Damp squid

Damp squid The WHO got COVID predictions exactly wrong. Received this from a friend? [SUBSCRIBE]( CRITICAL STATE Your weekly foreign policy fix. [The World]( [INKSTICK]( If you read just one thing… … read about how the WHO got COVID predictions exactly wrong. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, the World Health Organization made a set of assumptions about which countries were likely to be hardest hit. In Africa, countries with larger economies and more public health investment were seen as being relatively safe from the virus, while poorer countries were more likely to be rocked by it. As a new [study]( points out, those assumptions were precisely wrong. Instead, the most consistent predictors of high mortality rates were an urbanized population, a high number of international airports, and a high prevalence of HIV — all indicators associated with a larger, more interconnected economy. The countries in Africa considered the most prepared for the pandemic have actually been hit the hardest by it. The Janis Joplin era of international conflict Johns Hopkins University’s American in the World Consortium just announced its awards for best research article on US foreign policy, and the winner was [this]( look at the recent character of war by political scientist Dan Altman. In the article, Altman examines how interstate war since 1945 has transformed from being primarily a situation in which one country to conquering another to one in which countries are taking small slices of one another’s territory. As war has evolved to focus on taking little pieces of the opponents heartland ([baby](), the way countries choose targets for their aggression has changed. Rather than gearing up for total war, countries often choose to annex or occupy their targeted territory and then avoid war entirely, hoping that the threat of total war will turn their territorial expansion into a fait accompli. Some have long believed that a norm of territorial integrity between states has held since World War II, leading to the observed decline in interstate conflict. That norm, Altman argues, simply doesn’t exist, and we should look elsewhere for explanations of the relative international comity of the last 75 years. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( Misunderestimating US chill There has been a range of recent scholarship, drawing mostly on surveys, that has argued that people in the US are particularly bloodthirsty of late. Estimates of public support for political violence in the US run as high as 44%. A new paper [pours]( cold water on those estimates. Running their own large-scale survey, a group of political scientists suggest that these are overestimates by between 30% and 900%. A major source of error in earlier studies is the vagueness of “violence” as a measure. It turns out that when you ask people about specific violent acts that might be undertaken to advance a political cause — from property crime to murder — people have different thoughts about the acceptability of those acts. They nearly all agree, however, that people who commit any form of political violence should be prosecuted. Another source of error is simply that people who take surveys about political violence don’t care that much. Disengaged respondents tend to choose answers randomly or pick the one in the middle of the scale. Since the middle on most scales is usually moderate support for political violence, that’s often what people who are just bored with the survey are recorded as believing. When you control for engagement with the survey, much of that support disappears. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] DEEP DIVE Choose your own adventure: Part II In last week’s Deep Dive, we looked at new research on how individuals make decisions in moments of peril, when the threat of political violence is literally at their doorstep. This week, we’ll look at how people make decisions about their political lives in the aftermath of conflict, and how the conflict shapes those decisions. One of the many negative side effects of Liberia’s civil war, which ran from 1989 to 2003 with a three year pause in the late 1990s, was massive disruption to education. Many schools were destroyed in the fighting, and many children were forcibly recruited into the conflict. Even for those who escaped those fates, displacement levels were high and access to education was extremely limited. In a new [article]( in the Journal of Peace Research, political scientist Shelley Liu aims to measure not just the extent of the educational interruption caused by the conflict but the effect the interruption had on the politics of the children who missed out on schooling due to the war. In order to gauge the effect of lost schooling, Liu first had to figure out just how badly Liberia’s education system was disrupted by the war. Looking at overall education levels, census data showed that children who reached primary school age in areas that had high education access before the war attained about 15% more education than children who grew up in the conflict. This reflects a high level of disruption and makes clear that the educational struggles faced by children of the civil war era were in part the result of the conflict, not solely of pre-existing educational deficiencies in Liberia. With the connection between the war and lost education established, Liu can move on to her core argument, which is that this loss of opportunity has left a generation less likely to engage in politics as adults. In her theory, it is not a lack of education that drives political apathy, but the lost opportunity for education. Liu hypothesized that people who were not able to attain skills necessary to compete in the post-war economy with those who grew up just before and after the fighting are likely to have a high level of political cynicism. The data bears out Liu’s hypothesis. The survey organization [Afrobarometer](asks respondents a number of questions about their political participation, and in Liberia, people in the generational cohort