Biological Weapons

A few years ago, a mid-career biochemist enrolled in my master's level international relations course because he was burned out of working in academic and commercial settings in his field. He wanted to apply his background in biological sciences to his new interest in security politics. The 2001 anthrax attacks, in particular, had influenced his thinking.

Phil McCauley turned out to be a very bright and capable student and we soon figured out a meaningful way to connect our common interests. After all, I spent much of the past decade thinking and writing about the "Bush Doctrine" of preventive war. Fear of biological weapons (BW) proliferation could potentially trigger American use of force.

Many states are surreptitiously working on BW, meaning that international arms control efforts to limit proliferation are failing -- or at least that perception is growing globally. In 2001, the Bush administration almost unilaterally killed a verification protocol to the Biological Weapons treaty. The taboo against BW use, however, has been strengthened in the past decade.

We wrote a paper explaining our concerns about these developments and presented it at the 2008 ISAC/ISSS conference in Vail. Here's the abstract:

States have constructed an ill-considered and potentially dangerous biological weapons (BW) taboo that rebukes the fundamental logic of arms control. Historically, to prevent war, minimize the costs and risks of arms competition, and curtail the scope and violence of war, states embraced an arms control regime that limited both the acquisition and use of BW. However, efforts to limit BW capabilities have stalled even as prohibitions on their use have been maintained and strengthened. The new regime effectively allows states to retain suspicious capabilities that will be viewed as very threatening by their peers. This approach is particularly troublesome as many states now embrace counterproliferation strategy and the prospect of preventive war. The Obama administration seems to have preserved perilous elements of the so-called “Bush Doctrine.” The international community should redouble efforts to build a more effective and verifiable biological weapons nonproliferation regime to augment the existing taboo against use.

"The Illogic of the Biological Weapons Taboo was published this week in the Spring 2010 issue of Strategic Studies Quarterly.

The paper explores Obama administration policy documents and concludes that it has not rejected the Bush Doctrine. As the news story linked above explains, it also decided in December not to reverse the Bush policy on the 2001 Verification Protocol.

Feedback on the paper would be welcome.

More ISA Redux: Diversity Issues in the International Studies Association

A debate about the mission of the ISA Diversity Committee that started Tuesday at the Governing Council weekend and continued throughout the conference has inspired me to think about diversity issues in the International Studies Association and in a number of our other professional environments.

While I will inevitably mischaracterize the contours of this debate - I'll try to describe it quickly as a prelude to what I want to say about these issues. The Diversity Committee (the old mission of which is still on its website, linked above), in reaction to the establishment of the Committee on the Status of Women and the (at the time pending) establishment Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Allies (LGBTQA) Caucus, suggested (and was granted) a change to its mission that narrows it to (part of) race and nationality politics within the organization, particularly:

The mission of the committee is (a) to promote the recruitment, integration, and professional development and visibility of underrepresented groups (African-American, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, Asian and Pacific Islanders) including individuals from the Global South (Asia, Africa, Latin America), and (b) to monitor and provide oversight with respect to these goals.

I think this mission is nothing short of a disaster for diversity promotion in ISA for a number of reasons (including that diversity is more than race, and that ISA's significant European membership is entirely left out of that mission), but also provides an opportunity to think about what it would mean to value diversity in the organization. Here are some thoughts ....

It is a good and productive idea to value sex and race subordination on face. This is the work that we do acceptably now – looking for women, (sometimes) race and national minorities, “foreigners,” sex and gender minorities, religious minorities, etc. in our organization’s membership, its positions of service, its positions of power, and in indicators of opportunity, success, and staying power in the field.

However, there’s more to thinking about the diversity implications of every decision that we make then correcting discriminatory representational practices, and even correcting discriminatory representational practices is more complicated. First, to reiterate, there are more axes of diversity rights, like race, national origin, disability, sex, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. Second, it is both a negative (neither ISA nor the profession are “diverse” enough along any of these axes) and a positive (the diversity of our community is a substantive and representational asset for us). Often, talk about diversity is in the negative (to save, take care of, emancipate underrepresented groups) to the neglect of the positive.

Even just talking about diversity in the negative sense, however, there’s a risk in what we call “essentialism” in identifying the people and groups that we want to look out for. What we mean by “essentialism” is the (implicit or explicit) assumption that groups have defined lines and that there are characteristics “essential” to membership in certain groups. In other words, we risk essentialism when we assume that “women” or “African American” or “[insert group here]” have particular personality characteristics and/or points of view because they are (perceived to be) members of those groups. Likewise, it is an oversimplified interpretation of the “diversity” project when we assume that certain underrepresented groups (for example, women) are represented in our governance structures and ideas because there is a member of that group is in a position of power. While representative diversity is an important component of making our organization more diverse and valuing its existing diversity, it is not the only (or even most important) component.

Instead, there’s a substance to diversity concerns as well. Are all our members being taken seriously as colleagues? Do essentialist notions of people underlie formal inclusion? Is there a (raced and gendered) power politics of interpersonal interactions in the organization?

These sorts of questions (which are the ones I hope the diversity committee was established to address, or at least that I hope it ultimately comes to address, or ISA addresses with or without it) require looking at diversity (even in the negative sense) as more than looking at the colors and shapes of faces. Instead, it requires seeing that the parameters, the rules, the electoral structures, the intellectual boundaries of our (and other) social and political organization(s) were established when men (and masculinity) were the majority. If we do not see that, our organization remains exclusionary even as we get better at representational diversity.

I am not advocating some sort of radical deconstruction of ISA as a policy choice or management strategy. Instead, I think that these insights suggest that we take account of both the actual and substantive diversity consequences of our decisions in more complicated ways – not only in choosing committee members or nominating ISA officers, but also in decision-making that appears “neutral” on the axes of diversity discussed above (budgeting, membership rules, etc).

Diversity is then more complicated then the (new) mission of the Committee on several levels. First, diversity about more than race/national origin, and limiting it to that is intellectually and politically both inaccurate and exclusionary. Second, the characterizations of race and national origin in this statement are United States-centric (with emphasis on minorities in the United States when 40% of our membership is from outside of the United States). While the “Global South” is included, our European and Australian members are not.

But perhaps diversity is also more complicated than the (old) mission of the committee as well. Even were this statement a “full” accounting for the axes of diversity in non-essentialist terminology, the statement would still be inappropriate, because it frames (lack of) diversity as a problem to be fixed (by adding underrepresented people to the field and aiding them in it) without acknowledging the positive side of diversity (and therefore, hopefully, the positive mission of a diversity committee) to highlight and emphasize diversity as an asset of our organization which improves its intellectual vibrancy, governance creativity, and sense of community as an organization.

