Evan Vucci/AP

President Trump listens during a meeting with Republican members of Congress on immigration in the Cabinet Room of the White House on Wednesday, June 20.

The optics – and the reality – just got to be too much: Babies and toddlers ripped from their parents’ arms, and put in “tender age” shelters. Children sitting in cages, wailing for Mami and Papi. Undocumented immigrant parents in anguish over losing custody of their children, as they await possible deportation – unsure of whether they will ever see their kids again.

Until Wednesday, President Trump defiantly insisted that only Congress could solve the crisis of family separations at the US-Mexico border, triggered by an administration policy implemented in May. But amid a revolt by allies, including Republicans in Congress and the Rev. Franklin Graham, the president took action, and signed an executive order Wednesday that temporarily allows migrant families that enter the US illegally to be held in detention together.

“We’re looking to keep families together,” Mr. Trump told members of Congress.

Critics liken Trump to a fireman who sets a fire, puts it out, then claims credit for saving the day. But nobody in Washington comes out of this crisis looking good. With November midterms looming, and control of both congressional houses on the line, Democrats in particular sought to take advantage of the heartbreaking images of distraught children – sending out email petitions and, in some cases, fundraising.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer played political hardball over the border crisis, refusing to support a proposal by Republican senators aimed at solving the problem. “When the president can do it with his own pen, it makes no sense,” Senator Schumer told reporters.

But the real challenge for Trump came from within his own party. Republican members of Congress – leaders, key committee chairs, rank and file – came out against the family separations. A June 14-17 Quinnipiac poll found 55 percent of Republican voters, in fact, supporting the practice of family separation, the only demographic group showing majority support, but that figure is far lower than Trump’s overall support among Republicans. Americans overall oppose the separation of migrant parents and children, the poll showed.

In short, it was a losing issue for Republicans, especially those trying to save their seats – and their party’s majorities on Capitol Hill – in November.

“The danger for Republicans,” says GOP pollster Whit Ayres, was that the administration was creating an environment where people felt the only way they could stop this was to vote for Democrats – “even in races where there are Republican candidates they like and admire.”

Mr. Ayres adds that the Trump administration was holding “a losing hand,” and Trump seemed incapable of admitting error. “You don’t look weak if you reverse a mistake, you look smart,” Ayres says.

But for the president, backing down clearly was a difficult decision: 

“If you’re really, really pathetically weak, the country’s going to be overrun with millions of people,” he said Wednesday. “And if you’re strong, you don’t have any heart. That’s a tough dilemma. Perhaps I’d rather be strong.”

Reversal could trigger lawsuits

All along, Trump’s posture has been that his administration had no choice but to separate illegally migrating parents from the children they had brought with them. He said he was just carrying out the law. But it was a policy change – a call to refer all illegal Southwest border crossings to the Department of Justice for prosecution – that triggered the new practice of family separation.

Now, with Trump’s order keeping families together in federal immigration custody, the president could face a new legal challenge: possible violation of the so-called Flores settlement of 1997, which limits the duration of child detentions to 20 days.

But for now, Trump can say that he has halted further family separations. 

In a call with reporters on Wednesday afternoon, Gene Hamilton, counselor to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, said the Justice Department would ask the judge to modify the terms of the Flores consent decree to facilitate the administration's approach toward detention of families. In addition, Mr. Hamilton called on Congress to pass legislation that will help close what the administration views as loopholes in US immigration law as a result of Flores.

The family separation issue consumed lawmakers on the Hill, overshadowing a Senate trying to debate spending legislation and a House moving toward a vote on two Republican bills to address the fate of young immigrants, or “Dreamers.”

Chaos and protest

“It’s a complete mess,” observed Theresa Cardinal Brown, an immigration expert at the Bipartisan Policy Center, in advance of the president’s meeting with House Republicans Tuesday. “I haven’t seen this much chaos since the travel ban.”

Also highly unusual: The president was heckled by Democratic lawmakers as he left Tuesday’s meeting. They held signs and one of them shouted: “Mr. President, Don’t you have kids?”

Members of both parties said they were deeply disturbed by the media accounts and images of the separated children at the border. But they came at it from two different perspectives – not surprising, given the highly charged nature of the issue and midterm elections just around the corner.

As he did with Dreamers, Trump initially threw the family separation issue to Congress to fix. Republicans – even while admitting the president had the authority to fix it himself – set quickly to work to come up with solutions. They appeared not to want to directly cross the president. 

