Evaluating Galbraith's dissent

Peter Galbraith is now officially out as Kai Eide's deputy in Kabul. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon announced Galbraith's recall/firing this afternoon after he received a letter of dissent from Galbraith about Eide's performance in investigating allegations of fraud. Here's a portion of the letter from tonight's NYTimes:

“For a long time after the elections, Kai denied that significant fraud had taken place, even going to the extreme of ordering U.N. staff not to discuss the matter,” Mr. Galbraith wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times.

“And, at critical stages in the process,” he wrote, “he blocked me and other U.N.A.M.A. professional staff from taking effective action that might have limited the fraud or enabled the Afghan electoral institutions to address it more effectively.” U.N.A.M.A. refers to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

... “Given our mandate to support ‘free, fair and transparent elections, I felt U.N.A.M.A. could not overlook the fraud without compromising our neutrality and becoming complicit in a cover-up,” Mr. Galbraith wrote.

Peter has long been a pain to much of the US foreign policy establishment and I have always liked and respected him -- even when I've disagreed with him. He is impassioned and principled and refuses to back down when he sees injustices -- characteristics that don't always play so well at Foggy Bottom. He pressed harder and more aggressively than anyone in the late 1980s for a robust response to Saddam Hussein's systematic attacks on the Kurds. He directly challenged Croatian President Franjo Tudjman about Zagreb's role in both the Bosnian conflict and the purging of Serbs from Krajina region of Croatia in 1995. He was a very vocal critic of the Bush administration's handling of the war in Iraq -- especially the constraints he saw being placed on Kurdish autonomy after Saddam's removal.

So, his outrage over the election fraud and Eide's handling of it are not much of a surprise.

But, I am really curious about what happens next on this story. This type of policy dissent often gets quite a bit of attention with all kinds of speculation about how it does, or does not, influence policy considerations. I have long wondered whether or not there are any credible methods or measures to assess the independent effects of this type of policy dissent (This would make for an interesting dissertation for some aspiring grad student). So here are a few questions I have:

1) What will Galbraith do now? Will he go on the talk show circuit to challenge the United Nations and Karzai? Would that have any discernible effect public opinion and elite opinion?

2) Dissenters almost always become the darlings of the media and a wide range of policy critics. My hunch (and experience) is that dissent can have some limited influence on policy considerations but its role in effecting events on the ground is almost always more limited than is, or will be, portrayed by the media and by policy critics. So, how will his dissent and his removal affect events on the ground in Afghanistan -- i.e., how will Afghan citizens and elites respond -- and what evidence should we be looking for to make judgments on this?

3) I'll wager that we'll see several stories that assert Galbraith's dissent and firing will "completely undermine the legitimacy" of both the elections and the United Nations in Afghanistan. But, is this really what we are likely to see and how would we measure it in this context?

4) And, finally, how does this influence the internal discussions within the Obama administration? Galbraith is known to be close to Holbrooke -- what does this do, if anything, to Holbrooke's position vis-a-vis the McChrystal recommendations?

Thoughts?

"In Chess, Why is the Queen More Powerful Than the King?"

My son asked me this very rich question during a chess game about a week ago. Indeed, the distribution of power among the royalty on the chess board is the reverse of the gendered logic documented by feminist theorists of the state.

In chess, the queen has mobility (the crucial barometer of power in the game) but less value, as the game can continue without her; the hobbled king is relatively powerless, but is the most valuable piece without whom the game ceases. In actual politics, the situation is reversed: women's relative lack of access to political and military power and even social, economic and physical mobility is sometimes justified and at any rate partly explained through their greater perceived value compared to men for reproductive and symbolic purposes.

Pleased though I was with my son's ability to recognize this contradiction, it took a week of digging to actually find an answer. Turns out Marilyn Yalom has written a brilliant little book about this very this paradox and how it came to be: The Birth of the Chess Queen. In her introduction, she asks:

"How did [the chess queen]come to dominate the chessboard when, in real life, women are almost alway sin a position of secondary power? What is her relationship to the other chessmen? What can she tell us about the civilization that created her?"

Reading on, one learns three fascinating parts of the answer.

First, the chess board once lacked a queen altogether: in India, Persia and the Arab crescent, early chess included only male figures, the closest thing to the queen being the "vizier." Yalom argues the appearance of the queen on the board coincided with the Arab invasion of Europe and the Christianization of the game as it took root in lands dominated by the idea of a woman as help-meet to a Christian king.

But second, the early queen was far from the icon of power she is today. Indeed, according to tenth century chess rules, the queen is second only to pawns in her abject powerlessness on the board - able to move only one step diagonally in any direction (less power than today's king). While my son and I have had much fun attempting to play by tenth century rules (which include the knight's final step moving on the diagonal), the question remains: how did the queen become so powerful? Yalom relates this to the importance of a series of strong European queens during the ensuring centuries.

So the queen was born of the gender politics associated with the clash between Christianity and Eastern cultures; and gained power in concert with traditions of queenly rule in Europe. But this doesn't explain the other side of the coin: why the chess king is so vulnerable relative to his counterpart - so (one might say) feminized? Queens may have had greater power in Europe than in other parts of the world, and chess may have been a site for using gender as a cultural marker for civilizational identity, but queens hardly displaced their husbands and fathers as the loci of political authority. Perhaps the chess king's vulnerability reflects the perception of many men surrounded by strong females that women actually hold the power, even if it's not wielded through the sword.

Or maybe chess has simply not caught up (yet) with historical shifts in gender relations in the family and political life. Imagine a set of chess rules where the king and queen function as partners - equally powerful and equally valued - each dependent on the other for protection. The goal of each army would be to defeat both; either king or queen could fight and be "taken," but once one partner is lost the other would revert to the vulnerability of the contemporary king, as it is the strength of the union from which their power is derived.

My son and I will shortly be beta-testing this chess system and invite faithful Duck readers to join in our little experiment and leave feedback in comments.

Tsunami Kills Dozens on Small Pacific Island

The tsunami was triggered by an earthquake today and hit the islands of Samoa. The death toll is 17 so far, but likely to rise. Though this doesn't sound that high, consider that the population of Samoa is barely over 200,000 (approximately 280,000 if you include American Samoa). So by the most generous estimates this is the equivalent of an event killing approximately 18,000 Americans.

This kind of vulnerability faced by low-lying island nations brings to mind the speech given recently at the United Nations by Mohammed Nasheed, President of the Maldives, articulating climate change as a human rights issue - one particularly threatening the environmental and human security of such countries. Many of these nations are literally at risk of being wiped off the map if more fortunate world governments fail to come to consensus at Copenhagen this year over strategies for stemming climate change.



UPDATE: I first posted this last night; as of this morning, AP reports the death toll is "at least" 99: proportional to the population of the islands, that's the equivalent of approximately 137,000 Americans.

Yugoslavia is now gone....

When ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) says it's over, I guess it's over. Tomorrow, websites using the .yu domain extension will no longer be available. I guess it's some kind of ironic tribute to Milovan Djilas that Tito's dream is extinguished -- in the end -- by some anonymous bureaucracy.

Buena de Mesquita: "Iran Is Moving in a Healthy Direction."

Global heavyweights are debating the seriousness of Iran's missile tests, and the newly acknowledged plant outside Qum; and what to do about it all. In this context, Bruce Buena de Mesquita's predictions on Iran, outlined in his new book The Predictioneer's Game and reiterated on the Daily Show last night, are worth revisiting.

Buena de Mesquita's computer model, which is said to be considerably more accurate than the CIA, predicts that Iran will stop after getting to the point where they could test a weapon.

As Jon puts it: "The end game is to prove they can, but then they don't?"

De Mesquita: "Yes."