Conscious discrimination (within our organization and in the field more generally) is a decreasing if not disappearing component of gender, race, disability, and other axes of subordination. The question is not now if but how to look out for diversity. In this spirit, it is crucial not to assume that gender, race, and embodied subordination disappears with the decrease in intentional discrimination or to assume that it is only “white American men” oppressing underrepresented groups. Instead, for example, men subordinate men on the basis of gender; women subordinate women on the basis of gender. Though it is not the only reading possible, I would read the current mission of the Diversity Committee as subordinating race/national origin minorities in ISA on the basis of race.

The question that we’re struggling with (hopefully) is to ask – if not this – then how? In the abstract, I think it is about asking questions about the substantive impact on diverse groups within our community of decisions that appear neutral – that is “diversity mainstreaming.” It is my contention that there is a mission for a Diversity Committee (distinct from other groups interested in minority rights in ISA) to have that does not necessarily require retreating to only thinking about race/national origin (even if it were doing so in an unproblematic way). While I don’t think that the language of the previous mission of the Diversity Committee (which privileges “women”) is particularly productive, I do think that it is dangerous to privileges some groups over others in the name of “diversity,” as well as to reify groups. If it is important to represent persons on the basis of race (which ISA doesn’t do) or national origin (which I am guessing is the idea behind the nomination of Non-North American members of the Governing Council), then I think that should be under the auspices of a body with such a mission not called the Diversity Committee (and I hope in a more nuanced way than the current language).

But I think Diversity Committee (and the ISA Diversity Committee) should have a both broader and deeper mission – to address diversity as a whole in a negative sense (how to get underrepresented groups represented both in positions of power and substantively) and (and even mainly) in the positive sense (how to see and advance our organization’s diversity as an asset in it). Can we do that? In ISA or elsewhere? I hope so.

Peace Talks and Terror Tactics

Video Source: Channel 4 (UK)

One day after peace talks between India and Pakistan, there has been an attack targeting Indian nationals on a goodwill mission in Afghanistan. I don't think anyone seriously doubts that these Taliban-led attacks in Afghanistan are being directed from Pakistani soil. (In general, the Afghan and Indian people have quite warm relations and Afghan nationalists have gravitated toward seeking a strategic partnership with India as both countries share territorial disputes with Pakistan.) Moreover, there are strong suspicions that a Pakistani extremist organization is to blame for the terrorist attack in Pune (India) a few days before the peace talks began.

The Government of India is convinced that the militant organizations attacking Indian citizens and interests are linked to elements within the Pakistani state. In the latest peace negotiations, India requested the extradition of 33 Pakistani nationals, including two currently serving Pakistani military officers, who are alleged to be involved in the Mumbai attacks of 2008. India provided Pakistan three dossiers with evidence to support their request. Pakistan's Foreign Secretary responded that he "did not want to be sermoned on terrorism." It became readily apparent that these talks, which had been urged by the United States, did not reflect a changed disposition toward the use of terror tactics by the Pakistani state.

In a forthcoming article in Pragati magazine, my co-author and I predict that the use of terror tactics by elements linked to the Pakistani state against India will increase in the coming years. Echoing the recent work of C. Christine Fair, we argue that more than a fear of further dismemberment, the real reason why a nuclear armed Pakistan continues to use terror is that it cannot compete economically or militarily with a rising India. In essence, the deployment of militants using terror tactics is not defensive in nature, nor is it a negotiating tactic; Pakistan's use of terror is preventive. The main objective is to prevent peace in the subcontinent which would clear a pathway for India's rise on the global stage. Unfortunately, Pakistan can delay but not prevent the inevitable rise of India.

American policymakers need to engage this issue in greater depth. Urging peace talks between India and Pakistan in order to free up Pakistani troops to fight America's War on the Taliban is a pointless exercise if Americans haven't laid the groundwork for successful talks. If the United States is serious about creating peace, it needs to force Pakistan to rethink its grand strategy. This can only be done by convincing the people of Pakistan that the quest for military and economic parity with a much larger and economically more dynamic India is a fantasy that undermines their own goals of democracy, regional peace & prosperity, and sovereignty. The Pakistani state and people must be encouraged to review their strategy in light of the 1998 nuclear tests. While Pakistan has had good reason to fear Indian aggression in the past, the strategic context has changed. It is only by re-evaluating their strategy that Pakistanis will realize that the goal of military parity is outdated, unnecessary, and harmful to their own national aspirations.

It will be argued that I am not asking India to change its behavior. That is correct. India can facilitate peace by continuing to show restraint in response to militant provocations emanating from Pakistan. Ultimately, India will need to make more sacrifices, particularly in Srinagar, but that can only come after Pakistan abandons the use of terror tactics and eliminates the militant organizations on its soil.

Explaining, broadly understood

So Charli -- who did, in fact, attend our ISA Battlestar Galactica panel in costume -- has posted elsewhere about the panel. Though she calls it the "best event [she] attended at ISA this year," she does express some disappointment about the content of the panel when compared with the panel's title:

Unfortunately the panel turned out to be misnamed however, for none of the papers really spoke to the question of whether BSG has an impact on actual world politics. ... Admittedly, the papers weren't really trying to do that kind of explanatory work - the panel really was misnamed - so this isn't a criticism as much as an observation.

Certainly, as one commentator over at LGM has already pointed out, there's sufficient ambiguity in the word "explains" that it need not quite mean "influences" or "impacts." But what's intriguing to me, methodologically speaking, is that Charli, along with not a few others in our field, tend to go directly from "explain" to "impacts," and in particular, to "exerts an independently-measurable causal impact on." That says something revealing about the field, and it might just help to explain why the study of popular culture continues not to make a lot of headway in the disciplinary mainstream.

Some definitions first. In Charli's formulation, for BSG to "explain" world politics, the show or the viewing of the show has to function as an independent variable, which means that in order for it to matter it has to be shown to be correlated in some relatively robust way with a measurable outcome. In that way, BSG could "explain" observed variance, perhaps best visible if we compared a BSG-watching-and-discussing national or international security bureaucracy with a non-BSG-watching-and-discussing one, or a BSG-watching public with a non-BSG-watching one. This does set up some tricky measurement problems -- how do we count watching and discussing, how do we specify the intervening steps between the show and the outcome -- and raises the specter of spurious correlation all over the place, but in principle there's nothing altogether impossible about conducting a study like this. The challenge would be to isolate the impact of BSG, which would probably require a more elaborate theoretical account of human perception than we have at present; it's one thing to see people in their office cubicles discussing BSG and then writing counter-terrorism policies, and another to demonstrate that their discussing BSG exercised an independent effect on the subsequent policies.

