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… read about how fishing turns to fighting.

Humans eat a lot of fish, which is weird given how committed we appear to be to making it impossible for fish to survive in our oceans. Pollution, overfishing, and climate change have all contributed to declining fish populations and increased competition for the remaining stock. Sometimes that competition turns violent, but social scientists know relatively little about when and why fishery conflict takes place. In a new article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Peace Research, researchers dig into data from East Africa – where fishery conflict killed over 400 people between 1990 and 2017 – to try to draw some conclusions. They found three major contributing factors to violence over fishing. The first is the presence of international actors, regardless of whether they are military or just other fishing ships. Something about foreigners in a fishery short circuits local dispute resolution mechanisms. The second and third – the presence of conflict in the region and poor fishery management – exacerbate those same stresses on dispute resolution.

on the move, on the march

Many people who leave their home countries do so to avoid political repression and the violence that might follow it. But what happens in a repressive political environment once the people it targets begin to leave? A new article [[link removed]] in International Studies Quarterly takes on that question.

In the short term, it seems, the separation of targets and targeters has the effect you’d expect: There is less political violence in countries from which people have emigrated. Not only that, but all forms of organized resistance begin to wane – as the people most likely to organize them leave, the number of strikes and protest marches decline.

In the longer term, however, the story is a bit more complicated. People who leave repressive countries maintain networks in that country, and when they move to places where they have the freedom to express themselves, they often find ways to remain active in their home country’s politics. When migrants end up in democracies, the countries they come from are likely to see an increase in non-violent protests as a result of their work.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Chinese trees, Brazilian ash

China has undertaken an ambitious program to grow huge numbers of trees as part of its effort to slow climate change. Yet, as a new longread [[link removed]] in Lausan makes clear, it would be a mistake to evaluate China’s afforestation program without also looking at the carbon-intensive demands it makes of other countries through its central role in the global economy.

The Chinese afforestation program is massive in scope. Forest coverage in China has nearly doubled since the early 1980s, from 12% to 23%, and a recent study found that the country’s land flora absorbed 45% of the carbon its people emitted between 2010 and 2016.

Yet China’s import economy is producing deforestation in other parts of the world even as it expands forests domestically. Brazil supplies a huge amount of soy to China, and to grow that soy it is destroying forests and turning them into soy fields. Brazil’s Cerrado region lost 734,010 hectares of forest in 2020, with over a quarter of that loss due to soybean production alone.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Monetary policy by other means: Part II

Last week on Deep Dive, we focused on new research about how an independent central bank can be an asset for countries trying to put down rebellions within their borders. This week, we’ll look at the security effects of another mechanism that countries use to signal financial stability: Keeping their budgets in order.

Fighting a war requires raising money, and raising money requires convincing potential donors and lenders that you’re a good investment risk. When countries go abroad to raise war funds, an independent central bank can help convince creditors that their loans will be repaid before the country’s financial system goes belly up. When countries raise money at home, however, the result depends more on the public’s faith in the country’s fiscal policy than its monetary policy. When people get taxed, they want to be able to tell where the money goes. When they can’t, they tend to get restless.

For political scientists Gary Cox and Mark Dincecco, the most basic element of a sound fiscal policy is what they call a “credible budget.” This means a budget that the state is legally required to produce, has a defined length (usually a year), and can be evaluated by some sort of representative body. In short, the state should be able to show how much it wants to spend, how long it will take to spend it, and be willing to take questions about why it is spending $1.7 trillion on bad jets [[link removed]].

Cox and Dincecco take that definition for a spin in their new article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Politics, where they use the experience of states in early modern Europe to test whether credible budgets lead to improved performance in wars. In that period, when European states were still consolidating their power and state institutions were frequently in flux, there was considerable variation in how states arranged their fiscal affairs. One thing everyone agreed on, however, was that spending more money made you more likely to win wars. Most leaders of the era saw wars as essentially spending contests – whoever could bring more cash to bear would win in the end.