Threat Detection

At the request of the US Secret Service, Facebook has removed this poll from its site:














According to ABCNews, the Secret Service is investigating the creator of the poll "to determine intent." But if the goal is to identify threats to the President rather than police hate speech, wouldn't it be more logical (and easier) to go after those who voted "yes," "maybe" or "if..."?

The limits of our diplomatic capabilities

I am generally supportive of President Obama's renewed emphasis on diplomacy. But, I also must admit to some skepticism about what, in the end, more "diplomacy" will be able to accomplish. For years, a core assumption of the critics (myself included) of the Bush administration and the neocons has been that contemporary diplomatic institutions and practices offer a more refined set of instruments to deal with the complexities of contemporary global challenges.

Maybe. But, then again, maybe not. Several recent studies and stories reveal significant problems with the institutions of American diplomacy. Particularly worrisome are the deficiencies in language skills and regional knowledge in both the U.S. diplomatic corps and the U.S. military.

Laura Rozen at The Cable has an early look at the new GAO report that finds dangerous shortfalls in language skills among Foreign Service officers. According to the report, foreign service officers failed to meet language proficiency in about a third of the 3,600 jobs requiring language proficiency.

In the warzones, the problem is much more pronounced. Thirty-three of 45 officers in language-designated positions in Afghanistan, or 73 percent, didn't meet the requirement. In Iraq, 8 of 14 officers or 57 percent lacked sufficient language skills. Deficiencies in what GAO calls "supercritical" languages, such as Arabic and Chinese, were 39 percent.

Forty-three percent of officers in Arabic language-designated positions do not meet the requirements of their positions, nor do 66 percent of officers in Dari positions, 50 percent in Urdu (two languages widely spoken in South Asia), or 38 percent in Farsi (which is mostly spoken in Iran).

NPR’s Morning Edition had a recent update on the shortfalls of the Obama administration’s “civilian surge” strategy in Afghanistan. Obama pledged to send 420 or so civilian experts. Thus far, fewer than a quarter of that number has been deployed.

The implications of these, and other, types of shortcomings for the practice of diplomacy are detailed in Carne Ross's book, Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite. My review of Ross’s book is here. Ross was a British diplomat who volunteered for duty in Afghanistan in late 2001. He had no language skills and little regional knowledge and he was often confined to the security of the British embassy in Kabul. But for a variety of reasons he discusses in his book, that did not stop him from dutifully submitting his daily reports and "analysis" that supported the official British government's narrative of progress in Afghanistan's transition to democracy.

It's tough to be an imperial power with such weak imperial administrative capabilities....

Update: Here's a further illustration of the point coming out of Iraq. General Odierno and Ambassador Chris Hill really don't like each other and both claim that the other doesn't have a clue about what's going on in the country. From Thomas Ricks today:

What I am hearing is that Odierno is profoundly frustrated with Hill, who despite knowing almost nothing about Iraq has decided after a short time there that it is time to stand back and stop influencing the behavior of Iraqi officials on a daily basis. In addition, I am told, the ambassador believes the war is an Iraqi problem, not something that really concerns Americans anymore, despite the presence of 125,000 American soldiers. On the other hand, the diplomats respond, the military guys believe they have good relationships with Iraqi officials, but, the dips add, how would the soldiers really know? Because unlike Hill's posse, they don't speak Arabic. Which brings to mind my favorite saying of Warren Buffett, that if you've been playing poker for half an hour and you don't know who the patsy at the table is, you're the patsy.

Security Forces Deployed Acoustic Cannon Against US Civilians

The G20 Summit is over, the protests of last Thursday and Friday have largely died down, as has the media coverage. The City of Pittsburgh reports 83 protesters arrested and nearly $50,000 of property damage within the city, mostly caused by a small number of protesters while the rest marched peacefully in a carnival atmosphere: environmental, anti-militarist and labor activists carrying the banner for social justice non-violently, as permitted by the US Constitution.

I've already criticized the protest tactics carried out by a minority of those protesting. Now a word about crowd control tactics deployed by police and National Guard units in the city. An interesting development is that riot police didn't stop with conventional methods of crowd control such as arrests, intimidation with batons and tear gas, but also utilized a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) to disperse protesters during the conference.



The LRAD is among the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate's menu of options for crowd control in stability and support operations or for use on the battlefield. It has been used a number of times to repel pirates from cruise ships. The device emits a high-pitched whine painful to human hearing. Allison Kilkenny has a decent description of what it meant for locals in Pittsburgh, plus video, here. This was the first use of this weapon within the US to prevent civilians from assembling in protest.

An American Technology Corp official touting his company's new technology in the Daily Finance describes it like this:

"LRAD creates increased stand off and safety zones, supports resolution of uncertain situations, and potentially prevents the use of deadly force... We believe this is highly preferable to the real instances that happen almost every day around the world where officials use guns and other lethal and non-lethal weapons to disperse protesters."

Note what is happening here: the claim by ATC that dispersing peaceful protesters is a legitimate activity, something every civilized government needs to be able to do, and it's just a matter of what means will do the job at the least human cost. As I've written already, I have no respect for the tactics of those protesters who aimed to incite police violence through attacks on persons and property. Law enforcement has every right and responsibility to protect private property and the safety of delegates to a conference. But I also have no respect for a security sector that makes it its mission to break up peaceful protest, in violation of both human rights law and first amendment rights under the US Constitution; for companies who profit from it.

And the transfer of a weapon designed for military contexts abroad to US crowd control situations is worrying in other respects. For one thing, the effects of the weapon are not entirely benign: the LRAD can cause permanent hearing damage. But they can also be easily countered through the use of earplugs. It's likely that most adversely affected by the use of such weapons in domestic contexts will be those in the vicinity, including children, who are not part of the formal protest or are unprepared for such assaults. Seasoned protesters will simply don earplugs along with bandanas in the future. For another thing, is this a harbinger of more "non-lethal" weapons to come in US crowd control operations? The Active Denial System, touted by the Pentagon as "A Revolutionary Non-Lethal Weapon for Today's Battlefield" causes human beings to feel as if they are on fire. It won't kill you - as long as you make haste out of its path. And you will, unless you're a small child or elder being trampled by a panicked crowd. Even if the First Amendment didn't apply (and it does) these things scare the *#@! out of me even in battlefield situations and have no business whatsoever being deployed on civilians.

John Robb writes at Global Guerillas about the securitization of protest and militarization of civilian police forces as a global phenomena: good stuff in the comments.

How Multilateral Can Obama Be?

My colleague, Mlada Bukovansky, from Smith College who does excellent work on the evolution of norms and the role of institutions raises some interesting points on the question at the IR Blog.

She's cites three recent examples on trade and the environment in which the Obama administration's rhetoric on multilateralism is disconnected from its actions. I think her punch line is fascinating and really thought provoking:

...multilateralism is difficult. It is especially difficult for a superpower. And it is most especially difficult for a democratic superpower. Anyone who studies trade and climate negotiations knows how easily domestic politics can derail multilateral commitments. The simplistic liberal view that democracy and multilateralism go hand in hand needs to be challenged, or at least viewed with more skeptical eyes and a nuanced analytical framework.

I wonder how our multilateral friends in the Obama administration see this?

Certain G20 Protesters Senselessly Ravage Beautiful American City Clash With Police in Pittsburgh, Giving the Rest a Bad Name. And For What?

The G20 Summit kicked off yesterday in Pittsburgh, and today the NYTimes reported that anti-globalization protesters vandalized the Boston Market I used to feed my kids at in Shadyside. Aside from feeling a bit homesick when I saw the photo of that neighborhood on the front page, I ask myself what the anarchist block of these movements really thinks it's accomplishing with these tactics. Bear in mind that unless the movement has changed considerably in the last decade, the majority of the protesters are using nonviolent tactics and it's only a few on the fringes that are mucking up my beautiful former city.