[And parenthetically, even if BSG were subsequently cited -- either in the final policy statement, or in interviews after the fact -- that would tell us precisely nothing except that some people who participated in the process thought and think that BSG was important. That doesn't make them right for thinking so. If, hypothetically, BSG was referenced when the policy was concluded and presented, we'd have a heck of a time determining whether this was a strategic rhetorical move designed to appeal to the audience (think of Reagan's use of the phrase "star wars" here) or some kind of an expression of a sincere belief, Similarly, if people interviewed later on cited BSG, or 24, or some other TV show as influential in their thinking, we'd have a heck of time distinguishing between a) strategic re-presentation of events in the light of contemporary concerns; b) mis-remembering what happened, perhaps benignly and perhaps more craftily; and c) actual influence. So that kind of primary source evidence isn't enough, in any case, to establish that BSG had an effect; instead, we need some hypothesis about what viewing and discussing BSG would imply behaviorally, so that we could look for the appropriate kinds of indicators not in what people said about why they did what they did, but in what they actually did.]

But fortunately for the rest of the panel, "explain" doesn't just mean this kind of neopositivist methodological strategy. Indeed, it's even something of a misnomer to say that an independent variable "explains" an outcome; strictly speaking, the whole statistical model explains the outcome, and the various independent variables participate in or contribute to the explanation -- or, perhaps, they explain a certain portion of the observed variance. So if we wanted to be precise here, even if we were following Charli's neopositivist implicit definition of explanation, we would have called the panel "How Battlestar Galactica Contributes to the Explanation of World Politics." This inelegant reformulation does, however, permit a number of things to fit more easily underneath its umbrella, including the paper that I presented on that panel on "Battlestar Galactica as Methodology" in which I suggested that social scientists could learn something from BSG about the way we construct our explanations of world politics. That would not be BSG as causal factor -- truth to tell, I think that the measurement and conceptualization problems with the BSG-as-IV thing that Charli proposes are actually insoluble, and pretty much everyone doing audience-reception studies agrees that drawing an independent causal connection between something that you see on TV and something that you subsequently do is pretty much impossible -- but BSG as inspiration, BSG as an exploration of a certain ideal-typical formulation of values as they confront a variety of fantastic empirical situations, and BSG as a model of how social scientists ought to analyze concrete cases in terms of how the logical implications of a given set of values are or are not realized in practice. (My remarks on the panel were recorded; podcast here, if anyone wants to check them out.)

But the bigger issue here is not whether Charli or I are correct about what to do with BSG, especially since I don't think that there's anything illegitimate about either of these methodological strategies. The issue is that we don't have a very good lexicon in IR for discussing what to do outside of the hypothesis-testing, IV-DV kind of explanation that Charli is proposing. I worry about that for a lot of reasons, not in the least because I think that a claim about the independent causal impact of popular culture is kind of foredoomed to failure and I like studying popular culture (among other things) because I think it does matter -- but it "matters" in a different way. I have written a book trying to address this situation, and I want to do something else about it too: a new department here at the Duck that I'm calling "Methodology411." I will post something launching that department sometime in the next couple of days, when I will also explain where the name comes from.

But for the moment, let me just post an excerpt from an e-mail exchange that Charli and I had about a slightly different point concerning methodology and BSG, by way of showing that the number of methodological issues involving the study of things like popular culture is actually quite a large one, and gets larger once you plunge into actual empirics. Food for thought, and perhaps, for subsequent discussion.

Charli: I have been thinking more about your argument re. humanity using the example of the moment with Helo. The more I think about it the more I don't buy it. I remember the problem with that scene was that Helo is in a love relationship with a Cylon and his child is Cylon. I think this really dilutes the moral strength of his argument as he appears in the episode to simply be promoting his own self-interest - not arguing in favor of sacrificing self-interest on moral ground to include "the other." For him, Cylons are part of the "in-group" already, so it's not exactly a hard case...

PTJ: Your analysis here makes two unfortunate conflations -- conflations that put your objections on a page quite different from my original claim [from the panel]. Substantively, you conflate an analysis of Helo's motives with an analysis of the social meaning of Helo's actions, and methodologically, you conflate an analysis of the characters in BSG with an analysis of BSG as a whole narrative product.

Substance first. In your objection you have subtly shifted the question from the terms of Helo's argument to the reasons that he might have for making it. This is 'reductionism' in the precise terms that Ken Waltz meant it: you take the social and reduce it to the individual, as though social action were merely the aggregate of individual behavior. But social action is meaningful, which means -- by definition -- that it includes a component that is not reducible in this way, since it involves shared sensibilities. 'The social' is not just a bunch of individuals, in the formulation I'm using; logically speaking, the social *precedes* the individual, and in fact 'the individual' is a site or a node in a structured social network. Why one individual does one particular thing, and how that thing was possible in the first place, are different kinds of questions, and they don't preclude one another; Helo might indeed have been motivated by the kinds of concerns that you suggest motivated him, but that is strictly speaking irrelevant to my argument. 'Sincerity' is not an empirical phenomenon, but a normative judgment, and it doesn't matter what Helo was really thinking; what matters is what he said (the socially sustainable vocabulary that he used), how people made sense of what he said (which might involve *their* judgments on his sincerity, but those would tell us precisely nothing at all about whether or not Helo really was or really was not sincere), and what resulted from his intervention. And in those terms, what's fascinating about Helo's action is that it might have involved a claim that the non-human Cylons had, in some sense, humanity -- that they were what Orson Scott Card (in his brilliant novel Speaker for the Dead) would call "ramen," or humans of another species. Motive doesn't matter; socially meaningful action does.

Now, methodology. You seem to be focusing on this scene in isolation from the rest of the text, as though BSG as a whole could and should be treated as a novel set of empirics to be analyzed in the same way that we might analyze the historical events of our 'regular' world politics. But BSG is, of course, *fictional*, which to me means that it has a necessarily world-constituting quality that actual historical events don't necessarily have. When we analyze world politics, when we are engaged in producing social-scientific accounts of world politics, we are of necessity treating world politics as the raw material from which we produce our accounts. There's no 'authorial intent' to worry about, and no pre-existing plotline save the one that our methodology and our analysis helps to disclose. BSG is different: not because what Ron Moore and company think about BSG should necessarily be controlling for our interpretations, but because the story is a *story* and as such has a plot of its own. Ignoring that -- which is what modern-day realists do when they mis-read Thucydides as advocating the Athenian philosophy "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must," since Thucydides then goes on to depict the tragic consequences of this bit of hubris as the book unfolds -- is problematic. When I say that BSG's value-system is critical humanist, I do not mean that any particular character is a critical humanist (although some are or become so, including Helo, and this scene is a pivotal moment when he consolidates that position), but that the series as a whole expresses critical humanism. That expression is sometimes found in dialogue, but it is more often found in plot and outcome, especially the show's relentless demolition of every particular definition of 'the human' and its replacement by something even more encompassing -- culminating, of course, in the revelation of 'mitochondrial Eve' as a Cylon/Colonial hybrid.

