Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik/AP

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz meet in the Kremlin in Moscow, Feb. 15, 2022. Western powers have warned that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which will pump gas from Russia to Germany, could be terminated if Russia invades Ukraine.

Nadezhda Mamonova, a Moscow office worker, says she’s learned to take life “day by day” amid talk of war with Ukraine and devastating Western sanctions that are threatened to follow.

Like most Russians, she’s been watching this movie for about eight years, ever since Russia annexed Crimea and the West began ratcheting up economic and financial punishments that, by all accounts, have caused both direct and indirect damage to Russia’s economic prospects.

“I feel it every time I go shopping,” she says, seeming to conflate Western sanctions with a host of other problems faced by Russian consumers, like inflation, high taxes, the devaluation of the ruble, and endless COVID restrictions. “I am far from politics, but these war games on both sides can only make a person feel alarmed.”

Ms. Mamonova’s frustrations are common among Russians, for whom daily life has gradually worsened in recent years. But the Russian economy, though stagnating, is still slowly growing. Most Russians have adapted over the past several years, and they appear ready to roll with whatever new punches may be coming.

Russian experts are more worried about the threatened new sanctions that would be imposed if Russia actually launches a military attack on Ukraine. The most extreme measures might include canceling the not-yet-operating Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany; banning Russian banks from using the U.S. dollar; and draconian sanctions against people in President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, their families, and possibly Mr. Putin himself.

But even those weapons are unlikely to change the Kremlin’s plans, experts say.

“If these threatened sanctions are applied, there would be some shocks to Russia’s banking system, financial position, and some industries would suffer,” says Anastasia Likhacheva, a faculty dean at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics. “But since 2014 there has been a great deal of Russian strategic planning, and the country is much better prepared for sanctions than it was. If we’re just speaking of sanctions, I cannot imagine any sanctions that could push Russia to give up its strategic priorities” in the crisis over Ukraine and NATO.

Years of preparation

Mr. Putin on Tuesday said he welcomed further negotiations over the status of Ukraine and Russia’s security. His statement, along with a declaration from Russian military officials that some troops near the Ukrainian border would soon return to their bases, could be signals to ratchet down tensions in Europe.

But if that proves untrue, it’s not clear that Western sanctions would dissuade the Kremlin from pushing ahead in Ukraine. 

According to an International Monetary Fund report, international sanctions shaved no more that 0.2% from Russia’s GDP annually between 2014 and 2018. Other things, like plunging oil prices, caused far more damage to the average Russian. So did the Kremlin’s responses to sanctions, which involved letting the ruble suffer massive devaluation rather than defending it with currency reserves, keeping interest rates extremely high in order to keep inflation under control, and reining in social spending to adjust to the revenue shortfall caused by lower oil prices.

Such methods have suppressed economic growth, and Russian consumers have borne the costs, but the Kremlin has assembled an impressive war chest. Russia’s currency reserves are near an all-time high at over $630 billion, and its National Wealth Fund – garnered from excess hydrocarbon revenues – is over $130 billion. Except for the two pandemic years, Russia’s government has run budgetary surpluses, while state debt is among the lowest in the developed world at about 18% of GDP.

The government has also introduced a payment system to rival the dominant position of U.S.-based Visa and Mastercard, which millions of Russians now use to receive pensions and other benefits. Working with China, Russia has also begun to remove the U.S. dollar as a factor in bilateral trade.

Despite these powerful hedges, which would protect the state’s financial system, the threatened ban on using U.S. dollars would still cripple many Russian banks, and be a catastrophe for many average Russians, experts admit.

“Many Russians still keep their savings in dollars, and a ban on that might instigate panic,” says Yevgeny Gontmakher, an economist and former Russian official. “Most of our trade, even with China, is still conducted in dollars. This could lead to severe shortages, even of foodstuffs, and people will rush to get their money out of banks while they can. People will be angry, and this would be a danger to authorities.”

Truly robust sanctions, such as cutting Russia out of the SWIFT bank messaging system, might make any financial transactions with the West impossible. For the U.S., which has little trade with Russia – though it does import significant amounts of oil, titanium, and also rocket engines for NASA – that might not be a huge problem. But for the European Union, which gets almost 40% of its energy from Russia, a supply breakdown could be catastrophic.

