2^82,589,933 − 1 Downing Street

2^82,589,933 − 1 Downing Street The language of data matters. Received this from a friend? [SUBSCRIBE]( CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. [The World]( [INKSTICK]( If you read just one thing… … read about why the language of data matters. In a new [article](, scholar and activist Nanjala Nyabola unravels the massive implications of a small observation about her native Kenya: “Kenya has a data protection law, but Kiswahili, one of its official languages, has no standardized term for ‘data protection.’” That linguistic imbalance is not limited to Kenya. Around the world, the internet is used in every language used by people, and yet the regulatory structure of the internet is largely limited to English. As Nyabola points out, that creates fairness problems both large and small. On the large end, if people’s digital rights are defined in an English discourse that non-English speakers cannot engage with, that effectively deprives non-English speakers of the ability to access their digital rights. On the small end, efforts to moderate online platforms often break down in the face of linguistic diversity on a platform, with companies like Facebook only able to offer content moderation in certain popular languages. As a result, people who speak languages outside of the set subject to moderation experience more hate speech online than those who engage primarily in English. Transit police abolition The mass transit think tank TransitCenter released a [report](last week that details the checkered history of transit policing in the US and suggests ways to improve transit safety without added police. The racial disparities in who is negatively affected by police enforcement of transit fares are often massive, while there is little evidence that fare enforcement actually improves transit system revenues. In New York, for example, people of color make up 90% of those arrested for fare-related offenses, and Black and Latinx neighborhoods receive more fare policing than white neighborhoods with the same income levels. In Washington, DC, not only is fare evasion enforcement racially coded — 91% of fare evasion summons between 2016 and 2018 were for Black people — but even access to fare payment systems is unequal. Bus fare evasion in Washington was highest in neighborhoods with low median incomes and no machines to add money to fare cards. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( Chinese nuclear attitudes For all of the ink spilled over China’s intentions with its nuclear arsenal, it’s perhaps surprising that scholars have spent so little time asking Chinese people what they think about their country’s nuclear posture. A new [study]( seeks to correct that problem, with a large-scale online survey of Chinese attitudes toward nuclear weapons. The study finds strong support for China maintaining a nuclear weapons capability. 86% of respondents agreed that nuclear weapons improve Chinese security. At the same time, however, 87% of respondents opposed the use of nuclear weapons in war. The opposition to nuclear use was even stronger among younger people, indicating how the norm against nuclear attack has grown over time. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] DEEP DIVE Family in conflict: Part I Ever since the field of international relations moved on from being the narrow study of European dynastic politics, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the role of family in conflict and security. This week and next, to belatedly honor the release of F9, we’ll be reversing course and highlighting new research about how family networks shape individual decisions about security. In their new [article]( in International Peacekeeping, political scientists Carla Suarez and Erin Baines take on a particularly thorny question of family in conflict: How to understand the family ties among people subject to forced marriages and pregnancy by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). During its 21-year war against the Ugandan government, the LRA abducted as many as 38,000 children into its ranks. As a method of further ensnaring and indoctrinating young abductees, the group often assigned boys and young men who had performed well in battle a “wife” (Suarez and Baines put “wife” and “husband” in quotations to denote the forced nature of these unions, a convention that we have adopted here). After the conflict ended, many members of these forced marriages were left with a conundrum: They had a family, often with children of their own, but that family originated as a coercive strategy in a war they wished to leave behind. How would they relate to that family in a post-conflict setting? Aside from the human dilemma created by forced marriages, Suarez and Baines argue that there are important political stakes to the question of what happens to coerced marriages after conflict. Programs to reintegrate insurgent fighters after civil wars end often focus on military networks as the most salient ties left over from the war era. Some programs seek to break those ties, sending fighters from the same unit to all different corners of the country in the hope that it will prevent the unit from re-forming and launching new attacks. More recent research, however — including by Midnight Oil alumna Nikkie Wiegink — suggests that relationships between members of the same unit during wars can help former fighters survive in the post-war period. Often estranged from