To post, or not to post, a list of "panels that look interesting"?
Pros: fills a blog post; highlights panels that I find interesting; provides potential springboard for discussions about conferences and conventions.
Cons: most interesting-looking panels turn out to be letdowns; will invariably piss off people whose panels I don't include; somewhat dishonest, as I've spent most of the last few conferences I've been at in the bar.
Monday, February 26, 2007
International Studies Association blogging
Saturday, February 24, 2007
wiki virtues
I must admit that I find the conservapedia "world history" lectures interesting--but for the same reasons that my wife and I used to collect premillenial dispensationalist pamphlets.
I promise this will turn into a more serious set of questions about the appropriateness of vandalizing, or even what it would mean to vandalize, a collective encyclopedia project. But before I do, let me note some of the list of great "homeschooled Christians" that are supposed to inspire the present generation:Leonardo da Vinci
I'm not terribly surprised, but still vaguely disappointed, that Stonewall Jackson is on the list. Joan of Arc seems like a strange inclusion; and George Bernard Shaw as someone right-wing Christians would want to emulate? That's just a declaration of idiocy.
Claude Monet
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Stonewall Jackson
John Paul Jones
Robert E. Lee
Douglas MacArthur
George Patton...
George Washington
John Quincy Adams
Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
William Henry Harrison
John Tyler
Abraham Lincoln
Theodore Roosevelt
Joan of Arc
John the Baptist
William Cary
Jesus Christ...
Winston Churchill
Benjamin Franklin
Patrick Henry
William Penn
Henry Clay...
George Bernard Shaw
Mark Twain...
George Clymer
Benjamin Franklin
William Livingston..."
Anyway, so here's the ethical question. My wife and I were discussing left-wing vandalism of the conservapedia not long ago, and she said that this "reflects badly on our side." Perhaps, but I'm not so sure about whether vandalism of the site crosses the line. For one thing, the whole point of a wiki encyclopedia is to draw on "collective knowledge" to produce intellectual and educational value. In fact, here are the "commandments" of the conservapedia:1. Everything you post must be true and verifiable.
Outside of the bizarre antipathy to British-English spellings (which, apparently, counts as major evidence of anti-American bias on the wikipedia), and the insistence on Anno Domini, these "commandments" imply a responsibility among readers to correct factual errors such that the entries are "true" and "verifiable." Not only is the site filled with some pretty egregious errors, but the administrators of the site have interfered with readers' attempts to correct them.
2. Always cite and give credit to your sources, even if in the public domain.
3. Edits/new pages must be family-friendly, clean, concise, and without gossip or foul language.
4. When referencing dates based on the approximate birth of Jesus, give appropriate credit for the basis of the date (B.C. or A.D.). "BCE" and "CE" are unacceptable substitutes because they deny the historical basis. See CE.
5. As much as is possible, American spelling of words must be used.[1]
6. Do not post personal opinion on an encyclopedia entry. Opinions can be posted on Talk:pages or on debate or discussion pages.
For another, even if the site did not include un-editable content inconsistent with 1, 2, and 6 (including the aforementioned world-history lectures, which involve no--or, at least, very few--reference), many of the instances of vandalism do little to diminish the factual content of the site. In many cases, it is pretty hard to distinguish between "vandalism" and sincere entries; in others, the claims are so outrageous that they might as well discuss how the moon is made of cheese.
So, while I think many of the attacks--however funny--definitely qualify as "tacky," I also wonder if the standards for what constitutes "vandalism" must be less clear in the face of a wiki with the aforementioned rules.
The Comedy of Great Power Politics
Next Wednesday in Chicago -- that's February 28, at 8:30 am -- at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, I'll be presenting a paper called "The Comedy of Great Power Politics in the 21st Century." Warning: that's a pdf, which I posted on my rarely used University homepage.
On the same panel, my friend Nayef Samhat is presenting "The 'Comedic Turn' and Critical International Relations Theory."
If those titles sound strange to you, read my paper (and Nayef's once it is available) and pass along your comments. Better yet, come to the panel.
If you are an IR theorist, you probably already guessed a little bit of what we are up to -- or at least what ideas we are challenging. After all, neorealist John Mearsheimer called his last book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
Realist theorists of international relations are pessimists and embrace tragic narratives. Classically, the main character of a tragedy was a noble, the story was set in the "great hall" or on the battlefield, and the plot featured the downfall of the protagonist -- often his death.
Realist theory is primarily about great powers, their story is set in the competitive "high politics" arena of the international system, and the plots are typically gloomy (featuring war, imperial overstretch, etc.)
My paper argues that contemporary great power politics, by realist standards, seems more like a farce than a tragedy -- no balancing behavior, no great power war for decades, the US and China are major trading partners, NATO is thriving, weak and failed states are viewed as the major threats, etc.
Nayef's paper puts our joint project in a broader context and part of my paper does that as well.
Again, the panel is scheduled for 8:30 am on the first day of the convention, turnout might be low. One person on this panel had to withdraw, so we'll have plenty of time to talk about comedy.
Come and see.
