Which New Year's Eve would you rather celebrate?

Dan Drezner and Bill have both flagged Randy Schweller’s new piece in National Interest. I’ve just finished reading the piece and I agree with them – it’s really a depressing read. But, it’s the type of piece that we see periodically – it tries to take stock of the state of the global politics and IR scholars’ understanding of it. In many way, it reads a lot like Mearsheimer’s “Why We Will Miss the Cold War” or Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations?” It aims high and tries to explain large systemic events by using a lot of broad generalizations to develop the core argument that we live in a world of disorder.

But, it got me to thinking (and since we’re all making lists of one sort or another as we end the first decade of the 21st century), how does this New Year’s Eve (and the transition from this decade to the next) compare to the past ten or so decade transitions. How unsettling is our current era relative to others? Which New Year’s Eve on the brink of a new decade would you rather celebrate?

Here’s how I’d rank mine:

1. 1999 -2000: Post-1989 but pre-9/11. Ah, the days when our biggest threat was that Y2K was going to destroy us all. Cool Millenium concerts.

2. 1989 – 1990: The fall of communism in Eastern Europe – the only real question was how would it end in Moscow. Democratization’s third wave was snowballing....

3. 2009 – 2010: Is unipolarity and American hegemony really a bust? Environmental degradation, resource scarcity, demographic stress all sound scary but many of these threats are distant while terrorism and proliferation do not seem to convey the existential threat we experienced during much of the Cold War.

4. 1959- 1960: End of the Eisenhower era and we had settled into the Cold War; but I still wouldn't trade tonight for 1959 -- kids were practicing duck and cover in school and tens of thousands of Americans were building nuclear bomb shelters in their backyards. (I grew up in North Dakota and we still had the duck and cover drills in the late sixties -- remember kids, even a piece of paper can help shelter you from fallout...)

5. 1979 – 1980: Collapse of Détente and a renewal of the Cold War, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Nicaraguan revolution, the Iranian revolution, global economic recession, oil price spikes, persistent claims of US in decline -- sucked to be us.

6. 1969 – 1970: Escalation of the Vietnam War -- 40K+ Americans already dead as well as several hundred thousand Vietnamese; a spiraling of the arms race and social tensions in much of the West.

7. 1949 – 1950: The eruption of the Cold War with a series of crises/war scares from 1946 to 1949 culminated with the Soviet detonation of an atomic weapon in August, 1949 and the Chinese revolution in October. State S/P was drafting NSC-68 = scary.

8. 1929 – 1930: U.S. stock market collapse in October, 1929 fueling the global depression, collapse of the global trading system, etc…

9. 1919-1920: Early post-WWI recovery – refugees, property destruction, grief, a generation of young men perished, feuding among the allies, the promise of Versailles was history... Not a happy time.

10. 1939 – 1940: WWII begins in September, 1939. Enough said

I'd just add one note that I hadn't fully anticipated before my developing my list, but my ranking goes from unipolarity, to bipolarity, to multipolarity. Hmmm.... Happy New Year's!

Facebook Back in the Hot Seat

A few weeks ago Facebook unleashed its new Terms of Use on the unsuspecting user community. As anyone with a FB site knows, though the changes were touted as enabling greater user control over personal information, FB's new default settings enabled "Everyone" to view users' information unless users were savvy enough to update their settings - a change that caused the Electronic Privacy Information Center to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission.

Even worse, FB initially included profile pictures and friend lists as "public" information that could not be made private even by savvy users - a move so blatantly in violation of privacy rights that it quickly resulted in an outcry on web-pages like "Facebook Restore My Privacy Rights." (Facebook quickly "tweaked" the options to make it possible to hide one's friend lists, though it is unclear to me whether this would protect people whose friends have their lists visible to the world.)

Not all agree that these changes are worth the uproar. A joke going around on Facebook belittles the concern: "If you don't know, as of today, Facebook will automatically start plunging the Earth into the Sun. To change this option, go to Settings --> Planetary Settings --> Trajectory then UN-CLICK the box that says 'Apocalypse.' Facebook kept this one quiet. Copy and paste onto your status for all to see, if we survive."

I'm with those who see the civil liberties implications of these changes as troubling and significant. My concern is not so much with the changes themselves but the inability of users to opt out of them. I fear the genuine real-world conflicts between online expression and physical security - the young student stalked by an angry ex-lover, the dissident persecuted by her government.

But the row over Facebook's privacy rules is not just about civil liberties. It's also about the very constitutive rules governing the construction and presentation online social identities. People really do see their pages as online versions of themselves - avatars if you will - not necessarily reflections of their whole real-space being, but an online representation constructed in relation to a particular community of friends that simply becomes socially dysfunctional when forcibly shared with everyone.

And the evidence of this is emerging in online practice. Consider the growing popularity of Facebook "Suicide" websites like Seppukoo.com, which offer Facebook users a ritual means by which to exercise "exit" under the rubric of "reclaiming your offline identity." According to Kaliya of Identity Woman.net:

The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine offers "suicide" for Facebook, Myspace and Linkedin. It highlights its time saving nature taking just under one hour vs. over nine hours to go through the process manually with 1,000 Facebook friends. Their FAQs are great:

"If I start killing my 2.0-self, can I stop the process? No!

If I start killing my 2.0-self, can YOU stop the process? No!

What shall I do after I've killed myself with the Web 2.0 suicide machine? Try calling some friends, talk a walk in a park or buy a bottle of wine and start enjoying your real life again. Some Social Suiciders reported that their life has improved by an approximate average of 25%. Don't worry, if you feel empty right after you committed suicide. This is a normal reaction which will slowly fade away within the first 24-72 hours.

Why do we think the Web 2.0 suicide machine is not unethical? Everyone should have the right to disconnect. Seamless connectivity and rich social experience offered by web2.0 companies are the very antithesis of human freedom. Users are entraped in a high resolution panoptic prison without walls, accessible from anywhere in the world."

Whatever you think about the bleak humor of a Facebook "suicide, those who've left - or are thinking about leaving - are talking about their decision in terms of freedom.

Facebook has responded to Seppuko.com with a cease and desist message - interestingly, in the name of the privacy rights of its users. Seppukoo.com issued a reply shortly before Christmas.

The suicide metaphor suggests this is not simply the civil liberties of users at stake, but people's entire sense of whether an online "life" separate from their physical lives remains "worth living." I don't know about this narrative of inherent dysfunction between one's online and offline representations. I like both. We all have different masks we wear in different contexts; a networked expression of ourselves online is no different and is a uniquely functional means of remaining connected in a world where social distance has shrunk while geographic and physical barriers remain wide.

Without user choice over what can be shared with whom, however, and without clear-cut rules intelligible to a reasonably literate user community, those identities will become as bland as people's professional websites. Who will post interesting personal pictures, or even their faces at all, on their profiles if anyone in the world can view them? Who will say anything funny, if everyone in the world must be counted on not to get offended at the joke? Friend lists take on a completely different meaning if in order to avoid awkward conversations with visibly excluded peers they get constructed not based on a user's preference, but based on one's estimate of people's perception of those preferences as a visible part of their public profile. This not only constrains choice but the very social structure in which online identity construction occurs. It demands, indeed, the death and remaking of existing identities to conform with new rules.