By tracking the fiscal structure of ten European powers, Cox and Dincecco measured how moving toward budget credibility affected both state spending in wartime and the outcomes of the wars the states were involved in. The numbers they come up with are pretty convincing. In states with no credible budgets, wars resulted in hardly any added expenditure. Rather than finding ways to raise more money, rulers demanded in-kind contributions to the war effort from their subjects, including labor and conscription. In states that took on credible budget structures, however, not only did peacetime spending increase but wartime expenditures grew some 38% beyond peacetime levels.

That massive increase in spending bought victories. Studying wars that states with credible budgets fought against those without them, Cox and Dincecco find that the states with more advanced fiscal structures won over two thirds of the time.

The debate Cox and Dincecco are most interested in influencing with their work is over the origin of the apparent advantage democracies have in fighting wars. Some argue that democracies win wars against autocracies because when a state’s population is involved in the decision to go to war, they will offer more inputs to the war effort and extract fewer costs to stand up a fighting force – basically, that participatory democracy makes warmaking go smoother. Others, however, say that what democracy really does is prevent executives from getting involved in stupid wars that they can’t win. By constraining executive power, it incentivises military moves that are actually in the country’s best interest. Cox and Dincecco come down on the latter side. Credible budgeting, they point out, is hardly limited to participatory democracies, and the martial benefits of fiscal responsibility do not fade just because autocracies are the ones being responsible. When any kind of executive is held accountable for their spending choices, the researchers argue, their chances of military success improve.

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Orla Berry reported [[link removed]] on the ways Maltese nights have become a bit more hospitable. Malta recently became the first European country to legalize recreational marijuana. Under the new law, growing and possessing the drug in small quantities will be legal, and people who have been convicted of marijuana-related offenses can apply to have their records expunged. Other countries in Europe are tracking the situation in Malta, in part to see if the new law offers a better path for disincentivizing trade in illegal drugs than the policy used in The Netherlands, where marijuana is still technically illegal but decriminalization has created a gray area for drug traffickers to work in.

Elsie Mares argued [[link removed]] that US political commentators should treat migration not as an issue of domestic security but instead as a response, in part, to US foreign policy. Most people who migrate from Latin America to the US say they would prefer to stay in their homes, but that they face threats of violence and dire economic situations there. Much of the political and economic pressure driving people to flee their home countries comes as a result of climate change, the war on drugs, and other phenomena that are directly linked to US policy decisions. US migration policy, Mares pointed out, relies on making false distinctions between people who we perceive as being forced to leave their homes due to specific violent threats – refugees – and those who chose to leave. Yet, she argued, the people who really have the power to make choices about the main drivers of migration are US policymakers.

Adam Wernick chronicled [[link removed]] the work YouTubers are doing to keep trash out of the ocean and in the comments section, where it belongs. Influencers have banded together to create Team Seas, a project that aims to raise $30 million for ocean health non-profits and remove 30 million pounds of garbage from the world’s oceans and major waterways. Even if successful, the project will only target a fraction of the estimated 20 billion pounds of plastics that find their way into oceans each year. But organizers see the purpose of the project as being not simply to have a direct impact on the problem of pollution, but to activate the millions of people – mostly young – who follow and support the project into further environmental awareness and activism.

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

The arc of the moral universe bends all kinds of ways, but some of those ways are pretty funny [[link removed]].

People usually attribute the collapse in funding for area studies in the US to the end of the Cold War, but actually it was a response to an alarming spike in dad jokes [[link removed]].

Live look [[link removed]] at how the application of deterrence theory to cyber operations is going.

A new competitor with the F-35 for the leading metric [[link removed]] by which to measure pointless US military spending.

The National Football League, the de facto most socialist US sports league, seems to have taken a turn and is now, judging from this map [[link removed]], going full tankie [[link removed]]. The NFL’s official position is that Taiwan is part of China, but also that Ireland is a single republic and, if you squint, that Gibraltar belongs to Spain.

He’s not the first DC denizen to vastly overstate the impressiveness of his BASE, but he gets points for novelty [[link removed]] at least.

Much like a direct-to-streaming TV reboot or any Gen-Xer you talk with, this poster [[link removed]] presupposes you come to it knowing a bunch of information about the 1990s.

Perhaps the greatest [[link removed]] combination of lede and photo composition in the history of journalism.

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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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