Duplicitous roundabouts

Duplicitous roundabouts Read about the resource curse that wasn’t. 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 resource curse that wasn’t. Historically, finding fossil fuels beneath your soils or oceans has been bad news for your country’s governance. Fossil fuel resources tend to bring inequality, insecurity and, ultimately, instability. As the age of fossil fuels ends and renewable energy becomes the engine of the world economy, there is a tendency to see the minerals crucial to renewable energy generation as the source of the same kind of resource curse that follows oil and gas. The reality, [argues]( political scientist Cullen Hendrix in a new article, is more complicated. So-called “critical minerals” simply are not valuable enough to hijack an entire domestic economy in the way that oil can. Unlike oil, once critical minerals are incorporated into solar panels or wind turbines, they don’t need constant replacing to make energy. That’s, you know, the whole point of renewables, and it means that ongoing mining revenues for critical minerals pale in comparison to those from fossil fuel extraction. Yet, Hendrix points out, that reality doesn’t preclude countries from acting the fool and trying to snap up control of critical minerals. The international aspects of the resource curse are still in the hands of world powers, and any attempt to segment the critical mineral market between US, European, and Chinese consumers could have negative consequences for mineral-producing countries. China in space Nothing drives “new Cold War” discourse in the US like discussion of China’s space program. In the mainstream US telling, every Chinese space operation confirms that we live in an era of great power competition for reasons that pretty much boil down to, “hey, remember Sputnik?” It might be worthwhile for US policymakers to understand what Chinese people actually think of their own space program before just assuming that they are analogous to 1950s Soviets. Luckily, political scientist Lincoln Hines recently [asked](. Hines ran a survey of 1,482 members of the Chinese public, asking them a range of questions about how they see their national space program and its relationship with the US. The big headline is that Chinese people love space, for its own sake. Over two thirds of respondents said that putting humans in space is worth the cost for China, despite the terrestrial problems the country faces. Respondents saw the US space program as a threat, and many believed that a “space race” between China and the US is likely. Yet, at the same time, huge majorities favored cooperation between the US and China in space and supported the deweaponization of space, both of which call into question the “new Cold War” narrative. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( Making civil wars stick If you fight a civil war to achieve policy changes, how can you be sure that those policy changes will actually be enacted once the war is over? One way is to get your policy written into the postwar constitution. That’s the process studied by political scientists Liana Eustacia Reyes, Maria Aroca, Keith Hamm, Nancy Martorano Miller, and Ronald Hedlund in their paper on state constitutions after the US civil war, which recently won the Southern Political Science Association’s award for best [paper]( on judicial politics. The researchers theorized that revisionist victors would enshrine their policy preferences in state constitutions, but that the durability of that approach would depend on the revisionists’ ability to keep power. Constitutionalism, in other words, is no replacement for political control. Conducting both quantitative and qualitative analysis, the researchers found support for their theory in the content of both northern and southern state constitutions between 1850 and 1900. Former confederate states saw their constitutions change much more often and dramatically during Reconstruction than union states. Yet, after Reconstruction, as former confederates returned to power in the South, many constitutions changed back, ushering in the Jim Crow era. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] DEEP DIVE Protest Projection: Part II Last week on Deep Dive, we looked at some of the unintended consequences for domestic protest movements of being observed by international actors. This week, we’ll look at new research on what happens when domestic protesters very much intend to be observed by the outside world. The whole concept of a political prisoner is, in some basic sense, internationalized. If you are being held in custody by a government because that government perceives you as a political threat, then it is near impossible to appeal to that government’s sense of legal responsibility to gain your freedom. Jailing political prisoners rarely seems absurd to the government doing the jailing. To international audiences, however, the logics of power preservation behind jailing political opponents are often painfully obvious. For that reason, many political prisoners make direct appeals to international audiences in hopes of aid in securing their release. In a recent [article]( in International Studies Quarterly, political scientist Jamie Gruffydd-Jones takes up the question of what happens once those appeals go out into the world. Gruffydd-Jones studies China, and the focus of his article is on political prisoners there. Chinese dissidents like Wei Jingsheng and Liu Xiaobo have gained international fame and recognition for both their activism and their roles as the faces of China’s carceral approach to deterring dissent. Yet, as Gruffydd-Jones notes, despite both being international causes celebres, Wei and Liu’s stories ended very differently. Wei was released as part of China’s effort