No wonder users are up in arms. I hope users keep the heat turned up on the architects of Facebook and other social networking utilities, rather than pointing the gun at their online selves. EPIC is continuing to press the FTC not only to restore user choice but to make the default settings err on the side of privacy rather than openness.

And as of they this week they can do so by keeping close tabs on Facebook's job search for an "Advertising and Privacy Counsel," the job description for which is to "ensure compliance with advertising and privacy laws." Readers interested in applying can read the job requirements here, which include not only a JD, state bar experience, and experience in privacy issues, but also "a sense of humor."

Susan Strange was (mostly) Right

I just re-read Susan Strange's article, "The Westfailure System" in the Review of International Studies 25, 3 (July 1999). In either early 1999 or late 1998 (depending on the editorial schedule of RIS), she wrote:

"I have put the financial failures of the state-based system first because my current research has convinced me that it is the most acute and urgent of the current threats-without-enemies. If we do not find ways to safeguard the world economy before a succession of stockmarket collapses and bank failures eventually lands us all in a 20-year economic recession -- as the history of the 1930s suggests it might -- then no one is going to be in the mood to worry overmuch about the longterm problems of the environment."

I doubt she would be rejoicing at the accuracy of her predictions about the fate of the Copenhagen climate talks in the face of the global financial crisis. OK, maybe not a 20 year recession, but the insight is still pretty good.

What I find less satisfying in the article, but only because the argument is only sketchily developed, is her "What is to be done?" section. She asks for the emergence of a viable opposition to the hegemony of a transnational corporate class (TCC), an opposition grounded in "an emerging global civil society". Not anti-market or anti-business (she draws a distinction between small and medium-sized firms and the TCC), but transcending the state and existing multilateral institutions. She concludes with a message to academics:

"We have to escape and resist the state-centrism inherent in the analysis of conventional international relations. The study of globalisation has to embrace the study of firms no less than of other forms of political authority. International political economy has to be recombined with comparative political economy at the sub-state as well as the state level. It is not our job, in short, to defend or excuse the Westphalian system."

Go Susan. Which is why the sort of increasingly rare investigative journalism evident in today's Washington Post story about AIG is worth highlighting -- great material for tracing the inner workings of the inciters of the herd, the "animal spirits" in action...

I suspect you enlightened readers of the Duck already know this stuff (Strange herself repeatedly says that the ideas she is presenting are "kids-stuff"), but I would be interested to hear comments on whether the global civil society approach has really gained any traction in the last decade.

Kidnapping

I've been traveling in the southwest and reading different newspapers than I usually do. As a result, I learned that Phoenix is America's "kidnapping capital." The LA Times published the AP story I saw on December 27:

The latest figures show Phoenix had 302 kidnappings in the first 11 months of 2009, when the city recorded an average of 27 abductions each month. The city had reached a 10-year high in 2008 with 359 kidnappings. The expected decline in 2009 would mark the first decrease since 2005, when the city had 228 kidnappings....

Over the last several years, immigrant and drug smugglers have snatched their rivals, associates or their family members as a way to collect unpaid debt for lost trafficking loads, make quick money from crews flush with cash or as retaliation for earlier abductions.

Clearly, this is a transnational problem -- violence from Latin America spilling over into the US according to one authority quoted in the piece:

The kidnappings first came to light in Phoenix in 2005, but they rose as overall violence associated with immigrant and drug smuggling intensified in Arizona, a busy hub for transporting illegal immigrants and marijuana into the country. From there, the city earned the unofficial distinction as America's kidnapping capital and drew parallels to Mexico, which has long had a kidnapping problem and is the staging point for smuggling operations.

Kidnappings in Phoenix are dwarfed by reported cases involving children, many of which involve family members in custody disputes.

To address the problem, Phoenix set up a special police squad. Officials seem hopeful that it is working, but I doubt that there's enough data to tell.

Pakistan's Supreme Court Recognizes Third Gender

Wow. If the use of non-binary-gender-codes on census forms is an indicator of progressive human rights law, Pakistan has now left the US in the dust:

Late on Wednesday, the Supreme Court in Pakistan ordered that the government officially recognize a separate gender for Pakistan's hijra community, which includes transgendered people, transvestites, and eunuchs. The court told the federal government to begin allowing people to identify as hijras when registering for a national identity card.

Such cards are necessary for everything from voting to more informal situations; patrons must present the card at cybercafes before surfing the Internet, for example. Not having an identity card, or having one with incorrect information, leaves a person vulnerable and easily excluded from society.

In India, voters are required to identify their sex both on their voter ID cards and at the polls. The insistence that they identify as male or female effectively barred many transgendered and transvestite people from the polls until late this year, when the government declared that for the purposes of voting it would recognize a third option.

The ruling in Pakistan, though, potentially reaches much further.

In addition to the order for government recognition, Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry also issued a warning that the hijras' rights of inheritance, which are often informally ignored, would be enforced, and that police harassment would not be permitted, a sign, perhaps, of rulings to come.

When I teach Gender and Security I often have my students do an exercise to debate how one would code the relative gender-egalitarianism of different states. There are many indicators - fertility rates, percentage of women in the labor force or the government, presence or absence of laws criminalizing marital rape. The WomenStats database has more. But most of them capture (or stand proxy for) women's empowerment rather than absence of gender hierarchies in a society per se. So when I read of this I wondered if gender-coding in census data should be understood as a useful measure of a state's commitment to gender inclusiveness.

The counterpoint is, of course, is that such a ruling (or human rights law in general) may mean little in a country where women, gender minorities and those who defend them face such persecution by the state and tribal elites.

Question for readers: how significant is this ruling as a step toward gender inclusiveness in Pakistan? Should other countries follow suit and should human rights activists press them to do so?

Donuts and Diplomacy

For my first blog post here at Duck of Minerva, I thought I should stick to one of my areas of experience (if not expertise): Alcohol.

The Canadian Press has picked up on the fact that although there are many Canadian wines available at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, there are only three Canadian beers (– and hardly the finest that the landmass north of the 49^th has to offer: Molson Canadian, Alexander Keith's Ale or Blue Light.) Considering that Canada is the nation of Bob and Doug, this hardly seems fitting.

I’ve been at two soirees at the Washington Embassy this year – and many at the Canadian High Commission in London over the course of doing a PhD. At either, the Canadian beer choice selection never really seemed to be lacking.But beer is as important to the Canadian identity as hockey, maple syrup and national embarrassment over Celine Dion, and clearly the Canadian Press believe the situation is important enough to make the national news.

So, this got me to thinking as to the subtle ways nations represent themselves abroad: food, drink, background music, etc. This is different, I think, from deliberate cultural representation where embassies and governments sit, choose and plan what events they will put on display – such as exhibitions of native arts, traveling national symphonies, ballets and operas, etc. Rather, it’s almost the unintended representation which may speak volumes about a country.

During the Bush years, the American Embassy in London held a series of film screenings of “great” American films, (including Flags of Our Fathers – hardly a pro-war film.) The screenings, organized by the cultural diplomacy section, were to presumably remind Londoners of the contributions of Hollywood to the world. This clearly represented an attempt at winning hearts and minds through free popcorn. However, the fact that viewers had to climb through security worthy of the Green Zone in Iraq, may have sent a more powerful message than what was on the screen.

