Human Rights and Foreign Policy

At ISA, I had the pleasure to share a panel with Alison Brysk, whose new book Global Good Samaritans was hot off the presses. I just went through my copy and wanted to offer a few off the cuff reactions.

Brysk's key contribution is to focus on positive cases - cases where human rights policies have been enacted by states (primarily middle or weak powers: her case studies include Canada, Sweden, Costa Rica, South Africa, the Netherlands and Japan) and have succeeded . Her key goal is to understand why states sacrifice their national interests (resources and citizens' lives) to help others abroad and her argument is simple: "They don't." Instead, such states see "humanitarian internationalism" as constitutive of their national interests. The book is about how they make this calculation. As such it is a helpful (and hopeful) antidote to much of the cynical handwringing characterizing so much human rights scholarship, precisely because that literature has been dominated by analyses of the hypocrisy of US foreign policy.

I shall leave aside discussion of methodological issues; Brysk acknowledges that the empirics are preliminary and she has intentionally left targets for graduate students who will no doubt be avid consumers of her work. But I do have two other comments:

First, though the optimism of her book is refreshing, I'm reminded of McCain's campaign slogan "hope is not a foreign policy agenda." I think in building her comparison of the political cultures of these countries with the U.S., Brysk glosses over the ways in which these powers fail on human rights, and the social movements criticizing them. Sweden may "set the gold standard" for human rights prootion abroad, but has a less than glowing record with respect to its indigenous Sami population. Canada may have championed the Kimberly Process but their own "clean diamond" industry comes perilously close to violating aboriginal rights. (I am also reminded of 2000, when I attended the Winnipeg Conference on War-Affected Children, and had to push my way through a massive protest against the activities of Canada's Talisman oil company in the Sudan in order to get inside where the foreign ministers were setting the human security agenda.)

Seemingly, human rights are what states make of them. Brysk's case studies would be somewhat more nuanced if they took a more critical look at the paradoxes of domestic human rights political cultures.

As a scholar of advocacy networks however, the chapter I found most interesting was the chapter on "coalitions of the caring." Brysk emphasizes not NGO networks, but interstate human rights networks - an extremely useful descriptive supplement to the literature on TANs. I wonder, however, if she is not also unduly reifying a distinction between the state and non-state layers of civil society, which are actually pretty blurry. If you map out the "human rights" or "human security" network using various indicators of network ties, you find both interstate organizaitons like the OSCE, or interstate networks like the Human Security Network, as nodes among others that include NGOs but also thinktanks, foundations, news hubs, and UN specialized agencies. I think what we need is an understanding of human rights networks that helps us look past the state/non-state distinction, actually, and look at structural relations between network nodes whatever they be. A paper I heard at ISA by David Davis his collaborators makes this point exactly, as does Wendy Wong's work.

Iraq: the light at the end of the tunnel

We're just a few weeks from the 6th anniversary of the Iraq war -- but the end is now clearly in sight. President Obama, earlier today:

Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.

Even better, as Obama told U.S. troops: "mission [kinda] accomplished."

We sent our troops to Iraq to do away with Saddam Hussein’s regime – and you got the job done. We kept our troops in Iraq to help establish a sovereign government – and you got the job done. And we will leave the Iraqi people with a hard-earned opportunity to live a better life – that is your achievement; that is the prospect that you have made possible.

In other portions of the speech, Obama described the circumstances that would justify the use of American military power in the future.

He didn't acknowledge being limited by an "Iraq syndrome," but he did suggest relative restraint:

as long as I am your Commander-in-Chief, I promise you that I will only send you into harm’s way when it is absolutely necessary, and provide you with the equipment and support you need to get the job done.

Right now, the White House reportedly says that the US will leave 35 to 50,000 troops in Iraq after combat troops are removed. I haven't heard just how many private military forces will remain.

Another ambiguity: Obama has not fully renounced the Bush Doctrine.

If he had been elected president, Joe Biden apparently would have made his opposition quite clear. But Obama perhaps wishes to benefit from ambiguity (a threat that leaves something to chance?) -- and that may well be the pragmatic route.

Political theory vs. political science

My Theories of International Relations course spent this week discussing Rousseau, a theorist whose relevance to international relations is a little unclear at first glance. Hobbes and Locke have been -- if badly -- imported into the canon of IR theory, largely through the use of their definitions of the state of nature as accounts of the international system. Individuals in Hobbes' state of nature, famously, lead lives that are "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short," as they are perpetually on guard against someone else's killing them; IR realists often use this as a description of the relations between sovereign states, notwithstanding Hobbes' own contrary thoughts on the matter of relations between states. Locke's state of nature, by contrast, shows up in IR liberals' account of the international system as primarily characterized by a global commitment problem; individuals for Locke, and states for IR liberals, are rational enough entities to adhere to their contractual agreements unprompted as long as they benefit from those agreements, and problems only arise when benefits are unclear or the terms of the contract itself has to be adjudicated.

I could go on elucidating the parallel, but the point is that Hobbes and Locke have some claim to being included on an IR theory syllabus because of this (mis)appropriation of their thought by contemporary IR scholars. Rousseau is another case, since as far as I know no one uses Rousseau's account of the state of nature to describe the international system; even Alex Wendt's tripartite updating of views of the international system uses Kant, not Rousseau, as the alternative to Hobbes and Locke. So what are we to make of poor Rousseau, with his concerns about popular sovereignty and the problem of how to preserve the natural liberty of individuals under conditions of modern social life?

Imagine my surprise, then, when this month's chosen article for our faculty-and-PhD-student IR theory reading group here on campus -- the lead article in the 2009 issue of International Organization, co-authored by none other than chart-topping influential scholar of IR Robert O. Keohane -- turned out to contain precisely the kind of reflection that would have been strengthened by a dose of Rousseau. I say "would have been" because, sadly, Rousseau is nowhere in evidence in the piece. Instead, we are treated to a somewhat stilted conceptual discussion about aspects of democracy, a discussion which then abruptly turns into a set of testable hypotheses about the correlation between the public's attentiveness to an issue and the extent to which the issue is governed by a multilateral international organization. The problem here is that these two tasks -- philosophical reflection on the character of democracy and the testing of hypothetical claims about how an issue-area is governed globally -- have basically nothing to do with one another. This makes it doubly odd that Rousseau doesn't show up, since Rousseau is very clear on the difference between an exercise in philosophical legitimation and a concrete, empirical study of some specific issue or society. Keohane to the contrary, whether some institution is democratic or not is not an empirical question, and no amount of empirical research will even in principle put an end to the philosophical question of whether some institution is democratic or not. Rousseau knew this; it's too bad that Keohane, and most of the rest of the IR field, has forgotten it.

The central puzzle in the IO article concerns what is sometimes called the "democratic deficit" displayed by international organizations. Unlike a state government, the traditional argument runs, which is directly accountable to their public and which can be directly influenced by the public's actions, international organizations are distant from the public and for the most part insulated from popular agitation. The people can't vote on what the IMF or the WTO or various organs of the UN do, which makes those institutions look "undemocratic" if by democratic we mean repsponsive to the people's moment-to-moment express wishes. Keohane and his co-authors argue that participation is actually only one component of democracy, and that participation is not even the most important component; combating special interests, protection minority rights, and encouraging collective deliberation are, if anything, more important components of democratic practice. They call this "constitutional democracy," and suggest that the basic idea is that popular rule can be enhanced by "complex procedural requirements" (p. 9). They are obviously not the first to suggest this, and James Madison shows up fairly often in the piece, along with more modern constitutional liberals like Robert Dahl or E. E. Schattschneider. The novelty here is extending the argument beyond the boundaries of the sovereign territorial state, and suggesting that multilateral international organizations, although relatively immunized from direct popular participation, can be likewise constitutionally democratic.

Here's the first place where Rousseau might have been helpful. On p. 15, the authors make the following rather convoluted series of claims:

While constitutional democracy in our conception emphatically does not imply that the government should act as the majority prefers at any given time (that is, it is not government by poll or plebiscite) the essence of democracy is that in the long run, after due deliberation, the people rule. It would therefore be undemocratic for an elite multilateral institution, cosmopolitan and working in what its members considered the good of all, to override repeated demonstrations of informed, rights-regarding, fairly represented popular will. This would be benign technocracy, perhaps, but not democracy.

