Hold me back, but 80 years ago!

Hold me back, but 80 years ago! 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 gangs under an anti-gang task force’s nose. Deputy gangs within Los Angeles County sheriff’s department inflicted extralegal violence for years that disproportionately targeted people of color. A sobering new collection about the [history]( of the LAPD’s deputy gangs serves as a great example of how institutions built to deliver one kind of violence — the blunt application of state power — can restructure themselves to produce another kind — self-aggrandizing, racially-motivated, and destructive to civilians and fellow law enforcement alike. The deputy gangs largely arose as a way for officers to provide cover for one another as they ignored laws and procedures in their attempts to become the premier armed force in their areas. Their efforts created legacies of impunity for police violence that continue today, with at least 18 gangs still active within the department. Why do some countries bail on international treaties? A new [working paper]( by political science PhD candidate Taylor Dalton looks at why some countries feel free to move in and out of international institutions like the Paris climate accord or the European Union. Dalton argues that a major factor in countries’ willingness to exit treaties is their centrality to the network of agreements that make up the international system. Basically, a country that has been involved in a lot of treaties for a long time is more likely to believe it can replicate the benefits it draws from any given treaty through other agreements. Conversely, countries at the periphery of those networks need the treaties that they do have to keep their connection to the rest of the international system. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( Agitation in Amman Oprah has been placed on alert as drama has overtaken the royal family of Jordan. Last week, multiple high-ranking Jordanian royals, including the former crown prince, Hamzah bin al Hussein, were arrested and the government announced that a sedition plot had been foiled. King Abdullah II later issued a statement claiming everything is fine, nothing to see here, but clearly something happened. In an [explainer](, political scientist Curtis Ryan lays out some of the implications of the arrests. The government tried to deny that Prince Hamzah had been arrested, but this is the 21st century and Hamzah soon made a video confirming that he was indeed under house arrest and criticizing the government’s recent record. Some speculated that Hamzah may have been involved in a Saudi-backed attempt to unseat Abdullah, but the Saudi government quickly announced its support for the king. No further evidence of a coup attempt has been uncovered, and the limits on press freedom in Jordan ensure that the true situation remains a mystery. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] DEEP DIVE The Blame Game: Part I Parenting and politics often intersect when it comes to apportioning blame. When things go wrong, politics can help determine where fault lies. And that’s as true among kids — just ask any older sibling if they ever ended up taking the fall for something their younger siblings did — as it is among states. This week and next on Deep Dive, we’ll look at new research on how blame gets apportioned in international politics, and how that affects unstable security situations. In a new [article]( in International Studies Quarterly, Uppsala University political scientists Annekatrin Deglow and Ralph Sundberg take on one of the stickiest questions about assigning responsibility in politics: When insurgents commit terror attacks against civilians, who gets the blame? On its face, the answer seems simple. The insurgents did the attacks — they may even have publicly crowed about having done so — so surely they should get the blame. And sometimes they do. But if insurgents took the brunt of the negative response every time they terrorized civilians, presumably they’d stop doing it, and they haven’t stopped yet. In reality, governments often take a large proportion of the blame for having failed to prevent terror attacks. The government’s inability to prevent the attacks becomes a key part of the insurgents’ case that the government is illegitimate and dysfunctional and that civilians should abandon their support for the state and embrace the insurgency. The problem is figuring out which attacks are likely to make civilians blame the insurgents and, in the language of social scientists, “rally around the flag” to support the state, and which attacks will instead prompt civilians to hold the state accountable for its failure to protect them. Most research on this question has looked at attacks that happen more or less out of the blue in stable political contexts — the al-Qaeda attacks in the US, on 9/11, or in Madrid, in 2004, for example. In those cases, researchers find that US and Spanish civilians largely rallied around the flag (even if, in the Spanish case, they [did not]( rally around the ruling party). Deglow and Sundberg set out to see if the tendency to rally also applies to large-scale attacks in existing conflict environments. To do so, they focused on the Taliban’s 2012 attack on the Spozhmai Lakeside Resort outside Kabul. Five Taliban fighters besieged the posh hotel, killing 15 civilians and taking 50 hostages before being killed