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“Super-villain studies” is an underappreciated subfield in political science. Everyone agrees that extremely rich people put their thumbs on various political scales, but we know relatively little about how much force they actually exert or what motivates them to do it. In a forthcoming article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Politics, political scientists Guy Grossman, Yotam Margalit, and Tamar Mitts look at the late billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s attempt to shape Israeli politics by upending Israeli media. In 2007, Adelson launched a free right-wing newspaper in Israel in part to push his right wing political agenda. According to Grossman, Margalit, and Mitts, it worked like gangbusters. Using data on media exposure, they found that not only did the newspaper become massively popular, but that exposure to its coverage drove voters to the right. In Israel’s fractured political system, even marginal shifts in voter preference could be pivotal in enacting Adelson’s vision: Extended rule by the right wing Likud party.

When all you have is a hammer

A common observation in US security studies in the 21st century is that the perception of the military as the only part of government trusted by most segments of society has led to a massive expansion of the military’s areas of responsibility. International development? Let the military do it. Emergency response? Let the military do it. Climate change mitigation research? Well, more on that later. But, according to a new article [[link removed]] in the European Journal of International Security, the impulse to militarize everything even in a democracy is not limited to the US.

The article chronicles the expansion of Latin American militaries into domestic security and even basic service provision, conducting everything from border patrols to trash collection. Yet, the researchers point out, these new missions aren’t reflections of Latin American militaries’ high approval ratings. Instead, they are attempts to justify the existence of militaries in a region where interstate war is vanishingly rare.

Domestic mission creep, the researchers argue, is bad policy. Expanding the military’s role in domestic life hasn’t historically been conducive to effective democracy. Furthermore, preserving military units means that governments have to spend money on them that could be put to better use – say, hiring real trash collectors.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Facebook’s failure in Ethiopia

Facebook is a global company that hosts a huge proportion of the world’s political discourse. Yet when that discourse turns menacing, Facebook often has insufficient mechanisms in place to nip it in the bud before it starts to drive offline violence. The problem is particularly acute in Ethiopia, where Facebook’s content moderation has been shockingly inadequate [[link removed]] to the task of hosting a social media site during a brutal civil war.

Language inciting violence has become common in Ethiopian Facebook communities, a fact that the company is well aware of. Yet it has not hired enough Amharic- and Tigrayan-speaking content moderators to track violent speech in Ethiopia.

Instead, Facebook has proposed doing content moderation in Ethiopia by algorithm, using experimental models in hopes of catching incitement automatically. Experts agree that this method, which is both unproven and totally opaque to users, is unlikely to solve the problem of operating a mass media platform in conflict zones across the world.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Political climate: Part II

Last week on Deep Dive, we looked at new research on why people who are worried about the security implications of the shift toward renewable energy need to take a deep breath. This week, we’ll investigate the geographic center of the tension between climate security anxiety and climate change denial: the United States Department of Defense.

The sheer perverseness of the relationship between the Pentagon and climate action is hard to overstate. On one hand, the Pentagon is, in a very real sense, the problem. The US military is the single largest petroleum consumer [[link removed]] in the world and also the largest [[link removed]] greenhouse gas emitter. If the Defense Department was a country, it would be the 55th-largest carbon emitting country in the world, worse than Morocco, a country with 37 million people. US military might, in other words, is bad for the planet.

On the other hand, due to a strange quirk of US politics, the Pentagon is charged with managing the problem – or at least its secondary consequences. The US government is worried about the effects of climate change on the international security environment, and has charged the arch-polluters over at the Defense Department with making sure that none of those effects blow up in the national face. In planning and national strategy documents, the Pentagon is required to explain how it will burn more fossil fuels to limit the security fallout of burning fossil fuels.

A new article [[link removed]] by researchers Mackenzie Burnett and Katherine Mach in the journal Global Environmental Change interrogates this contradiction. The authors reviewed a range of national security documents and conducted 42 interviews with climate security researchers and Pentagon national security practitioners to understand how climate issues actually get treated inside the five sided puzzle palace.

