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One of the central contributions of civil war studies in the last two decades is the insight that territorial control is one the main factors that predicts violence against civilians in civil wars. When either the state or the insurgency is in full control of a given area, they tend to be selective about who they inflict violence on there. When control of an area is shifting, however, that’s the danger zone — violence against civilians becomes markedly more widespread while an area is changing hands. According to a new article [[link removed]] in the Journal of Peace Research, that insight is as true for statues as it is for people. Using data from the Syrian civil war, researchers tracked intentional destruction of cultural artifacts by ISIS over the course of its time ruling swaths of the country. They found that incidence of cultural destruction was far higher in areas of contested control than in areas clearly in or out of ISIS control.

Voting rights and incarceration

Lest there be any doubt that carceral policies are as much a political control mechanism as any other form of restricting access to political power, a new article [[link removed]] in the American Political Science Review offers convincing evidence that increased incarceration of Black people in southern US states after 1965 is a direct response to increased Black voting power following the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

As Jim Crow fell, Black voters gained more power in some sections of the South than others, a process often related to the use of Section 5 of the VRA, which gave the federal Justice Department veto power over voting practices in certain jurisdictions.

Areas that were subject to Section 5 saw significant increases in the number of Black people entering prison in the aftermath of the VRA, even in comparison to areas in the South where there were fewer electoral protections for Black voters.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] Quantifying colonial and neocolonial extraction

An important theory underpinning the study of economic relations between the Global North and Global South is the idea of unequal exchange — basically, that when the North buys things from the South, those things gain value (and therefore the North gains from the exchange) simply by being in the North. In other words, the political power of the North cheats the South out of the “true” value of its goods and labor, even in uncoerced exchanges. Economists have struggled to quantify the amount of value the South has lost through this process, but a new article [[link removed]] in Global Environmental Change brings a new approach to the challenge.

The article looks not at the money changing hands between the Global North and South, but at the physical resources. How much land, materials, labor, and energy was put into making products for exchange, and how would those inputs be valued if they were in the North?

Using that method, the researchers find that the North’s net appropriation from the South in 2015 alone was $10.8 trillion, including 12 billion tons of raw material equivalents, 822 million hectares of land, 21 exajoules of energy, and 188 million person-years of labor.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE If not police, what? Part II

Last week on Deep Dive [[link removed]], we looked at an example of how local security arrangements can clash with efforts to achieve what some police reform advocates present as a timeless ideal of policing. This week, we’ll look at new scholarship on a community that considered how policing was actually working for them and decided they could come up with something better.

In 1968, the city of Pittsburgh contracted Freedom House, a local Black-led non-profit, to offer ambulance services in some of the predominantly Black neighborhoods around the city. Thus began a signal success in American medical history. Freedom House (no relation to the democracy-rating organization) set new standards in the US for paramedic training and performance — standards that were then adopted around the country. “These Black paramedics,” writes lawyer Tiffany Yang, whose recent Washington Law Review article [[link removed]] on Freedom House is our focus this week, “were among the first in the country to deliver an electric shock to a patient's heart in the field, intubate a patient on the street, or use Narcan to reverse an overdose.” Their medical innovations, Yang argues, were the result not just of a desire to improve ambulance service but also to eliminate the role of police in at least one aspect of Black life in Pittsburgh.

Yang traces the history of ambulance work to before Freedom House, when emergency medical response was one of the public duties that fell to police to perform. That practice, which Yang terms “ambulance policing,” was a public health mess across the board. Police had little first aid training, and so even in the best case scenario they focused on transporting patients to hospitals in the backs of paddy wagons rather than providing care at the scene. When they did provide care, according to a study done in 1971, they did the wrong thing 62% of the time — not great. Often, they didn’t care about health outcomes at all. One Pittsburgh resident remembered watching police draw a chalk outline around someone who was still alive. He pointed out that the person was alive and a policeman responded, “Yeah, but not for long.”