The scenes of the children were “terrible,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R) of Texas on Tuesday. He promised a fix within a matter of days – a position backed by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky. On Wednesday, Senate Republicans introduced a bill to keep families together in safe facilities and to hire 225 more immigration judges to speed up processing.

Democrats were far more graphic in their denunciation of the separations, for instance, making comparisons with America’s Japanese internment program in World War II. They put the onus on Trump to fix a problem he created with his “zero tolerance” policy of criminally prosecuting everyone who crosses the border illegally. 

“I’m not at all surprised,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D) of California Wednesday, as reports of the new executive order surfaced. “I mean everybody has spoken out against it, including the pope, including the prime minister of the United Kingdom, and I think everything that we believe in is made a mockery of by separating children from their parents.”

The issue has caused alarm among his constituents, says Sen. Chris Coons (D) of Delaware. He’s been struck by the range of people up and down his state who have texted, called, emailed, and sent private Facebook messages, including Republican activists. People who had his private cellphone number – and had promised not to disturb him unless it was an emergency – considered this a “break-the-glass” moment and contacted him to do something, he says.

Will Congress take action?

It’s not clear whether Congress will act in the wake of the executive order. Behind the scenes, senators from both parties are talking with each other. During votes on Wednesday, Senator Feinstein could be seen in long conversations with key Senate Republicans who have been working on family-related legislation. She has her own bill that is supported by all of the Democrats. 

On the larger issue of border security and “Dreamers,” it’s hard to see this going anywhere without a bipartisan effort – yet that is not the path taken by House Republicans. On Thursday, they are expected to vote on two measures, a more hardline version that does not see a path to citizenship for Dreamers, and a more moderate, compromise measure among House Republicans that does. Neither looks to have enough support among Republicans to pass on a party-line vote, and House Democrats oppose both bills. 

“At the end of the day, it’s going to take both parties and the president coming together” to make progress on immigration, says Ms. Brown. It is the continued use of immigration as an election issue that has brought the country to this point of “tragedies,” says Brown.

“Multiple Congresses, with various configurations of Republicans and Democrats, have been punting on immigration for a very long time. It’s resulting in all of these tragedies that we’re seeing. Tragedies of Dreamers. Tragedies of [families] at the border.”

Staff writer Warren Richey contributed to this report.

At the United Nations Human Rights Council, it’s known simply as Agenda Item 7.

Item 7 addresses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and rights abuses in Israel and by Israel in the adjacent occupied territories. It is the only item of business that appears automatically on the agenda of the 47-nation council, the world’s preeminent human rights body, year in and year out.

The biased treatment of Israel has drawn criticism and admonishments to act more evenhandedly from numerous international human rights groups and world leaders – including UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

Beyond the case of Israel, these same critics have called on the Geneva-based council to address its other glaring shortcomings. These have included overlooking the violations of some of the world’s most oppressive dictatorships and even honoring some of the most flagrant abusers of human rights with seats on the council.

But it was not until Tuesday, when the United States announced its withdrawal from membership in the council, that any country – let alone a permanent member of the UN’s Security Council – had taken its frustrations with the human rights body to the extreme level of giving up and pulling out. That said, under President George W. Bush, the US withdrew from the council’s predecessor, the UN Human Rights Commission, citing similar issues.

The US decision Tuesday was hailed by some as a principled act proclaiming the Trump administration’s refusal to continue to bestow legitimacy on a flawed and unrepentant body through American participation.

“The only thing worse than a council that does almost nothing to protect human rights is a council that covers for human rights abuses, and is therefore an obstacle to progress and an impediment to change,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at the State Department Tuesday.

Moral security umbrella

But for many others, the decision represents a further US retreat from its position of leadership in the global system of multilateral organizations and agreements – and from its decades-long standing as the champion of individual rights and values.

In this case, these observers add, the losers are the world’s oppressed, and the many thousands of rights advocates and local organizations around the world that have depended on America’s voice and support to stand up to tyrants and bullies.

Toya Sarno Jordan/Reuters

US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, announcing the US withdrawal from the UN Human Rights Council, addresses the press with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the State Department, June 19, 2018.

“This is not about a hard-power security umbrella, but a moral security umbrella that so many around the world have come to count on over the last seven decades that the US has played this role of champion of human rights,” says Melissa Labonte, an associate professor and expert in multilateral peace operations and human rights promotion at Fordham University in New York.

Acknowledging the council’s faults, she nevertheless says the US absence will hurt most those the US has traditionally sought to defend. “The first loser here is human rights,” Dr. Labonte says. “The council is not the only table out there, but it is a significant forum for advancing American values and interests in seeing human rights safeguarded and advanced around the world.”