What is convoluted here is that the authors seem to lack a solid grounding for the argument that something insulated from direct public participation can nonetheless represent rule by the people; as a result, they have to blur the boundaries by suggesting that an institution can prove its democratic character by being responsive, at least in the long run, to what the people claim to want. But this, in turn, means that the only difference between a constitutional institution and a regular one is that the constitutional institution is somewhat slower to respond -- and the qualitative distinction between constitutional democracy and participatory democracy collapses. One might easily imagine any given popular movement calling for greater "democracy" when facing a multilateral international organization, being told that the organization is looking after long-run interests, and replying by simply insisting that the timeline be accelerated and the institution conform to the public expression of its will in the moment, because there is no significant or fundamental difference between responding to the people's declared wishes now or in a few months/years. And Keohane and his coauthors explicitly reject the argument that it is sufficient for an organization to be acting in the people's actual interests even if the people don't know what those interests are; democracy, it appears, can mean nothing but doing what the people say that they want.

Enter Rousseau, who famously distinguishes between the sovereign and the government: the sovereign is the people assembled as a whole, whereas the government is what the sovereign establishes in order to handle day-to-day business. The sovereign, so to speak, only acts constitutionally, establishing the rules of the game and the parameters for governing; actual ruling is carried out by the government, which has to remain within the parameters established by the sovereign (which speaks with the General Will as opposed to any particular interest -- indeed, as opposed to the "will of all," i.e. what everyone says that they want at any given moment). The government derives its mandate and its authority from the act of collective, or general, will, and what makes it "democratic" is not whether it is at all responsive to the people at any given moment, but whether it is adhering to the constitutional mandate that it was given at the outset. If the people want to re-do that mandate, Rousseau suggests, all they have to do is to assemble as the sovereign, and the government automatically disbands because its jurisdiction ceases; then the sovereign can establish a new constitution and government, complete with "censorial tribunals" and other mechanisms designed to prevent the government from getting too far away from the constitution.

My point here is not that Rousseau is necessarily correct about any of this. In particular, there is a key ambiguity involving how one ascertains whether an expression of will is truly general and hence constitutional, as well as a particularly thorny problem involving the relationship of a general will to standards established by other groups of people or to claims about universally valid norms. Instead, my point is that introducing Rousseau into the discussion would help to clarify the issues involved -- if the authority of a multilateral international organization can be traced to a constitutional document or expression of a general will, that puts a different spin on the whole debate. But no Rousseau in the article means no considerations of this sort, so we are left with a bit of a conceptual muddle.

The other thing that Rousseau does for the discussion is that he makes it clear that discussions about democratic legitimacy are philosophical discussions, not empirical ones. It is clearly not a realistic expectation that a government would disband simply because the people showed up as a unit and told it to disband; that said, Rousseau's point is not that this is a feasible empirical scenario, but that the jurisdiction of the government ceases when the people assemble as the sovereign -- if it remains in power, it does so by sheer force of arms, deprived of the legitimacy it enjoyed when it was operating under a popular constitution. Rousseau is not operating in the sphere of empirical facts, but in the sphere of moral principles, which is where a discussion about democratic legitimacy ought to be carried out. This is because when one boils it down, principles like "rights" and "authority" are something other than merely empirical objects. The validity of a claim to authority depends not on the simple claim itself (or, parenthetically, even on whether the claim is accepted; we can easily imagine a claim being accepted even though it is not, strictly speaking, morally correct -- and it doesn't matter which system of morality one uses to evaluate that correctness), but on whether the claim is defensible within some moral frame of reference. Whether a government is legitimate and whether a government behaves in some particular way are different kinds of issues, and Rousseau -- like most political philosophers -- troubles himself with questions of legitimacy, leaving questions of behavior for others.

Not so Keohane and his coauthors. After their conceptual discussion, which takes up most of the length of the article, they proceed to elucidate an empirical research agenda characterized by observable implications and testable hypotheses:

In areas of the highest priority to the public, where relevant publics are very highly organized and attentive, multilateralism will tend to be subject to more directly participatory democracy, whereas where publics are less organized and attentive, nonparticipatory mechanisms will be used.

Ignore for a moment that this formulation is basically tautological, unless there were some way to determine the public's priorities without observing how they act in various issue-areas. And ignore the fact that this formulation shifts the focus away from whether an organization immunized from public participation is democratic to how particular issue-areas are governed by the public, and in so doing basically presumes away the entire animating question of the first two-thirds of the article (since "the public" is governing the issue-area in either case, by this definition). The most profound problem here is that this hypothetical proposition has nothing, diddly-squat, nada to do with the conceptual discussion that preceded it. The empirical proposition that publics act on their interests, and that those interests can be correlated with particular kinds of organizational outcomes and arrangements, is completely separate from the conceptual question of whether a nonparticipatory organization can be a democratic organization. One simply doesn't matter to the other, because they operate in different conceptual spheres: whether something is democratic is a moral or philosophical (or political) question, while the effect of a certain kind and degree of public attentiveness on how an issue-area is governed is an empirical or causal (or scientific) question. Neither has any implications whatsoever for the other.

Now, it is of course always possible to claim that because democracy means being attentive to the (to steal a phrase from Madison) "permanent and aggregate interests of the community," we can ascertain whether an institution is democratic by determining whether it upholds those interests. (The authors reject that option.) Or we could claim that democracy means responsiveness to the people's will in the long term, and see whether an institution was democratic by determining whether it was in the long term repsonsive to the will of the people over whom it governs. But neither of these operations would settle the question of what democracy means, or whether an institution is democratic in some global or universal sense. Regardless of the results of any given empirical assessment of an institution, someone else could come in with a different definition of "democracy" and demonstrate that according to that definition, the institution either was or was not democratic. Empirical measures can't resolve the debate unless we have prior agreement on the relevant conceptual standards; hence, empirical tests of hypotheses, or empirical traces of process, can't tell us whether constitutional democracy is "actually" democracy -- which is what the article seems to suggest. Rather, political philosophy inhabits its own sphere, separate from empirical controversies about how things factually hang together.

Just to be clear: what bothers me in the article is the fact that the authors appear to be trying to assimilate philosophical investigation/discussion to empirical research. It does not, however, follow that I think that philosophical discussion can actually resolve the question of what "democracy" is; I actually don't think that it can, and I would rather characterize any discussion of "democracy" as a political discussion, and any resolution to that discussion as a contingent political settlement. But that's a separate issue. My point for the moment is that I don't think that Keohane and his coauthors can actually do what they are setting out to do, which is to resolve a philosophical controversy with empirical data. And when the lead article in the most important journal in our field, co-authored by the most influential person in our field, promulgates this kind of methodological confusion, I feel that it merits an extended response. In the end, you just can't get there from here; the best way to get where they want to go is not to start where they start, and not to imagine that empirical social science can do things that it simply cannot, constitutively, do.

More on cats

Just to follow up on Charli's post: if for some reason, you're not one of the millions who have already seen "An Engineer's Guide to Cats," please rectify that now.

And the sequel:

Following the theme of Animal Posting...

I swore I'd never catch the whole "Friday cat blogging" meme, and this won't be a regular thing, but I just have to wish everyone a happy "Leave Your Cat at Home Day." Founded in response to "Bring your Kid to Work Day" and "Bring your Dog to Work Day," ("Kids and D*gs have their own day - they go
to work! Now cats have their own day - are they going to go to work?
Of course not!" ), this holiday celebrates the spirit of cats, and asks us to "admire the way cats have arranged the world":

"Everyone has to go to work – grown-ups, kids and those other unspeakable creatures who sit on command and beg for treats – while cats get to relax in luxury at home. Celebrate this special day with your cats by lavishing them with gifts and lots of extra pampering. Be sure to honor your cats with the Chant of the Day©. Visit the rest of this website for celebration ideas and make up some of your own."

OK, back to work now. Me, that is.

UPDATE: Cute photo of Mr. Precious Perfect below the fold.

Monkeys do not make good pets (or you're no man in a yellow hat)

After the Animal Revolution, monkeys will take revenge on us for attempting to domesticate them. Monkeys do not make good pets. There are very sensible arguments for this--Hilzoy makes them most eloquently--and there are the times when it is self-evident that one must be a bit crazy to keep a monkey as a pet:

On one occasion, they got in a wrestling match, and Higgins [the baboon] put one of his “steel-like fingernails” through Bob’s scrotum....

Bob has been bitten several times by Higgins, who now weighs 50 pounds and has large incisors. Once, when Bob was leading him from an outdoor enclosure back to his cage in the house, Higgins exploded and the two got into a battle so ferocious that despite the steel mesh glove Bob was wearing, he screamed for Carlie to get his .22 rifle and put a bullet in Higgins’s head. She got Higgins a slice of raisin bread instead, quickly defusing the fight.