But let’s bring it back to more pleasant things – like coffee and donuts. Perhaps even more important than flack-jackets to Canadian troops is the Tim Hortons, the beloved Canadian chain of coffee stands (even mentioned on How I Met Your Mother) put in Kandahar to boost troop morale. (It might be the one thing that unites all Canadians.) The coffee stand has, apparently, also been attracting troops from different countries, eager to try a “double-double”.

But this seemingly works for other nations as well. In his book, The Interrogators, Chris Macky, frequently spoke of his desire to go to the UK compound because it gave him a chance to leave the “dry” US military base and have a gin and tonic. And having friends who had access to the American PX in London was always important for those who wanted access to “real-fake” peanut butter and chocolate.

Is this form of cultural diplomacy, discussions over donuts in Afghanistan, more important than screenings, parties, evenings, and concerts? Is it important for embassys to consider the unintended ways they can fly the flag – whether negatively or positively? Or should we all just relax and enjoy our Keiths in peace?

Pandora's Balks

I have now seen Avatar twice, (one in each 'D'), and I can say without spoiling anything that critics like Armand White and Annalee Newitz* are way off base in describing the film as "the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt." Corny, maybe a little. OK, maybe a lot. But imperialist?



According to White:

Avatar’s going-native F/X fantasy infantilizes Cameron’s technology-infatuated audience; they’ve never read Joseph Conrad on colonialism or feel any compunction about balancing politics and fantasy. There’s even a Busby Berkeley-style tribal dance to divert them. Also, Avatar’s techno-exoticism involves blue cartoon creatures, not brown, black, red, yellow real-world people. It’s the easiest, dumbest escapism imaginable.

Newitz concurs:

"These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color - their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades.

OK first, if these critics are right and the film is about assuaging guilt, how is that anything to sneeze at? At worst, that makes this story about an individual switching sides as a result of communicative action with another species to oppose his own culture's hegemonic dominion because his conscience tells him it's the right thing to do. If there was a little more guilt in this world at atrocities against indigenous people or other vulnerable populations, a little more empathetic readiness to set aside one's desire to 'teach the natives' and embrace the opportunity to learn from those unlike 'us', a little more seeing the world through others' eyes, and a little more efforts to assuage any said guilt through direct action, I think the world would be a better place. That's not "rampant imperialism." That's the opposite.

Here's another way to look at films like these: as a story about how individuals should act when faced with the awareness of their complicity in - and capacity to stop - a military-industrial machine about to commit great wrongs. To me, this was the thrust of the film.

But in this, unfortunately, it was poorly executed. The real problem with Cameron's hero Jack Sully, in fact, is not his love of "exultant technological thrills" banshee-flying, or the fact that he "goes native" falls in love with an indigenous woman and her land and culture. The real problem is that he is unforgivably slow to come to grips with the key moral dilemma of the film. It is not until he actually mates with a Na'Vi and is himself threatened as one of them that he decides to take a stand against the Sky People's war machine. Prior to that, he unproblematically wears his two hats - developing deep knowledge of / comraderie with the Na'Vi by day, reporting happily back to the industrialist-cum-genocidaires and their private contractor-henchmen by night. Bemoaning their transition from fighting good wars to pimping military services for a paycheck, how easily he forgets what good wars are about until it's too late. By the end, he has few options at his disposal. This is no narrative of just warrior-hood; the fact that it's being presented as such, but so badly, weakens the entire story.

Other "good" characters too seem all too easily to manage the cognitive dissonance of knowing what is in store for the Na'Vi they consciously respect and love. Grace the xeno-biologist makes a few half-hearted attempts to dissuade when the tanks are already rolling. But surely she understood what was coming sooner? Soon enough to avoid feeding all the relevant facts to "the company," or to warn the Na'Vi, or to engage Jack Sully about the ethics of his duplicitous posturing. If anything this is not a story about assuaging historical guilt but about forgetting the lessons of history. It is as if these characters are blissfully unaware of every mind-numbingly obvious political metaphor in the story.

And so while the film is a visual marvel in every way, it disappoints in every other way. It's not just that the plot itself is mostly lifted from lesser films like Battle for Terra (as even my seven-year-old recognized). Or that most of the characters boil down to shallow stereotypes - the greedy, oblivious, corporate industrialist, the single-minded bullying colonel, the boot-licking trigger-happy marines that seem to follow diabolical orders not only readily but happily. You go in hoping for something to excite your political and scientific imagination the way Cameron did in The Abyss, and you get a beautiful film whose message boils down to this: genocide against the indigenous is bad. I found myself looking hard for a more subtle narrative, but of those easily accessible - the relationship of science to the military-industrial complex, the interaction between human consciousness and embodiment - all were basically left to the imagination. Even the technology isn't really explained. (How the heck do avatar riders not go mad from lack of sleep?)

But you see, this is my anthropocentrism talking, thinking that the film ought to have been more about the humans: it was, and was meant to be, about the Na'Vi and their contact with the Sky People. Through Jake Sully, we are given a primer in Na'Vi culture and biology. But even here there are many open questions. (Try this one on: Na'Vi biology allows them to literally bind themselves to the beasts they ride, yet this special ability seems to have no bearing on their own reproductive rituals. Hmm.)

So ultimately, the brilliance of this film is not that it makes you think - it doesn't. You will enjoy it more if you don't try. However, it does makes you feel. What Armand White dismisses as "phosphorescently pretty sci-fi dazzle" is a way of story-telling that sends a message for which a plot is largely unnecessary. Maybe it's a contradiction to critique industrialism with a film that cost around $400 million to make. But that message (of interconnection, respect for one's planet, simplicity) conveyed that way (a visually appealing flight of fantasy) soaks in on an emotional level in a way that environmental commercials don't. I came home thoughtful, alert to the insignificance of many of the things I take so seriously, ready to turn off my computer and just sit quietly in front of a fire, drink some tea, curl up like a cat and do nothing but feel thankful for the amazing planet around me and its place in the universe.


*UPDATED: Thanks, Drew!

Happy Festivus

From ICanHasCheezburger.com.

Is there a Santa Claus?

I first posted this two years ago; since it's that time of year again, and since I still stand by what I wrote then, I am re-posting. 'Tis the season, and all.

Ever since the invention of the InterNet, not a December goes by without some version of this making the rounds of listservs and e-mail chains and the like. I must have received it a dozen times from various sources. It's cute and funny and all, but I must say that I've never been entirely happy with its conclusions. So in the spirit of the season, I present the first known social constructionist investigation in the the existence of Santa Claus. I mean, why should the natural sciences get to have all the fun -- and why should they get to corner the market on looking into such matters?

The first thing to point out is that a social constructionist would not necessarily consider the existence of Santa Claus to be the same thing as the existence of a man in a red suit who flies around the world in one evening in a sleigh pulled by eight or nine flying reindeer and delivers toys to all of the good children of the world. Perhaps physicists are so literal when it comes to social actors, but we social constructionists tend to have a broader view on the subject. Indeed, for us, an actor exists inasmuch as and insofar as action is legitimately performed in its name. It is the massive set of activities carried out in the name of the state -- invoking state authority, done on the state's behalf -- that provides the evidence for the state's existence, as well as concretely instantiating the actor "the state" from moment to moment. Contra some IR constructivists (like Alex Wendt), it's not like there's some essential stateness lying around somewhere from which state acts emanate; rather, there are a series of actions performed in the state's name, actions that -- if successfully legitimated -- give rise to the effect of a solid object called "the state". It's not center first, action second; it's action first, appearance of a center second.