For the Trump administration, however, US participation in a human rights organization that honors the likes of China, Congo, Cuba, and Venezuela with membership is in effect bestowing legitimacy on some of the world’s most flagrant rights abusers.

As Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, asserted in announcing the withdrawal at the State Department Tuesday afternoon, “American participation is the last shred of credibility that the council has. But that is precisely why we must leave.”

Ambassador Haley insisted that the US will continue to promote human rights outside the council, and to lead like-minded countries in efforts to advance values of individual freedoms.

Change from within?

But for many nongovernmental human rights organizations – and indeed for many individual rights advocates who have learned over recent decades to rely on American backing – the US pullout is short-sighted. It’s an action that will remove from the table a global power that traditionally has been one of the foremost advocates of the world’s oppressed, from women and minorities to political dissidents.

The advocates’ resounding message: Yes the Human Rights Council is flawed, but the US can do a lot more to improve global respect for rights from within the tent than outside it.

The US withdrawal “only serves to empower actors on the council, like Russia and China, that do not share American values on the preeminence of universal human rights,” Freedom House and 11 other international rights organizations said in a letter to Haley and Secretary Pompeo. “Without strategic US engagement at the council as a member, the US loses a platform to influence the course of human rights globally for the better.”

Others say it is the US fixation on defending Israel and not in fact any unwillingness by the council to address other cases of rights abuse that explains the US withdrawal.

“The Trump administration’s withdrawal is a sad reflection of its one-dimensional human rights policy: defending Israeli abuses from criticism takes precedence above all else,” says Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch in New York. He says the council has “played an important role in such countries as North Korea, Syria, Myanmar, and South Sudan, but all Trump seems to care about is defending Israel.”

Part of wider trend

But some supporters of the US withdrawal said the council’s evident bias against Israel, while a key concern, was just one reason justifying the US action.

Citing Haley’s depiction of the council as a “cesspool of political bias,” former Pentagon official Frank Gaffney, now president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, says the council remains “riddled with human rights violators, rabidly hostile towards Israel, and reliant on US subventions. It’s high time we’re outta there.”

Officials at the UN in New York say the US decision is regrettable – and one that Secretary-General Guterres in particular is unhappy to see. But some said the decision would have been a bigger shock to the UN system and more of a clarion call for the cause of human rights if it were not coming from a US administration that has shown a broad disdain for multilateral organizations and actions.

“This is part of a wider trend on the part of the US that goes well beyond the Human Rights Council and UN bodies and which across the board raises the question, ‘Where do you get the most impact – from the inside working with other like-minded nations, or from the outside acting alone?’ ” says one official who requested anonymity to speak candidly on the issue.

Pointing to the US withdrawal under Trump from the Paris Climate Accords, the Iran nuclear deal, and heightened US friction with allies as seen at the recent G7 summit, the official adds, “You could make the case for each action individually, but if you put it all together you have to wonder what it says about the direction of the US.”

Israel loses vigorous defender

Fordham’s Labonte says that one irony of the US decision is that Israel also comes out a loser, as it will no longer have at the council a strong defender that she says has made a difference in its treatment since the US joined the council in 2009.

By some measures, she says, “hostility and animosity towards Israel” have fallen by roughly half. For example, she notes that resolutions focused on Israel’s human rights record have fallen from around 40 percent of the council’s annual totals in 2009 to about 20 percent last year.

It’s not clear who will step in to defend Israel so vigorously, Labonte says. But she adds that the US absence from the human-rights forum raises the same question more broadly.

“Others will now have to come up with a strategy for how to fill that gap,” she says. “But right now, it’s not clear who that will be or if anyone can or will.”

James Courtright

Claimant Alfa Dabo spent months in the hospital after being wounded by police in November 2010. "The money that my father had been saving for the family has been spent on me alone. I would like to pay them back," he says. "My brothers were deprived of an education."

“When the police came they did not ask, they did not inform the people,” remembers Fadda Kargbo, a farmer whose village is tucked into the verdant Sula Mountains of northern Sierra Leone. “They just started firing.”

On that day in November 2010, the brutal civil war had been over for eight years – ushering in a surge in foreign investment, from mining to industrial farms. Home to some of the world’s largest iron ore deposits, more than 200 square kilometers of Sierra Leone had been leased to African Minerals Limited (AML), a London-based multinational. But talks over plans for AML to build a dam near their mine in Mr. Kargbo’s village, Kemedugu, turned heated, with many locals refusing to consent.