Personally, I blame the discursive representations of Monkeys and Chimps as appropriate in-house pets. The biggest culprit here is H. A. Rey and Curious George. Unfortunately, too many contemporary Monkey as Pet people misread Rey (1941). While current literature--particularly the "New Adventure" school--tends to portray George as a lovable, curious 4-year old (cf Vipa Interactive, 1999) they have overlooked the warnings of Monkey-As-Pet deep in the text of Rey's original work.

The New Adventures approach silences the narrative of oppressive Man in Yellow Hat and George's simian rebellion. Recall that Yellow Hat abducts George from Africa in a yellow sack, echoing the colonial practices of the times. On the ship back to the big city, George, after an attempted escape re-narrated as an attempt to fly like a seagull, is disciplined into a Stockholm-syndrome like relationship with the Man in the Yellow Hat, now his "friend." This friendship includes taking George home, giving him a pipe to smoke after dinner, and then putting him to bed. George's rebellion of calling the fire department, results in discipline and punishment by the state, as George is sent to prison. He escapes prison by walking on telephone wires, and holding onto balloons. The recidivist George is finally directed to the zoo, where he can become a spectacle for passers-by.

As generations have grown up with the innocuous images of George, they too think that monkeys might make good pets. This is not the case. Monkeys cause trouble. George is always in trouble, and clearly present in all of Rey's work is the Man with the Yellow Hat paying for all of George's destruction, mayhem, and misplaced curiosity. Perhaps if such an intervention was attempted earlier, we might not have these tragic incidents of people thinking it would be a good idea to take a monkey home as a pet.


*in the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that my 2-year old son is completely enamored with Curious George, and we probably read him 5-10 curious George stories a day. Right now, he's in a "George Cow" phase.

Tortured Rhetoric

President Obama said a lot of important things tonight, but he also regurgitated a disturbing Bushism or two.*

One of these is the term "America does not torture."

Stated in this particular way, an indisputible statement of principle is conflated with and therefore masquerades as an empirical "fact," one which is blatantly untrue. This trope was one of the Bush Administration's many brilliant inventions, and was designed as a public relations counter-response to growing acknowledgement that US military and intelligence personnel not only had tortured detainees, but had in fact been ordered to do so.

In the context of some other disturbing continuities between Bush Administration policies and Obama's policy so far, this worries me. It should also worry Obama's advisors: these kinds of rhetorical not to mention policy non-changes are precisely the type of behavior that will undermine Obama's effort to reengage the international community in the wake of Bush-era unilateralism. Why? Because these particular issues are so closely emotionally associated with Bush-era unilateralism. If there is any sense in Obama's decision to retain a policy of extraordinary rendition (and I can't see any), there is certainly no sense in the decision to draw attention and umbrage to it by failing to at least change the rhetoric.

One of the most interesting conversations I had at ISA was about the Geneva Conventions. I had suggested in The National Interest last year that the Bush Administration and the human rights community work together toward an Additional Protocol to clarify the law, and my colleague asked whether I thought this advice still applied after the transition.

I would say it is even more relevant now. The Bush White House flaunted multilateral institutions like the torture regime because Bush's policy was to flout multilateralism. Obama can't continue that course - simply reinterpreting and then violating the law - while claiming to embrace multilateralism. But what he could do is lead a multilateral effort to clarify the law. An effort framed in good faith by a skillful and (as yet) largely untarnished leader like Obama could unite both the human rights community and those concerned about how to apply the laws in an era of asymmetric warfare. It could resolve some of the interpretive problems as a community. Obama should shift course and lead this movement before the opportunity is squandered as the US once again instead becomes its target.


*I mean, how it within his perogative or power to "not allow people to plot against America"? What does that mean as a basis for one's foreign policy?

Zombie scale?

Abi Southerland on the current popularity of Zombies:

I mentioned this puzzle to my better half, who happens to be in the middle of a reread of World War Z. His answer? ... You can have a fascinating story about a single zombie in a world of humans or the last human in a world of zombies. You can do one on one human-zombie interactions, or set entire armies against each other. They work differently as individuals (stupid and clumsy) and in crowds (lucky by means of what sheer numbers can do with probability theory). A group of them is as impersonal as a natural disaster; a single one is as intimate as death or betrayal.

Um. Maybe.

I suspect that, like most social phenomena, we're in the realm of complex causation. There isn't one reason for the popularity of the Zombie Apocalypse. Instead, we have a convergence of many reinforcing factors.

1. Over the last 10-15 years we've seen a number of different, but independently successful, Zombie-themed cultural artifacts. Just take two examples: we've had a generation (at least) of gamers cut their teeth on the Resident Evil franchise. 28 Days Later made a lot of money--and significant cultural impact--back in 2002. Both of these saw success for qualities not at all intrinsic to their Zombie elements, but related to their quality as games or as film.

2. Note I say "Zombie-esque." Neither Resident Evil nor 28 Days Later dealt with "traditional" Zombies. The Zombies in both are the consequences of contagion unleashed by biomedical experiments. In fact, most contemporary Zombie fare--going back at least to George Romero's genre-defining work--takes a similar line. While there have been attempts to update Vampire mythology the same way--with Vampyrism as a virus--I don't think such attempts have really worked. The nature of the transformation seems less plausible; the contrast with fears of mass contagion and biotechnological catastrophe somewhat shallow.

3. Indeed, Zombies aren't scalable so much in size but in terms of representation. Vampires are basically about sex, sex, and sex: "scary" female sexuality, "scary" eastern sexuality, coming of age, defilement and corruption, etc. Even the "good vampire" genre is basically about sex. You know: some powerful guy proving his love by restraining his natural urges and refusing to take the heroine's virginity blood, even when the heroine has no such self control and would willingly surrender to him. I'm surprised Twilight didn't get an grant from the Bush Administration.

Now, Barbara Hambly did once try to use vampirism to riff on nationalism and World War I, but Zombies will always beat Vampires as metaphors for nationalism. Indeed, as Romero himself proved, one can represent anything involving contagion (natural or mimetic), loss of individuality, or consumption with Zombies. And that covers a lot of ground.

4. Zombies are meta. Yes, of course, we all know about Shaun of the Dead, but Zombies have been ironic ever since they first appeared in US popular culture. Vampires just don't work as objects of the funny-but-still-kinda-scary sort (except, perhaps, in Joss Weedon's hands). Subject the Vampire mythology to too much scrutiny, however, and collapses under its own quasi-pornographic weight.

[update: I neglected vampirism as "drug abuse," but I suspect that the The Lost Boys probably proves my point about the limited ways one can successfully use vampires as allegory]

Think of Bill in Left4Dead ("You call this a zombie apocalypse? This ain't nothin' compared to the zombie attacks of 1954!") or Alyx Vance in Half-Life 2, Episode 1 ("A Combine zombie. Zombie Combine. That's, that's like a... ah... a Zombine! Right? Heh").



Ultimately, though, the real issue isn't "Vampires versus Zombies" (although I think I smell a... oh wait, google says it's been done) but why we're seeing a wave of interest in metaphorically-laden supernatural thingies.

I would have attributed to the economy--kinda like punk's big breakout in the US during the early 1990s--but it started before then. 9/11? Harry Potter as gateway drug? What do you think?

Realism and the Great Balance of Power Debate

One of the panels I attended at ISA was a roundtable on Stephen Brooks' and William Wohlforth's excellent new book, World Out of Balance: International Relations and the Challenge of American Primacy. The participants did an outstanding job of discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the piece, but it was a point made both by Charles Glaser (soon to be of George Washington University) and Randall Schweller that got at the crux of a larger problem with the last six years of debate about balance-of-power theory.

In essence, the debate looks like this: "France and Germany opposed the invasion of Iraq, but they're not preparing for a possible war with the United States. Oh noes! How can we salvage balance-of-power theory?"

Whether one opposed or supported the Bush Administration's conduct of foreign policy, it can hardly be said that they sufficiently embraced unilateralism and diplomatic ineptitude to transform the United States into an existential threat to most of the second-tier powers of the world. On the other hand, both the Russians and Chinese have engaged in some degree of balancing. It just isn't the case that most balancing looks like the Anglo-German naval arms race.

None of this should imply my endorsement of the current health of balance-of-power theory. I just think the problems largely lie elsewhere in time and space.