Sudan's Truce: A turning point or a simple pause?

Last weekend's signing of the truce between Omar al-Bashir's government and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rebels in Darfur is a good first step. The government will commute the death sentences of some of the JEM rebels and will release several others. The JEM will hold to a truce and the two sides will resume more comprehensive negotiations in March.


However, the problem is, as Laura Heaton from Enough Project notes, this is essentially a bilateral agreement between the government and JEM. It does not include the dozens of other rebel groups that have been fighting over the past seven years. JEM has long demanded it be considered the central voice for Darfur.

Excluding groups from peace processes is often done out of diplomatic expediency. It is easier to get a deal between two major warring groups than to open the process up to several factions. However, as we frequently see, this often creates significant downstream problems. For example, the Naivasha Agreement (Comprehensive Peace Agreement CPA) that helped end the war in Southern Sudan limited the negotiations to SPLM and the Sudanese Government. Other groups, including many fighting in Darfur since 2003, also had grievances against the government in the 1990s but were largely excluded from the CPA process. Similarly, the Kosovar Albanians had hoped to get support from the international community for their grievances against Slobodan Milosevic in 1995 but were shut out at Dayton. In both instances, unresolved conflicts between governments and aggrieved groups ultimately led to additional violence.

To mitigate against this potential in Darfur, the Obama administration has been working with other international negotiators to unite a disparate group of other factions under the umbrella of the Liberation and Justice Movement (LJM) and negotiating a parallel track between the LJM and the govenrment. It seems we may see a similar truce between the government and LJM in the coming days.

The question, of course, is how will the JEM respond to the joint track with LJM -- especially if a final agreement includes government power sharing with Darfuris. Who will represent Darfur? Furthermore, not all of the other factions have joined forces under LJM. What happens if they balk? And, how will the government respond if there are outliers in the process?

Finally, neither the first track between the government and JEM nor the second track between the government and LJM include a wide range of civil society groups. To be sure, a cease fire is the first step, but the long-term sustainability of any cease fire as well as successful post-conflict transitioning will require the active participation and incorporation of civil society groups into the process. But, if they are shut out from the beginning when the initial power-sharing rules and structures are parceled out, it's hard to see how they will be able to join the party later.

(cross-posted at The IR Blog)

Wilson's legacy

Duck readers may recall that just over two years ago Charli posted about an interesting and provocative Deborah Boucoyannis article arguing that realist notions of the balance-of-power are actually liberal ideas about checks-and-balances.

The post generated a lot of comments (which apparently cannot be linked under the new software), including a fairly long and somewhat critical one from Duck founder Dan Nexon. Despite the flaws he noted, Dan nonetheless wrote that "the argument...is persuasive; she's made a very important contribution, at a minimum, in arguing that the 'balance of power' is too big to restrict to realism, and ought to be treated as an object of analysis in its own right." Later, the author responded to the critics.

As Charli said in her post, if an idea long associated with realism can be explained from a liberal viewpoint, then many of us must rethink how we teach IR theory. In my case, I'd long compared the balance of power to domestic checks and balances so that students familiar with the latter could better understand the IR concept. However, I'd never made the argument Boucoyannis presented.

This exchange came to mind recently when I read Stanford historian David Kennedy's brief essay in the January/February Atlantic Monthly. Kennedy makes a novel-to-me argument about Woodrow Wilson's famous call that "The world must be made safe for democracy." This time, however, the scholar asserts that an idea long associated with liberalism (nee Wilsonianism!) in IR was actually tied to a practical realism:

Wilson tempered his diplomatic ideals with a pragmatic comprehension of the modern world, of its possibilities and its dangers. He respected the pride and the prerogatives of other peoples. He shrewdly calculated the reach as well as the limits of American power. Perhaps most important, he was attentive to what kind of foreign policy, resting on principles of moral legitimacy, the American public would embrace.

Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman took the lessons. They asked only that the world be made safe for democracy, not that the world be made democratic. They understood the complexities of human cussedness and the constraints on even America’s formidable power. They would surely have hesitated to wage a preemptive war against Iraq that grossly overestimated America’s capacity to achieve its goals.

In the end, Kennedy praises a set of four "principles [that] constitute a blend of realism and idealism, not a stark choice between them, and their careful application over several decades represents a singular achievement for American diplomacy."

At ISA, I served as a discussant on a panel about continuity or change in U.S. foreign policy from Bush to Obama. Two of the three papers quoted the familiar Wilson line in a way that reflected the taken-for-granted meaning -- and widely shared view of its crusading implications. I pointed the authors to Kennedy's piece because it was fresh in mind, but it is certainly possible that this is an established argument that I've somehow missed or forgotten. Does a longer version appear elsewhere?

Kennedy's argument about Wilson serves also as a fairly clear warning that neoconservative calls for a "democratic realism" are dangerous and not Wilsonian. Neocons want to employ American (military) power to advance democracy. Wilson and his successors wanted to secure democracy in a dangerous world.

More late post-ISA thoughts

I, like Laura, am a bit slow off the take regarding post-ISA blogging. In my defence I have a 6-hour jet-lag that was aggravated by United Airlines being successful in severely messing up every single segment of my flight to New Orleans and back. (The friendly skies? More like the unfriendly kick in the... oh forget it.)

Certainly one of the highlights for me was the panel (already discussed here, here , here and here) on international relations, academia and blogging. I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but I did want to add my $0.02 (~£0.013) It was great to see Dan Drezner, Stephen Walt, William Winecoff, Robert Farley and DoM’s Charli Carpenter discuss the implications of the medium for the dissemination of knowledge, risks to tenure (at least in the US) and use to policy makers. Joe Nye was the dissenting voice and was more sceptical of the enterprise (although this has not stopped him from contributing to the Huffington Post). I’ve been doing this for nearly two months now so, as a newbie, I found this quite useful.