Sorry for the shameless self promotion
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Twenty IR terms
I'm on sabbatical, which helps to explain my pronounced absence from this and any other blog of late . . . I promise to return to regular posting sometime in a month or two. (Or is that a threat? :-)
But in the meantime I wanted to ask for readers' help with the design of an assignment I am considering for my introductory World Politics class in the Fall. I call it "IR Vocabulary," and the basic idea is to split students into pairs and have each pair go off and find consensus definitions of key IR terms, My intuition here is that in order to have a good discussion about world politics, there are some basic terms that we need to know; some of these terms are more or less empirical and refer to objects in the world, while others are more or less conceptual and refer to ways of making sense of those objects. [Yes, yes, this is an unstable distinction; yes, empirical terms are conceptual and vice versa . . . but there is still a difference, if only a difference of degree, between a term like 'the balance of power' and a term like 'the Security Council.']
So here's my question for all of you: if you were going to draw up a list of twenty key terms that people ought to have working definitions of in order to sensibly and meaningfully talk about world politics, what would they be? What is the basic vocabulary that people have to know before they can start in with the arguing and the debating and the pondering?
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
The William and Mary Survey, 2006-2007
The Foreign Policy summary (registration required) of the William and Mary "Inside the Ivory Tower" survey is out (as is the full version).
The 2006-2007 survey was conducted by Daniel Maliniak, Amy Oakes, Susan Peterson, and Michael J. Tierney. I participated in a trial run, but I'm not sure if I filled out the final version. No matter.
Part of the survey involves ranking PhD, MA, and undergraduate programs in international studies. In essence, these questions measure the reputation of various programs across the field. How did the institutions of international-relations bloggers fare?
First, PhD programs:1. Harvard University
This data, as I mentioned above, measures reputation among survey participants and little else. That might account for the fact that Tufts, which does not have an academic PhD program, breaks the top-20. The survey also, at least in my view, displays some good evidence about continued lags in reputation and current performance.
2. Princeton University
3. Columbia University
4. Stanford University
5. University of Chicago
6. Yale University
7. University of California, Berkeley
8. University of Michigan
9. University of California (San Diego?)
10. Cornell University
11. Mass. Institute of Technology
12. Johns Hopkins University
13. Georgetown University
14. Duke University
15. Ohio State University
16. New York University
17. University of Minnesota
18. University of California, Los Angeles
19. Tufts University
20. University of Rochester
Georgetown and Johns Hopkins both moved up this year, largely because of Duke's drop. Now, I have nothing but wonderful things to say about Georgetown--at least most of the time--but I wouldn't rank us above some of the programs that come in below us on this list.
One of the major problems with any of these kinds of rankings is that they don't specify "in what dimension of international relations." Rochester, for example, is much better than number 20 if you want to do formal modeling; Minnesota, Ohio State, and Cornell are the premiere schools for constructivist scholarship.
The MA rankings demonstrate, at least in my view, a better (but still imperfect) correlation between rankings and quality:1. Georgetown University
Georgetown appears to have edged out SAIS this year. I wonder if that represents a sampling change?
2. Johns Hopkins University
3. Harvard University
4. Tufts University
5. Columbia University
6. Princeton University
7. George Washington University
8. American University
9. University of Denver
10. Syracuse University
11. University of California
12. University of Chicago
12. Yale University
14. Stanford University
15. University of Pittsburgh
16. University of California
16. University of Maryland
18. Mass. Institute of Technology
18. Monterey Institute of Int’l Studies
20. University of Southern California
In the undergraduate international-relations program rankings, I think Georgetown probably underperformed at number 4:1. Harvard University
For those of you who don't care about the inside baseball, the most interesting parts of the survey concern academics' attitudes towards foreign policy. We're very pessimistic about the prospects for democracy in Iraq in the next 10-15 years (85% say "unlikely" or "very unlikely"). We tend to think (and this surprised me a bit) that the "Israel lobby" has too much influence over US foreign policy, and so forth. These, and other opinions, do vary with political orientation (conservative, liberal, and moderate) but not as much as one would expect. Conservative and moderate international-relations scholars don't, for example, care very much for the current administration.
2. Princeton University
3. Stanford University
4. Georgetown University
5. Columbia University
6. Yale University
7. University of Chicago
8. University of California, Berkeley
9. Dartmouth College
10. George Washington University
11. American University
12. University of Michigan
13. Tufts University
14. Swarthmore College
14. University of California (?)
16. Cornell University
17. Brown University
18. Williams College
19. Duke University
19. Johns Hopkins University
One of the more intriguing findings:This support for multilateralism is remarkably stable across ideology. In the cases of both Iran and North Korea, liberals and conservatives agree that U.N.-sanctioned action is preferable. More striking are the attitudes of self-identified realists. Scholars of realism traditionally argue that international institutions such as the United Nations do not (and should not) influence the choices of states on issues of war and peace. But we found realists to be much more supportive of military intervention with a U.N. imprimatur than they are of action without such backing. Among realists, in fact, the gap between support for multilateral and unilateral intervention in North Korea is identical to the gap among scholars of the liberal tradition, whose theories explicitly favor cooperation.
I don't believe this is because realists have suddenly turned into Wilsonsians; rather, I suspect the data reflects how a broad cross-section of realist scholars have come to the conclusion that international legitimacy greases the wheels of power and makes counterbalancing less likely. Thank (or blame) the Bush administration.
Anyway, as they say in blogland "read the whole thing." I hope Mike and his colleagues sort out their technical problem so we can access the complete report.
Assume A Rational Actor....
This was just too good to pass up.