So the social constructionist standard for an actor's existence is related to the variety of actions performed in that actor's name, and on their reception by the relevant audiences. "Acceptance" here doesn't necessarily mean "belief"; it merely means that the audience accepts that the actor has performed the action, even if the action itself is questioned. If the state seizes my possessions, I might challenge that in court, but in so doing I am accepting the state's actor-hood, even if only provisionally (I might be a principled anarchist or an extremely rigorous libertarian, and so would never completely accept the state as an actor). The only way to refuse to accept a claim of actor-hood is to refrain from even speaking of an action as though it were performed by the supposed actor, something that it is extremely difficult to do in a world constituted by sovereign territorial states.

Now, some of my critical realist friends always object, at this point in the account, that all of those actions performed "in the name of the state" are really being performed by individual human beings. [When talking to a critical realist, always watch for the adjective or adverb "really" -- this generally shows you the weak point in their arguments, since these are the places where they have to rely on the linguistic equivalent of banging a fist on the table in order to make their point.] My usual response is to smile and ask them what basis they have for that assertion; the basis they give usually boils down to either:

-- "individual human beings are constituted to be actors, unlike other beings; other beings are only actors inasmuch as human beings do things with and for them." To me this looks kind of like species prejudice, and also temporal prejudice, since it wasn't so long ago that animals were considered to have moral culpability (and in some parts of the animal rights movement, this is not a radical claim at all).

-- "when you point to something done in the name of the state, you're actually pointing to a physical human being doing something." Hmm . . . empiricism and behaviorism from a critical realist? How deliciously ironic. Sure, if I try to abstract from all of the social content what I "see" is a member of the species homo sapiens whose limbs and extremities and orifices are moving. Well, only if I am looking at a certain macroscopic scale; if I peer in closer, I see mitochondria and various cellular components, closer and I see complex chains of organic and inorganic molecules, and if I go even closer I see atoms. Why stop just on the level that is comfortable to those of us raised in human society -- especially since if we've been raised in human society, we know the difference between that person who has the authority to stop traffic an that other person who does not: the first person is not acting under her or his own authority, but is instead the instrument of the state and as such is not a single isolated individual but is instead a representative of a broader corporate person with a claim on me. The fact that members of the species homo sapiens are involved in these interactions is as little relevant as the fact that oxygen is involved in these interactions.

-- "we can only preserve human agency if we confine the notion of action to individual human beings." I think this is just silly. Indeed, confining action to individual human beings strikes me as a fine way to degrade human agency, because it runs the risk of changing every social arrangement into a more or less deliberate bargain entered into by pre-social individuals, and converting human agency into a matter akin to selecting products from a supermarket shelf. I'd much rather celebrate human creativity, including the various ways that social actors are produced and reproduced over time -- some of those actors are "individuals," to be sure, but this is just as much of a social product as "the state" or "the clan" or "the nation" or even "the civilization" is.

Critical realists dealt with, we can turn to the facts about Santa Claus and actions performed in his name. Every December, millions of kids write letters to Santa, go to malls and other places to see Santa, and discuss what Santa is going to bring them. Millions of adults use the threat of Santa not bringing anything (or bringing coal) as a way to induce better behavior in their kids. NORAD, the strategic air command for the USA, devotes at least some server-space to tracking Santa as he supposedly travels around the globe. And -- this is the most important thing -- every year millions of kids get presents from Santa on Christmas morning. A gift with a note attached saying "from Santa" strikes me as prime facie evidence of an action performed in the name of Santa Claus, and by social constructivist standards, that's pretty much all it takes for Santa Claus to exist as a social actor. Wait, you say: what about legitimacy? Think or a moment of the great lengths that people go through to make sure that their kids can't poke holes in the Santa Claus story: different wrapping-paper for the Santa gifts, modified handwriting for the Santa cards, and so on. And it's not just kids: think of "Secret Santa" activities in offices, at shelters, in churches. And why does the Salvation Army dress its collectors up in Santa outfits? Clearly, they're invoking a selfless giver in an effort to solicit donations for their own charitable work. "Santa" has wide popular cultural currency, and the idea of a "present from Santa Claus" occupies a distinctive place in the cultural resources that we use to make our lives meaningful. QED: Santa Claus exists.

Call this the Miracle on 34th Street version of the case for Santa Claus' existence: to the extent that there's a series of social practices identifying Santa Claus as their author, there's a Santa Claus. Of course, that movie presents a mythologized version of the account; there's a concrete human (or apparently human -- Santa is often envisioned as an elf of some kind) being who claims to be, and is eventually recognized by the US postal service and the State of New York (and the two female protagonists) to be the one and only Santa Claus. But in actuality, we have something closer to the situation that Thomas Hobbes identified centuries ago as pertaining to the concept of sovereignty: the commonwealth only exists insofar as it is "personated," and that personation is, at bottom, a social convention. Hobbes' Leviathan is a sustained argument to the effect that the commonwealth ought to keep getting personated lest we collapse into a civil war, and as such is an implicit acknowledgment of their being no higher court of appeal for questions of actor-hood than the diffuse processes that go into making socially sustainable claims. We aren't living in a movie; we don't have a single identifiable individual member of the species homo sapiens who is the one and only genuine Santa Claus. Instead, we have a whole panoply of cultural practices revolving around the idea of gifts that show up from mysterious sources. And inasmuch as those practices continue, the actor that they sustain continues, and Santa Claus continues to exist.

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Melowdrama, thy name is Schweller

The opening of Randall Schweller's latest article for The National Interest:

CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL relations is moving toward a state of entropy. Chaos and randomness abound. Now, the story of world politics unfolds without coherence, unfettered by classic balance-of-power politics, a plotless postmodern work starring a menagerie of wildly incongruent themes and protagonists, as if divinely plucked from different historical ages and placed in a time machine set for the third millennium. We live in an era in which unprecedented globalization and economic interdependence, liberal-democratic hegemony, nanotechnology, robotic warfare, the “infosphere,” nuclear proliferation and geoengineering solutions to climate change coexist with the return of powerful autocratic-capitalist states, of a new Great Game in Central Asia, of imperialism in the Middle East, of piracy on the high seas, of rivalry in the Indian Ocean, of a 1929-like market crash, of 1914-style hypernationalism and ethnic conflict in the Balkans, of warlords and failed states, of genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, and of a new holy war waged by radical Islamists complete with caliphates and beheadings reminiscent of medieval times. In short, we live in a Thomas Pynchon novel.

The increasing disorder of our world will lead eventually to a sort of global ennui mixed with a disturbingly large dose of individual extremism and dogmatic posturing by states. It is the result of the unstemmable tide of entropy. A world subsumed by the inexorable forces of randomness, tipped off its axis, swirling in a cloud of information overload. Who would have thought a mere half decade ago we would be turning to physics for the answers to international politics.

Well, considering that IR scholars have been heavily influenced by theoretical physics for decades I don't think it is all that hard to imagine. It's just that Schweller's application is off the mark.

