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Journalists at the magazine New Lines obtained [[link removed]]a database of the men (and they are all men) who make up the Wagner Group, the infamous mercenary company closely associated with the Russian state. The database, which was put together by Ukrainian security services and maintained by former Ukrainian intelligence operatives now working in think tanks, allowed reportes to connect with family members of the men and learn some of the human stories of how people choose to become soldiers for hire. Entries on 4,184 mercenaries show that at least 372 have died since 2014, mostly in Syria. Recruitment of Wagner mercenaries from Ukraine seems to have taken place largely in secret, with recruiters targeting young, pro-Russian men. Once they join Wagner, their families receive little communication from them. Indeed, when mercenaries are killed in battle, some families receive no official death notice at all. Instead, in some cases, families are surreptitiously brought across the border to Russia to pay their respects at a graveyard there, then sent back and told not to inquire further.

Civil war and ethnic identity

Conventional wisdom on state violence targeting entire ethnic groups in civil wars suggests that the violence is the result of the state’s inability to gather accurate information about rebellions. If the state believes that rebels are likely to come from a particular ethnic group but can’t gather information on them as individuals, the thinking goes, it will inflict collective violence on the ethnic community as a whole. A new article in Comparative Politics, however, suggests a more complex explanation.

States, the researchers argue, are not only trying to defeat certain rebels, but are trying to eradicate any versions of ethnic identity associated with rebellion. Therefore, they engage in collective violence not only to threaten particular rebels but to punish communities that they perceive as having an ethnic identity incompatible with loyalty to the state.

As evidence, they track Turkish state violence against Kurdish communities in the 1990s. They find that, even controlling for the location of Kurdish separatist violence, the Turkish state disproportionately targeted communities that primarily identified as Kurdish compared to those that expressed their Kurdish identity through a broader identity as Sunni Muslims.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Dialysis and COVID-19

In 2019, over 550,000 people in the US relied on dialysis – a medical technology that replicates the function of kidneys for people with kidney failure – to survive. The technology worked. Death rates for people with severe renal diseases had been falling since the early 2000s. Then, as a ProPublica investigation details, COVID-19 hit.

In 2020, the death rate of people on dialysis jumped 20%, meaning 18,000 more people died of kidney disease than would have been expected based on 2019 numbers.

The death disparity is down to COVID-19. Not only are dialysis patients likely to have comorbidities that put them at greater risk of COVID-19, but the dialysis process itself also posed a threat. For most people, receiving dialysis requires traveling to a facility and then sitting, usually with other people, in a room for hours while the treatment takes place. People who wanted to avoid the COVID-19 risk of that process skipped treatments, with sometimes deadly consequences.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE Foundations of international relations

One way to understand philanthropy by society’s richest individuals is as a tax dodge. Setting up large foundations and funding them out of pocket allows billionaires to perform a nifty trick. Not only do the billionaires keep that money from going into government coffers, where, in a democracy, the public and its representatives would decide how to spend it on the state’s behalf, but they get to keep control of the money in the form of an organization that putatively acts in the public interest. Except, when the money is in a foundation, it’s the billionaires who get to decide what the public interest actually is – which is to say, billionaires get to act like a state. And, like a mouse recently gifted a cookie, if you give a billionaire the opportunity to act like a state, he’ll want to get involved in international relations. This week and next on Deep Dive, we’ll look at research on what happens when major philanthropy tries to influence the international system.

Researchers Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, Lucas Núñez, and Hayden Ludwig took a systematic approach to measuring the effect of philanthropic interventions in international politics in their recent article [[link removed]] in Global Studies Quarterly. In 2011, they point out, private philanthropy in international development spent $39 billion on development projects. For comparison, in the same year the World Bank spent $43 billion on development projects, and US government development aid amounted to $31 billion. It might, they suggest, make sense to keep track of what projects philanthropic money funds and how those projects fare.