The foolishness of crowds

John Dickerson asks "Is it Obama's Fault the Dow Is Tanking?" and provides "yes" and "no" talking points. Josh Marshall thinks the answer is no:

I was just watching Chris Matthews explaining how the Dow is President Obama's "scoreboard" and how people are going to start getting angry at him soon if he's not able to get the Dow to stabilized and start going up soon... There does seem to be a certain lack of comprehension of the fact that there are economic realities, actual losses, underlying the steep stock market decline.

I don't watch much any cable news these days, yet I can guess that some number of talking heads are nattering on about how "the market" is passing judgment on Obama's plans, and finding them wanting.

What I want to know is: why we should care? Of course I don't like seeing my last ten years of savings getting hammered; I'd be rather pleased, in fact, if the stock market rallied for a very long time. But shouldn't it be pretty obvious by now that the collective judgment of "the market" isn't worth sh*t?

I'd hoped that at least one positive externality of the implosion of our financial system would be an end to all the blather about how we should look to Wall Street's group mind for useful assessments of just about anything, let alone the best way to clean up the mess it made for us. After all, these are the same people who watch CNBC and think "moral hazard" means spending money on people making less than $250K a year.

Philosophy of science in a nutshell

From the department of shameless self-promotion and linking to one's colleagues: here's a little scholarly op-ed I wrote for the good folks over at e-ir. Nice site they have there, and they read Duck, making them people of taste and discernment besides.

The op-ed is titled "What the Philosophy of Science is Not Good For."

More ISA reflections: Technology, IR, and the study of IR

To continue the theme of ISA follow-up, I wanted to mix in a few observations about the way the massive technical shift of stuff like Web 2.0 seems to be changing that which we study, how we study it, and how we conceive of what it means to study what we study. Of all, it feels as if our professional norms of what it means to study IR and how we ought to do so are the most lagging.

I attended several panels on discourse analysis. One panel focused on the study of images as discourse and featured two innovative graduate student papers investigating the discourse of photographs of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. The two papers revealed just how powerful these images have been world-wide, impacting the understanding of the US occupation of Iraq and War on Terrorism. Gitmo, in part, has become such a powerful international symbol because of the images the world has seen of prisoners there. As a field, we have historically focused on discourse as text, privileging the primary discourses of speeches and archival records. As a discipline, we ask researchers to publish papers and present without access to LCD displays. The presenter of the Gitmo paper managed to put up some color overheads, which made her presentation significantly more effective. And my question to them was--why are you writing a paper about pictures?

It would seem to me that there is room in the field for us to innovate beyond the 10,000 word journal article and engage the Web and digital media. James DerDerian, who was discussant on one of these panels, is doing some remarkable work with documentary film. The two papers on images would be so much more powerful as multi-media enterprises but the field has no way to recognize that. And, ISA has no way to present that to a panel.

I was at another panel on Diplomacy (also with DerDerian...). Of note there was the way in which the military, especially in the US, is taking over traditional diplomacy. Counter-insurgency operations only serve to magnify this trend. And yet, I asked, why is it that the pragmatism of the military is willing to embrace these new forms of diplomacy while diplomacy looks so much as it did 30 years ago? Of all the agencies within the US government, the Pentagon is far and away the most innovative in using information technology resources. Imagine the State Department embedding journalists in the 6 party talks. Imagine the State Department's public diplomacy program with the resources of the Pentagon's information operations. Imagine the State Department with a website filled with cool photos like any of the .mil sites. Imagine a first-person interactive negotiating game on the state department's website (like the Army's first person shooter games).

Information technology is changing the stuff that we study. Information technology is changing the way we conduct our craft. And yet, some institutions seem slow to catch up. Alas, our own profession seems to be one of them.

For crying out loud, how hard would it be for ISA to just buy some wireless access for everyone already!!!

And, for crying out loud, how hard would it be to get a truly transformational diplomacy?

Meteoric causation

One of the most memorable sets of interactions I had at this year's ISA conference came directly after the close of our impossibly-well-attended graveyard-shift panel on "The Relational Turn in the Study of World Politics." (I say "impossibly-well-attended graveyard-shift" because it was in fact scheduled in the very last session of the entire conference, 4:15pm Wednesday afternoon; I and the other participants, including Dan, expected to outnumber the audience-members and were quite prepared to adjourn the panel to the bar. Instead, there were 64 people in the audience.) The panel was a deeply odd occasion for me in a number of ways, especially since I had the unenviable task of channeling our absent and very famous discussant -- Alex Wendt -- by reading aloud his written comments on the papers and the project. If you've never had the experience of reading aloud someone else's sympathetic-yet-critical comments on a project that you've been involved with for years, and reading them aloud before a room full of your peers and colleagues . . . well, let's just say that it's tremendously odd to find yourself mouthing someone else's words and having to forcibly restrain yourself from responding to the very comments "you" are making.

But enough about that for now. What I want to talk about instead is the interesting question asked of us by an Italian graduate student studying at the Sorbonne (if you're reading this, do get in touch so I can add in your name -- we were both out of business cards by that point in the conference so I cannot recall his name). The topic of conversation had by that point shifted to the problem of whether there were causal factors of interest to IR scholars that could not be captured by a focus on networks and processes of social relation/transaction -- in other words, whether we needed to make a space for non-social factors in our analyses of the social world. His example was a meteor crashing into the earth, which he posited was clearly a non-relational factor: a meteor is clearly exogenous to all possible social networks, and its impact with the earth cannot be explained in terms of processes of social transaction. I replied that even a meteor's impact would have to be socially mediated in order for it to assert causal effects on the social world; the physical impact needed to be made meaningful in order for the meteor to have any social impact, and that process of making-meaningful couldn't be reduced to the physical act of the meteoroid hitting the planet. Hence, relational analysis could deal with even a meteor impact.

The questioner was not fully satisfied, and we started chatting after the panel. He tendered the following claim: the 1908 meteor impact in Siberia caused the next several winters to be harsher; those harsh winters contributed both to the demoralization of the Russian military; and hence the meteor caused a social outcome (the Russian Revolution, and hence the outcome of the First World War) without the mediation of social relations -- much like, he claimed, the AIDS virus and global warming, both of which exerted effects whether anyone noticed them or not. If true, this claim would present a bit of a challenge to relational social theory, since it would appear to affirm the importance of essential physical dispositions in the face of social arrangements, and even to discount those social arrangements to a large extent.

Fortunately for relational theorists, I think that the questioner's challenge is relatively easily met. I offer the following three points -- basically the same three points I made in conversation with the questioner -- in reply, in the hopes that some of our readers might find them of interest.

1) the purely physical causal claim is rather tenuous to begin with. Scientists have been investigating the 1908 event -- usually called the Tunguska event -- for almost a century, and the results remain somewhat inconclusive. The basic problem is that there are no pieces of the meteorite that one would normally expect to find at the site of such a collision between an extraterrestrial object and the earth. Nor is there any obvious impact crater to be found at the site of the blast, and debate continues as to whether Lake Cheko could in fact be that crater. So although scientists generally agree that the explosion was caused by some kind of collision with an extraterrestrial object, it remains unknown whether that object was an asteroid, a comet, a small black hole, or whatever (although most contemporary scientists say asteroid or comet; gone are the days when anyone reputably claimed that this event involved an alien spacecraft, except in various fictional works). So we still don't quite know what the event itself was.

Regardless, scientists are also still debating precisely what the effects of the Tunguska event were. The questioner's claim about harsh winters, though sounding plausible at first, does not seem to be echoed by any of the published research on the event; there are some claims that global warming might have been kick-started by the Tunguska event, and also some evidence that the event produced some cooling (about 0.3 degrees C) in the Northern Hemisphere relative to the Southern Hemisphere -- but "volcanic activity during this period also contributed to the cooling." So the physical effects of the meteor collision, if meteor it was, remain ambiguous.

2) but grant the meteor's posited effects for a moment. Even if the meteor impact made things a bit colder, it does not necessarily follow that the meteor impact is somehow responsible for everything that came after that minor decrease in temperature. For one thing, the estimated decrease in temperature is so small -- 0.3 degrees C! -- that it probably wouldn't even be noticed in the middle of a Russian winter. So in order to argue that this drop in temperature actually caused anything, one would have to somehow establish that dropping 0.3 degrees C crossed some kind of threshold from the ordinary "really fracking cold" series of Russian winters to an extraordinary "so fracking cold that we feel like having a social revolution" series of Russian winters. For another thing, we have to keep in mind that extremely cold and harsh winters are not exactly unknown in that part of the world; there is, after all, a famous old saying about how Russia is protected by General Winter and General Snow, and there are numerous other anecdotes that reflect that basic fact that it's always harsh and bitter during the winters in Russia. Nonetheless, people have adapted to living there, which suggests that extreme cold is survivable given the proper preparations -- in other words, that it's impossible to reduce "the Russian winter" to a set of physical constraints without also focusing on the survival strategies that people have adopted in order to get through them.