A couple of observations from the panel:

• Charli was the only woman on the panel and I’m struggling to think of other women bloggers out there in international relations blogging. Charli was fantastic and presented a rather scholarly view of the subject. But it got me wondering as to whether there is actually a dearth of female IR bloggers out there and for what reasons this might be? Is it the whole tenure risk thing – that blogging may be seen as a liability rather than as something neutral or even beneficial? Is it that we’re all just busy trying to get published in “traditional” forms for the same reason? Is it that we feel that we’re already having problems being taken seriously in a discipline? Or is there just a barrier to new entrants – and most of the “old guard” happens to be men?
• I asked a question about academia and “snark” – exactly which tone should we be using when we blog? Joe Nye made an analogy that taking a bad or rude tone online was akin to posting naked photos of yourself before a job interview. (I could say so much here, but I don’t want to be too.... snarky.) Stephen Walt said that he just took a boring tone (although his posts are almost always interesting so I’m not sure he’s being fair to himself.) Dan and Charli took a different view of “snark” however. They both argued that if “snark” was understood as “wit” then it was to be welcomed and may serve to make dissemination of information more fun and blogging more enjoyable. (As you can probably tell, I take the latter view – most of us are doing it because we like it. It needs to be at least a little fun.)
• Of course one might expect this from a panel of mostly successful bloggers, but there was a real sense that it has already become a force to be reckoned with and that it is increasingly being taken seriously. And perhaps nothing illustrated this point better than the fact that the room was pretty packed. It may have been that there were big names on the panel, but I felt that people were genuinely interested in what these individuals had to say about blogging.

Other minor observations about ISA this year:

• I couldn’t agree more with Jon’s post on the state of New Orleans. While the area we stayed in was largely damage-free, the city was clearly still in recovery mode. But what was so inspiring to see was how happy the New Orleans Saints Superbowl win had made so many people I can’t tell you how many times I heard “we needed this”. They clearly did.
• At the same time, “WHO DAT”, even to a Saints fan, becomes a little tiresome after six days or so.
• If you are staying in a hotel in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, please check for assorted random objects under your bed before you unpack. Trust me. Just think of it as a very sordid treasure hunt.

More to come on human rights, civilian casualties – but first I still need to unpack.

ISA -- Katrina's Legacy

I'll have more to say about the ISA conference in a few upcoming posts, but let me begin with some comments on the host city. ISA was held in New Orleans, in part, to provide a lift for the city after Hurricane Katrina five years ago. Somewhere around 5,000 folks descended on the city with cash in hand to help the local economy. The conference started the day after Mardi Gras and came less than two weeks after the Saints' Super Bowl victory. A lot of locals commented that the previous two weeks really were the best two weeks for the city in years. Indeed, walking around the French Quarter, it was easy to forget about Katrina.

But, I joined Leslie Vinjamuri, Stephen Hopgood,and Lise Howard for the Grey Line bus company's Katrina tour (check out the video in the link). It's a bit uncomfortable being a "disaster tourist," but all four of us have done work on humanitarian relief and recovery, post-conflict transitions, and state building in other countries. It was eye-opening to see similarities here in a US city to many of the things we study abroad.

The city still bears serious scars of the disaster. Five years after the hurricane, there remains extensive devastation (abandoned and heavily damaged houses and businesses) and limited rebuilding in parts of New Orleans (notably the lower 9th Ward). I have traveled and worked extensively in the Balkans over the past fifteen years. There was less lasting devastation and more rebuilding in Sarajevo and even in Mostar by 2000 (five years after the war) than there is in the poorer districts of New Orleans five years after Katrina -- though neither Sarajevo nor Mostar were picnics.

Whether its disaster recovery or post-conflict reconstruction, the story is really how to go about building institutional capacity to create appropriate incentives for populations to return, to alleviate poverty and develop mechanisms to ensure a base-level distribution of wealth, to facilitate functioning (and functional) markets, and to establish conditions for local communities to govern and adjudicate competing claims on authority. In New Orleans, there is a still a significant lag in all of these. About one-third of the city's pre-Katrina population left and likely will not return, poverty is rampant, property rights remain in flux, institutional mechanisms to encourage and protect investments are absent (i.e., available credit and sufficient insurance pools against catastrophic loss), and economic development and employment opportunities are largely stalled.

I don't want to overstate the parallels between post-Katrina New Orleans and cases of post-conflict transition (there are significant differences) but I think New Orleans is worth a closer look for anyone working on international cases of reconstruction, development, and state-building.

Gender and Security: Theory and Practice

My post-ISA blogging is slower than it otherwise would have been, due to an unfortunate interlude with food poisoning. But I figured I'd start with the "working group" that Jennifer Lobasz and I ran at ISA, called "Gender and Security: Theory and Practice," which Charli mentioned in her previous post. A Working Group at ISA meets on the day before the conference, and then twice during the conference, and members are asked to attend common panels around the theme of the group.

The stated mission of our group was:

The “Gender and Security: Theory vs. Practice” working group aims to develop an evolving subfield of Feminist Security Studies by creating a discussion between key scholars in the field of gender and international relations and new voices seeking to grow and consolidate these research programs. Addressing subject matter of interest to the Peace Studies, International Security, Feminist Theory and Gender Studies, and Women’s Caucus sections of the ISA as well as the conference theme, this working group will deal with questions about the relationships between gender, war, and peace; between the theory and practice of gender and security; between gender/feminist theorizing on security and the mainstream of “Security Studies”; and between different branches of Feminist Security Theorizing.

In the last five years, work in Feminist Security Studies has proliferated, producing dozens of journal articles, several important books, and several journal special issues, including, most recently, a special issue of the journal Security Studies. This workshop is meant both to reflect on and analyze this recent proliferation of scholarship and to look forward to defining and developing Feminist Security Studies as a subfield. Gathering a group of approximately 20 junior and senior scholars working in the field, the Working Group will look at Feminist Security Studies both internally (what is this subfield) and externally (how does it relate to Security Studies/IR more generally, and what does it have to say about “real world” practice of security?) through a variety of panels, informal conversations, roundtables, and other presentations.

While I couldn't be at all of the meetings, I caught snippets of very interesting conversations: Tuesday, about the "state of the field" in Feminist Security Studies and the relationship between theory and practice in various areas of research, including conflict, post-conflict reconstruction, foreign policy, and peacemaking; Thursday, the conversation that Charli referred to about the relationship between Feminist Security Studies and Security Studies more broadly; and Saturday, concluding conversations reflecting both on those discussions and panels. I very much enjoyed listening to and participating in these conversations, and its hard to pick what to talk about, but two things jump out ...

First, at the Thursday meeting, we posed a number of questions to participants, some of which Charli mentioned:
1) What (if anything) can gender analysis tell us about international security that security analysis omitting gender cannot?
2) What (if anything) can Security Studies tell feminist theorizing about security that it would not have access to otherwise?
3) Is a conversation where the sum will be greater than its parts? If so, how do we get to those benefits? What are the potential risks?
4) Can we develop effective strategies for communication among scholars coming from substantially different epistemological understandings to make a bridge between Security Studies and Feminist Security Studies? Should we?

