Critical State

class=”MuiTypography-root MuiTypography-h1 mui-style-1wnv7m0″> Use the force: Part II

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into what happened when Colombia’s military took on police work in Cali, the country’s third-largest city.

Inkstick MediaMay 31, 2023 · 2:30 PM EDT

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

Soldiers line up before leaving to patrol the streets in Bogotá, Colombia, Saturday, Nov. 23, 2019. 

Ivan Valencia/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

The notion that states have a monopoly on violence is more aspirational than actual. Violence occurs regularly below the level of states and can build to regular criminal capacity. While police forces nominally exist to prevent and thwart this type of violence, cops can be bribed to look the other way or can simply be ill-equipped to assert government control in the face of organized violence. To counter this, governments will sometimes turn to the military.

In the last Critical State, I wrote about what happens when countries “constabularize” their militaries or use them alongside police. The study, looking at past instances in Mexico, found an increase in complaints of human rights violations.

In “Little Evidence That Military Policing Reduces Crime or Improves Human Security,” authors Robert A. Blair and Michael Weintraub offer a deep look into what happened when Colombia’s military took on police work in Cali, the country’s third-largest city. The authors focus specifically on Plan Fortaleza, a program that had the military regularly patrol hot spots, targeting crime.

Studies on militaries doing the work of policing remain relatively young. Much of the speculative debate over military effectiveness in such work hinged on whether or not military training and accountability to a chain of command can overcome the limits of policing. 

“Only a small handful of studies have tested the effects of ‘constabularizing’ the military for purposes of law enforcement, all using observational data,” Blair and Weintraub note. For their study, in a plan approved by the Ethics Committee at Universidad de los Andes, they “randomized only the specific city blocks where soldiers would and would not patrol.”

The military patrols and Plan Fortaleza preceded the intervention by the researchers, and the new change in routes continued an ongoing pattern of patrols changing regularly so as to not become targets.

“Our results suggest that military policing in Cali was at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive,” the authors write.

“We find little to no evidence that Plan Fortaleza reduced crime in the administrative data while the intervention was ongoing, and if anything our results suggest that it exacerbated crime after the intervention was complete. We observe an increase in crime in the administrative data after the intervention alongside an increase in citizens’ accounts of witnessing and reporting crimes and an increase in the frequency of arrests.”

“We find little to no evidence that military policing improved perceptions of safety, except perhaps among business owners.”

While both police and militaries are armed agents of the state, the ends to which they are bent and the context in which they operate are divergent enough that adapting soldiers to policing does not appear to have a meaningful effect on crime, with the researchers noting “we find little to no evidence that military policing improved perceptions of safety, except perhaps among business owners.”

Despite the lack of efficacy, sending in soldiers is one of the most visible kinds of “doing something” politicians can have. Conclude the authors, “If policymakers insist on adopting military policing strategies despite the small but growing body of evidence of their ineffectiveness, they should at least complement those strategies with robust systems for monitoring and prosecuting misconduct.”

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class=”MuiTypography-root-134 MuiTypography-h1-139″>Rebel reliance: Part II

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into a unique method of augmenting human-labeled destruction in satellite imagery with machine learning, providing footage that lends insight into patterns of urban warfare and civilian relief.

Inkstick MediaMay 10, 2023 · 1:45 PM EDT

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

In this Jan. 20, 2017, file photo, residents walk through the destruction of the once rebel-held Salaheddine neighborhood in the eastern Aleppo, Syria. 

Hassan Ammar/File/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

When the Syrian civil war came to Aleppo, it was hardly the first conflict to define the ancient city. Aleppo's Citadel alone hosts traces of fortifications built over four millennia, though the citadel has suffered damage, like the rest of the city, in recent years from the ongoing civil war. Mapping the damage of war is a simultaneously important and difficult task and often one at best tertiary to the survival efforts of those living in a besieged city. 

Unlike besiegers of Aleppo in centuries past, modern observers can access satellite imagery of the city, taken before and over the course of the war. This kind of footage, collected, labeled, and analyzed, can offer insight into the patterns of war in a city, and in turn, serve as a starting point for useful research into urban warfare, civilian relief, and the shape of conflict.

In “Monitoring war destruction from space using machine learning,” authors Hannes Mueller, Andre Groeger, Jonathan Hersh, Andrea Matranga, and Joan Serrat outline a method of augmenting human-labeled destruction in satellite imagery with machine learning. The result allows an automated tool to parse out a city, compare points in time, and identify areas of heavy destruction.

At present, such labeling is done by hand and can be combined with reports from people on the ground, but is limited to the speed of human observation, labeling, and detection.

“An automated building-damage classifier for use with satellite imagery, which has a low rate of false positives in unbalanced samples and allows tracking on-the-ground destruction in close to real-time … would therefore be extremely valuable for the international community and academic researchers alike.”

“An automated building-damage classifier for use with satellite imagery, which has a low rate of false positives in unbalanced samples and allows tracking on-the-ground destruction in close to real-time,” the authors write, “would therefore be extremely valuable for the international community and academic researchers alike.”

To make the model, the researchers trained a neural network to spot features of destruction from heavy weapon attacks, like artillery and bombings, which can be seen in the rubble of collapsed buildings and in craters. Then the model also looked at what undestroyed areas of cities look like, making sure the model can distinguish between existing buildings and ones hit by heavy attacks. 

Part of this model meant classifying images in patches of approximately 1,024 square meters (32 meters by 32 meters). This resolution allowed for damage to be precisely mapped, with the destruction of larger buildings covering multiple patches, while a bomb loose in a neighborhood might cover only one. In a map of Aleppo produced under this model, the destruction is plotted in red, and places free from damage are marked green.

The authors explained that “roads and parks are clearly visible as dark green (lowest destruction probability) or yellow patches. This is not only evidence of the power of our approach in picking up housing destruction, but it also shows how the classifier has learned that roads and parks are never destroyed buildings.”

Ultimately, conclude the authors, “reliable and updated data on destruction from war zones play an important role for humanitarian relief efforts, but also for human-rights monitoring, reconstruction initiatives, and media reporting, as well as the study of violent conflict in academic research. Studying this form of violence quantitatively, beyond specific case studies, is currently impossible due to the absence of systematic data.”

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class=”MuiTypography-root-142 MuiTypography-h1-147″>Rebel reliance: Part I

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into a rebel group's propensity toward battle as a function of the group's control of resources.

Inkstick MediaMay 3, 2023 · 4:15 PM EDT

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

Democratic Republic of Congo Defense Forces gather in the North Kivu province village of Mukondi, Thursday March 9, 2023. At least 36 were killed when the Allied Democratic Forces, a group with links to ISIS attacked the village and burned residents' huts. 

Socrate Mumbere/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

Battles are a curious event, requiring two participants but whose timing is decided almost entirely by the planning and malice of one half of the equation. This is especially tricky when it comes to rebel or insurgent groups, who have extra incentives to carefully pick battles given their inherent vulnerability. One possible explanation for the timing and frequency of battles has to do with the resources a rebel group has on hand. If the money is there to fund a fight, a once-vulnerable group may become bolder, but there’s a major catch. If the money from controlling and exploiting resources directly is too good, rebels may lose interest in rebellion, instead choosing stable profit over political contestation.

In “Rebel Resource Efficiency and the Escalation of Civil Conflict,” authors Bryce W. Reeder, Dongjin Kwak, John R. Smith, and Michael D. Wales examine rebel propensity toward battle as a function of rebel control of resources.

“We begin from a basic, noncontroversial premise: rebellion costs money,” the authors write. Securing, generating, and sustaining that income is organized and difficult work, and it leads political rebels to follow paths and patterns more common among armed criminal enterprises than rival political factions. This means black market provision of resources, whether illegal, like narcotics, or commercial, like timber. By nature of rebel exploitation, the resources in insurgent hands pass through black markets before arriving at legitimate ones.

"Rebels holding these types of nonlootable resources often resort to the sale of booty futures,” the authors write.

"A booty future is a promise to provide future access to a particular resource to an outside financier after the rebel group has achieved its political goals and overthrown the government. In exchange for future access to a major resource, such as an oil refinery, wealthy external patrons will provide funding to rebel groups in the present."

Looking at the complex nature of present and speculative assets controlled by rebels, the authors divide their model of rebel resourcing into three stages. There’s a “vulnerability phase,” when rebels control few resources and are most at risk from state repression. This can be followed by an “emboldened phase,” when rebels with a steady income and power base turn those resources into an attack on the government. Then there’s an “exploitation phase,” where rebels focus on the profit and wealth from resources over the further pursuit of political violence. 

“While many factors contribute to a group's decision to rebel against the government, this paper suggests that the ‘greed’ element plays a different role than the ‘grievance’ element in predicting insurgency,” the authors write.

“Rebels accumulate resources in order to field capable fighting forces. At a high enough level of resource portfolio efficiency, greed overcomes grievance for the rebels…"

“Rebels accumulate resources in order to field capable fighting forces. At a high enough level of resource portfolio efficiency, greed overcomes grievance for the rebels; the perceived injustice the group initially organized may remain, but groups with highly productive resource holdings choose to pursue profits over justice, vengeance, or governance.”

Rebellion is a common-enough phenomenon that understanding the material underpinnings behind how groups chose to fight and not fight can help policymakers understand if their foes are desperate and starving, well-fed and hungry for battle, or living off the fat of the land, and perhaps open to a political settlement.

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class=”MuiTypography-root-134 MuiTypography-h1-139″>Winning the peace

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into the history of Ukraine's fight for independence — through peacekeeping.

Inkstick MediaApril 19, 2023 · 2:30 PM EDT

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

US paratroopers parachute at the Yavoriv training range in the western Lviv region, Ukraine, on Monday, July 17, 2000. Some 250 US commandos flying in the C-17 aircraft conducted an 11-hour flight to participate in the NATO-sponsored Peace Shield-2000 exercise. The manuevers involved servicemen from 21 countries. 

Valeriy Kovalyov/AP/File

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

Ukraine is locked in a war it did not choose with Russia in order to preserve its national sovereignty. But a new paper makes the case that, long before that war began, Ukraine was trying to assert its independence internationally: not with war, but through peacekeeping. 

Writing in Foreign Policy Analysis, Madalina Dobrescu argues “that states’ contributions to peace operations can be related to attempts at acquiring a positive identity in the international arena through membership in highly ranked groups.”

Dobrescu focuses on Ukraine in particular because “Ukraine's significant peacekeeping engagement in the first two decades following independence represents an intriguing case of an emerging state positioning itself in the international and regional systems, which makes it a relevant case study to explore.”

“Ukraine became independent in an international system that initially discouraged its emergence as a new state and subsequently questioned its permanence as a new international actor,” Dobrescu explains.

“Therefore, the main preoccupation of Ukraine’s foreign policy in the years following independence” was to define and assert its sovereignty. “Specifically, Ukraine sought to pursue this goal through a two-fold strategy: gaining recognition for its newly acquired independent status and achieving separateness from Russia…Thus, Ukraine’s first foreign policy doctrine stated that the young country attached ‘primary importance to the peacekeeping activities of UN bodies,’ which it regarded as ‘increasing the role and influence of the Ukrainian state in the world.’” Per Dobrescu, Ukrainian decisionmakers in the early 1990s saw UN peacekeeping contributions as a way for Ukraine to bolster its self-image both internally and externally. 

That is not to say that this has been without challenges.

As Dobrescu writes, “it is precisely the reference to Ukraine’s national identity and its unsettled nature, oscillating between — and trying to reconcile — east and west, that has rendered NATO and US-led multinational operations highly controversial among domestic elites and the public.” However, a reader might note that both are decidedly less controversial now that the country is engulfed in all-out war with Russia.

Dobrescu acknowledges that peacekeeping participation wasn’t Ukraine’s only or even main method for building such status, “nor was achieving status the exclusive motivation for engaging in peacekeeping.” 