Indeed, we can push this point a bit further. What makes the Russian winter so devastating for invading armies from the west is, I would posit, the lack of preparation for and familiarity with the local conditions that those armies bring along with them. Similarly, what makes the Russian winter manageable for those who live there are their coping strategies. Put together, these observations strongly suggest the inseparability of "the Russian winter" from a whole panoply of social arrangements and practices surrounding and reacting to a set of environmental conditions. Hence, as social studies of science have been telling us for years, it makes little sense to try to isolate the "social" versus the "non-social" aspects of a phenomenon, since what we have in practice is a complex tangle -- Andrew Pickering calls it a "mangle" -- of various aspects. Sorting through these aspects is both pointless and practically impossible.

3) but further, grant even that we could determine that the 1908 meteor impact has certain environmental effects that could be traced definitively in purely physical terms. The problem that we run into at this point is that to say that these temperature fluctuations caused the Russian Revolution is to imply that absent these temperature fluctuations the Russian Revolution would not have occurred. Such a counterfactual is, however, rather implausible, since the other things that scholars conventionally think of as having produced the Russian Revolution would operate completely irrespective of whether the temperature was a bit colder. That other combination of factors -- virtually all of which are clearly more social than not, such as governmental oppression and economic dislocation -- is, as Max Weber might put it, "adequate" to cause the outcome. In fact, Weber's procedure is instructive here: if we can imagine a scenario in which some causal factor changes but the outcome does not, then that factor probably isn't all that important to the overall causal account. Conversely, if we can't imagine things going the way that they did without that factor, then it's probably important. We can easily imagine the Russian Revolution with a series of colder or warmer winters, so that's probably not all that important; we can't imagine the Russian Revolution without, say, the economic problems that led to food shortages, or the leadership of someone like Lenin, so those are probably important.

Note the importance of "imagination" here; Weber is very clear that the only way that we determine whether something mattered is to test the limits of our ability to conceptualize a plausible alternative without it, and that is simultaneously a comment on the event and on our present-day cultural resources that we use to grasp the event. But this is not a problem for Weber, since social science for him is not about grasping how things "really are" (whatever that means) but instead about the analytical ordering of experience -- both our experience and the experience of the people that we are studying. Imagining a counterfactual scenario is a good way to do this.

Note also that the argument I've sketched here stands up even if the 1908 meteor impact did alter the temperature. Because of the mediation of physical facts by social practices -- because of the ways that physical facts have to be made meaningful in order to exert social causation -- whether the meteor impact changed the temperature is, strictly speaking, irrelevant. That fluctuation would have to be made meaningful in order for it to matter, and social relations would remain implicated in any such process. And while it's even possible that the temperature fluctuation did exist and was made socially meaningful (people commented on it, etc.), the fact that we can easily imagine the outcome without it is a good sign that it probably wasn't all that important.

The only way around this would be to say that all social relations are reducible to non-social factors: that even the making-meaningful of temperature fluctuations has to do with biological facts about our species, and that we're basically assembled such that we find certain kinds of temperature fluctuations of interest. By the same token, the only way to make those fluctuations that (in such an account) we cannot help but notice cause a change in the way that a society is governed is to link governance practices to non-social factors, such that our noticing the temperature and being physically affected by it would have a necessary spill-over effect into how we think about the government. It's all or nothing: either social factors (including the making-meaningful of natural events) cause social outcomes, or the social is reducible to the natural. And you can't have it both ways. On those grounds, even if a meteor does crash into the earth and alter the climate, I will continue to insist on the analytical priority of social relations, as I did on the panel.

Some of What I Picked Up at ISA This Year

A series of short posts will follow with targeted reflections on what I learned at panels and dinners this past week, and how it ties into my take on world events. For now however, let me share a few random things I learned while attending this year’s International Studies Association Annual Meeting in Manhattan:

1) "Lead pencil shavings" is, according to some but not others, apparently a coveted flavor for modestly expensive Italian wine. Who would have thought.

2)...Edward James Olmos is licensed to perform marriages in the state of California; a triplicate chant of “so say we all” is apparently quite a good substitute for the traditional wedding march.

3) The View Restaurant on the roof of the Marriott Marquis is "the only revolving roof top restaurant in New York." And the Marriott Marquis proudly advertises this on a big sign by the elevators.

4) I am now in the market for an IPhone. This became glaringly obvious to me when, while drinking with my former doctoral students in a wireless cold-spot (that is, pretty much the entire Marriott if you weren’t one of those independently wealthy IR scholars), I noticed on the television across the bar that two nuclear submarines had "collided", and only by appealing to a nearby colleague’s IPhone could I determine whether or not to stay put or ditch the Dogfish Head and start immediately blogging. (My lack of posting during ISA should make it obvious what I decided. However, see Sam Leith's sardonic take on the whole "nuclear submarine fender-bender.")

5) I will not be acquiring many of the available IPhone applications. Any tool designed to convince me that I have a 27.9 percent chance of being killed by “wildlife” in the Harmony View pub in Times Square is… well.

6) The impact of Web 2.0 on the actual profession of IR is unmatched by the impact of Web 2.0 on our professional association’s logistical planning. For more, see Peter's post. Perhaps I should reconsider the article I was about to start cooking up with Dan Drezner about how Blogger and Facebook are changing everything in the discipline. It starts to seem a little silly throwing that idea out at a professional conference where you can barely obtain a Powerpoint projector.

7) A number of graduate students I met this year are apparently of the view that if they critique an established scholar’s writing, they need to apologize in advance, at least as long as they expect to be able to carry on a civil conversation with that scholar (me) over a drink. Let me disillusion all of this: engagement is flattery in academia, and part of our job is to include in our work a few targets for the next generation. Besides, if we can’t knock glasses at the end of the day with our epistemological adversaries, what fun is it to be surrounded by 4,000 political scientists?

8) In case this post leads any one to think that all I did at ISA is drink alcohol and geek out over gadgets and science fiction shows, let me assure you I imbibed a fair amount of coffee as well, and just to prove it check out this quote by Po Bronson, fresh off a $6 Starbucks cup:

“Failure is hard but success is harder. If you’re successful @ the wrong thing, the combination of money, praise and opportunity can lock you in forever.”

As I looked around at grad students hob-nobbing and junior professors like myself lurching from panel to lunch to coffee to workshop peddling our modest proposals, I began to hope that we’re all trying to succeed at the right thing, and wondering how we would know.

ISA not live blogging

Its been somewhat quiet around here for the past few days, as many of us are attending the annual meeting of the International Studies Association in New York. Internet access at the convention hotel is spotty--there is wireless available in the rooms and expansive main lobby but it costs something like $10-$15 / day, which is far more than any of us on limited travel budgets can afford, hence no live updates.

I think, though, that blogging and its complex relationship to the academy in our field may be turning a corner with this ISA. I was in a panel on "Waltz's World" which was one of those high-profile panels with big names in a large ballroom that was packed with participants eager to hear reflections on the 30th anniversary of the publication of what is perhaps the single most significant book in our field. In her introductory remarks, one of the panelists mentioned Herz and his contributions to the field, referencing Stephen Walt's recent comments that he's perhaps one of IR's underrated scholars.

Note the link there--that's right, its to Walt's blog. She revealed that 1) she reads (or read) his blog, 2) that she assumes we, the large audience, were also familiar with Walt's blog, and 3) that this is a meaningful way for us to hold some of our professional discussions.

In the "old days" the word on the street was don't let your department know you blog because you'll end up like Drezner and get denied tenure. Now it seems the conversation is a little different, as Drezner is doing just fine in his new job with his new blog, and a number of other blogs by IR scholars have surfaced offering a rich discussion of the substance of our field. We (and the others) have a nice blog-role of such sites. We (and others) do talk about fun stuff, offer commentary on current events, but we all also post research notes, insights from our scholarship, and reminders of what the theories and findings of our discipline say about unfolding international events.

Maybe fodder for an "innovative panel" in New Orleans....