As bad as ambulance policing was for the population at large, it was noticeably worse in Black neighborhoods. Police violence against Black people was rampant in 1960s Pittsburgh — over the course of a few months in 1965, police killed two Black Pittsburgh residents who posed no threat to them, and beat and choked another. The everyday racism of the Pittsburgh police force drew many protests from the Black community, and it created a well-justified wariness of calling for police, no matter the situation. In addition, police resisted entering Black neighborhoods, especially on calls that did not involve violence. Medical emergency calls often went unanswered. With a police holding a near monopoly over ambulance services, that meant Black people were denied access to even the limited emergency medical attention the police provided in white neighborhoods.

Freedom House offered a solution to that problem, and an effective one. Whereas the police rate of inadequate care was 62%, Freedom House’s was just 11%. It also offered a solution to the broader problem of mixing policing with emergency medicine. Freedom House ambulances were not in the business of arresting their patients, but instead responded to crises with an eye toward producing the best health outcomes. When patients were drunk, Freedom House dropped them with the Salvation Army instead of in jail. When police started to withhold 911 calls out of jealousy that they were losing the emergency medicine beat, Freedom House got police radios to make sure they heard every call. In short, Freedom House created a form of emergency health provision for the Black community wholly separate from the carceral logics of the police.

Of course, those logics struck back. In 1974, Mayor Peter Flaherty announced his intention to defund Freedom House and expand ambulance policing. His argument was telling: Ambulances were a “public safety function” and therefore by rights belonged to police. There was widespread community outcry, but by 1975 Freedom House was shut down and a police-run city ambulance system covered the whole city. Eventually, that program would be supplanted by a civilian EMS system, which rejected police involvement in emergency medicine on the grounds of persistent police failure to provide adequate care. Though Freedom House only survived for seven years, Yang makes a compelling case that it offers a clear refutation of the argument put forward by Mayor Flaherty and many others before and since, that questions of public safety are somehow naturally the province of police. Instead, Freedom House showed the plausibility and value of stripping away parts of what were once seen as natural police functions and finding new and innovative ways to better provide those services to the whole community.

LEARN MORE [[link removed]]

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

Shirin Jafaari spoke [[link removed]] to experts who played down the significance of the recent US special operations mission that killed ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi. Qurayshi was the target of a February 3 raid in northwest Syria that also resulted in the deaths of about a dozen other people, including children. The leader had the top job in ISIS since 2019, when his predecessor was killed, also by US special operations forces. He had never made a public statement as ISIS leader. Experts told Jafaari that, while Qurayshi’s death is a blow to the group, it is unlikely to slow ISIS’s expansion in Africa, Central Asia, or the Middle East.

Kate Kramer wrote [[link removed]] about how the Biden administration’s continuation of punitive Trump-era policies against migrants is harming vulnerable women attempting to find refuge in the US. The Migrant Protection Protocols — the Orwellian-named rules forcing people applying for asylum in the US to wait in Mexico while their claims are processed — originated as a Trump administration plan to deter migrants from attempting to seek asylum. The areas where migrants are forced to wait while US bureaucracy does its thing are often unsafe, with camps for migrants offering neither sanitary conditions or safety from violence or exploitation, which disproportionately impacts women. So long as the Biden administration continues the policy, women will continue to bear the brunt of its intended cruelty.

Daniel Ofman interviewed [[link removed]] Ukrainians living near the Russian border about the potential for a Russian invasion. People living in the city of Kharkiv report that they fear war, which would be both physically dangerous and undermine everything they’ve worked to build in their city. Border guards, who would be among the first to experience a Russian advance, are even more worried. Their work has become more militarized in recent years as they cope with the challenges of Russian aggression. Living on the potential front lines is, for them, a constant experience of preparing for the worst.

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

Someone at the Scottish National Party probably got very excited at the concept of a boom emanating from Scotland across the UK, but unfortunately for them it’s just terrible [[link removed]] defense reporting.

This [[link removed]] is bad, but just imagine the levels of cringe PW Botha could have reached if Instagram had pierced the cultural boycott in the 1980s.

The legs on these [[link removed]] are the best part.

So far, it appears that most of Putin’s reason for ginning up the Ukraine crisis was showing off his giant table [[link removed]]. It’s… a big table.

The only pre-conflict Ukraine analysis [[link removed]] we’ll be engaging in here at Critical State.

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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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