Ivor Bell, a former IRA member, last week avoided conviction for his alleged role in the murder of Jean McConville ... Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

...read about oral history on trial.

The Ivor Bell trial offered a close look [[link removed]] at the decision-making processes insurgent groups use to decide when to commit violence. It also shines a light on the consequences of poorly conceived conflict research. Bell, a former IRA member, last week avoided conviction for his alleged role in the murder of Jean McConville, a Northern Irish woman killed by the IRA in 1972, on suspicion that she was passing information about the group to the British government. The case against Bell rested on tapes Bell recorded for an oral history project on the Troubles, run by Boston College, in which he described meetings between himself and two other men, including former Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, to plan McConville’s murder. Boston College had told Bell that the tapes would not be released until his death, but that promise couldn’t survive a subpoena, so now they are on the public record and make for fascinating listening.

Disappearing citizenship

Immigration law professor Amanda Frost offered [[link removed]] a history of American efforts to revoke the citizenship of naturalized citizens. As the Trump administration launches a large, new initiative to investigate the naturalization of some 700,000 citizens, Frost’s piece details just how historically aberrant that project is.

Between 1990 and 2016, the government denaturalized an average of 11 people per year, usually because investigations revealed that they had a past as war criminals. The next time someone tells you there was never any accountability for American war criminals in the 21st century, you can point out that there actually was, so long as the war criminals were immigrants.

The Trump administration, however, is spending $207.6 million and hiring 512 new staff expressly to investigate the citizenship of 700,000 Americans, the vast majority of whom are likely to have done nothing untoward at all beyond misspell some words on their naturalization forms.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Border misery

The humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border created by the Trump administration’s Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) continues [[link removed]]. MPP requires people seeking asylum in the US to wait in Mexico, without support or legal opportunities to work, while American judges consider their cases.

Kirenia Navas Rodríguez, a Cuban woman who arrived at the border seeking asylum in April after crossing 11 countries, was issued number 1,067 in the queue and received no estimate of when her number would be called for her case to be considered. Wait times have averaged around two months, but other migrants told Rodríguez to expect to wait six or seven months. Her number still has not been called.

Similarly, Areli García García, a Guatemalan asylum-seeker escaping gang violence and domestic abuse, has been living in a tent on the Mexico side of the border since May, despite the fact that her mother has lived in Los Angeles for 23 years and could house García and her 8-year-old son.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Tweets in the two-level game

This week on Deep Dive, we continue to look at how information technology shapes modern statecraft. Specifically, we’re interested in what happens when states get their hands on the keys to the depression factory and start producing content for Twitter dot com.

An June 2018 article [[link removed]] by Oxford social scientists Corneliu Bjola and Ilan Manor takes us back to an earlier age, now decades past, when governments used social media to promote international agreements. Writing in the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Bjola and Manor focus on the Obama administration’s efforts to promote the Iran nuclear deal by establishing a Twitter account for it: @TheIranDeal. After the deal was announced, and immediately became the target of harsh denunciations from congressional Republicans, the Obama team created the account to have a dedicated channel for public engagement about the deal. The account would play an important messaging role as the administrations shepherded the deal through a 60-day congressional review period that could have scuttled the agreement.

To Bjola and Manor, @TheIranDeal is most notable as an example of new, 21st century rules for Robert Putnam’s two-level game. Putnam, an Americanist political scientist most famous for “Bowling Alone,” his book on social capital in America, casually dipped his toe into international relations waters in 1988, and published one of the most-cited IR papers [[link removed]] ever: "Diplomacy and Domestic Politics: The Logic of Two-Level Games." The gist of Putnam’s argument is that when national governments interact with each other, they are constantly aware of, and being checked by, political pressures within their own countries. Therefore, national politics play a huge role in shaping international relations, and governments who hope to act on the international level must play, as the title suggests, a two-level game: negotiating both with international players and with domestic constituencies. Any agreement that doesn’t produce wins at both levels is almost certain to fail.

Bjola and Manor found that the primary purpose of @TheIranDeal was to expand what Putnam called the government’s “win set” — the set of outcomes acceptable to the stakeholders at each level — with domestic audiences. To do that, the channel was used for both broadcasting and listening. It sent out the administration’s initial arguments for the deal, as you might expect, but Bjola and Manor also found that the kinds of arguments the account pushed changed over time in response to the amount of engagement different tweets received. The ability to measure response in real time and to adjust messaging accordingly is a new factor in the two-level game and, Bjola and Manor argue, is likely to grow in importance to international diplomacy in the future.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS

Rupa Shenoy surveyed [[link removed]] terrorism experts on Joe Biden’s claim during the most recent Democratic presidential debate that ISIS fighters who escaped jails in Syria as a result of American troops withdrawing are “going to come here” and attack the US. Views were mixed as to the actual threat posed by the escapees, but experts agreed that President Donald Trump’s decision to pull troops from Syria took the counterterrorism policy community by surprise.

Sara Kutchesfahani and Critical State’s own Laicie Heeley recalled [[link removed]] the discrimination they faced early in their careers as both women and young people in national security fields. They both now lead organizations that work to ease the path for a new, more diverse generation of security policy wonks, but, as they wrote, the security community as a whole still has a long way to go to open itself to the new voices and ideas that will bring progress to the world’s most intractable problems.

Megan Janetsky profiled [[link removed]] the Silla Todoterreno, a new wheelchair designed in Colombia to aid survivors of the country’s civil war who are living with disabilities in rural areas where accessibility by traditional wheelchairs is severely limited. The chair, made of lightweight magnesium and featuring highly durable wheels, is built to navigate mountainous regions where paved roads are few and far between. Colombia’s civil war left nearly 200,000 citizens with disabilities and securing mobility for those who reside in rural areas is a key part of achieving the rural development goals set out in the recent peace accord between the Colombian government and FARC rebels.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] WELL PLAYED

We could easily do an entire section on President Donald Trump’s letter [[link removed]] to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, but we’re trying not to be fools. Call us later. (If you missed it, though, here’s [[link removed]] a good summary).

There are, of course, downsides to online government engagement, like when you accidentally [[link removed]] engage militaries that are shelling [[link removed]] you in real life.

A little-known connection [[link removed]] between the late Soundcloud rap icon Lil Peep and the original late Soundcloud rap icon, Vladimir Lenin.

This [[link removed]] joke is wretched (of the earth).

The past was gross, but this [[link removed]] thread is good. Don’t drink mercury, kids, even if royals of yore thought it was cool.

If, at the end of this newsletter, you’re in the market for yet more longreads, check out the new special issue [[link removed]] of Energy Strategy Reviews focused on the geopolitics of transitioning to renewable energy. It’s an excellent roundup of a topic that doesn’t get enough attention.

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Critical State is written by Sam Ratner and is a collaboration between PRI’s The World and Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX, BBC, and WGBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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