Some Russian economic sectors have actually benefited from sanctions, as well as from the counter-sanctions Russia fired back with at the start of the crisis. Import substitution has made the Russian arms industry far more independent, especially from Ukrainian inputs, than it was before. And Russian agriculture has positively boomed after the cutoff of food imports from the European Union.

Russians ready for sanctions?

So far the Russian public has shrugged off the escalating sanctions of the past eight years, in large part because they cannot see any direct impact in their personal lives.

“We actually see a decrease in public anxiety over sanctions,” Denis Volkov, director of the independent Levada Center, said in a commentary on his agency’s comprehensive polls of Russian attitudes about sanctions. “Back in 2015, over half of people said that sanctions concerned them. Today it’s around 25%. ... The general attitude is that Western countries are against us. If at first it was seen as a response to [the annexation of] Crimea, the more time passes the more people see it as a constant: They are against us, they have always been against us, we just have to accept it.”

Some Russian industries have been hurt by technology restrictions and some, such as electronics, would be slammed hard if those were extended to any product with a U.S. component in them, such as computers and cellphones.

Much would depend on whether other non-Western countries, especially China, would defy U.S.-led sanctions, say experts.

“Theoretically, China might be interested in an anti-sanctions alliance with Russia,” says Ivan Timofeev, a sanctions policy expert with the Russian International Affairs Council, which is affiliated with the foreign ministry. “Chinese banks, so far, have largely obeyed U.S. sanctions, and other Chinese companies are likely to comply as well, especially in areas where they have some international market share.”

But Russian analysts laugh at the suggestion that sanctions on Russia’s elite are likely to have any impact. They point out that Russia is no longer an oligarchy in the sense that the rich hold political power, as they did in the 1990s. The hallmark of the Putin era has been the restoration of state supremacy and the subordination of the rich to Kremlin goals.

“The logic of such sanctions is counter-productive. We have an elite who are absolutely dependent on state service, and if they were hit by sanctions, they would have to draw more tightly around Putin for protection,” says Dmitry Suslov, an expert at the Moscow Higher School of Economics. “On that level, Putin is bulletproof.”

As for radical sanctions, Mr. Suslov says. “We all hope for a diplomatic solution to this crisis. But if it comes to the worst, Russia will not relinquish its strategic priorities. And if the U.S. enacts these extreme sanctions, it will be bad for everyone, but the West will no longer have any leverage at all over Russia.”

Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/AP

Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, shown here on Nov. 3, 2021, has said “American men are working less, getting married in fewer numbers. ... They are suffering more anxiety and depression. They are engaging in more substance abuse.” Such data points are stirring concern from thinkers on both the political right and left.

When Roberta Chevrette explores the idea of a “crisis in masculinity” with her students, she’ll often have them analyze some of the cartoons that proliferated in the early 20th century as the suffrage movement began to gain momentum.

Some of the cartoons mock women making political speeches, sexualizing their appearance with the caption “only a figure of speech.” Other images depict women smoking cigars and playing cards in a backroom while a visibly frustrated man in the next room washes clothes and holds a crying child. “Notice to fathers: wash your shirts with Sud’s soap.”

Another depicts a sketch of a girl brandishing a rolling pin, glaring at a startled and confused young boy: “You believe in women’s suffrage – don’t you?”

“There is a certain power in these rhetorical tools, which say, ‘Oh, hey, no, women’s rights? That means that men will be oppressed or somehow feminized,’” says Dr. Chevrette, professor of rhetoric, intercultural communication, and gender studies at Middle Tennessee State University.

Similar ideas of a crisis in masculinity emerged as a second wave of battles over women’s rights emerged along with the civil rights movement. “So in the 1970s and ’80s, for example, when U.S. women made major legal victories, the idea that ‘manly’ feminists were gaining too much power and demasculinizing men again gained popularity,” she says.  

A global phenomenon

In many ways, similar anxieties animate a revival of crisis rhetoric today, she and other scholars point out, not only in the United States but also around the world. While conservative thinkers and populist leaders today focus less on the expanding rights and social roles of women, many have decried what they call the left’s “gender ideology,” which they perceive as deconstructing the biological differences between men and women and defining masculinity itself as “toxic.”

Government officials in China last year banned media depictions of so-called sissy men in pop culture, which many blame in part on Western gender values. They’ve also cracked down on the number of hours children spend playing video games and have committed to a renewed focus on sports education in order to “prevent men from becoming too feminine.”

Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/Reuters

Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán during his visit to the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, on Dec. 9, 2016. Mr. Orbán has taken steps such as banning gender studies programs in the country’s universities, to defend traditional gender roles.