Still, she concludes, “This article has sought to show that states engage in peacekeeping for reputational reasons not merely because ‘status matters,’ but in order to achieve a positive social identity in the international system.”

Dobrescu observes something else, too: “the potential for peacekeeping policies to disrupt the international order and change the status hierarchy is an important finding and should be explored further, as it goes against the common understanding of peacekeeping as supporting the status quo.”

Ukraine wasn’t just helping to keep the peace. It was changing it.

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class=”MuiTypography-root-142 MuiTypography-h1-147″>An elephant never forgets, sometimes sheds insight

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into what the socialization patterns of elephants can teach us about human evolution.

Inkstick MediaApril 12, 2023 · 12:30 PM EDT

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

Elephants in the Chobe National Park in Botswana on March 3, 2013. 

Charmaine Noronha/AP/File

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

New research suggests that elephants may be self-domesticated, which could tell us not only about the similarity between elephants and humans but also about why humans evolved the way we did.

A theory known as the human self-domestication hypothesis suggests part of what is unique about human behavior — our development of cultures, tools, and languages — came about because of an evolutionary process that did not favor aggression. But that theory is hard to test as so few living beings are self-domesticated.

Enter the elephant, joining bonobos as another species that may also be self-domesticated, as suggested by Limor Raviv, Sarah L. Jacobson, Joshua M. Plotnik, Jacob Bowman, Vincent Lynch, and Antonio Benítez-Burraco, writing in a new article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Elephants indeed exhibit many of the features associated with self-domestication (e.g., reduced aggression, increased prosociality, extended juvenile period, increased playfulness, socially regulated cortisol levels, and complex vocal behavior).”

They write that “elephants indeed exhibit many of the features associated with self-domestication (e.g., reduced aggression, increased prosociality, extended juvenile period, increased playfulness, socially regulated cortisol levels, and complex vocal behavior.)”

This, they say, is reinforced by genetic evidence, insofar as “genes positively selected in elephants are enriched in pathways associated with domestication traits and include several candidate genes previously associated with domestication.”

One particularly interesting point of potential proof is “an extended juvenile period and enhanced play behaviors have been hypothesized to be a crucial outcome of self-domestication, contributing in turn to the behavioral changes associated with self-domestication, particularly to cultural niche construction, in a sort of positive feedback loop.”

Elephants take longer to develop, and more of what they learn is taught, as opposed to innately known. They also note that “enhanced playfulness in adulthood can counteract tendencies toward dominance, promoting more egalitarian and cooperative behaviors and thus contributing to the sophistication of culture.” Every playful adult elephant is (maybe) a sign of evolutionary success.

The socialization patterns of elephants, the authors argue, “parallel what we find in humans.”

Human self-domestication is thought to have been “triggered by several (potentially interacting) factors, including the reliance on more variable and nonlocal food sources that require more cooperation to obtain, and the adaptation to harsh environmental conditions like those resulting from the Last Glaciation, which increase the need for resource sharing.” They theorize that there were also several potential triggers for elephants, too.

The point isn’t just that we now know more about elephants, though, for pachyderm fans, that is exciting, too. It’s that we might know more about ourselves and how we humans came to be as we are.

“If elephants have undergone self-domestication, one can expect to see at least some of human’s unique social and cognitive abilities in elephants as well, especially those associated with cultural niche construction and cultural evolution,” they write.

“Our hypothesis for self-domestication in elephants thus has important implications for studying the process and outcomes of cultural evolution, which is seen as one of the most prominent and powerful hallmarks of humanity.”

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class=”MuiTypography-root-134 MuiTypography-h1-139″>States at dawn: Part I

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into the pre-history of international relations.

Inkstick MediaMarch 29, 2023 · 1:30 PM EDT

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

A student shows a piece of ceramic in the archaeological excavation near Salbitz, central Germany, on Friday, April 8, 2011. The Saxon office of Archeology says remains of the oldest houses of Saxony have been found and excavated. The three houses are around 7,500 years old, and come from the beginning of the Neolithic Age in middle Europe. Field director Harald Staeuble says the houses are 50-80 square meters big and were probably inhabited by families with up to 15 members. They were discovered when a local researcher found pieces of ceramics in a field. He recognized the linear band decoration to be a mark for pottery specific for the Neolithic Age.

Jens Meyer/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

From what raw material conditions does the field of International Relations (IR) emerge? The first recorded histories cover states and statelets in existence. But cuneiform writing that emerged in Sumer and ancient Mesopotamia is downstream from state formation, and thus downstream from the existence of earlier IR.

In “Prehistorical International Relations: How, Why, What,” authors Iver B. Neumann and Håkon Glørstad make the case for international relations to look into prehistory, both to try and study the emergence of state systems and to see how well the tools of IR hold up when working with evidence based on material cultures.

Part of their interest concerns the genealogy of the field IR field. “[W]e want to know when the phenomena we study emerged, and how and why they changed,” the authors write.

To treat changed perceptions of time and space, especially linear time and land as possessed territory, the authors look to changes in the material evidence left by two different eras of people in prehistoric Europe. These are House Polity Proto-systems, dating from 9000-4500 BCE, which were followed by Segmentary Polity Proto-systems from 4500-2500 BCE. 

“The house and its household is the major structuring element of these early polities, with the complexity of the house and of the layout of the village being solid indicators of the marked but low level of complexity of these polities,” the authors write. In this system, there was minimal trade with other groups, but the lack of large surpluses and a fairly universal profile of resources kept such trade small.

The second system analyzed is Segmentary Polity Proto-systems, which emerged after House-Polity Proto-systems collapsed under pressures, including disease. In Segmentary Polities, the important unit is not the household but the lineage, establishing relations that are linear in time and expansive, as new families and kin can be folded into lineages. Domesticated animal labor and better agricultural tools meant bigger surpluses could be stored and sustained. It also meant that polities could trade local abundance for distant resources not available close at hand, like flint, for better axes.

“At the end of the European Neolithic, then, the key preconditions for increased interaction between polities were in place: stable food production, long-distance transport, uneven distribution of key resources (flint),” the authors write. This shows up in the bones and tools recovered from the era.

“Conflicts are documented both as skeletal lesions from graves and as defense systems that bear the signs of attacks, especially in the latter part of the Neolithic. Special hand weapons also occur (battle axes and lances).”

While just an early foray into applying IR to prehistory, the study makes a real stab at showing how territory became seen not as a place where people are but as a place they and their ancestors claim. Solidified and enshrined in monumental ancestral tombs, this is a kind of historical memory held by a culture before written language. It reflects a way of living and thinking that was concerned with neighbors and outsiders, existing among and in tension with other similarly constructed formations.

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class=”MuiTypography-root-142 MuiTypography-h1-147″>Founding fatherhood: Part II

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into the decriminalization of abortion in Colombia, in the context of the country's legacy of war.

Inkstick MediaMarch 22, 2023 · 1:30 PM EDT

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

Posters with a message that read in Spanish "Free abortion," hang in front a Constitutional Court as abortion-rights activists celebrate the anniversary of the Constitutional Court's decriminalization of abortion, lifting all limitations on the procedure until the 24th week of pregnancy, in Bogota, Colombia, Tuesday, Feb. 21, 2023.

Fernando Vergara/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

War complicates the decision to become a parent. For civilians caught up in conflict, the violence and uncertainty can make family planning difficult or impossible, with routes to seek medical care in cities and hospitals dangerous or extortionate. And war carries with it the threat and reality of reproductive coercion. People in war can be forced to carry children they did not intend, and they can similarly be coerced to give up wanted pregnancies.

In “Abortion access and Colombia's legacy of civil war: between reproductive violence and reproductive governance,” authors Megan Daigle, Deirdre N. Duffy, and Diana López Castañeda look at the decriminalization of abortion in Colombia. The paper was published in July 2022, months before the election of leftist candidate Gustavo Petro, and focuses on reproductive rights and access as contested political space.

“Colombia, therefore, demonstrates, first, the uneven political economies of gendered conflict harms, and second, the complexity of harms beyond explicit violence — that is to say, lack of access to abortion should be read as a gendered conflict harm, as access continues to be limited by conflict-related (im)mobilities and material inequalities that are racialized, localized and classed,” write the authors.

In other words, the conflict shapes the way people can travel and the resources they have on hand, and it does so along lines of gender, race, locality, and class. While the fighting may largely be over, the duration of the war prevented the establishment of rural clinics. This absence of health care infrastructure, especially that which can address reproductive health care needs, is compounded by the legacy of sexual assaults, forced abortions, and forced births experienced by people caught up in the fighting. 

The 2016 peace deal between the government and the longstanding rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia — People's Army (or commonly known as FARC-EP) itself became a source of conflict over reproductive rights. The terms of the peace included taking a gender-based approach to redress harms, a framing device that was seized upon by conservative opposition to peace as a compromise too far.

“Criticizing the original peace deal's language on gendered harms, opponents argued for a ‘no’ vote in the plebiscite by appealing to the protection of marriage, family, religion and the legal system. The then attorney-general, Alejandro Ordóñez, called the peace deal a ‘mortal blow to the Colombian family,’” the authors write. 

In making this case, conservative forces in Colombian politics set the primary victim of the war as not people but families, a distinction that shifted state responsibility in the aftermath to restoring families, rather than protecting individuals.

“Abortion is cast by these interlocutors as antithetical to Colombian society and the peace process, and opposition to it as a means of forging stability, family, identity and normality in the wake of decades of conflict,” the authors write. That makes the provision of abortion care and reproductive freedom difficult, even when it is technically legal.

“Activists for reproductive justice are keenly aware of these competing demands [for addressing violence and abortion access]: on our visit to La Mesa in 2018, we were handed postcards printed with the message, Nuestro cuerpo es nuestro primer territorio de paz —‘our body is our first territory of peace,’” the authors write.

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class=”MuiTypography-root-142 MuiTypography-h1-147″>Founding fatherhood: Part I

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into parental leave and caregiving in various affluent democracies between 1965 to 2016.

Inkstick MediaMarch 15, 2023 · 3:30 PM EDT

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

In this Wednesday, June 29, 2011, photo, Henrik Holgersson puts a shoe on his son, Arvid, at their home in Stockholm. Holgersson has split Sweden's generous parental leave with his girlfriend Jenny Karlsson and is spending eight months at home with their child. 

Niklas Larsson/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

Caring for an infant is a beyond full-time job, but it has only recently started to be treated by governments and labor laws as worthy of being a paid job. The provision of paid leave for new parents is a relatively new right in the countries that have it, one won only after acknowledgment of, respectively, mothers in the workforce and fathers as invested in the early raising of their children. While state perception and rights are largely binary, that’s a discussion for another time. 

In “Making Parenting Leave Accessible to Fathers: Political Actors and New Social Rights, 1965–2016,” Cassandra Engeman specifically focuses on how different political currents pull towards and shape leave for new fathers.

“In 1974, Sweden became the first country to establish paid parental leave for fathers, and the incorporation of fathers as caregivers under family policy continues today,” notes Engeman, though her study first tracks the idea as having political salience and legislative action as early as 1965. 

Crucial to Engeman’s study is tracking two related but distinct kinds of parental leave: transferable leave, which is extended to fathers but can be transferred to mothers, and nontransferable paid parental leave, which cannot be transferred to another parent and must be taken by the father.

According to Engeman, “Each type of leave sends different signals about fathers’ caregiving roles. While transferable paid parenting leave recognizes fathers’ need for time to care for new children, nontransferable paid parental leave entitlements emphasize fathers’ gender-equal responsibilities for their children.” She explains that while transferable leave entitlements allow more family “choice” around how to divide care, in practice, it is the mothers who end up taking a bulk of this leave. In contrast, individual entitlements have been shown to effectively increase fathers’ leave use.

