The Duck of Minerva

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

The World According to Realists or, "Never Go In Against a Sicilian When Death is On the Line"

In World Politics yesterday we covered the Peloponnesian War, the Melian Dialogue, and the security dilemma as an introduction to realist theory. Students played a version of the 2-person non-iterated prisoner's dilemma game developed by my former professor Robert Darst, with the winners receiving candy and the person with the lowest possible grade receiving an extra credit point toward their final grade. The students learned that the incentive structure in the game is a powerful causal variable affecting outcomes: when the game is structured so as to reward rational, self-interested behavior, cooperation becomes foolhardy, even if your intentions are noble. Realists would say this reflects the nature of the international system under anarchy.

Then again, game theory also predicts that if you change the parameters of the game you change the possible outcomes. The clip above from The Princess Bride demonstrates the basic idea of game theory, and also how changing the nature of the game is the best way to get what you want. But there's many a slip between cup and lip - between manipulating perceptions within the context of the same parameters and changing the game itself. Unfortunately, realists are not optimistic about the latter happening unless a world government is established.

Overcoming Fears of Unicorns and Rainbows

U.S. Southern Command (SOCOM) is using a new transnational information sharing system in the All Partners Access Network (APAN) to coordinate its efforts with hundreds of NGOs and dozens of IOs in Haiti. It is a one-stop coordination platform that allows real-time questions/requests on resources and Information Sharing. SOCOM has been sharing imagery of bridges, transportation networks, and even public disturbances to facilitate responses and coordinating communication among NGOs and other relief agencies.

Likewise, dozens of NGOs and other networking organizations like Crisis Mappers have been crowd sourcing a wide range of information requests on APAN. Last week, they crowd sourced exact locations of hospitals and other medical facilities throughout Haiti and the Dominican Republic to determine available beds for post-op care and recovery of those treated in mobile surgical units. The mapping platform Ushahidi, which was started by a couple of Kenyans in the aftermath to the political violence in Kenya in 2007, began compiling mapping information in Haiti via Twitter tweets and media reports less than 24 hours after the earthquake. SOCOM relied extensively on this mapping to determine areas of need and to prioritize which transportation routes to clear.

It's hard to measure the effectiveness of this effort, but it seems that Information Sharing is coming of age. Just over a decade ago, when Sarah Sewall assumed the post of first DASD for Peacekeeping and Humanitarian Assistance there were very few mechanisms for coordinating US military and NGO efforts -- and even fewer in real time. This was not simply because of limited technology, but because of deeply embedded organizational cultures the promoted distrust and disdain of one another. The military has often referred to the relief agencies and NGOs as the "unicorns and rainbows" community.

I guess the next step will be to watch and see if the Pentagon can take some of this information sharing and overall coordination experience in Haiti and integrate it into the stabilization and reconstruction efforts in the Balkans, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan -- the levels of coordination each of these efforts have been severely lagging.

Operation Moshtarak

Operation Moshtarak ("Together" in Dari), which is slated to move into a more active phase any day now, has been billed as the largest ground battle in Afghanistan since 2001 and the largest air assault since the Iraq War in 1991. The planned attack, which will be centered around the towns of Marjeh (Marjah) and Nad-E'ali (Nad-e-Ali) in Helmand Province, was announced in a press conference by the Pentagon last week. Villages have been leafleted and village leaders have been informed of the coming attack.

It is not uncommon to advertise a planned offensive in the Afghan war, but the usual objective has been to encourage the Taliban to vacate the area so that ISAF troops could move in to protect and build relations with civilians. For Operation Moshtarak, ISAF wants the civilians to leave but a perimeter has been established in the hopes of preventing Taliban fighters from sneaking out with the civilians. Not surprisingly, many civilians have packed up their meager worldly possessions and they are leaving their homes for the wretched displacement camps. It is still unclear whether the Taliban insurgents will stick around for a head on confrontation against staggering odds instead of just melting into the civilian population as they have done in the past.

If they stay, ISAF plans deploy roughly 15,000 troops with massive air support against (at best) 1,000 to 2,000 Taliban insurgents.

So what is the point of this operation? I would venture that the main point is theatrical. ISAF forces are desperate for the kind of publicity that will justify a wind down of the surge on the predetermined timetable. Generals have promised politicians results from the surge by December 2010. The goal is also to show that the Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP) is ready to take "ownership" of their country. Of course, as a massive joint operation, it will be difficult to tease out the impact of the ANA and ANP on the success or failure of this operation.

The question that seems to be going unasked is why Operation Moshtarak is necessary after last summer's Operation Khanjar and Operation Panther's Claw in nearly the same area of the province. One argument that I've seen given to gullible journalists is that the towns of Marjeh and Nad-E'ali are the last two areas which remain uncleared from the previous campaign. This argument is misleading since the Britons attacked Nad-E'Ali late last summer and Marjeh fell to coalition troops in May of 2009. In reality, the previous attempt to clear and hold succeeded in clearing but failed to hold the province.

I would argue that this campaign is just as poorly planned and unlikely to meet its strategic objectives as the operations of last summer -- although there are more troops this time.

First, the extension of the fighting season into winter time is certain to increase the misery of internally displaced Afghan civilians. If the goal is to win over the civilian population, then bombing their homes to rubble and sending them to huddle in mud-soaked tents where the temperature drops below freezing at night is unlikely to do the job.

Second, the failure to secure Pakistani cooperation for a major offensive on the other side of the Durand Line means that the back gate will remain open for any high-level Taliban who want to winter in Pakistan's FATA this year.

Third, it is unclear how ISAF troops will hold these towns after the surge winds down in 2011 (and they certainly won't have the full cooperation of the poppy-cultivating civilians who were displaced). No one really believes that the ANA or ANP have sufficient numbers or experience to hold the province by themselves when the Taliban return. There has been talk of a "civilian surge" to help hold and build territory, but these foreign advisers are not a long-term substitute for a capable and competent Afghan state which has not been built and needs at least a decade to achieve.

Fourth, very few people in the US or Europe who do not have a loved one in the fight care about this operation or the war more broadly. Hence, the propaganda value of this battle is dubious.

Finally, the fighting is not intended to make room for a particular political solution. In contrast to the previous campaign in Helmand which was at least designed to stabilize the province in time for the presidential elections, there is no stated political objective of the operation from what I've read. Even if all of the estimated 2,000 Taliban are slaughtered in these towns there are an estimated 38,000 more Taliban in the rest of Afghanistan and across the border. If the political goal is eventual reconciliation and reintegration with the Taliban, it is unclear how this battle will encourage Taliban to lay down their arms since they know the foreign forces are leaving soon anyway.

Canadian Banks do it Better

Recently I assigned my students to identify the nationality of different global companies. The results were interesting. No matter what information they looked at-- from the nationality of CEOs and managers, to the location of most employees-- major global companies had clearly identifiable nationality even when the majority of sales were abroad. Some companies seemed to try to hide their background when marketing abroad--hello, did you know T Mobile is DeutscheTelekom? Most of my students didn't-- but their actual operations remained culturally distinct. This not a new observation (see the work from a decade ago of my grad school pals Doremus, Keller, Pauly and Reich), but the myth of the global corporation persists. I'm pretty sure my students were surprised by the results.

Does it matter? Well, Clay Ramsay recently brought to my attention a Financial Times article about why Canada is not suffering a big financial crisis. One reason: Canadian bankers are "either too nice or too dull to indulge in the no-holds-barred capitalism that created such a boom, and such a bust, in more aggressive societies." And, don't we wish American bankers would act a little more...well, Canadian?

For a long time now, there has been talk of a borderless world in which global corporations are untied from the shackles of their national base--from Kenichi Omae writing two decades ago to Thomas Friedman today. But apparently, Canadian banks are very... Canadian: as one investment banker tells it, Canadians have a "being nice" institutional culture, where decorum, amiability, and collegiality are important values. In other words, these are not the selfish risk-taking sharks that are likely to take down the global financial system. The Canadian government did not have to bail out its financial sector, and the Canadian banking system is rated the world's soundest. In other words, Canadian corporate culture mattered big time.

Chrystia Freeland, the author of the FT article, starts with corporate culture, but then goes on to make an institutional argument, too. She points to the comprehensive, effective, and yet not too heavy-handed Canadian regulatory system, especially when it comes to mortgages. And the bankers mostly went along with it.

Aha, you say, then what we needed was more regulation! But the debates in the US over regulatory failures typically focuses on too much regulation (e.g. US government efforts to expand home ownership led to massive subprime lending; but see this interesting article on contrary evidence). OR perhaps it was the total lack of regulation of speculative hedge funds (which were not regulated because policymakers thought that people who invest millons of dollars know what they are doing--I'm not joking, that really is the reason policymakers give for not regulating...)