The international political system is no more "closed" than most social systems (Patrick--come in, Patrick...). If one looks to complex adaptive systems theory (which I did very early in graduate school) you'll find that entropic systems will reorganize and settle into a new equilibrium and demonstrate a period of stability until the process repeats itself. You'll also find that no system is truly 'closed'. I think this is more applicable to social systems than the classic physics model--no system is ever free of potential perturbation and reorganization. We cycle through various new equilibriums and entropic states. (Would love to hear more from Drew Conway, etc, on this point.)

To be fair, there is a lot of interesting commentary and thought in Schweller's piece. However, it does seem a bit over-the-top. Furthermore, given that his preferred paradigm is neo-classical realism (with its emphasis on how domestic politics can disrupt the theoretically predictable workings of the international system) I am surprised that he would focus on the international realm as closed. The thing I like about neo-classical realism is that it (implicitly and explicitly) emphasizes how the domestic system can act as a perturbation for the international system (and vice versa).

Coming Soon.....Ataque de Panico

Uruguayan producer Fede Alveraz uploads a short 4-and-a-half minute film of giant robots destroying Montevideo to YouTube and now has a $30million dollar contract to develop a feature length film of it. Alveraz says it cost him $300 to produce -- call me a skeptic on that point -- but it is cool how quickly information technologies open space for new voices....

Open-ended vs. Scale Questions: A note on survey methodology

Aaron Shaw had an interesting post at the Dolores Labs blog last week that examined how using different question scales in surveys can elicit very different responses:

You can ask “the crowd” all kinds of questions, but if you don’t stop to think about the best way to ask your question, you’re likely to get unexpected and unreliable results. You might call it the GIGO theory of research design.

To demonstrate the point, I decided to recreate some classic survey design experiments and distribute them to the workers in Crowdflower’s labor pools. For the experiments, every worker saw only one version of the questions and the tasks were posted using exactly the same title, description, and pricing. One hundred workers did each version of each question and I threw out the data from a handful of workers who failed a simple attention test question. The results are actual answers from actual people.

Shaw asked the same question to both samples but altered the scale of the available answers:

Low Scale Version:
About how many hours do you spend online per day?
(a) 0 – 1 hour
(b) 1 – 2 hours
(c) 2 – 3 hours
(d) More than 3 hours

High Scale Version:
About how many hours do you spend online per day?
(a) 0 – 3 hours
(b) 3 - 6 hours
(c) 6 – 9 hours
(d) More than 9 hours

He found that there was a (statistically) significant difference in the responses he received from questions using both the high and low scales. More specifically, more people responded that they spent more than 3 hours online per day when presented with the high scale question. Additionally, more people exposed to the high scale responded that they spend less than 3 hours online per day. What accounts for this? Shaw hypothesizes that it is the result of satisficing:

[...] it happens when people taking a survey use cognitive shortcuts to answer questions. In the case of questions about personal behaviors that we’re not used to quantifying (like the time we spend online), we tend to shape our responses based on what we perceive as “normal.” If you don’t know what normal is in advance, you define it based on the midpoint of the answer range. Since respondents didn’t really differentiate between the answer options, they were more likely to have their responses shaped by the scale itself.

These results illustrate a sticky problem: it’s possible that a survey question that is distributed, understood, and analyzed perfectly could give you completely inaccurate results if the scale is poorly designed.

It's an important point--how you ask a question can have a significant impact on the answers you get. Or put another way, you need to pay as much attention to design and structure of your questions (and answers) as to the content of those questions.

A number of commentators chimed in about when it is better to use scale versus open-ended questions. One major advantage that comes immediately to mind is that scale questions don't require analysts to spend additional time coding answers before commencing with their analysis. While open-ended questions may avoid the issue of satisficing (which I am not convinced they do--respondents could easily reference their own subjective scale or notions), they do place an additional burden on the analyst. For short, small-n surveys this isn't that big of an issue. However, once you start scaling up in terms of n and the number of questions it can become problematic. Once you get into coding there are all sorts of issues that can arise (issues of subjectivity and bias, data entry errors, etc). Some crowdsourcing applications like Crowdflower may provide a convenient and reliable platform for coding (as I've mentioned before), but at some level researchers will always have to make an intelligent trade-off between scale and open-ended questions.

[Cross-posted at bill | petti]

Aasif Mandvi, Our Future Overlord

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I just saw this clip from last Thursday and I think the inversion of US/South Asian security ethics is just brilliant.

A Seat at the Table

In a scathing analysis of the Copenhagen summit, The Financial Times published the following side-bar vignette:

Barack Obama’s meeting on Friday evening with the leaders of the major developing economies was perhaps the most farcical event in two weeks of mayhem. At 7pm, the leader of the world’s biggest economy was due at a meeting with Wen Jiabao, Chinese premier, in a backroom barred off from the rest of the conference with heavy security.

Mr Obama strode in, according to US accounts, discovering as he did so that his planned interlocutor was already there – deep in conversation with Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister who, the Americans had been told, had already left. With them were Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and South Africa’s Jacob Zuma.

The US leader called out: “Are you ready for me?” There was no space at the table, but Mr Lula squeezed round, allowing Mr Obama to pull up a chair and sit down.

I wish I had a video of that. Welcome to the new multilateralism, where the old fiction of developing countries having a seat at the bargaining table has been transformed into reality. Surely this is a good thing?

The FT insinuates otherwise. They compare the Copenhagen process to the Doha round of World Trade Organization talks -- now stalled out and unlikely to be revived in the current neo-mercantilist economic climate. Many analysts have blamed the collapse of Doha on both the increased complexity of trade issues, and the increased number of negotiating parties at the table. Basically, when multilateralism comes to mean over a hundred sovereigns at the table, rather than 15 or so who expect the hundred or so others to be too weak to object, it no longer produces meaningful binding agreements. To further quote the same FT story:

According to UN rules, countries must reach a consensus before any binding decision is made. For a climate change agreement covering many complex areas, hundreds of negotiators had to meet in dozens of groups to work on pages of highly detailed drafts.

But once this was under way, the technical meetings did not go as planned. Smaller developing countries raised questions of procedure, repeatedly delaying discussions of the substantive issues. Some reopened discussions on matters others had thought settled. For instance, Tuvalu and several small island states forced a half-day suspension by seeking to make the talks’ ultimate aim a limit of 1.5°C in global temperature rises rather than 2°C – a limit many countries view as impossible to achieve.

As the talks entered their final week, the wrangling grew worse. Australia was to be the co-chair of a group discussing commitments to reduce emissions but needed a developing country partner. Of at least 10 approached, none would do it.

While some of the countries raising objections had legitimate concerns – “It’s hard to argue with people whose homeland is going to disappear”, as one negotiator put it – the effect was a failure to make progress on the formal aspects of an agreement.

So effective were the tactics that some developed countries suspected a co-ordinated campaign, backed by China. China has many trade links with the 130 developing nations in the “Group of 77”, of which it is the most powerful. For instance, the G77 chair is held by Sudan, closely tied to China through investments and oil trade. Lumumba Di-Aping, the group’s leader, was one of the most confrontational developing country representatives, likening the rich countries’ stance to genocide.

