A Prussian war theorist and eight tiny reindeer

A small army of content moderators work constantly to evaluate whether YouTube videos meet the site’s standards. Received this from a friend? [SUBSCRIBE]( CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. [The World]( [INKSTICK]( If you read just one thing… … read about the price of a livable internet. A small army of content moderators work constantly to evaluate whether YouTube videos meet the site’s standards. Some moderators look for porn, some for copyright violations, and some for explicit violence, especially the kinds of videos posted by groups like ISIS. The people who watch decapitations and beatings all day – so that you don’t have to — are subjected to a constant dose of the worst things humans can do to one another, which [leads]( to high rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health ailments. Many of the moderators are contractors, paid roughly $37,000 per year to mainline disturbing content, and many of the contractors are immigrants who have the language skills necessary to evaluate videos from around the world. To them, the need for a job as part of their bid for citizenship acts as the eyelid clamps from "A Clockwork Orange," forcing them to take in more and more awful images each day. Even for better compensated, in-house workers at Google, however, the effects of the work are corrosive. Speech and Syrian civil society Adi Magazine is a new publication led by political scientist Nimmi Gowrinathan and artist and journalist Meara Sharma, that showcases marginalized perspectives on conflict and policy. In Adi’s second issue, Syrian civil society leader Marcelle Shehwaro [wrote](about the many systems that have tried to silence her in a political life that has spanned revolution, war and activism. Growing up in Aleppo, Shehwaro recalled, even schoolchildren had their political speech closely watched by the Assad regime. A teacher signed Shehwaro and her classmates up for the ruling Ba’ath party in fourth grade, and parents sent their kids off to school with a warning that “the walls have ears.” Much later, though, when Shehwaro co-founded the Syrian human rights group Kesh Malek, she found that the international donor community also had a highly-attuned sense of what counted as acceptable political speech. In grant applications, referencing state violence, even violence committed by a pariah like the Assad regime, was not “donor friendly,” Shehwaro found. Discussions of nonstate violence, however, were encouraged. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( All networked up and no one to spy for Ethiopia’s ruling party long maintained a network of informants so dense that it aimed to cover the whole country by having each informant maintain files on just five other citizens. Since the 2015 protests that led to reform-minded Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s election, however, the party has publicly distanced itself from the network, which is now beginning to [fall apart.]( Ethiopians are by and large happy to see it go. The network was repressive, gathering private information on huge numbers of people and allowing the party to monitor and punish even minor opposition. Yet the loss of the network also poses an administration problem for Abiy’s regime. Earlier governments used it as a form of local control — informants weren’t just spies, they also ran public health seminars and distributed agricultural loans for the government. They could compel participation effectively because they had dirt on everyone, which made them useful policy implementers. Without the informant network, some Ethiopian bureaucrats are wondering how the state will extend its reach into communities going forward. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] DEEP DIVE THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT: PART II In the last edition of Deep Dive, we learned about how nuclear policymakers speak publicly about their understandings of escalation in crisis situations so that potential foes will understand where they are coming from in the event of a real nuclear confrontation. Better understanding, policymakers hope, will mean fewer surprises and a clearer path to de-escalation before things get catastrophically out of hand. Nuclear war, however, isn’t the only context in which nuclear policymakers prefer to send clear signals about their aims. Arms control and disarmament efforts also turn on questions of trust and intent, and so negotiators of those agreements also have strong incentives to explain themselves to scholars. This week, we’ll look at Kjølv Egeland’s [recent](article in the Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament in which he talks to a group of Norwegian wonks who want to be sure that their efforts to put the world on a path to having zero nuclear weapons aren’t misconstrued. In the late 2000s, the Norwegian government was among the leaders in a movement to jumpstart the international nuclear disarmament agenda by highlighting the danger of nuclear detonation as a humanitarian risk. A nuclear blast, the argument went, would be so devastating to human life that it is irresponsible not to take steps to prevent it in the way we try to prevent, say, famine. With disarmament under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) stalled, many were excited by the prospect of reframing nuclear disarmament as part of this humanitarian initiative. By 2017, the humanitarian approach to disarmament had grown into an effort to adopt a Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which would do just what it said: ban non-weapon state signatories from nuclear weapons activity and set clear deadlines