One crucial part of the study was the cabinet composition for governments that adopted policies, showing which ideological coalitions were willing and able to move the parental leave from proposal to reality.

To build her study, Engeman looked at the first adoption of parental leave for fathers in 22 affluent democracies between the years 1965 and 2016. One crucial part of the study was the cabinet composition for governments that adopted policies, showing which ideological coalitions were willing and able to move the parental leave from proposal to reality. This cabinet composition is most crucial in understanding the role of confessional (or religious) right parties in overseeing the adoption of leave, despite it coming as a more general push from the left.

“[W]omen lawmakers have a significant, positive relationship only to transferable, paid parenting leave, and leftist party actors — and in restricted models, trade union institutional strength — have significant, positive relationships only to nontransferable paid parental leave. Results, therefore, suggest that fathers’ access to transferable and nontransferable paid leave are possibly distinct political projects,” Engeman writes. 

“While confessional [right and religious] parties may emphasize family policy issues, they are not expected to support caregiving leave for fathers because such provisions challenge traditional-gendered family roles,” Engeman continues. But an increased presence of confessional-right parties in government may mean the government is willing to act and move on family leave policies, even if they are pursued by the left, allowing the religious right parties to negotiate the form such leave ultimately takes.

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Email AddressEmail AddressSubscribeI have read and agree to your Privacy Policy.Related ContentCitizen pain: Part IICitizen pain: Part ITrust the process: Part IIRandom rules: Part II

class=”MuiTypography-root-142 MuiTypography-h1-147″>Citizen pain: Part II

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into how the US-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003 not only dismantled the government but destroyed an entire nation, forcing a mass exodus of certain ethnic and religious minorities.

Inkstick MediaMarch 8, 2023 · 3:15 PM EST

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

In this May 2, 2003 file photo, President George W. Bush declares the end of major combat in Iraq as he speaks aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln off the California coast. But the war dragged on for many years after that.

Scott Applewhite/File/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

When the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, together with the United Kingdom and a handful of tag-along allies, it unmade not just a dictatorship but the nation itself. 

As the invasion sprinted from victory over Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein to rapid dismantling of government and then hapless occupation, groups in Iraq began to contest the idea of the nation. This has led to a long-running civil war, the imposition of a sectarian constitution, and ultimately the mass exodus of ethnic and religious minorities that were afforded only nominal protections and no real power under the new constitution.

In “Nation-destroying, emigration and Iraqi nationhood after the 2003 intervention,” Oula Kadhum examines how before the modern state of Iraq could congeal into its present form, the existing national community was actively destroyed, broken up, and remade, with minorities taking their communities to new and safer homes beyond the borders of Iraq. 

“Caught between more dominant and competing ethnic and sectarian nationalisms, non-Muslim Iraqi minorities became targets in the quest for territorial gain and political power, or were otherized through takfir campaigns and imagined out of the nation,” Kadhum writes.

“Takfir campaigns refer to the campaigns by ISIS to target non-Muslim and Muslim infidels,” and while ISIS may have been the most explicitly exclusionary of the factions to context for power in post-invasion Iraq, the reordering of the nation around sectarian lines predates and post-dates its emergence and power.

To understand this nation-destroying, Kadhum conducted interviews with members of Iraqi diaspora communities. Today, those diaspora communities, in many cases, represent the largest share of a given group’s population, as the war in Iraq left no protection and no civic nationalism for minorities to share in.

“Whereas before 2003, there were roughly 1.5 million Christians in Iraq, today that figure stands at just 250,000. More generally, minorities in Iraq were said to comprise 10% of the Iraqi population in 2003; these included Armenian, Syriac and Chaldo-Assyrian Christians, Baha'is, Jews, Sabaean-Mandaeans and Yazidis as well as ethnic minorities such as Shabaks, Turkmen and Palestinian refugees,” Kadhum writes.

“By 2010, and even before the 2014 threat from ISIS, that number had dwindled to 3% for Iraq's most vulnerable minority groups, excluding Turkmen and Faili Kurds," she continues.

As of 2020, ethnic minorities made up no more than 5% of the population. 

The US-driven effort to build a state in Iraq, especially amid the growing civil- and anti-occupation war, settled on a confessional system, formally taking signifiers like Sunni, Shi’a, or Kurd, and making them a fixed political identity. 

“Iraqi minorities were no longer discriminated against linguistically or culturally, as they were under the Iraqi constitution, but their citizenship has been relegated from an active one to a passive one as their electoral power has effectively been curtailed,” Kadhum writes.

“Indeed, apportioned just nine out of 329 parliamentary seats in the parliamentary electoral laws, the ability of Iraqi minorities to participate with any significance in Iraq's democratic governance has been negligible if not non-existent.”

Ultimately, Kadhum concludes, “The 2003 intervention, therefore, catalysed a process of dividing the Iraqi nation into primordial entities rather than unifying it under a civic nationalism.”

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class=”MuiTypography-root-142 MuiTypography-h1-147″>Citizen pain: Part I

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into how states determine citizenship, with a spotlight on Assam, India, as the case study.  

Inkstick MediaMarch 1, 2023 · 4:45 PM EST

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

All Assam Students Union (AASU) activists hold hands together as they form a human chain to protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act on a road in Gauhati, India, Saturday, Feb. 1, 2020. Critics say the bill threatens the secular fabric of India. 

Anupam Nath/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

When the British Crown imposed rule on India by force (and through the East India Company), it reordered the subcontinent in many profound ways that persist to this day. The very act of determining citizenship, where the state sets rules to decide who is and isn’t legally allowed to live where they are based on documented claims of residency, can be traced back to colonial rule. 

In “Deprivation of Citizenship as Colonial Violence: Deracination and Dispossession in Assam,” authors Rudabeh Shahid and Joe Turner turn to Assam, a northeastern province of India, as a case study for how the categories of citizenship are used to inflict material harm.

To ground their study in the present, the authors open by talking about the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), passed in December 2019 by the Indian parliament, which amended the National Register of Citizenship (NRC) in Assam.

“The registry aims to catalog ‘genuine’ inhabitants of the state and effectively purge Assam of so-called illegal migrants,” the authors write. The CAA is a tool to grant citizenship to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian communities. “However, what the CAA effectively did was focus on the dispossession of rights on Muslim communities who were left off the list of protected religions and turned into ‘illegal migrants.’”

When encountered by the British, Assam was full of Indigenously-tended and maintained forests and fields, leading British settlers and colonists to determine that the land was mostly wasteland, and thus ripe for reorganization. “In order to make the land ‘productive,’ the colonial state introduced an extractive model of tea plantations in Assam and a system of forced and waged labor, networking the region into the imperial economy,” the authors write. 

This forced and wage labor included locals pressed into service, as well as people from diverse communities brought together in competition by British-driven movements. These categories became enshrined in the laws of British rule and then, following the 1947 partition of British colonies into India and Pakistan, became national identities.

“What we argue is that in acts of deprivation that make ‘citizens’ into ‘migrants’ — or more often ‘illegal migrants’ and stateless subjects — this relies upon the racialized conditions under which it becomes possible and thinkable to deprive someone of their rights,” write the authors. “Attempts to categorize the demographic makeup of the state were focused on delineating those ‘original inhabitants’ from ‘outsiders’ while erasing the economic and historical conditions of colonization and imperialism that created population movements.”

Colonization, partition, war, and now exclusionary rules imposed by the national government all build toward the same purpose. Citizenship is seen not as a right of every person, but as a privilege that can be pulled away from those deemed outsiders or undesirable.

Colonization, partition, war, and now exclusionary rules imposed by the national government all build toward the same purpose. Citizenship is seen not as a right of every person, but as a privilege that can be pulled away from those deemed outsiders or undesirable.

“Because of the colonial logic underpinning citizenship, altered rather than fully transformed by the postcolonial state, certain populations are never recognized within codes of citizenship in the first place. The recent NRC and CAA create hierarchies of belonging and illegality that are already partially rooted in Indian citizenship,” conclude the authors.

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class=”MuiTypography-root-134 MuiTypography-h1-139″>Home front: Part II

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into the World Congress of Families, an organization that has helped shape and share a reactionary agenda among conservatives across the globe.

Inkstick MediaFebruary 22, 2023 · 2:30 PM EST

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

World Congress of Families XI meeting, Budapest Congress Center, May 27, 2017, Budapest, Hungary.

Eleks Andor/Creative Commons

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

When President Vladimir Putin announced the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he did so by receding tropes that would be common across a Fox News broadcast or in the pages of the New York Post. His speech devoted a whole paragraph to the West’s assault on traditional values, saying, “They …  force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.”

There is no definition of global elite that does not meaningfully include Putin, but the familiar language of reaction he employed is part of a transnational strategy by conservatives — and those opposed to gender and reproductive freedoms. Thanks to the work of diligent reactionaries, there is a regressive international working to force people to live under an explicitly patriarchal order, one that punishes reproductive choice and gender expression.

In “Transcalar Activism Contesting the Liberal International Order: The Case of the World Congress of Families,” authors Sara Kalm and Anna Meeuwisse examine how one specific international organization was able to make the language of reaction transcend borders, despite so much of reactionary thought being linked to narrow expressions of local rule.

“Backlash politics in the gender field is now a broad political program, fought for by activists in many different countries,” the authors write.

“On the anti-gender (or ‘pro-family’; we use the terms interchangeably) agenda are issues such as banning abortion and surrogacy, prohibiting sexual education in schools, stopping legislation on domestic violence, complicating divorce procedures, and disallowing sex change as well as same-sex marriage.”

To explore the shaping and sharing of this reactionary agenda, the authors focus on the World Congress of Families (WCF), which was founded in 1997, with both Americans and Russians having early prominent roles in creating and shaping the organization.

The WCF is at the center of global networking and unites different kinds of actors across most regions of the globe. These actors include evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox civil society organizations, the Holy See, religious leaders, scholars, aristocrats, and politicians, such as high-level ministers in countries like Hungary, Italy, and Brazil.

One major breakthrough of the WCF has been finding a common language for authoritarian leaders peripheral to the West, like former President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil or President Viktor Orbán in Hungary…

One major breakthrough of the WCF has been finding a common language for authoritarian leaders peripheral to the West, like former President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil or President Viktor Orbán in Hungary, as well as reactionary populists of western nations, like Italian leaders of the Lega Nord. In this, both groups share a framing that places reactionary politics as one that protects the natural family without having to confront different regional variations on family.

“The discourse on the natural family fits very well with the nationalist and ethnocentrist worldview of the right-wing populists who currently enjoy great success in many corners of the globe. The most obvious reason for this is the notion of a global left-liberal elite that tries to implement a radical agenda that is alien to the interests of the ‘common man/woman,’” the authors write. 

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class=”MuiTypography-root-134 MuiTypography-h1-139″>Home front: Part I

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter, takes a deep dive this week into the ways in which US communities that most bear the costs of war are also more prone to right-wing radicalization.

Inkstick MediaFebruary 15, 2023 · 1:15 PM EST

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

American soldiers drive a Bradley fighting vehicle during a joint exercise with Syrian Democratic Forces at the countryside of Deir Ezzor in northeastern Syria, Dec. 8, 2021. 

Baderkhan Ahmad/File/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

When soldiers return from war, they do so changed by the experience, while integrating with home communities that changed in different ways in their absence. It’s a trope of military memoir, fiction, and often public testimony: that the soldier left to fight for one country and came back to one in some way unrecognizable and, often, worse. One of those differences, too, is the loss of comrades in arms, of fellow soldiers who left and never came back. In communities that especially feel the brunt of war, from lost family to returned, changed veterans, the experience of loss during wartime can be a catalyst of reactionary sentiment.

Such is the contention of Richard J. McAlexander, Michael A. Rubin, and Rob Williams in their working paper, “They’re Still There, He’s All Gone: American Fatalities in Foreign Wars and Right-Wing Radicalization at Home.” 

