There's Treasure Everywhere

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Desertification between the rivers

The Iraqi people have suffered tremendously this decade -- and are apparently suffering even more this summer. The LA Times is reporting today that Iraq's latest calamity is an "environmental catastrophe."

Decades of war and mismanagement, compounded by two years of drought, are wreaking havoc on Iraq's ecosystem, drying up riverbeds and marshes, turning arable land into desert, killing trees and plants, and generally transforming what was once the region's most fertile area into a wasteland.

Falling agricultural production means that Iraq, once a food exporter, will this year have to import nearly 80% of its food, spending money that is urgently needed for reconstruction projects.

"We're talking about something that's making the breadbasket of Iraq look like the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma in the early part of the 20th century," said Adam L. Silverman, a social scientist with the U.S. military who served south of Baghdad in 2008.

While most Americans probably think of Iraq as a desert, much of Iraq was previously known as Mesopotamia, which literally means "land between the rivers."

Indeed, the Iraqi area between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers used to feed much of the Middle East. No more.

[Iraq's] Agriculture Ministry estimates that 90% of the land is either desert or suffering from severe desertification, and that the remaining arable land is being eroded at the rate of 5% a year, said Fadhil Faraji, director-general of the ministry's Department for Combating Desertification.

Some of the environmental damage to Iraq was the fault of Saddam Hussein, and much of the damage has accrued over a 10 to 20 year period. That doesn't make the damage to Iraq's marshes, for example, any less devastating:

"We're talking about an area about the size of Lake Ontario that has been reduced to about a tenth of its original size," says Dr. [Barry] Warner [of University of Waterloo]. "So, if you can imagine Lake Ontario disappearing, that's essentially what has happened to the marshes in southern Iraq."

Nor does this history of mismanagement relieve the U.S. of its responsibilities here.

In IR, much of the research on ecology and security has focused on the possibility that "environmental scarcities" contribute to the outbreak of violent conflict. It would appear as if additional research should focus on the environmental harm of war itself -- and the difficulty of making critical green choices in a war context.

Interpreting Terrorists' Strategies

I have mentioned the outstanding blog Cheap Talk several times in my Twitter feed, but have yet to promote it in a blog post. If you are not familiar with the blog, the authors present excellent daily commentary on current events from a formal and strategic perspective—I highly reccommend it.

Today, author Sandeep Baliga, Associate Professor of Managerial Economics at the Kellogg School of Management, offers examples of strategies to incite government repression from three terrorist organization: ETA (Spanish Basque separatist), ALN (leftist Brazilian rebels) and al-Qaeda. For example, here is Baliga's entry for al-Qaeda:

Al Qaeda strategy:

Force America to abandon its war against Islam by proxy and force it to attack directly so that the noble ones among the masses….will see that their fear of deposing the regimes because America is their protector is misplaced and that when they depose the regimes, they are capable of opposing America if it interferes. Abu Bakr Naji, The Management of Savagery (p. 24)

There are two problems with presenting terrorist strategy in this way. First, in each of the three examples the stated strategy is an interpretation of the group's strategy by a third party observer rather than a statement of purpose from the group itself. As such, these interpretation are prone to inherent the strategic assumption of that observer. In the case of al-Qaeda, their formation and strategic roots reach back to the jihad against the Soviet Union, while their focus on the U.S. did not start in earnest until the first Gulf War. The assertion that al-Qaeda's strategy is to "Force America to abandon its war against Islam," is clearly an interpretation of more recent signals from the group, and does account for the compounding of historic strategy into contemporary motives.

Next, grouping terrorist organizations like ETA and ALN with al-Qaeda is problematic given the formers' micro-strategic focus and al-Qaeda's macro-motives. Both ETA and ALN have local motives, and thus their tactics for political coercion reflect these goals. Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, is an amorphous international umbrella that acts more as an inspiration to local groups than as strategic hub. Recognizing the scope of a group's area of interest and influence is a critical first step when attempting to examine a terrorist organization's broader strategic focus.

The assumption that terrorists' strategy is to incite government repression, however, is an interesting starting point for a model of coordination between a terrorist group selecting targets and government counter-terror efforts. Assume that the terrorists' strategy is to successfully attack a target that will provide the maximum repressive response, while the state's strategy is to minimize the number of civilian casualties. Given some matrix of targets and simultaneous allocation of resources, what are the equilibrium coordination strategies for each player?

Thinking abstractly, it seems that both players would allocate all, or most, of their resources to those targets likely to result in a mass causality event. The empirical evidence supports the framework given that mass causality events have prompted extreme restrictions on civil liberties all over the world. This, however, would result in an stalemate equilibrium, where no successful attacks take place because presumably terrorist targeting resources are met with equal counter-terrorism efforts. Could this be why we see so few successful terrorist attacks relative to failed ones? Would such a model show that that when attacks are successful it is because one side has obtained an informational advantage that causes the other to maintain an off-equilibrium allocation? I am interested in other's thoughts on the value of such a model, and its potential consequences.

Photo: dailylife

The Problem of State Capacity

The question of state capacity might be one of, if not the, most important question that academics and policy makers can tackle. When we talk about local, regional, and international stability, failed states, etc, often times the major problem is a lack of capacity by a state to control what goes on within its borders. State capacity is the product of numerous variables, including legitimacy, material resources, government coherence, coercive capacity, and autonomy vis-a-vis international actors. And while state capacity is seemingly a critical issue in global politics, policy makers and academics alike have found it one of the most intractable problems to solve. How do you build capacity? What are the proven techniques? Are techniques portable or replicable in other states and regions?

I think the short answer is: we don't really know

The Financial Times ran a story this morning chronicling the continuing degeneration of the Nigerian state's ability to maintain control over the oil rich Niger Delta. While conflict with rebels in the region is nothing new, militants have expanded and refined (no pun intended) their activities over the past decade to include the tapping of oil pipelines for sale on the black market. However, the militants have recently began refining the crude being siphoned for local sale.

The article goes on to discuss how the state is struggling to determine a course of action that will reestablish it's authority and control in the region. (John Robb over at Global Guerrillas has commented for some time on the role of super-empowered individuals and their ability to disrupt states, in particular rebels in Nigeria). For the state, control over crude is key for capacity, as it provides economic resources with which to exert control and influence. By slowly losing control over that key resource (along with refinement and its distribution) the state suffers in at least two ways:

1) It further depletes its fiscal resources through which it maintains stability within society and has less funds to distribute to key players in exchange for political support;

2) It reveals that the state doesn't have the capacity to control key parts of its territory. As some have argued, this kind of signaling can potentially lead other separatists/militants/rebels in other parts of the country to determine that they too can encroach on the state.

There are many ideas about how to build state capacity--charismatic leadership, leveraging large fiscal reserves and/or natural resources, increase public goods and social welfare programs, etc.

The question I have is whether we truly know how to build state capacity (i.e. have we fully developed a science of state capacity) or whether the problem is simply one of implementation (i.e. conditions on the ground rarely allow for known, effective policies to be implemented).

Interested to hear readers thoughts.

Is America cool again?

According to the latest data from the Pew Global Attitudes Project, "the image of the United States has improved markedly in most parts of the world reflecting global confidence in Barack Obama."

Follow the Pew survey link to find data charting some dramatic American improvements throughout the world. The biggest upswings seem to have occurred in Western Europe, parts of Latin America, India, and in Indonesia and Nigeria. Note that in some of these states the U.S. image was already on the upswing the past year or so following lows achieved earlier this decade.