Yet a few days later, they say, farmers woke to bulldozers uprooting their crops. The conflict escalated, with residents setting up barricades to trap the bulldozers. After negotiations with AML representatives failed, a truckload of police arrived and fired tear gas and live rounds into the air, according to a Human Rights Watch report. Residents fled for the hills as police broke into their homes. Dozens were arrested, and some severely injured.

“The authorities that we expected to intervene on our behalf did not – they actually made the problem worse,” says Kargbo.

Kemedugu residents are among dozens of claimants who have sued Tonkolili Iron Ore Ltd., which operated the mine, and AML, its former parent company, in British courts, alleging that they were complicit in violent police crackdowns in 2010 and 2012 – claims the companies deny. Legal experts warn that, even if they succeed, the case is unlikely to bring quick change on the ground. But a judge's decision to visit Sierra Leone earlier this year to hear testimony from claimants – believed to be the first time a British judge has done so – has raised the possibility of a new precedent in how cases for corporate accountability overseas are handled.

“It’s a very big decision on the behalf of the UK judge to go and hear the claims against English-based [corporations] in Africa,” says Ekaterina Aristova, a doctoral candidate studying law at the University of Cambridge. The judge “is realizing how important it is for England as the state where the headquarters of the company are based to investigate and to examine the impacts of their operations in the world.”

Complex legal landscape

When mining operations started up in 2010, some residents were hopeful. People in Bumbuna, a sleepy town at the base of the mountains, expected an influx of jobs and infrastructure. In the iron-laden hills above, villagers say they were promised roads, schools, and hospitals, in addition to payments for the land.

But some villages were told they would be relocated to make way for the mine – without their informed consent, they say. As the company began hauling iron ore from the hills, tensions increased, and once again came to a head in April 2012, when police responded to workers’ protests in Bumbuna by firing tear gas and live ammunition. At least six people were shot, one of whom died, according to Amnesty International.

“What we saw on that day can be compared to what we went through during the war,” one witness told the Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone (HRCSL). “We were worried to imagine we were going to lose all we have worked for a second time.”

Around Tonkolili and other large investments, local authorities “either connive with the company or they receive pressure from central government,” says Abdulai Yollah Bangura, head of the Business and Human Rights Unit at the Human Rights Commission of Sierra Leone.

The “close relationship” between police and AML “raises serious questions about the ability of the police in Bumbuna to independently maintain public order and enforce the rule of law in an impartial manner,” Amnesty International wrote in a report on the Bumbuna incident.

Rights groups around the world have raised similar questions about international mining and oil companies’ influence on abuses, from Kazakhstan to Indonesia. For decades, victims in developing countries have explored options to hold multinationals accountable in Western courts – but often without success.

In the United States, plaintiffs’ lawyers have typically attempted lawsuits using international human rights law. Across the Atlantic, however, more courts have been experimenting with the principle of foreign direct liability: foreign citizens coming to courts in Europe, claiming multinationals were liable under domestic law for damages caused by their operations abroad.

Establishing foreign direct liability (FDL) is notoriously complex, however. Multinationals’ parent companies are often based in Western capitals, with subsidiary companies running the operations abroad, and they are technically separate legal entities. This complicates determination of jurisdiction (which country’s courts have authority to hear a case) and liability, says Lucas Roorda, a doctoral candidate studying foreign direct liability at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

James Courtright

Fatamata Dabo once farmed rice and vegetables on this land outside Kemedugu, Sierra Leone. Some villagers allege that iron tailings from the mine poisoned local water sources.

“Let’s take Nigeria as an example,” says Mr. Roorda, referring to attempts to prosecute Shell for environmental damage. “Now if you want to go into a European court and say we have Shell polluting our rivers, what you’re basically saying is we have a Nigerian company that’s also called Shell, we have Nigerian plaintiffs, and in fact it all took place in Nigeria – and the British court has no connection or jurisdiction on that issue.”

The lack of case law from previous cases – multinationals usually settle before cases reach trial – has also left uncertainty about what evidence is needed to hold a parent company accountable. In addition, claimants generally face serious practical problems such as traveling to Western courts and finding and paying for legal representation – making the judge’s decision to visit Sierra Leone this February to hear testimony, after witnesses and claimants were denied travel visas to Britain, a significant help.

Previous cases were “all done with words,” Roorda says. “Actually going there and seeing for yourself what the impact is of a particular way of operating by companies, seeing what it means to actually work there and be subjected to these police operations, I do think that affects judges more than just the case on paper. That doesn’t mean it’s an open and shut case,” he cautions, “but it changes the game.”