By the time the leaders began to arrive last Thursday night, Ed Miliband, UK climate change secretary, was warning the talks were in danger of degenerating into farce. Progress was stalled on substantive issues and the wording of the draft text was still subject to intense quibbling. Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad chose to use their time on the world stage to denounce western capitalism rather than discuss climate change, which did not help the atmosphere.

"Degenerating into farce" is the operative term. Has conference diplomacy ever been anything other than farce? Surely something like the 1814 Vienna Congress is exempt from such a charge? They only had a few great powers to contend with, not demagogues and rabble, right? But I recently read (just for fun) a popular, gossipy account of the Congress (Vienna 1814 by David King) that makes this haloed moment in international history seem just as much a farce as Copenhagen (the full text of the Copenhagen agreement is here).

Of course, the fact that a conference appears as farce does not preclude it having lasting and significant effects. But it is difficult (impossible?) to disentangle those while the initial drama is still reverberating.

Is there a general problem with conference diplomacy? Too many parties at the table? The degeneration of UN conferences into nothing but opportunities to grandstand for a domestic audience? The inability of governments to cope with global problems, combined with their inability to make credible commitments to each other? The nefarious and increasingly powerful influence of China? Does the new clout of countries like China, India, and Brazil undermine progress toward binding commitments? Or is this just an imperialist attitude? Is what we have now Multilateralism 2.0, or is it the same old game, with some new players stepping into old roles? I'm wondering.

On The Ecology of Human Insurgency

Charli highlighted the recently published work of Sean Gourley in Nature on the patter of frequency and magnitude of attacks in insurgencies, so I wanted to cross-post my critique of this work to initiate a discussion here at Duck.

The cover story of this month's Nature features the work of a team of researchers examining the mathematical properties of insurgency. One of the authors is Sean Gourley, a physicist by training and TED Fellow, and this work represents the culmination of research by Gourley and his co-authors—a body of work that I have been critical of in the past. The article is entitled, "Common ecology quantifies human insurgency," (gated) and the article attempts to define the underlying dynamics of insurgency in terms of a particular probability distribution; specifically, the power-law distribution, and how this affects the strategy of insurgents.

First, I am very pleased that this research is receiving such a high level of recognition in the scientific community, e.g., Sean tweeted that this article "beat out 'the new earth' discovery and the 'possible cancer cure' for the cover of nature." Scholarship on the micro-level dynamics of a conflict is undoubtedly the future of conflict science, and these authors have ambitiously pushed the envelope; collecting an impressive data set spanning both time and conflict geography. Bearing in mind the undeniable value of this work, it is important to note that several claims made by the authors do not seem consistent with the data, or are at least require a dubious suspension of disbelief.

In many ways I reject the primary thrust of the article, which is that because the frequency and magnitude of attacks in an insurgency follows a power-law distribution this somehow illuminates the underlying decision calculus of insurgents. Without belaboring a point that I have made in the past, the observation that conflicts follow a power-law is in no way novel, and I am disappointed that the authors failed to cite though I am encouraged that the authors did cite the seminal work on this subject (thank you for pointing out my errata, Sean). The data measures the lethality and frequency of attacks perpetrated in the Iraq, Afghanistan, Peru and Colombia insurgencies, but the connection between this and the strategy of an insurgent is missing.

The authors' primary data sources are open media reports on attacks; therefore, their observation simply reveals that open-source reporting on successful insurgent attacks follows a power-law. There are two critical limitations in the data that prevent it from fully answering the questions posited by the authors. First, there is some non-negligible level of left-censoring, i.e., we can never attempt to quantify the attacks that are planned by insurgents and never carried out, or those that are attempted by fail (defective IEDs, incompetent actors, etc.). Although they do not inflict damage, these attacks a clearly byproducts of insurgent strategy, and therefore must be present in a model of this calculus. Second, while the authors claim to overcome selection bias by cross-validating attack observations, this remains a persistent problem. Consider the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan; in the former most of the attacks occurred in heavily populated urban areas, garnering considerable media coverage. In contrast, Afghanistan is largely a rural country, where the level of media scrutiny is considerably lower, meaning that media outlets there are inherently selective in what they report, or most reports are generated by US DoD reporting. How do we handle the absence of attack observations for Afghan villages outside the purview of the mainstream media?

The role of the media is central to the decision model proposed by the authors, which is illustrated in the figure above. Again, however, this presents a logical disconnect. As the figure describes, the authors claim that insurgents are updating their beliefs and strategies based on the information and signals they receive from broadcast news, then deciding whether to execute an attack. For lack of a better term, this is clearly putting the cart before the horse. The media is reporting attacks, as the authors' data clearly proves; therefore, the insurgents' decision to attack is creating news, and as such insurgents are gaining no new information from media reports on attacks that they themselves have perpetrated. Rather, the insurgents retain a critical element of private information, and are updating based on the counter-insurgency policies of the state—information they are very likely not receiving from the media. The framework presented here is akin to claiming that in a game of football (American) the offense is updating their strategy in the huddle before ever having seen how the defense lines up. Without question updating, in football both sides are updating strategy constantly, but it is the offense that dictates this tempo, and in an insurgency the insurgents are on offense.

This interplay between an insurgency and the state is what must be the focus of future research on the micro-dynamics of conflict. From the perspective of this research, a more novel track would be to attempt to find an insurgency that does not follow a power-law; but rather a less skewed distributions, such as the log-normal or a properly fit Poisson. Future research may also benefit from examining the distribution of attacks in the immediate or long-term aftermath of a variation in counter-insurgency policy. After addressing some of the limitations described above, such research might begin to identify the factors that contributed to why some counter-insurgency policies shift the attack distribution away from the power-law. The key to any future research; however, is to connect this to the context of the conflict in a meaningful way.

Again, congratulations to Sean and his team, I hope their piece will initiate a productive discussion in both academic and policy arenas on the methods and techniques for studying the micro-dynamics of conflict.

Photo: Nature

New Year's Ducks

I am happy to announce that the Duck of Minerva will be kicking off the Pagan New Year with the arrival of three new guest bloggers. Stephanie Carvin joins us from Royal Holloway University of London to write about international law and foreign policy. Virginia Haufler is an Associate Professor at University of Maryland's Department of Government and Politics specializing in international political economy and particularly the influence of multinational corporations in global politics. Finally, we are delighted to be joined by Mlada Bukovansky of Smith College, whose research emphasizes international norms and institutions. A warm welcome to all!

Additionally, Jon Western, who has been guest blogging since early Fall, will be remaining at the Duck of Minerva on a permanent basis and has been moved to the Contributor's list. Congratulations Jon - an honor to have you on board for the long haul.

Finally, we are delighted to confirm rumors of Patrick Jackson's return to regular blogging after the New Year, or perhaps sooner if a cool, watery planet is discovered in the next few days... Welcome back, PTJ!

I look forward to the vibrant discussions this group will continue to bring to the blogosphere as we move into the New Year. On behalf of everyone here, Happy Solstice!

Speaking of Fatality Data...

A physicist named Sean Gourley has created a model that he claims explains the power law distribution of deaths in insurgencies across a range of country contexts. Just published in Nature. The abstract is here. Check out his presentation on his original correlational findings from last May:



Q&A about his new model here. I'm not sure I understand it well enough to comment, but I figured Duck readers would find it interesting, and I'm asking myself how I can get my hands on his data to look at whether it's broken down by category of victim...