Getting back to corporate culture, I think the Canadian regulatory framework made a huge difference... but, and here's the hitch: American corporate culture makes it very difficult if not impossible to replicate it in the US. From the perspective of scholarship, institutions and culture are not opposing explanations, but intertwined. From the perspective of policymaking, well, I guess I should start hiding my meagre pots of money under the bed, ready for the next financial crisis....

Rethinking War Deaths in the Congo

Nicholas Kristof is writing about Congo again this morning:

It’s easy to wonder how world leaders, journalists, religious figures and ordinary citizens looked the other way while six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. And it’s even easier to assume that we’d do better.

But so far the brutal war here in eastern Congo has not only lasted longer than the Holocaust but also appears to have claimed more lives. A peer- reviewed study put the Congo war’s death toll at 5.4 million as of April 2007 and rising at 45,000 a month. That would leave the total today, after a dozen years, at 6.9 million.

What those numbers don’t capture is the way Congo has become the world capital of rape, torture and mutilation...

Kristof is right about that - though not quite in the way he seems to mean. Actually the 5.4 million number from April 2007 has just been debunked by a new report out from the Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University, which argues that two of the five International Rescue Committee studies from which the estimate was derived woefully under-estimated the baseline peacetime national mortality in the Congo and therefore dramatically exaggerated the number of deaths in the country caused by the war.

In determining the excess death toll, the “baseline” mortality rate is critically important. If it is too low, the excess death toll will be too high.

The IRC uses the sub-Saharan average of 1.5 deaths per 1,000 per month as its baseline mortality rate for all but the very last survey when the sub-Saharan average drops to 1.4. Using the sub-Saharan African average mortality rate as a comparator––to indicate how high death rates were in the east of the DRC compared to the rest of sub-Saharan Africa, for example—would have been both instructive and appropriate. Using it as a measure of the pre-war mortality rate in the DRC itself makes little sense.

The IRC argues the sub-Saharan average mortality rate is a conservative choice for pre-war DRC because it was the highest estimate available. In 2002 the IRC recorded no violent deaths in the western region––which it refers to as the “nonconflict” zone. Yet, the mortality rate in this zone is 2.0 deaths per 1,000 of the population per month––a third higher than the sub-Saharan African average that the IRC uses as its pre-war baseline mortality rate.

But, the DRC is in no sense an average sub-Saharan African country—indeed, it is ranked at, or near, the bottom of every sub-Saharan African development indicator. The baseline mortality rate for the country as a whole should therefore be considerably higher than the sub-Saharan African average. The survey evidence from the western part of the country suggests that this is indeed the case.

The fighting in the DRC was also heavily concentrated in the eastern provinces during the period covered by the first two surveys. This suggests that in this period too there was no significant violent death toll in the western part of the country. Indeed, this is precisely the assumption the IRC makes in arriving at its 5.4 million excess death toll estimate for the DRC for the period 1998 to 2007.

The report breaks down the numbers in much greater detail and contrasts them to the much more conservative and, it argues, rigorously arrived at estimates - estimates that have been largely ignored by the press.

If "only" some 3 million people, instead of 5.4 million, died by 2007, does this undermine Kristof's call for action on the Congo? By no means. A more useful metric may not be the absolute numbers (which in themselves don't seem to incite much policy attention) but rather the relative numbers: Congo is one of the few places in the world where, according to this report, violence has reached sufficient levels to actually raise the national mortality rate (which is declining in nations elsewhere around the globe in both war and peacetime). According to their data, the one other case in which this occurred in recent decades is Rwanda.

US Contemplated Giving India Nuclear Technology in 1961

Two days ago the National Security Archive released a fascinating State Department document from 1961. In the document, US officials recommend passing nuclear technology to India in order to take the steam out of the anticipated nuclear tests by Communist China.

Ultimately, of course, Secretary of State Rusk vetoed the recommendation to pass America's nuclear secrets on to India. China would go on to hold its first test three years later. India would not test its first nuclear device (i.e. the "Smiling Buddha") until 1974. Nevertheless, the document reveals a great deal about how the US State Department understood the psychological and strategic issues surrounding nuclear proliferation in 1961. Moreover, it shows that the Americans properly understood India's nuanced position on nuclear technology despite Nehru's public pronouncements against nuclear weapons. And Ambassador Galbraith's strong advice against approaching Nehru directly in favor of working indirectly through Dr. Homi Bhabha was certainly wise.

While the National Security Archive discusses the relevance of the document for the current debate on Iranian nuclear weapons (I frankly don't see the connection), I think it is more interesting to ponder what would have been the effects of a nuclear armed India in 1961.

The most obvious implication would have been that the 1962 War between India and China would have been rather unimaginable if India had nuclear weapons while China did not. Similarly, one could speculate whether the 1965 India-Pakistan War and subsequent wars would have been imaginable in this strategic context.

Of course, the potential burden of a nuclear arms race in Asia at a time when India still suffered from food shortages is a sobering thought... to say nothing of the horrific scenario of a nuclear exchange in the heart of Asia...

The UK Iraq Inquiry: The Agony and the Ecstasy or International Law and Deja Vu

The legality of the 2003 Iraq War has been back in a big way in the UK over the last few weeks. This, no doubt, is the result of several high-profile figures who were involved in the decision as to use force testifying in front of the Iraq Inquiry.

For the uninitiated, the Iraq Inquiry is an independent panel of figures set up “identify lessons that can be learned from the Iraq conflict.” It is often referred to as the Chilcot Inquiry, so named for the chairperson, Sir John Chilcot, and the panel of experts also includes such notable IR/War Studies-type figures as Sir Lawrence Freedman.

Last week we saw the testimony of Elizabeth Wilmshurst, a former Foreign Office (FCO) legal advisor and the only senior level government official to resign over the war. (She now heads the International Law Program at Chatham House.) In addition, there was Lord Goldsmith, the then-Attorney General who, it has been suggested, had advised that such a war would be illegal but subsequently changed his legal opinion under apparent political pressure; Sir Michael Wood, who was the Foreign Office's chief legal adviser and apparently also advised that a second resolution would be necessary; and this week there was Clare Short, the then Minister for International Development who agreed to support the war, but then resigned in protest when she felt that she had been lied to by the Prime Minister.

But the biggest fireworks certainly came when former Prime Minister Tony Blair was called to testify to the Inquiry. He was grilled on all sorts of fronts, and was, I suspect, quite determined to rescue his reputation for being George W. Bush’s poodle.

I’m not certain as to how much publicity the Inquiry has generated overseas. It might be that the subtleties of UK politics are too much for American audiences to really grasp? (Note: I see that Jon Stewart discussed the issue on the Daily Show, but as videos are now blocked in the UK, I have no idea what was said. DAMN YOU CHANNEL 4!!!)

But there are all kinds of issues that one could raise. Given my interests in international law, I will just mention a few.

My first thought is just trying to imagine this happening in the United States. Sure there was the 9/11 Commission, but this is really on a whole new level. Like George W. Bush being grilled by IR-academics on live TV kind of level.

If I’m perfectly honest, I can think of perfectly solid reasons for NOT having a similar inquiry in the US that could compel a former president to testify – namely that the US is still in Iraq whereas the British have pretty much left. Additionally, the spectacle of it all would be an unwelcome distraction for Obama who has enough on his plate between a sputtering economy, healthcare, Guantanamo, etc.

Yet if there is something both satisfying and incredibly horrifying about having watched Tony answer questions for a full day in front of a relatively demanding panel, (it was a bit like witnessing a train wreck in the atmosphere of the British Library) how would this have looked in Washington, with George standing in for Tony? I suspect this will have be left to playwrights.
The second major issue is the relative importance of international law at the Inquiry. It was a bit of 2002-2003 all over again. Was the invasion illegal? What was it that persuaded Lord Goldsmith to change his mind? Was Resolution 1441 ambiguous or clear permission to carry out an enforcement operation? That these continue to haunt the Labour Government and to be very much at the centre of the debate over Iraq says much about the British (if not European) attitude towards war and law.

Yet, despite my own interests in international law, I have to wonder why do we pay so much attention to this question - particularly seven years after the fact? Would it have made a difference if the war was “legal”? Would it have made it right? Certainly there is no doubt in the mind of Tony Blair that it was both, but would we have seen the same kind of outcry if, as I once saw Professor Philip Allott tell a crowd of LSE students, (and I’m paraphrasing here)“15 men in New York could have agreed to raise their hands”.