(why the big to-do over Walt? Because he's Stephen Walt. Lots of people have been discussing his Valentine's Day post, everything from I thought it was cute to that just proves that the Feminists were right and realism is completely gendered. He's at Harvard. Origins of Alliances. And, he's got a 17 on influence and 8 on most interesting scholarship in the TRIPS report (pdf) which is to say he's a big deal in the field in a sabr-metric kind of way)

Stephen Walt on Valentines Day and IR

This post on Foreign Policy Blog is not to be missed! First couple of paragraphs:

"Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. As a public service, I would like to remind FP readers of the important insights that international relations theory can provide for people in love.

To begin with, any romantic partnership is essentially an alliance, and alliances are a core concept on international relations. Alliances bring many benefits to the members (or else why would we form them?) but as we also know, they sometimes reflect irrational passions and inevitably limit each member's autonomy. Many IR theorists believe that institutionalizing an alliance makes it more effective and enduring, but that’s also why making a relationship more formal is a significant step that needs to be carefully considered.

Of course, IR theorists have also warned that allies face the twin dangers of abandonment and entrapment: the more we fear that our partners might leave us in the lurch (abandonment), the more likely we are to let them drag us into obligations that we didn't originally foresee (entrapment). When you find yourself gamely attending your partner’s high school reunion or traveling to your in-laws for Thanksgiving dinner every single year, you’ll know what I mean."

It continues. Read the whole thing. Walt doesn't go so far as to say it, but in my view this vindicates decades of feminist IR theory arguing that our understanding of the international system is largely a metaphor built on family and gender relations. Given that, however (and given the complexity of gender roles and relations that Walt nods to in his last few paragraphs) I was surprised to see his argument in favor of bipolarity used as a defense of traditional monogamous partnerships. Does anything in perhaps the post-realist IR canon provide a roadmap for heatlthy, stable, alternative forms of inter(person)al relations as well?

Food for thought. Happy Valentine's Day!


Type rest of the post here

Alison Des Forges Dead in Buffalo Plane Crash

A light went out in the human rights movement last night with the crash of Flight 3407 near Buffalo, NY. I barely knew Alison Des Forges, but I share the collective grief of many of my colleagues in the human rights scholarly community and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and friends at Human Rights Watch and in the wider movement.

Alison was known for her pathbreaking work chronicling the Rwandan genocide, and was a tireless advocate for human rights around the globe through her work at Human Rights Watch. Her interview by Frontline on the 10th anniversary of the genocide is worth revisiting.

I am sitting at Union Station as I write this preparing to take the train to the International Studies Association Meeting in New York, so I have no time to do justice to this news. Instead, I respectfully refer you to a few heartfelt obituaries that have popped up in the last few hours since word went out, by people who knew her better than I did: here and here.

Meanwhile, I shall be holding her family, and the families of all those who perished with her, in the light.

Another year, another TRIP

The good folks of William and Mary have completed another TRIP survey of the field. Comments later. Link now (PDF).

Obama's NSC

I want to call attention to a WaPo article from Sunday on the emerging structure of Obama's national security council--it was front page, but largely lost among the coverage of the Stimulus package. Indeed, only Rozen really seems to have picked up on it. While largely an interview with new National Security Adviser James Jones about organizational charts and workflows, it nevertheless offers a substantial insight into the new Administration's ability to deal with foreign policy--both crises and long-term issues.

Students of foreign policy analysis focus on the decision-making process that Administrations use to make foreign policy. At the heart of that process is the NSC. Since the Kennedy Administration (remember Ex-Comm?), the NSC has largely taken over from the cabinet agencies as the President's main source for foreign policy management, planning, and coordination. Any introductory foreign policy course covers the evolution of the NSC (as Daalder and Destler do in the most recent Foreign Affairs), noting how the organization and function of the NSC reflect the President's decision-making style. JFK had a collegial group, Nixon a rigid hierarchy, Bush I an well organized coordinating system, and so on.

Jones tells the Post that:

President Obama plans to order a sweeping overhaul of the National Security Council, expanding its membership and increasing its authority to set strategy across a wide spectrum of international and domestic issues.

The result will be a "dramatically different" NSC from that of the Bush administration or any of its predecessors since the forum was established after World War II to advise the president on diplomatic and military matters, according to national security adviser James L. Jones, who described the changes in an interview. "The world that we live in has changed so dramatically in this decade that organizations that were created to meet a certain set of criteria no longer are terribly useful," he said.

A couple changes are worth pointing out.

1. Obama plans to radically alter membership. By law, the only standing members of the NSC are the President, VP, SecState, and SecDef. The CJCS is the military adviser and DNI intelligence advisor. By design, its a flexible structure, allowing the President to add members as he sees fit. Traditionally other agencies have attended as required--Justice, Treasury, etc. Jones plans to draw in members from across the executive branch, involving any agency relevant to an issue. In part, this reflects the increasing role that other agencies, from law enforcement to energy to agriculture play in foreign policy. The potential pay-off is greater coordination and a greater ability to focus the government's actions on a topic. The downside, of course, is that more people in the room always makes for a more difficult meeting.

2. Jones will assert greater control over access to the President and Presidential involvement in decision-making. Largely, this is a reaction to the Bush II NSC, where back-channels and unilateral action, especially among State, Defense, and the Vice President's office, undermined effective coordination. (Do note the comparison between Bush Administrations--largely composed of the same cast of characters. Bush I is widely regarded as having had a model NSC, while Bush II is widely regarded as having had a highly dysfunctional NSC).

3. He plans to re-draw agency maps. Yes, maps. Each department divides the world into region--State has its regional bureaus, DoD has its Unified Command Plan, and the NSC has its Senior Directors. These regional division, however, reflect Agency-specific needs and do not correspond in any way to each other. State's South Asia bureau includes Afghanistan and India, while in DoD, CENTCOM runs the show in Afghanistan while PACOM has jurisdiction over India. His goal is to have parallelism within agencies, creating peers who oversee policy with the same group of countries. It would certainly make it easier to know who to pick up the phone and call.

The point here is that, from a foreign policy analysis perspective, this stuff really matters. A significant chunk of foreign policy theory asserts that the decision-making process has a substantial influence in the quality of decision made, and thus effectiveness of US foreign policy.

The NSC is how Presidents do this. A functional NSC can provide the President with options, information, and advice to make the best possible decision when faced with a foreign policy choice. A functional NSC can make sure that government agencies work in concert to carry out the President's chosen course of action. A dysfunctional NSC process can rapidly reproduce its dysfunction across the government and embed itself within US foreign policy.

So, take note of Jone's comments, as his success in creating the working NSC structure he describes will be a sizable indicator of the Administration's ability to handle the myriad of critical foreign policy issues it faces.

Depleted Uranium Munitions: Emerging Norm, or Propagandist Overreach?

Arab states’ accusation that Israel used depleted uranium weapons in its recent attacks against Gaza, and Israel’s denial of this, raise an interesting question: is a customary norm against the use of depleted munitions* emerging? As scholars studying norm emergence, how would we know?

As far as I can ascertain it would not be illegal for Israel to have used such weapons, since there is no ban on DPU in international law, and since the suspected qualities of the weapons that would render them illegal if proven (widespread environmental damage and uncontrollable negative effects on civilians) have not been shown conclusively. Indeed, neither most governments nor leading human rights and humanitarian law organizations have concluded the DPU is a violation of humanitarian law. The ICRC has not commented on the issue since 2001, when a press release stated:

"Currently available scientific information provides evidence that the increase in levels of uranium is marginal in areas where depleted uranium munitions have been used, except at the points of impact of depleted uranium penetrators."

So this is not an issue around which mainstream human rights organizations are actively mobilizing.

A growing opposition to the use of DPU is clearly emerging in public opinion, however. A widespread transnational network of activists has emerged promoting a global ban on depleted uranium munitions, drawing members from the anti-war community, veterans groups, feminist peace groups, environmental movement, the anti-nuclear movement, and local NGOs in war-torn countries where DPU weapons have been deployed. This network of groups has lobbied the UN, EU and various member states to ban the use of such weapons. Some meager results so far: Belgium initiated a moratorium; and the UN First Committee has issued a resolution expressing concern over the possible health effects of DPU and encouraging the Secretary General and several specialized agencies to look into it.

None of this renders DPU illegal, and without a clear position on the issue by organizations such as the ICRC and Human Rights Watch, it is hard to imagine that momentum will develop to formally codify a ban against these munitions. If I read the tea leaves correctly there is not widespread support among humanitarian law mainstream for taking such a position in favor of a ban along the lines of landmines or cluster munitions.

