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… read about the pointlessness of border deterrence.

From US border patrol agents whipping Haitian migrants from horseback to Greek coast guard units attempting to push migrants coming from Turkey back into the sea, 2021 has seen leading migration destinations double down on violent border policies. As sociologist and migration expert Heba Gowayed notes [[link removed]], these policies are as pointless as they are inhumane. European Union policies to deter migration have killed at least 2,000 people, but migrants have continued to come for the simple reason that it is riskier for them to stay than to go. As migration destinations appear to have converged on the idea that reducing migration is a policy imperative, they have dispensed with the obvious truth that their border policies have little impact on demand for migration.

Memorialization madness

Every time protesters in the US or UK succeed in getting the statue of a slaveholder or other historical monster torn out of public life, the response from certain quarters feels wildly out of proportion with what has happened. After all, one statue was changed for another. A materialist might ask: What’s the big deal? According to a forthcoming article [[link removed]] by political scientists Francisco Villamil and Laia Balcells, for a certain kind of conservative, it’s a measurably big deal.

Villamil and Balcells looked at recent efforts in Spain to change the names of streets that honor people associated with Spain’s Francoist dictatorship.

They found that areas where street names were changed saw electoral shifts toward the far-right Vox party. There was no overall rightward shift (that is, the street signs didn’t turn leftists into centrists), but some right wingers who supported the more traditional conservative party bolted for Vox.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] COVID-19 protests and existing inequality

The more time researchers spend poring over data about political responses to COVID-19, the more the main takeaway appears to be that even unprecedented pandemics are profoundly shaped by the political context they arrive in. A new working paper [[link removed]] from researchers at the UN University examines how protests against anti-COVID-19 measures in the US related to political and economic conditions in the localities where those measures were implemented.

Working with county-level data, the researchers found that added policies to restrict the spread of the virus did prompt increased protests, but only in counties that had high levels of economic inequality before the pandemic began.

They also found that more stringent policies had a greater drag on economic activity in unequal counties. In counties with the highest levels of inequality, COVID-19 restrictions drove up unemployment and drove down consumer spending.

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

Last week on Deep Dive, we examined the particulars of a peaceful push for self-determination in Catalonia, and the effects of violent efforts from the Spanish government to shut it down. This week, we’ll zoom out and look at why some pursuits of self-determination grow into violent conflict and others remain mostly non-violent.

A new article [[link removed]]on that topic in the journal International Organization by political scientists Micha Germann and Nicholas Sambanis starts from the basic insight that almost all civil wars start with non-violent claims, most of which concern some form of self-determination. Just as obviously, however, not all such claims grow into full-scale wars. Germann and Sambanis are interested in the circumstances that generate those claims and whether different circumstances are more likely to bring about civil war. If a regional or ethnic group sees their political participation undercut in the state to which they ostensibly belong, for instance, are they likely to demand autonomy violently? What if they had autonomy at one point and then lose that autonomy?

These questions are important in part because they speak to a basic debate about civil wars. Some political scientists see civil wars as fundamentally the result of grievance: One side has a political bone to pick, and pick it they do. Others see civil wars as fundamentally the result of opportunism: One side sees a chance to wrest power and resources from the central state, and they grasp it. If some forms of grievance are more likely to lead to war than others, then it is evidence that grievance plays a role in civil war onset and is a blow to the opportunism camp.

Germann and Sambanis do in fact find differentiations between forms of grievance in how likely they are to result in a civil war, but their case against the opportunists is more nuanced than you might expect. First, though, the data. The researchers drew on a database of worldwide self-determination claims made between the end of World War II and 2012, and then matched those claims with data on ethnic exclusion from national politics and civil war onset. This gave them a global view of when groups suffered two forms of repression — political exclusion and lost autonomy — and when that repression led to self-determination claims and, in some cases, war.

The two forms of repression produced notably distinct outcomes. When groups lost autonomy, they were quite likely to make non-violent claims to self-determination. When groups were excluded from their countries political process, however, the more common response was to try to get access to that process rather than try to form a separate political entity. Once a self-determination claim was made in an instance of political exclusion, however, that claim was much more likely to result in war than a claim rooted in loss of autonomy. The only times self-determination claims following loss of autonomy predicted eruption of a violent conflict was when the claim followed close on the heels of the actual autonomy loss. The longer a latent independence movement waited to announce itself, the less likely it would be to choose violent means to achieve its goals.

Those results are interesting on their own, but they also illuminate the grievance versus opportunism debate. As noted before, the fact that political exclusion and lost autonomy produce distinct escalation patterns for self-determination claims suggests that grievances do matter in producing civil wars. But, as Germann and Sambanis note, those escalation patterns suggest that opportunism also plays a role, muddying the distinction between the two sides of the debate. For groups suffering political exclusion, for example, once non-violent attempts to re-enter their state’s political system fail, the opportunity cost for violent separatism falls precipitously. If a group sees no path forward to address their political exclusion through non-violent means and instead takes up arms because the state has made itself so illegitimate that rebel recruitment is now possible, is that grievance or opportunism? Who’s to say?

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

Taylor Giorno tracked [[link removed]] the flow of money between companies who stand to benefit from the US nuclear modernization program and the think tanks that opine about the necessity of modernization. Nuclear weapons companies donated over $10 million in 2020 to 12 leading think tanks that publish on nuclear issues, including the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Atlantic Council, and the Brookings Institution. Despite the donations, experts from those think tanks are skirting new rules about disclosing conflicts of interest when testifying before Congress about nuclear modernization. Rather than admit their organizations’ ties to the nuclear weapons industry, think tank experts now simply claim they are testifying on their own behalf to avoid awkward questions about how their salaries get paid.

Sanjeeta Pant identified [[link removed]] corruption as a key obstacle to meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. G20 countries have committed to major reforms over the years to limit corruption, but there is no formal mechanism for tracking progress toward those commitments and holding governments accountable. In place of such a mechanism, Pant’s organization, The Accountability Lab, has created an informal tracker that monitors how well G20 countries have implemented those commitments. The tracker helps keep countries on the hook for promised efforts to reduce the $1.26 trillion lost to corruption in developing countries annually.

Heather Barr discussed [[link removed]] the exclusion of women from negotiations with the Taliban after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. A range of countries and international organizations, from the UK to UNICEF, sent only men to engage with the Taliban in Kabul. The gender imbalance was not the result of unwillingness on the Taliban’s part to meet with women. In fact, Taliban officials met with women frequently, and conducted peace negotiations with an Afghan government delegation that included four women. Instead, the delegations become a reflection of who these organizations believe the Taliban will take seriously on a cause they all claim to represent: Women’s rights. If only men are involved in these discussions, Barr asked, how are demands for women’s rights to be taken seriously?

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

If you stare at this [[link removed]] photo long enough, you’ll see Carol Cohn [[link removed]]’s head stick out from the crawl space, cocking a knowing eyebrow at you.

You know the Pentagon budget is too high when one Deputy Assistant Secretary forgets where they parked their car one time and then this [[link removed]] happens.

Boomer Sooner indeed [[link removed]].

So China tested a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System last week, and the arms control community… is fairly [[link removed]] excited [[link removed]] about the acronym [[link removed]].

Monarchy [[link removed]] just ain’t what it used to be.

“Gunfight dad” is a whole vibe [[link removed]].

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

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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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