(Allot, incidentally, stated his most recent comments on international law, role of legal advisers (rather than advocates) and Iraq here.)

Two philosophers shoveling snow

A brief non-Platonic dialogue.

Dramatis Personae:
Friedrich William Shotter-Wittgenstein ("Will"), a mind-world monist
Rene Roy Searle-Wight ("Roy"), a mind-world dualist

Roy: Hey there, Will. Surprised to see you out here shoveling snow.

Will: Hey, Roy. Why would you be surprised at that? It snowed a lot last night, and I need to get the sidewalk cleared in front of my house.

Roy: Well, can't you mind-world monists just think the snow away? Why bother to shovel it?

Will (shaking head, to himself): Oh no, not this again.

Roy: Seriously. If you don't believe in the separation between the mind and the world, then doesn't it necessarily follow that the world is a figment of your imagination, or your mental projection, or something like that? And if that's true, why are you imagining yourself this rather tiring task of shoveling snow?

Will: Roy, if I've told you once I've told you a dozen times -- you're confusing mind-world monism with subjective idealism, and they're not the same thing.

Roy (somewhat skeptically): Please, enlighten me.

Will (continuing to shovel snow): Subjective idealism is the solipsistic doctrine that nothing beyond perception exists, which implies that how we organize our perceptions is arbitrary -- so we should be able to reorganize them, and thus the world.

Roy: where I come from we call that the "epistemic fallacy."

Will: Yes, I know, and that's actually part of the problem -- you only admit two possibilities, either the world exists outside of mind or the world is a subordinate function of mind. Your "epistemic fallacy" is really just a reductio ad absurdum of subjective idealism, leaving the other pole of the dichotomy as the only option standing.

Roy: But the notion that the world is limited by what we know of it is absurd -- as absurd as the notion that we make the world by organizing our perceptions. If we did, then I could make all of this snow disappear by wishing.

Will: I agree that the notion that thinking makes things so is absurd. I'm out here shoveling rather than inside wishing or praying or casting a magic spell, right?

Roy: Then you admit it -- your mind-world monism is just an intellectual game, and when push comes to shove, you're a dualist like the rest of us.

Will: How do you figure that? This isn't going to be your uncle David's thing about doors and windows again, is it?

Roy (grinning): How did you guess? Yes indeed, the mere fact that when you leave a building you use the door instead of walking out the second-story window shows that you respect external reality as much as the rest of us do. As does your shoveling snow.

Will (shaking head): Ah, Roy. Why is it so important for you whether or not I assent to your beliefs about how the world is put together?

Roy (sputtering): Because . . . because . . . because you're wrong, that's why! And because if this snow weren't real, if it weren't something that existed in the world outside of our consciousnesses and wills, then not only would our activity in shoveling it be an absurd waste of time, but the county officials wouldn't feel any necessity to send out snowplows to clear the roads. It's delusions like "the snow only exists in your mind" that lead people to cut back on funding for emergency preparedness and basic scientific research, mark my words.

Will (skeptically): I'm pretty sure that the arguments against spending more on snowplows were largely about relative priorities given the climate, but we can probably look that up online later. Scientific research -- especially social scientific research in fields like Political Science -- yes, you have a point there. A lot of government funding follows the logic that if science isn't about an externally-existing world about which we could achieve completely solid and classically objective knowledge, then it's not worth supporting. and since I know that you're such a big fan of the government, they couldn't possibly be wrong, could they?

Roy (fuming): Ha ha.

Will (continuing to shovel): In any event, my point is that there are options other than subjective-solipsist one that we both clearly think is absurd, and the mind-independent world that you claim to have knowledge of. I would suggest that there is another option.

Roy (exasperated): But you already admitted that you are also taking the world into account in your actions! How can you now deny that world?

Will: I never said that I was taking the world into account. I just said that I wasn't sitting back and wishing for the snow to go away; I was out here shoveling it.

Roy: And how exactly is that different from taking the mind-independent world into account?

Will: Because I'm not conforming my mind to something mind-independent; I'm just doing what is appropriate under the circumstances.

Roy: This is just semantics.

Will: I would disagree.

Roy: Figures.

Will: But seriously, I think it's an important distinction. In your account, the snow falls in a mind-independent way, and then all of us confront the mind-independent fact of the snowfall and take action, right?

Roy: Precisely. And I think that's what we all did -- even you, my friend.

Will: Well, even if we did -- and I'm not saying that I do -- that still wouldn't prove anything except that we all assume that the snow exists independently of our minds; it wouldn't prove that the snow actually does exist independently of our minds.

Roy: Right -- it's background assumption, like my cousin John always says.

Will: But the fact that it's our background assumption doesn't make it true, any more than background assumptions about the existence of witches among the Azande was true. In fact, truth and falsity are not at issue here; what matters is efficacy.

Roy: So you're willing to accept mind-independent reality as a working pragmatic assumption?

Will: Sort of. Actually, I'm willing to accept intersubjective reality, and to reject solipsism, on that basis. But I'm not sure how we could get from intersubjective reality to mind-independent reality, so I'm not willing to accept that.

Roy: But we could all be wrong about it having snowed -- we could all be laboring under a delusion out here. And, if snowfall is an intersubjective consensus, can't we change it if we all wish hard enough?

Will: An intersubjective consensus isn't just a summation of individual thoughts in heads; it involves publicly accessible rules and procedures, like my cousin Ludwig is fond of saying. If I said that it hadn't snowed, you'd think that I was using the words wrong.

Roy: You would be using the words wrong, because it snowed a lot last night.

Will: Right -- "it snowed" is the description that makes sense in our language-game.

Roy: So if we had a different language-game, it wouldn't have snowed?

Will: If we had no word for snow, then we couldn't very well say that it had snowed, could we?

Roy: But what about all of this white crap on the ground?

Will: It's only "snow" under a particular description, within a particular language-game. And it's only a "heavy snowfall" under a language-game that emerges from a form of life where this amount and frequency of snow is an unusual occurrence.

Roy: But it did snow.

Will: Yes, that's what we say.

Roy: But it snowed! It really did!

Will (smiling): Now, Roy, what does saying "really" add to that sentence?

Roy: It adds a certain non-delusional reality constraint, so you can't just pretend that it didn't snow.

Will: But I can't pretend that it didn't snow -- not under this language-game. We established that. So we don't need "really," or the notion of a mind-independent reality, to dismiss solipsism; we can do that with intersubjective consensus just fine.

Roy: But we could be wrong! Intersubjective consensus isn't enough to ensure that our perceptions and actions are actually lining up with reality; we need to be in touch with what really exists in order to ensure that we aren't accidentally reproducing the conditions of our own oppression. If it didn't really snow, why are we out here shoveling? Why are we accepting what might be a coercive appropriation of our labor-power? Only knowledge of mind-independent reality can make us certain that we're doing the right thing.

Will: You worry about whether we're reproducing the conditions of our own oppression. I'm going to go shovel the driveway.

[Loosely inspired, as the names should indicate, by the works of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, William James, John Shotter, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rene Descartes, Roy Bhaskar, John Searle, and my ISA sparring-partner Colin Wight. Snow courtesy Snowmageddon 2010.]

The Short Career of Hakimullah Mehsud

In the latest round of the ongoing blood feud between the US military/intelligence agencies and the Pakistani Taliban (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan or TTP), it appears that the TTP's leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, was killed by a Predator drone attack in mid-January. The assassination was apparently in “revenge” for the murder of seven CIA operatives at a forward operating base in Afghanistan by Hakimullah's associate and Jordanian double agent, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi. Of course, Al-Balawi had claimed that his suicide bombing was in retaliation for the assassination of the former leader of the TTP, Baitullah Mehsud, by a CIA drone in August 2009. The US and Pakistan targeted Baitullah Mehsud because he was allegedly behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 and a series of suicide bombings and armed attacks in Pakistan. Baitullah had claimed that his attacks were only in retaliation for US drone attacks facilitated by the American puppet regime in Pakistan... Thus the origins of this blood feud recede into a murky history of drone attacks and suicide bombing counter-attacks.

To understand the feud, one needs to appreciate that the relatively precise and virtually unstoppable suicide bomber is considered the military equivalent of the predator drone in the eyes of the Taliban. Hence, there is a cycle of carnage unleashed with each drone attack.

So who was this latest target, Hakimullah Mehsud? Should his death be considered a significant victory in the war?