“We agree that both economic anxiety and racial resentment explanations are important for understanding right-wing radicalization, but highlight a third factor missing from this debate: the impact of US foreign military engagements on politics and society at home,” the authors write.

“We argue that communities that bear the costs of these wars, specifically in terms of fatalities among community members, may be more prone to high rates of radicalization.” 

To build evidence for this, the researchers looked at publicly available posts on Parler, an online Twitter-like platform specifically seen as a home for right-wing mobilization. Parler video posts were geolocated, making it easy to match hometowns and travel for users. 

“Efforts to measure early stages of radicalization systematically typically face major barriers: extremist organizations remain clandestine, individuals may be wary of revealing their participation, and, unlike violent incidents, the mundane forms of social and political action that mark the early stages of radicalization are not widely investigated or reported on by law enforcement, government agencies, or the media,” the authors write.

“The Parler data provide a unique opportunity to capture the early stages of far-right radicalization for systematic empirical investigation.”

With such mobilization done in the open, it became possible to determine the hometowns of Parler users down to county and census tract levels, or smaller neighborhood-sized regions studied by the US census. Then, the researchers compared that to US war fatalities from Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003. Looking especially at the videos users uploaded of themselves, the researchers found that, the more war fatalities in a user’s hometown, the more likely they were to post a video on a reactionary site. Because it is harder for users to hide behind anonymity in videos, the researchers treat a willingness to post a video on Parler as evidence of deeper engagement in the site.

“Our statistical results show a strong correlation between areas in the US whose residents have died in overseas wars and the level of participation in a far-right social media website,” the authors write.

“This is a remarkably robust result that holds even when controlling for military participation. It is not participation in the military that leads to far-right radicalization, it is specifically the harmful domestic repercussions of foreign military interventions that lead to far-right radicalization in the United States.” 

Understanding how these long wars shape radicalization, and in turn diminish the possibilities for domestic politics, is a vital component to understanding danger at home, and the follow-on consequences of sending armies crusading abroad.

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class=”MuiTypography-root-142 MuiTypography-h1-147″>Trust the process: Part II

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into the function of ad-hoc organizations that are formed to address a specific crisis — and then often get dissolved when the crisis ends.

Inkstick MediaFebruary 8, 2023 · 2:00 PM EST

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

French Barkhane force soldiers who wrapped up a four-month tour of duty in the Sahel board a US Air Force C130 transport plane, leave their base in Gao, Mali, Wednesday June 9, 2021. European leaders said troops from the European-led military task force known as Takuba will withdraw from Mali, while France is expected Thursday to announce the pullout of its own troops from the West African country. 

Jerome Delay/AP/File

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

International problems can require international solutions, but many of the organizations set up to address problems of global governance are, by design and tradition, slow to act. Much of the study of international organizations focuses on these relatively ponderous giants, the durable structures like the UN, World Health Organization, or NATO, which delicately balance the needs of members and the broader world. But sometimes, when there’s a specific crisis like a violent insurgency that arises across borders or a new disease outbreak in a whole region, ad-hoc organizations are formed to address the specific problem, and then often dissolved after the crisis has passed. 

In “Ad hoc coalitions in global governance: short-notice, task- and time-specific cooperation,” authors Yf Reykers, John Karlsrud, Malte Brosig, Stephanie Hofmann, Cristiana Maglia, and Pernille Rieker argue that these impromptu structures are worth further study, especially as they will shape how states might respond to crises in the future.

The authors define ad hoc coalitions as “autonomous arrangements with a task-specific mandate established at short notice for a limited period of time.” In practice, that looks a lot like a task force or relief mission put together by a few nations in service of an immediate crisis. One example is the Biafran airlift, a humanitarian mission that ran from 1967-1970. Responding to reports of starvation and risk of genocidal violence, a coalition formed of church groups, nongovernmental organizations, and airline companies that received “active (behind the scenes) support from several states, including the United States, Canada, Norway, and Denmark.” The coalition succeeded in evacuating 4,000 children from Nigeria.

A more contemporary example, and one that is the case for the researchers, is Task Force Takuba. In January 2020, the governments of Mali and Niger asked for help against a jihadist insurgency in a cross-border region shared with Burkina Faso. By Mar. 27, 2020, 11 European nations pledged to set up such an effort, and by Jul. 15, 2020, a multinational force was ready. The coalition was consciously formed outside the existing structures of either NATO or the European Union’s Common Security and Defence Policy.

The task force operated for almost two years, before being dissolved in June 2022. The mission ended not because the threat itself was gone but because the political relationship between France, the task force’s largest contributor, and Mali had changed, leading the rest of the coalition to withdraw. In particular, the military junta that took over Mali had invited Russian-backed mercenaries from the Wagner group, which precipitated the French exit.

This is an example of how such organizations can be spun up to meet needs and then broken down when the task-specific nature of the mission no longer meets existing political realities. 

“When global gridlock and inflexibility dominate a global governance problem, actors tend to look for solutions in which political resistance can be overcome or circumvented,” note the authors. But rather than seeing this as an end-run around existing structures, they could be studied as a complement to other international organizations. “Their short-notice creation suggests that AHCs [ad hoc coalitions], such as Task Force Takuba, are ‘first responder’ governance arrangements, whose performance should be examined in particular during the fast-burning phase of a crisis such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks.”

Related: Trust the process: Part I

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class=”MuiTypography-root-134 MuiTypography-h1-139″>Trust the process: Part I

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into the politics of patronage in Brazil.

Inkstick MediaFebruary 1, 2023 · 12:45 PM EST

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

Teachers representing the observatory of knowledge, protest against budget cuts for public universities outside the Ministry of Education, in Brasilia, Brazil, Tuesday, July 2, 2019. 

Eraldo Peres/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

“Patronage networks” are a popular villain of political imagination, conjuring to mind cynical images of a corrupt party boss and elected lackeys indulging in extracted wealth from the public coffers. More realistically, this kind of “rent extraction” is real, where appointed government officials use the privileges and access of the job for personal profit, but it’s hardly the only story. That patronage can facilitate corruption is well known, but it remains an insufficient explanation for why patronage structures persist across political systems. 

There are benefits from political appointments, not just to the appointees, but to the provision of public goods, argues Guillermo Toral in “How Patronage Delivers: Political Appointments, Bureaucratic Accountability, and Service Delivery in Brazil.”

The paper is written as a broader contribution to the study of patronage, adding discussion of its effectiveness to a literature already rich in outlining how such systems are used for plunder. To test the assumption of benefits, Toral looked at data from local Brazilian governments, surveyed bureaucrats and politicians, and conducted over 120 in-depth interviews across seven Brazilian states.

“I argue that political appointments and connections upwardly embed bureaucrats, which provides a set of governance resources. … Depending on how these resources are used, patronage can enhance either rent-seeking or public service delivery.”

Guillermo Toral

“I argue that political appointments and connections upwardly embed bureaucrats, which provides a set of governance resources,” Toral writes. “Depending on how these resources are used, patronage can enhance either rent-seeking or public service delivery.”

Toral goes on to explain the five mechanisms of patronage that he uncovered in his research, which he calls “upward embeddedness.” The first is the bureaucrats’ increased access to material and nonmaterial resources. The second is how patronage allows for politicians to monitor bureaucrats, while the third is how it facilitates the application of sanctions and rewards. The fourth mechanism is related to how patronage aligns bureaucratic priorities and incentives, and the fifth is how patronage works to increase mutual trust. Toral explains, “The advantages of upward embeddedness are not based on distributive favoritism because most of these governance resources are not zero-sum.”

Another way to think of this is that because appointees come in by recommendation and selection from an elected executive, those appointees are bound to that leader and have access to — at a minimum — some of the executives' attention. This makes it especially worth looking at in rural municipal contexts with finite budgets and labor pools.

“In these challenging environments, the counterfactual to a political appointee is not necessarily the highly capable, autonomous, and driven bureaucrat that Weberian theories presume,” Toral writes. “Without adequate human capital and incentives, civil servants may simply lack the capacity and motivation to deliver services. In those contexts, patronage can alleviate some constraints on bureaucratic governance.”

Appointees are also at-will employees, which means that they can be dismissed or threatened with dismissal for a failure to deliver and can also be promoted for success. In Brazil, while a developed city may have an established bureaucracy capable of handling tasks, the trust between appointees and executives in a developing city can facilitate coordination. 

This effectiveness can be seen in tracked changes of school quality in Brazil, as illustrated by scores in the Basic Education Development Index following political turnovers. Quality changes with political transition indicated that previously well-connected appointees were using those connections for meaningful service provision before the election.

“For the benefits of patronage to outweigh the costs, politicians must value public service delivery, be it due to intrinsic beliefs and norms, political competition, electoral accountability, or anti-corruption institutions,” Toral concludes.

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class=”MuiTypography-root-142 MuiTypography-h1-147″>Random rules: Part II

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into Ahrar al-Sham, one faction in the Syrian war, and the strategies it used to manage alliances among other rebel factions.

The WorldJanuary 25, 2023 · 3:00 PM EST

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

In this Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2014, photo, a Free Syrian Army fighter from Shams al-Shamal heads to the front line in Kobani, Syria. 

Jake Simkin/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

A rebel alliance can be self-explanatory, the purity of rebellion enough to cohere together a popular insurgent front. But, in the messiness of real life, the messiness of rebellion is a hobbling force, with ideological divisions keeping apart factions that should, by all appearances, be natural allies.

In “Same Same but Different? Ideological Differentiation and Intra-jihadist Competition in the Syrian Civil War,” Regine Schwab examines Ahrar al-Sham, one faction in the Syrian war, and what strategies it used to manage alliances among other rebel factions.

While violence is certainly one strategy rebel groups can employ against rival groups, it carries a high cost. For example, ammunition used against another rebel group can't be used to fight the government both groups seek to topple. After all, ammunition is a scarce resource. Moreover, killing fighters of another rebel faction also depletes strength.

“Differentiation also has consequences for other audiences such as local civilians, prospective recruits, and external supporters,” Schwab writes.

“Local civilians suffer from rebel infighting as they might get into the crossline or be consciously targeted. Hence, they should prefer nonviolent ways of managing conflict. When groups take a large ideological distance from each other, it is easier for prospective local and foreign recruits to choose their preferred group. While nonstate external sponsors might prefer to support the most radical rebel outlet, state sponsors often choose a more moderate option.”

In Syria, ideological differentiation proved a valuable strategy for Ahrar al-Sham, especially as ISIS occupied a radical extreme of the spectrum. For people looking to combat the Assad government but not driven to the same hardline rules and beliefs as ISIS, Ahrar al-Sham was a path into the fight.

In parsing out how groups occupy ideological space, Schwab sets out two axes: a territorial perspective and a social-political outlook. Territory ranged from national or those seeking to limit the war to smaller geographic confines, and transnational, like ISIS’s vision of Syria and Iraq as both under one rule. 

On the pragmatic end of the social scale, Schwab writes, “groups prefer integration with society and see fitna (civil strife) as detrimental to their cause. Hence, they are willing to work with actors that do not share their creed.” This is in contrast to purist groups, which took an expansive definition of takfir or declaring other Muslims "infidels."

Ahrar al-Sham was able, especially in 2013-2014, to differentiate itself from ISIS by emphasizing its nationalist credentials and broader ideological umbrella. However, this was not a particularly moderate vision, as al-Sham regularly proclaimed Afghanistan’s Taliban as the model for its desired program. Yet, those same moves left it vulnerable against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which after the fall of ISIS, was able to supplant Ahrar al-Sham as the main rebel force in the country.

“By analyzing the puzzling case of Ahrar al-Sham that emerged both as a winner and a loser of intra-jihadist competition in Syria, the paper finds that ideological differentiation is used when military constraints or ideological similarity preclude the initiation of violence against rivals,” Schwab concludes.