Data from Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Muslim Middle East do not reflect major changes. Indeed, the US image has actually declined in Israel post-Bush and is flat (with low marks) in Pakistan, Palestine, and Turkey.

What does it mean that major U.S. foreign policy initiatives of the past half year are most popular in other advanced states?

I think the results reflect rational thinking around the globe. After all, the Obama administration announced some important changes in the war on terror, escalated the war in Afghanistan, followed the path towards withdrawal from Iraq (starting with the cities), and started talking differently about global climate change.

Those are all relatively popular moves in Europe. Thousands of NATO troops are in Afghanistan, so even though Europeans are not especially hawkish on the war, many have reason to seek victory.

President Obama has personal connections to Indonesia and Nigeria, so the improvements in U.S. image in those states may only reflect favorable views towards a "favorite son." Do the Pew survey results from the rest of Muslim world mean the famed "Cairo speech" didn't hit its intended target audience?

I've come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles -- principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.

Apparently, much of the Muslim world is going to wait awhile for policy results before changing their impression of the USA.

Use it or lose it

A recent paper from Brookings, Georgetown and Hoover discusses the international legal aspects of targeted killing. As you would expect, American policy isn't in sync with the emerging global norm. An idealist might argue that the US is in the wrong (and they have a very strong case under the International Convention on Human Rights); a Realist might argue that the US needs the latitude to kill because it (or somebody--and nobody else is available) has the responsibility to combat enemies of the legal regime that everyone else assumes. The point that I hadn't thought of before is the conclusion that the US might want to be open about what it is doing and assert--as a legal principle--that this is as it should be.

The ultimate lesson for Congress and the Obama Administration about targeted killings is “Use it or lose it.” This is as true of its legal rationale as it is of the tool itself. Targeted killings conducted from standoff platforms, with improving technologies in surveillance and targeting, are a vital strategic, but also humanitarian, tool in long-term counterterrorism. War will always be important as an option; so will the tools of law enforcement, as well as all the other non-force aspects of intelligence work: diplomacy and coordination with friends and allies. But the long-standing legal authority to use force covertly, as part of the writ of the intelligence community, remains a crucial tool—one the new administration will need and evidently knows it will need. So will administrations beyond it.

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The death of Osama bin Laden and his top aides by Predator strike tomorrow would alter national security counterterrorism calculations rather less than we might all hope. As new terrorist enemies emerge, so long as they are “jihadist” in character, we might continue referring to them as “affiliated” with al Qaeda and therefore co-belligerent. But the label will eventually become a mere legalism in order to bring them under the umbrella of an AUMF passed after September 11. Looking even further into the future, terrorism will not always be about something plausibly tied to September 11 or al Qaeda at all. Circumstances alone, in other words, will put enormous pressure on—and ultimately render obsolete—the legal framework we currently employ to justify these operations.

What we can do is to insist on defining armed conflict self-defense broadly enough, and human rights law narrowly enough—as the United States has traditionally done—to avoid exacerbating the problem and making it acute sooner, or even immediately.

****

We stand at a curious moment in which the strategic trend is toward reliance upon targeted killing; and within broad U.S. political circles even across party lines, a political trend toward legitimization; and yet the international legal trend is also severely and sharply to contain it within a narrow conception of either the law of armed conflict under IHL or human rights and law enforcement, rather than its traditional conception as self-defense in international law and regulation as covert action under domestic intelligence law. Many in the world of ideas and policy have already concluded that targeted killing as a category, even if proffered as self-defense, is unacceptable and indeed all but per se illegal. If the United States wishes to preserve its traditional powers and practices in this area, it had better assert them. Else it will find that as a practical matter they have dissipated through desuetude.

Does the US (or someone) have the right to target individuals? In States where the US is not formally at war? Inside the US?

I suspect that someone has to have the job of playing cop in the international system. I don't see anyone but the US who is able and willing to do it. A UN force is a possibility, but it still comes down to great power politics and capabilities. On the other hand, I don't want to give the cops--any cops--the right to target whoever they choose. Even if they start with the best of intentions, that's a structure that corrupts the cop, alientates the community, and kills the innocent.

What I've Been Reading This Month

During my self-inflicted hiatus, I've been traveling a lot by road with two children, so I've had less reading time. But I've also been staying in a lot of people's houses along the way, and that has allowed me to accumulate vast (and vastly more diverse than usual) amount of reading material.

We turned around and headed east yesterday, and I should be back to blogging regularly in a couple of weeks. Until then, I thought I'd post tell of a few literary nuggets worth the late-summer beach-goer's attention, especially if you're looking to get out of your foreign policy head-space.

Each one has been loaned to me by a friend or relative I have visited on this journey, and each one has my highest recommendation. See below the fold.

Why Buildings Stand Up. I'd always wondered about that! Mario Salvadori puts architectural history and the basics of structural engineering into language anyone can understand and get excited about. Loaned to me by my good friend Joel Oestreich.

Mop Men: Inside the World of Crime Scene Cleaners. A fascinating, humorous and informative ethnography of disaster restoration specialists who clean up after suicides and murders. (I flipped open a page randomly and learned a great deal about the life cycle of maggots.) This is in the genre of Mary Roach, but with more social science as it's as much about the industry of death as it is about the forensic science of human decay. This one came courtesy of my brother Richard, who owns two cleaning businesses in Durango CO and also has a quirky interest in disaster science.

Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century. It was especially nice to read the original short story version of Ender's Game, something I'd never managed to do despite my devotion to the Ender book series. Thank you Alex.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Seth Grahame-Smith has taken Jane Austen's original novel and embellished it with a sub-text of an England afflicted by a "strange plague" that causes the dead to rise and intermittently feast upon the minor characters. Needless to say conversations from the original about ladylike decorum, otherwise intact, now include references not just to accomplishment in music and manners, but also in the deadly arts; and squabbles between Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy are now interrupted by battles with the unmentionables. A bloody good read, thanks to my brother USMC Major Edward Carpenter; and one that makes me look forward to reading more in the genre Grahame-Smith has no doubt just popularized, the humorous retelling of classics. Let us hope the original authors don't return from the dead to challenge their new compatriots on grounds of copyright.

Why I don't expect I'll ever be Secretary of State

..or much of any other government-related position. Stephen Walt gives a list of the 10 Commandments--the 10 "thou shalt not hold or even consider" positions that are considered outside of "acceptable" foreign policy discourse. I've given serious consideration to ALL of them at one time or another. Probably about half of them are things I believe today.

This reminds me of when I was a very young research analyst, and after handing in a report I had out a lot of work into, my boss (for whom I had and still have the greatest respect) returned it with the comment

"Well thought out. Almost certainly true. Don't ever say it again."

I think that was the point I decided I'd get out of professional consulting and focus on the university. University political science departments have their own taboos, but once you get tenure you are less vulnerable to sanction. And officially, at least, every idea is supposed to be considered on its merits--even the "unacceptable" ones.

Taboo Topics on Contemporary Foreign Policy Discourse | Stephen M. Walt

SIgning off

For reasons I noted when I introduced our new bloggers, I will be suspending blogging activities for about a year. I just signed the forms that indicate my agreement to take a one-year position with the powers-that-be, so it seems like the right time to cease blogging.

