Who gets exploited to make AI work? Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

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In order for self-driving cars to self-drive or facial recognition algorithms to recognize faces, they need people to teach them about the world. Computers aren’t born knowing how to tell a stop sign from a green light, and teaching them the difference is arduous. People have to painstakingly label huge numbers of photos and videos in order for these artificial intelligence systems to work. The work is so unpleasant that AI companies have taken to outsourcing [[link removed]] that work to people who have few other choices for employment: Refugees living in refugee camps. Many of the companies tout their work as “job creation” for refugees, but with the work paying often less than a dollar an hour and offering no skills training, workers are left more stuck than enriched. The companies, meanwhile, benefit handsomely, with valuations for autonomous vehicle companies alone expected to jump ten-fold between 2019 and 2026.

The return of fumigation to Colombia

In 2015, the World Health Organization pointed out that the Colombian government’s policy of dropping huge amounts of herbicide on its own citizens in the name of stopping the production of coca — and therefore cocaine — was a public health hazard. Specifically, it likely causes cancer. Colombia banned the practice, but today, under pressure from the US, the Colombian government has pledged [[link removed]] to return to fumigation, using the same chemicals the WHO warned about.

Farmers who still produce coca say that the fumigation plan is ineffective. Many would like to grow different crops, but the economics of the situation are such that, even with fumigation, they are unlikely to be able to make a change.

Farmers who have left coca production successfully are also against fumigation, arguing that the herbicides kill their crops too, making it harder to get by without returning to coca.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Messenger (RNA) matters

A new study [[link removed]] about COVID-19 vaccine messaging and vaccine hesitancy in Latin America sheds light on how political context shapes people’s willingness to be persuaded to get vaccinated. Trust in a range of institutions, both national and international, mediates vaccination decisions.

Among the most interesting topline numbers are the data points for the brand of vaccine people prefer. People were a bit more likely than average to accept the vaccine if they were offered American-made options like AstraZeneca or Pfizer, but significantly less likely to take the vaccine if they would be taking Russian or Chinese vaccines.

When you break it down, however, the interaction effects between trust in producing countries and the willingness to take that country’s vaccine were substantial. The Russian vaccine, though unpopular overall, was much more popular among people who reported high levels of trust in Russia. The same was true for US and Chinese vaccines.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE How to train your dragoon: Part II

Last week in Deep Dive, we looked at new research on how the US military succeeds and fails at changing its own officers’ attitudes about civilian protection. This week, we’ll turn to the story of what happens when military training becomes an export product, and the political processes that can set in motion for the country doing the exporting.

During the height of decolonization in the mid-20th century, the global market for military training exploded. Having a military is widely seen as a sine qua non of stateness, and the sudden appearance of dozens of new states meant that there were dozens of new militaries being built, largely from the ground up. Historians Daniela Richterova, Mikuláš Pešta, and Natalia Telepneva have a new article [[link removed]] in the International History Review that describes the supply side of that market in one of the most prolific military exporters of the era: Czechoslovakia. From Egypt to Cuba to Indonesia, the Czechoslovak policy of exporting military equipment and training shaped the militaries of many new states around the world.

The question that occupies Richterova et al. is why Czechoslovakia pursued that policy in the first place. All else equal, states tend not to be in the business of making other states more competitive on the battlefield. States that do engage in large-scale military assistance are often hegemons, engaged in the complicated dance of strengthening their proxies just enough to keep the proxies on their side. Czechoslovakia was hegemon-adjacent, as a Soviet satellite state, but was hardly cultivating proxy states. Instead, the historians argue, Czechoslovakia became drill instructors to the world out of a combination of ideological solidarity and economic need.

Czechoslovakia entered the decolonization era with two notable advantages in the military training market. First, it had a massive defense industrial base left over from the world wars, along with a legion of skilled weapons designers and manufacturers. Demand for Czechoslovak weapons and military technology was high, and it seemed only natural to exploit that demand by also selling training on how to use those weapons and technology. Second, Joseph Stalin had died and Nikita Kruschev had entered the chat, bringing with him the idea that Soviet satellite states should pursue their own foreign policies within the Soviet system. The Czechoslovak state had an asset — and the freedom to exploit it.

And exploit it they did. Czechoslovakia created new institutions within its military training infrastructure set aside for foreign students, including the Faculty of Foreign Studies at its main training site and a separate Aviation Training Centre. These institutions did some pro bono work, training members of left leaning insurgencies and offering small weapons and training packages to new countries that were particularly strapped for cash. Yet it was the Ministry of Trade, not the Ministry of Defence, that conducted most of the business around foreign military training — the point was to make sure that the training programs brought in badly needed foreign currency. Between 1956 and 1961, the government made 2.3 billion Czechoslovak Crowns from military assistance, of which 140 million was just from the training programs.