Related: Random rules: Part I

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Email AddressEmail AddressSubscribeI have read and agree to your Privacy Policy.Related ContentArctic alternatives: Part IIArctic alternatives: Part IOutsourced force: Part IInsult to injury: Part II

class=”MuiTypography-root-134 MuiTypography-h1-139″>Random rules: Part I

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into the role of sharia in northern Nigeria.

Inkstick MediaJanuary 18, 2023 · 1:45 PM EST

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

Muslims in Nigeria attend Eid prayers at the Kofar Mata prayer ground in Kano Nigeria, Sunday, May 24, 2020. 

Photo/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

In 1999, northern states within Nigeria adopted “full sharia,” or Islamic religious law, an action possibly made to deliberately delineate the country’s Muslim north from its Christian south. Every law can be open to interpretation in ruling, execution, and standards for evidence, and the sharia adopted is not different. Where there is a dispute over interpretation, there is a discourse, and while dominant traditions and legal schools largely held sway, the debate created room for alternate expressions of religious reasoning.

In “Northern Nigerian intellectuals, Sudan, and the ‘eclectic style’ in contemporary Islamic thought,” Alexander Thurston examines a pair of thinkers actively involved and engaged in this discourse.

“Eclecticists cross or blur boundaries between sectarian camps, even as they may have their own enemies and rivals,” Thurston writes. “Within politics, eclecticism carries advantages and disadvantages for its bearers, sometimes facilitating their access to non-Muslim institutions and forums, but simultaneously exposing eclecticists to charges of heterodoxy and inauthenticity.”

While doctrinaire intellectuals abound, firmly adhering to their respective schools of thought, the experience of intellectual debate, practice, and implementation can’t be contained in a single school. Thurston notes that, while the Sunni and Shi’a divisions in Islam persist, increasingly, Muslims across the world identify as “just Muslim,” a category that includes over one-fifth of Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa.

The presence of this laity, of believers in faith broadly rather than expressly tied to a specific school of thought or doctrinal tradition, can create room for eclecticists. In his article, Thurston focuses on two specific eclectic thinkers: Aminu Ismaʿil Sagagi and Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, both from Kano, Nigeria, who attended Sudan's International University of Africa in the mid-1990s, and who have public writings on the role of sharia in northern Nigeria.

Like Islamists, with whose thoughts both men are deeply familiar, these eclecticists ask how to create a just Islamic society by using the tools of the state and the law. Yet, “eclecticists deconstruct, rather than objectify, notions such as ‘sharia,’” Thurston writes.

“The eclecticists' emphasis on exploring political possibilities rather than championing established political programmes recalls the notion of ‘post-Islamism,’ (Bayat 2013),” which eludes to the frustration-driven search for an Islamic political framework beyond the horizons of the Muslim Brotherhood and its peers.

Some of this broader deconstruction can be attributed to the intellectual climate of the International University of Africa, which attracted students from a range of traditions and actively featured a curriculum drawing beyond just the set texts of any given school of Islamic jurisprudence. It meant an expansive engagement with Islamic intellectuals and writers like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx, and Antonio Gramsci.

When considering Sanusi’s thinking, Thurston writes: “A central component of this framework is the idea that Islamic movements and institutions are historically conditioned rather than universally replicable.” Sanusi noted that, while sharia interpretations were expansive and progressive at the time they were first implemented, returning to the original implementation of the laws misses what was so powerful about them in the first place.

While neither of the scholars featured set out a dominant path in Islamic thought within Nigeria, both demonstrate that intellectual debate over the nature and implementation of religious law is alive and well, and capable of accommodating more perspectives than just the narrow tenets of long-established schools.

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class=”MuiTypography-root-142 MuiTypography-h1-147″>Arctic alternatives: Part II

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Arctic Council has been on hiatus. This week's Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive into the history of the council as a model of international cooperation.

Inkstick MediaJanuary 11, 2023 · 4:30 PM EST

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

Large icebergs float away as the sun rises near Kulusuk, Greenland, Aug. 16, 2019. The Biden administration said Friday, Aug. 26, 2022, that it will upgrade its engagement with the Arctic Council and countries with an interest in a region that's rapidly changing due to climate change.

Felipe Dana/AP/File

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

In the frozen waters and still-extant ice at the top of the world, it is easy to imagine that the environment is harsh enough for humans to leave conflict behind. While the fate of the warming North Pole is relevant to the whole of the world, international cooperation in the region, in recent decades at least, has been led by the countries north of the Arctic Circle. These eight nations, the United States, Canada, Denmark (through its possession of Greenland), Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, joined the Arctic Council in 1996. 

The organization, which began as the Cold War ended, also consists of Indigenous Peoples as permanent participants, and has many non-member observers (like Germany and the Republic of Korea) who share a concern for the region. But following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Arctic Council has been on hiatus, and its once exceptional nature as a durable model of international cooperation is in question.

In “Can Exceptionalism Withstand Crises? An Evaluation of the Arctic Council's Response to Climate Change and Russia's War on Ukraine,” Gabriella Gricius and Erin B. Fitz look at the history of the council and examine what, if any, of its fair-weather functionality is durable in crisis.

To start, the authors look at two distinct, compounding crises for the council. The first is climate change, which expands human activity in the Arctic while also imperiling the climate, life, and lifeways in the region. Second, the authors look at Russia’s war on Ukraine, an acute and entirely voluntary geopolitical crisis brought about by one of the council’s member states, and which has an impact on its ability to cooperate with all other countries, especially with the council.

The authors sought to understand the perception of the council’s stability. Todo so, they conducted a literature review of scholarly articles about the Arctic Council. One finding was notable specifically for what was absent.

“Although the publications included in our review largely failed to mention actual geopolitical crises, Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea had an unequivocal impact on global and Arctic politics,” the authors write. Much of the work of the council continued, even as Russia did not participate in “annual meetings of the Chiefs of the Armed Forces of Arctic States, an independent cooperative institution from the Arctic Council.”

The course of action was normal enough that Russia could assume its role as council chair in 2021, though any expectations  at preceding normally were lost with the invasion.

“Although it is likely that Arctic Council activities would have halted in response to the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war regardless of who held the chairmanship, the fact that the Council did not shut down during previous crises suggests that the other seven Arctic states viewed this conflict as a more significant, state-driven stimulus,” the authors write. While the cooperation among other states and partners is beneficial, it suggests that the institution's previous decades of smooth operation hinge largely on the absence of geopolitical headwinds. At best, they conclude, it’s the lack of dispute that has made the Arctic Council durable, rather than the council ensuring a lack of disputes.

Related: Arctic alternatives: Part I

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class=”MuiTypography-root-142 MuiTypography-h1-147″>Arctic alternatives: Part I

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into 21st-century US policy on the Arctic, with a focus on the language used to shape these policies.

Inkstick MediaJanuary 4, 2023 · 4:00 PM EST

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

A CH-47F Chinook helicopter sits nestled in the Alaska Range to offload National Park Service equipment, supplies and personnel on Kahiltna Glacier April 27, 2022. 

John Pennell/US Army/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

The Arctic is one of the least hospitable places on the planet, but that has never meant inhospitable. For Indigenous people who have survived and thrived in the coldest reaches of the Northern hemisphere, the Arctic can be a world of abundance, with deep knowledge and practiced skill, making it a life-sustaining home. Yet, the Arctic is warming, thanks to human-caused climate change. It also has the misfortune of being located between the United States and Russia, two nuclear powers who have spent decades anticipating the danger of surprise war blowing in like a cold wind from the north.

In “Pulling back the curtain: coloniality-based narratives of wilderness in US Arctic policy,” Gabriella Gricius examines 21st-century US policy on the Arctic, and specifically how the language used to discuss the region constrains thinking about policy.

To start understanding US Arctic policy, Gricius examined Arctic policy statements from across the George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump administrations, all with an eye toward how the country handled anxiety over the region.

"Anxiety, here, is the ordering principle of how states interact with the world and what they must manage to feel secure. States can never solve anxiety, but they can manage it through routines and narratives," Gricius writes. 

To justify aggressive investment in and policy to control the region, successive US administrations all adopted the language of “wilderness” to justify their policies.

Here, the Arctic anxiety was threefold: that climate change is making its resources more exploitable, that the resources would go unexploited, or worse, that other nations would exploit the resources of the Arctic faster and better than the United States. To justify aggressive investment in and policy to control the region, successive US administrations all adopted the language of “wilderness” to justify their policies.

“Importantly, wilderness in the American Arctic is not diminishing in any material way. Rather, its character is fundamentally changing because of climate change from a region that was relatively difficult for extraction purposes to one that is significantly more accessible,” Gricius writes. 

While the planet is warming from human-caused climate change, the Arctic is warming the fastest, drastically changing life in the thawing north. But when US policy statements talk about the risk of a diminished Arctic, these statements largely sidestep climate change and instead highlight that reduced sea ice means easier access for drilling the ocean.

“In short, removing responsibility takes away settler blame and treats this diminishing as a blameless event rather than connecting this to capitalist and colonialist practices that are intrinsically connected to climate change. Furthermore, by treating the wilderness as a disappearing object with no subject, these policies even more so reinforce older American conservation narratives,” Gricius writes.

“This has implications for Indigenous People, who still live in Arctic wilderness, and are not diminishing with the region, but in fact require more funding, visibility, and assistance in dealing with food and energy insecurity.”

By seeing the Arctic as unsettled, and thus open for settler exploitation, US policy across administrations treats the area as an untapped resource, rather than a lived-in and inhabited place. Adopting a different policy for the Arctic, including one of preservation versus exploitation, requires a different narrative among US policymakers. To get there, presidents and analysts likely need to abandon the notion of the Arctic as available for exploitation.

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Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, take a deep dive this week into reasons why a government might choose to outsource its violence.

Inkstick MediaDecember 14, 2022 · 2:15 PM EST

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

In this file photo taken Thursday, Aug. 8, 2013, a Nigerian soldier patrols in an armored car, during Eid al-Fitr celebrations, in Maiduguri, Nigeria. Graphic new video footage from northeastern Nigeria shows the country's military carrying out abuses against civilians as part of their fight against the Islamic extremists of Boko Haram, Amnesty International said Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2014. The violence against civilians constitutes "war crimes," alleged Amnesty.

Sunday Alamba/File/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

The state, as we understand it, has a monopoly on force, but that doesn’t prevent the government from licensing out that power. Paramilitaries and pro-government militias can be a tool of state violence with plausible deniability for the government, even if there are provable links showing funding and direction. That deniability is a huge reason a government might choose to outsource its violence, especially if the government's formal agents, like soldiers and police, have already been condemned by the international community.

In “From Shame to New Name: How Naming and Shaming Creates Pro-Government Militias,” Lora DiBlasi examines the role of governments in creating pro-government militias, especially as a response to critique.

Di Blasi points to the experience of Nigeria, which was called out for human rights violations by Amnesty International a total of 35 times between 1996 and 1998, prompting resolutions from the UN Commission on Human Rights. In 1999, Bakassi Boys and Abia State Vigilante Group pro-government militations were stood up, which engaged in execution, mutilation, torture, unlawful detention, and election violence.

“The Bakassi Boys received orders directly from the government and had close and regular interaction and communication with government officials,” writes Di Blasi. “The government has also provided office space, paid their salaries, and equipped them for their missions. Moreover, the militia purportedly announced to their victims, ‘We are Bakassi Boys. It's a government order … The government wants you to die.’”

Despite the clear ties, the use of militias to carry out the condemned violence of the state creates an air of deniability, however flimsy, between the people doing the violence and the people directing it. If it’s a militia doing the violence, it becomes beyond the state’s control, even if the militia serves the ends of the state.