Before I go, I'd like to thank our readers and my co-bloggers for making writing here so much fun. I don't have anything profound or insightful to impart, but I feel like I should write a few more words before I go on (hopefully) long-term hiatus.

I started the Duck of Minerva in May of 2005. I'd been blogging anonymously, largely out of fear motivated by all the discussion of blogging as a net negative on one's academic career. But I ultimately decided that if Georgetown would deny me tenure for blogging, then I didn't want to be at Georgetown. Besides, if anyone wanted to paint me as an unserious academic, I already had a big fat targetfor them under production.

I consider the Duck of Minerva a success. It has never joined the "big leagues" of academic blogging, but we've developed what I hope others view as a quality niche blog. We even occasionally get called up from the minors.

But regardless of its reputation, the Duck has provided me with a community of virtual friends and sparring partners, most of whom I never would have connected with otherwise. I consider this the most rewarding aspect of blogging. That community expands and contracts over time; some ties fray while others go stronger. But those ties exist at all only by virtue of the activity.

Before I sign off for what may prove a very long time, I'd like to extend special appreciation to those who supported the Duck in its early days, including Henry Farrell (who seems to take all new academic bloggers under his wing), Daniel Drezner, Marc Lynch, Rob Farley of LGM, Mark of Zenpundit, the guys at Coming Anarchy (who re-designed our banner), and any number of people I've left out due to an inconsistent memory and a desire to just get this over with.

Bye all. Even if things work out and I don't post again until next September, I'll be hanging around hoping to get a contact buzz.

Losing my religion (or Jimmy Carter follows me)

In an article in The Age, Jimmy Carter recently renounced his membership in the Southern Baptist Church, arguing that "women and girls have been discriminated against for too long using a twisted interpretation of the word of God." Particularly, Carter objected to statements by the Southern Baptist Convention "claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and was responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be "subservient" to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors or chaplains in the military service." Carter links this sort of belief to justificatory logic for slavery, violence, forced prostitution, and the failure to make and enforce rape laws.

In a 1995 op-ed in the Pensacola News Journal too old and obscure to be located online, I renounced my membership in the Southern Baptist Church, arguing that the misogyny and heterosexism of Southern Baptist doctrine was something no God could want.

Carter's article fluctuates between brilliant feminism and over-rhetorical politicking, but includes some important food for thought. The "lowlights" include his declaration of his membership in a group called the Elders and an unsophisticated understanding of gender hierarchy which seems to blame it almost entirely on men's manipulation. While criticizing the Southern Baptist Church, Carter generalizes about the world's religions - and, while his recognition of the link between patriarchy and religion is important, it would be nice if Carter recognized that all religions were not "created equal," and have different (and different level) gender hierarchy problems. The highlights of Carter's announcement/article, however, are surprisingly insightful.

For example, Carter argues that these religious beliefs "help explain why in many countries boys are educated before girls; why girls are told when and whom they must marry; and why many face enormous and unacceptable risks in pregnancy and childbirth because their basic health needs are not met." Inherent in this and other statements in Carter's argument is clear understanding that gender hierarchy is structural, and that structural gender hierarchy negatively impacts women's lives on a daily basis all around the world. The second important recognition that Carter makes is nearer to the end of the article, where he points out that "it is not just women and girls who suffer [from gender hierarchy]. It damages all of us." This is a realization that gets way too little play in the policy world - that gender hierarchy hurts the people "on top" as well as the people "on bottom" of that hierarchy. I applaud Carter for being able to see this, and concluding that "it is time we had the courage to challenge these views."

Still, the egocentric part of me was tempted to reread Carter's statement next to mine, and recall what I was thinking when I renounced my membership in the Southern Baptist Church. My column talked about many of the issues that Carter's does, but also talked about the "Disney boycott" (where the Southern Baptist Convention objected to Disney's decision to recognize and insure employees' domestic partners) and other heterosexist policies. It also, while renouncing my membership in the Southern Baptist Church, urged the Convention to rethink its position and volunteered to enter into a dialogue to think about these problems more seriously. Reading both my column from years ago and Carter's now, though, my major complaint is this: really? you think you can just quit patriarchal institutions? I think that Carter's heart is in the right place, but I also think that we can't disassociate ourselves with patriarchal society - we have to work with, and within, it. And maybe, for someone who otherwise agrees with the Southern Baptist Church like Carter claims to, that means dealing with it within that patriarchal society.

This vote really matters!

Today the Senate voted to cap the Air Force's purchases of the F-22 at 187 planes by stripping the funding for further purchases of the plane from the Defense budget. This is a very significant vote for several reasons:

1. Its a big political win for the President. Obama threatened to veto a defense bill. That just Does Not Happen--no one vetoes money for DoD.

2. This is the first major cut to a major weapons system in recent memory. The military industrial complex is mighty powerful, and a vast range of interests lined up to defend the F-22, led by its manufacturer and the congressional delegations of many of the states where significant parts of the plane are made. Leading supporter of the F-22 in the Senate? Saxbe Chambliss, R-GA. The F-22 is assembled in Georgia. The final vote tally shows bi-partisan support for killing the plane. It also shows bi-partisan support for keeping the plane. This spending is all about pork, and little about ideology.

3. It is a major victory for the prospect of restoring some sanity to the defense budget. As Spencer Ackerman points out, lose here and Gates and Obama have no chance to reign in the defense budget. The win here brings the Defense budget back to reality (if only a little bit, but its a start). Gates powerfully made the point that DoD needs that money more urgently elsewhere. Lest we forget, there are still 2 wars going on, with troops who need stuff to fight those wars. The F-22 has yet to see any role in either Afghanistan or Iraq.

4. It offers some hope to procurement reform at DoD. Much of the modern military--both operationally and administratively--is organized around the purchase of major weapons systems. This works if you have a great weapons system, but is incredibly inefficient, wasteful, and leaves you with the Army you've got-- pace Rumsfeld, not the one you wish you had. One of the reasons we don't have the military we wish we had is all of the support, doctrinally, institutionally, culturally, and financially for these weapons systems. The fighter jocks of the Air Force really want the F-22. They have resisted UAVs like Predator and Reaper and ugly Close Air Support planes like the A-10. And yet, these have been among the most useful and most in demand throughout the wars we're actually fighting. The F-22? Not so much.

5. Gates went to the mattress on this one, with the full support of the President, and he won. He's going to be in a commanding position to institute further reforms at the Pentagon. Its rather ironic, don't ya think, just a little ironic, I really do think, that Rumsfeld came in determined to reform the Pentagon, and, arguably, left much of it in worse shape than when he arrived while Gates, called in to clean up the mess, so to speak, and then retained by an administration of a different political party which ran in opposition to the war Gates, as SecDef, was overseeing, manages to gain the bureaucratic and political strength to make reforms where it matters. The money. All about the Benjamins, that.

So, yeah, a big deal today in the Senate.

Modern conservativism and all that...

Andrew Sullivan Conor Friedersdorf thinks that Mark Levin "offers a serious response" to Peter Berkowitz's criticisms of his recent book. I disagree.
Here's Berkowitz:

Indeed, one could scarcely devise a better example of the imprudence that Burke dedicated his Reflections on the Revolution in France to exposing and combating than Levin's direct appeal to abstract notions of natural right to justify a radical reversal of today's commonly held convictions about the federal government's basic responsibilities.

Levin's response?

Edmund Burke, who Berkowitz misunderstands and, therefore, wrongly cites for his proposition, supported the American Revolution (while rejecting the French Revolution). The American Revolution can hardly be described as a moderate reaction to England's usurpations.

