Read about who gets climate mitigation. Received this from a friend? SUBSCRIBE [[link removed]] CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. If you read just one thing…

… read about who gets climate mitigation.

On paper, it is clear that contending with climate change will require both large scale physical changes to mitigate the effects of climatic shifts and large scale societal shifts to make an economy that works for people and the planet. In practice, however, too many climate mitigation projects only serve to strengthen social hierarchies. A new study [[link removed]] in the Journal of Planning Education and Research looks at 170 local Climate Action Plans across the state of California and finds that those plans focus more on issues like increasing urban tree cover and green space and less on issues crucial to the way local economies function, like high density, affordable housing. Plans that include explicit promises to pursue equity in climate mitigation are more likely to address housing, but even those plans are vague on housing issues compared to the detailed plans for green space they put forward. Climate Action Plans are a step in the right direction, but many of them still serve to delay important discussions about how society will need to be reorganized to prevent climate disaster.

How democratic can foreign policy even be?

An article of faith among foreign policy elites is that voters don’t care about foreign policy. Sanctions, trade deals, even wars (if they’re fought overseas) don’t swing elections in the way that employment rates and civil rights issues do, according to the conventional wisdom. Less considered, however, is the opposite question: Do policymakers care about voter preferences in foreign policy? A new study [[link removed]] in the Journal of Politics makes a strong case that they do.

The researchers polled UK voters on their beliefs about the UK’s military presence in the South China Sea. Then, they ran a survey experiment: They asked 101 members of Parliament for their positions on the UK’s military presence in the South China Sea, but only some of the MPs were given the results of the poll before giving their answer.

The MPs who were told about the poll tended to give answers significantly closer to the public’s preference — that UK ships should remain in the South China Sea. Politicians may not be sure that voters care about foreign policy, but they’re not about to abandon the idea that they might.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Institutions of non-proliferation

When countries choose whether or not to pursue a nuclear weapon, it’s not a decision they make just once. Nuclear acquisition is complex, it takes a long time, and there are many opportunities for a government to change its mind and decide to delay or even abandon its nuclear program. Therefore, the study of non-proliferation can’t just look at the outcomes of those programs, it has to look at the processes within them. A new article [[link removed]] in Journal of Global Security Studies does just that, evaluating how different international non-proliferation institutions influence nuclear programs in progress.

The Nuclear Suppliers Group, which aims to control the inputs necessary to make a nuclear weapon, creates barriers to material acquisition that clearly lead nuke-seeking states to press the pause button on their ambitions.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, however, which is built around the idea that no country that isn’t already in the nuclear club should try to join it, has little influence once countries begin to flout it by beginning a nuclear program.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE What does ‘legitimacy’ mean: Part II

Last week on Deep Dive, we looked at new research on how people who have lived through civil wars evaluate their options when it comes to postwar governance. The experience of developing community organizations under rebel rule, it seems, makes it both easier for communities to develop their own alternate governance solutions in peacetime and more difficult for the central government to compete with local offerings. But what happens with questions of legitimacy when conflicts are ongoing? Does the presence of violence, rather than just the presence of rebels, affect how state institutions are perceived?

Those questions are at the core of a recent article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Politics, written by political scientists Annekatrin Deglow and Ralph Sundberg. They wanted to investigate how state institutions lose their relationships with citizens during civil wars. To do this, they researched perceptions of Afghan local police between 2007 and 2012, drawing on a large-scale survey that recorded responses from 31,720 Afghans over 360 districts throughout the country.

Using the survey, Deglow and Sundberg measured the relationship between people’s self-reported confidence in their local police and the level of violence taking place in each respondent’s district around the time they took the survey. The statistical results Deglow and Sundberg found are about what you’d expect (although it represents one of the first major statistical efforts to confirm this finding): More violence means less faith in police. Specifically, increased conflict intensity led to less belief that police are effective in fighting crime, less belief that they are procedurally fair, and less trust overall.

Yet it actually isn’t obvious why that should be the case. On one hand, sure, police say they are there to reduce violence, and so when violence increases their credibility takes a hit. On the other hand, however, if police are doing an effective job of local dispute resolution or crime deterrence, there is no clear reason for citizens to shun those services just because national-level forces have brought higher levels of violence to the area. What, then, is the mechanism that causes police to lose legitimacy in the face of increased civil war violence?

Deglow and Sundberg posit that the explanation lies in how police respond to increased insurgent violence. The Afghan National Police, as trained and equipped by US and NATO forces, was both a policing and a counterinsurgency organization. The balance between those roles shifts in a given district depending on the scale of the conflict in that district. As the conflict grows more intense in a district, police units cease whatever community roles they served before to fight a brutal war, one in which community members they might have served before often end up on the opposite side. With no resources to expend on community dispute resolution and every reason to become a divisive force in communities, police who are converted to counterinsurgent forces see their approval ratings suffer.

In some ways, this finding is like a refraction of the conclusion in Part I of this Deep Dive [[link removed]]. In that piece, local governance structures durably separated themselves from the central state in order to sustain themselves through conflict. In this one, national governance structures undermine their own local relationships by being unable to separate their local roles from the national-level conflict they are drawn into. In both cases, legitimacy is won and lost not by the overall popularity of the national government or the insurgency, but by the local-level decisions of institutions.

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

Shirin Jaafari reported [[link removed]] on the challenges facing children who are being held in custody in Syria because of their association with the Islamic State. Some 700 children are locked in Al Sina’a prison in the northeast of the country, along with over 5,000 adult detainees, many of whom hail from other countries. They have been there since 2019, when ISIS in the area crumbled. Since then, human rights organizations have urged the prisoners’ home countries to accept them back, but most have been reluctant to do so. Now, reconstituted ISIS units are attempting a prison break, putting those children back in harm's way.

Lovely Umayam examined [[link removed]] the debate over non-fungible tokens (NFTs), a new form of digital asset that has generated a great deal of publicity and money. NFTs use blockchain technology to solve the “problem” of attributing ownership of media distributed online. Basically, it allows people to buy and sell some underlying concept of ownership of a thing — say, a photograph or a tweet or a sound file — that can still be shared freely and enjoyed by anyone with an internet connection. No one can quite explain why that is a problem that needs solving, but there is apparently money to be made in solving it: NFTs were valued at a combined $41 billion in 2021.

Shirin Jaafari also spoke [[link removed]] to members of the Yemeni diaspora about the difficulty they had contacting their loved ones after a Saudi airstrike on a telecommunications tower cut off internet service in Yemen for almost four days. Yemeni citizens are struggling after years of war, including Saudi airstrikes, undertaken with US support, that frequently target civilian infrastructure. The Biden administration is currently mulling sanctions against the Houthis, the group that controls most of the country. If the sanctions are put in place, Yemenis and international human rights groups warn, it will make purchasing food and other necessities much more difficult for people living in the country.

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

How is the term of art “NATO’s eastern flank countries” and not this [[link removed]]?

The notorious family of Belarussian criminals, the Lnus [[link removed]].

The traditional ambassadorial crewed yacht [[link removed]] will not be in service, at least until the crisis abates.

Make this [[link removed]] Spirit Airlines agent the chair of the House Armed Services Committee. They can tell real from fake, and they definitely know how to actually cut a budget.

The stealth mode is actually [[link removed]] moisture-activated in the F-35C.

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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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