"OMG": War Death Statisics Reconsidered

Researchers associated with the Human Security Report Project have a new article in the Journal of Conflict Resolution contradicting a recent critique of corpse-counting techniques prevalent in the battle-deaths community. The original critique, authored by Obermayer, Murray and Gakidou (humorously referred to as OMG by the authors of this new rebuttal) compared war death reports from the World Health Organization's sibling survey data with battle-death estimates for the same countries from the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO) and concluded that battle-death estimating methods (which draw on incident reports by third party observers) significantly undercount war deaths because so many go unreported. Surveys, OMG argued, constitute a better measure of the death toll of war; and they conclude that in the wider survey data there is less support for the widely reported global decline in war deaths.

Michael Spagat, Andrew Mack and their collaborators point out a few errors and inconsistencies in the comparison drawn by "OMG." The most damning of these is that the data are non-comparable, since the PRIO dataset is measuring "battle-deaths" (soldiers killed and civilians killed in the crossfire in two-sided wars where a government is one of the parties) whereas the WHO dataset is measuring all "war deaths" as reported by conflict-affected populations. So the most OMG can say is battle-death estimating methods undercount war deaths because they aren't counting war deaths. Maybe they have a point. Actually I think both sets of indicators - as well as the labels we assign to them - are subject to critique, and I've said so elsewhere.

However regardless of how we define which corpses to count and what to call them, what ought to be at issue here is how best to arrive at valid estimates. Suppose OMG's original findings were true, and suppose both datasets were actually trying to measure the same thing. Does this mean surveys are a more accurate measure than incident reporting, or simply that both measures are inaccurate in different directions? I can imagine that surveys would result in significant over-reporting, just as I find it plausible that incident reports report-based estimation methods may miss some data. I am no number-cruncher, but if I were constructing a casualty dataset for specific wars, I expect I would want to take the average of the two estimates. So this debate over which methodology is more accurate strikes me as a slightly misplaced.

Name That Planet: Open Thread on "GJ1214b"

WOW. As PTJ reports below, scientists have discovered the first Earth-like exoplanet... and, in accordance with International Astronomical Union convention, promptly named it GJ1214b.

Clearly astronomers need some assistance from readers of the Duck in choosing a planetary moniker that befits this extraordinary discovery and enables breakfast-table conversations with budding young space scientists. Submit your suggestions and ask others to do the same. The results will be passed along helpfully to the graduate student who made the discovery - perhaps he or his senior faculty members can convince the International Astronomical Union to begin giving important planets like this proper names.

Waterworld

I promised myself that I wouldn't start blogging again until my grades were turned in (by Friday of this week) and my book manuscript was sent off the the publisher (looks like that will happen in early January). But I couldn't resist calling attention to this. It doesn't have the most mellifluous name -- GJ 1214b -- but it is in important ways the most Earth-like extrasolar planet found to date. Lots of important and interesting things about this exoplanet, such as its orbital location placing it in the "habitable zone" surrounding its star, but the most important thing is that the planet appears to be composed of mostly water.

Yes, water. H20. One of the most basic building-blocks of life as we know it. And the density of this particular exoplanet strongly suggests that the planet is 3/4 liquid water, and also has an atmosphere of hydrogen and helium. Okay, granted, the atmosphere is like 10x thicker than ours, and the planet is hot and the surface is likely obscured by thick clouds and haze, so it's not like we've found Twin Earth or something. But hey, at only 40 light-years out, it's practically in our cosmic backyard, and it appears to have many of the elements that current scientific knowledge says are important preconditions for the existence of living beings.

So why does this matter? Setting aside for the moment any specific goals involving GJ 1214b itself (although I would be all for getting some kind of unmanned expedition together -- launch it now, and in maybe a century and a half we'll have some first-hand data on the place!), the real implication here is for something even more exotic: the probability of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. The Drake Equation, widely used in exobiology as a way of estimating how many extraterrestrial civilizations there might be, rests on a number of parameters that have only speculative values; the discovery of exoplanets whose composition can be ascertained by observations made by Earth-orbiting telescopes might allow better estimates of some of those parameters. So we might have better estimates of just how likely -- or just how unlikely -- intelligent life is in the universe.

Either way, there are implications. Either we're pretty darn unlikely, in which case we probably ought to think seriously about whether we should be continuing to waste our time as a species quarreling about small patches of terrestrial surface or imposing various ideas of the good life on one another at the point of a gun; or we're pretty likely, in which case we probably ought to think seriously about why the heck we haven't actually seen irrefutable evidence of extraterrestrial life yet -- and my money's on the zoo hypothesis, the notion that any alien species that detected us would cordon us off until we managed to mature a bit and in some sense demonstrate that we're worth contacting.

But the point is that we have no way of knowing either way unless we get some better data -- and GJ 1214b might be able to give us some. Think of the effect on global politics, on global life, if we were actually able to provide a scientifically respectable answer to the question "are we alone in the universe?" About the closest precedent that we have is the discovery conquest of the "New World"; arguably, that changed basically everything. What kind of changes would be wreaked now? No way of knowing unless we head into that frontier and see what's out there.

As the Starfleet motto has it: per aspera ad astra. Sometimes we should remember to lift our eyes and look beyond our often dreary political horizons; thanks to the astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, we have yet another exoplanet to dream on. And this one is likely full of liquid water. An ocean of possibilities; can we allow ourselves the conceptual flexibility to take advantage of them?

Grading IR 101 Through Film: Another Bleg

Last time I taught "World Politics" as a GenEd class, I had my first-years write their midterm on their choice of Lord of the Rings, Independence Day or Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith. I want to use the same concept this year but not the same films two years in a row. The assignment is to use the film as a hook to discuss four schools of thought in IR - realism, liberalism, constructivism, feminism; and make an argument about which one is best reflected in the film and why.

One of my TAs suggested BSG: Razor. I worry that Razor, and BSG in general, is too complex a story for such an assignment. Also, it's more about civil-military affairs and military ethics than about statecraft or foreign policy per se. What do readers think? Thumbs up or thumbs down on Razor? Other ideas for recent blockbuster films that could be used for this exercise?

Territoriality and Beyond

Stacie Goddard has a guest post at the IR Blog promoting her new book, Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy:

In international relations, territory often appears indivisible: actors are unable to divide territory through negotiation, shared sovereignty, compensation, or other mechanisms of division... As the site of competing national and religious claims, it may seem little wonder that Jerusalem, Northern Ireland, Kashmir and Taiwan are indivisible; how could it be any other way?... It’s exactly this conventional wisdom that this book attempts to challenge.My central argument is that indivisible territory is a social construct: far from being inevitable or inherent to territory, indivisibility is a contingent outcome, one that is very much the product of human action. When bargaining over territory, politicians engage in a contentious legitimation process: in making their claims to territory, actors use rationales that explain why their territorial demands are legitimate.