Haikmullah (also known as Zulfiqar; real name: Jamshed) Mehsud was reportedly first captured and interrogated by Western forces (either NATO or CIA) in the Shawal district of North Waziristan in a raid on March 9th, 2007 according to Pakistani and Chinese media agencies. The illegal incursion by two military helicopters into Pakistani territory led to the ritualized faint murmurs of protest and indignation from the Pakistani government. NATO would later deny any involvement in the kidnapping without denying that the incident may have happened. At the time, Hakimullah was merely known as a cousin and confidante of Baitullah Mehsud, the head of the TTP. Through an apparent "catch and release" policy for junior terrorists, Hakimullah was let go.

Although he was most likely illiterate, the young and handsome (in a swashbuckling, Captain Jack Sparrow-ish sort of way) Mehsud became a spokesman for the TTP organization. He appeared on a local news station (Khyber News) in October 2008 to refute rumors of the death of his cousin. He then transferred from the Taliban's communications desk to become a commander in the field. By November 2008, he rose to become the head of the Taliban in the Orakzai, Khyber, and Kurram Agencies of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). However, even as he rose in the ranks of the Taliban, he continued to hold press conferences and grant interviews to local journalists -- a sharp contrast with his introverted cousin, Baitullah. The brash commander particularly enjoyed showing off the Humvee he had captured from NATO forces by raiding their supply lines.

Despite his oddly charming personality, it was clear that Hakimullah was also ruthless. He claimed to have had several men beheaded for spying on the Taliban. He instituted a strict interpretation of sharia' and enforced a ban on the movement of women outside of their homes in the Orakzai Agency.

The first attempt by the US to kill Hakimullah with a Predator drone was in April 2009. In revenge for this failed attempt, Mehsud unleashed a wave of suicide attacks and threatened that there would be at least two suicide bombings per week in retaliation.

Hakimullah was appointed to head the TTP network by a shura (council) after the assassination of his cousin by a drone in August 2009. Notably, Hakimullah held a press conference flanked by his new lieutenants to announce his promotion and he vowed to avenge the drone attack ... a vow that his associate, al-Balawi, helped him to fulfill on the last day of 2009. Hakimullah would live for only one more month as American drones narrowed in on him.

At the end of the day the short three year career of the brash and ruthless Mehsud is relatively inconsequential in the broader war. The contrast between Hakimullah and his predecessor only illustrates the wide range of personality types which can assume a leadership position within the Taliban. The skill set Hakimullah used to lead the Taliban organization in the field were not particularly unique or demanding -- he was little more than an illiterate, brutal, and narcissistic gangster.

When the camera pans back from the current assassination, it is clear the overall US strategy of leadership decapitation has failed to make a noticeable dent in the operational capacity of the organizations and networks that call themselves the Taliban. If anything, the Taliban appear to be growing bolder on both sides of the Durand Line that separates Pakistan and Afghanistan. For each commander who is killed, a new leader will rise and take his place after a short period of disorganization. The Pakistani government and media hypes each new leader (while selectively ignoring other militant "assets"), transforming a small fish into a whale; the leader comes to the attention of American forces which begin plotting an assassination with the assistance of Pakistani officials and local informants. After a few failed attempts and some collateral damage, which embitters the local population and helps to recruit more militants, the US usually succeeds in bringing down their man. The Americans trump their kill as a success in the war. Unfortunately, very little is actually accomplished as the cycle resets with each successful assassination, the structural positions are re-loaded, and the game begins again.

A leadership decapitation strategy only makes sense when one is confronted with a highly centralized organization led by a small number of capable leaders and a mass of fighters with low morale -- this is clearly not the situation of the organizations and networks targeting Americans and their client regimes in South Asia. The US military and intelligence community continues to confuse a policy of revenge killings for a viable military strategy to defeat a broad based and conscious rebellion.

Hello Ducks

Hi. I've been invited to guest blog here at Duck of Minerva for a little while. So I thought I'd introduce myself...

I'm Vikash Yadav. I teach Political Science and International Relations at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. My doctoral research (and first book) was an attempt to apply the framework from Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality to understand the concept of risk and its effects in international financial markets. I have also worked on the political relationship between international financial institutions and low income countries.

My current research and teaching is oriented toward issues of security, sovereignty, and identity in greater South Asia, particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan -- but also including Singapore and the Gulf. I intend to post mainly on my current interests.

Israel's Integrated Military

Danny Kaplan at Foreign Policy is pointing out how the US lags behind other top-notch militaries like the IDF in its nascent, grudging willingness to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly.

The United States and Turkey are now the only NATO military powers that do not allow gays to serve openly, but Israel and other countries have shown that the participation of gay soldiers in combat units presents no risk for military effectiveness. What's more, acknowledging their presence might even improve unite cohesion.

No "might" about it, actually; Elizabeth Kier's study of this topic twelve years ago demonstrated it does. She drew attention back then to the distinction between "unit cohesion" which is indeed based on a sense of commonality among fellow fighters, and "task cohesion" - the ability to actually get things done in a professional manner - which at times can actually be threatened by too much unit cohesion resulting in group-think. While the "military morale" arguments have accounted for the opposition to open integration by conservatives, Kier explains this only applies to unit cohesion, but it's task cohesion that makes military units effective.

[cross-posted at LGM]

Why Sign the Torture Convention If You Plan to Torture?

At the Monkey Cage, Erik Voeten has a round-up of some conventional answers and calls attention to a novel explanation just out as a working paper from NYU.

[cross-posted at LGM]

Re-schooling IR Theorists

I was intrigued to read my colleagues' latest essay in International Studies Quarterly a couple of weeks ago. Here's the abstract.

American scholars routinely characterize the study of international relations as divided between various Kuhnian “paradigms” or Lakatosian “research programmes.” Although most international relations scholars have abandoned Kuhn's account of scientific continuity and change, many utilize Lakatosian criteria to assess the “progressive” or “degenerative” character of various theories and approaches in the field. We argue that neither specific areas of inquiry (such as the “democratic peace”) nor broader approaches to world politics (such as realism, liberalism, and constructivism) deserve the label of “paradigms” or “research programmes.” As an alternative, we propose mapping the field through Weberian techniques of ideal-typification.

If I've understood them correctly (and if I've not they'll be sure to tell me so), Patrick and Dan are arguing that it is bad semantics to refer to the IR "isms" as "competing paradigms" or to certain empirical areas of study as "research programmes." They make this case by deploying Thomas Kuhn's and Imre Lakatos' original definitions of the terms "paradigm" and "research program" and point out that these concepts were meant to define wholly incommensurable areas of study. Whereas what IR scholars are doing is studying interesting empirical phenomena from a variety of perspectives.

But, they point out, there are certain cleavages in IR that might very well be described using those terms. Critical theory versus problem-solving theory might be a plausible candidate, they argue. On this particular point, I am not so sure. I tend to see that as a continuum rather than a dichotomy, a point made by Bob Keohane way back in 1997. And it's certainly the case that many conversations and engagements are happening along that continuum, so in what sense are they incommensurable? I think possibly normative theory v. explanatory theory would be a better candidate.

P/D also suggest that a more useful way to carve up the field for conceptual or pedagogical purposes is through thematic propositions such as the extent to which anarchy constrains, or the extent to which power can be tamed. I like this idea - in part because it suits the kind of institutional culture in which I'm currently embedded, which is all about breaking down silly conceptual divisions among schools or subfield to focus on cross-cutting thematic problems.

However I'm curious about the selection of anarchy and power here. Sure, these two ideal-typifications are as good as any for illustrating the point, if that's all they're doing. But if there's another reason those two propositions (rather than, say, something about the extent to which sovereignty continues to matter) ended up constituting their nifty two-by-two grid, I'd love to know - especially since the whole question of whether anarchy exists is begged by deconstructions of sovereignty, and critical theory appears to have fallen off their grid altogether.

Randomized Controlled Trials: Just Abstain

A new study (summarized here; full text available here if you're lucky enough to be at an institution with a medical school and an institutional subscription to the relevant journal) released yesterday purports to have some implications for sex education policy. By conducting what the authors -- or the publicists at the University of Pennsylvania, at any rate -- refer to as the first randomized controlled study of the effectiveness of various kinds of interventions, and finding that the abstinence-only intervention was more effective at encouraging teens to delay sexual activity than safe sex or abstinence-plus-safe-sex programs. The numbers aren't overwhelming -- 33.5% of adolescents reported having sex in the 24 months following their participation in the abstinence-only program, while 48.5% of the students in other programs reported having had sex during that period of time -- but they look compelling.