Here are two standard rationales for anarchist tactics at the protests:

Rationale #1: The "black bloc" legitimizes the wider movement on non-violent protesters by behaving illegitimately. This kind of "radical flank" effect is noted in many social movements, but in this case since the Black Bloc tends to monopolize the press coverage, I tend to think they do more harm than good.

Rationale #2: They promote the movement by inciting a harsh police response that then tarnishes the authorities in the public eye, creates press for the movement and helps the mainstream nonviolent protesters look like helpless victims. Classic insurgent strategy, can be quite effective but like other forms of violent protest or terrorism, often has the opposite effect of making moderates look like they're associated with extremists.

I have a more cynical hunch based on my memories of being involved in the organizing run-up to the 1999 Battle in Seattle while in graduate school at University of Oregon: at best those two rationales serve as justifications. I suspect that anti-globalization vandalism isn't tactical at all but rather primarily self-promotional. Individuals in fringes of the anti-globalization movement may be doing it for no better reason than to earn status among their peers, a small minority of the wider movement. A shame to see an entire protest effort tarnished by the self-aggrandizing activities of a few.

Also, I wish they would stop wrecking my Pittsburgh!

The legitimacy of America's wars

Last night, over a good meal, two Department colleagues and I talked with several out-of-town guests for quite some time about the prolonged war in Afghanistan. Eventually, I happened to make a point that a fellow blogger said seemed novel and interesting -- certainly worthy of a blog post.

Let's see if anyone agrees.

As many experts note, the war in Afghanistan is prolonged in large part because too much of the local population sees the U.S.-NATO intervention as illegitimate. Regardless of good intentions, Americans are seen as unwanted foreign invaders. Moreover, even U.S. Generals concede that the Karzai regime lacks legitimacy within much of Afghanistan.

In contrast, of course, the war in Afghanistan is widely seen as legitimate by the international community of states. There's plenty of evidence: the September 2001 UN Security Council Resolution, NATO support, etc.

Is the reverse true in regard to the Iraq war? Is the Afghan war a mirror-image legitimacy problem? Is there anything novel about such a claim?

Internationally, the world clearly refused to grant legitimacy to the American invasion in 2003 -- and continued to be skeptical of the war for many years.

Did Iraqis view the war and occupation as legitimate? Obviously, Iraqis who have used violence against U.S. troops see the invasion and/or occupation as illegitimate. However, Iraq's Kurds have long appreciated America's assistance in holding off Saddam Hussein's government and providing them a measure of autonomous rule. Iraq's Shia may not have supported war, but they have been big winners in terms of political clout within Iraq. Many Shia politicians have actively cooperated with the USA and most would likely applaud the toppling of Saddam. The minority Sunni -- bigger losers in Iraq's internal power struggle -- have certainly not been pro-American, but many have been pacified since the Anbar Awakening and are perhaps willing to take their chances with domestic politics. Additionally, the Status of Forces Agreement arguably legitimizes the current US position within Iraq.

By making this argument last night, I was trying to point out that America's task of securing and stabilizing Afghanistan will likely be even more difficult than was the comparable task in Iraq. I know, I know. That may seem obvious given the length of the Afghan war -- nearly 8 years now! However, many critics of U.S. policy have argued that the problem in Afghanistan was a simple lack of attention and resources. Once U.S. attention turns from Iraq, the U.S. can get down to business.

I say no.

The lack of international legitimacy meant that the U.S. had to pay almost all of the costs in Iraq (compared, say, to the 1991 Persian Gulf War). Those costs have been very painful, but once America devoted substantial resources it achieved a measure of success in Iraq -- and agreed to a way out with an Iraqi government that has a measure of legitimacy.

On the other hand, the lack of legitimacy within Afghanistan means that America's COIN strategy faces an enormous uphill battle. Almost regardless of international assistance, the US and NATO will not be able to defeat insurgent forces in Afghanistan unless the domestic government is viewed as legitimate (and likely autonomous) and the western forces are NOT viewed as foreign invaders.

Rather than problematically increasing the size of the US military presence in Afghanistan, it might be better to do the difficult social and political work to "appreciate the dynamics in local communities" and understand "how the insurgency, corruption, incompetent officials, power-brokers, and criminality all combine to affect the Afghan population."

"Not in Anyone's Backyard": Andrew Yeo on the "No Bases" Network

This issue of International Studies Quarterly includes an article by Andrew Yeo on the emergence of an advocacy network against foreign military bases. Aside from the minor fact that Yeo omits reference to an important recent contribution to the literature on basing politics, I found his process-tracing of the No Bases Network fascinating. Here's the abstract:

"Providing an overview of the emergence, characteristics, trajectory, and potential limitations of the transnational anti-base network, this article focuses on two broad questions relevant to transnational politics. First, what processes and mechanisms enabled local and transnational activists to form the international No Bases network? Second, how did activists juxtapose existing local anti-base identity and frames to emerging transnational ones? Following existing transnational movement theories, I argue that the global anti-base network slowly emerged through processes of diffusion and scale shift in its early stages. The onset of the Iraq War, however, injected new life into the transnational anti-base movement, eventually leading to the inaugural International Conference for the Abolition of Foreign Bases in 2007. Although loose transnational ties existed among anti-base activists prior to 2003, the U.S. war in Iraq presented anti-base activists the global frames necessary to accelerate the pace of diffusion, scale-shift, and brokerage, and hence, the consolidation of a transnational anti-base network. Paradoxically, however, even as No Bases leaders attempted to forge a new transnational identity, anti-base activists, as "rooted cosmopolitans," continued to anchor their struggle in local initiatives."

I liked this article because it's a great substantive example of what I look for in my work: interesting ideas that could be converted to international norms and have attracted supporters but have not yet hit the mainstream human rights/human security/disarmament agenda. Yeo is interested in network emergence and identity; I'm more interested in how a network mobilized around a new idea like this manages to market itself to the mainstream NGOs who most have the ear of governments and the UN. This one's the kind of "aha" case I like to find - something that makes intuitive sense but I hadn't thought of or heard articulated before.

(Or does it make sense? In Empires of Trust Thomas Madden argues that the regional security provided by a hegemon's military presence outweighs the negative externalities of military bases. Interesting counterfactual.)

Well, whether it is a good idea or not in "human security" terms, this is a network with an idea that one could imagine being promulgated as a global norm as easily as the idea of banning landmines, only you don't hear mention of it at the global level: it's an issue not yet "on the agenda" the way many other global problems are. And Yeo's analysis of the Iraq war as a focusing event that triggered the consolidation of disparate domestic networks into a transnational movement suggests an obstacle this network need to overcome in order to attract support from large NGOs and achieve anything like real international norm change: the perception that this is really an anti-US movement instead of a movement to address a problem that's inherently global.

"Success is Still Achievable"

General McChrystal's strategic review concludes that the situation in Afghanistan is serious and getting worse, but "success is still achievable" as long as he gets more troops to wage a more aggressive counterinsurgency campaign.

According to the review, the US/ISAF objective in Afghanistan is to get to a point where the "insurgency no longer threatens the viability of the state." To this end, it calls for a new strategy in which the focus is winning over the population.

But I find this assessment striking:

"Afghan social, political, economic, and cultural affairs are complex and poorly understood. ISAF does not sufficiently appreciate the dynamics in local communities, nor how the insurgency, corruption, incompetent officials, power-brokers, and criminality all combine to affect the Afghan population."

And, the "insurgents control or contest a significant portion of the country, although it is difficult to assess precisely how much due to a lack of ISAF presence. . . . "

Take a moment to unpack this. To repeat: ISAF does not control much of the country (nor does it know how much it controls), it does not know how local politics are playing, it does not understand the relationship of the insurgency, corruption, incompetent officials, power brokers, and criminal activity and how they affect the Afghan public. Think about what these gaps mean in the context of a request for more troops to wage a counterinsurgency strategy and to win over the population such that the insurgency does not threaten the "viability" of the state.