Profitable though it was, the primacy of the Trade Ministry created some problems for the training program. For one, customers hated the Trade Ministry. Czechoslovakia was a major player in the world arms and training market, but far from the only one. When potential buyers sat down with Czechoslovakia’s competitors, they were doing business with fellow military leaders who shared their concerns and sense of military propriety. When the buyers sat down with the Czechoslovak Trade Ministry, they were doing business with profit-seeking bureaucrats.

For another, Czechoslovakia was trying to compete in a market where the other sellers were ignoring the rules of the market. Western military exporters, more interested in pursuing proxies than in profiting from weapons sales and training, began to dramatically undercut Czechoslovak prices. This, combined with a dramatic slowdown of the Czechoslovak economy in the early 1960s, led the Defence Ministry to argue that Prague faced a choice: Either shutter the military export program or stop trying to compete on price and instead engage the market with the same political eye as its competitors.

The latter strategy worked, but not in the way that advocates from the Defence Ministry, who long tried to wrest control of the program away from the Trade Ministry, believed it would. By 1968, the military export program was booming again, and the Trade Ministry smugly noted in an internal document that it was still in charge. The document claimed that the turnaround was the result of maintaining a strictly commercial approach to weapon and training sales, but it undercut that claim with an important political admission. The renewed popularity of Czechoslovak military programs, the document noted, derived in large part from the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement and the desire of many recently decolonized countries to separate themselves from both the US and the USSR. Czechoslovakia, as a smaller and more or less independent exporter, suddenly became a much more popular source for military goods and services. The Trade Ministry rode that wave as long as it could.

In the end, training programs that were often presented primarily as examples of socialist solidarity served dual roles for Czechoslovakia. The expressions of solidarity were real — Prague not only trained and supplied the FLN independence movement in Algeria, it also continued to arm Algeria largely for free for years after it gained independence. Yet the commercial purpose of the training programs was central, even to the point where a breakdown in international socialist solidarity resulted in a major comeback for Czechoslovak military exports. In international markets for military readiness, politics and economics are indeed inseparable.

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

Van Jackson broke down [[link removed]] a very serious problem at a very silly institution: The fight over academic freedom at Yale’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. The director of that program, historian Beverly Gage, stepped down recently to protest pressure from conservative donors to conduct the program in the image of famed war criminal and boot licker Henry Kissinger. As Jackson pointed out, the program’s hide-bound commitment to a great man theory of history — which Gage was trying to leave behind — obscures the value of having academic programs that look holistically at national and international challenges.

John Sopko spoke [[link removed]] to The World’s Marco Werman about his nearly decade-long tenure as the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, leading an office dedicated to finding out what went wrong with US development programs in Afghanistan. Sopko highlighted the extent to which US spending and programming drove corruption in Afghanistan, undermining the legitimacy of the Afghan government even as it propped it up. As an example, Sopko referenced the fact — uncovered by his office — that over half the Afghan police that the US was paying for in contested provinces like Helmand actually never existed, despite ongoing attempts from US bureaucrats to convince policymakers that they did in order to justify continuing the program.

Hamida Chumpa argued [[link removed]]for broad implementation of comprehensive sexual education programs around the world. Data drawn from programs funded by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief show that comprehensive sexual education programs lead to lower rates of sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancies among students. Abstinence-only education, conversely, accomplishes exactly nothing in terms of disease prevention and strengthens harmful gender stereotypes. With the White House about to release a US Gender Policy, Chumpa urged President Joe Biden’s policy team to make comprehensive sexual education a priority.

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

We’d buy a book made up only of New York Times ledes [[link removed]] about Soviet repression.

Take a trip back to the 1990s, when the US government commissioned what basically amounts to a Chick Tract [[link removed]] but for cowardly centrism [[link removed]].

If you think about it, this [[link removed]]makes perfect sense — Britney and Japan both have famously complicated relationships [[link removed]] with US conservatorship law.

Robert McNamara’s shadow [[link removed]] is long, and, in the right light, really resembles [[link removed]] a clown.

This [[link removed]] is cute, but what it doesn’t tell you is that before The Phantom Menace came out, Colin’s callsign was the rather less glamorous “Planespotting.”

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

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

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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