With immigration a growing political issues, The New York Times looks back and asks-- remember NAFTA, like 14 years ago? Wasn't that supposed to stop illegal immigration by building up the Mexican economy through free trade?
Why didn’t Nafta curb this immigration? The answer is complicated, of course. But a major factor lies in the assumptions made in drafting the trade agreement, assumptions about the way governments would behave (that is, rationally) and the way markets would respond (rationally, as well).Ahh, the dreaded rationality assumption, rearing its ugly head again.
Neither happened...
First, it was assumed that the government would respond rationally to the new incentives provided by NAFTA:
When Nafta finally became a reality, on Jan. 1, 1994, American investment flooded into Mexico, mostly to finance factories that manufacture automobiles, appliances, TV sets, apparel and the like. The expectation was that the Mexican government would do its part by investing billions of dollars in roads, schooling, sanitation, housing and other needs to accommodate the new factories as they spread through the country.Next, it was assumed markets (ie farmers in the agricultural market) would rationally respond to the new incentives offered by NAFTA:
It was more than an expectation. Many Mexican officials in the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari assured the Clinton administration that the investment would take place, and believed it themselves, said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington who campaigned for Nafta in the early 1990s.
“It just did not happen,” he said.
The assumption was that tens of thousands of farmers who cultivated corn would act “rationally” and continue farming, even as less expensive corn imported from the United States flooded the market. The farmers, it was assumed, would switch to growing strawberries and vegetables — with some help from foreign investment — and then export these crops to the United States. Instead, the farmers exported themselves, partly because the Mexican government decided to reduce tariffs on corn even faster than Nafta required, according to Philip Martin, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis.Two key assumptions, both based on a particular model of a rational, homo economicus, model of actorhood. The State pours investment into areas that lead to the greatest benefit in terms of national product growth. Farmers shift crops to farm what provides them the greatest return at the market. Any rational actor facing these market pressures and incentives would choose this course.
“We understood that the transition from corn to strawberries would not be smooth,” Professor Martin said. “But we did not think there would be almost no transition.”
Except that they didn't. The Mexican government--and here's the key: despite individuals within that government individually believing that they would--never was able to reform its domestic spending priorities. Farmers, rather than shift to farming a new crop, simply followed other relatives into the United States, creating an immigration network.
Finally, the steady flow of Mexicans to the United States has produced a momentum of its own — what Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Institute, calls a “network effect,” in which young Mexicans travel to the United States in growing numbers to join the growing number of family members already here.This brief NY Times article reveals the core difficulty and flaw of rationality assumptions and the real consequences of building policy on social science theory based on rationalist models of human behavior. Quite simply, as the scholarship of most of the contributors of this blog (and a large number of our friends and colleagues) has shown, identity and therefore rationality are social constructs that depend on rules of legitimacy. Government leaders and farmers ask not what offers the greatest return, but rather, "Who am I?" and what do I do now? Absent a domestic political climate that could reform the rules and legitimacy of government spending practices, the investment envisioned by NAFTA couldn't take place. Governments don't just "rationally" decide to reallocate funds. Anyone who has ever looked at a defense spending bill can tell you that. Its a political process, and winners and losers in politics are not determined by the same rules as rational returns on investment in economics.
Questions of livelihood are approached with the same process. Farmers suddenly unable to farm corn don't just say well, what crop would sell. No, they say I've lost my livelihood, what do I do now. The look to others who define their identity--family--for opportunity, and see it in America. Hence, the network patterns of immigration. Its not a "rational" response to incentives, rather, its a network push and pull bringing certain people to the US and not others.
Unfortunately,
“We have indeed had one disappointment after another on this score,” Mr. Rodrik said, noting that the same assumption about government spending is part and parcel of the agreements, now before Congress, with Columbia, Peru and Panama.Perhaps Congress and the USTR should not build in such assumptions to these deals--rather, appreciate that other logics might inform government spending, migration, investment, and trade patterns, and allow for enough flexibility in the deal to address this.
And, perhaps some of the social scientists out there who continually trumpet theories and policies based on those theories that assume a Rational Actor should take a time out and really think about the consequences of what they're doing.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Frenemies
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
The North Korean Deal
I'm still reading reports of the North Korea nuclear deal, and I should have more to say as things develop. A few quick thoughts:
1. The terms of the deal, at least as currently reported, seem reasonable. North Korea looks to get most of what it wants, but the benefits of a non-nuclear North Korea mitigate against that. The administration should ignore the howls of protest already emanating from hardliners. The US, Japan, and South Korea don't have any other good options. Military strikes are too costly, and the Chinese will only pressure North Korea so far in the current environment. As I argued in one of my earliest posts on the Duck of Minerva, bribery has its places in international politics, and bribing the North Koreans is a price we're likely going to have to pay for our policy objectives in Northeast Asia.
2. The deal may still fall through, either in the short-term or the long-term. A failed deal, however, may be better than the status quo so long as North Korea, rather than the US, shoulders the blame for the breakdown of the proposed process. In such a scenario, the US may have an easier time pressuring the Chinese to take an even harder line on the North Koreans.
3. I'm not convinced that the US will likely suffer "reputational" costs that hinder negotiations with the Iranians. Not only has the US already made clear that it won't punish other proliferators--such as India and Pakistan--but the deal at stake is conditioned on eventual North Korean denuclearization. If the Iranians want some aid and a future normalization of relations with the US in exchange for giving up their program, that seems like a pretty good deal for the US as well.
