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CRITICAL STATE
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Your weekly foreign policy fix.
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If you read just one thing…
… read about why regime change fails.
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Midnight Oil alumnus Ben Denison released a report last week summing up the scholarly literature on regime change as a way to achieve foreign policy goals. As it turns out, the record is bleak. Pursuing regime change in a country makes civil war and human rights abuses in that country more likely. It drives other countries, who feel they may be targets of future regime change, to seek greater military capabilities, including nuclear weapons. Regime change missions often spiral for the country doing the regime changing, turning into decade-plus nation-building efforts. And for all that, the initial goals of the regime change are hardly ever accomplished, because the behaviors that regime-changers seek to
reform tend to stem not from the regime itself but from national priorities that will outlive any one government. In all, Denison argues that American policymakers need to reevaluate their reliance on regime change as a policy tool.
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Rights in rebel ranks
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Colombia is taking a step toward breaking down the often-false distinction between victims and perpetrators in civil wars. The Colombian constitutional court ruled last month that a woman who was forced to join the FARC rebel group at 14-years-old can now be added to the country’s Victim’s Registry, giving her access to health care and reparations that are guaranteed to victims of the country’s civil war.
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The case sets an important precedent by recognizing that the FARC systematically violated the sexual and reproductive rights of women and girls in its ranks. The woman who brought the case under the pseudonym Helena was forced to have an abortion by the group, a widespread practice that has long been an open secret.
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It is rare for rebels, and especially rebel women, to be recognized as both victims and perpetrators by post-conflict institutions, though scholars have often urged a more expansive framing.
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Trafficking as a source of stability
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A new International Crisis Group report on trafficking in northern Niger suggests that efforts to disrupt illicit trade could be more destabilizing than the trade itself. European countries are pressuring Niger to clamp down on trafficking in an effort to reduce migration to Europe, but doing so would disrupt longtime understandings between traffickers and the government that have limited violence in the region.
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Illicit trafficking of drugs, gold and people are crucially important to the northern Nigerien economy, and Nigerien officials have adopted the stance that it is preferable to manage the trade — by working to ensure peace between traffickers, for example — than to end it.
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The management policy even survived a recent gold rush that threatened to upend the arrangements that kept the peace in northern Niger. Outside armed groups attempted to grab the gold, but local and national officials ensured that local miners would have access to informal mines, creating thousands of jobs.
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This week’s Midnight Oil guest is Susan Bartels, an attending physician and clinician-scientist in the emergency department at Queen’s University and a fellow at the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University, who has done extensive research on women’s health and sexual violence as a weapon of war. She is the co-author, along with Sabine Lee and Luissa Vahedi, of two recent articles on the effects of sexual abuse by United Nations peacekeepers in Haiti.
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WHAT IS THE HARDEST PROBLEM YOU WORK ON?
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The most challenging and pervasive problem I face in my work on gender-based violence in humanitarian settings is poverty, with the feminization of poverty increasing the vulnerability of many women and girls to a variety of gender-based violence threats. For instance, poverty, and a desire to secure their daughters’ economic futures, is a key underlying driver of child marriage, particularly in complex emergencies and during forced displacement. In other contexts, poverty plays a critical role in sexual exploitation by peacekeepers and aid workers. With few educational and employment opportunities, women and girls in humanitarian settings often live with very constrained choices and sometimes the only option to meet the basic needs of their families is for them to engage in survival sex.
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HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT TRYING TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM?
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My research addresses the inherent complexity around issues like child marriage and sexual exploitation by using self-interpreted narrative capture — an approach in which affected individuals both share and analyze their own stories — to help contextualize the problems within their broader lived experiences. My research also recognizes that more revealing data can sometimes be obtained by asking indirect questions, particularly when studying sensitive or value-laden topics. For instance, we learned about practices like sex trafficking under the guise of marriage, in which families accept money in exchange for their daughters entering a contractual “marriage” for two to three weeks at a time, through questions that did not directly reference sex, trafficking, or marriage.
No single intervention is going to solve complex issues such as child marriage and sexual exploitation. Complex issues such as these are more likely to be solved obliquely by implementing a larger number of small strategies that address the underlying issues at a community level – for instance, improving access to affordable education for girls and employment or income-generating activities for women.
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Holly Dagres evaluated the US-Iran relationship after a week in which both sides seemed to step back from the brink, somewhat. Iran’s missile attack in retaliation for America’s assassination of Qud’s Force commander Qasem Soleimani deliberately avoided killing American servicemembers, offering what Dagres called a “golden bridge of de-escalation.” The Trump administration has taken that bridge for now, but, Dagres argued, its “incoherent” strategy makes long term stability unlikely.
Leah Matchett fact-checked President Trump’s claim that a war between the US and Iran would improve a president’s electoral chances. A study of presidential approval ratings in the wake of military action found that the average American strike produces no change at all in a president’s ratings. During wars, presidential approval often spikes early on but then declines precipitously as the war drags on.
Portia Crowe chronicled an attempt to use France’s new “duty of vigilance” law to hold energy major Total accountable for its subsidiaries’ approach to relocating people living on what Total hopes will be an oil megaproject in Uganda. A new lawsuit alleges that Total and its subcontractors intimidated Ugandans into accepting much less money than their land was worth in exchange for relocation and, in some cases, forced people to leave their land before they had received any compensation at all. If successful, the lawsuit would open a new avenue for addressing human rights abuses by multinational corporations.
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There’s nothing wrong with Florida (like escaped Burmese Pythons terrorizing the Everglades) that cannot be cured by other things that are wrong with Florida (like footballs made out of python skin).
When you’ve been in the trenches of too many media unionizing struggles, the news starts to read differently to you.
People dealt with the stress of what seemed like impending war with Iran in different ways, some more creatively than others.
What transforming the defense budget really looks like.
If you were intrigued by the last two editions of Deep Dive and want to learn more about election violence, Stephanie Buchard has a new paper out in the journal Democratization this week that you will want to check out. Using survey data from 32 African countries, Buchard argues that election violence tends to backfire on incumbents who try to use it to guarantee reelection.
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Critical State is written by Sam Ratner and is a collaboration between The World and Inkstick Media.
The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX, BBC, and WGBH.
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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