At least, they look compelling at first glance. Despite the authors' own admirable cautionary notes regarding the need for further research before any policy implications can be solidly grounded, the pundits seem to be lining up as expected, and deploying the results in a decontextualized manner: the researcher at the Heritage Foundation who wrote the federal guidelines for funding abstinence-only programs is (big shock here) pleased that the study validates what he always maintained, while the critics of abstinence-only (in an equally big shock) deny that the study validates the programs that they oppose. Politicized science, indeed.

The problem here is that both sides of the political discussion appear to fundamentally misunderstand the methodology involved in a study like this -- and this misunderstanding permits them to drawn erroneous conclusions about what the results actually mean. This is a little more serious than "correlation is not causation," although it begins there; in fact, the issue is more like "662 African American students from four public middle schools in a city in the Northeastern United States are not a laboratory." As Nancy Cartwright (among many other philosophers of science) has pointed out, the fundamental error involved in the interpretation of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) is that people mis-read them as though they had taken place under controlled conditions, when they actually did not; in consequence, generalizing beyond the specific trial itself is a process fraught with the potential for error.

Consider, for a moment, what makes a laboratory trial "work" as a way of evaluating causal claims. If I want to figure out what chemical compound best promotes longevity in fruit flies or mice, the first thing I do is to make sure that my entire stock of experimental subjects is as similar to one another as possible on all factors that might even potentially affect the outcome (a procedure that requires me to draw on an existing stock of theoretical knowledge). Then I work very hard to exclude things from the laboratory environment that might affect the outcome -- environmental factors, changes in general nutrition, etc. And when conducting the trials, I make sure that the procedures are as similar as humanly possible across the groups of experimental subjects, again drawing on existing theory to help me decide what variations are permissible and which are not. All of this precise control is made possible by the deliberately artificial environment of the laboratory itself, and at least in principle this precise control allows researchers to practically isolate causal factors and their impact on outcomes.

Now, the problem is that the actually-existing world is not a laboratory, but a much more open system of potential causal factors interacting and concatenating in a myriad of ways. Scientific realists like Cartwright bridge the gap between the laboratory and the world by presuming -- and I stress that this is a theoretical presumption, not an empirical one -- that the same causal factors that operated in the laboratory will continue to exert their effects in the open system of the actual world, but this most certainly does not mean that we will observe the kinds of robust correlations in the actual world that we were able to artificially induce in the laboratory. Hence, what is required is not a correlation analysis of actual empirical cases, but detailed attention to tracing how causal factors come together in particular ways to generate outcomes. (Sections 1.2 and 1.3 of this article provide a good, if somewhat technical, account of the conceptual background involved.)

So causal inference goes from the controlled laboratory to the open actually-existing world, and we can make that move precisely to the extent that we presume that objects in the lab are not fundamentally different from objects in the world. The problem with an RCT is that it turns this logic completely on its head, and seeks to isolate causal factors in the actual world instead of in the laboratory, and as evidence of causation it looks for precisely the kind of thing that we shouldn't expect in an open system: namely, robust cross-case correlations. Following 662 students from four middle schools over a period of several years is in basically no significant respect anything like putting 662 mice on a variety of diets in a lab and seeing which groups live the longest; the number of potentially important factors that might be at work in the actual world is basically a countably infinite quantity, and we have precisely no way of knowing what they are -- or of controlling for them. No lab, no particular epistemic warrant for correlations, even robust ones; they might be accidental, they might be epiphenomenal, heck, they might even be the unintentional result of sampling from the tail-end of a "crazy" (i.e., not a normal) distribution. All the technical tricks in the world can't compensate for the basic conceptual problem, which is that unless we make some pretty heroic assumptions about the laboratory-like nature of the world, an RCT tells us very little, except for perhaps suggesting that we need to conduct additional research to flesh out the causal factors and processes that might have been at work in producing the observed correlation. In other words, we need better theory, not more robust correlations.

The limitations of RCTs can perhaps be even more clearly grasped if we think about the marvelous machine that is organized Major League Baseball: 30 teams playing 162 games each over the course of each six-month-long season, and doing so under pretty rigorously controlled conditions. Indeed, MLB is a kind of approximate social laboratory, where players are required to perform basically similar actions over and over again; pitchers throw thousands of pitches a season, batters can have hundreds of plate appearances, and so on. And over everything is a bureaucracy working to keep things homogeneous when it comes to the enforcement of rules. It's not a perfect system -- "park effects" on pitcher and batter performance are measurable, and sometimes players cheat -- but on the whole it's a lot closer to a closed system than four middle schools in the Northeastern United States. But even under such conditions, there are prediction failures of epic proportions, as when a team pays a great deal of money to acquire a player who previously performed very well (cough cough Yankees acquiring Randy Johnson cough cough) only to discover that some previously-unaccounted-for factor is now at work preventing their performance from reaching its previous heights. Or there are celebrated examples like the more of less complete collapse of a previously elite player like Chuck Knoblauch when moving from small-market Minnesota to huge-market New York -- something that looked like a very robust correlation between a player and his performance turned out to be in part produced by something hitherto unknown. It works in reverse too: players who did badly someplace resuscitate their playing careers after signing with different teams, and there is precisely no perfect system for predicting which players will do that under which conditions.

My point is that if the laboratory-like environment of MLB doesn't produce generally valid knowledge that can survive the transplantation of players from team to team -- in effect, if the results of previous laboratory trials are at best imperfect predictors of future laboratory trials, and we can only determine in retrospect how good a player was by looking at his overall playing career statistics -- what hope is there for an RCT study conducted under much more uncontrolled conditions? At least in baseball one can say that all of the trials take place under similar conditions, and given the absurdly large n that can be worked with if one aggregates performance data from multiple seasons of play, it is possible to develop probabilistic forecasting models that have some reasonable chance of success on average. But the practical condition of this kind of operation is the approximate closure of the environment produced by the organization of the MLB season; this is not merely a quantitative convention, but an actual set of social actions. In the absence of such practical conditions, a robust correlation counts for very little, and seems like a very thin reed on which to base public policy decisions.

Again, what we need is better theory, not better correlations. How do sex education programs work? What kind of processes and mechanisms are involved in educating an adolescent about sex, and how do those work together in the actual world to generate case-specific outcomes? That's the basis on which we ought to be having this discussion -- and, not incidentally, the discussion of every other public policy issue which we mistakenly refer to correlation studies conducted in the open system of the actual world as helping us to puzzle out. A robust correlation is neither necessary nor sufficient for a causal claim, and until we accept that, we will never avoid this kind of gross mis-use of scientific results for partisan purposes.

Obama's Lesson on Audience Costs

One line that caught my attention in Obama's Q/A with the House Republicans last Friday was his rationale for toning down the demonization of one another. He argued, for example, that when Republicans portray him as someone out to destroy the country (i.e., health care reform is a Bolshevik plot), it radicalizes their constituencies and ultimately limits their ability to engage in any bipartisan efforts with him to deal with the country's problems -- lest they be accused of being an accomplice with a socialist.

Audience costs don't come as a surprise to many of us in IR. James Fearon's 1994 APSR piece articulated the concept and suggested that because democracies would likely have higher domestic audience costs than authoritarian regimes, they would be able to make more credible threats. Michael Tomz has elaborated on the theoretical mechanisms and developed stronger empirical evidence showing how audience costs actually shape and constrain elite behavior. Focusing on national security issues, Tomz finds that domestic audiences are concerned with reputation and credibility and routinely punish leaders who say one thing but do another thing.

I found it interesting that Obama made these references last Friday -- the same day Tony Blair defiantly testified before the British Iraq Inquiry. Audience costs don't constrain elites who are true believers like Blair who continues to hold that Saddam Hussein posed an existential threat to global society. He told the Inquiry: "I believe he was a monster, that he threatened not just the region but the world."

But, I've argued that domestic audience costs did have an effect on Bush's U.S. domestic mobilization for war against Iraq. The legacy of a decade of demonization of Saddam Hussein throughout the 1990s opened the political space for President Bush and the Neocons to maneuver the US towards a preventive attack on Iraq. Several of the Democrats who voted to authorize the war in Iraq in October 2002 were clearly uncomfortable with their vote, and yet, they feared a public backlash a month before the mid-term elections. That backlash wouldn't have happened without their own participation in the decade-long rhetorical conditioning that Saddam Hussein posed an existential threat to the United States -- they couldn't oppose war with Iraq without the risk of seeming to coddle a tyrannical dictator hell-bent on destroying America.

Obama's caution -- that demonization of your political opponent could very well box you in -- is certainly worth noting whether it pertains to domestic politics or international diplomacy.