The judge’s visit offers an example of how cases could be “practically and efficiently administered in the future,” says Ms. Aristovia. “It is a very good example saying in the globalized world, in the modern world, practical convenience should not be such a decisive factor in favor of one [legal] forum or another.”

Only a handful of FDL cases have actually been heard in courtrooms, and as of yet none have received a final judgment. Most cases in Britain, including the case against AML and Tonkolili, have been brought by Leigh Day, a firm with a reputation for taking on multinationals.

In the past, corporations have typically tried to settle cases after they get jurisdiction. But some are now trying to take cases all the way to judgment, Roorda says, in an effort to set a precedent and discourage future lawsuits. One hundred and one of the original 142 claimants represented by Leigh Day in the Sierra Leone case have already settled.

But a judgment in the remaining claimants’ favor could set an example, such as by creating guidelines for how companies engage with police and security forces. “That could set quite an important precedent,” says Astrid Perry, a litigator at Leigh Day.

For many living near Tonkolili, however, what matters is here and now. Claimant Alfa Dabo spent months in the hospital after being wounded by police in November 2010. “The money that my father had been saving for the family has been spent on me alone. I would like to pay them back,” he says. “My brothers were deprived of an education.”

Even a verdict is unlikely to impact day-to-day operations at the mine, however. In 2015 Tonkolili Iron Ore was bought out by Shandong Iron and Steel, a Chinese company, and nearby villagers have complained of ongoing environmental damage: rice-growing swamps polluted by iron tailings; the village’s main stream left undrinkable. Namati, a global legal-empowerment organization, has filed proceedings against Tonkolili Iron Ore and Shandong in Sierra Leonean court for flouting environmental regulations.

“The fact is that these companies operate in Sierra Leone,” says Sonkita Conteh, director of Namati in Sierra Leone. “It’s all well and good for them to be held accountable in court in the UK, but at the end of the day we must build confidence in our institutions here at home.”

Five years ago, Jason Lary attended a workshop on how to build your own city.

He had witnessed the sprawling metro Atlanta region (pop. 5.5 million) carve 10 medium-sized cities out of unincorporated county parcels like his own in south Dekalb County in just over a decade. The recasting of some of the most sprawling suburbs in the United States with new boundaries created a giddy Sim City-like atmosphere.

The bulk of new cities ended up whiter and wealthier than the largely minority areas they left in the dust. At the workshop, Mr. Lary, an insurance executive and part-time concert promoter, was the only black person in the room.

Saying he didn’t have time to fret about it, he set aside his misgivings and took notes. And now, as of May, Lary has completed his first year as mayor of Stonecrest, a 95 percent African-American city so new that it still registers as neighboring Lithonia on GoogleMaps. Its namesake is a mall.

With its population of 53,000, it and neighboring city of South Fulton last year became the first black-majority cities of that large a size to incorporate since Reconstruction. They also are part of a countertrend: The majority of America’s new cities have tended to have white majorities. Now, amid rising property values in a gentrifying city, Atlanta is experiencing “black flight.” The region’s increasingly prosperous black middle class is making the same trek white Americans made in the 1960s and 1970s, decamping for the suburbs. Such shifts of wealth have created new flashpoints over race, class, and property values.

“The front of this conflict is now out in the suburbs,” says Paul Lewis, a political scientist who studies suburban growth at Arizona State University, in Phoenix, reflecting in part an understandable “instinct to fortress” against encroaching regional problems. “If you are allowing places of certain racial characteristics to secede or form their own area of self-rule, that might work out well for African-American rule ... or it may deprive African-American communities of real resources.”

Critics say Georgia’s free-for-all city building experiment has unleashed a torrent of race and class resentment threatening to devolve into a form of “municipal warfare” for taxable spoils.

These critics see Mayor Lary as joining a segregation movement. For his part, he sees Stonecrest as the harbinger of “a new Harlem Renaissance” that creates a partnership between the city’s predominantly black working class, a racially diverse business community, and the “100 percent white” industrialists who dominate the region’s economic development scene.

One year in, he says, “we’re squeaking by ... but we are finally squeaking by on our own terms. The most difficult thing has been getting people to see the vision.”

Between 1990 and 2010, 44 majority-minority cities sprang into existence across the US, including the transformation of colonias in Texas, the creation of Asian-majority cities in California, and a new Native American city in Oklahoma that incorporated largely to focus more resources on a rampant drug problem.