Particularly, most of you who know my work, know that the great majority of what I do is devoted to making links between Security Studies and feminist theorizing - so I've defended that as a mission many times and remain committed to it. That said, a commitment to engagement, in my understanding, also requires asking the third question on this list - particularly, what are the risks of engagement? Sarah Brown (in a special issue of Millennium 22 years ago) warned that, in engaging IR, feminism risked losing its ontological and epistemological uniqueness. I'm interested in this concern particularly as I read Charli's post which effectively advocates instrumentalizing gender as the way to package, re-present, and sell "feminist" concerns to the security establishment. While I don't want to argue that there aren't policy benefits that come from such approaches, but do worry that being quick to accept (or accepting at all) that it is okay to "sell" gender emancipation as a means to "normal" (impliedly gender-neutral) policy ends is problematic, reifying both the secondary nature of gender concerns and the existing (gendered) hierarchy of policy concerns in the security arena.

So, to me, write about gender in gendered techno-strategic language? No so much. Or, at least, not exclusively. But that brings me to the second question - the one to which I don't have the answer, entirely. That is - if it is important to speak to/with the security arena, but not appropriate to do it in a way that "sells out" gender emancipation (at its ultimate expense) - then how? Separately, works in Feminist Security Studies reformulate mainstream approaches to traditional security issues, foreground the roles of women and gender in conflict and conflict resolution, and reveal the blindness of security studies to issues that taking gender seriously shows as relevant to thinking about security. Together, these works, as a research program, show that gender analysis is necessary, conceptually, for understanding international security, important for analyzing causes and predicting outcomes, and essential to thinking about solutions and promoting positive change in the security realm. How to "sell" that, though? Still working on it. But many of the very bright, very engaged participants in the Working Group had a lot of very interesting ideas and important success stories that I thought walked the line better than I ever have. And I will try to share some of those in the coming weeks and months.

More ISA highlights

I spent a fair amount of time at ISA attending panels and very little sitting in the NOLA bars. Perhaps I wasn't fully engaged in the "business of conferencing," though we'd all probably agree that "ISA is what we make of it."

So, what did I make of ISA 2010 (beyond what I wrote Saturday)?

Over several delicious dinners through the week, I learned that Abita Amber is over-carbonated. This Duck recommends ordering the Turbodog.

The next time ISA selects a hotel within a short walk of a casino, I propose that a group of IR theorists nab a table and play Texas Hold 'Em. Will the rational choice theorists prevail? Is it likely that a critical theorist will count outs and carefully calculate pot odds before gambling? Will the group be able to come to shared understandings about playable hands -- and identify the sucker(s) at the table?

Alternatively, next time ISA is deep into March, perhaps a bunch of fantasy baseball fans should draft a league. So far, I have one taker.

Here are some academic highlights from conference panels I attended:

1.) Kathyrn Sikkink scolded realists for (a) telling her over the years that all sorts of (progressive) changes "can't happen" in world politics, and then (b) for explaining after they happen that these changes were completely foreseeable and within the realm of normal politics.

I kept this in mind when informed by Robert Art that nuclear abolition is "as likely as hell freezing over."

2.) Charles Glaser also deflated talk of Obama-inspired momentum toward nuclear disarmament by arguing that if it was going to happen any time soon, then the U.S. and Russia should be able to negotiate a new START deal in about 5 minutes. But they can't.

Credit for the short version goes to Anne Harrington de Santana: it's really difficult to kick a "nuclear fetish."

3.) Jerel Rosati and Patrick Haney think it's good that we don't know much about National Security Advisor James Jones, even after a full year on the job. His relative invisibility likely makes him an honest broker for advise within the White House. I'm not sure that this visit to CNN affirms their point.

The Transmogrification of Scholarly Discourse: More Insights from ISA

Does a video blog post satirizing a scholarly debate count as a contribution to that debate? This is the question I meant to pose when I chose to preface my remarks with a YouTube clip about academic bloggers on the ISA panel entitled “Do International Relations Blogs Inform Practice? Theory? Both? Neither?”

Naturally, the equipment failed. So it wasn’t until Q&A when I had a chance to hit “play” – and then only in the context of a question about whether the kind of snark associated with blogging is good or bad for academic discourse. (The consensus position on the panel: a qualified "yes.")

But in this post, I’d like to go back to the point I’d originally wanted to make because I think there really are some interesting questions about how the nature of scholarship and the media through which scholarly ideas are communicated, are transmogrifying due to the merging of academic discourse with new media.

Here’s the original video:



The context is a blog post in which "the author" attempted to summarize and satirize a debate afoot last year among IR scholars – taking place almost entirely in the blogosphere rather than in scholarly forums. As you may recall, it was sparked by an op-ed by Joseph Nye in the Washington Post and then by Dan Drezner’s blog response to it entitled “The Academy Strikes Back” and it was a debate about the extent to which the theory/policy divide could be overcome and who was to blame for it. Though this video may appear to be pure satire, I argued it actually illustrates two arguments about the impact of blogs on the relationship between the academy and the “real world.”

First, it substantively satirizes the reification of a gap between theory and policy – a reification we saw in Nye’s essay and the debate that followed it – and a reification we see in the title of the ISA conference itself (“Theory v. “Policy”). In my view, the erosion of the alleged “gap” between theory and policy is actually exemplified by the very medium – blogs – being used to conduct the debate described in this video. Academic bloggers are, of course, working at the very nexus between the academy and the policy world – and doing so rather successfully, if the anecdotes shared by my co-panelists are to be believed.

Yet for all the reasons mentioned on the panel (and in the background paper), that nexus is a tricky place to be professionally. Perhaps one way to interpret the blogosphere dialogue about Nye’s op-ed is as a reification of the theory-policy gap borne of a need to re-establish the conceptual boundaries precisely because they are so in flux.

Second, as a means of describing an academic debate, this video itself reminds us that the types of user-generated artifacts we might conceivably associate with scholarly output is expanding somewhat beyond that which we were socialized to accept as legitimate, due to the dynamic nature of Web 2.0 - just as academic blogging has expanded that conception over the past few years. Entire conferences have, in fact, relied upon YouTube as a means to disseminate academic ideas rather than conventional presentation formats. How long will it be before such means of expressing views in a debate become commonplace? How will this transform scholarly discourse? How does the ease with which users can generate such content affect what counts as legitimate academic discourse?

Now, let's not overstate the case. I’m not saying that we are all about to give up writing conference papers and instead just create YouTube videos to disseminate our research or ideas. In fact, Darth Drezner and I have argued quite a bit over whether a video satire of an academic debate constitutes a contribution to that debate or not. And it’s true that although lots of scholars complimented me on the video, not many participants in the debate itself seized upon any of the points I was trying to make with it. So perhaps satire as a form of academic discourse is ahead of its time.

But I think that one of the impacts of blogs and other new media on the academy is that they are forcing us to have these discussions.

Thinking About Gender and Security Studies at ISA

Among events I attended last week at the International Studies Association Annual Conference: an informal discussion on the relationship between IR feminist theory and security studies, organized by fellow Duck Laura Sjoberg. Some of the questions posed to the participants in advance: What (if anything) can feminist theory teach security studies? What (if anything) can security studies teach IR feminism?