I should hardly need to elaborate the problem here. But I'm taking a break from academic writing, so I will.

Burke supported the aspirations of colonial Americans because he understood them to be claiming the rights they were owed as English subjects. The question of moderation concerns not whether the colonists resorted to arms, but their aims. The French Revolution, on the other hand, comprised a "whole cloth" revolution that sought radical changes in the character of government and society. The result, he predicted, would be quite bloody.

I understand that the struggle over how to understand Burke matters to conservatives. Burke is a crucial thinker for modern American conservativism, a "conservativism" quite different from its common European variants, insofar as it seeks to conserve a particular historical moment in the evolution of liberal thought and liberal order.

Thus, Berkowtiz and Levin--whether for genuine or rhetorical reasons--accept Burke's rectitude ad arguendo. In matter of fact, I think Burke greatly underestimated the radical character of the American Revolution, and I am not convinced that, absent the French Revolution, the ideals of the American Revolution would have achieved their current global success.

Regardless, Berkowtiz clearly gets the better of Levin. Indeed, I don't see Levin's response as a serious rebuttal to Berkowitz's concern: that the political program embraced by Levin-style conservatives is antithetical to Burkean conservative principles. That program calls for a massive transformation in the character of contemporary American political and economic life. This is precisely the kind of transformation that would raise the alarm for a contemporary Burkean conservative.

I emphasize the word "contemporary" for a reason. One can, of course, go back and read Burke's description of all that is grand about contemporary English values (yes, I'm aware that Burke was Irish), measure the twenty-first century United States against it, and, as a result of the rather glaring differences, call for a return to "Burkean principles." Perhaps Burke might do the same if transported to the year 2009 and set down in Washington, DC.

But in doing so, he would abandon a Burkean political philosophy. The 'timeless' and 'universal' principles advocated by Burke include a respect for the wisdom sedimented in existing traditions, a skepticism of the capacity of human reason to design superior alternatives, a fear of the consequences for civil and moral life of radical political programs, and a resulting embrace of reformist measures that often amount to slow, deliberate, and gradual tinkering with existing institutions.

Levin also completely drops the ball with respect to Berkowitz's warnings about the tensions between the self-regulating market and civil society, let alone conservative social order. Levin simply natters on about what conservatives believe:

But the Conservative believes that the individual is more than a producer and consumer of material goods. He exists within the larger context of the civil society -- which provides for an ordered liberty....

The Conservative believes that while the symmetry between the free market and the civil society is imperfect -- that is, not all developments resulting from individual interactions contribute to the overall well-being of the civil society -- one simply cannot exist without the other

Yet no amount of nattering can disguise the overwhelming empirical evidence of the last 150 years: that unbridled capitalism profoundly corrodes conservative social mores, and that the "creative destruction of the market" often devastates civil society.

The problem isn't so much that conservatives need to figure out what their principles mean in a "postmodern" order, but that the present-day conservative movements lacks a viable program for applying their principles to the post-1945 order.

We had the Reagan Revolution, which, as Sullivan Friedersdorf points out, left the welfare state intact and fiscal conservatism on life support.

We had the 1994-2006 period, which ultimately amounted to a giant exercise in crony capitalism, gave us the single largest expansion to date of the welfare state since Johnson's Great Society, and enacted a decidedly anti-Burkean foreign policy.

Now we have the alternative embraced by Levin and his ilk, which offers a picture of the world as a struggle between two great abstract principles and advocates, in consequence of this Manichean vision, a revolutionary program guided by, as far as I can tell, a utopian vision of life in the early Nineteenth Century.

With the Democratic tide at its likely high-water mark, I think all of us--liberals, conservatives, progressives, moderates--have an enormous stake in the emergence of a conservatism worthy of the adjective "contemporary." Let's hope that behind the noise of conservative radio, the intellectual unseriousness of The Corner, and the neo-conservativism[*] of the Weekly Standard, such a program incubates in the fertile minds of thoughtful conservatives.

*Neo-conservatism once held the promise of being such a movement, but it traded in Theodore Roosevelt for George W. Bush and Richard Cheney.

Bernanke op-ed in the Wall Street Journal

Ben Bernanke wants to assure people that the Fed isn't just throwing money at the current problems, unaware of the long-term impact on inflation.

My colleagues and I believe that accomodative policies will likely be warranted for an extended period. At some point, however, as economic recovery takes hold, we will need to tighten monetary policy to prevent the emergence of an inflation problem down the road. The Federal Open Market Committee, which is responsible for setting U.S. monetary policy, has devoted considerable time to issues relating to an exit strategy. We are confident we have the necessary tools to withdraw policy accommodation, when that becomes appropriate, in a smooth and timely manner.

Gee--is everybody confident now? He goes on to tell how it will be done. A few observations:

1) The chairman of the Federal Reserve Board is worried enough about confidence that he chooses to make this statement.

2) He does so in a form that allows no questioning or rebuttal.

3) To the extent that he discusses the tools to contract the money supply, it's all pretty much the same as before. They aren't nearly as all-powerful as he wants us to believe.

4) Bernanke says almost nothing about the international dimension--including foreign exchange and the impact on what has been the world's reserve currency.

5) All his promises miss the political dimension altogether. Are we really to believe that those who have been personally helped by recent policies--bailed out banks, investment houses, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc.--are going to sit by and watch the Fed crank up the pain? The relation of Congress and State governments to the stimulus package is similar to that of an addict to cocaine. The American people will want their freebies, and they won't want to pay for them.

I'm supposed to feel more confident after reading this?

Bernanke Op-ed in WSJ: The Fed’s Exit Strategy - WSJ.com

We chose to go to the moon--not because it was easy but because it was hard

Forty years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first humans to set foot on the Moon. Michael Griffin, former NASA Administrator, observed:

What is most striking about this 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon is that we can no longer do what we're celebrating. Not "do not choose to," but "can't."

By the 40th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Oregon Trail was carrying settlers to the West. By the 40th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental railroad, a web of rail traffic crisscrossed the continent. By the 40th anniversary of Lindbergh's epic transatlantic flight, thousands of people in jetliners retraced his route in comfort and safety every day. And on the 40th anniversary of Sputnik, hundreds of satellites were orbiting the Earth.

Only in human spaceflight do we celebrate the anniversary of an achievement that seems more difficult to repeat than to accomplish the first time. Only in human spaceflight can we find in museums things that most of us in the space business wish we still had today.

What is missing? Someone who can say:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.

...Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.

Could Obama do this? Quite possibly. Reagan tried, Clinton tried, even Bush tried (PDF). Will he Obama do it--after he's finished with the Economy, Health Care, Iraq, Afghanistan, and chopping the F-22? I'd love to see him try.

David Nexon on healthcare reform

Turns out my father is (or, more accurately, was) blogging, although I'm not sure if he even knows what a blog is. Which leads me to suspect that someone else might be entering those posts on his behalf.

Some more recent comments appear here, although he's much more acting in his capacity as an employee of AvaMed.

Wanker of the day

Not every behavior needs to confer a reproductive advantage, dammit!