Emerging evidence shows that majority-minority cities such as Stonecrest “can control their own destiny,” says Leora Waldner, public administration professor at Troy University in Alpharetta, Ga., who tracked these new cities and found them nearly universally successful. “They have a seat at the bargaining table for regional issues, they protect themselves from undesirable land uses, and they can and do take on environmental [and social] justice initiatives.” 

She adds: “Black or brown communities creating their own cities from unincorporated areas – that can be a potent civil rights tool.”

Georgia as a testing ground

About 10 new towns and cities a year are created in the US, the Census has estimated.

Georgia has become a pioneer of city-building, birthing insta-cities averaging around 50,000 people – the population of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. The ostensible motivations are better services, protective zoning, and separation from corruption-prone county government.

As the most valuable pieces of land have been scooped up, the areas left behind have struggled to maintain services amid growing pressure to raise taxes, says Professor Lewis. At the same time, property values have for the most part risen in majority-minority cities.

The median household income is $71,743 in majority-white Brookhaven, compared with $50,856 in majority-black Dekalb County, from which it sprouted. Such snapshots underscore how city building by African-Americans may fail to break a deeper pattern of injustice, one political scientist says.

“The majority of these cities have been majority white cities advocated for by whites ­­responding to their racial anxiety and grievance on a variety of things, inclusive of black control of the county,” says Emory University political scientist Michael Leo Owens, author of “God and Government in the Ghetto.” “It’ll be interesting to in fact see how long Stonecrest sticks around. ... The problem of course is that the places where [African-Americans] want to create new cities are not necessarily the most commercially vibrant and thriving places – a result of prior choices that were made.”

The pressure – and the potential

Stonecrest is feeling the pressure. Its budget is about a 10th of the majority-white new city of Brookhaven, which has 10,000 fewer residents. Instead of big ribbon cuttings, the city has seen Walmart, Sam’s, Publix, and Kroger all make plans to depart, potentially creating a food desert.

But the potential for homegrown economic development – apparent in a slew of new weekend festivals and the opening of a start-up incubator – is also becoming apparent to at least some residents, 60 percent of whom voted to create the new city.

“What we are finding is that people are impatient, and I keep telling them, ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day,’ ” says retired transportation worker George Turner, who sits on the city’s inaugural city council. “They remind me that this isn’t Rome; this is Stonecrest.”

He sees the key to success in shifting from a “sleepy little town [to a] progressive community that can bring in high paying jobs,” says Mr. Turner. “Jobs and opportunities have been shifting to the northern part of the county, and now we have our own city and we’re not shifting anything anywhere. It will be right here with us.”

That dynamic is a matter of a personal pride for many African-Americans, including Matt Hampton, who runs the start-up incubator in Stonecrest.

“I think in a lot of black communities around the country, you have economic fundamentals but you don’t have a way to leverage them for people,” says Mr. Hampton. “And in Stonecrest, everybody is kind of looking, how do I capitalize on this city now? How do I make it better?”

In some ways, what is playing out in the Atlanta suburbs reflects what happened before the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, when the evolution of suburbs and towns often carried a political fingerprint, interlaced with race and class.

‘I believe we created a monster’

“The question is: Is this just the 21st century cold, bureaucratic way of doing what the South did by other means 50 or 100 years ago in terms of having racially exclusive zones?” says Mr. Lewis, author of “Shaping Suburbia.” “People could say, ‘Well, it’s a strictly neutral question about tax rates and local control and quality of public services.’ But looked at from 10,000 feet, racial and class issues” are evident.

Those questions are building to a crescendo in a place called Eagles Landing.

In what Professor Owens describes as a “raw, naked power play” signed into law by Republican Gov. Nathan Deal, residents in Henry County will vote in November not only to incorporate part of a county, but to, in effect, de-annex – secede, really – from the majority-black city of Stockbridge, taking nearly half the city’s tax base with it. Those left paying higher interest rates on $16 million of municipal debt because of a downgraded bond rating will have no say in the matter.

Eagles Landing (the name of a golf course) would remain plurality black, but would be far whiter and wealthier than Stockbridge.

The devolution of the Eagles Landing proposal into resentment and recrimination has shocked some advocates of city-building. “It is setting a very bad precedent when you can cannibalize one city to create another,” says Turner, the Stonecrest city councilor. “If you start that, there may be no end to it.”

The stakes are high enough that Republican state Sen. Renee Unterman changed her mind on the cityhood movement. “I believe we created a monster,” she warned a Senate committee earlier this year.

Intersection with voting rights

Voting rights in the South lie at the heart of the deeper legal questions the state now faces. Before a US Supreme Court ruling undercut parts of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 2013, the Department of Justice had to pre-clear most annexations and de-annexations, including many in Georgia.