to win the competition to host the 2000 Olympics, and credited international pressure for helping achieve his freedom. Liu, conversely, died incarcerated despite winning a Nobel Peace Prize. Gruffydd-Jones takes a data-driven approach to understanding why some international awareness efforts produce results like the campaign for Wei, and why some end in failure. Drawing from a database of Chinese political prisoners who between 1994 and 2017 who have sought local, national, or international attention for their cases, he coded whether each case was highlighted by international human rights groups, major international media outlets, or the US State Department. He then compared the level of international attention each case received to its outcome – namely, were the prisoners released before completing their sentences. The answer is that international attention does help free Chinese political prisoners, but only if it comes early in the process. Early international publicity made it 70% more likely that a prisoner would be released before they had been sentenced. Once a Chinese court passed down a sentence, however, the effect of international publicity disappeared. If anything, attention from abroad after a prisoner had been sentenced actually reduced their chances for early release. International pressure has also become less effective over time in China. The effect of all forms of international pressure was higher between 1994 and 2007 than between 2008 and 2014, but the change in the effect of State Department involvement is particularly striking. Up until 2007, being mentioned by the State Department made it slightly more likely that a Chinese political prisoner would receive early release. Since 2008, the impact of a State Department mention is unambiguously negative. As China has grown economically stronger, it appears, its resistance to pressure on human rights issues – especially from the US – has increased. Gruffydd-Jones’ study is, ultimately, good news for human rights activists. It offers strong evidence that even the most powerful human rights abusers can be pressured to do the right thing in the correct circumstances. Naysayers who suggest that any outside pressure will result in the Chinese government merely doubling down on repression to save face appear, at least in pre-sentencing cases, to be wrong. The fact that such a shift occurs at sentencing suggests that the limits to international pressure have more to do with domestic political structures than with the strategies used by outside advocates. [LEARN MORE]( [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [• • •] SHOW US THE RECEIPTS Shirin Jaafari [spoke]( with Afghan women who have taken to the streets to protest Taliban restrictions on their daily lives. Women like Wahida Amiri have been holding marches, both in Kabul and around the country, for months to advocate for teenage girls to be allowed to attend school and for women to be able to hold jobs under Taliban rule. The protests are dangerous – marchers have been assaulted, and one protester was shot to death in November. Yet the marches continue, and have now expanded to include protests against the humanitarian crisis that is engulfing Afghanistan following the US decision to bar the Taliban-led government from accessing the government’s own central bank reserves. Sweta Tiwari and Shrinidhi Ambinakudige [marked]( Martin Luther King Jr. Day by publishing their study of how US society has treated streets named for the great civil rights leader. There are 955 MLK streets in the US, nearly all in neighborhoods where mostly Black Americans live. MLK streets often serve as main streets of neighborhoods which have racial makeups determined by the same kinds of segregation policies King spent his life fighting against. The effects of those policies remain with us today, with areas around MLK streets often lacking outside investment and access to government services compared to white neighborhoods of equivalent size. Yet MLK streets are also hubs of entrepreneurship, with MLK streets producing similar levels of jobs and revenue as other traditional commercial street names, like Main Street. Anita Elash [tracked]( the true effect of COVID-19 on non-emergency medical procedures in Canada. As the prevalence of the virus has spiked in recent weeks due to the omicron variant, the Canadian government has indefinitely postponed “elective” procedures to make sure there are hospital beds open for COVID-19 patients. That means that crucial procedures – like removing tumors or conducting angiograms – will go undone, endangering the safety of patients. The government is working to expand capacity by hiring up to 1,000 foreign-trained nurses, but critics are livid that, two years into the pandemic, the government has still not adequately invested in care for both COVID-19 patients and the rest of the general public. [FORWARD TO A FRIEND]( [ ] WELL PLAYED A million dollars while [supporting]( Ugandan government internment policies and [dismissing]( 3,000 starving Congolese families as “nothing” isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? A Nobel Prize while supporting Ugandan government internment policies and dismissing 3,000 starving Congolese families. The existence of a puppy forever war in the children’s television landscape was always going to lead to [this](. It’s the only way to [describe]( just how cold and icy it gets on Jan. 6. The political situation in London remains [extremely]( [entertaining](. Your grandpa, hearing you’re going to get a degree in political science: “Oh, so you’re gonna learn how to be a politician!” You, using your degree in political science: [This](. [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 with 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](