Populist leaders such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Hungary’s ​​Viktor Orbán have also proclaimed a crisis in masculinity caused by the “gender ideologies” of the left. Prime Minister Orbán has taken steps to ban gender studies programs in the country’s universities, saying “people are born either male or female, and we do not consider it acceptable for us to talk about socially-constructed genders, rather than biological sexes.”

Attacks on traditional ideas of masculinity threaten not only the civic vigor of a society, but also a nation’s ability to compete with others and defend itself from dangers, these leaders say.

“The left want to define traditional masculinity as toxic,” Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said in an address to the National Conservatism Conference last fall. “They want to define the traditional masculine virtues – things like courage and independence and assertiveness – as a danger to society.”

“The problem with the left’s assault on the masculine virtues is that those self-same qualities, the very ones the left now vilify as dangerous and toxic, have long been regarded as vital to self-government,” said Senator Hawley, who has become one of the most outspoken conservative leaders to proclaim that American men are in a crisis. “Observers from the ancient Romans to our forefathers identified the manly virtues as indispensable for political liberty.”

Goal of reviving manly virtues

The idea of “manly virtues” can easily be caricatured and made into a silly, cartoonish nostalgia for bygone eras, says Casey Chalk, a conservative Roman Catholic thinker and writer in Virginia. He’s also been concerned by what he sees as “the weird extremes” of a militaristic machismo and obsession with guns that men on the far-right express online.

“From a classical perspective, and certainly as someone who subscribes to the Catholic tradition, I believe men and women flourish when they’re participating in the same pursuit of cardinal virtues,” says Mr. Chalk, who did civilian work in Afghanistan as a Persian language specialist for the Department of Defense. “But males are naturally more aggressive, and they need outlets that will help direct that physical or sexual aggression in ways that are socially productive,” he says.

In that sense, he says, men need to rediscover the virtues of being a gentleman, a special moral discipline that can both channel and control the innate biological drives and special sociological roles of men. 

Adriano Machado/Reuters

Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro, pictured on Feb. 4, 2022, at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia, Brazil, is among world leaders who have proclaimed a crisis in masculinity caused by the “gender ideologies” of the left.

“I think there is a real sense in which men do, you know, eagerly want to be able to be viewed as brave and strong – not necessarily even physically, but even temperamentally and psychologically,” Mr. Chalk says. “They want to be protectors; they want to be able to defend their family and, more broadly, their way of life.”

But ideological pressures are only part of the current crisis, leaders like Senator Hawley say. Neoliberal policies of deindustrialization have cost working-class jobs, causing a crisis of idleness that then exacerbates problematic addictions to pornography and video games.

“American men are working less, getting married in fewer numbers,” he said. “They’re fathering fewer children. They are suffering more anxiety and depression. They are engaging in more substance abuse” – startling data that thinkers on both the right and left have observed with growing alarm.

But conservative thinkers such as David French and others have echoed concerns on the left about “the new right’s dangerous cult of toughness.” Some of the crisis rhetoric has led to an avalanche of threats directed toward public officials and even stoked the kind of rage behind the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“That’s not just Twitter trolling,” Mr. French told Sean Illing at Vox. “It’s not just posturing online anymore. It’s the logic of a movement centered around aggression divorced from virtue that indulges in apocalyptic rhetoric.”

The historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, however, also points out that this kind of crisis rhetoric along with ideas of masculine toughness and aggression has recurred throughout American history, especially within white evangelical Protestant subcultures, in which the idea of Christian manhood evolved to be seen in rugged, militant terms.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP/File

Then-President Donald Trump gestures as he arrives to speak at a rally in Washington, on Jan. 6, 2021. To many of his followers, part of Mr. Trump's political appeal has been an aura of toughness – while critics warn this brand of masculinity is typical of an authoritarian playbook.

“Part of this definition of masculinity, this kind of rugged masculinity, is the kind masculinity that [Donald] Trump embodies for the right,” says Dr. Du Mez, author of “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.” “It isn’t primarily physical strength, but it is a kind of ruthlessness. It is the willingness to do what needs to be done regardless of democratic norms, regardless of traditional civility.”

“This is kind of taken from the authoritarian playbook,” says Dr. Du Mez, professor of history at Calvin University in Michigan. “With such stark gender differences, women are to be very quote-unquote ‘feminine,’ women are vulnerable and need to be protected, and so it’s the strong, masculine men who have a God-given obligation to stand up and defend their women, defend their culture, and that violence may be necessary.”