And, we've been at this for eight years.

Obama: "I Was Actually Black Before the Election."

Hear, hear. I'm tired of all this distracting talk about racism in the health care debate. You can disagree with a liberal policy championed by a black President without being a racist. Lots of people have been misled into fearing health care reform for lots of reasons. I'm glad to see our President laughing this stuff off and keeping focused on the issues.

Taking Drezner's Challenge (Kind of)

In response to my discussion of his post "The Trouble with Dames in World Politics," Dan Drezner (among other things) challenges me to blog more, and to blog more about the issues directly related to Gender and IR - an encouragement so emphatic that it gets both bold and italic emphases.

While I will start blogging more about when my book publisher thinks that's an acceptable substitute for a manuscript, those deciding on my tenure consider it service, and it paints my new house ... I (kind of) accept the challenge. Dan is right that I have not blogged a lot about issues related to gender and International Relations. I really just started blogging this summer in the throws of moving across the country, and really wrote about whatever was on my mind at the time. I wasn't complaining about the absence of gender on IR blogs when I answered Dan's post. I was complaining about the absence of gender in "mainstream" IR as reflected on the blogs, understanding it to be a mutually reinforcing cycle.

For that reason, I think it is important to say that, while I haven't blogged a lot about gender and IR, I have written a lot about why gender matters in International Relations, and think that should matter in a discussion of talking about "the issues." For that reason, at the bottom of this post, I've summarized some of the work that I've done on these issues.

Still, there is, I think, some value to getting some of this stuff out on the "blogosphere" (I felt so old typing that word). What time I do have to blog, I will spend dealing seriously with some of the important issues related to gender and global politics.

Here's a little discussion before I get on the plane to go to ISA-West ....

First, Dan expresses hesitance about talking about gender as a "Man." Dan (and any other "men" interested in engaging these issues), if there are people out there in the world opposed to men talking about gender, I'm not one of them, and would welcome an open dialogue about these issues. Certainly (see more below), men have a gender too (right?) ... and one of the major goals of feminist advocacy in IR as I understand it is to mainstream gender discussions in IR, rather than leaving them as the sole property/responsibility of (women) feminist scholars. While some may differ, I think the majority of feminist scholars in IR would say that you have as much license to talk about gender as anyone else, and I certainly won't give you less credit for your gender.

Second, I'll concede Dan's argument that research programs don't rise and fall with your blog posts. But in so much as (your and others) blog post are representative of the field of IR, and (increasingly) students take their cues from online representations as much as they do from journals and syllabi, I think it is important that we notice the position that gender studies has in these blogs, as well as in the field writ large. My point was not that it could never be funny to joke about gender/IR (I'll delay judgment on that), or that this blog post was (anywhere near) solely responsible for the marginalization of gender-based/feminist scholarship in IR. My point is simply that it means something discursively that the only mention of gender and IR on a blog considered "mainstream" in the discipline is as a (theoretically problematic) joke. That said, I welcome a serious engagement of these issues, even in blog format, where humor is par for the course. And while I would never want to (even unwittingly) perpetuate the stereotype that feminists are humorless, I also think it is important to understand that (even funny) discourse has social and political impact.

Third, perhaps a taking off point for serious discussion (that I can't really do justice right now). Dan "defends" his "FP colleagues" by mentioning that some of them have raised the issue of gender, linking to Steve Walt's post about the "top ten" books written by women in IR, written after Steve (and his wife, according to his post) realized that his "top ten" books in IR list featured only books authored by men. I appreciate Steve's consciousness about the sex of the authors of books, and that he took the time to go back and write this second list out of this consciousness.

Still, if we are going to have discussions about "gender and IR" we need to get some sense of what it is we are talking about - and Steve's post is about women (in the discipline), not about gender (in global politics). The two (women/gender and the discipline/global politics) are related, and often women/gender are discussed in the same scholarly works. Still "women" and "gender" are not the same, conceptually or actually, and their conflation often causes substantial confusion and miscommunication between scholars attempting to discuss these issues. So, a couple of points:

1) "Sex" is a (falsely, but we'll get to this in a minute) dichotomous category, where there are two choices, "male" and "female." In addition to conflating sex and gender (also, we'll get to this in a minute), way too much of the scholarly and media discussion (links available on request) about "gender issues" reduces gender to "women," implying first that "women" are the only people who have gender, and second that "gender issues" are about women's problems and the solutions to them, rather than about gender subordination more generally (which happens both to "women" and to "men"). "Gender" is something that everyone has, and that everyone is impacted by, whichever "sex" category they are assigned to.

2) (Because I said I'd get to this), the "sex" categories "male" and "female" are a false dichotomy. It is estimated that fully one percent of the population physically and/or genetically differ from the standard biological understandings of what it means to be "male" or "female." Those people are currently understood as one category, "intersex," though many of the biological causes and manifestations of "gender ambiguities" differ fairly substantially. I bring this up because we are often quick to understand people as male/female (and associate masculinity and femininity), but there are a substantial number of people in the world who don't fit (either comfortably or at all) in either category.

3) (This is the point, for today) Sex isn't gender. If "male," "female," and "intersex," are sex categories, gender is not the equivalent of (perceived) membership in biological sex classes. Instead, when feminist scholars say "gender," they are referring to a system of symbolic meaning that creates social hierarchies based on perceived association with masculine and feminine characteristics. So "gender" and "gendering" are about the association with (and value attached to) characteristics that we understand as associated with sex categories. The best sentence-long explanation of this that I've found comes from Lauren Wilcox, who says that "gender symbolism describes the way in which masculine/feminine are assigned to various dichotomies that organize Western thought" where "both men and women tend to place a higher value on the term which is associated with masculinity" (in Gender and International Security). An implication of this is that "gender subordination" isn't just when "men" put down "women," it is a system of symbolic meaning perpetuated by both "men" and "women" that affects and orders the lives of all. There is not just one "masculinity" or one "femininity" but various masculinities and femininities ordered in relation to what R. W. Connell calls a "hegemonic" masculinity, the cultural ideal-type to which others are compared and expected to aspire. It is certainly a "gender issue" when we discover the hugely disproportionate impact on "women" of phenomena like wartime rape, human trafficking, post-conflict DDR processes, and the like. But it is also a "gender issue" when militaries motivate soldiers by identifying weaker men as "sissies" and "girls," despite it "happening to" men. While I am interested in the question of the ways that gender hierarchical social relations lead to women's subordination, I am more interested in the ways that gender hierarchical social relations which subordinate women and characteristics associated with masculinity constitute a rule in global social and political relations, and impact not only all individuals' lives but the structure and function of the international system.

Those are the sorts of things I will talk about as I blog about gender and IR.

Because I promised it at the top of this post, not in a self-congratulatory way, but instead in a "see, its out there," sort of way ... you can find my work:

In Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq, where I argue that gender has been a key factor in shaping the historical and current debates around just war theory, and point out the ways in which the gendered nature of just war theory affected the state-level dialogues surrounding the wars in Iraq (the First and Second Gulf Wars, as well as the sanctions). Dan, I don't know if you remember, but the sanctions chapter of this book comes out of my undergraduate thesis, which was an attempt to expand the thesis of the sanctions article you linked to in your response to my post. We talked about it a few times while I was at Chicago, though you were away my senior year.