4. The Bush administration has basically embraced the Clinton policy for dealing with North Korea, so it isn't surprising that hardliners feel betrayed. My advice to them is to get over it. Rob Farley has more on the subject.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Dictators on Parade
Parade Magazine--that little thing in your Sunday paper with all the advertisements from Best Buy and office Depot--has one article each year that I think is completely brilliant: Who is the World's Worst Dictator?
Its such a simple thing, yet such a powerful statement, I'm surprised more people don't do it. Yet I love that its in Parade magazine--something with such mass circulation in the Sunday paper that people normally look to for celebrity interviews and such. One week a year, they lay out the "bad people" in the world and call American's attention to the other 'evil-doers' in the world outside of the war on terrorism.
This year's list:
1) for the third year in a row topping the list, its Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, in power since 1989. Bashir earned and keeps his ranking because of Darfur.
This is why I love this article-- it reminds a large number of people that there are international issues and leaders worthy of US attention and action. Darfur lingers on the edge of the current USFP agenda, crowded out by items such as Iraq and terrorism. I'm not saying that these things aren't important, but rather, the point is, the worst person in the world (as Olberman might say) is not associated with either issue. There are other things out there that demand attention.
2) Kim Jong Il, everyone's favorite lonely dictator, trying hard to recapture his number 1 ranking he last held in 2004.
3) Sayyid Ali KhamEnei of Iran. Key educational point here-- its not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president, but the Supreme Leader, the head of the religious clerics who control Iran who really calls the shots.
4) Hu Jintao, China
5) King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia
Ahhh, now it gets complicated. Key American Frenemies. We need them, we're good friends with them, but Parade reminds us that we're not always friends with the world's best people.
Check out the rest of the top 20.
Friday, February 09, 2007
The Crash that Launched a Million Deaths
On 6 April 1994 someone shot down a plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira at it attempted to land at Kigali Airport. Habyarimana's death sparked waves of killings by Hutu extremists, the Interahamwe militia, and eventually significant numbers of opportunistic collaborators. They targeted not only ethnic Tutsi but also Hutu moderates, particularly supporters of the Arusha Peace Accords. Hundreds of thousands died in the fastest genocide in history; an excess of human remains choked Rwanada's rivers. The genocide ended only when the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) defeated the government and took control of the country.
Scholars and observers have long speculated about who shot down the plane. Suspicions generally fell on Hutu extremists--and perhaps even the Akazu ("Little House") of cronies and relatives surrounding Habyarimana and his wife. In other words, those who stood to lose the most from the accords killed the President and initiated a genocide to maintain their hold on power.
But not according to former UN investigator Michael Hourigan, who tells the BBC that the UN halted his investigation into Habyarimana's death. The reason: he was close to pinning responsibility on Paul Kagame: head of the RPF and now the President of Rwanda. Michael Doyle reports:The former UN investigator who has now spoken to the BBC, Michael Hourigan, worked on several aspects of the genocide in 1996 and 1997.
This is a pretty big deal.
He successfully prosecuted a number of Hutu leaders responsible for the mass killings, but also found witnesses who alleged that the Tutsi Paul Kagame, the current president of Rwanda, was involved in the plot to shoot down the plane when he was a rebel leader.
Mr Hourigan told the BBC from his home in Australia that senior UN officials instructed him to stop his enquiries.
"None of it makes sense," he said.
"That all of a sudden when we get the breakthrough and we start to actually get people coming forward saying: 'We were involved in the crash, you know, I fired a rocket which took the president's aircraft down' - when we're getting those people with that sort of quality information coming forwards and then we shut it down."
"I mean it didn't make sense to me then and it doesn't make sense to me now." ....
Senior UN officials say the enquiry into the plane crash was stopped because it was not within the mandate of the genocide tribunal. Mr Hourigan strongly disagrees.
A spokesman for the then chief prosecutor of the tribunal, Louise Arbour, who is now the UN human rights commissioner, said she would not comment on Mr Hourigan's complaints because she had a duty of confidentiality.
Diplomats say Rwanda would almost certainly have stopped cooperating with the tribunal if its investigations targeted Mr Kagame.
The diplomats add that the foreign policies of western nations towards Rwanda are partly driven by guilt because the international community failed to stop the mass killings.
President Kagame has denied involvement in shooting down the plane, but adds that he does not regret the death of the former Rwandan leader, who he describes as a dictator.
When the France's anti-terrorism judge accused Kagame in November of 2006, it was easy to dismiss his claims. The French government backed the Hutu regime and doesn't like Kagame's Anglophone orientation. Chris McGreal of The Guardian explains the case for French bias before he concludes that Hutu extremists were likely responsible for Habyarimana's death.When the genocide started, Paris made no secret of where its loyalties lay. The French military flew in ammunition for government forces and, in the following weeks, a stream of Hutu officials travelled to Paris, including Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, who was later convicted of genocide by the international tribunal, for meetings with President François Mitterrand and the French prime minister. Even as the mass graves filled across Rwanda, Paris engineered the delivery of millions of dollars' worth of weapons to the Hutu regime from Egypt and South Africa.
Hourigan's accusations suggest, however, that there is more to this than Francophone-sphere political maneuvering.