This matters especially for countries and leaders who want to enlist repression as a tool to hold power but fear international condemnation and sanction for doing so. 

“After being named and shamed, many states will be eager to avoid being chastised publicly again, as was the case in Kenya [in 1991],” writes Di Blasi. “However, not all leaders will want to end their spell of repression. An alternative solution is for states to create a separate apparatus to carry out acts of repression on its behalf, such as a PGM [pro-goverment militia]. Instead of making genuine efforts to reform their human rights practices in their country, states may instead opt to delegate violence to PGMs to escape the responsibility of subsequent human rights abuses.”

As leaders work out ways to repress while sidestepping shame, it behooves the international community to find new ways to condemn and constrain these end-runs around accountability.

As leaders work out ways to repress while sidestepping shame, it behooves the international community to find new ways to condemn and constrain these end-runs around accountability. Using proxies for violence may make the chain of causality murkier, but the effects can be seen clearly, especially when the supposedly uncontrollable militias do violence in a way that just so happens to align with the leaders saying they are powerless to intervene.

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Count me in!Related ContentInsult to injury: Part IIInsult to injury: Part IState reformation: Part IIState reformation: Part I

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Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive into how insults play out in informal settings behind highly formal events. 

The WorldDecember 7, 2022 · 3:45 PM EST

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

US President Donald Trump, centre left, and the Prince Charles The Prince of Wales, centre right, join other NATO leaders before posing for a formal group photo during a reception for the heads of the NATO countries, at Buckingham palace in London, Tuesday Dec. 3, 2019. 

Yui Mok/Pool/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

World politics is a stage that comes with a backstage. For international leaders, the theatrics of performance before cameras and behind the podium is highly public and often tightly calibrated. But every summit and every meeting includes moments of less on-display activity. In these spaces, asymmetric rhetorical attacks, insults, jokes, and jibes can shape how negotiations play out.

In “Backstage Mockery: Impoliteness and Asymmetry on the World Stage,” Eric Van Rythoven examines how insults play out in the informal settings behind highly formal events. 

“For a higher-ranking party, impoliteness from a subordinate can be perceived as a denial of deference and esteem, and even a challenge to the hierarchy itself. For a lower-ranking party, acts of impoliteness from a superior can be perceived as an abuse of position, which foreshadows threats to their autonomy,” writes Van Rhythoven.

The pairing of status and mockery is vital because it shows that the same styles of speech can have wildly different effects depending on who is using it and how.

The pairing of status and mockery is vital because it shows that the same styles of speech can have wildly different effects depending on who is using it and how. Van Rhythoven opens the paper by discussing a 2019 incident at the 70th anniversary of NATO. In a video of the incident, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte can be seen laughing. The audio cuts out, but several jokes about US President Donald Trump can still be heard. After the release of the video, Trump left the summit early, refusing to partake in further events with national leaders seen mocking him. 

“Conversely, the same parties can use impoliteness as a kind of friendly teasing or ‘jocular humor,’ which strengthens solidarity and the bonds of amity,” writes Van Rhythoven.

NATO was likely never in danger of falling apart under the Trump administration. However, the leaders of states less powerful than the United States were still able to, through humor, reassure each other that the alliance was more durable than the fickle moods of one particular president.

When it comes to responding to powerful states, writes Van Rhythoven, “Any act of overt ridicule comes with the risk of political, economic, or — in extreme cases — military retaliation. Weaker actors, however, can avoid retaliation by employing strategies to evade attribution.”

This could include laughing as part of a crowd or tweeting an image with plausibly deniable content. Masking intent and identity are two ways to respond without drawing direct retaliation. Backstage mockery allows the weaker party to save face while still challenging behavior. It can build solidarity between other smaller powers. And, like the video at the NATO anniversary, the mockery can be known through unofficial channels. 

“While the main audience in the backstage are the aggrieved, lower-status members, evidence of ridicule can spill over into a broader field of perception. Whether gleaned through diplomatic networks, savvy journalism, or intelligence services, reports of backstage mockery from subordinate powers can signal problems to transgressive governments—including pushback against their behavior,” Van Rhythoven writes.

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Count me in!Related ContentInsult to injury: Part IState reformation: Part IIState reformation: Part IWhen putsch comes to shove: Part II

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This week's Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive into the function of insults, name-calling and other types of undiplomatic language.

Inkstick MediaNovember 30, 2022 · 4:00 PM EST

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

US President Joe Biden and Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson, right, chat as they gather for a group photo at Castle Elmau in Kruen, near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, on Sunday, June 26, 2022. 

Brendan Smialowski/Pool/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

What does it mean when a leviathan turns to schoolyard taunts? States, as superstructures made of people, are subject to actions taken by those individuals. Diplomacy is adults talking with permission to set terms. So, why might a state, or its representatives, choose to insult another state?

That’s the central question at the heart of “'Filthy Lapdogs,' 'Jerks,' and 'Hitler': Making Sense of Insults in International Relations,” in which Elise Rousseau and Stephane J. Baele examine the function of undiplomatic language.

“Our central contention is indeed that international insults constitute both at once tactical tools used to achieve interests by disrupting an interaction and modifying the payoffs associated with it and linguistic artifacts constructing and sharpening self- and other identities,” write the authors.

The paper was published in the fall of 2020, and the presence of President Donald Trump lingers heavily over the entire draft, though the authors take lengths to show his approach is hardly singular in the history of world politics. Twenty-first century leaders like Britain’s Boris Johnson and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez feature, as do giants of the 20th century like President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. There are even prior examples, such as a 19th century letter used to nudge President William McKinely toward the Spanish-American war or the 1870 telegram edited by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, used to spark the Franco-Prussian War.

Insults have a long history in international relations, sometimes with bloody consequences.

Insults have a long history in international relations, sometimes with bloody consequences. Instead of treating these insults as irrational behavior, Rousseau and Baele instead look for the instrumental function behind name-calling.

“In the pragmatic literature, insults are considered ‘successful’ when they destabilize the target and, in so doing, create a new social situation. Therefore, insults are understood in opposition to the intuitive idea that they tend to be irrational outbursts of aggressiveness,” write the authors. “On the contrary, they are conceptualized as potentially advantageous linguistic devices that can be used tactically by individuals conducting their social interactions with broader strategic goals in mind.”

States and their agents use insults to disrupt and challenge the existing polite theater of diplomatic norms. Earlier this year, Critical State wrote about the Trump administration’s diplomacy as specifically following the beats of professional wrestling. 

“The international insults used to qualify the EU in the wake of the Brexit vote were also used instrumentally in a bid to shift UK national identity, and yet they tabled on much broader background discursive formations that preceded the vote,” write the authors.

These insults have both international and domestic audiences, and they can sharpen divisions while bolstering the in-group appeal of the speaker’s followers. It’s a tool in the diplomats' toolkit, though, as the authors note, when insults become a habit for world leaders, they are much easier to ignore than when they are carefully chosen and used rarely.

“In an international environment where actors seek to preserve face and material interests alike, insults are a potentially powerful linguistic instrument to gain advantages, to destabilize a rival and force him/her into a reaction, to disrupt cooperation or secure connivance, or even to alter the structure of the system,” the authors conclude.

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Count me in!Related ContentState reformation: Part IIState reformation: Part IWhen putsch comes to shove: Part IIWhen putsch comes to shove: Part I

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Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into the power and politics of collective memory when it comes to partitions. "If states told ghost stories, they would tell them of past partitions," Kelsey D. Atherton writes.

Inkstick MediaNovember 16, 2022 · 2:30 PM EST

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

In this September 1947 file photo, hundreds of Muslim refugees crowd on top a train leaving New Delhi for Pakistan. After Britain ended its colonial rule over the Indian subcontinent, two independent nations were created in its place _ the secular, Hindu-majority nation of India, and the Islamic republic of Pakistan. The division, widely referred to as Partition, sparked massive rioting that killed up to 1 million, while another 15 million fled their homes in one of the world’s largest ever human migrations. 

AP/Photo/File

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

If states told ghost stories, they would tell them of past partitions. Acts of partition, which span time and geography, unmake and remake states and people, often at the behest of at least one more-powerful third party. While lives may continue in partitioned states, it is not the sort of action undertaken willingly by the polity without other tension driving it to be a less-bad option. States are not living entities sharing campfire stories but instead are made up of people with historical memory. And the stories of partition are powerful in shaping how a state may react to future divisions or the possibility of reunification.

In “Connected Memories: The International Politics of Partition, from Poland to India,” Kerry Goettlich talks about partition as a memory held collectively and one where past examples in faraway lands are used as a tool for understanding and arguing about the present.

“The idea of ‘memory communities,’ likewise, does not break with the idea of a community of some kind,” Goettlich writes.

“While Western and Eastern Europeans’ memories of the Holocaust, the Second World War, and their outcomes may clash, they do so as a contest over the meaning of a series of tightly connected historical events, and ultimately as a struggle over what it means to belong to the collectivity called ‘Europe.’”

The way that people in countries in Eastern and Western Europe collectively respond to the experience of World War II shows shared events as contested memory and about memory in relation to other communities. What makes memories of partition so distinct is that they look for similarity and precedence in distant events, but events of a similar kind.

“The picture of partition that emerges from Poland to India here, however, is not one in which partitions are discrete, disconnected events, as assumed by much literature on partition, nor are memories of partition only relevant to those who experienced them,” Goettlich writes.

“Instead, the argument here is that social memories of partition traveled, and shaped how partition was seen, one way or another, beyond their original context.”

To explore this concept, Goettlich takes the partition of Poland, when from 1772 to 1795, Prussia, Austria, and Russia divided and occupied the land that had once been a distinct nation. This historical understanding of this event in the United Kingdom, while not leading to any change for Poland itself, shaped how British foreign policy approached a range of foreign policy decisions, including proposed partitions in Belgium, or how the gradual dissolution of the Ottoman Empire was to be handled.

“Only through the partition of Ireland, for example, particularly through the work of the imperial federalists,” Goettlich writes, “did it become possible for some to articulate ‘partition’ as a solution to intercommunal conflict, and to forget its negative associations with Poland.”

The story of Irish partition, in turn, echoed through the wider world. Goettlich opens the article with Ireland’s President Michael O’Higgins tying the partition of Ireland to the colonial struggles across the globe. If partition is a ghost story told by states, reunification after is a campfire song sung afterward.

Related: State reformation: Part I

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This week's Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive into what might happen should Ireland and Northern Ireland fall under one government again.

Inkstick MediaNovember 9, 2022 · 1:15 PM EST

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

Parliament buildings over looks the city of Belfast, Northern Ireland, Oct. 28, 2022.

Peter Morrison/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

“The Irish Unification of 2024” is a one-off reference from a 1990 episode of Star Trek. But eight years before the Good Friday Accords, the episode’s acknowledgment of terrorism as a path to such a political settlement prevented it from being aired on the BBC for 17 years. In late 2022, the question is: What might happen should Ireland and Northern Ireland fall under one government again? This issue is now less science fiction and more plausible policy.

In “Irish Unity: Lessons from Germany?,” Tobias Lock examines the textbook example of national unification in the modern era. 

Following World War II, Germany’s Nazi government was driven from power, and the country was divided by the occupying forces of France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union. This division followed in miniature in Berlin, which was otherwise surrounded by the Soviet Zone. The Soviet Zone became the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, while the three other areas became the Federal Republic of Germany or West Germany. This division lasted from 1945 until 1990 when a series of changes began in 1989 and led the last government elected in East Germany to vote for accession to West Germany. The two countries have been one ever since, though many divisions from nearly half a century apart still run deep.

“The German and Irish contexts differ, however, as far as the subjects of unification are concerned: whereas the GDR was a sovereign state and ceased to exist as such on 3 October 1990, Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom, which would continue to exist as a state after Irish unification,” writes Lock. “In other words, whereas German unification consisted in the absorption of one state in another, Irish unification would technically be a transfer of sovereignty over territory by one state to another.”