In "The Gendered Realities of the Immunity Principle: Why Gender Analysis Needs Feminism" in International Studies Quarterly, I argue that the nature of the non-combatant immunity principle can only be fully understood (either casually or constitutively) without taking account not only of gender but of the fact that gender (in global politics and elsewhere) is a hierarchy against which particular roles are doled out and values are measured. It argues that the non-combatant immunity principle is (both philosophically and in practice) fundamentally based on the classification of women as "beautiful souls" (at once protected from war and the object to be fought over) which warrants men's roles as citizen-soldiers, and serves as an underlying justifactory logic for war.

In Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics, Caron Gentry and I argue that gender-based expectations about women's behavior obscure their political motivations for engaging in violence, leading instead both scholars and popular media to characterize women as lacking agency in their violence, whether that violence is revolutionary, terrorist, or genocidal. We point out that the continued assumption that women are incapable of violence betrays lingering unequal understanding of men and women (individually and collectively) in global politics, which has important implications both for international conflict and gender subordination.

In the "Security Studies: Feminist Contributions," the introduction to the special issue of the journal Security Studies that I edited, I discuss briefly what it means to approach IR from a feminist perspective and provide a brief overview of questions of epistemology and method in feminist theorizing. I then summarize some of the accomplishments of Feminist Security Studies, and related that work to Security studies writ large. I argue that gender is conceptually, empirically, and normatively essential to studying international security, and that, as such, accurate, rigorous, and ethical scholarship cannot be produced without taking account both of women's presence in and the gendering of global politics.

In "Agency, Militarized Femininity, and Enemy Others," in the International Feminist Journal of Politics, I explore the gender-based expectations of women joining the United States military, especially as it relates to women's participation in the prison abuse "scandal" at Abu Ghraib. It points out the increasing sophistication of the idealized image of the "woman soldier," stories of militarized femininity constructed in opposition to the gendered enemy, and contradictions in understandings abot women's agency in their violence.

In "Feminist Interrogations of Terrorism/Terrorism Studies," in International Relations, I point out that, while there isn't one feminist approach to terrorism/terrorism studies, feminist approaches might ask a collage of questions, including: where are the women in terrorism? in terrorism studies? in our understandings of terrorism's victims? what approach should we use to study terrorism? what epistemological biases are inherent in how we see "terrorism?" how are current definitions of terrorism gendered? how are gender roles and gender perceptions manipulated in terrorist and counterterrorist efforts? how does the (gendered) rational/emotional divide impact the way that we study terrorists' motivations?

Along related lines, I've also edited a fair amount of work in gender/security, written on gender and styles of political leadership, gender and issues of IR pedagogy, feminist reformulations of just war theory, the sexualization of women's violence, the applicability of feminist just war theorizing to non-state actors in 21st century war, and the gendered nature of power transition theory, among other things. And certainly, my work only scratches the surface of work in Feminist Security Studies specifically, and in gender and IR more generally. Several projects developing comprehensive bibliographies should be up and running later this year.

Afghan Statebuilding

I'm generally sympathetic to the letter from the IR scholars on Afghanistan discussed below -- though I am most certainly not a realist and I am not averse to statebuilding as a concept or as an occasional practice in foreign policy. I supported the effort in Bosnia (notwithstanding the impression given in George Will's Washington Post column tomorrow morning -- I'll respond to that later). For me, I have long been persuaded by Tony Smith from Tufts who argues that the question should not be simply: is one for, or against, the enterprise of state building. It is whether or not there is a credible strategy and set of conditions conducive to success.

In Afghanistan, it has been almost eight years since the Taliban were ousted from power, and on the issue of governance, functionality of state institutions, and civil society development there are very few positive indicators. The recent elections and the UN’s handling of them have been a disaster. The sudden departure this week of Peter Galbraith from his position as the number two UN official in the country after a not-so-private feud with his Norwegian boss, Kai Eide, who heads the UN mission in Kabul reveals the train wreck. From the Times Online:

Mr Galbraith, a close friend of the US special envoy Richard Holbrooke, left for Boston on Sunday after a heated meeting with Afghan election officials. His “pointed” questions to the Independent Election Commission (IEC) were evidence of a much tougher line towards the Afghan authorities than the “softly-softly” approach of Mr Eide, who heads the UN mission to Kabul.

“The relationship between Kai and Peter has completely broken down,” said a diplomat in Kabul. “Peter has left the country. The official line is that he’s on a three-week mission to New York. But Kai just turned round to Peter and said, ‘I want you out’.”

The apparent row illustrates the deepening divisions within the international community on whether to allow President Karzai to claim re-election in the flawed presidential poll.

Mr Galbraith wants the IEC to annul results from 1,000 of the total of about 6,500 polling stations and to recount results from another 5,000, diplomatic sources said. Mr Eide, a former UN envoy in Bosnia, seeks only a face-saving recount of some 1,000 polling places, the sources said.

Mr Galbraith’s wholesale recount would virtually ensure a second round in the election, denying Mr Karzai his claimed first-round victory. Harsh winter weather means that the second round could not be held before May, leaving Afghanistan in political limbo.

Mr Eide’s solution would probably enable Mr Karzai to claim victory, although with a reduced margin.

There just isn't anything good to say about this....

Happy International Talk Like a Pirate Day

In addition to being Rosh Hashanah, today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

In case any of you needs pointers, I strongly recommend The Pirate Primer by George Choundas, who has culled literature and historical sources to create a complete annotated dictionary of swashbucklers' lingo.

Enjoy, or let me rot and perish.

More Weekend Geek Blogging

This just in from the Interwebs. According to Airlock Alpha, the film Battlestar Galactica: The Plan won't air on Syfy until next year.

"The much anticipated movie, which is a new take on the pivotal events of “Battlestar Galactica,” will tell the story of the attack on the Twelve Colonies from the point of view of the Cylons.

Fans are eagerly anticipating the release and with much reason. The show ended in April, which left a lot of fans wanting more after only four seasons. Edward James Olmos, the director and legendary Adm. William Adama in the series that ran from 2003 to 2009, has said on numerous occasions that when “Battlestar” fans see “The Plan,” "They’re all going to have to go back and watch the entire series again.”

The DVD will still be released Oct. 27, and there's no word from Syfy that this street date will change.

Also, no projected change in the airdate of the new Caprica series in January. Whew.

This Movie is Every Kind of Sick.

If you need a little stomach-turning yet intellectually provocative weekend fun, go watch District 9 while it's still in theatres. Only check your disbelief at the door. (I mean seriously. If two of your teeth fall casually out of your rotting mouth in the space of ten seconds, you're not about to get through storming a fortified secret biolab with the rest of them intact, are you now? And since when can humans and aliens understand one another's languages without a universal translator?)



If you've not seen it (and chances you have, I'm usually late to these things since my typical night out to movies still in theatres involves children too young to watch people bite their own fingernails off) Rob Williams sums it up pretty well: "Think 'Blair Witch Project' meets 'Aliens' meets 'Borat.'" Aliens arrive at earth to be cast into apartheid-like conditions policed by a sprawling and corrupt private security firm. The rest is a commentary on the Weberian state, emnification processes between in-groups and out-groups, the grimy reality of slum conditions, and the similarities between medical science and voodoo cannibalism. Oh, with a good old-fashioned adversity-makes-a-real-man-of-you hero narrative.

Students who saw it ahead of me raved about it: "Professor, you have to see this film, I watched it and all I could think about was your class!" And true it's chock full of provocative themes straight out of a human security textbook (though you would think given the context that the political semantics might be slightly more sophisticated).

Sharmini Brooks says the film is full of cliches and it is. (I mean, we get that it's a play on different kinds of apartheid. Did it really have to be set in Johannnesburg to make that point - wouldn't any megacity do?) But maybe so. Eric Conway-Smith of the Global Post sees the film as a commentary not on the many forms of institutionalised exclusion American audiences (especially human security students) could read into the plot, but literally about actual living conditions in South Africa's present-day slums.