This makes it that much more interesting, in my mind, that the use DPU is now being routinely cited by governments eager to accuse one another of misconduct, despite its current legality. Even more interesting is the compulsion to deny their use. Does this mean a norm against the weapons is emerging even in the absence of a formal treaty process? Or are there other ways to interpret this discourse?

*Depleted uranium is a by-product of nuclear enrichment processes increasingly used in armor-piercing incendiary projectiles to penetrate tanks, bunkers and personnel carriers; and by corollary, to harden tank armour against anti-material weapons. Its military utility is said to come from its particular density: depleted uranium munitions are both cheaper and more effective at penetrating armor than tungsten, the alternative. DPU has been used by the United States and Britain since approximately 1960 and is increasingly sought after by other militaries: China, France, Russia and Pakistan are among the countries now known to include DPU rounds in their arsenals. Whether Israel does or not is uncertain.

News flash: defections give dems filibuster-proof majority

You can't really blame the AP. It can be so hard to tell those DINOs and RINOs apart.

Alex Cooly on Manas

From an opinion-editorial in the International Herald Tribune:

The recent decision by President Kurmanbek Bakiyev of Kyrgyzstan to close the U.S. military base in the small Central Asian country should come as no surprise to Washington's new foreign policy team. Since its establishment in the fall of 2001, the U.S. air base at Manas has been founded upon the granting of narrow economic incentives to the host country - and not on the Kyrgyz Republic's commitment to the broader international campaign in Afghanistan.

What began as a relationship based on economics is about to end for financial reasons. Though the loss of Manas will deal a short-term blow to U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, staying is not worth the new Kyrgyz asking price.

Read the rest.

Rally from war to election?

The rally effect, where public opinion surges in favor of an incumbent government in the face of a foreign policy crisis or military action, is well documented in studies of US foreign policy. Similarly, diversionary theories of war posit that leaders will engage in military adventurism to distract a public from economic troubles or electoral difficulties.

Israel goes to the polls tomorrow. The recent Gaza war is front and center in the campaign. Barak and labor were poised to lose seats, and the conventional wisdom was that a good showing in Gaza could help Barak, Defense Minister, and bolster Labor's vote share. Same with Livni and Kadima, the current ruling party. And yet, the initial benefactor seemed to be Likud and Netanyahu--as a growing sector of Israeli public opinion seems to think that perhaps the war did not go far enough.

And yet, the most recent reports have seen the right wing (yet secular) party of Lieberman, Israel is our Home, as the real story, gaining seats at the expense of Likud and others. Governing Kadima and Labor don't seem to be making a significant showing, though the final results tomorrow will tell the full story.

This was not the first time that Israel has launched a military operation right before an election. In 1996, Shimon Peres launched an attack into Lebanon near the election, and subsequently lost to Netanyahu.

Does any of this suggest that these theories might not apply?

Scientifically the "middle course" is not truer even by a hair's breadth, than the most extreme party ideals of the right or left

Steven Mufson and Lori Montgomery report in The Washington Post:

Despite a growing sense of urgency, economists across the political spectrum continue to criticize the congressional stimulus plans. Most economists agree that the Senate alterations in the plan would undermine stimulus aims. Taxpayers who fall under the AMT are generally well-off enough to be able to save some of the tax cuts they receive, delaying any positive effect on the economy. By comparison, school aid to states would probably be spent immediately to prevent layoffs of teachers.

Let's hope the reconciliation process restores some sanity to the Senate bill.

Iran's Sputnik

Earlier this week, Iran put a satellite into space for the first time. The AP covered it on Wednesday, February 4:

The telecommunications satellite - called Omid, or hope, in Farsi - was launched late Monday after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave the order to proceed, according to a report on state radio. State television showed footage of what it said was the nighttime liftoff of the rocket carrying the satellite at an unidentified location in Iran.

At least unofficially, some experts within the U.S. government seem to be trying to play down the importance of this event -- comparing it without context to a Soviet launch more than 50 years ago:

A U.S. counterproliferation official confirmed the launch and suggested the technology was not sophisticated. Speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence-gathering, the official said it appeared it "isn't too far removed from Sputnik," the first Soviet orbiter launched in 1957.

However, as The New York Times reported, not everyone in the government dismisses the significance of this technological achievement:

In Washington, the State Department called the event worrisome. “Iran’s development of a space launch vehicle establishes the technical basis from which Iran could develop long-range ballistic missile systems,” said Robert A. Wood, a department spokesman.

At the White House, Robert Gibbs sounded fairly hawkish too.

My dissertation had a lengthy case study chapter on the U.S. reaction to Sputnik -- it was certainly not "ho-hum." At the time, U.S. security experts believed that a state that could put a satellite into space could probably launch a missile soon. Threat perceptions soared. Sputnik dominated the news for weeks. It was a VERY BIG DEAL.

Interestingly, in its story about the Iranian launch, Voice of America quoted an expert who makes the launch sound defensive:

"They want a nuclear weapon to defend their territory, defend their government. They live in a very tough neighborhood. They are surrounded by nuclear states - Russia, China, Pakistan, India. And, too, Israel and the United States," The Ploughshares Fund, President Joseph Cirincione explains.

However, Sam Sedaei at the Huffington Post seems to think the media overplayed the alleged threat signaled by Iran's satellite -- and he's not talking about the right-wing media. Sedaei criticizes the Times and The Guardian!

Despite this concern, I think the coverage was reasonably balanced and I applaud the Obama administration for exhibiting some concern without panic. As we all recall from the Iraq debate, there's more than one way for public officials and media to address this kind of stuff.

How do you say "Great Game" in Russian?

For some time now, NATO and Russia have engaged in on-again, off-again discussions about supplying Afghanistan via the Russian Federation. So consider this sequence of events:

1. An increasingly hard-currency strapped Kremlin offers Kyrgyzstan $2 billion in aid.
2. Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiev announces that he's expelling the US and NATO from Manas.
3. The Russians agree to give the US transit rights for non-military supplies headed for Afghanistan.

As the BBC reports:

Russia has long opposed the presence of American military forces in Central Asia, says the BBC's Richard Galpin in Moscow.

Russia says it has agreed to a request from the US to allow the transit of non-military Nato supplies across its soil, but says it is waiting for details of specific shipments before issuing permissions.

"As soon as that happens we will give the corresponding permission," said Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, quoted by Russian media.

For the US, the base closure comes at a critical moment, as the new administration of President Barack Obama plans a sharp increase in the number of American troops in Afghanistan.

For Russia, on the other hand, its closure would be a significant diplomatic victory as it seeks to reassert its influence in all former Soviet republics and beyond, analysts say.

Now, a cynic might see an additional motive for the Russians. If Russia became a key supply route for Afghanistan, that would certainly give Moscow some leverage over the US and NATO on a variety of other issues. At the very least, they get to play "the good guys" as part of their bid to de-ice US-Russian relations.

The advantage may not last, however.

The US is negotiating with both Tajikistan and Uzbekistan to acquire a replacement for Manas, and the BBC reports that a US-Uzbek deal may be very close.

Despite the K2 fiasco, in fact, a number of reports suggest increasingly low-level US-Uzbek cooperation prior to the last few days; one has to wonder if Islam Karimov might be concerned about the consequences of the Russians consolidating their position in Central Asia.

UPDATE: Patrick Barry got their first, and adds some stuff I didn't address about how this all relates to Georgia and the potential Georgia-Azerbaijan transit route.

It seems I need to start reading Democracy Arsenal again.

USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!

We're now only the THIRD most unpopular great power! We beat Russia and China!!!!

Now that I'm done quaffing celebratory beer and eating nachos, I should quote the article:

"Our poll results suggest that China has much to learn about winning hearts and minds in the world," said GlobeScan chairman Doug Miller.

"It seems that a successful Olympic Games has not been enough to offset other concerns that people have," he added, referring to the summer games hosted by Beijing in August 2008.

The poll also suggests that substantially more people now have a negative view of Russia's influence - 44% negative versus 31% positive - and that was before the recent disruption in Russian gas supplies to Europe. [...]

The US, for the first time since 2005, has surpassed Russia in positive ratings, with an average of 42% compared with 36% last year.

But it is still rated negatively by 42% of those polled, down from 46% in the 2008 poll.

Views of the US have improved in six countries, but attitudes towards it in Russia and China have grown more negative, while most people in Europe show little change.

"Though BBC polls have shown that most people around the world are hopeful that Barack Obama will improve US relations with the world, it is clear that his election alone is not enough to turn the tide," said Steven Kull, director of Pipa.