What unification would share is a continued international place for Ireland, which would maintain its relations as it absorbed transferred territory. If such a transfer should occur, Northern Ireland would once again be a party to the European Union, which the United Kingdom left under the policy of Brexit. 

One major structural difference is that, whereas East Germany’s parliament was able to unilaterally vote for accession, the existing “Good Friday/Belfast Agreement stipulates that Irish unification requires ‘consent, freely and concurrently given, North and South,’ i.e. two concurrent expressions of consent,” Lock writes. 

In structuring such expressions of consent, negotiators could strive to accommodate the hard-won — and already-negotiated — terms of the agreement. One way such a unification could improve upon German reunification would be ensuring that the burdens of constitutional change are not shifted entirely onto the ascending territory. 

“Constitutional reform confirmed by a subsequent referendum would have given Germans East and West a greater degree of agency over reunification, which by and large was an event that was happening to them rather than one they were actively able to shape; and it might have demanded that West Germans adapt to at least some changes to their status quo, which — in stark contrast to their East German compatriots — they did not have to grapple with,” Lock writes. 

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Count me in!Related ContentWhen putsch comes to shove: Part IIWhen putsch comes to shove: Part ILeft unresolved: Part IIThe Italian job: Part I

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Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into the myth of "coup contagion."

Inkstick MediaOctober 26, 2022 · 4:00 PM EDT

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

Supporters of Capt. Ibrahim Traore parade waving a Russian flag in the streets of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Oct. 2, 2022. 

Sophie Garcia/AP/File

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

The period from February 2021 to February 2022 saw six successful coups in Chad, Mali, Guinea, Sudan, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, and three failed attempts in Niger, Sudan, and Guinea-Bissau. If militaries, especially in neighboring countries in Africa, are experiencing similar instability, is there a greater risk to worry about?

No, argues Naunihal Singh in “The Myth of the Coup Contagion.” Instead, he writes, “Three key structural factors made these countries particularly vulnerable to coup attempts: a recent history of successful coups, low economic development, and regimes that are neither highly democratic nor highly authoritarian.”

Before diagnosing the problem, Singh walks through several possible other explanations. The first is the risk of contagion of coups, where a military seizing power in one country inspires a nearby military to take the same chance. Instead of looking for a connection in geography, Singh points to the lineage of coups in the countries in question. If the strategy has served the political needs of officers in the past, then officers can refer to that domestic precedent instead for inspiration and justification.

The second claim Singh examines is that of coups as a response to insurgent violence, especially across the Sahel. In Burkina Faso, the coup plotters specifically point to a lack of resources to fight the war as they’d like as a cause, but that dynamic is lacking elsewhere. Further limiting the role of insurgency in driving coups is that insurgent violence in the region had higher peaks in 2015 yet saw no coups related to that threat.

There is also the question of training by Western militaries, especially done by the United States. The US military is actively involved in training forces it chooses to partner with across the world, and many US training efforts with countries in the Sahel have come as part of the United States’ broader effort to fight insurgencies in the region. Some of these soldiers, trained by the US military, have participated in coups, one even dramatically leaving a months-long training by Green Berets to stage one. Singh notes, “US Africa Command does not track how often officers whom it has trained try to overthrow their governments,” but also points to the fact that between 1999 and 2016, the United States trained 2.4 million soldiers abroad, a pool large enough to include some coup plotters.

Instead, coups can largely be traced to a successful history of coups in the country,  low economic development, and weak institutionalization in either democratic or authoritarian directions. Consolidated regimes are harder to overthrow.

The security concerns that have eroded once-strong anti-coup norms are looming over all of this. “Penalties against coup making are also weak and inconsistently applied. When Western countries fail to act against coups out of fears of disrupting security relationships, they appear hypocritical, preaching the virtues of democracy but placing a low value on democracy-promoting actions in practice,” concludes Singh. “In the end, there is no substitute for clear and consistent implementation of pro-democratic and anti-coup norms, without loophole or exception.”

Critical State is your weekly fix of foreign policy analysis from the staff at Inkstick Media. Subscribe here. 

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Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive into the beliefs of citizens of Germany and the Netherlands on the use of US nuclear weapons — especially as informed by partisan belief.

Inkstick MediaOctober 19, 2022 · 3:15 PM EDT

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

An F/A-18 E launches from the deck during flight training ops aboard the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022, off the Virginia Coast. After years of delays and problems with new technology the US Navy's most advanced aircraft carrier embarked on it's first deployment and will train with other NATO countries.

Steve Helber/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

NATO exists under the shadow of the US “nuclear umbrella.” It is, like most strategies, a kind of euphemism. What the “umbrella” does is allow the United States to guarantee that its nuclear arsenal will deter nuclear threats against other NATO members without those countries needing to develop their own weapons (though France and the United Kingdom both have their own nukes). To guarantee this, in part, the United States deploys nuclear weapons at bases in European countries, such as Italy, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Anatolian Turkey.

While the ultimate decision over whether or not to use nuclear weapons will come down to governments of host countries, and, additionally, to the US president, the people living under the nuclear umbrella have divergent opinions regarding their use, which can, in turn, shape the policy of countries hosting nuclear warheads.

In “Ideology and the Red Button: How Ideology Shapes Nuclear Weapons’ Use Preferences in Europe,” authors Michal Onderco, Tom W. Etienne, and Michal Smetana, examine the beliefs of citizens of Germany and the Netherlands on the use of US nuclear weapons, especially as informed by partisan belief.

In both countries, the researchers asked survey respondents if they support or opposed four different scenarios of possible nuclear weapon use by NATO in Europe. These were a demonstration explosion over an unpopulated area in response to a Russian conventional invasion of the Baltics; a direct use of a nuclear weapon against the Russian military in a shooting war; a demonstration detonation in response to a Russian demonstration detonation; and use against Russia’s Kaliningrad in response to a Russian nuclear strike on NATO troops.

Importantly, the authors found that in “none of the four scenarios did the willingness to use nuclear weapons exceed 24% of the population, and in two scenarios it reached only 10%”

That matches with other research indicating that European public opinion is more broadly opposed to nuclear weapons use than people in the United States. Of the scenarios, the use of nuclear weapons against Kaliningrad in retaliation to a Russian nuclear strike received the most support, approved by almost 25% of survey respondents in the Netherlands. 

“Our results indicate that right-wing voters, including those on the far-right, are more willing to consider the use of nuclear weapons."

“Our results indicate that right-wing voters, including those on the far-right, are more willing to consider the use of nuclear weapons,” the authors write. “While there are similarities between how German and Dutch voters see nuclear use, there appears to be a difference between them when it comes to centrist voters. Whereas German centrists lean toward the rest of the right in favor of nuclear use, Dutch centrists lean along with the left wing in opposing nuclear weapons.”

While the authority to use nuclear weapons ultimately rests on the US president, the continued storage of nuclear warheads in Europe is a political question left up to the countries. It suggests that those in the United States are more eager to threaten thermonuclear oblivion and share a political alignment with the right and far-right voters in NATO countries. At the same time, attitudes toward nuclear disarmament remain an international left-wing project — even in places where they have centrist appeal.

Related: Left unresolved: Part I

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class=”MuiTypography-root-126 MuiTypography-h1-131″>Left unresolved: Part I

This week's Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive into new scholarship that examines the broad spectrum of leftist foreign policy ideas.

Inkstick MediaOctober 12, 2022 · 3:15 PM EDT

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

American military personnel wait to greet US Secretary of State Antony Blinken before he boards a plane to travel to Brussels for meetings with NATO counterparts, a day after his unannounced visit to Ukraine, at Rzeszow-Jasionka Airport in Jasionka, Poland, Friday, Sept. 9, 2022. 

Jonathan Ernst/AP/Pool

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

At the heart of foreign policy is a simple question: What actions in the world will make tomorrow safer than today? As framed, the question reads primarily about nations. After all, these are the traditional foreign policy agents and the unconstrained players in the anarchic world of realism. But the question could just as easily be about national leaders, transnational alliances between elites, or the interests and desires of everyday people. Likewise, what constitutes a safer tomorrow is likely to have very different answers for an internationally minded high school student and a Saudi oil baron. The world is, in a real sense, what we make of it.

In “Left of Liberal Internationalism: Grand Strategies within Progressive Foreign Policy Thought,” Van Jackson examines the broad spectrum of leftist foreign policy ideas and how they formulate what could be seen as grand strategies to understand the world. 

“Because military-first politics are a blight on democracy, antimilitarism has always been a throughline for the American Left that informs its antiwar politics. But antimilitarism does not inherently rule out the use of force, which means it is not reducible to pacifism,” Jackson writes. Debates over the how, against who, and to what ends military force should be used is central to differentiating camps of progressive foreign policy.

In looking at the debates among the Left, Jackson finds primarily three camps, which share some language and approaches, but can differ greatly on means, ends, and underlying rationale. The first of these perspectives is “progressive pragmatism,” which starts from US foreign policy as it is and seeks to make it more equitable and just. Another is “antihegemonism,” a camp that sees the United States and US power as responsible for the far-right at home and abroad and seeks to minimize US power in order to reduce the influence of the Right in the world. Finally, “peacemaking” seeks to structure international relations through means other than the national security apparatus, especially military and intelligence agencies, relying instead on cooperative security and transnational civil society to manage conflict.

While those camps can be at odds, they often share an expansive way of thinking about security, one often missing from narrow assessments of tank numbers or warheads in arsenals.

“The human security agenda, for example, which stresses anthropogenic threats (climate change) and naturogenic threats (pandemics), has received short shrift in grand strategy literature but is instrumental in how progressives think about security; they believe foreign policy should attend to the root causes of geopolitical problems, which reside disproportionately outside the military realm,” Jackson writes.

Guiding all three camps of Left foreign policy is an understanding of some degree of greater kinship with people outside their own nation. This is crucial to all movements that seek international solidarity in a fight for a better tomorrow against reactionary forces, but how the groups define allies can be illuminating.

“In essence, all progressives claim to be global solidarists with an at least thinly cosmopolitan outlook, but that conviction can be directed narrowly at democratic governments, selectively at the working class, or universally at human beings,” Jackson writes.

Critical State is your weekly fix of foreign policy analysis from the staff at Inkstick Media. Subscribe here. 

class=”MuiTypography-root-134 MuiTypography-h1-139″>The Italian job: Part I

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into the prosecutor’s office in Rome, Italy. From 1975 to 1991, this office was able to use gatekeeping to shield politicians from corruption charges. When those protections ended, the stable coalition system was overturned.

Inkstick MediaSeptember 28, 2022 · 12:15 PM EDT

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

A view of a courtroom inside Rome's tribunal Thursday, Nov. 5, 2015, during the first hearing of a trial of involving politicians and businessmen. An Italian court began the trial of 46 politicians, businessmen and others in a still-expanding corruption probe investigating Rome's City Hall that has revealed a well-oiled system of alleged kickbacks, payoffs, and Mafia-style intimidation to gain control of millions of dollars of city contracts. 

Alessandro Di Meo/AP/Pool

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

The Italian Constitution was adopted in 1947, years after the overthrow of Benito Mussolini’s fascist state at the hands of liberating allies and Italian anti-fascist partisans. Enshrined in that constitution, and enforced in the decades since, is a principle of judicial prosecution. Because all cases were pursued, the venue where the cases are tried and charged matters a great deal, as the discretion of the prosecutor manifests not in case selection but instead in sentencing and rigor of pursuit.

In “Prosecutorial Gatekeeping and Its Effects on Criminal Accountability: The Roman Prosecutor’s Office and Corruption Investigations in Italy, 1975–1994,” Lucia Manzi looks at the particular structural role of the Rome prosecutor’s office.

