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When you vote for a mobbed up mayor, what are you getting? Data from Colombia, analyzed in a new article [[link removed]] by political scientist Sarah Zuckerman Daly, suggests that you’re getting the friendship of the mob, for better and worse. Daly reviewed cases in which a candidate with ties to an armed militia either narrowly lost or won a mayoral election against a candidate with no such ties. When the militia-associated candidate took office, crime dropped dramatically. On average, a militia-associated mayor taking office led to an astonishing 85% reduction in theft. On the other hand, social services also took a beating — the proportion of kids in school dropped 17% on average with a militia-associated mayor. The drop in crime makes intuitive sense — if the government and the criminals are friendly, the need for crime decreases. The drop in social service spending, however, points to a darker explanation — that militia-associated mayors shift resources from social services to pay their militia allies to do extra-legal security work.

Women peacekeepers matter

In the mid-aughts, the United Nations became seized, as it would say, with the idea that sending peacekeeping contingents made up almost exclusively of men might not be the optimal strategy for addressing conflicts in which women play a crucial role. Between 2006 and 2014, the number of women in UN peacekeeping missions jumped from 1,034 to 2,803 — still only 3% of peacekeepers, but a huge expansion. A new article [[link removed]] in the journal International Interactions looks at the effects of increased women’s participation in peacekeeping.

Measuring variations between missions, some of which have higher proportions of women peacekeepers than others, the researchers found that higher numbers of women in a mission led to better implementation of women’s rights programming, more involvement of women in post-conflict political processes, and to sexual assault survivors being more willing to report their assaults to peacekeepers.

All this at the cost of… nothing. The researchers found no evidence that adding women to peacekeeping missions makes conflict resumption more likely.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Tracking girls’ safety in schools

In a new working paper [[link removed]], development economists tackle the question of whether it is safer for adolescent girls in Africa to attend school or to stay home. Violence in and around schools is a major issue across the world, especially in areas where poor oversight can expose young people to threats from teachers, fellow students, and outside actors who target schools. If schools are a particularly egregious site of violence, then governments can make great progress by targeting interventions there.

Drawing from survey data from 20 African countries, the researchers found that the answer to the question of whether girls are safer at school or at home is a resounding no. Almost 29% of girls reported suffering physical or sexual violence, and the numbers for girls in school were not significantly lower than for girls out of school.

On one hand, this is something like good news — with education being so important, it is useful to know that schools aren’t more dangerous than the alternative. On the other, however, it is both a sobering reminder of the level of violence young people experience and a public policy conundrum. Given the differences between the lives of girls who attend school and those who do not, how can governments best design interventions to make girls from both groups safer?

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE whither wog: Part II

Last week, we examined research on how members of the US-led coalition in Afghanistan interpreted the idea of “whole-of-government” counterinsurgency in that war. This week, we’ll look at what the obsession with WOG approaches in the US wars of the mid-aughts has wrought in modern public policy: An insistence on utilizing WOG approaches for all kinds of problems.

In an article [[link removed]] in the the journal Development and Practice, US Agency for International Development (USAID) official Megan Rhodes and global health researcher Samuel Boland take a meta look at a recent episode in the US government’s ongoing quest to use its whole self. During the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, the US pledged assistance from a range of agencies to help local governments contain and treat the disease. The agencies would work together, coordinating to offer a “whole-of-government” response to the challenge of Ebola. The international effort to counter Ebola was a success, preventing a catastrophic outbreak and providing hope — soon to be dashed — that international public health cooperation would be a major feature of 21st century international relations. But was it really an example of a successful WOG effort?

Rhodes and Boland examine that question by reading the reports that all the agencies involved in the WOG anti-Ebola campaign produced to grade their own performance. Focusing on reports from the Defense Department, the Department of Health and Human Services, USAID, and the USAID inspector general, they mined the reports and their recommendations for any sort of broad-based (“whole-of-government,” even) agreement about what went right and what could be improved.