Indeed, some of the best work on anti-Americanism suggests that most hostility towards the US centers on its policies, not its "values." Let's hope we can put behind us disastrous fad for public-diplomacy-as-superficial-branding that marked the Bush years, and focus on adjusting US policies where appropriate, and doing a good job of explaining them when we can't.

It's About Time. (For Regime Change.)

Finally, a resolution to the four-month-old stand-off with the hijackers of the Faina off the coast of Somalia. NY Times reported today that the pirate crew will disembark from the Faina after some sum of money, paid by the ship owners, was air-dropped onboard:

"According to one of the pirates, the owners of the ship had paid the ransom; the pirates had counted the money; and now they were just waiting for nightfall to slip away from the ship.

The hijacking of the Ukrainian ship, called the Faina, stirred up fears of a new epoch of piracy and helped precipitate a rash of similar attacks off Somalia’s coast and an unprecedented naval response in return. Warships from China, India, Italy, Russia, France, the United States, Denmark, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Greece, Turkey, Britain and Germany have all joined the fight against the pirates, though the attacks have continued.

The pirates aboard the Faina would not reveal how much they had netted in ransom — originally they were asking for more than $20 million. According to businessmen on shore, the ransom was around $3 million and the money was dropped by parachute from a small plane, which seems to be the new way to deliver pirate booty. Last month, a huge Saudi oil tanker that had been hijacked was freed in a similar way."

You can look at this in two ways. One: as a triumph of diplomacy with no loss of life. Two: as an excruciatingly glacial policy response to an incident emblematic of a widespread human security problem afflicting civilian and commercial traffic on the high seas - a global governance failure which could be changed with a shift in priorities and some savvy institution building, if these could only be sparked off by a bit of political imagination.

I don't have concrete proposals, but I tend to see it through the latter lens. Four months? Surely this track record could be improved if governments took hostage taking at sea seriously as a human security problem. In fact, the protection and liberation of hostages was one of the 'human security problems' identified by respondents to my human security survey that has not attracted significant advocacy or global policy response.

In other words, this strikes me as an example of what Radoslav Dmitrov and his collaborators called a "non-regime" on p. 235 of their 2007 International Studies Review article: "a transnational public policy arena characterized by the absence of multilateral agreement for policy coordination."

I wonder how this might be changed. Readers are invited to submit their ideas: what concrete goals could human security activists push for in terms of mechanisms to protect and assist victims of high seas piracy?

Manas: the hands of fate? (Updated)

It remains unclear whether the Kyrgyz government really wants the US out of Manas or whether it wants to extract higher rents.

Rob Farley comments that the "United States has been paying considerable rent to use the airbase in question."

Yes and no. It can be too easy to focus merely on the size of sidepayments. In fact, that might be part of the problem.

Remember that the US doesn't officially pay rent for basing and access agreements. It just so happens that host countries get "unrelated" aid packages and foreign-policy perquisites. This isn't simply a normative issue; the US has strong incentives to reduce the transparency of the price it pays for bases in order to preclude upward pressure on host rent seeking. Keeping the true "value" of transfers and concessions opaque both makes it more difficult for hosts to calculate the true "market price" of the strategic package it offers, as well as gives US officials greater ability to deflect direct demands for higher rents.

Prior to the Tulip Revolution, the US was getting Manas on the cheap. In addition to some development assistance that was probably in the US interest anyway, the US negotiated some pocket-change (in relative terms) contracts with Kyrgyz elites to supply goods and services to US forces. As Alex Cooley wrote in 2006 (PDF):

The Manas base also offered critical material support to the Kyrgyz president and his political clients. The base constituted the biggest U.S. economic investment in Kyrgyzstan. From its first year, it contributed about $40 million annually to the small Kyrgyz economy and employed about 500 Kyrgyz nationals in a variety of positions.

The lion’s share of base-related funds flowed not to national agencies, however, but to private Kyrgyz entities closely tied to the ruling regime. The Manas International Airport, a technically independent company partly owned by Aydar Akayev, the president’s son, collected $2 million annually in lease payments, plus additional landing fees of $7,000 per takeoff. The airport company also was awarded most of the base-related service contracts. These revenues flowed directly to Manas Airport and were neither accounted for nor taxed by the Kyrgyz government.

However, the most lucrative source of base-related payments were fuel contracts, secured by the airport- affiliated Manas International Services Ltd. and another legally independent fuel company, Aalam Services Ltd., owned by Adil Toiganbayev, Akayev’s son-in-law. A New York Times investigative story revealed that out of a total of $207 million spent by the U.S. Department of Defense on fuel contracts during the Akayev era, Manas International Services received $87 million and Aalam Services received $32 million in subcontracts. The amounts and structure of these payments were kept opaque and were not reported in the Kyrgyz media. A subsequent investigation by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation uncovered that the Akayev clan had embezzled tens of millions of dollars of these base-related revenues through a network of offshore accounts.

Pentagon and State Department officials contend – and they are legally correct – that none of these payments or contracts clearly violated any U.S. laws or DOD tender procedures. But such claims do not change the fact that these payments played a highly
political role within the Kyrgyz political system. These base-related revenues supported the Akayev regime and its political clients, who regarded them as the unstated quid pro quo for granting basing rights to the United States and its coalition partners.

Commenting specifically on the adoption of the seemingly generous landing rights formula, former U.S. ambassador to Krygyzstan John O’Keefe suggested that the fees could have been avoided but were viewed by the U.S. side as an important economic inducement that would secure the Kyrgyz government’s commitment. Consequently, these private or selective incentives also served to “depoliticize” the base issue in Kyrgyz politics, as political parties, the Kyrgyz parliament, and the media neither publicized nor overtly criticized the terms of the basing agreement.

The problem came when the new government "opened" the terms of the US-Kyrgyz agreement and realized what was actually going on. They demanded an hundred-fold increase in rent. The ultimate agreement fell short of Kyrgyz expectations.

As I alluded to in my prior post, there are a couple of dynamics going on.

First, the Kremlin has never been particularly pleased with US influence in Central Asia (Russia has its own base in Kyrgyzstan). It looks like the Russian government decided to provide "exit options" to the Kyrgyz in the form of a significant offer of bilateral assistance. Even if that aid is unconditioned upon shutting down US operations at Manas, the Kremlin's decision to play Monty Hall still significantly shifts the balance of leverage in US-Kyrgyz negotiations towards the Kyrgyz. Indeed, I write about this dynamic in a forthcoming review essay on the state of balance-of-power theory.

Second, the US approach toward Manas, consistent with the so-called "lily pad" vision of the 2001 QDR (PDF), focused on creating a "light footprint" base with minimal social impact on the country. The idea is that doing so makes anti-basing sentiment less likely. In fact, such a posture only increases suspicions about US policy objectives, fails to avoid incidents of the kind that reduce the legitimacy of the US presence, and inhibits the process whereby US bases produce substantial local public goods.

Thus, while current US rents really are quite substantial given the size of the Kyrgyz economy, they come in a variety of side payments that fail to concretely tie the base to the prosperity of significant domestic constituencies. Under those circumstances, the dynamics of the relationship become merely about the size of the aggregate rents paid by the United States compared to public concerns over US activities, i.e., the least desirable frame for US negotiators.

For more, see another piece by Alex Cooley: "U.S. Bases and Democratization in Central Asia," Orbis. Vol. 52, No. 1 (Winter 2008), pp. 65-90 (PDF).

UPDATE: As I was arguing:

Bakiyev has been seeking more money from the United States for use of the air base, and the timing of his announcement seemed designed to highlights his nation's economic needs. Russia agreed to provide Kyrgyzstan with $2 billion in loans and $150 million in financial aid, and also to write off $180 million in debt and build a $1.7 billion hydropower plant.

U.S. payments to Kyrgyzstan currently total $150 million a year, of which about $63 million is rent for the Manas base. "We hope to continue those discussions because Manas is vitally important to our operations in Afghanistan," said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell. Morrell added, however, that "we can continue without it, obviously."

"There is obviously a long-term political dimension here that's in play vis-à-vis Moscow," a senior U.S. Central Command official said yesterday, with Kyrgyzstan "trying to play one bidder off the other. The United States is caught in the middle, seeing who is going to be the highest bidder. We don't know yet whether this is simply a card being played in the negotiating process or they are going to ask us to leave."

The Manas base is "pretty inexpensive from the U.S. point of view when you consider what it gives us in terms of access in the region," the official said. "I don't know what price the United States is willing to pay . . . but at the same time I don't know whether we're willing to be held hostage."

Image Source: Defense Update