My key answer to the first of these questions has typically been: feminist theorists can show security folks how a gender lens can help solve problems that matter to security studies.

The foreign policy community and defense establishment gets this, I think. The US Army has recently begun requiring all soldiers, male and female, to undergo resiliency training so they can learn to “talk about emotions” as a bulwark against morale problems, suicide, domestic violence and divorce. Top Pentagon brass are urging the Obama Administration to repeal the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy not just because “it’s the right thing to do” but because the discharge of numerous gay and lesbian servicemen and women has deprived the military of key assets.

What the defense establishment often doesn’t get is how to do "gender" very well because their efforts to craft more gender-friendly policies are themselves so based on gender assumptions rather than gender analysis. So for example, the State Department has seized upon “women’s empowerment” as a benchmark for its democracy promotion efforts – with mixed results. I think there’s a tremendous opportunity right now for feminist IR scholars studying gender dynamics in post-conflict zones and the roles of gender discourse in national identity and international negotiations to have an important effect in creating sounder policy options.

The key to having that effect, though, is to speak to the interests of those states involved. The US interest may not be “Iraqi women’s betterment” in and of itself; it may be “effective stability operations.” But if you can make the case that protecting Kurdish women from honor killings or ensuring Shi’a women equal protection under a national constitution supports the broader goal of the “nation-building” then you may have a much better chance of harnessing the support of powerful actors for feminist ends than if you limit yourself to "critiquing the hegemonic discourse."

And this is where my answer to Question Number Two comes in: Security Studies can teach IR feminists how to communicate with the defense establishment more effectively. As I pointed out at the discussion, very few IR feminists I know – (and I am obviously poking fun at some of my own writing here as well) – can utter the sentence “the US needs to revamp its force structure to ensure power projection in anti-access environments” without snickering much less talk or write seriously about the kinds of issues raised in the QDR that was released last month – on terms that are actually likely to be taken seriously by military bloggers, defense intellectuals, or men and women in uniform. Certainly most of Laura’s posts at the Duck do not.

I think this is a shame and that it could easily be changed if IR feminists accept the validity of a genuine exchange with security studies on its own terms, rather than on some asymmetric cross-paradigmatic battlefield. My review essay with Valerie Hudson and Mary Caprioli forthcoming in the ISA Compendium will - if the Compendium ever actually materializes - attempt to do just that.

P.S. Peter Feaver from Shadow Government attended this discussion and his contributions were the bomb. I hope he blogs about them...

[cross-posted at LGM]

Let the Post-ISA Blogging Begin...

More thoughtful posts to come. But for starters, here are some tidbits from conference papers I read or heard presented while AWOL at the International Studies Association conference last week:

1) Isaac Kamola: The recent securitization of Somali piracy is a pretty big mystery given how few vital interests are at stake. Peter Andreas points out that it's therefore also a mystery that no major IR journal has published a serious IR paper on this topic yet.

2) Sebastian Kaempf quoting Charles Law of UC Berkely: "Going to war actually saves US troops' lives." (Relative to gun violence, car wrecks etc associated with life on the civilian front.) Still trying to track down the original study that shows this is true to see how the risk assessment is computed.

3) Shorter Iver Neumann: "Battlestar Galactica is all about Mormonism." (Really. Check out the full paper in the ISA Archive.)

Some more pedestrian insights here.

Can't wait to hear from Patrick, Dan, Laura, Stephanie, Vikash, Jon, Peter, Rodger and Craig on their conference adventures.

Mullah Baradar and Stringer Bell

My first thought when I heard of the capture of Mullah Baradar, "Mullah Omar's #2 man," was of Stringer Bell, "Avon Barksdale's #2 man" from "The Wire."

"The Wire" was the ultimate show for Political Scientists. Beneath the gritty surface of a stale cops-n-robbers thematic is a brilliant show about dynamic organizations - mainly "po-lice" and criminal gangs, but also the city's decaying educational system, the media, city hall, etc. The individual characters no matter how innovative and charming cannot transcend the organizations in which they work or "the game" in which these organizations interact.

Among the drug lords and their lieutenants, Russel "Stringer" Bell (Idris Elba) was clearly the most innovative and strategic thinker that had come around the streets of Baltimore for some time. He had a plan to make himself and his criminal organization legit. He took courses in economics at the local community college and he organized a cartel with regular meetings at a local hotel. He tried to improve the quality of his product and professionalize a group of individuals who were not particularly known for civility (although he did object to McGinty taking minutes at the meeting of criminal conspirators). All the while there was never a moment's doubt that Stringer was a ruthless criminal who would quietly arrange to have his rivals killed.

Of course, the tale of Stringer Bell is a tragedy. Although he made some major strides towards becoming a legitimate businessman, he was tricked by corrupt politicians and betrayed by his boss. Ultimately, he was killed by Omar Little, a cunning and self-employed ronin and the Nation of Islam's Brother Mouzone (literally Brother Judicious in Arabic). An American audience, unused to having leading characters killed off, was stunned. But to not have killed off Stringer would have defeated the purpose of the show.

Like Stringer Bell, Mullah Baradar was a master strategist who managed the daily operations of his organization. As a general commander for the Taliban's five operational military zones, Baradar's job was to manage the bickering of the commanders and sub-commanders within in each zone by rotating personnel; to prevent commanders from poaching fighters from other units; and to insist that the composition of fighting units bridge tribal lines.

Baradar is credited with creating a "code of conduct" manual to professionalize his fighters. The manual emphasized the importance of protecting civilians and winning their support in the struggle to retake Afghanistan. The goal was to lay the groundwork for the return of the government of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, i.e. to go legit.

As in "The Wire," the Taliban became more aware of their enemy's surveillance tactics under Baradar's watch. The Taliban dropped the use of their satellite phones on the battlefield and returned to more reliable methods of communication -- messengers.

According to Newsweek (3 August 2009), Baradar also managed hundreds of millions of dollars in finances of the Taliban organization. Apparently, Baradar required video evidence of raids from his subordinates before providing reimbursements for their expenses.

Not unlike Stringer Bell, Baradar may have been willing to have enemies terminated. Baradar has been accused of having his rival commanders, most notably Mullah Dadullah Akhund and Mullah Mansoor Dadullah, meet their untimely demises at the hands of American and Pakistani troops. Of course, the rumors have not yet been confirmed.

Finally, Mullah Baradar was a close personal friend, comrade-in-arms, and confidante of Mullah Omar. At times, those who watch the Taliban closely even wondered whether Baradar had not supplanted his boss. Baradar apparently ran the meetings of the Taliban's Quetta Shura while Omar remained in occlusion.