In some ways, the researchers and the practitioners had similar approaches to thinking about climate and security. They agree that climate change is real, and that it poses a major threat in the form of both natural disasters and political upheaval. However, they also disagree on some main points. Researchers all understand that the effects of climate change are upon us already, and that the threats it poses will manifest in the short term as well as the long term. Practitioners, conversely, were much less likely to see climate change as a short term threat. Even among the Defense Department planners who personally believed that climate change is an urgent issue, most felt that their colleagues saw it as a concern for the future and a low priority. Indeed, practitioners rated the importance of climate in their work a 3.67 out of 10. Researchers averaged 7.05 out of 10.

Even the practitioners Burnett and Mach spoke to agreed that this disconnect is a policy problem for the Defense Department. Though part of the challenge of taking climate seriously at the Pentagon is political – researchers and practitioners both agreed that the Trump administration reduced focus on climate, a perception borne out by the distinct drop in the number of Pentagon documents discussing the issue – the lack of focus on the problem inside the Department is also institutional. In their interviews, many practitioners volunteered that climate awareness in the Pentagon has not kept pace with increased concern about the issue in the general public. As a result, climate discussions lack urgency, and climate is only applied selectively as a justification for future planning.

Of course, climate issues have been getting kicked down the road for years and years at this point. The US Navy formed a Task Force on Climate Change in 2009 – a move that felt overdue then – only to see it disbanded in 2019. Until political momentum inside and outside the Pentagon align, there will likely be no moment at which the long term concerns of the practitioners suddenly become short term concerns. The Pentagon still has a long way to go to come to terms with its role as both a polluter and a manager of pollution’s ill effects.

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

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

Max Rivlin-Nadler spoke [[link removed]] to asylum-seekers on the border between the US and Mexico who are infuriated by the US government’s new travel rules. The Biden administration has used the COVID-19 pandemic to justify maintaining a Trump administration rule forcing asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico while their claims are reviewed. Recently, the Biden administration opened US borders to anyone with a tourist visa who is vaccinated against COVID-19. Asylum-seekers, however, are still barred from entering the US even if they are vaccinated. The double standard works against people who should be protected by international law but instead have been forced to live in grim conditions on the border while their cases are decided.

Ligia Maura Costa and Roberto di Cillo examined [[link removed]] what the Pandora Papers – the massive leak of financial records from major international tax shelters – can tell us about the politics of Brazil. Many prominent Brazilians appear in the papers, from Central Bank president Roberto Campos Neto to Economy Minister Paulo Guedes. Their investments in offshore companies set up for the purpose of avoiding taxation skirt the line of legality and raise serious ethical questions. Beyond the individual cases, though, the Papers’ revelations indicate the need for tougher anti-corruption and anti-money laundering enforcement in Brazil and elsewhere.

Halima Gikandi reported [[link removed]] on two suicide bombings in Kampala, Uganda that have set the country on edge. The bombings, which killed six people including the three bombers, took place near government buildings in the downtown of the Ugandan capital. Ugandan officials suspect that the attacks were carried out by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an Islamic State-associated rebel group based in the Democratic Republic of Congo but with a long history of enmity against the Ugandan state. There have been other bombings in Uganda in recent weeks, which authorities believe are also the work of the ADF.

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

When there aren’t enough academic jobs for political science PhDs, they get up to all sorts of things [[link removed]].

The British government has placed an export ban on part of the throne of Tipu Sultan, an important 18th century Indian ruler, out of concern that the artifact might be sold outside the UK. Selling it abroad would be a problem because, to paraphrase [[link removed]] the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport, “we stole it fair and square so no take backsies.”

*The dulcet tones of Cortana’s voice* “And to senior enlisted personnel who we made a whole generation believe were invincible superheroes… you’re welcome [[link removed]].”

This is why, [[link removed]] to pass the SAS selection course, you have to last at least one whole week on "Love Island."

Something to keep in mind [[link removed]], with Black Friday on the horizon.

His verdict [[link removed]]? The fat in these ribs has been rendered extraordinarily [[link removed].].

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Critical State is written by Sam Ratner with 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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