Applying Social Science Concepts to Business: E-Book Edition

[Cross-posted at bill | petti]

Sunday's Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon has stopped selling Kindle versions of all Macmillan titles. John Sargent, Macmillian's CEO, recently went to Amazon's headquarters to try and negotiate new terms for the sale of e-books published by his company. In general, the publishing industry has been unhappy with Amazon's insistence that most books be priced at $9.99. Apparently, the discussions resulted in Amazon pulling all Macmillan e-books from it's website.

I am a firm believer that the historical knock on the social sciences is unwarranted and that many of the theories, frameworks, and concepts found in the various disciplines are widely applicable in the real world, business in particular. So when I read about the Amazon-Macmillan dispute I was struck at how a number of social science concepts shed quite a bit of light on these developments; namely Albert Hirschman's concepts of exit, voice, and loyalty as well as signaling and the indirect use of force.

So what do these concepts have to do with e-books? Glad you asked.

In his classic Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, political economist Albert Hirschman provided an elegant framework for analyzing the options available to individuals when they become displeased with actions of an organization. According to Hirschman, individuals have three options: they can be loyal to the organization, they can exercise voice (e.g. protest, negotiation), or they can exit the organization (e.g. join a new group, shop at a new story, etc). The framework is quite elegant and can easily be applied to both explain and predict the behavior of consumers in a market or citizens in a political system.

Since the launch of Amazon's Kindle, book publishers have tried to exercise their voice vis-a-vis Amazon and their pricing requests, but to little avail. Until now, voice and loyalty seemed the only realistic options. Sure, there are other e-book retailers out there, but success of Amazon's Kindle and the attractive prices they set for their customers provided the retailer with a huge advantage in terms of a distribution channel. However, with the launch of Apple's iPad, book publishers now have a more realistic exit option. Not only is Apple a potentially powerful sales channel, but they have agreed to pricing terms that are more favorable to publishers than Amazon (Apple will take 30% of whatever price publishers choose to charge, leaving the price point up to individual publishers).

When individuals have the option of exit, we should see typical market dynamics at work--i.e. customers can shop around to various suppliers to find the products they want at the price they want, with competition among those suppliers driving the quality of products higher and the price for goods lower. This is why we generally abhor monopolies, since by nature they stifle market dynamics and leave customers with only the options of loyalty or voice, meaning they lack much leverage. With the launch of a new and potentially powerful sales channel, publishers now have a more realistic exit option that can be brought to the table in negotiations with Amazon.

However, rather than alter the current pricing terms with Macmillan as a result of this new exit option, Amazon stopped distributing Macmillan's e-books altogether. The question, of course, is why? I would posit that Amazon was trying to send a signal to dissuade other publishers from also trying to renegotiate terms. Now I have no information as to what Sargent may have proposed and if any ultimatums were given, so what follows is purely an intellectual exercise.

We can view Amazon's move as a deterrent threat to other publishers who, emboldened by Apple's entry into the market, may attempt a similar renegotiation. By harshly punishing one actor (i.e. refusing Macmillan access to a valuable and dominant sales channel) that attempted to change the status quo (Amazon's preferred pricing structure), Amazon hopes to send a signal to other potential actors to not attempt something similar. This is a great example of signaling and the indirect use of force, two related concepts that economists (such as Michael Spence and Thomas Schelling) and political scientists (such as Robert Jervis and James Fearon) have fleshed out over the past 40+ years. Rather than having to expend resources forcing every potential adversary to either change their behavior or maintain the status quo, an actor can choose to send a signal to all potential adversaries by making an example of one of them. Not only can an actor make a threat to punish their adversaries, but they can also demonstrate that they have both the capability and the will to do so by carrying out such a punishment on one adversary.

This dynamic is accentuated in systems where one actor faces challenges from many potential actors versus just one. Barbara Walter has looked at why some states decided to deal with separatist groups and factions in a violent manner versus through negotiations. The key variable: the number of potential separatist groups that may also seek self-determination. As the number of potential adversaries increases the probability of solving these disputes through negotiation decreases. When faced will many potential challengers, governments will choose to demonstrate their willingness and ability to put down rebellions in order to deter other separatists groups from similar challenges. In other words, having reputation for resolve when dealing with adversaries becomes more important when you face many potential threats than just one.

In the case of Amazon, it could be that seeing the potential for many actors to attempt to renegotiate the current pricing structure it was decided that they should send a signal to the rest of the publishing world that attempts to change the status quo would not only fail, but would result in sever punishment (i.e. the loss of a popular sales and marketing channel). My guess is that this likely won't work for two reasons: 1) as mentioned earlier, the publishers actually have someplace else to go--they can exit the current relationship and cast their lot with Apple; and 2) Amazon is heavily reliant on the book publishers. Without their titles the allure of a Kindle decreases. The threat may not be credible, or at least sustainable for long.

Thoughts?

Open Thread on "Caprica"

Isn't All Politics Global?

Dan Drezner is among those who today bemoaned the absence of foreign policy content in President Obama's State of the Union Speech. He's not the only one. Max Boot calls foreign policy "AWOL" from the speech. Eric Ostermeir at Smart Politics has quantified the foreign policy content at only 13.9%. Whether they were very worried or not about Obama's foreign policy message, most commentators agreed it was a weak one relative to the domestic policy content in the speech.

My off-the-cuff reaction to the speech echoed this concern as well. But then I began thinking about the assignment I have my World Politics students doing right now, which is to write about their lives using a global perspective. Lots of them are struggling with it as they always do: if they haven't traveled abroad, served in the military, supported a global social movement, or watched BBC regularly, they don't feel like they are really participants in world politics. I challenge this thinking by asking them to reflect on the ways in which their everyday lives are impacted by, and in turn impact, the world beyond our borders.

The purpose of the assignment is to get them thinking past their identity as Americans and situate themselves globally. However the assignment - and the era of globalization we live in - begs the question about the entire notion of the domestic politics / international politics divide. One way to look at the distinction we draw between domestic and foreign policy is as a boundary-maintenance project that is part of the practice of sovereignty. If we make the choice to suspend this practice for a moment, we might realize that Obama's speech had more foreign policy in it that we may have recognized.

For example Foreign Policy's Josh Rogin, whom I linked to earlier describes the Obama's foreign policy talking points as consisting of "trade, export controls, Afghanistan, Iraq, nukes, North Korea and Iran" and says he touched on all of this for only "a couple of minutes at the end." Rogin categorizes energy policy, jobs and financial reform as domestic issues. So do those who have tallied the foreign policy content of the speech and found it wanting.

Yet what could be more global - in their impetus and impact - than a turn toward clean energy and alternative transportation in the US, which until recently led the world in global carbon emissions per capita? Given the global impact of the US banking crisis, is not financial reform a global issue? And is not a policy of "ending subsidies for firms that ship jobs overseas" a foreign policy as well as a domestic one? Certainly it will impact individuals abroad who rely on manufacturing jobs with US companies as a stepping stone out of poverty. This in turn will affect those individuals' abilities to consume the products Obama also wants to export in greater volume. I'm not saying this is good or bad, just that these things are interconnected.

And actually, Obama said as much. Consider his rationale for financial, education and energy reform:

China is not waiting to revamp its economy. Germany is not waiting. India is not waiting. These nations -- they're not standing still. These nations aren't playing for second place. They're putting more emphasis on math and science. They're rebuilding their infrastructure. They're making serious investments in clean energy because they want those jobs. Well, I do not accept second place for the United States of America.

We think of foreign policy as that subset of policy that is directed at relations with other countries. But since so much of what happens here affects (and can be affected by) what is happening elsewhere whether we intend it or not, perhaps this perspective is behind the times. Drezner concludes his post by saying:

"I would have liked to have seen a more robust effort to link foreign policy priorities to domestic priorities - because the two are more linked than is commonly acknowledged."

What would it mean to our practices of citizenship if our policymakers and pundits routinely thought past that distinction entirely? As Drezner himself once said, in today's world "all politics is global."

Or maybe this is all bunk. But it sure is a useful teaching tool. Thoughts?

[cross-posted at LGM]

Thinking about gender and foreign policy

I am, perhaps, the world's worst guest blogger. I do it rarely, if at all, and in a scattered way. I keep meaning to, but then ... Perhaps I am not suited for this medium of communication. Or maybe I am just distracted. With apologies to my colleagues for my flawed posting habits, however, I am not quite ready to give up on myself-as-blogger, and feel like weighing in on this question of "what to read on gender and foreign policy" might be a good place to make amends for my otherwise neglectful blogging (even if I have not managed to be timely even in this endeavor).