This office, as the jurisdiction overseeing the seat of government, was able to use gatekeeping to shield politicians from corruption charges up through 1991. Then, following a change in the judicial philosophy of the prosecutor in charge of Rome, an end to those protections cleared the path for the Mani Pulite ("Clean Hands") corruption investigation, which overturned the stable coalition system of the Cold War and led to the political reality of the present.

“Due to its geographical location at the heart of the country's capital, where all government institutions and political parties' headquarters reside, the Roman prosecutor's office could potentially claim jurisdiction over most, if not all, criminal violations committed by elected officials and political personalities,” Manzi writes. 

The Italian judiciary is structurally independent and responsible for the appointment and advancement of its members. After the 1970s, this was by seniority, but prior to that, it hinged on evaluation by superiors, encouraging ideological homogeneity among the profession.

Confounding the hopes of those who would want to prosecute corruption was a long-standing belief among the conservative elite of the Italian legal establishment that shielded government officials from the investigation, starting with a refusal to hold fascist officials accountable under laws punishing “particularly cruel barbarity” passed after the overthrow of fascism. 

This meant, Manzi writes, “the use of gatekeeping powers to shield state agents from accountability followed a much broader logic, rooted in Italian legal positivism's traditional hostility toward the use of investigative powers against the state.”

Manzi details two prosecutions of corruption scandals by the Milan office. A 1981 look into corruption by the Italian Socialist Party, a regular feature of Italy’s governing coalitions, unearthed deeper webs of connections and Swiss bank accounts for payouts. But, looking to shield the state from accountability, the Rome prosecutor's office claimed jurisdiction, blocked the Milan team from requesting Swiss records, and steered the investigation from above.

In 1992, the Milan team pursued a similar set of leads under a different Roman prosecutor. Without interference from Rome, their corruption investigation was allowed to proceed, kicking off the start of a sweeping investigation that found all parties of Italy’s stagnant governing coalition entwined with bribery for contracts and other kinds of corruption.

Manzi concludes that the “preferences of the prosecutorial actors in charge of gatekeeping institutions may have massive implications for the quality of democracy and the rule of law.”

Related: Political theater: Part II

Critical State is your weekly fix of foreign policy analysis from the staff at Inkstick Media. Subscribe here. 

class=”MuiTypography-root-134 MuiTypography-h1-139″>Political theater: Part II

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into all the ways in which diplomacy is a kind of performance.

Inkstick MediaSeptember 21, 2022 · 12:45 PM EDT

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

In this June 12, 2018, file photo, US President Donald Trump, right, meets with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Sentosa Island, in Singapore. 

Evan Vucci/AP/File

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

All of world politics is a stage, and all the world leaders are merely players, with their exits and entrance music. This theatricality of international diplomacy is ever-present, though it was perhaps rarely as visible as under the Trump administration. The former entertainer brought an intuitive understanding of the dynamics of professional wrestling to meetings more typically defined by intricate details of nuclear arsenals. Yet, even that official and prescribed seriousness hinges on diplomacy as a kind of performance, even if it is usually one so polite as to not acknowledge the stagecraft involved.

In “Wrestlemania! Summit Diplomacy and Foreign Policy Performance after Trump,” authors Benjamin S. Day and Alister Wedderburn focus on the particular stage of international summits. In particular, they examine how the actions, mannerisms, and choices made by former US President Donald Trump obliterated the false line between “performance” and “substance.” This is a lesson valuable for understanding the recent past, the actions of other right-wing populists, and the theatricality of international diplomacy in general.

“[W]restling is a pertinent lens through which to read international summits."

“[W]e argue that wrestling is a pertinent lens through which to read international summits,” the authors write, “which also cordon off a masculinized arena in which expansive, complex issues can be distilled into a comestible narrative, arranged into a series of symbolic set pieces, and presented to a global audience.”

Diplomats are performers in multiple senses. As agents of a distant state they stand in for the state, and in turn, represent it through their own personal actions. At summits, world leaders take this on, even if they are just heads of government and not heads of state, but especially when they are both.

At the center of Day and Wedderburn’s analysis are the events leading up to, and then following from, the 2018 Singapore Summit between Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. The authors map the preceding diplomacy like a season of wrestling. This approach allowed Trump to initiate diplomacy while simultaneously threatening North Korea with nuclear oblivion, an arc that ultimately culminated in a face-to-face meeting but no lasting achievement beyond the routine de-escalation of time.

“Our argument is predicated on the belief that even the naturalized norms of decorum that conventionally govern foreign policy actors depend for their acceptance and reproduction on theatrical modes of presentation and staging. It is important to ask how these norms might help to constitute certain actors as ‘sensible,’ ‘serious,’ and ‘statesmanlike,’ even as these actors tolerate and often authorize violence, death, and environmental degradation,” the authors write.

It is unlikely that another world leader will come to power as in sync with the rules and arcs of professional wrestling as Trump, but the theatricality of diplomacy, especially summit diplomacy, will persist. Only now, instead of real adults acting on roles they’ve unconsciously rehearsed since they were children in Model United Nations, the theatrical nature is clear to see.

“The question of whether and how to regenerate or renaturalize these norms must, therefore, be accompanied by a reckoning with performance's role in their construction, maintenance, and reproduction,” conclude the authors.

Related: Politcal theater: Part I

Critical State is your weekly fix of foreign policy analysis from the staff at Inkstick Media. Subscribe here. 

class=”MuiTypography-root-134 MuiTypography-h1-139″>Politcal theater: Part I

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into the language and word dynamics used in plays before and after early modern revolutions.

Inkstick MediaSeptember 14, 2022 · 2:00 PM EDT

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

Loyalist ephemera depicting British theater in Victorian London. 

Public Domain/New York Public Library

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

All the modern world’s a stage for revolution. But before the Age of Revolutions, the notion of overthrowing a monarch and installing a new form of government altogether was the stuff of antiquity, of fiction, and of minor Italic states. For people in England in the 1600s, or France in the late 1700s, the well of revolutionary references in history was shy, with scant immediate precedent to point to, one possible predecessor for revolutionary mood could be the themes of theater.

In “The rise of prosociality in fiction preceded democratic revolutions in Early Modern Europe,” authors Mauricio de Jesus Dias Martins and Nicolas Baumard examine the language and word dynamics used in plays before and after early modern revolutions.

“Interestingly, in postrevolutionary reactionary periods, characters became stronger and less trustworthy.”

Related: Rebel alliance: Part I

“We show that prior to both the English Civil War and French Revolution, there was a sharp rise in the frequency of words associated with prosociality, trustworthiness, and sympathy vs. words related to authoritarianism, strength and anger,” the authors write. “Interestingly, in postrevolutionary reactionary periods, characters became stronger and less trustworthy.”

Plays offer a useful corpus of popular media over the eras, in part because the work of staging and incorporating existing actors into productions meant that form and style stayed relatively consistent over time. To test their method of word association, the authors first demonstrated that their tool could sort plays into tragedies and comedies, with tragedies tending toward authoritarian themes and comedies trending towards sympathy.

Bound in the study of this change in England was the English Civil War of (1642-1651), which pitted Parliamentarians against Royalists, the royal Restoration under Charles II (1660-1688), and then the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which saw an adamant Catholic Royalist driven out and replaced by a Protestant monarch much more amenable to Parliament. The Protectorate, in which Oliver Cromwell ruled not by royal right but as Lord Protector as appointed through the proto-constitutional Instrument of Government, is “in line with our hypothesis, trust, sympathy, and prosociality rose during the period preceding the Civil War,” the authors write. They continue, “Crucially, we found that in comparison with the Restoration, the [slope of trust, sympathy, and prosociality] was significantly higher in the periods before the Civil War and after the Glorious Revolution. For sympathy, the absolute level was higher before the Civil War than during the Restoration.”

In France, the authors looked at these trends from before the French Revolution (prior to 1789), during the Revolution (1789-1799), in Empires and Restorations (1804-1870), and in the Third Republic (after 1870). In plays in France through that time, the authors found “that the trustworthiness-to-strength ratio rose before the political revolutions, and declined afterward.”

The authors also checked these trends against change in gross domestic product for the respective nations, noting “our results are consistent with the hypothesis that rising living standards might contribute to the shift of psychological orientations toward cooperation.”

Looking at further research, the authors suggest these trends can be used to explore other changes in behavior, ones that don’t reach the abrupt breach of trust and violence in revolution and reaction.

Related: Rebel alliance: Part II

Critical State is your weekly fix of foreign policy analysis from the staff at Inkstick Media. Subscribe here. 

class=”MuiTypography-root-126 MuiTypography-h1-131″>Rebel alliance: Part II

Critical State, a foreign policy newsletter by Inkstick Media, takes a deep dive this week into how Myanmar revolutionaries waged a war against drugs was part of a broader effort to define and demonstrate the world they were trying to build.

Inkstick MediaSeptember 7, 2022 · 3:15 PM EDT

• By Kelsey D. Atherton

Members of community based anti-narcotic campaigners known as The Pat Jasan shout slogans protesting against the government’s ban prohibiting the group from destroying poppy farms in Wai Maw, northern Kachin State, Myanmar, Sunday Feb. 21, 2016. 

Hkun Lat/AP

This analysis was featured in Critical State, a weekly foreign policy newsletter from Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.

Revolutionaries, in form and function, frame their work as a cure for the body politic. The history of revolutions is at least as much a history of organization and skill by those seeking to overthrow political order, as it is a failure of a political establishment to cure what ails it. This failure can take many forms, variations of an existing political and social order inadequately addressing the needs, rights, and desires of a wide cross-section of people within a country. 

When revolutionaries and rebels seek to challenge that order, they can do so by addressing the harms done to the bodies of the people within it. In “Defending Society, Building the Nation: Rebel Governance as Competing Biopolitics,” authors David Brenner and Martina Tazzioli argue that the way revolutionaries treat bodies is part of how they define and demonstrate the world they are trying to build.

To understand this in practice, the authors open with the role of the Pat Jasan, a non-state movement waging a war on drugs in northern Myanmar. The Pat Jasan is linked to the Kachin Independence Organization, a ethnonational rebel movement.

“Locally, the cheap availability of opiates and methamphetamines has fueled a public health crisis among already marginalized ethnic minority populations in the context of protracted civil war,” the authors write. They then pose this question: “Why would a rebel movement involve itself in a public health campaign against drugs, especially in a context where many other armed actors fund themselves through the drug trade? And what kind of political and social orders emerge from such interventions?”

Last week, and also in March 2021, Critical State examined resource dependence and resilience among rebel groups, and how control of drug fields or smuggling routes can sustain rebellions. While there are merits and disadvantages to both direct control and functioning as intermediaries, actively destroying a resource with direct black market value must come with some benefit, or else rebels wouldn’t do it. 

"We propose that rebels engage in governing populations because sustaining and optimizing life is precisely what establishes their sovereignty in the absence of formal statehood.”

In this case, the authors argue, “rebels might not only or even primarily provide public goods in exchange for public support. Rather, we propose that rebels engage in governing populations because sustaining and optimizing life is precisely what establishes their sovereignty in the absence of formal statehood.”

The provision of material aid, from bread to shelter, can be seen across rebel groups, looking to win over a population they need against a more heavily armed and repressive central government. But governance is more than material, and the authors point to the role of justice administration and health clinics as ways in which rebels demonstrate themselves as providing government in ways the central government won’t.

By governing in direct contrast with the state, including both destruction of poppy fields and movement-operated rehabilitation camps for users, the movement provides an alternate vision and even reality of governance. Or, as the authors put it, this work molds a population “into imagined communities in direct opposition to the existing nation state.”

By forsaking the material benefits of controlling narcotics that cause direct public health harms, the rebels are demonstrating an imagined cure for body politic.

Related: Rebel alliance: Part I

Critical State is your weekly fix of foreign policy analysis from the staff at Inkstick Media. Subscribe here.