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… read about how everything is terrorism.

When the US declared war on the concept of terrorism back in 2001, it gave the federal government carte blanche to define that concept however it liked. Two decades later, the terrorism carte is as blanche as ever, and people in power still use it mean pretty much anything they don’t like. During the Trump administration, a new investigation [[link removed]] by ProPublica finds, counterterrorism teams were used to intimidate US citizens who were working with asylum-seekers at the border with Mexico. Members of the Border Patrol’s Tactical Terrorism Response Team interrogated activists and people connected to them. The interrogations went against policy — only people suspected of criminal activity are supposed to be subject to interrogation at the border. When “terrorism” can be anything, however, those rules become surprisingly bendable.

Climate and indigenous sovereignty

In a new issue of Adi Magazine, Ruxandra Guidi examines [[link removed]] some of the inherent tensions between market-driven climate change mitigation strategies and the rights of indigenous people whose land is often a crucial input for those strategies.

For example, the Guna people of Panama rejected a deal in which major carbon polluting countries would have paid the Panamanian government to preserve forests in Panama to offset the polluting countries’ emissions. The Guna control much of the forest land on which the deal depended, but would not have controlled the money raised by the Panamanian government in exchange for the Gunas’ stewardship of the forest.

More broadly, Guna leaders struggled with the idea that their forest stewardship — which they pursue for reasons unrelated to globalized markets — should be used in a scheme to excuse lack of stewardship elsewhere.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Electoral security dilemmas

A new study [[link removed]] investigates the counterintuitive question of why leaders who promise authoritarian, anti-democratic rule continually find ways to win elections in democracies, even when people say they support democratic ideals. In politics as in first grade classrooms, it appears that the tendency comes down to the crucial question of “who started it?”

The “it” in question here is democratic backsliding. Using a survey of US voters, the researchers asked Democrats whether Republicans supported eroding democratic norms and vice versa. They found that partisans broadly overestimated their opponents’ self-described willingness to subvert democracy, and that each side’s willingness to do so is heavily conditioned on their beliefs about their opponents’ willingness to do so.

Illustrating the ongoing gulf in political science between Americanists and international relations scholars, the researchers’ recommend that democracies “simply correct misperceptions about opposing partisans’ commitment to democratic norms.” Somewhere, Bob Jervis’s eyebrows just shot through the roof.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Struggle for self-determination: Part I

In honor of Indigenous Peoples Day, this week and next on Deep Dive we’ll engage with new research on self-determination, a cause long championed by Indigenous leaders and activists that became the watchword for independence movements around the world.

It’s been a tough few months for symbols of Catalan independence. The pride of the autonomous community located in eastern Spain, FC Barcelona, lost its talismanic striker Leo Messi after years of financial mismanagement of the club. Worse, he departed for another, slightly more successful post-colonial nationalist project. Soon after, former Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont was arrested in Italy after fleeing Catalonia four years earlier.

Puigdemont was on the run because of his role in the dastardly crime of helping run an illegal referendum. In 2017, the Catalan government under Puigdemont’s leadership announced that it would hold a popular vote on whether to secede from Spain altogether and pursue life as an independent country. The Spanish government deemed the vote illegal and unleashed a wave of repression in Catalonia, sending police to interfere with the conduct of the referendum and injuring over 1,000 Catalan civilians in the process. Violent politics not being the typical order of the day in Spain, the crackdown galvanized a huge reaction, leading to massive protests and a constitutional crisis.

As it stands, Catalonia is not substantially more independent today than it was in 2017 – a fact underlined by Puidemont’s years on the run. Yet the events of 2017 still reverberate today. A new article [[link removed]] by political scientists Laia Balcells, Spencer Dorsey, and Juan Tellez in the British Journal of Political Science attempts to measure those reverberations.

Balcells et al. use surveys from before and after the referendum crisis to isolate the effect of Spanish repression on Catalan attitudes toward independence and various government institutions. They find that, overall, people became about 7% more likely to support independence after Spanish police interfered in the referendum. That may not seem like a huge shift, but, as the authors point out, it could be big enough to “flip the independence question from minority to majority support.”

The shift also extended to popular attitudes about Spanish institutions. Confidence in the Catalan government and parliament increased after the crackdown, but confidence in Spanish governmental bodies cratered. People reported losing confidence in the central government, Spanish courts, and the EU — which stood by while the crackdown took place — at about the same rate that they increased their support for independence. Confidence in Spanish police fell by much more: Over 20%.

The researchers also asked about whether the respondents knew anyone who was injured in the violence around the referendum. People who reported having friends and family among the victims unsurprisingly increased their support for independence and their willingness to participate in protests. Somewhat more surprisingly, that tendency held even for people who didn’t vote in the referendum — that is, people who were likely not highly committed to independence before the crackdown. Interestingly, the results also hold if you separate people with close friends and family among the victims and people who only had a passing familiarity with someone who was injured by Spanish police. Even for people with only a loose association with a victim, the effect on independence preferences is strong.

As Balcells et al. note, the value of loose relationships in driving reactions to repression underline the problems that face repressive governments in the internet age. Governments have long understood that arresting or injuring an activist is likely to anger that activist’s immediate circle. However, when the potential for backlash extends to all the activist’s Twitter followers and Facebook friends, the costs of repression could be far higher.

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Rebecca Kanthor checked in [[link removed]] on blockbuster season in China, where Korean War movie “Battle at Lake Changjin” is set to become a huge hit. The film is a war epic that celebrates the sacrifices of Chinese soldiers in a battle against US troops, and helps mark last year’s 70th anniversary of the start of the Korean war. The government commissioned the movie as part of an ongoing effort to mix propaganda and mass entertainment. Analysts point to the focus on Lake Changjin — a battle in which China defeated the US — as a measure of the perilous state of US-Chinese relations.

Emma Ashford chided [[link removed]] members of Congress for failing to engage in good faith oversight over US foreign policy issues. Members of both houses have spent a great deal of time since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan making speeches about the failures of that withdrawal, but relatively little time examining the government’s inaction in the face of decades of indications that the war was unwinnable. If Congress is not going to seek accountability for the war itself, Ashford argued, it undermines the legislative branch’s claim that greater legislative involvement in foreign policy will lead to improved outcomes.

Senator (and apparent Inkstick reader) Tammy Duckworth spoke [[link removed]] to The World’s Marco Werman about her proposal to conduct exactly the kind of Afghanistan oversight Ashford was suggesting. Duckworth has called for an Afghanistan War Study Commission to investigate the war and produce policy recommendations to prevent repeating the mistakes made in the conflict. In particular, Duckworth said she looks forward to recommendations on limiting the duration of war authorizations and preventing corruption in military contracts.

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

Military parades remain the gift that keeps on giving [[link removed]].

Last week, the FBI arrested a couple who tried to sell the blueprints for Virginia-class nuclear submarines to an unnamed foreign country. According to the Justice Department, when the couple reached out to sell the plans, the country they hoped would be the buyer immediately called the FBI and washed their hands of the situation. News coverage of the case has focused on the fact that they passed the plans to undercover FBI agents by hiding them in peanut butter sandwiches, which makes for great headlines [[link removed]]. Given the other [[link removed]] hilarious story Virginia-class submarines have been the center of recently, maybe the couple’s bigger mistake was not putting them in a croque monsieur.

Brazil read about the CIA’s war dolphin program and decided to do them one better [[link removed]].

War economies can create massive inflationary pressures. For two decades, US contracting money pouring into Afghanistan pushed the cost of a technical up into the mid-five figures. As US forces left, however, prices stabilized at something closer to their true market value: two cans of dip [[link removed]].

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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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