that had their education disrupted by the war report less participation than their near-peers on every measure. People in the war cohort were less likely to vote, less likely to attend political rallies, less likely to work for candidates, more likely to reject elections as a method for choosing leaders, and less interested in public affairs than their near-peers. One could argue that the war cohort, coming up in a time of political contestation, might reject post-war democracy because they don’t understand it. Yet Liu demonstrates that this is not the case at all. Respondents in the cohort knew just as much as other Liberians about the structure of the Liberian political system, and though they demonstrated slightly less trust in it than others, they were largely in agreement with their compatriots that the electoral system functioned effectively. Liu argues that the disconnect, therefore, comes not from ignorance but from cynicism. Liu found evidence of the cynical view of government in her interviews with both war cohort Liberians and Liberian government officials. People from the war cohort reported facing near-insurmountable financial challenges as a result of their lack of education. Indeed, Liu’s data analysis bears those reports out — people in the cohort are much less likely to be employed than those outside of it. When asked about potential political remedies for the situation, one cohort member told Liu, “we strongly believe that most politicians when they get into state power, they will not look back” and help those who were left behind by the war. Indeed, that appears to be an accurate description of at least some in government. One frustrated official told Liu, “There are thousands of Liberians here saying, ‘there’s no jobs.’ And I say, ‘well what can you do?’ And then his response is ‘anything.’ Hm. Have you ever read a vacancy for ‘anything’?” We pay a great deal of attention to the effects of dramatic wartime traumas on individual and national psyches. Yet the effects of dashed hope lost to the vagaries of violent political contestation can also be substantial. As Liu demonstrates, a government’s unwillingness to address the needs of all those left behind by conflict can lead those who feel abandoned to make decisions that shape the postwar political landscape. [LEARN MORE]( [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [• • •] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS Risa Brooks [examined](the state of civil-military relations in the US in the wake of revelations that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley tried to limit then-President Donald Trump’s ability to order a nuclear strike near the end of Trump’s presidency. The actual facts of Milley’s actions are unclear — the revelations come from leaked quotes from a forthcoming book without accompanying context. Yet, Brooks notes, even the discussion highlights the growing politicization of the US military. Whether or not people support Milley acting in what they perceive to be a partisan manner — many believe that he did, and quite a few support his purported actions — it could lead the US down some dangerous paths in the future. Carol Hills [spoke]( to cybersecurity expert John Scott-Railton, who recently discovered a massive security defect in Apple’s iPhone. The hack, which affected all major Apple devices, was originally built by an Israeli company called the NSO Group, and was first observed on the phone of a Saudi activist. Apple has put out a software update to patch the vulnerability, but Scott-Railton says that NSO and similar mercenary hacking organizations likely have other vulnerabilities in the back pocket to exploit. That said, everyone with an Apple product should download the software update to prevent NSO or any other cyber intruder from gaining access to their data. Anne Harrington [reflected]( on the 10-year anniversary of the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the US military’s cowardly policy banning out queer servicemembers (that still managed to sound like a romance novel). One of the major arguments for the repeal was readiness — don’t ask, don’t tell forced the military to dismiss otherwise qualified service members in important jobs. Yet the focus on readiness came at the expense of a focus on justice. Few advocates framed the repeal, and the embrace of queer people in all aspects of American life, as simply the right thing to do. Harrington notes the costs of that approach, which put no pressure on the Defense Department to make sexual orientation or gender identity categories eligible for protection under the military’s Equal Opportunity programs — ant oversight has been particularly hard on transgender service members, whose capacity to serve and receive gender-affirming health care has shifted depending on who holds the Oval Office. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] WELL PLAYED A [time capsule]( of one of the most deranged attempts at self-delusion/hearts and minds winning ever recorded in the US post-9/11 wars. Needs to be heard to be believed. Conversely, if you were to summarize the propaganda goals of [this]( video clip, you could do worse than “We’re the [POGs](. That’s the message.” The perfect [news story]( if you want to be simultaneously outraged and hungry. Preserving the international ideal with the kind of [manners]( for which Midtown East is rightly famous. Expert commentary from famous moist calamari [enthusiast]( Richard Gowan. In a cunning attempt to become more relevant among both Gen Z and Millennials, the United Nations [invited]( Korean pop idols BTS to the General Assembly, hoping to receive some [awards]( from ARMY. The [calliopes]( can be heard from here to [Severomorsk](. Luddism at its [best](. There’s dudgeon, there’s high dudgeon, and then there’s whatever level of maximum drama French [officials]( and [mouthpieces]( reached when responding to Australia’s completely understandable decision to buy submarines from the US rather than France. [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](