First, I'd like to agree with Charli both that it is a very positive development that Foreign Affairs is showing a commitment to including gender issues and gender analysis in their coverage of foreign policy issues. I am encouraged both by that as an epistemological commitment on the part of the journal as well as as a reflection of changes in the policy world.

Despite the positive directions in the academic world and the policy world as concerns gender issues, I remain only cautiously optimistic, given what I read as still largely missing: critical, complex, dialectical approaches to that gender analysis. Given that, I will accept Charli's invitation to talk about what to read in gender and foreign policy, and through that conversation, perhaps (briefly), give a sense my hopes and fears for the field.

While I don't disagree that a number of the books that Charli lists are important ones likely to have an impact on the field and potentially also on the policy world, I worry both about the message some of them send individually and their collective omissions. I suppose, as a segway into this discussion, I should tell you that I was inspired to go to graduate school by the question of the policy relevance of feminist theorizing (a curiosity inspired by my engagement with policy debate). Feminist theorizing has done a lot of work to analyze and demonstrate its policy relevance, but there remains a tendency for some of the nuance and complexity of gender analysis to be lost in the work read in the policy world.

For example, there is a lot of work in Feminist IR specifically and feminist theorizing generally critical of the sort of approach taken in Kristof and WuDunn's Half the Sky. While there is no denying both the density and quality of information about women's human rights, postcolonial feminist scholars like Chandra Mohanty (in Feminism without Borders) and Geeta Chowdhry and Shelia Nair (in Power, Postcolonialism, and International Relations) have cautioned us against understanding a radical division between "Americans" and the "Third World" where "Americans" fail to be conscious of both genderings in their relationships with the "Third World" and position ourselves as helpers of victims rather than understanding agency, power, desire, and subjectivity in more complicated ways (perhaps as is evidenced in Christine Sylvester's Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey).

Along similar lines, while Tara McKelvey's volume includes an unprecedented amount of empirical information and some important theoretical accounts (particularly those by Eve Ensler, Angela Davis, and Cynthia Enloe), several of the accounts of feminism in the book (particularly those by Barbara Ehrenrich and Katharine Viner) betray both an oversimplified understanding of gender analysis and a partial, politically interested view of what gender emancipation would look like. Other work (not least Caron Gentry and my Mothers, Monsters, Whores, but also, and closer to the empirical evidence, Miranda Alison's Women and Political Violence) identifies gender hierarchy not as a result of (in Charli's words) foreign policy institutions that incentivize manliness, but instead, as a structural feature of global politics reproduced not only in the incentivization of manliness in foreign policy institutions, but in gendered hierarchies within most if not all domestic and international institutions in international relations.

I'm also concerned with the potential orientalist (see Edward Said's Orientalism) and gender essentialist (see discussions in Brooke Ackerly, Maria Stern, and Jacqui True's Feminist Methodologies for International Relations implications of Hudson and Den Boer's Bare Branches. Much gender analytical work in foreign policy, security, and International Relations more generally provides a more sophisticated account of states' gendered violence that does not rely on naturalizing the sex/gender dichotomy or blaming men for gendered violence (see, for example, Ann Tickner's Gendering World Politics or Jane Parpart and Marysia Zalewski's Rethinking the Man Question).

To stop from going on for too long, I will turn to the things I would include in such a list that are not included in Charli's as perhaps a suggestion of how I see the field. While my citations above give some indication of the sort of work that I find relevant to "reading about gender and foreign policy," there are a couple of books explicitly on point that I think are important. First, I don't think one can read about gender and foreign policy without reading Laura Shepherd's Gender, Violence, and Security. This book is a feminist post-structuralist account of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, with important implications for national security policy-making and international organization constitution and effectiveness. I suggest this because I think it is important, when reading about gender and foreign policy, to pay attention not only to "women" and "gender" as material, but also in the relationship between gender, foreign policy, and violence that crosses the material/symbolic/performative divide. Along those lines, I would call Natalie Florea Hudson's book on human security, gender, and the UN essential reading as well. The new (third) edition of V. Spike Peterson and Anne Sisson Runyan's Global Gender Issues includes not only a sophisticated account of "feminization as devalorization" in the making of foreign policy, but also of (not only sex but gender) analysis of a number of crucial issues in 21st century foreign policy, including development, globalization, militarization, and migration.

This is just the start of a conversation on these issues, I suppose. I am happy that we've gotten to a place where there is an essential reading list for gender and foreign policy at all, but I'd like to push the envelope and argue that complex, non-essentialist, culturally sensitive, perhaps even post-colonial and post-structuralist, work on gender and foreign policy should make the "must read" list for those interested in the subject matter.

My IR Theory Syllabus, FWIW

Many of you were kind enough to share your thoughts on what I should assign in my IR Theory Seminar this year. Now that I've got something on paper, thought I'd provide the link so that those interested can see the current draft. Comments on this thread will no doubt be studied closely by my IR students as empirical evidence of ongoing debates about the constitution of our field. ;)

Macro rap -- who knew?

I think I'm speechless:

The Afghan Detainee Abuse Scandal in Canada

For those of you who may be following the issue of detainee abuse of prisoners of war in Canada (or any other country than America), I have an editorial piece with Dr. Grant Dawson (Deuputy Director of the David Davies Memorial Institute at Aberystwyth) in the Ottawa Citizen today.

A quick summary is that two different detainee scandles (one in the aftermath of the Somalia Intervention in the 1990s and the current Afghan one) are being confused. Where as the "Somalia Inquiry" was used to shield the government from responsibility and criticism, an Afghan inquiry might actually hold the government accountable.

The issue was the subject of my second blog post here.

Defining Corruption

So the U.S. Supreme Court has decided that limits on direct corporate spending for political campaigns violate the First Amendment rights of corporations (hey, corporations are people too!). The New York Times has a good overview, plus links to the actual decision. Since I've done some work on corruption in the past, and regularly teach a seminar on Corruption and Global Governance, this decision has resonated with me and I can't help being shaken up.

Let's consider a commonsense definition of corruption: the abuse of public power for private gain, or the use of private means to shape public decisions so that they conform to narrow private or sectoral interests. The definition depends on our being able to draw a line between public good and private interest. The idea of corruption not only means that it is wrong for public officials to take bribes, but also more broadly that some things, like justice, should not be bought. If money becomes the primary determinant of public outcomes, public trust in governance, the rule of law, and the overall system of justice is corroded. But the primary focus of anti-corruption discourse emanating from the U.S. has been on corruption in the developing world. We consider ourselves to have the most advanced anti-corruption legislation in the world, thanks to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits U.S. corporations from bribing foreign public officials. Equating corruption with flat out bribery allows us to ignore the bigger question of the role of money in politics, and especially of private, corporate money. By shaping global anti-corruption discourse to focus on bribery (see the OECD Convention on Bribery) we have managed to generate a relatively "clean" identity for the U.S. (though not entirely so, according to Transparency International's rankings) and keep the focus on the developing world as the hotbed of corruption. While it would be silly to deny that corruption is a problem for development, the discursive maneuvers emanating from the U.S. prevent adequate reflection on the health of our own political system. The role of corporate money in the U.S. political system was of course already a concern before this latest Supreme Court decision, but even so, the blow that has now been dealt to campaign finance reform (a bipartisan issue, by the way) is staggering. And now we hear the word "corruption" being thrown around a great deal more than usual in discussions of the U.S. political process. So the silver lining may be an increased propensity to reflect on the corruption of our own system, not just on corruption as a problem for those under-developed Others.

Hamiltonian Failure?

Yesterday, my class on U.S. Foreign Policy considered Walter Russell Mead's Hamiltonian School -- ostensibly an American realism grounded in the aligned interests of the state and business.

The Hamiltonians have their roots in Alexander Hamilton. They have always believed that the American national strategy should be modeled on the British system: use your trade to make money through commerce; government should support large business; your trade policy should be an instrument of your economic development, however that benefits you most; and then, the revenues from your international trade will support your military expenditures and interests while preserving political stability at home.

For most of U.S. history, argues Mead, Hamiltonians were mercantilists -- favoring "open door" trading policies over "free" trading policies. However, after World War II, the Hamiltonians became free traders and thus embraced GATT, then WTO, NAFTA, etc.

After outlining Mead's arguments to the class, I also presented some data that questions whether the new laissez-faire Hamiltonians have made the right call. Does the free trade system they've helped create build American wealth?

Dan Drezner might disagree with the limited analysis I provided, but many of the students shared the concerns I was raising.