Despite Daniel Enger's valiant effort:

Despite this bestiary of autoeroticism, scientists have spent relatively little time on the question of why animals might have evolved to masturbate. At first glance, the behavior would seem to be maladaptive. First, there's all the energy that's wasted on the production of spilled seed—macaques, for example, are thought to devote between 1 percent and 6 percent of their daily metabolism to the production of ejaculate. Second, it distracts the animal from the more important work of finding food and evading predators, let alone mating. According to the literature on horses, a masturbating stallion sometimes takes on "a trance-like, glazed-eye appearance." What could be more inviting to a hungry bear?

I still think this sounds like spandrel territory:

Still, neither the fresh-sperm hypothesis nor its discredited cousin, the kamikaze-sperm hypothesis, can account for more than a small subset of animal masturbation. Reloading might explain the behavior of bucks, bulls, and male primates, all of which tend to ejaculate at the end of an autoerotic episode. But many other animals never reach that point. Horses rarely climax, despite masturbating dozens of times per day—so what motivates the dalliance of a stallion or, for that matter, a mare? Can evolution account for female masturbation in the animal kingdom?

Just think about it for a second.

For these behaviors to be selected out of a population we would need a genetic mutation that prevented animals from masturbating but also still allowed them to take pleasure from genital sex. Like some sort of magic "anti-onanism" gene that makes it only feel good if someone else touches it.

So yeah, I say "spandrel."

Image Source: http://daily.swarthmore.edu/2009/2/19/gilbert-vatican/

Identification and clientelism

Patrick Porter writes about two contending visions of the Afghan insurgency:

Burke is playing down the economic angle. But there is a certain tension, or tradeoff, between ‘power’/'politics’ and ‘tribal vendettas’/'ethnicity.’

Identity can define allegiance, but not exhaustively. Calculations about power balances can wreck the whole day of cultural ties.

In Afghanistan, it is more prudent, given the impermanence with which different power brokers rule, to hedge, and at the right time, to flip, to change sides and align with the winning side. As Fontini Christie and Michael Semple argue:

After continuing uninterrupted for more than 30 years, war in Afghanistan has developed its own peculiar rules, style, and logic. One of these rules is side with the winner. Afghan commanders are not cogs in a military machine but the guardians of specific interests — the interests of the fighters pledged to them and of the tribal, religious, or political groups from which these men are recruited…Thus in Afghanistan, battles have often been decided less by fighting than by defections. Changing sides, realigning, flipping — whatever one wants to call it — is the Afghan way of war.

Not sure I’d particularise it as the Afghan way of war. But the point emerges clearly. As Fouad Ajami once said, nations cheat. They juggle their identities. They uphold blood ties and kinship when it suits them. They avert their eyes when it suits them. Historical struggles and ancient hatreds can be powerful ideas…until the wind changes.

Two comments:

1) The apparent paradox that identities often matter a great deal--people routinely explain what they do or exhort one another to action via identity claims--but also seem quite flexible has long plagued scholars of international relations. This becomes a good deal less of a problem, though, once we take seriously the fact that people operate with multiple identities that range from the very broad (e.g., religious) to the rather specific (e.g., a warlord's "man").

All things being equal, we shouldn't expect any one of those identities to provide an efficient explanation for anyone's behavior. Moreover, we should certainly not assume that under "normal" conditions relatively broad, abstract identities are the most salient for individuals at any given moment.

Some of the most interesting aspects of the politics of identity, moreover, concern struggles over which of those identities should take priority at any given moment and, relatedly, which of those identities should be homologous with socio-political boundaries.

2) What Christie and Semple describe is actually pretty typical of communities in which clientelistic relations predominate, let alone when patron-client networks involve violence-wielding capacity.

I actually discuss this in The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe, both as a way of illustrating relational approaches and because such networks proved extremely important in the European "wars of religion." Indeed, many nobles joined the Reformed Church in France precisely because their patrons did, and while they fought and died in a struggle over whether Calvinism or Catholicism would predominate in France, a good number might easily have found themselves on the other side if their patrons had chosen to remain Catholics. And much of the potency of the "religious" struggle stemmed from how it mapped onto factional conflicts for control over the French court.

But none of this should be taken to mean that identity is irrelevant in the face of "material interests." Instead it suggests that we delude ourselves if we think the only identities that matter are religious, national, or ethnic, and that we tend to place too much emphasis on the subjective dimensions of identity and not enough on the politics of identity claims and counterclaims.

Image from The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe, published by Princeton University Press, 2009. All relevant copyrights apply.

Blah

The weather favors us today, so much so that the dog refuses to come inside. It is 81 degrees and dry.

I have a beautiful new bike, which I have ridden only a few times. The wife and kid are out of town.

And yet my flu-like illness lingers. Not enough that I feel actively sick, but with sufficient tenacity that I cannot engage in strenuous activity.

In other words: teh suck.

A "war on slavery?"

Over at Coming Anarchy, "Munro Ferguson" writes:

This past December, UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon warned that the current geo-economic crisis would add fuel to the already raging fire that is international human trafficking. 146 years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, there exists more slaves on planet earth now than at any other given time.

The UN puts the number of current slaves at some 27 million human beings, though a recent UN report offers the caveat that forced labor is much harder to track and enumerate than the most proliferate form, that of sex-slavery, and so the exact number may well be higher.

He accompanies his post with a link to a SkyTV documentary on sex trafficking. All pretty appalling stuff, albeit depressingly familiar to anybody whose even skimmed the surface of the subject. So, while I don't particularly like describing a campaign against thugs, criminals, and slavers as a "war," I have to agree that this issue needs to be much higher on the international agenda.

I know some of our readers have expertise in this area, so I welcome any comments. My sense is that the policy portfolio has to include (1) more aggressive efforts against trafficking rings, (2) economic development in regions such as the Balkans and Eastern Europe, (3) policies that exempt slaves from the legal requirement for passports and grant them at least temporary refugee status, and (4) massive public awareness campaigns to deter men from frequenting prostitutes at high risk of being sex slaves.

On that last note, it strikes me that even if there's some truth to the argument, talking about how all prostitution is rape doesn't help matters. Some prostitution really is rape--prostitution involving sex slaves--and at least some of the men committing the crime might change their behavior if they realized what they were doing. None of this will help, of course, in countries where dominant norms mean that men--and government officials--just don't care.

The really thorny issue, as I understand it, concerns legalization. The underlying theory of legal prostitution makes sense, insofar as it allows state agencies to regulate the business and puts prostitutes in regular contact with state officials. But, in practice, there's at least some evidence that legalization provides a "protective belt" that allows slavery and other forms of exploitation to flourish. This is one of those areas in which my long-dormant libertarian side wakes up, in that it strikes me that the problem isn't legalization per se, but incomplete legalization, inadequate enforcement, and the stigmatization of prostitutes such that rape and exploitation are somehow considered part of their job description.

Anyway, some of the arguments for and against can be found here.

Beyond the lessons of empire

Not a few people have asked me to comment on Steve Walt's "10 lessons of empire" post. Or, more precisely, they've asked me "why haven't you written anything on Walt's post?" I guess my initial reaction was, more or less, that I've said my piece on empires and imperial dynamics; if a prominent academic wants to blog about the "lessons" for the US he found in a history of the British Empire that he read on vacation, then, well, more power to him. After all, most of the realist scholarly writings that invoke empire don't go far beyond this sort of exercise. But, at the end of the day, I suppose I should probably weigh in.

In brief, Walt's "lessons" range from pretty banal to not quite right.