I think the most interesting subtext is not about slum life or social exclusion or even identity and interests and liminality and man's inhumanity to prawns but about the media Panopticon. The mockumentary format of the early and final scenes implies that the non-mockumentary parts have been cobbled together by news cameras constantly watching everything... it's an eerie effect when you can't even barf in privacy. Where must one go for a little respect anyway, off-planet?

Fresh Duck Meat

I am writing to introduce a new guest blogger to the Duck of Minerva. Jon Western is a Five College Associate Professor based at Mt. Holyoke College and has an extensive background in US foreign policy, including stints at the United States Institute of Peace and at the Department of State during the 1991-95 crisis in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Jon is the author of Selling Intervention and War: The Presidency, the Media, and the American Public and most recently published "The Death of Dayton" in Foreign Affairs. Please extend a warm welcome.

On Afghanistan

The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, a group of scholars and foreign affairs experts formed -- or at least solidified -- around the time of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, has issued an open letter to President Obama calling for a rethinking of US policy in Afghanistan. Below the fold I'm going to reproduce the letter, the text of which (and the full list of signatories) can also be found here on the Coalition's website. I'm doing this for two reasons.

First, the Coalition's efforts seem to me very much like a logical extension of the work that I (and Dan Nexon, among others) did with Security Scholars for a Sensible Foreign Policy in issuing an open letter in 2004 concerning Iraq policy. This kind of "Weberian activism," in which scholars weigh in to help to enrich the context of public debate, strikes me as precisely what academics ought to be doing -- as opposed to compromising our academic vocations by using our university positions as platforms for narrowly partisan lobbying. To the contrary, Weberian activism consists primarily of scholars using their expertise and knowledge to raise "uncomfortable facts" with which politicians have to grapple; in this case, the uncomfortable facts involve a mis-match between goals and capacity, plus the kind of creeping hubris of "idealists with overwhelming force" that is almost always a temptation in American foreign policy. In those senses I'm proud to be a "realist" when it comes to foreign policy, in the grand tradition of Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr and, ultimately, Max Weber.

Second, I'm a signatory of the letter -- not as an expert on Afghanistan, certainly, but as someone who knows a thing or three about how American identity is implicated in American foreign policy, and someone who is more scared of liberal idealists with weapons than of most other kinds of people who might be at the helm of the foreign policy of the most powerful military force on the planet.

Full text below the fold.

The Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
Washington, DC

Dear Mr. President:

During your campaign for the Presidency, Americans around the country appreciated your skepticism of the rationales for the Iraq war. In 2002, you had warned that such an endeavor would yield "a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, and with unintended consequences." You pointed out the dangers of fighting such a war "without a clear rationale and without strong international support." As scholars of international relations and U.S. foreign policy, many of us issued similar warnings before the war, unfortunately to little avail.

Today, we are concerned that the war in Afghanistan is growing increasingly detached from considerations of length, cost, and consequences. Its rationale is becoming murkier and both domestic and international support for it is waning. Respectfully, we urge you to focus U.S. strategy more clearly on al Qaeda instead of expanding the mission into an ambitious experiment in state building.

First, our objectives in that country have grown overly ambitious. The current strategy centers on assembling a viable, compliant, modern state in Afghanistan--something that has never before existed. The history of U.S. state-building endeavors is not encouraging, and Afghanistan poses particular challenges. Engaging in competitive governance with the Taliban is a counterproductive strategy, pushing the Taliban and al Qaeda together instead of driving them apart. If we cannot leave Afghanistan until we have created an effective central government, we are likely to be there for decades, with no guarantee of success.

Second, the rationale of expanding the mission in order to prevent "safe havens" for al Qaeda from emerging is appealing but flawed. Afghanistan, even excluding the non-Pashto areas, is a large, geographically imposing country where it is probably impossible to ensure that no safe havens could exist. Searching for certainty that there are not and will not be safe havens in Afghanistan is quixotic and likely to be extremely costly. Even if some massive effort in that country were somehow able to prevent a safe haven there, dozens of other countries could easily serve the same purpose. Even well-governed modern democracies like Germany have inadvertently provided staging grounds for terrorists. A better strategy would focus on negotiations with moderate Taliban elements, regional diplomacy, and disrupting any large-scale al Qaeda operations that may emerge. Those are achievable goals.

Third, an expanded mission fails a simple cost/benefit test. In order to markedly improve our chances of victory--which Ambassador Richard Holbrooke can only promise "we'll know it when we see it"--we would need to make a decades-long commitment to creating a state in Afghanistan, and even in that case, success would be far from certain. As with all foreign policies, this enormous effort must be weighed against the opportunity costs. Money, troops, and other resources would be poured into Afghanistan at the expense of other national priorities, both foreign and domestic.

Mr. President, there is serious disagreement among scholars and policy experts on the way forward in Afghanistan. Many of those urging you to deepen U.S. involvement in that country are the same people who promised we would encounter few difficulties in Iraq and that that war would solve our problems in the Middle East, neither of which proved to be the case. We urge your administration to refocus on al Qaeda and avoid an open-ended state-building mission in Afghanistan.

Sincerely, [full list of signatories here]

Crowdsourcing Data Coding

I just finished watching a video of CrowdFlower's presentation at the TechCrunch50 conference. CrowdFlower is a plaform that allows firms to crowdsource various tasks, such as populating a spreadsheet with email addresses or selecting stills from thousands of videos that have particular qualities. The examples in the video include very labor intensive tasks, but tasks that a firm is not likely to either need again or feels is worth dedicating staff to.

As I was watching the video I thought about the potential to leverage such a platform for large-scale coding of qualitative data. In the social sciences, often we find the need in large scale research for the massive coding of data, whether it is language from a speech, the tenor or sentiment of quotations (or newspaper articles in media studies), the nature of cases (i.e. did country A make a threat to country B, did country B back down as a result, etc.), or the responses from an open-ended survey. Coding is an issue whether you conducting qualitative or quantitative analysis--especially where you have captured large amounts of data. Often times the data is not inherently numerical and needs to be translated so that quantitative analysis can be conducted. Likewise, with a qualitative approach one still needs to categorize various data points to allow for meaningful comparisons.

The interesting thing about a service like Crowdflower is that it can leverage a ready group of workers globally who are ready and willing to conduct the coding at a reasonable price. Additionally, Crowdflower utilizes various real-time methods to ensure the quality of the coding. Partially this is achieved through the scoring of coders relative to their past performance, how they fair on tasks that are "planted" by Crowdflower (i.e. salting with tasks where the correct answer is known ahead of time), and how much agreement there is between coders on various items.

The final method comes up quite a bit in social science research when you have to determine how to categorize a given piece of data. The level of agreement is crucial to confidently coding a particular case. I would imagine that a platform such as CrowdFlower could make that task easier and more robust by quickly tapping into a larger pool of coders.

Has anyone used a service like CrowdFlower in this way (i.e. coding data from qualitative research)? Would be interested in your perspective.

[Cross-posted at bill | petti]

China: democracy and warlords

A reporter for OpenDemocracy spent the month of August touring China, looking for signs of democratization. He finds more than he bargained for:

Indeed, in interviewing people from various organisations and from very different perspectives, I was struck by a consistent undertone of worry about the prospect of a regime change (even a "colour revolution") along the lines of those in the post-Soviet states in the early 2000s - which culminated in the governing communist or reformed-communist parties being ejected from office. elections China's clear official aim is to ensure that it doesn't make the same mistake. But in a country undergoing rapid change, how much of the political course of events and outcome can the party still control?