But American rhetoric surrounding a “crisis in masculinity” also recurred in places such as the 1965 Moynihan Report, says Brandon Manning, professor of Black literature and culture at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. 

“His report talked about the legacy of slavery and its impact into the latter part of the 20th century, but it also said that Black communities were going to keep struggling because of a growing matriarchy in those spaces,” Dr. Manning says. “And so, essentially, he was doing a similar kind of call to action for men to take their rightful places – as well as an admonishment of Black women.”

“The family is meant to reflect and reverberate into political structures, educational structures, and such,” he says. “If masculine ideals are not exercised at home, then everything else is kind of, within this logic, out of whack, in a space of disarray.” 

Economy of “brains not brawn”

But such ideas about biological sex and gender have evolved within a much larger sweep of cultural and technological change, says Gloria Feldt, co-founder and president of Take the Lead, a women’s leadership center in Manhattan. 

“In today’s economy that is based on brains not brawn ... the kind of masculinity some men yearn for isn’t even functional anymore, if it ever was,” she says. “And it is toxic because it’s rooted in inequality.”

“In reality, gender is a social construct and power is like a hammer,” Ms. Feldt continues. “You can build with it or destroy with it. ... Those men who understand, as women typically do, that the resources that matter now – intelligence, innovation, empathy, for example – also understand that the world will be healthier, happier, and more prosperous with greater equality in leadership roles.”

On one level, there have been numerous efforts to encourage men to break out of limiting models of masculinity and encourage emotional vulnerability and expressiveness. 

Others such as Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur and former Democratic presidential aspirant, have outlined a greater commitment to vocational education, national-service programs, and marriage counseling to address the growing economic struggles that many middle-class and working-class men are facing, along with increasing levels of opioid addiction and suicide.

“Here’s the simple truth I’ve heard from many men,” Mr. Yang wrote in a recent op-ed. “We need to be needed. We imagine ourselves as builders, soldiers, workers, brothers — part of something bigger than ourselves.”

Second of two parts. Part 1: Why these men find the phrase ‘toxic masculinity,’ well, toxic

Sarah Cox, a fifth grade student in northeastern Tennessee, knows precisely what she likes best about school: seeing her friends, math class, and recess. This year, there’s a new routine creeping up on her list of favorites: small group tutoring.

“I’ve set a lot of goals, like learning how to be better at grammar,” says Sarah after a tutoring session on thesis statements. “I’ve never been good at it, so it’s definitely something I want to achieve because of better job opportunities.” 

East Side Elementary School, where Sarah attends, sits next to the rolling Appalachian Mountains in Elizabethton, Tennessee. The school is an early adopter of a “high-dosage, low-ratio” statewide tutoring program, where students meet in small groups for several intensive sessions per week.

The stakes are high, in Tennessee and nationally, for educators tasked with catching students up from once-in-a-century learning interruptions, including initial pandemic shutdowns and reports of ongoing high student and staff absenteeism in many districts. Finding a way forward will prove important to keeping children on track for everything from learning to read to reaching graduation. 

Nationally, based on assessments, K-12 students are still three months behind in reading and four months behind in math, according to a December 2021 report by McKinsey & Company. Tennessee state tests in spring 2021 resulted in 4% more students scoring below proficiency on state standards compared with 2019, the last year assessments occurred.

Tutoring, like that in Sarah’s school, is presented as a potential solution by education researchers, who point to multiple studies confirming the effectiveness of intensive tutoring. This type of help can result in learning gains equal to three to 15 extra months of schooling, according to Susanna Loeb, a professor of education at Brown University. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Fifth grader Sarah Cox (center) participates in a writing skills tutoring session at East Side Elementary School on Jan. 12, 2022, in Elizabethton, Tennessee.

“There have been more studies of tutoring programs than almost any other kind of intervention, and they’ve consistently shown large effects for students if done well,” says Dr. Loeb, who also directs the National Student Support Accelerator, an initiative started at Brown’s Annenberg Institute in 2020 to share resources like toolkits with educators trying to start tutoring programs.

Tennessee is one of the first states to establish a statewide tutoring program, launching Tennessee Accelerating Literacy and Learning Corps (TN ALL Corps) in September 2021, with 79 of the state’s 147 school districts signed up to participate. The state provides matching grants to districts for three years, using federal COVID-19 relief funding, and projects the program will reach 150,000 students, which is about 15% of the overall student population.  