Africa has traditionally been considered such a special case in Paris that France's policy is run out of the presidency. At the time, the "Africa cell" was headed by Mitterrand's son, Jean-Christophe, a close friend of the Habyarimanas. He later said that there could not have been a genocide because "Africans are not that organised". France's president did not deny what had happened, but took a view no less racist: "In such countries, genocide is not too important."
Let us suppose that Hourigan's sources are unreliable. I still find it troubling that the UN might have shut down his investigation rather than rattle cooperation from the Kagame government. This sort of behavior brings back memories of how higher-level UN officials behaved immediately before and after the genocide broke out.
At the same time, post-conflict justice must always be tempered by pragmatism. Peace may not be worth any price, but it seldom comes cheap. And no one should shed any tears for Habyarimana.
The Looming Threat
I assumed the data on Svalbard military spending was a mistake. But now I'm becoming quite concerned. David Johnston uncovers more about the possible threat from Svalbard.
The island will soon be home to a Doomsday facility.
David questions whether the bunker is really just a seed vault. Given our information about Svalbard's immense per capita military expenditures--which in absolute terms dwarf its "official" GDP--I think he's right to be skeptical. When we combine these facts with the looming Polar Bear threat--territorial losses and foreign occupations breed, as we all know, suicide terrorism--perhaps the US is focusing undue attention on Iran and North Korea. The true threat may lie in Svalbard.
But, and here's an even more frightening thought, what if the "Doomsday" vault really is a seed bank?
Why would Svalbard be hoarding seeds in a facility designed to insulate them against future catastrophes? What could Svalbard be planning?
Developing...
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Why its so difficult to debate the war in Iraq
Over at Early Warning, William Arkin has generated incredible traffic to his site--over 1500 comments on one post--over his recent posts on the Iraq war. Arkin took on a very central issue in our debate over the war, and in doing so, exposed the continued difficulty we as a nation have in developing a language to debate the war.
Arkin's initial column noted how "the troops" in Iraq--the enlisted soldiers who bear the brunt of the fighting in this war--are reacting to the rising criticism of the war:
Friday's NBC Nightly News included a story from my colleague and friend Richard Engel, who was embedded with an active duty Army infantry battalion from Fort Lewis, Washington.Note what's going on here. In all of his messages to "the troops," President Bush and his senior military leadership have continually emphasized the centrality of the war in Iraq to the war on terrorism and the need to defeat terrorists in Iraq in order to guarantee the safety and future of the United States. These soldiers identify with their mission to such an extent that they take any criticism of the mission as an attack on themselves. And, indeed, at a certain level, they need to identify with their mission in this way in order to make any sense of why they are there and what they are doing. Arkin recognizes the problem:
Engel relayed how "troops here say they are increasingly frustrated by American criticism of the war. Many take it personally, believing it is also criticism of what they've been fighting for."
First up was 21 year old junior enlisted man Tyler Johnson, whom Engel said was frustrated about war skepticism and thinks that critics "should come over and see what it's like firsthand before criticizing."
"You may support or say we support the troops, but, so you're not supporting what they do, what they're here sweating for, what we bleed for, what we die for. It just don't make sense to me," Johnson said.
Next up was Staff Sergeant Manuel Sahagun, who is on his second tour in Iraq. He complained that "one thing I don't like is when people back home say they support the troops, but they don't support the war. If they're going to support us, support us all the way."
Next was Specialist Peter Manna: "If they don't think we're doing a good job, everything that we've done here is all in vain," he said.
I'll accept that the soldiers, in order to soldier on, have to believe that they are manning the parapet, and that's where their frustrations come in. I'll accept as well that they are young and naïve and are frustrated with their own lack of progress and the never changing situation in Iraq. Cut off from society and constantly told that everyone supports them, no wonder the debate back home confuses them.However, its when Arkin makes a critical remark about the make-up of today's military and who owes who what that he opens up the real can of worms:
So, we pay the soldiers a decent wage, take care of their families, provide them with housing and medical care and vast social support systems and ship obscene amenities into the war zone for them, we support them in every possible way, and their attitude is that we should in addition roll over and play dead, defer to the military and the generals and let them fight their war, and give up our rights and responsibilities to speak up because they are above society?This generated some 900 comments to his blog at washingtonpost.com.
...But it is the United States, and the recent NBC report is just an ugly reminder of the price we pay for a mercenary - oops sorry, volunteer - force that thinks it is doing the dirty work.
The notion of dirty work is that, like laundry, it is something that has to be done but no one else wants to do it. But Iraq is not dirty work: it is not some necessary endeavor; the people just don't believe that anymore.
...America needs to ponder what it is we really owe those in uniform. I don't believe America needs a draft though I imagine we'd be having a different discussion if we had one.
Now, Arkin knew what he was doing, and did it on purpose, intending to make a very important point. He initialy responded:
I knew when I used the word "mercenary" in my Tuesday column that I was being highly inflammatory.The point he wants to make is:
NBC News ran a piece in which enlisted soldiers in Iraq expressed frustration about waning American support.
I intentionally chose to criticize the military and used the word to incite and call into question their presumption that the public had a duty to support them. The public has duties, but not to the American military.
So I committed blasphemy, and for this seeming lack of respect and appreciation for individuals in uniform, I have been roundly criticized and condemned.
Mercenary, of course, is an insult and pejorative, and it does not accurately describe the condition of the American soldier today. I sincerely apologize to anyone in the military who took my words literally.