As elites attempt to outbid each they are likely to turn to rhetoric—what I call “legitimation strategies”—that will give them an advantage over their opponent. Politicians use rhetoric that will build support at home. They turn to language designed to coerce their opponent into accepting their demands. In most cases, these politicians are not trying to instigate violent, intractable conflict—they are simply using whatever legitimation strategies help them further their own political interests. But once used, legitimation strategies can have unintended consequences. Most notably, a politicians’ choice of rhetoric can lead to lock-in effects: by resonating with some actors and not others, legitimation strategies can trap actors into bargaining positions where they are unable to recognize the legitimacy of their opponent’s demands. When this happens, actors come to negotiations with incompatible claims, constructing the territory as indivisible.

Viewed in this way indivisibility is tragic, but hardly inevitable: how actors choose to legitimate their interests can either create or destroy the possibility of dividing territory. The book traces this process through two significant cases of indivisible conflict: Ulster (and then Northern Ireland), and Jerusalem.

I haven't read the book yet, but reading the short description made me think of another paradox of territoriality and conflict: the myth that love of indivisible territory must lead to conflict obscures not only the menu of valid political choices for resolving political claims by dividing territory, as Goddard argues, but also the ways that the indivisibility of territory can be used to dampen conflict and promote nonviolent conflict resolution. It is often common love of place-ness that binds people together in civic nationalist communities. The Bosnian city of Tuzla, for example, managed to avoid major ethnic clashes during the war in ex-Yugoslavia because its mayor promulgated, and its citizens espoused, a view that its people are citizens of the same city rather than members of distinct ethnic or nationalist groups. So I think the relationship of territorial myth and identity to conflict outcomes is quite complex. I look forward to reading Goddard's contribution.

Even More Thoughts on Obama's Oslo Speech

Obama has received a lot of credit and praise for his articulation of Just War doctrine in his Oslo speech. And, while I, like Charli, found a lot to like about the speech, I take exception to the way in which he set up the issue of Just War:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones." As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

First, let me say that I subscribe to the Just War doctrine. But all proponents of Just War need to be aware of the ambiguities, subjectivity, and moral consequences found within the contradictions of a position that claims a moral abhorrence to war and yet accepts its necessity at times. No war has lived up to the ideal type of Just War. And, the challenges of Just War doctrine will only become more complex with the confluence of such factors as technological innovation, which significantly reduces the domestic political costs of going to war; the emergence of new types of threats; emerging permissive norms of intervention; and so forth.

My broader concern, however, is with the caricature of pacifism and non-violence set up by Obama and the casualness with which he -- and most Just War theorists -- dismiss them. Obama rightly noted that neither King nor Gandhi were passive or naïve, and yet in the very next paragraph of his speech he dismisses their views precisely as passive and naïve when he states that as president, he has to “face the world as it is” – and “make no mistake” – “evil does exist.” And, then for good measure, he adds the standard canard that “a non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies.”

It is absurd to imply that neither King nor Gandhi recognized the existence of evil – King endorsed the judicious use of police force to enforce laws precisely because he saw and understood the nature of evil (he rejected Tolstoy's variant of pacifism on these grounds). Many pacifists accept the use of non-lethal force. But, King and Gandhi nonetheless rejected war on both moral and instrumental grounds – killing was morally wrong and violent means could never produce a just result. And, both King and Gandhi rejected passivism that they argued could lead to submission or slavery. Indeed, both suggested that those who failed to resist could be viewed as morally culpable as perpetrators of violence. They both advocated an overriding commitment to making and understanding peace and to active resistance.

Obama is not alone in his casual dismissal of non-violence. We all tend to reject it. Very few courses in IR theory, security studies, or war even address the topic of non-violence. Duane Cady points out that Walzer only gives the issue of non-violence a brief afterthought in an appendix before rejecting it as naïve. (How many of you have read Cady?)

This is surprising given that we now have some stunning empirical examples of effective non-violent civil resistance. This fall marked the 20th anniversary of non-violent popular protests that swept through East and Central Europe and accomplished what no one anticipated. Nine years ago this month, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic was ousted from office through the power of massive civil protest. And, only a few years after that, he died alone in a jail cell in the Hague.

Just War theory says that use of force should be the last option and only considered when other alternatives are determined to be impractical or ineffective. My concern is that when we so casually dismiss non-violent resistance, when we fail to research and study non-violent civil protests, when we simply assume non-violent resistance is a naïve concept, it’s hard to believe that war and the use of force really are used as the last option……

Join a Live Web Seminar on Drones and International Law

With growing attention to the legal implications of unmanned drone attacks (LA Times reported yesterday that the US is considering expanding its campaign to Quetta), the latest International Humanitarian Law Live Seminar at Harvard's Humanitarian Law and Policy Forum is particularly timely. The title is "Unmanned Weapons and Challenges to International Humanitarian Law" and it will be webcast live Thursday morning at 9:30 eastern time. Register to attend here, or join the group's Facebook page. I'll check in with thoughts and analysis after I listen, but nothing beats hearing these kinds of discussions live.

The Other Swiss Referendum

Recently Switzerland got a lot of press over the results of its referendum on religious architecture. But almost no coverage globally of another ballot measure last month: an initiative to ban the export of military weapons abroad. The initiative was voted down by more than a 2/3 majority on the same day as the minaret ban, according to SwissInfo:

Official results show 68.2 per cent of voters against the initiative and 31.5 per cent for. Turnout was above average, at 53 per cent.

It's ironic that activists in a country where neutrality is so much a part of national identity would have so much trouble drumming up support for such a policy.

Further Thoughts on Obama's Oslo Speech

My previous remarks about the relative lack of attention to climate change in Obama's speech were written after having read the text of Obama's speech. I stand by those comments - he spent 160 words on nuclear proliferation, 663 on human rights, and 128 on poverty reduction; but only 79 on climate change, which was folded into "freedom from want" rather than separated out into its own section.

However, having now listened to the whole thing, I am considerably more blown away about the speech as a whole. For IR scholars and human security specialists, this speech will probably be one of those that define his Presidency.

I am completing focus groups with practitioners who work in the "human security" network today. We've recruited individuals working for NGOs, international organizations, UN specialized agencies, think-tanks, and ministries and donor agencies of governments whose diplomatic efforts are prominent in the areas of human rights, development, humanitarian affairs, conflict prevention and environmental security. While NGOs and UN officials have been eager to join us for these discussions, I've been interested to see what a difficult time we've had recruiting government officials to participate.

Possibly, it's the term "human security" that is troublesome to people. Canada has long since abandoned this jargon. The US avoids it, while participating in the promotion of human security in many different ways abroad. I wonder if Obama's speech, which ties together the elements of a broad human security agenda - peace with justice, just war, promotion of human rights, freedom from want, and environmental security - will reinvigorate our understanding of human security as a master paradigm for global governance in the new century.

Obama's Oslo Speech and Climate Change

Dan Drezner encourages us to analyze what he said for references to policy prescriptions from IR theories. Steve Walt tells us let's focus not on what he said but on what he does. I'm with those who would focus on what he didn't say as an indicator of what he might or might not do. (Not to be contrarian, but hey.)

Namely, with the Copenhagen summit at hand, I'd have liked to see more than just a passing reference to the relationship between the environment and war, and the fact that mitigating the impacts of climate change will be one of our most urgent security problems in the next century. How do readers interpret the relative marginalization of climate issues in the speech?

Peer Review

Sort of safe-for-work (as long as no one is reading the subtitles)...