Other states and districts are also prioritizing tutoring efforts. At least 18 states and the District of Columbia plan to, or have started, a variety of statewide tutoring programs, according to a legislative tracker from the National Student Support Accelerator. 

The evidence that tutoring is successful appealed to Penny Schwinn, the Tennessee commissioner of education. “We were looking at what are the best strategies for accelerating achievement, especially coming out of the pandemic, and what we saw is that the most proven strategy for accelerating and maintaining achievement was this high-dosage, low-ratio tutoring,” says Dr. Schwinn.

Obstacles include staffing, especially in urban and rural areas, and determining how to fit tutoring into the school day, or before or after school, says Dr. Schwinn.

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Tutor Kayla Adams works with first graders at East Side Elementary School on Jan. 12, 2022. The Tennessee Department of Education is providing funds for a tutoring program to respond to pandemic-related learning losses.

“An extra set of hands”

Inside the hallways of East Side Elementary School, pictures of famous Americans and a global map with cutout letters proclaiming “We are going to change the world” dot the walls. The school, part of a city of about 14,500 people, is in an area known for abundant fishing and award-winning barbecue. 

In the school cafeteria on a frosty morning in January, three tutors gather with a handful of first grade students identified by staff as kids who are on the bubble of meeting proficiency standards in literacy.

Emily Rock, a former physical education teacher who recently went back to school to earn her elementary teaching certificate, works with three boys at a long table at the back of the room. She reviews double final consonants, where the last two letters of a word form one sound, as in ball and class.

“Do we say ba-l-l?” she asks her students, repeating the final ‘l’ in the word twice. “No, that would be silly,” she exclaims as the children shake their heads. The group practices blending, or sounding out the word, by tapping the syllables on their arms. 

Ms. Rock and two other staff members – paraprofessionals who formerly served as teaching assistants in the Elizabethton school district – work full time at East Side Elementary tutoring 90 students in first through fifth grade. They’re hired through TN ALL Corps for three years. 

East Side qualifies for federal Title I funding because at least 40% of their students are low income, according to principal Travis Hurley. Nearly 23% of local residents live below the poverty line.

Student achievement dipped during the pandemic, Mr. Hurley says. In the latest statewide tests, 34.6% of students at East Side scored as “on track” or “mastered” for English language arts standards, as compared to 41.8% in 2019. 

When administrators in Elizabethton City Schools found out they could offer TN ALL Corps tutoring during the school day, they quickly agreed, and hired tutors to start in the fall of 2021. Although finding tutors is challenging for some Tennessee districts, Elizabethton benefits from proximity to two universities with teacher training programs. East Side pays $800 per student for the tutoring program, with a $700 grant per student from the state making up the $1,500 needed per child. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

Tutor Emily Rock works with first graders at East Side Elementary School on Jan. 12, 2022. Ms. Rock and two other staff members work full time at East Side tutoring 90 students in first through fifth grade.

The tutoring program through TN ALL Corps is showing early promise. At East Side Elementary, students in the program had an average of 14% growth between their first benchmark assessment in September and their second assessment in December, compared with 6% growth for students not participating in the tutoring, according to the district. The Tennessee Department of Education has not yet released statewide data for TN ALL Corps. 

April Pearson, a fifth grade teacher at East Side, sees the positive effects in her classroom, through progress on student test scores and grades. “Every educator in the world would love to have an extra set of hands in the classroom,” she says. “Considering what we have on our plates, not only dealing academically with trying to play catch-up, but with social [behavior] as well, it’s been nice to have these [tutoring] groups.”

Across the state in Dyersburg City Schools, a small northwestern Tennessee district of about 2,600 students, the number of first and second graders on track or mastering the district’s early literacy assessment doubled from the start of this school year to January 2022, after starting the TN ALL Corps tutoring program, according to district staff.  

“We’ve seen that small group tutoring, especially at the primary school, which is where our students learn to read, has had a great impact on our students,” says Kim Worley, director of schools at Dyersburg City Schools. The district will likely maintain tutoring in the future for at least the youngest students, she says.

A solution in progress

Researchers are quick to caution that not all tutoring leads to equally strong results. For instance, during the No Child Left Behind era, federal funding was provided for tutoring, but they were largely voluntary programs held after school and few students participated.