But that’s the cities. I imagine most of the conversations were with the intelligensia. Out in the countryside, a far different picture emerges:

In China's northeast, quasi-mafia groups have made entire rural areas their fiefdoms, which they run according to their extensive business interests. In the southeast province of Fujian, similar elite economic groups have established control of villages via local representatives who ruthlessly pursue the groups' private interests with no regard for broader social goals. In the central provinces of Hunan, Henan and Hebei, most evidence I saw showed a clear battle between party operatives and other increasingly powerful groups (from specific clans in one area, to economic or ethnic or social groups in another). Such tense and uneven situations help put in perspective Hu Jintao's emphasis, in the aftermath of the Xinjiang disturbances, on the need to have "one law for everyone".

Lots of luck on that, Hu.

Reading Fareed

Recently, I've been reading and mostly enjoying Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World. It is a remarkable book, offering sweeping analysis of all sorts of global trends. Not just anyone could have tackled this project and it is definitely to Zakaria's credit that he has put together a well-written and interesting book about an important topic -- the apparent long-term relative decline of the U.S. and the rise of the "rest" of the world (especially China and India). "The great shift taking place in the world might prove to be less about culture and more about power" (p. 86; author's emphasis).

I've been considering the book's adoption in my spring 2009 master's level seminar on international relations. Zakaria's book has deservedly received a great deal of praise and he's appeared in all sorts of media to promote it. Plus, it was famously carried around by Barack Obama in May 2008.

In fact, because the book is so well-known, I'm not going to offer a proper review here. Instead, I will list a few book notes -- examining a few claims in the text that grabbed my attention as I was reading. For instance, on p. 202 Zakaria notes that "Americans are borrowing 80 percent of the world's surplus savings and using it for consumption." Shame on us, I thought -- especially given more pressing global needs.

Usually, I wrote something in the margin to mark these insights -- often a question mark, but sometimes an exclamation point. On occasion, I think Zakaria follows the conventional wisdom too closely. At other times, he can be a bit sloppy. Most of the time, however, Zakaria is level-headed and offers smart analysis.

In any case, my first question mark is on p. 28 of the paperback edition, as Zakaria notes (and emphasizes) that

"In recent years...[oil] prices have risen because of demand from China, India, and other emerging markets, as well as the continuing, massive demand in the developed world."

However, journalist Matt Taibbi says this simple market explanation of recent oil price increases is false. Oil was not in short supply and demand was not behind the surge in prices:

the short term flow [of oil] has actually been increasing. In the six months before prices spiked, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the world oil supply rose from 85.24 million barrels a day to 85.72 million. Over the same period, world oil demand dropped from 86.82 million barrels a day to 86.07 million. Not only was the short term supply of oil rising, the demand for it was falling — which, in classic economic terms, should have brought prices at the pump down.

So what caused the huge spike in oil prices? …the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once solid market into a speculative casino. Goldman [Sachs] did it by persuading pension funds and other large institutional investors to invest in oil futures — agreeing to buy oil at a certain price on a fixed date. The push transformed oil from a physical commodity, rigidly subject to supply and demand, into something to bet on, like a stock. Between 2003 and 2008, the amount of speculative money in commodities grew from $13 billion to $317 billion, an increase of 2,300 percent. By 2008, a barrel of oil was traded 27 times, on average, before it was actually delivered and consumed.

Elsewhere, Zakaria relies on other economic data provided by Goldman Sachs.

I think my first explanation point was placed on p. 39, as Zakaria seems to share a critical-constructivist view of political authority:

"Today, no solution, no matter how sensible, is sustainable if it is seen as illegitimate. Imposing it will not work if it is seen as the product of one country's power and preferences, no matter how powerful that country."

Perhaps this will become the convention wisdom in post-neocon Washington?

Zakaria sometimes has a knack for explanation that minimizes the kind of hyperbole often used to sell books. Just after describing the past and predicted successes of India ("over the past fifteen years...the second-fastest-growing country in the world"), the author tempers this by noting that "it also has three Nigerias within it -- that is, more than 300 million people living on less than a dollar a day" (pp. 131, 133). Later, he notes that 800 million Indians earn less than $2 per day (142).

However, on other occasions, Zakaria could have offered a bit more explanation to assure greater accuracy. Why did he quote unnamed Indian oficials who assert that the country has "a perfect record of nonproliferation" (160)? India has made valid points accusing others of hypocrisy, and may well have a perfectly consistent record on that score, but failure to join the NPT is a pretty strong strike against this claim.

Despite the nits I have picked, Zakaria's The Post-American World is worth your time and could provoke a great deal of discussion in an IR seminar for advanced undergraduates and master's students. It is likely not sufficiently theoretical (nor rigorously empirical) to be considered for adoption in a class for doctoral students.

The Security Council Goes Nuclear

I just finished reading the UN Security Council's latest Cross-Cutting Report on The Security Council's Role in Disarmament and Arms Control; Nuclear Weapons, Nonproliferation and Other Weapons of Mass Destruction.

It's an excellent overview for non-experts on the relationship of the UN Security Council to nuclear diplomacy. Background sections cover the history of UNSC's involvement in disarmament and arms control and why it mostly failed during the Cold War; the nature of alternative bilateral and non-UNSC multilateral arrangements to date and their drawbacks; the Security Council's engagement with a series of WMD crises since 1977; and the relationship between nuclear weapons and other WMD (though the report accepts as valid the socially constructed distinction between WMD and conventional weapons - obviously the authors haven't read Tannenwald). Anyway, it's useful reading for anyone wanting the current skinny on disarmament and non-proliferation regimes and where the UNSC fits.

But the report also includes an optimistic, forward-looking and (I think) a little bit naive appraisal of the Council's resurgent role in nuclear diplomacy, which was set out in Article 26 of the UN Charter but fell by the wayside for much of the UN's history:

"The Security Council has shown... that it has the potential - and the power, if it chooses to exercise it - to contribute to addressing both specific and broader disarmament dimensions of security issues... Clearly there are a huge range of options the Council members can pursue in their national capacities that would have positive impacts on the disarmament and non-proliferation agenda."

These, the report goes on, include "national statements in UNSC debates, committing the UNSC to "play a regular role," an annual high-level meeting, an omnibus resolution bringing together and updating existing resolutions, statement and decisions on disarmament; and "establishing a high-level subsidiary body to support the Council in discharging a strategic-level role in the area of disarmament, arms control and non-proliferation."

But most of avenues envisioned here for SC involvement seem halfhearted and largely rhetorical. On the one hand, the Security Council has one thing going for it that other nonproliferation forums lack: a 2/3 majority voting process rather than a consensus process where every stakeholder has a veto. On the other hand, the P5 veto dilutes this advantage for all issues; and it's particularly problematic on nuclear policy given that the P5 are all on one side of the disarmament debate. Indeed the report's appraisal of the SC's earlier efforts at nuclear diplomacy paints a more somber picture of its ability to exert more than an epiphenomenal effect on political outcomes, for this very reason:

"The P5 - all of whom have nuclear weapons - seem unusually united about compliance with the nonproliferation obligations in the NPT and preventing other states and nonstate actors from acquiring nuclear weapons. However, the Council's record of effectively addressing the parallel obligations on the P5 under article VI of the NPT [which requires nuclear states to work in good faith toward disarmament] is almost completely absent in any practical sense... Council action against state proliferation has been uneven and is often criticised as selective... it has acted firmly against nuclear programmes in Iraq, the DPRK and Iran. Nuclear weapons programmes in Israel, Pakistan and India were largely ignored."

As anyone schooled in realist theory knows, this is precisely the pattern that would be predicted in the absence of the Security Council.