Of course, the fact that each agency has its own report is itself indicative of the trouble with the concept of WOG efforts. As Rhodes and Boland write, “a publicly available, comprehensive review of the [US government’s] ‘whole of government’ response which synthesizes common recommendations and deconflicts differing proposals about the best way forward would represent enormous value,” but none exists. Instead, each agency participating in a style of policy implementation that is supposed to be defined by close cooperation between agencies graded itself on how well it cooperated with others. Though the Ebola effort may have had the characteristics of a WOG program, the reality is that executive structure in the US remains stubbornly separated into parts of government. Indeed, the authors note, “no major relevant institutional reforms of interagency work across DOD, HHS, or USAID have occurred following the West Africa Ebola Epidemic.”

Keeping that in mind, it is instructive to look at what all the relevant agencies said they wished they had done to make WOG work more effective. All the reports agreed that work is needed to make clear which agency is responsible for what in WOG operations, due to the duplication of effort and lack of clarity that marks the beginnings of cooperation between agencies that are normally separate. The reports also all agreed that data sharing is crucial, and that the arduous process of un-siloing data is a major drag on creating effective cooperation. Most of the reports also noted cultural and communications mismatches between agencies, noting that different agencies often have difficulty sharing plans or observations because the language they use for each is so varied.

Rhodes and Boland rate the fixes for each of these issues as being technically and logistically doable — even easy in many cases. Yet the fixes, like the overall report on WOG cooperation on Ebola, have not come to pass. The reason for this might be found in last week’s Deep Dive. In that article, Maya Dafinova argued that national politics was the major determinant of commitment to WOG approaches. With political will for interagency cooperation likely to vary, agencies move to protect their resources and reputations rather than restructure to maximize interoperability with others.

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Carolina Loza León profiled [[link removed]] La Trocha, a café and cultural space in Popayán, Colombia that employs women who were, until their recent demobilization, FARC guerrillas. La Trocha sells food, drinks, and crafts, and operates as a kind of halfway house for capitalism. When they were in the FARC, the women operated as part of a collective, keeping each other afloat while fighting a dangerous mountain war. As one put it, after demobilization, “Each one of us enters a capitalist model that is every person for themselves.” La Trocha allows the women to retain some of the togetherness of the mountains in their new lives, while also serving as a community space for the peacebuilding activities to help them and others reintegrate into Colombian life.

Paul McKinney outlined [[link removed]] many of the issues that the US Agency for International Development will face as it tries to achieve its goal of dramatically increasing local partner funding. Making organizations in countries receiving aid the main implementers of US programs has been a USAID goal before, and it was tried in Syria starting in 2010. As the US avoided running development funds through the Syrian government, it instead partnered with a range of local civil society organizations. Those organizations — the vast majority of whom were formed after the start of the Syrian civil war — produced many successes in a challenging environment. However, the fact that USAID and other donor money was the main source of funding for these groups created pressures for them to become professionalized in a way that causes talented staff to leave for higher-paying jobs at major international organizations.

Durrie Bouscaren chronicled [[link removed]] the rise of cryptocurrencies in economically troubled Turkey. In November, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan forced the country’s central bank to cut interest rates, sending the lira into freefall. Inflation grew to 21.31% last month, and the value of the average wage has fallen by half in a year. As a result, many Turks have turned to cryptocurrency as a way of maintaining the value of their money. The problem, however, is that cryptocurrencies are often as volatile as the lira, and lack of regulation has led to some high profile swindles. Yet cryptocurrency has worked its way to the center of Turkish popular culture, with cryptocurrency companies sponsoring major sports teams and their ads adorning metro cars and billboards.

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

The only problem with Critical State now coming out on Wednesday is that it gave the dedicated journalists at Task and Purpose the time to debunk this [[link removed]] perfect story.

The logical outcome [[link removed]] of national twitter accounts.

Whoville joined [[link removed]] the Jungle of Nool and wherever the sneetches are from in a Triple Entente in response.

The only explainer necessary [[link removed]] on global COVID-19 “vaccine apartheid.”

This [[link removed]] is what a chameleon looks like when it stands on a small portrait of Prussian war theorist Carl von Clausewitz.

Actually, the Mambos [[link removed]] count down from five in order of the likelihood of war, so you don’t need to get worried until Mambo No. 3 or so.

The subject of this [[link removed]] photo won a convention award for best covplay.

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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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