1. There is no such thing as a "benevolent" Empire.

In his classic history of ancient Rome, Gibbon had noted that "There is nothing more adverse to nature and reason than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations, in opposition to their inclination and interest." Britons thought of the empire as a positive force for themselves and their subjects, even though they had to slaughter thousands of their imperial subjects in order to maintain their control. Americans should be under no illusions either: if you maintain garrisons all over the world and repeatedly interfere in the internal politics of other countries, you are inevitably going to end up breaking a lot of heads.

By this standard, of course, there is no such thing as a benevolent political community, period. As any realist worth the name should know, all political authorities rely, to one degree or another, on coercion to maintain control over their citizens or subjects. Some states are more coercive than others, of course. And some empires are also more coercive than others. The more interesting questions revolve around accounting for why empires find themselves more or less dependent on using brute force, as well as other kinds of coercive power, to manage their territories.

2. All Empires depend on self-justifying ideology and rhetoric that is often at odds with reality.

British imperialists repeatedly portrayed their role as the "white man's burden" and maintained that imperial control brought considerable benefits to their subjects. (This is an old story: France proclaimed its mission civilizatrice, and the Soviet empire claimed it was spreading the benefits of communism. Today, Americans say we are spreading freedom and liberty). Brendon's account describes the various benefits of imperial rule, but also emphasizes the profound social disruptions that imperial rule caused in India, Africa, and elsewhere. Moreover, because British control often depended on strategies of "divide-and-conquer," its rule often left its colonies deeply divided and ill-prepared for independence. But that's not what English citizens were told at the time.

We could debate whether Walt's describing a bug or a feature of imperial control, but, yet again, self-justifying ideologies and institutionalized hypocrisy are not distinguishing characteristics of imperial rule. They are endemic features of political life. As one (admittedly obscure)
realist wrote:

3. Successful empires require ample "hard power."

Although the British did worry a lot about their reputation and prestige (what one might now term their "soft power") what really killed the Empire was its eroding economic position. Once Britain ceased to be the world’s major economic and industrial power, its days as an imperial power were numbered. It simply couldn't maintain the ships, the men, the aircraft, and the economic leverage needed to rule millions of foreigners, especially in a world where other rapacious great powers preyed. The moral for Americans? It is far more important to maintain a robust and productive economy here at home than it is to squander billions of dollars trying to determine the political fate of some remote country thousands of miles away. External conditions may impinge on U.S. power, but it is internal conditions that generate it.

On the one hand, I doubt Walt would find much disagreement with the proposition that empires tend to get into trouble when they no longer enjoy sufficient military and economic resources to control their possessions. On the other hand, I'm not at all clear whether Walt is talking about global hegemony or empire. Since I'm feeling lazy, I'll just quote myself:

Many of those who affirm the imperial character of the United States, in fact, compare the scope of its power and influence to that of Rome and nineteenth-century Britain. Both, however, controlled empires and, at various times and in various places, also operated as hegemonic and unipolar powers. We should, therefore, exercise a great deal of caution lest we declare the United States an empire through a comparison with Roman and British preeminence.... Empire, properly understood, describes a form of political control exercised by such minor powers as Belgium and the Netherlands. The concept enjoys no intrinsic relationship with the distribution of power.

Another problem with Walt's lesson is that it glosses over the degree to which imperial "hard power" depends upon more nuanced power relations.

Much of Britain's land power in Asia stemmed from the Indian Army, a force composed of South Asian volunteers.In fact, empires often work by recruiting local collaborators, providing benefits to at least some segment of the local population, and engaging in various forms of divide-and-rule. To the extent that empires succeed at these ventures, they lower their "governance costs" and enhance the net benefits they derive from imperial control (PDF).

In other words, an empire's "hard power" resources are, at least in part, a function of its success at imperial management, which, in turn, depends on dimensions of power beyond those associated with simply counting the number of troops at its disposal and the size of its metropolitan economy.

4. As Empires decline, they become more opulent, and they obsess about their own glory.

Brendon's description of the British Empire Exposition at Wembley in 1924-1925 is both slightly comical and bittersweet; with cracks increasingly evident in the imperial façade, Britain put on a lavish show designed to bind the colonies together and highlight its continuing glory. Moral: when you hear U.S. politicians glorifying America's historical world role, get worried.

I suppose. But, then again, U.S. politicians have been glorifying "America's historical world role" since the founding of the country, so maybe I'm not that worried. I'll tell you what will make me worried: when U.S. planners start to realize they've extended far more security guarantees than they can make good on or we face multiple rebellions against friendly regimes throughout the world.

5. Great Empires are heterogeneous.

The British empire was not a uniform enterprise; the various bits and piece were acquired at different times and in different ways, and the relationship between London and the different components was far from uniform. One could say the same thing for America's less formal global "empire": its relationship with NATO is different than the alliance with Japan, or the client states in the Middle East, or the bases at Diego Garcia or Guantanamo. An empire is not one thing.

6. When building an empire, it's hard to know where to stop.

The expansion of the British empire after 1781 shows how difficult it is to engage in a rational assessment of strategic costs and benefits. Once committed to India, for example, it was easy for Britain to get drawn into additional commitments in Egypt, Yemen, Kenya, South Africa, Afghanistan, Burma, and Singapore. This was partly because ambitious empire builders like Cecil Rhodes were constantly promoting new imperial schemes, but also because each additional step could be justified by the need to protect the last. History has been described as "just one damn thing after another," and so is the process of imperial expansion.

Yes, both of these are right. Moreover, nearly everyimportantsocial-scientificwork on empireswritten in the last forty years makes these central points of its analysis of imperial rise and decline.

7. It takes a lot of incompetent people to run an empire.

A recurring theme in Brendon’s account is the remarkable level of ignorance and incompetence with which the British empire was administered. Although there were obviously some very able individuals involved, Britain’s colonial endeavors seem to have attracted an equal or greater number of arrogant, corrupt, and racist buffoons. The bungling that accompanied the U.S. occupation of Iraq looks rather typical by comparison.

Very droll. Your mileage will vary across time and space, however, when n is greater than one. Imperial history is full of both astounding brilliance and puerile incompetence. Kind of like the history of all forms of governance, when you think about it.

8. Great Powers defend perceived interests with any means at their disposal.

Great powers like to portray themselves as "civilized" societies with superior moral and ethical standards, but realists know better. Like other empires, Britain used its technological superiority without restraint, whether in the form of naval power, the Maxim gun, airplanes, high explosive, or poison gas., and the British showed scant regard for the effects of this superior technology on their "uncivilized" targets. Today, the United States uses Predators and Reapers and smart bombs. Plus ca change ...

I thought we were talking about empires, not great powers.

Anyway, this reminds me of what I take to be the primary lesson of offensive realism:"states always maximize power, except when they don't."

Similarly, I think it is fair to say that "great powers defend perceived interests with any means at their disposal, except when they don't." US technological superiority in Afghanistan and Pakistan extends just a wee bit beyond remote-controlled airplanes with guns, and includes a good many capabilities the United States hasn't used, or uses in one case but not in another. Same can be said for other great powers, past and present.

9. Nationalism and other forms of local identity remain a potent obstacle to long-term imperial control.

Britain's supposedly "liberal" empire contained a deep contradiction: a society that emphasized individual liberties could not hold in bondage whole societies and deny the inhabitants independence. Once nationalism took root in the colonies (intermingled with other tribal and/or religious identities), resistance to imperial rule increased apace. As the United States is now discovering in Iraq and Central Asia, most peoples don’t like taking orders from well-armed foreigners, even when the foreigners keep telling them that their aims are benevolent.