So ultimately I think it is naive to place much faith in the UNSC as a bulwark against nuclear proliferation. This doesn't mean it's entirely devoid of power. The UNSC is good for three things, all significant:

First, as Inis Claude famously argued, it functions as a collective legitimation body, so it has some role to play in reproducing norms negotiated in other forums like the Conference on Disarmament. Second, it may be poor at helping states escape collective action dilemmas, but it does constitute a forum for states to coordinate policy responses vis-a-vis non-state actors - perhaps it should be taking the lead particularly on this aspect of non-proliferation policy. Third, as any civil society actor who has attempted to influence a Security Council resolution knows, it functions to securitize issues: the agenda of the UN Security Council is considered a signal to the global community about the significance of threats and concerns, and in this sense alone its re-engagement with disarmament and proliferation issues is important.

Doesn't mean we should pin all our hopes on New York, however. I think it is far more significant that the United States is now playing a lead role on nonproliferation issues as well holding the rotating Presidency for the month of September. To the extent that the UNSC has power to play a constructive role, it will be wielded through sympathetic P5 governments.

Dan Drezner on Gender ....

I am overdue on a journal contribution I need to finish today (hopefully, the editors don't read this blog), but couldn't pass this one up ...

Referencing an article in The Daily Telegraph called "Men Lose Their Minds When Speaking to Pretty Women," Dan Drezner writes a blog entry on Foreign Policy, "The Trouble with Dames in World Politics," where he, among other things, blames the Cuban Missile Crisis on Jackie Kennedy, expresses concern that Michelle Obama might be the next Helen of Troy, muses about Angelina Jolie's relative success as a celebrity activist, and wonders what a country ruled by Salma Hayak would look like.

Alright. I know this is supposed to be funny. If I didn't, I'd have the blog tag "humor" in Drezner's labels to guide me. But ...

Though I appreciate the effort, this is not funny. Some would call me a spoilsport, and not up for a good joke. That might be also true, but isn't the reason I don't find this funny.

"Mainstream" IR engages gender issues rarely if at all, and when it does, it usually does so fairly trivially. I'm not a regular reader of the Foreign Policy Blog, but back searches say that this is one of the few times issues of gender have been mentioned on the blog (other than the runner-gender "scandal," which, had I had time, I would have weighed in on) and the only time that I can find in the archive that the IR theorists on the blog have mentioned gender issues at all.

In a joke?

Three reasons why this is not funny:

1) It trivializes gender-based work in IR.

Even Dan admits in the post (somewhere in the discussion about Angelina Jolie, gender, and celebrity activism) that there is something to be learned from thinking about gender and IR (Dan, if you're reading this, FYI, I have a Ph.D. Candidate at Virginia Tech, Sandra Via, who is currently writing her dissertation on the very question you find interesting, about gender tropes/effectiveness of celebrity diplomacy). If there is something to be learned from studying gender and IR (certainly, about Angelina Jolie, but about most everything in international politics), then this is not the way to encourage/develop the field and those research programs, which are already struggling for resources and legitimacy.

I cannot tell you how many times I have been told that my publication record was excellent, and I'd be perfect for a job if I just studied something "respectable" or "serious," or that I would be included in some honor or some governing body if I just "got over that gender phase" and did "real political science." I've landed on my feet thanks to some great people who disagree, but I can tell you that's the prevailing attitude towards gender-based work that I've encountered.

(Likely unwittingly on Dan's part), only acknowledging gender studies in IR as a joke contributes to IR's unwillingness to take gender (and people who study gender) seriously. While communication/miscommunication is a two-way street (most effectively demonstrated in the debate between Ann Tickner and Bob Keohane in International Studies Quarterly a decade ago), and several recent conversations (like the Feminist special issue of the journal Security Studies published this summer) have been promising, most people still study IR as if it were gender-neutral, which it is not. Its unfortunate that the position of gender studies in IR remains so marginal that something like this matters, but given the high-profile nature of this post compared to the relative exclusion of gender studies from this sort of high-profile outlet ....

2) Agency

As one of the comments to Dan's post mentions, even the story that Dan's post tells isn't the "trouble with dames" (which in itself is a gender-subordinating discourse), its the trouble with men ... assuming all the parameters of the discussion hold (which, if I had more time, I'd get into), men being distracted by women isn't women's doing, right? Women don't seem to be assigned a lot of agency in their successes in global politics (which I've written about a lot before), but seem to be assigned plenty of agency in men's transgressions and failures (which I've also written a lot about before).

My personal favorite was always in Byman and Pollack's "Let Us Now Praise Great Men," where one of two women mentioned in the article, a Czarina, matters in history: because if she wouldn't have died, Fredrick the Great wouldn't have achieved his full greatness ...

Women matter, and have agency, in important ways in global politics - as leaders, as soldiers, as peacemakers, as seamstresses, as housewives, as prostitutes, as business executives, etc.; and where women matter (and even where they do not seem to), gender matters in the shaping of expectations associated with jobs and leadership positions, they way people in those positions are treated, and the way that they treat each other. Again, likely unwittingly, Dan's post replicates traditional assumptions that women are at once without agency and to blame for men's mistakes.

3) Privileging Sex in IR.

Sex (the act) matters in IR. Gender matters in IR. Women matter in IR. But women and gender don't matter exclusively as they relate to sex (the act). By taking the joke off an article that discusses the influence of attractive women, and then joking about the influence of attractive women in IR, Dan (likely unwittingly, again), reinforces a third traditional notion about women/gender in politics: that women's role centers around sex and sexuality. While certainly there is an overlap, there are many areas and ways in which gender matters (for example, in the security arena), where the exclusive focus is not women's attractiveness/sexuality. That work gets less attention because it is less (pardon the double entendre) "sexy," but matters just as much.

I'd write in a lot more detail if I had more time, but wanted to get some "food for thought" out there ....

"How Can we Make Civility Interesting?"

Hat tip to President Barack Obama. (The good stuff begins about 10 minutes into the clip.)

Goodbye....

So, I guess this is goodbye-- for now at least, for a while.

Starting tomorrow, I'll be officially joining the State Department's Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow. For the past 2 weeks, I've been going through AAAS orientation, a program designed to introduce scientists to Washington.

This fellowship process has been quite the experience. I'm in a class of over 180 fellows--all Ph.D.'s in the sciences--who will be joining various agencies of the federal government as well as Congressional offices. There are a few social scientists, but I'm pretty sure I'm the only "political scientist" in the group. Most of my fellow fellows come from bench science, and are learning how Washington "works." I as a political science type ostensibly already know this. The irony is rich, though, as our discipline teaches "politics" and then doesn't understand why politicians tend to ignore our "scientific" policy advice. My week has been quite the clash of two syllabi: Intro to Political Behavior meets Intro to Research Methods.

For any of you looking for a fantastic way to spend a year (or two!) in government, I'd highly recommend checking this fellowship. While Dan's is the one that gets all the accolades in our field (and Dan certainly deserves accolades for it), the AAAS fellowship does essentially the same thing. We're in need of some more social scientists in the program! AAAS is tremendously supportive of its fellows, and the mission of this fellowship is to better connect science and policy. Its a goal I support, even as a "scientist" who studies policy.

As I depart the blogosphere for a prolonged hiatus, I'd like to thank everyone here at the Duck for inviting me to be a part of this wonderful community. When I started blogging, it was at the suggestion of my then teaching assistant (who I am proud to now call a colleague) who told me blogging was much cooler than discussion boards on Blackboard. As it turns out, I really like blogging. But, I think, one of the reasons that I enjoy it so much is this site and this community--a fantastic group of readers and commenters.

As for me, my future is a lot less clear. For the next year I'll be at State. AAAS Fellowships come with an option to renew for a second year, and that is a very real possibility for me. As loyal readers know, I have mixed feelings about our field and profession. I loved my time as a scholar and professor. But, I did so from a non-tenure track position, working on yearly contracts and picking up an administrative job to maintain my position. I enter the policy world without a spot in the academy waiting for me to return. At this point, I can honestly say that I have no idea where I will go once this fellowship ends. That's scary, but also exciting.

So, goodbye. For now at least.