Those in uniform who think about and speak out about this predicament [Iraq] are rightly frustrated and angry. Many seem to find some solace in blaming the media or anti-war "leftists" or the Democratic Party or the liberals, or even an ungrateful or insufficiently martial American public.There Arkin hits the the central issue on the nose. Is there no political / rhetorical space for one to argue that the best way to support the troops is to stop their leadership from doing any further to deepen American involvement in Iraq? Might the best way to support the troops be to bring them home?
But if those in the military are now going to argue that we are losing in Iraq because the military has lacked for Something, then the absence of such support should be placed at the feet of the Bush administration, Rumsfeld and company, and a Republican Congress -- not on the shoulders of the American public, who have been nothing but supportive, even those who have opposed the war.
...When I hear soldiers and war supporters expressing their frustrations about the American public or the news media, something doesn't quite seem right -- even when the soldiers and war supporters aren't talking about me. I know that those in uniform would like to bring the war to an honorable conclusion, but are they blaming those who are against the war and the news media for having tied their hands under a Bush administration which is certainly the most warrior-oriented in the past 20 years? Is there no space for respectful acceptance of the possibility that people who also love the nation and care about our security think that the country is wasting national treasure - lives and money - on an unwinnable cause?
Of course, here Arkin stumbles into the rhetorical trap laid by the Bush Administration. It generated over 1500 comments to his post. In this debate,
In the middle of all of this are the troops, the pawns in political battles at home as much as they are on the real battlefield. We unquestioningly "support" these troops for the very reasons that they are pawns. We give them what we can to be successful, and we have a contract with them, because they are our sons and daughters and a part of us, not to place them in an impossible spot.And yet this is exactly what we have done. Its "the troops" who occupy an impossible spot in Iraq. They need all the best support we can offer them to do the impossible job they have been given. They believe--perhaps because they must, perhaps because they honestly do think so--that they can succeed if given the chance and if given just a little more help. A few brigades here, better Rules of Engagement there, more active patrols, more training, and "we" can turn the corner. So, all who want to support "the troops" who are our sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, (and in my case, an uncle) really want them to have every chance to succeed and don't want to be put in the very uncomfortable position of saying no to them.
And this is just what the Administration wants, for it makes it next to impossible to have an honest debate about the role of the military in Iraq. Witness the recent debates in the Senate--the various resolutions under discussion for possible debate (only in the Senate...) talk about a lack of confidence in the mission and leadership but still promise to continue to fund the troops. The Democratic-led Senators want it both ways, and Bush (and his allies in Congress) are raking them over the coals for it, and the Democrats with any national ambition are caving over the resolution. Just notice McCain's come-back--if you really believe the war is wrong, then why aren't you just de-funding it and ending it now? While perhaps Russ Fiengold would support this, few others would, and once they conceed that--they won't de-fund "the troops" but have serious problems with the way the war is being fought, they end up with the same problem as Arkin.
In his final words on the subject (a post which has a mere 600 comments), Arkin assesses the substantial criticism he has recieved, attempting to understand how those who have attacked make sense of the world and Arkin's place in it:
As this line of argument goes, the soldiers themselves and those who have served in Iraq are the only ones who really know what it is like, what the war is about, and what should be done. The media in general and war opponents in particular intentionally and purposefully provide a negative and discouraging view that doesn't comport with what the soldiers see, so goes this argument. But the bigger point is that any dissenting voices are just those of whores, politicians, tin foil hat liberals, or worse, un-Americans. In this view, there are no actual experts in this world, no one who studies and measures public opinion, no one who studies war or the military, who do not wear the uniform. This is not some post-modern relativism, it is pure anti-elitism. The elite think they know it all, while those who do all of the dirty work, who do all of the suffering, are methodically ignored and dominated.Patrick has previously discussed the role of "expert" knowledge and offered a very insightful analysis into the anti-elitism, you've never been there so you don't know what its like argument, and that's not really the point I'm interested in discussing here. Rather, its Arkin's second point, that what he is encountering are two versions of a larger narrative about those who criticize the troops. Its a narrative that the Bush Administration and its pro-Iraq war allies have spent the past 5 years articulating, reinforcing, supporting, and defending.
Finally, commenters attack what I wrote as the work of Democrats and "liberals." I'm lumped with Bill Clinton, that degenerate who decimated the military and the Kerry-Sheehan-Hillary-Gore-Pelosi evil axis, which now threatens more of the same. Fight back, the commenters say to their brethren. America for too long turned the other cheek against terrorism and now it is time not just to fight but to draw battle lines and show no mercy in that fight. They have, after all, shown no mercy for us.
In this narrative, I have spat upon the American soldier and thus America, called the true patriots naïve and un-educated. I have all the power and control all of the words and through my actions I enslave others and ensure that only my type and my class prospers.
The reconciliatory and peace-loving narrative is that only the soldiers are honorable and virtuous, and no matter how despicable I and my ilk are, they will still "save" me from the enemy. The evil narrative is that they will happily watch me die, serving not as protector but as judge of who can live and who does not deserve to.
What "we"--as scholars of IR who study the role of language and narrative in world politics--have "found" in our work is that you can't defeat a narrative simply by poking holes in it or finding flaws in its ability to explain this or that particular outcome. No, the way you combat a narrative is with another narrative. Creating real space for dissent requires developing, articulating, and promoting a counter-narrative in which that dissent makes sense.