Note how this point tracks with my comments concerning overplaying the centrality of "hard power."

10. "Imperial Prestige" is both an asset and a trap.

Britain's leaders fretted constantly about any erosion in their image of superiority, fearing that one or two setbacks might lead their subjects to rise up or encourage other great powers to poach on Britain’s holdings. As a result, Britons found themselves fighting to defend marginal possessions in order to preserve their position in the places they believed mattered. Ironically, the refusal to liquidate far-flung commitments early so as to focus resources on more vital interests may have hastened Britain's imperial decline.

This captures one "standard model"of strategic overextension (see Habsburg Spain, the Vietnam War, etc.). Indeed, the interesting question is not whether or not these process happen, but the conditions under which metropolitan officials are right or wrong about the consequences of losing "prestige" by cutting-and-running from a peripheral conflict. I should also note that a number of other processes produce counterproductive peripheral entanglements, and it may be a mistake to treat "reputational concerns" as the most important factor involved within or across particular cases.

Voting with their feet

Here's an interesting factoid: For the first time since the Great Depression, the migration of people from the less-developed to developed countries may have reversed. Remittances are expected to be dropping next year by 8 percent. On the other hand, many of the returnees have skills and capital, and that may help back home.

40 years after One small step

40 years ago today, Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy on its way to the moon. Monday will be the 40th anniversary of the first moonwalk. In celebration, NASA has released restored footage of the moonwalk, revealing in incredible clarity the amazing steps of Armstrong and Aldrin.

Its a fascinating moment for reflection on one of the most incredible accomplishments of the 20th century. The Space Program revolutionized America, revolutionized the world. It thrust us into the computer age, and it provided one of the most famous images of our world, reminding us of our shared home.

To put into context just how impressive the Apollo program was, it flew one of the most complex and powerful machines ever built, the Saturn V rocket, to the moon and back with less computing power than you have in your cell phone.

All this, brought to you by your US Government.

What I wonder is--could the US pull off a similar feat today? One of my students wrote a thesis this past spring essentially arguing no. Not because of the expense or the technical feasibility, but because of the lack of a good reason. Space, if you remember, was still the New Frontier in the 1960's, something America could conquer in the midst of the Cold War when the Best and the Brightest still held promise for a greater tomorrow.

It seems a romantic myth today, that the country would unite behind a goal of progress, scientific discovery, and exploration of new frontiers. Today we're consumed with debates about health care, terrorism, and funding the F-22, and a functional space launch capacity is deemed an expendable luxury. Indeed, with the pending (and overdue) retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2010 (lets remember this is 1970's technology that still flies), the US will lack the ability to put people into space until the Constellation Program launches somewhere around 2015. No one is concerned about the "space flight gap" with the Russians (as the US will rely on the Soyuz program to access the international space station in that time). There's no hue and cry that NASA plans to de-orbit the space station in 2016. The space program has no role in any of this, and that lack of a legitimizing foundation has led to its undoing.

In a way, space flight seems the ultimate source for international cooperation. Its sort of silly for the US and China and Russia to all compete to get back to the moon. From up there, there's really no difference between any of us. The ISS was supposed to be a step in that direction. And yet, how much of a romantic myth it is to discuss a global mission to Mars or an outpost on the moon.

40 years ago today, that myth was much closer to reality than it is now.

Rethinking liberal arts

What does a citizen need to know? What skills and knowledge should we assume in our interactions with others? What makes a person a well-rounded person? The issues go back for centuries, and every so often some suggests modifications to the list of "liberal arts." I teach at a university with a "liberal arts" requirement, and I know from experience the battles to have a class listed as required (or optional) include issues of academic politics and teaching philosophy. The outcomes of those battles can make or break particular classes, or entire programs.

A group of scholars has published a new reconsideration (PDF) of "liberal arts" (note: not the liberal arts). What began as a series of conversations on a blog has been refined to a short book. The contributors go out out of their way to declare their list is not canonical, but here's their table of contents:So, what do you think? What needs to be added to the list of liberal arts? What needs to be dropped? Is there a place for what we teach?

The Mathematics of War, Revisited

A few months back I wrote a post discussing Sean Gourley's TED talk on the Mathematics of War; specifically, noting that his finding (a power-law distribution of attack frequency and severity in Iraq) was—well—old news. This set off an excellent discussion on Sean's work, my comments, and more generally how the social and hard sciences can clash. More recently, Tom Ricks of The Best Defense blog revisited Sean's talk with his own skepticism, which induced a response from Sean, and further skepticism by Ricks. In defense of his work, Sean responded to Tom's post with the following:

With this new approach we can do several important things that were not possible before. We can understand the underlying structure of an insurgency i.e. how an insurgency 'decides' to distribute its forces (weapons, people, money etc). Further, we can explain why this kind of insurgent structure emerges in multiple different conflict zones around the world. We can estimate the number of autonomous insurgent groups operating within a theatre of war. We can monitor and track a conflict through time to see how either sides strategies are affecting the state of the war. Finally we can compare the mathematical patterns of current ongoing wars with past wars to estimate how close they are to ending.

I think Sean's work in extremely important, as in many ways our research interests run parallel and this project has great potential. That said, his response leaves me with more questions than answers, therefore, with Sean's response in hand I would like to revisit the mathematics of war.

First, I have serious doubts as to the connection between the distribution of attack frequency and severity and the underlying structure of an insurgency. Power-law distributions can provide a categorical approximation of a network's underlying structure because in these cases the distribution in question refers to the frequency of edge counts among nodes, a structural measurement. Even for networks, however, the actual underlying structures of networks following a power-law can vary wildly. Attack frequencies, on the other hand, have nothing to do with structure. In what way, then, is this metric valid for measuring the structure or distribution of insurgent forces?

There is also a large element of context that is not captured in this analysis. To get to Sean's question on why different types of insurgencies occur in different parts of the world, with varying lethality and effectiveness, one must account for the inherent variance in ability among insurgents and insurgent organizations. We know that people vary in their abilities to perform any task, which of course includes insurgency; therefore, we must control for any exogenous or endogenous factors that could contribute to this variance as to avoid inserting into our analysis the belief that all insurgent are created equally. Once a reasonable number of theoretically justifiable control variables are identified, we may be able to get at this question at both a micro (insurgent) and macro (insurgency) level. A present, the data used in Sean's analysis accounts for this variation.

Next, there has been quite a bit of research on the duration of wars, including state-on-state, civil and insurgency. For this research, a critical hurdle has always been how to overcome bias in the data collection and reporting when attempting to approximate how various factor contribute to the curation of a conflict. Sean uses open-scource media accounts of attacks to develop his data, and because most of these media outlets are primarily motivated by profit it is difficult to view this data as unbiased. This problem, however, can be dealt with by various sampling techniques and control varaibles. Of greater concern are the eventual conclusions drawn by attempting to match conflict patterns in this manner. With Sean's data, we might ask what factors contribute to ending conflicts following a power-law. Unfortunately, as previously discussed, all manner of conflicts follow this pattern. If two conflicts have a near identical power-law distribution when observed in the long term, but upon examination we find that one is an insurgency and other a state-on-state conflict, what insight have we gained? This categorical approach, therefore, may be significantly limited in its explanatory value.