I started the challenge with the question famously raised by Robert Reich: "Who is us?" Then, I asked the students to consider (from the Hamiltonian position) if the American state has perhaps gone too far in removing itself from global capitalism -- effectively benefiting transnational corporate interests (and mercantilist states) at the expense of U.S. interests.

Essentially, the U.S. trade deficit has ballooned to historic levels, a substantial portion of that deficit is linked to trade with China. A huge problem is the loss of America's manufacturing base:

the U.S. manufacturing sector never emerged from the 2001 recession, which coincided with China's entry into the World Trade Organization. Since 2001, the country has lost 42,400 factories, including 36 percent of factories that employ more than 1,000 workers (which declined from 1,479 to 947), and 38 percent of factories that employ between 500 and 999 employees (from 3,198 to 1,972). An additional 90,000 manufacturing companies are now at risk of going out of business.

The "continental realist" John Mearsheimer argues that the U.S. has had a flawed China policy for a very long time. Yet, as the data reveal, the U.S. is helping to make China a stronger future great power competitor.

In the long run, the U.S. might be able to survive the loss of its manufacturing base -- thanks perhaps to its innovative information technologies. However, in the midst of a deep recession (with real unemployment at near 20%) and huge trade deficits, the current situation seems troubling -- at least it should for Hamiltonians worried about American national interests.

Sam Eagle: The Original Neo-Con

If you’re asking me if I’m a little upset right now, you’d be right. The Economist has just reported what I’ve been saying for years. The Muppets have a secret conservative agenda.

“What?!” You must be exclaiming. “Miss Piggy is a Palin Predecessor?”

No. It’s not so simple. Jim Henson was no fool and I’m sure Kermit does not believe that Obama is a secret communist socialist muslim agent. Or at least I really hope so.

According to the article (which is chronicling a debate on the issue as a break from the never-ending nightmare of the healthcare “debate”):

... the Muppets are temperamentally conservative. While they value education, for example, their interest in the subject is implicitly linked to their desire for children to adopt the norms of bourgeois society, and thereby to take their place as productive citizens. Mr Henson wanted everyone to count by numbers, in the order in which those numbers traditionally appear. Although Muppets occasionally dabble in the arts, notably Rowlf at his piano, Mr Henson had little appreciation for free-form intellectual endeavour. Among his earliest Muppet sketches two curious characters appear. One, "the philosopher", is described as scatter-brained and often quoting things inappropriately or inaccurately. Another, depicted variously as an octopus and a sea-monster, is described as big, happy, and "normal-thinking".

But I think it goes far beyond this. Exhibit A: Sam Eagle.

Sam Eagle, the protector of “American” values, who hammers on and on and on about culture. Who uses the show to deliver address against “namby-pamby” liberals who want to put a halt to industry to protect endangered species... like American bald eagles.

Sure, Jim Henson may have supported liberally-oriented civil rights in public(remember Roosevelt Franklin?) He arguably introduced tv’s first gay (albeit closeted) couple. But let’s face it – Sam was the dark heart of the Muppet Show. The Col. Nathan R. Jessep (“protecting these walls”) so that the show may go on. The true side of felt-based American television entertainment.

And who else could we add to this list?

The Count – Clearly the man loved to count. I’m thinking capitalist.
Wayne and Wanda – Possibly secret Canadians, but were clearly in on Sam’s agenda.
Miss Piggy – I have always seen Miss Piggy as someone who would (hi-ya! *chop*) fight for women’s lib. But with her lust for the lime-light, willingness to trample over others for it and love of clothing and shoes, could we indeed have another Palin on our hands?

I leave it for blog readers to suggest their own candidates for a “vast rightwing sing-along variety hour conspiracy”.

Congratulations to "Kinshasa Symphony"

Congratulations to Claus Wischmann, Martin Baer, and the performers of the Kinshasa Symphony Orchestra for their work on the documentary of the “Kinshasa Symphony.” The film has been selected to premier at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival “Berlinale Special” on February 17th 2010, 21:45h (rerun February 18th, 18:00h, Cubix 8)

This is a beautiful project about the only symphony orchestra in central Africa - the “Orchestre Symphonique Kimbanguiste.” The film will be shown in cinemas all over Germany later this spring. I hope it migrates over here to the US soon. Here's a short clip of it:

Le seul Orchestre Symphonique de RDC à Kinshasa
Uploaded by pollux91. - See the latest featured music videos.

Type rest of the post here

Scott Brown and the end of the Transatlantic Security Community?

One thing that hasn't really been addressed about our little election here in Massachusetts this week is the degree to which Scott Brown openly campaigned on his support for waterboarding, his opposition to any constitutional rights for terrorists, and his opposition to closing Guantanamo. His main campaign commercial ended with the line "I believe the constitution was designed to protect our nation and does not give rights to terrorists."

Brown is a Lt. Colonel (Reserve) in the Judge Advocate Generals (JAG) Corps (National Guard) but apparently he didn't subscribe to the views of his superiors. The JAG Corps consistently opposed the Bush administration's torture policies and specifically objected to the CIA's use of waterboarding.

Nonetheless, Brown ran heavily on these views and I think his campaign tapped into a level of populism that is not simply economically-driven,but is also driven by an increasing acceptance of Jack Bauer's view of the world -- every threat is existential and torture is needed to keep us safe.

This all strikes me as further evidence of a growing divide between the United States and its transatlantic partners. I just finished reading The End of the West? Crisis and Change in the Atlantic Order edited by Jeffrey Anderson, G. John Ikenberry, and Thomas Risse. Coming from a variety of theoretical perspectives, each of the contributors agrees that the transatlantic security community took a direct hit during the Bush years and most conclude that while the intensity of the crisis over the Iraq War may have receded, the shared values, collective identities, and common interests embedded in the transatlantic security community may well continue to decline. With a significant number of Americans, even in the bluest state, seeming to have a dismissive attitude toward international law and the Geneva Conventions (and, at the very least a casual acceptance of torture) it strikes me that we are in the midst of a significant transformation of what we call the West.

Online Security Jam

I know I was asked to comment here on international political economy issues, but how can I pass up the opportunity to point you all to the Online Security Jam?

Yes, on February 4, you too can participate in an online discussion of important security issues. You will "help make the world a safer place...online." The Jam is being co-produced by the European Commission and NATO, who are just so..so..cutting edge, yes? Well, ok, it's actually being organized by Security and Defence Agenda, a think tank, and IBM. The goal is to engage literally thousands of experts and non-experts alike in "widening the debate" beyond military concerns. As they say, "No one person has the solution. We all do." They even have a "Guide to Jamming," complete with a video, for those of us who are not so of-the-moment, not so part of the online social community.

Actually, I do applaud the idea of widening the debate. And the organizers are sensitive to the increasing influence of NGOs in security issues, which has not always captured the attention of the powers that be. I will be interested in seeing what comes out of the Jam session. Although, frankly, I am not confident that crowdsourcing is the way to solve security issues, even in the 21st century.

"What to Read on Gender and Foreign Policy"

Over the break, Foreign Affairs posted my picks on which gender literature the foreign policy community should take seriously. Here's how the piece begins:

Feminists have long argued that it is wrong to ignore half the population when crafting policies meant to secure a stable world order. Now foreign policy experts are beginning to grasp a different point: a "gender perspective" is relevant not only to those concerned with making the world better for women, but also to anybody who cares about military effectiveness, alliance stability, democracy promotion, actionable intelligence, the stem of pandemic disease, or successful nation building. The following sources are essential reading for anyone interested in the connections between gender relations -- norms and assumptions about men and women, masculinity and femininity -- and the practice of foreign policy.

You can argue with how I framed it or which works I chose out of the volumes of good scholarship on gender and IR. But if you ask me, it's fabulous that FA is starting to include gender issues among its must-reads - and, if the latest issue is any suggestion, mainstreaming them in its print edition. Go check it out and tell me what you think.

[cross-posted at LGM]

Politics and Infographics

Cliff Kuang at Fast Company points to a short, interesting talk by Alex Lundry of TargetPoint Consulting.

Lundry quickly runs down the importance of infographics and data visualizations in the political realm. Bottom line: people are hard wired to learn through visualization, and infographics can be very powerful tools in political battles over ideas and policy:

It amazes me that we haven't seen a faster uptake among professional politicians of data visualization, especially considering the sheer number of political operatives, consultants, and strategic communication firms. All it takes is about five minutes watching C-SPAN to realize that these folks are due for a major upgrade in the infographics department.

I also love Lundry's updating of a famous H.G. Wells quote

Visual Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write.

Personally, I think you need both visual and statistical in there, but in general I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment.

[Cross-posted at bill | petti]

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