That measurement project is easier for the really ambitious foundations, which aim to produce national-level change in the countries where they intervene. To understand whether they are achieving their goals, we don’t have to rely on internal project measurements, but instead can look at independent measures of national outcomes. Few foundations have the level of national-level ambition for its projects around the globe that the Open Society Foundation (OSF) brings to its work. OSF, funded by billionaire George Soros, explicitly aims to promote democratic governance in countries around the world. To accomplish that goal, OSF spent $1.7 billion between 1999 and 2018 funding organizations outside the US that work to strengthen democratic norms in their home countries.

Correa-Cabrera et. al. tracked that spending to see what results it produced. The short answer? Not much. The researchers compared countries that received high levels of OSF funding, lower or intermittent funding, and those that received no OSF support at all. After some statistical wizardry to account for the baseline differences between those countries, they compared measures of democracy, state fragility, and freedom across all three groups. Countries that received significant OSF support fared basically the same in all measures as those that received none at all. OSF target countries even experienced the same number of protest events as other countries, despite the right wing slander that Soros directly funds left wing protesters.

In part, this result just reinforces the difficulty of international democracy promotion. OSF’s record on strengthening democratic norms abroad between 1999 and 2018 may not be impressive, but it certainly was less bloody than the (charitably) equally fruitless efforts of the US government over that period. Yet the result also emphasizes the extent the foundation system allows billionaires’ ideological fixations – even those that are laudable in theory – to take precedence over priorities that the public might prefer. $1.7 billion spent tax-free on failed democracy promotion efforts are funds that could have gone toward programs by agencies that at least are accountable to US voters.

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Nick Fulton chronicled [[link removed]] the year in violence against queer people in the United States. 2021 was the “deadliest year on record” for transgender and gender non-conforming people in the US, according to the Human Rights Campaign – at least 50 transgender people were murdered. Despite this, states across the country have attempted to erase violence against queer people by systematically underreporting anti-queer hate crimes. Recent federal legislation has provided more resources for tracking hate crimes, but prejudice from the state and local police departments tasked with gathering the data is the major obstacle to accurate reporting. With state-approved discrimination against transgender and gender non-conforming people expanding at an alarming rate, the trend on state protection of the queer community is moving in the wrong direction.

Daisy Contreras spoke [[link removed]] with Haitian migrants who are suing the US government because they allege they were illegally denied the opportunity to apply for asylum in the US. One man, who fled Haiti after a gang he refused to join threatened his life, was put in two detention centers at the US southern border and not allowed to apply for asylum at either. Then, after being told that he would not be deported, US officials hustled him onto a plane, not telling him where it was going until it landed in Haiti and he was forced to return to the situation from which he fled in the first place. Under international law, asylum seekers must have their asylum requests considered and cannot be sent back to their home countries to face the dangers they are trying to avoid. Yet under a Trump-era policy that the Biden administration continues to enforce, has continued to deport Haitian asylum seekers without considering their cases.

Khury Petersen-Smith examined [[link removed]] new appropriations for nuclear weapons and delivery systems in the newly-signed National Defense Authorization Act. The law includes $2.6 billion for a new intercontinental ballistic missile system, as well as added funds for nuclear modernization. As Smith-Petersen pointed out, this spending is part of a turn in US policy away from a commitment to nuclear arms control and disarmament. With US nuclear spending increasing, little prospect of meaningful arms control talks with Russia, and hope of a return to the Iran Nuclear Deal slipping away, 2022 will begin as an especially grim year for the nuclear disarmament community.

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

We’re half a century into the War on Drugs, and the Drug Enforcement Administration still [[link removed]] doesn’t know the plural form of “molly.”

This [[link removed]]fight ended up going to the judges, which was important for maintaining the principle of judicial review.

As you’re trying to come up with original things to write in thank you notes for holiday presents, here’s [[link removed]] some inspiration.

If your flight this season has been delayed due to omicron, it is perhaps a comfort to know that yours is not the first [[link removed]] flight to be altered by the knock-on effects of massive executive branch failures.

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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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