Finally, I must point out that I have a very superficial perspective on Sean's work, as I have only been exposed to the TED talk, and the discussions that have followed from it. There are likely many elements of this research that I am missing, and as such all of the above concerns may have already been addressed. I am interested in your take on Sean's response, my position, and where you see the value in this research? To quote Tom, "Smart, statistically-comfortable readers: Do you see support for these claims?"

Photo: Chart of distribution of attacks with magnitude from "Variation of the Frequency of Fatal Quarrels with Magnitude," by Lewis F. Richardson.

Modeling Torture, and the Ethical Dilemma of the Results

A few months ago fellow NYU inhabitant Joshua Tucker of The Monkey Cage asked what, if any, social science research had been done on the effectiveness of torture in obtaining valuable intelligence? Josh's primary question was an ethical one, that being if a researcher had a personal objection to the use of torture, but through an empirical analysis of data found that it in fact did extract valuable data, should the researcher attempt to get it published despite his or her personal objection? This touched off a very interesting discussion among Monkey readers, and I recommend it to all.

Today, Josh revisits the topic, but this time with a bit of relevant research in hand. In "Interrogational Torture: Or How Good Guys Get Bad Information with Ugly Methods," John Schiemann presents a theoretical model of an interrogation.
Briefly, the model has two players, the detainee and the state, where the state is uncertain about the value of the detainee's knowledge and the detainee is uncertain as to the state's willingness to use torture. The state moves first, by either asking leading questions (uninformative signal) or objective questioning. The detainee must then decide to send a valuable message, or not. Finally, the state evaluates this message to ascertain the detainees type, and from this decides whether to use torture to extract additional information (for a full description of the game see the paper).

In approaching this research, Schiemann struggled with the exact ethical dilemma hypothesized by Josh in his first post, and after deciding to research the the topic he concluded:

...even in a worst case scenario in which torture is shown to be effective under some limited circumstances, we would want to know that. What is the alternative? The alternative is to do nothing and help preserve a status quo in which torture is unrestrained. As difficult as it would be to swallow a result showing some limited effectiveness of torture, I’d rather live with that than what the U.S. has been doing – and perhaps is continuing to do.

There are two interesting points of discussion that fall from this discussion. First, do we believe the model presented above is an accurate or useful interpretation of the decision process of a state to use torture? One weakness to note is the presumed equality of uncertainty between the players. The state is rarely completely uncertain as to the value of a detainee's knowledge. Presumably some amount of intelligence collection went into the decision to capture and interrogate a detainee, therefore, the state can (and does) have the ability to rank the value of detainees. Likewise, unless a detainee is the first of a given conflict, the game is clearly repeated; consequently, all subsequent detainees will be able to update their beliefs about a state's type. It may be more valuable, and easier to model, to make this a repeated game of one-way uncertainty, where a state is known to use torture, but the type of detainee is unknown by adding noise to the intelligence collected on a detainee prior to capture.

The second point of interest are Schiemann's thoughts on how social scientists should approach researching ethically sensitive topics (for his full remarks see the Monkey post). My opinion is that all finding should be disclosed; first because it is a fundamental principle of scientific endeavor, but more to the point, it can expose false assumptions and promote more accurate models to be built and explored. For example, the model above is an excellent first step toward building a theory of how a state decides to use torture. As we can clearly see, however, it is in no way the definitive model on the topic. If the results from this model show that torture is effective that does not mean it should be used. On the contrary, it means that under the assumptions of this particular model, in some cases, it is shown to be effective. Improving the model, and generating new results, may alter the conclusion completely (or not). This iterative process is the only way to contribute valuable knowledge to a discipline.

I am interested in other's thoughts, both in terms of the model, but also how to approach research on these kinds of topics. Particularly from practitioners (not necessarily of torture) within the defense community. How is this model getting at the dynamics of interrogation, and where does it fail? How might it be improved? Also, as consumers of social science research, how do you think the community should handle these ethical concerns?

Photo: Wikimedia

ISA Book of the Decade

Dan Drezner offered his picks. The crazy people on Political Science Job Rumors fought a series of flame skirmishes over it. But I can't imagine the conversation's tapped out. Let's take a look at the announcement:

The International Studies Best Book of the Decade Award honors the best book published in international studies over the last decade.In order to be selected, the winning book must be a single book (edited volumes will not be considered) that has already had or shows the greatest promise of having a broad impact on the field of international studies over many years. Only books of this broad scope, originality, and interdisciplinary significance should be nominated.

We can cut into this in any number of ways.

First, we might offer some picks. Drezner understands the criteria this way:

Hmmm.... which books published between 2000 and 2009 should be on the short list? This merits some thought, but the again, this is a blog post, so the following choices are the first five books that came to mind:

1. John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001)
2. G. John Ikenberry, After Victory (2001).
3. Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill (2003).
4. Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales, Savng Capitalism from the Capitalists (2003).
5. Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms (2007).

I don't agree with everything in these books -- but they linger the most in the cerebral cortex.

But I'm not sure "linger in the cerebral cortex" is quite the right standard. I take Dan's more important point as being that "broad impact" is not necessarily the same as "great" (more on this below). So, in that spirit, I'll list five of the works that have crossed my mind as strong contenders:

1. G. John Ikenberry, After Victory (2001)
2. Charles Tilly The Politics of Collective Violence (2003)
3. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D. Morrow, The Logic of Political Survival (2004)
4. Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, Rules For The World: International Organizations In Global Politics (2004)
5. Alexander L. George and Andrew Bennett, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (2005)

Second, we might question the criteria. Let's reflect on the wording again: "the winning book must be a single book... that has already had or shows the greatest promise of having a broad impact on the field of international studies over many years. Only books of this broad scope, originality, and interdisciplinary significance should be nominated." But "broad impact" is not really the same thing as "broad scope, originality, and interdisciplinary significance."

For example, my number two pick (Politics of Collective Violence) easily satisfies the second set of criteria, but runs into some trouble in the first: while it has been cited a lot, it hasn't had that dramatic an impact on international studies writ large. I can think of plenty of books that score very highly on originality and scope--such as PTJ's Civilizing the Enemy: German Reconstruction and the Invention of the West (2006)--that haven't received the amount of attention that they deserve.

Third, we might question the timing of the award. As a number of commentators have noted, it seems odd to run an award that covers 2000-2009 in 2009/2010. Sure, Wendt's Social Theory of International Politics (1999) won the last award, but it was pretty darn obvious that this was a Big Book(tm). Moreover, one might argue that giving him the award provided a way to recognize the impact of his prior writings on international-relations theory and scholarship.

But, regardless, how can one really make such a judgment at this stage? Wouldn't a "Book of the Decade" award be better offered with the benefit of hindsight--say, in 2015 or 2020? And no, I'm not just saying that because my first book came out in 2009. I don't see my book as a contender. But certainly some books in 2008 or 2009 might turn out to be more important than anyone could guess right now?

Fourth, we might ask what this means in a "post-paradigmatic" era. The last decade simply hasn't been a period marked by major, disciplinary wide debates. Instead, the field is more fragmented than it has ever been. Perhaps that narrows the list of contenders. Or perhaps it makes it difficult to justify giving the award to any specific recipient.

Fifth, we might ask what interests and functions awards like these serve. In many ways, I think, that kind of question is far more relevant than arguing over what book deserves the award, and involves issues of greater significance for the field than the contents of whatever book actually wins. I don't have any obvious answers right now. But I bet some members of the Duck community do.