their home communities and lacking peacetime skills, former fighters rely on one another for mutual support. This debate about reintegration programs and military networks, however, largely ignores the family networks of former fighters. From Suarez and Baines’ long-running field work with former LRA members, they’ve concluded that family networks are also crucial to the lives former fighters make for themselves after conflict, even if those networks are particularly fraught. For one thing, the researchers found that many men they spoke to saw their families as being key to their decision to defect from the LRA. Some defected to protect their “wives,” who, even if they escaped the LRA, were often rejected by their “husband’s” extended family. Others defected to get their children away from the conflict. In interviews, one recounted that, “When I got a child, it became challenging because that was a time the war was intense… Looking at the condition that my child was going through, led me to ask, ‘why I am suffering and my child is also suffering?’” He abandoned the LRA soon after his child was born. Despite the centrality of family relations to these and other crucial security decisions, little official attention was paid to the fate of LRA coerced marriages in the wake of the conflict. Indeed, reception centers for people escaping the LRA encouraged the separation of families born of coerced marriage, in an effort to help people put the war behind them. For LRA families in which men wished to resume responsibility for their children in the post-conflict era, that approach by the reception centers made it very difficult to do so. Most fathers who left the LRA did not know the location of their children, and sometimes did not even know the location or real name of their “wife.” Women leaving their LRA “husbands” often had trouble integrating into new families and communities, and were left without support from either their LRA family or their post-conflict family. Their efforts to reunite with their “husbands” were also frustrated by the same policies. Suarez and Baines highlight these practices as what they call a “blind spot” in post-conflict reintegration policy. Their work with former LRA members makes clear the extent to which family considerations mediate security decisions even in the most fraught circumstances. When policymakers decide how to bring former insurgents back into civilian life, their nuclear families deserve consideration as potential networks of support along with their siblings in arms. [LEARN MORE]( [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [• • •] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS Rebecca Kanthor [recounted]( the experience of feminist and LGBTQ activists in China who face online censorship of their work. Recently, the Chinese social media giant Weibo suspended the accounts of LGBTQ student groups and prominent feminist activists. One activist tried to sue to restore her account, but Chinese courts have simply ignored her petition. Organizers of affected LGBTQ groups worry that the censorship will spread, potentially including banning the groups themselves from university campuses. Paul Carrol and Bonnie Klassen [explained]( the role of US sanctions in severely worsening the economic situation in Cuba. COVID-19 has helped create a dire economic crisis in Cuba, and attempts by the government and NGO community to respond to the pandemic and its consequences have been hamstrung by US sanctions. Food aid shipments have been held up for months in US bureaucracy, while the designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terror makes any coordination with the Cuban government very risky for aid groups. The Biden administration has begun a review of US sanctions policy against Cuba, but the outcome of that review may not come soon enough for suffering Cubans. Anna Kusmer [spoke]( to the authors of a new report on the links between the solar power industry and forced labor camps in Xinjiang province, China. Companies in Xinjiang produce 45% of the world’s polysilicon, a crucial ingredient in solar panel production. At least nine of those companies have been linked to forced labor, which largely targets ethnic Uyghurs. The US has sanctioned some of the companies involved, but none of the sanctions so far have targeted polysilicon production in particular. As it currently stands, an expert told Kusmer, “all solar panels, in the end, are contaminated by forced labor in Xinjiang.” [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] WELL PLAYED As Gauss [predicted](, the longer Downing Street extends, the [fewer]( fitting addresses there are for a head of government in a parliamentary system. There’s strong [“In The Loop”](energy to [this quote](, in which either Mark Milley was trying hard to seem like he was offering legal advice without actually offering any, or he honestly was trying to offer legal advice but very stupidly. [Tweet]( of the week. Congratulations to the multiple White House communications staff who stayed late at work to write variations of “good for you / you look happy and healthy / not me / since I never cared to vax” before realizing that Anthony Fauci definitely wasn’t going to do a duet with [Olivia Rodrigo](. The Japanese Ministry of Defense heard that defense planning documents are usually sketchy and really [ran with it](. [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. 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