for disarmament by weapon states. The TPNW passed the United Nations General Assembly, but no nuclear power or NATO member voted for it and it has been ratified so far by only 34 of the 50 countries needed for it to come into force under UN regulations. Generally speaking, major world powers hate the TPNW. It’s inconvenient for weapons states, and for people who spent their careers working within the framework of the NPT, it’s quite jarring to suddenly have a number of countries clamoring to approach nuclear issues completely differently. As a result, a lot of diplomats and scholars have bad-mouthed the treaty, calling it, in the words of a French diplomat, an “emotional and divisive” outburst, “disconnected from today’s strategic context” that threatens the primacy of the NPT. Basically, the weapons-state argument goes, the TPNW was just a fit of pique from some small countries who couldn’t be asked to think through the consequences of their actions. When Egeland spoke to the Norwegians present at the genesis of the humanitarian initiative for disarmament, however, he found that they had considered the consequences quite deeply. Former Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre told Egeland that the humanitarian approach grew not out of annoyance with the NPT’s processes but out of a belief that the NPT itself was crumbling. With proliferation crises ongoing in North Korea and Iran, and little progress made on disarmament, Støre worried that “the NPT could fall apart if there was not enough ambition to take it forward.” Støre and his colleagues believed that efforts toward disarmament — one of the pillars of the NPT — needed to be reenergized to ensure that the NPT framework retained its legitimacy going forward. Similarly, internal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs documents from the time show that Norwegian diplomats saw the humanitarian approach as an attempt to strengthen the NPT. In one 2013 memo, a diplomat wrote, “The humanitarian focus is not a contradiction of the NPT or other initiatives, but rather a contribution to the fulfilment of the NPT and other international commitments” through emphasizing the shared danger to humanity that nuclear weapons pose. Weapon states are likely to continue opposing the treaty on policy grounds, but, as Egeland demonstrates, concerns from non-weapon states about the future of nuclear weapons are real and deeply held. [LEARN MORE]( [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [• • •] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS Halima Gikandi [examined]( the situation in Sudan one year after popular protests overthrew the country’s ruler of 30 years, Omar al-Bashir. Even after the revolution, American sanctions against Sudan remain in place, choking off prospects for growth. The sanctions date back to the Bashir regime’s involvement in international terrorism in the 1990s, but the US has offered no path for the new government to get out from under them besides a vague suggestion that Sudan should pay a $14.5 billion judgment against the Bashir regime for its role in the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Elizabeth Beavers [decried](the disconnect between the release of “The Afghanistan Papers,” which details the ongoing hopelessness of America’s war effort in Afghanistan, and House Democrats’ decision to authorize more money for the war the same week. The continued expansion of spending on the Afghan war, Beavers argued, stems in part from voters’ apparent indifference to the conflict’s toll. Tania Karas [spoke]( to Liberian immigrants to the US who stand to benefit from a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act that will grant them a path to green cards and eventual citizenship. Under the law, Liberians who have lived continuously in the US since late 2014, when President Barack Obama designated Liberians eligible for Temporary Protected Status as a result of an Ebola outbreak in Liberia, will be able to apply for permanent residency in the US. President Donald Trump had repeatedly threatened to revoke the temporary orders allowing Liberians who fled from the Ebola virus to remain in the US. Karas gathered responses from Liberians, which were a mix of relief and frustration that the same law that offers them a path to citizenship also funds Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency charged with harassing Liberians and many other immigrant communities. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] WELL PLAYED The holidays are upon us, which means it’s time to bring back the one true classic piece of holiday security studies content: [Santa Clausewitz](. Space Force’s first major innovation will be the heretofore unimaginable [square]( challenge coin. Sometimes the worst crime you can commit as a reporter is to make jokes in front of someone like (now-former) Energy Secretary Rick Perry who absolutely[refuses]( to believe that you’re joking. On the other hand, sometimes a newsmaker’s[inability]( to recognize a joke sheds light on the quality of their analysis overall. Last week in [impeachment.]( The film adaptation of[this]( story will almost certainly be called "Bisque-tic River." [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( Follow The World: [fb]( [tw]( [ig]( [www]( [DONATE TO THE WORLD]( Follow Inkstick: [fb]( [tw]( [ig]( [www]( [DONATE TO INKSTICK]( Critical State is written by Sam Ratner and is a collaboration between The World and Inkstick Media. The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX, BBC, and WGBH. With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.” Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. [Preferences]( | [Web Version]( [Unsubscribe](