“Sometimes people hear tutoring and think it’s a 24-hour homework help line. ... But the best kind of tutoring isn’t that kind of opt-in,” says Dr. Loeb, who considers in-school tutoring more equitable than private or free after-school tutoring.

Tutoring programs also face learning struggles that existed pre-pandemic. Even prior to COVID-19, only a third of Tennessee third graders were proficient in English language arts, according to the state department of education. Dr. Schwinn says the TN ALL Corps tutoring program is working in tandem with other efforts to boost student success, like a statewide literacy and phonics program called Reading 360.

Mr. Hurley, the principal at East Side Elementary, appreciates the state subsidizing the tutoring program, but worries about its future at his school when state matching funds expire in three years. 

Alfredo Sosa/Staff

East Side Elementary School principal Travis Hurley speaks during an interview at his office on Jan. 12, 2022, in Elizabethton, Tennessee. He hopes funding for the school's intensive tutoring program will continue beyond the three years currently planned.

“Hopefully the program will continue to be funded by the state,” he says. “A lot of times education programs are like the snap in [the Avengers movies] from Marvel. You snap your fingers and it disappears.”

Researchers urge schools to build ongoing evaluations into their tutoring programs so district leaders can see results and consider making tutoring a budget item after federal pandemic relief funding expires. 

“What we’ve been saying with scaling up is everyone will probably do it a little differently ... so please evaluate,” such as by tracking whether tutors and kids show up, says Kim Dadisman, senior policy and research manager of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. J-PAL sponsors research on effective education interventions, including tutoring. 

“It’s important to know that these are working in the way they are intended to work,” she says. 

“It’s fun and it helps” 

For Sarah, the fifth grade student at East Side Elementary, a recent tutoring session saw her picking three supporting details for an essay about the person she most admires. She likes the individualized attention from the tutor and how much content they can cover during a session.

Her schoolmate Stella Holtsclaw, a third grader, especially enjoys games during tutoring, like preposition bingo, and earning extra recess time. 

“I think it’s fun and it helps,” she says.

Courtesy of the authors

Chris Lockhart (left) and Daniel Mulilo Chama are co-authors of "Walking the Bowl: A True Story of Murder and Survival Among the Street Children of Lusaka."

When Daniel Mulilo Chama, a Zambian social worker, and Chris Lockhart, a longtime American aid worker in sub-Saharan Africa, met at a conference about youth empowerment in Lusaka, Zambia, in 2011, they quickly realized they shared a mutual wish. They wanted to see the stories of children living on the streets in Zambia told better.

When they were written about at all, street children often appeared as statistics, or worse, “treated like subjects and not real people,” Mr. Lockhart says. And Mr. Chama, himself a former street child, knew there was a heft and complexity to these children’s lives that could never be captured in a non-governmental organization’s report.

That meeting was the beginning of a nearly 10-year project that culminated in a new book, “Walking the Bowl: A True Story of Murder and Survival Among the Street Children of Lusaka,” which follows a group of kids who become entangled in a murder investigation. After the discovery of the body of a street child, the book’s protagonists – among them suspects, family members, and bystanders – must navigate what justice could look like in a city that treats them as expendable.

Mr. Chama and Mr. Lockhart spoke to the Monitor about their research process, the book’s message, and the particular challenges of writing ethically about young people living on the margins of their society.

The book’s title, “Walking the Bowl,” comes from a story about a hungry traveler who is given a bowl of food by a good Samaritan. Her only condition is that he walk that same bowl to someone else in need – to pay it forward. Why did you give the book this title?

Mr. Lockhart: At one level, we want folks reading [“Walking the Bowl”] to be aware of the social inequalities these kids face, the structural injustice. We don’t want them to look at it and say, “This is about Africa. These kinds of inequalities exist only in Africa or only in Zambia.” This is a global issue. Street kids are everywhere and the inequalities that determine their lives are faced everywhere. The number of street kids around the world is growing exponentially. But at the same time, the book is rooted in this idea that small good deeds by individuals can go a long way, which is something that happens again and again in the book. 

Mr. Chama: That idea of doing a good deed for the next person – that every time someone does a good deed for you, you must do it for the next person – that’s a lesson that applies to everyone, and is something we can learn from these kids.

"Walking the Bowl: A True Story of Murder and Survival Among the Street Children of Lusaka" by Chris Lockhart and Daniel Mulilo Chama, Hanover Square Press, 304 pp.