by Afghan security forces. The attack took place on June 21, right in the middle of a week-long public opinion survey effort carried out in Kabul by a leading Afghan research center. Deglow and Sundberg turned the survey data into an experiment, comparing the answers of Kabul residents who were interviewed before the attack to the answers of those interviewed after the attack. The effect of the attack on people’s reported trust in the Afghan government was remarkable. People interviewed after the attack were 32% more likely to say they had a “fair amount” or “great deal” of trust in the provincial government than people interviewed before. For trust in the Afghan parliament, the effect was even more pronounced — people were 65% more likely to say they trusted the parliament after the attack, and 34% less likely to say they distrusted it. For the police, who already were much more trusted than either the provincial or national governments, the effect was less substantial but still significant: People were 12% more likely to say they trusted the police after the attack. One notable aspect of Deglow and Sundberg’s finding is that, despite the evidence they offer of a dramatic rallying effect following a large-scale attack against civilians, two decades of conflict between the Taliban and the Afghan state has not yielded an overwhelming embrace of the government by Afghan civilians. Indeed, quite the opposite — when the same organization that did the 2012 survey [asked]( Afghans in 2019 about their confidence in public organizations, just 47% expressed confidence in parliament as a whole, and 56% in provincial councils. While governments may be able to avoid blame for large insurgent attacks on civilians even in a conflict zone, the long-term effect of failing to make peace is still the erosion of state legitimacy. [LEARN MORE]( [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [• • •] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS Lydia Emmanouilidou [reported]( on the ongoing mental health crisis among refugees stuck in Greek migrant camps. Many refugees who are living in the camps as they await action from European governments to determine their migration status experienced violence in their home countries and are attempting to process those traumas in the difficult circumstances of camp life. There is also violence in the camps themselves — residents have reported rapes and other assaults. Mental health professionals charged with serving refugees in the camps say that suicidal ideation is common and on the rise, as the prospects of people being able to leave the camps dim. Augusta Dell’Omo [discussed]( the similarities between white supremacist agitation in South Africa and the United States. In the run-up to South Africa’s first free elections in 1994, white supremacist elements with deep roots in the country’s security services engaged in violent attacks designed to prevent those elections from taking place. Dell’Omo saw a parallel between those attacks and the Jan. 6 insurrection in the US, given that close to 20% of alleged insurrectionists arrested are current or former members of the military. Reforming the security sector in South Africa to remove white supremacist elements, she pointed out, went beyond simply dismissing personnel involved in attacks. The institutionalized incentives bringing white supremacists into the security sector in the first place had to be addressed — an effort, she argued, that will have to be undertaken in the US, as well. Patrick Winn [spoke]( to Sasa, an elected member of Myanmar’s parliament who has become a prominent pro-democracy figure after he and his colleagues were imprisoned or forced into exile by a military coup. Sasa laid out his plan to unite Myanmar’s many ethnic armed organizations to form a “federal army” that can stand against the national military that overthrew his government. He also called on the United Nations to intervene in Myanmar under the Responsibility To Protect doctrine, citing the nearly 600 civilians the military has killed so far in its effort to maintain power. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] WELL PLAYED This week’s award for worst historical revisionism from a country that decided to [sit out World War II]( goes to [Carl Bildt]( of Sweden. Some people around Selma, Alabama, celebrated the anniversary of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in a … [memorable]( way. These contestants have an incredibly [optimistic]( view of the US justice system’s interest in reparations. US Forest Service: We have Smokey The Bear, the only bear employed by a government to encourage personal responsibility. The Province of Ontario: You [absolute infants](. The only peer-reviewed [version]( of [this]( meme. Usually the Congressional Research Service is reluctant to throw shade at its employers, but in 1975, the Committee on International Relations tasked them with conducting a whole [study]( on the “desirability and feasibility” of the US military seizing oil fields around the world to ensure US oil supply. Their [conclusion]( was basically to tell the committee, “Well, you idiots, not only is it impractical, it’s also extremely illegal.” [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 and GBH. With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.” Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. [Preferences]( | [Web Version]( [Unsubscribe](