“The VRA protects electoral opportunity, and doesn’t actually protect against every deprivation of real political power,” says Justin Levitt, a former deputy US assistant attorney general for civil rights enforcement, now at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, in an email. So, “if [de-annexation] siphons away the tax base, it’s not clear whether that’s something the VRA is well-built to protect. On the other hand, if there’s proof that the incorporation/de-annexation is based on race, the Constitution may offer protections of its own, directly.”

For instance, in Gomillion v. Lightfoot, a landmark 1960 Supreme Court case, the justices found that Alabama violated the rights of black voters by redrawing the city limits of the historically black college town of Tuskegee, Ala., to exclude nearly all its black neighborhoods in order to ensure white supremacy on the city council.

In the meantime, Lary says he is working not just overtime, but double-time.

One of his first acts as mayor was to propose carving out 350 acres to create the city of Amazon – a pitch he made directly to Amazon chief executive officer Jeff Bezos on a cable news program, amid a national search for its HQ2. A multimillion dollar regional sportsplex is in the works, but behind schedule.

Among Stonecrest’s first-year accomplishments on a shoestring $2.5 million budget: Closing an illegal nightclub, demolishing an abandoned hotel, and expediting building and business licenses. This year, with new tax revenues from a penny transportation tax, will likely see the creation of a police force and the sculpting of city parks.

“It is about seizing our destiny,” says the mayor. “Now I just need to not screw it up.”

Boris Grdanoski/AP

People protest on June 17 in Bitola, Macedonia, against the deal between Greece and Macedonia to give their country a new name, North Macedonia.

When Greece and Macedonia signed an agreement Sunday to bring an end to their vicious, three-decade diplomatic dispute, the story had an unlikely hero.

An adjective.

Yes, the force that finally brought an end to the poisonous conflict that had long kept Macedonia out of NATO and the European Union was not bold political leadership or a savvy negotiator. Or at least, it wasn’t only those things.

It was also a single, lowly modifier.

It was the word north.

Specifically, Macedonia agreed that it would officially change its name to “North Macedonia,” a nod to the two countries’ shared claims over the history of the ancient kingdom of Macedonia. 

That move puts (North) Macedonia in a rarefied global club, of countries who have officially changed what they call themselves – and how the world knows them as well. In April, the tiny southern African kingdom formerly known as Swaziland announced that it was undergoing a name change to eSwatini, or “land of the Swazis” in the local siSwati language. And in 2016, the country you may know as the Czech Republic formally changed its English short-form name to Czechia.

Although there isn’t a single set of reasons why a country might want a new name, many name changes follow a familiar pattern, says Steven Gruzd , head of the governance and foreign policy program at the South African Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg. They are a way to start over.

“It's about asserting independence, distancing [yourself] from colonialism, evoking history, trying to clean the slate,” he says.

In Africa, for instance, many countries changed their names at independence to create space between themselves and their former colonial overlords. So the Bechuanaland Protectorate became Botswana, or the “land of the Tswana.” The Gold Coast became Ghana, or “warrior king.”  And Southern Rhodesia re-styled itself Zimbabwe – a nod to the Great Zimbabwe civilization that ruled from the 11th to the 15th centuries.

But the decision to change a name is almost always at least as much about the present as the past.

Take the 27-year dispute between Greece and Macedonia, purportedly over the origins of Macedonia’s name. Greeks say the word belongs to them and them alone, since the ancient kingdom of Macedonia ruled by Alexander the Great was largely based in modern-day Greece. Macedonians, meanwhile, say that same kingdom contained much of their modern country, and so they have just as much claim to the name as the Greeks do.

But the standoff was never just about ancient history. Since Macedonia splintered off from Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, Greece suspected that the small new country secretly harbored ambitions to expand into its territory – specifically, into a northern Greek region that shared a name and a near-identical flag with Macedonia.

So from the moment of Macedonia’s independence in 1991, the Greeks fought tooth-and-nail against recognition of the new country. In 1995, the two countries struck an inelegant bargain. In exchange for letting Macedonia join the global fraternity of countries – the United Nations – the new country had to agree to call itself the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM. And it amended its constitution to make clear it had no claims on Greek land.

Still, the fight dragged on. For people on all sides, after all, the name was deeply symbolic, and that wasn’t easy to let go of.

Naming rights

For Mswati III, the King of eSwatini, that was also true of his country’s name. But for him, the old name had been another kind of symbol, of an African country poisoned by Western influence.