This book is told in a very novelistic style. It’s mostly scenes and dialogue. How did you conduct the research?

Mr. Lockhart: The kids have a name for the kind of researchers they meet a lot of. They call them clickers, because they come with their iPads and they just click, click, click, taking down all the information and then going away. We didn’t want to fall into that category. We wanted to build trust. So we spoke to the ethics committee at the University of Zambia, and someone there suggested we create an independent community ethics board to oversee our research. So that’s what we did. We included teachers, local leaders, people from faith-based institutions, local nongovernmental organizations, respected elders, and one shopkeeper because that was somewhere the kids spent a lot of time. They advised us.

And then for the research itself, we worked with five former street kids – four boys and one girl. We basically trained them to act as embedded journalists. That took a year – training them on participant observation, rapid interviews, recording with an audio recorder. And then they fanned out to different areas [in Lusaka]. They each had a special area where they worked and they each had a different relationship with one of the four kids who’s at the core of the book.

Mr. Chama: We focused on observing events as they unfolded. Just observing everyday life. You entrust yourself to these kids. You have to win their trust. That trust was very important. And me myself, from being there, I know what that life entails. The intelligence and the heartbreak. That it’s not an easy thing.

How do you make sure you’re portraying them fairly and accurately?

Mr. Lockhart: As part of the data collection, we did these things called event reconstructions with the kids. We went to an empty lot and said, “OK, tell us exactly what happened here” – even if we did have a researcher who observed it directly and had an audio recording, which we often did. But we always did these kinds of event reconstructions with the kids. It almost became like putting on a play. They would tell us, “This is what happened here. This person was standing here when I entered the scene. This is what I was thinking. This is what I was smelling. This is what I was seeing.” And they knew that because we were going through all of this, [it] was going to be part of the book. So they could say, “I don’t want this in here. I don’t want to talk about this.” We respected that.

As researchers, did you ever feel a tension between wanting to just observe what was happening in the lives of these kids and wanting to intervene, to help them, which might then alter the story?

Mr. Chama: There were a couple of kids who are not included in the book specifically because of that. They wanted to be included but there were big issues with abuse and violence going on. So we had counselors step in at those points and it really changed the trajectory of those kids’ lives, and they couldn’t be part of the book anymore. There was always a risk-benefit analysis that we had to reassess as we went along.

What do you hope readers take away from this book?

Mr. Chama: These kids have dreams. They are resilient. And they have a story to tell, like any children do.

Reuters

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett speaks to Bahraini youth during his visit to Manama, Bahrain, Feb.15.

One driver of war and unrest in the Middle East is unhappy youth, especially jobless ones. The average age of the 9/11 hijackers was 26. The 2011 Arab Spring was sparked by a protesting 26-year-old fruit vendor in Tunisia. Last year, a survey of Arab youth found 1 in 5 are considering emigration. Monarchs, dictators, and ruling clerics must plot their moves around this demographic powder keg.

In the tiny Gulf nation of Bahrain, nearly a third of those between the ages of 18 and 24 want to relocate. This youthful unease explains why the country’s ruling royal family has been eager to provide more security and prosperity. It also explains why the leader of Israel, during a historic red-carpet visit to Bahrain Feb. 15, was allowed to speak to a group of young people.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told the group that the “growing friendship” between Israel and four Arab countries since the signing of the 2020 Abraham Accords is now “a leading force” for profound change in the region. For Bahrain in particular, part of that change will be an expected influx of Israeli tourists, investments, and advanced technologies.

Mr. Bennett’s visit follows one he made in December to another Gulf state, the United Arab Emirates. Israel has also begun to draw closer to Morocco and Sudan, two other signers of the Abraham Accords. But it may be his visit to Bahrain that carries the most significance. That country is closely allied with Saudi Arabia, which has not officially recognized Israel.

For the visit, Mr. Bennett’s plane was allowed to fly through Saudi airspace, a symbolic hint that the kingdom may soon set up diplomatic ties with Israel. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is eager to lift up the country’s restless youth. Like the UAE and Bahrain, he knows Israel’s economic prowess would help.

One of the great rivalries in the Middle East is a race between Iran and Saudi Arabia to develop their economies for that large cohort of unhappy youth. So far Saudi Arabia is ahead. If it also joins other Arab states in recognizing Israel, the “growing friendship” in the region may help cut down on all that unhappiness.