Though the Bush administration continues to stick to its narrative about Iraq, the recent election and Bush's record-low public approval ratings reveal discomfort with this narrative. The American public has its doubts. The time seems ripe for an alternative.
The problem the Democrats in Congress have is that, while they can offer alternative facts, figures, and even plans, they are having a real hard time offering an alternative narrative in which all the other stuff makes sense. Indeed, when Arkin calls for a "space" in which one can love his country and still think that the war in Iraq is a waste of blood and treasure, he is in a sense asking for an alternative narrative in which his dissent makes sense. We've seen the beginings of some of these narratives from the various presidential candidates, but the trick that they need to master is how to develop an alternative narrative of dissent that a) validates their earlier positions on the war, b) explains the current failure c) offers an imperative to leave Iraq and d) doesn't offend those who they are counting on for Votes in 2008. That's a tough road to hoe, and if any of you out there can square this circle, you're really onto something.
As Arkin has discovered, entrenched narratives, even ones under siege, are stubborn and difficult to dislodge.
Review of Harry Potter and International Relations
The most recent issue of International Affairs (January 2007) includes a review of Harry Potter and International Relations
Harry Potter and international relations. Edited by Daniel H. Nexon and Iver B. Neumann. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefi eld. 2006. 245pp. Index. Pb.: £15.99. isbn 0 7425 3959 8.
My first advice for readers of this book would be: do not let the title fool you, this is a serious book. I must admit I requested to review this book with a certain amount of faith that I could while away hours reading about why Voldemort is the epitome of realism and how Dumbledore is a brilliant constructivist (though Torbjorn Knutsen disagrees with this assessment in chapter 9). However, it turned out that my appreciation of how International Relations can shed insight into Harry Potter’s tales of magic is not the sole goal of this book. Rather, the book is an exposition of what J. K. Rowling’s stories about Harry Potter reveal about our social and political world.
In the introduction, Neumann and Nexon argue that International Relations, particularly its constructivist and post-structuralist approaches, is able to provide insights into political choices, statements and cultures by examining popular culture. Culture shapes politics because ‘within popular culture morality is shaped, identities are produced and transformed, and effective analogies and narratives are constructed and altered’ (p. 6). Tracing the effect of culture on international relations is the task of this book and the contributors provide insights into the Harry Potter series and its potential impact on Muggles (non-magic folk) through four different approaches: popular culture and politics; popular culture as mirror; popular culture as data; and popular culture as constitutive.
Popular culture and politics seek to understand how the global success of Harry Potter has changed economic and political processes. One contributor (Patricia Goff ) does this by tracing the global empire that controls the Harry Potter franchise, Time Warner American Online (AOL). Another chapter (Maia Gemmill and Daniel Nexon) looks at the Christian right’s response to Harry Potter and its attempts to ban the book in schools and libraries. Popular culture as mirror seeks to illuminate how Harry Potter’s world reflects elements of our own world. This in turn allows us to question our own assumptions and epistemologies. Popular culture as data discusses how cultural values collide with those coming from ‘outside’. This is exemplified in a chapter by Ann Towns and Bahar Rumelili which looks at how Harry Potter has been received in Sweden as compared to Turkey. Finally, popular culture as constitutive looks at whether our beliefs represent international politics. Wonderfully illustrative of this is Martin Hall’s chapter on how realism reflects an international relations version of the fantasy genre for western civilization.
The constitutive effects, Neumann and Nexon argue, are the most important ones to trace in locating popular culture’s impact on politics. So far, they argue, it is too soon to say that Harry Potter has informed or determined politics through popular culture. For example, Harry Potter analogies have not yet seeped into the official speeches of western officials, unlike Star wars and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness. However, the naturalizing effect of Harry Potter is a very real future possibility—J. K. Rowling’s brilliant series has been able to encapsulate the ‘natural’ way that we understand politics as a contest between good and evil. Popular culture is thus an important empirical source by which to further investigate our political assumptions and question why things are ‘just the way that they are’ (p. 19). Harry Potter, whether liked or disliked, has been a global phenomenon through its economic impact, its translation into a mass of languages, debates over its local interpretation and its complementarity to our, Muggles, appreciation of the social and political world. Best of all, because of the quality of the insights that this book achieves in examining the relationship between culture and international relations, we as International Relations scholars can read Harry Potter and justify it as ‘research’.
Sara E. Davies, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Iran
Scholar Larry Diamond resides at Stanford's conservative Hoover Institution, but he worked for the Bush administration in Iraq just a couple of years ago. He thinks that a war with Iran might be in the cards:
President Bush's neoconservative advisors and pundit supporters have been beating the drums of war with Iran since 2003, when the president declared Iran to be part of an "axis of evil." Recall that a senior administration official told The Times that Iran should "take a number" in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. In his recent address to the nation on the troop surge in Iraq, Bush issued more threats to Iran. Now the president has named a Navy admiral to head the U.S. Central Command and dispatched a second aircraft carrier and minesweepers to the Persian Gulf, presumably to prevent Iran from closing the Strait of Hormuz in the event of conflict.Here at the Duck and on my own blog, I've been blogging about the drumbeat for war for awhile now.
These developments and other administration moves could presage an air attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.