Changing the name is “built on the idea that we are reclaiming our values,” says Bheki Makhubu, editor of The Nation, an independent political magazine in eSwatini. “It’s like the King is saying, Let’s go back to our roots. Let’s reclaim our identity from a world that wants to steal it from us.”

But like some other country name changes, eSwatini’s new moniker is also a way for its leader to assert his own power.

“It’s also part of a narrow brand of nationalism that centers on the King himself,” says Mr. Makhubu, a prominent government critic. Renaming the country allows Mswati to frame himself as a true patriot, Makhubu says, “even though we have an absolute monarchy that’s utterly failed our people.” 

Mswati isn’t the first leader to use a new country name to shore up his own popularity. When Mobutu Sese Seko became the president of Congo in 1965, he launched an aggressive campaign of what he called authenticité to scrub the new country clean of its old colonial influences. Much of it centered around changing the names of people (he dropped the Western-sounding “Joseph-Désiré” from his own name) and places (the capital Léopoldville, for instance, became Kinshasa). And in 1971, Mobutu announced that he was changing the name of the country itself, to Zaire – a local name for the Congo River.

Unfortunately for Mobutu, his rule didn’t last. And when a new president, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, came to power in 1997, he announced he was changing the name back to Congo.

New name, new chapter

But of course, changing your country’s name isn’t as simple as just saying you’re going to do it.

In Macedonia, for instance, the new name will now be put up for a popular vote, and the agreement between Greece and Macedonia must be ratified by the parliaments of both countries.

But even after that’s all done, it’s not over. Countries have to send official notice of the change to the UN, which then registers the new title in its database of World Geographical Names. Among other things, the country must advise on how to write its new name in each of the six official UN languages (the UN says Swaziland has instigated this process, but it is not yet completed). Once this is done, the alphabetical order for where the country sits at the UN is adjusted.

“It’s a hugely expensive undertaking – virtually everything needs to change, from maps to legal documents to car registrations,” says Mr. Gruzd of the South African Institute of International Affairs. “Ideology can override practicality.”

Still, for many countries, the nitty gritty expenses are worth it for the chance to recast your own history.

When Thomas Sankara came to power as president of Upper Volta, a small West African country, in 1983, he immediately turned his attention to transforming his poor, aid-dependent country into a model for an independent African state not reliant on the West. He rejected most foreign aid and instituted farming assistance programs that drastically reduced the need for imported food, while refusing the most ostentatious trappings of the presidency – working in an office without air conditioning and driving a cheap, boxy Renault.

A country like his, he said, needed “to take bold and radical initiatives” to reinvent itself. And where better than the country’s name?

In 1984, Sankara announced that Upper Volta – a creation of the French – no longer existed. His country was now Burkina Faso. Translation: “the land of honest people.”

Reuters

Former members of the leftist guerrilla groups ELN and FARC, members of the right wing paramilitary groups, and victims of the armed conflict in Colombia participate in a soccer match for the peace in Dabeiba, Colombia, June 19.

After ending a half-century of civil war with a peace pact two years ago, Colombia held its first presidential election last Sunday. The presence of peace was palpable.

For the first time in generations, there was no political violence on voting day. The use of misinformation in the campaign was minuscule. The ballot count was finished in less than an hour. Most of all, many Colombians voted for a leftist candidate for the first time without fear or shame, a sign of an emerging national reconciliation.

In the end, the right-leaning candidate, Iván Duque, won with an 11-point margin. In his victory speech, he acknowledged that “peace has to be above political calculations.” He will need to keep that promise in order to fully implement a peace settlement that found the right balance between justice and mercy for the war’s combatants.

Mr. Duque was born before the war even began in the 1960s between the government and the Marxist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). When he takes office in August, he will become the country’s youngest elected president. His running mate, Marta Lucía Ramírez, will become the first female vice president.

Just as historic was the fact that his opponent, Gustavo Petro, a former rebel and former Bogotá mayor, garnered 42 percent of the vote. In conservative Colombia, this was quite a feat. It shows a new sense of freedom and a desire for peace after a war in which more than 200,000 Colombians were killed.

Duque will need to govern from the center to help consolidate the gains of the peace pact as well as finish up negotiations with a smaller rebel group called the National Liberation Army (ELN). Voters are most concerned about corruption, the economy, and urban security. And they mostly accept the reintegration of former FARC rebels into society and into politics.

With its new peace, Colombia is now searching for unity. “No more divisions,” Duque said after the election. “I will not govern with hatred.” If he succeeds, it will help show that peace is far more than an absence of conflict.