What to Read Right Now
Today’s news cycle can feel like constant chaos. Yet articles that might, on any given day, fly under the radar or land below the fold are critical for understanding our current moment, for occasionally taking a step back to reflect on the why behind the headlines, and for considering possible paths forward on a range of topics.
To that end, Just Security presents What to Read Right Now, a curated selection drawn from articles we’ve published on our website over the past week. WIth certain U.S. and global rule of law topics well-covered elsewhere in our Substack, this newsletter focuses on other issues, helping readers to stay informed on the broad range of law and policy developments that shape our world.
War in Sudan, Two Years On
“As Sudan marks two years since the eruption of war between rival military factions—the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—the country stands at a dangerous crossroads,” Quscondy Abdulshafi writes in Two Years of War in Sudan: From Revolution to Ruin and the Fight to Rise Again. The conflict has led to a catastrophic humanitarian crisis and drawn in regional powers, complicating peace efforts and creating a risk of broader instability across the Sahel and Horn of Africa.
The author, an award-winning Sudanese civil society leader now serving as a Senior Regional Advisor at Freedom House, who also appeared on our podcast this week, also analyzes what the conflict means for the country’s democracy.
“Sudan’s democratic future is not dead. It is under siege. And it needs allies not just in words, but in action,” he writes, recommending six concrete policy actions: sanctions aimed at addressing violence and protecting civil space; sanctions on external actors fueling the conflict; support for pro-democracy initiatives and civil society; reconstruction where possible; and inclusive mediation and political processes.
For more detail on these, and for other perspectives, also visit our Sudan archive.
Lessons in Tech Policy
Our symposium, Regulating Social Media Platforms: Government, Speech, and the Law, a joint production with Tech Policy Press and the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, continued this week with Olivier Sylvain’s States in the Vanguard: Social Media Policy Today.
In the absence of comprehensive federal social media regulation, Sylvain writes, U.S. states have stepped in with various laws and regulations covering domains including content moderation, data protection, and online child safety. Tech companies are challenging many of these laws in court, often on First Amendment or preemption grounds.
One observation that may provide a clue for what the future of social media regulation could look like: while some “content-based or speaker-based” legal challenges have prevailed, “the states have been winning to the extent the new laws redress harms from non-speech related commercial practices and design features.”
This and other articles in the Symposium—like Daphne Keller on the tension between First Amendment rights and content regulation or Susan Ness on comparative European and U.S. trends in digital platform governance—offer models of how regulation and governance might happen across a variety of policy spheres in our tech-inflected future.