Skeptics should keep Diamond's warning in mind, since "recklessness, not prudence, has been the hallmark of this administration's foreign policy." Condi Rice's former colleague wants Congress to hold hearings and prevent war against Iran NOW -- unless there's "an imminent attack or a verified terrorist attack on the United States by Iran."
Carter administraiton National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski is also very worried, as he testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 1:
If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a “defensive” U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.As Dr. Brzezinski noted, the threat comparison is absurd since Germany and the Soviet Union were powerful states with great resources, while few Muslims follow the "isolated fundamentalist Islamist aberration" that is al Qaeda.
A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by false claims about WMD’s in Iraq, the war is now being redefined as the “decisive ideological struggle” of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism and al Qaeda are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated America’s involvement in World War II.
On the bright side, there's at least some evidence that the Bush administration might be backing off on some of its claims about Iran.
Monday, February 05, 2007
The Svalbard Threat
Can someone explain to me why the CIA World Factbook lists Svalbard as ranking 22nd in military defense expenditures (at $ 5,501,000,000)?
Most of the sources I can find seem to agree that Svalbard, a territory of Norway, was demilitarized as part of the 1920 Paris Treaty.
I'm not the only one to have noticed this, of course.
Is someone at the Agency a Pullman fan?
Image Sources:
http://static.flickr.com/14/15515254_5f2b21d623.jpg
http://www.dla.mil/j-3/j-334/
http://img.pro-g.co.uk/images/pub/large/golden_compass.jpg
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Obligatory Superbowl Post
It is the single most viewed television event in the United States annually, and one of the most watched events in the world (and yes, its no World Cup, but there is no cup to watch this year...).
After that first play, when Hester returned the opening kick-off for a Touchdown for the Bears, I thought to my self: well, game over, the Colts have won.
I wasn't the only one.
Still, how crazy is that, the same opening, the same result for the two biggest football games of the year.
Filed as: Superbowl
Speaking of glocalization
Does anyone know of a systematic comparison of the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials? The US and UK ones don't seem very different--as much as it pains me, the UK PC stacks up surprisingly well against John Hodgman.
The German and French variants look to be just dubbed version of the US editions. I can't parse the Japanese ones, but they seem to be about as localized (or not) as the UK versions.
At the very least, the ads might provide a snapshot of similarities and differences in "loser suit" and "laid-back dude" archetypes across multiple countries. I wonder, however, how well the ads travel to other settings; do the Mac commercials work as well in the UK, France, or Japan as they do in the US?
The relentness march of outsourcing
The Super Bowl score is the AP's lead story right now; needless to say, I dropped down through the wire reports. I discovered that India not only leads the US in cheap call centers, but that the country also enjoys a capital/labor comparative advantage in surrogate motherhood. Surrogate motherhood is among the latest in a long list of roles being outsourced to India, where rent-a-womb services are far cheaper than in the West.
The cultural dimensions of the whole thing seem rather interesting. Supporters stress India's "special" suitability for globalized reproduction:
"In the U.S. a childless couple would have to spend anything up to $50,000," Gautam Allahbadia, a fertility specialist who helped a Singaporean couple obtain a child through an Indian surrogate last year, told Reuters.
"In India, it's done for $10,000-$12,000."
Fertility clinics usually charge $2,000-$3,000 for the procedure while a surrogate is paid anything between $3,000 and $6,000, a fortune in a country with an annual per capita income of around $500.
But the practice is not without its critics in India with some calling it the "commoditisation of motherhood" and an exploitation of the poor by the rich. "It's true I'm doing this for money, but is it also not true that a childless couple is benefiting?" said Rituja, a surrogate mother in Mumbai, who declined to give her full name.
The rest of the article suggests we might see Kabir's claims as just so much marketing.
For the surrogates -- usually lower middleclass housewives -- money is the primary motivator.
For their clients it's infertility or -- some claim -- educated working women turning to hired wombs to avoid a pregnancy affecting careers.
But there is also a social dimension to their service, an empathy with the childless in a society that views reproduction as a sacred obligation, and believes good deeds performed in this life are rewarded in the next one, experts say.
"Surrogate mothers are giving their (the eventual parents') lives a new meaning. For them the money they pay is just a token gesture that by no way substitutes their gratefulness," said Deepak Kabir, a Mumbai-based gynaecologist. Surrogacy as a temp job may be a lucrative deal but traditional attitudes to sex and procreation, especially in the countryside, mean Indian surrogate mothers often invent cover stories for their neighbours.
I don't find any of this completely outrageous; all things being equal (and they never are), I'd rather we see third-world countries as having a comparative advantage in life than in death. But I do think there's a story here about the relentless internationalization of, uhh, production in the contemporary international economy.
Most say they are carrying their husband's child, and once the baby is delivered to the intended parents, they say the newborn has died. Some go to other towns and return after delivery, telling neighbours they were visiting relatives.
"It's a lie we have to tell, otherwise how can we earn this much money?" said a 29-year-old prospective mother at a Mumbai clinic. "A lie told for a good cause is not a sin."
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Flat-Footed Empiricists of the World, Unite!
You have nothing to lose but those pesky questions about whether your methods actually prove anything....
[Warning: what follows will likely only be of interest to practitioners and students of academic IR]
[UPDATED 2/4/07]
Almost a year ago, but two months after the conversation had moved on, "IR scholar not philosopher"--who, to his/her credit included an amusing false email address (empiricist@empiricist.com)--posted an interesting comment in response to a post I wrote on