The main question is why the Pakistani government chose to turn an asset like Baradar over to the Americans at this point in time. After all, the Pakistani ISI is accused of intervening on Baradar's behalf when he was first caught by the Northern Alliance in 2001. It may be that the Pakistani government decided that Baradar could not be used to broker a peace deal in Afghanistan (that would allow Pakistan to retain its influence there). Thus Baradar may have lost his value to his host. Or it may be that the whereabouts of Baradar were quietly leaked by someone in the Taliban organization...

Either way, Baradar is out of the picture, but "the game" will resume.

[Cross-posted from my Notebook]

ISA: Renewing my call for comedy

I'm just back from the 2010 ISA conference in NOLA, but I don't have time for a full convention report right now. Among the highlights: First, I attended a panel on blogging featuring the Duck's Charli Carpenter on a stage with Dan Drezner, Rob Farley and Steve Walt, among others. Later, over drinks, I got to meet a few of the newest Duck bloggers.

These events motivated me to blog more frequently. We'll see, eh?

In any case, in addition to networking, a major purpose of ISA is for scholars to exchange ideas in a somewhat formal setting. Ideally, panel members present their latest research and then receive useful feedback from other academics. Since I wouldn't mind getting more feedback on my latest projects, I'm using the rest of this post to highlight my two ISA papers. Sorry for the shameless self promotion -- but I'm in a bit of a panic as I saw something at the conference that made me think that I should work faster.

Loyal readers may recall my 2007 ISA paper and related Duck post on "The Comedy of Great Power Politics." At this ISA, I presented two papers related to my ongoing "comedy project."

One was fairly directly on point: "Teaching Global Politics Through Film: The Role of Comedy." Here's the abstract:

Popular films can be employed very effectively to teach international relations theory. Indeed, film creates learning opportunities that are not readily available in more typical formats. As a mass medium, film provides potent access to viewers’ imaginations, even as it serves as a unique alternative text and mode of learning within the classroom. The paper first reviews the traditional realist concern with tragedy to cement the importance of dramatic narratives in the field and to stress the contours and limits of the typical story. The second section develops the case for studying comedy in world politics, emphasizing the importance of the concerns of ordinary people and highlighting the critical value of farce and satire. This section brief discusses the storylines or other cinematic elements of several specific films that illustrate each of these comedic forms.

I'm pretty sure that anyone can download the pdf, but let me know if you have difficulty and I'll email it. The paper borrows a bit from my Duck series of posts on my film class, mixes in a bit of my 2007 paper, and provides something of a critique of IR theory and the way it is ordinarily taught.

My other paper ("Is Nuclear Deterrence as Dead as the Dodo?") views nuclear deterrence as a long-established norm that is currently in the midst of an increasingly heated "norm contest." For decades, some scholars have argued that deterrence is irrational, illogical, or contradictory, but a few have gone even further -- arguing that the inconsistencies reveal nuclear strategy to be absurd, fantastic, ridiculous and far-fetched. You know, "not a tragedy but a ghastly farce."

Since at least the early 1980s, many prominent political figures and former military leaders have taken up these points as well--calling often for nuclear disarmament based on the framing developed by the academics. When I teach Global Politics Through Film, I assign my students a speech by former SAC Commander General Lee Butler, who offered one of the strongest statements against nuclear deterrence in 1998 (perhaps poorly timed in a year of Indian and Pakistani proliferation). Butler noted SAC planning that "defied reason" and reflected "complete absurdity."

My primary concern in the paper is whether the growing recognition of the contradictions, irrationalities, and even absurdities of nuclear deterrence might usher in the strategy’s demise—and potentially create the conditions for, and/or provide the impetus to, a world free of nuclear weapons. Critical theorists often argue that serious contradictions between public justification and policy action are logically unsustainable and suggest an opening for alternative, perhaps emancipatory, possibilities. Of course, it is possible that the death of deterrence might merely assure the life of preventive war and counterproliferation strategies like the “Bush Doctrine.” The paper looks at that too.

Before ISA, I posted the full abstract and link to the paper on my personal blog. Again: I'm trolling for feedback, so please let me know if you need an emailed copy.

Is Sovereignty the Worst Organizing Principle -- Except for All the Others?

The IMF has changed course and legitimated capital controls (under certain circumstances). Former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson (among others) bemoans Greece's inability to devalue its currency (given that it is locked into the Euro) in light of its balance of payments difficulties:

"If Greece still had its own currency, everything would be easier. Just as in the case of the United Kingdom since 2008, the Greek exchange rate would depreciate sharply. This would lower the cost of labor, restoring competitiveness (as in Asia after 1997-98) while also inflating asset prices and thereby helping borrowers who are underwater on their mortgages and other debts.

But, with Greece and other troubled euro-zone economies (known to their detractors as the PIIGS: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain) having surrendered monetary policy to the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt, their currencies cannot fall in this fashion. So Greece – and arguably the PIIGS more generally – are left with the need to curtail demand massively, lower wages, and reduce the public-sector workforce. The last time we saw this kind of precipitate fiscal austerity – when countries were tied to the gold standard – it contributed directly to the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930’s."

Countries around the world are responding to the financial crisis by (to the best of their variable ability) favoring domestic industries and abandoning free trade commitments. And the Lisbon Treaty, the latest contribution to the shape and form of the European Union, has, for the first time, added a withdrawal clause -- a way to leave the EU. Before, there was no institutionalized opt-out. Oh, and let's not forget that China's rise to world power has been accompanied by consistent insistence on the sacrosanct nature of sovereignty. Is this a random assortment of observations?

What if sovereignty is the best international organizing principle we can hope for? The concept itself has evolved, its trappings have varied. But despite that evolution it has proven itself remarkably durable. Despite all the international and transnational institutional innovations we've manufactured in the past century or so, and despite all the outbursts of hegemonic pretense, sovereignty keeps coming back. I don't want to sound like a dull realist saying its all about power balancing in the end. No, sovereignty is an IDEA. An idea that carries a lot of weight, a lot of gravity. And yes, there is a balancing element to it, but not just balance of material power but assertion of distinctiveness, separateness. It is a very compelling idea. Are we stuck with it? Just throwing out some random and maybe obvious thoughts while the other ducks are busy at ISA...

Does Social Science Training make us Selfish and Immoral?

Tim Hartford (whose blog at FT.com you really must read) discusses the results of a recent survey that suggest the answer is yes:

A recent survey by Yoram Bauman and Elaina Rose, two economists from the University of Washington, explains that in experiments, economics students are less generous, more likely to choose an unco-operative approach and more likely to accept bribes.

Bauman and Rose's survey built upon an earlier study 30 years ago which demonstrated that "postgraduate students of economics were more likely than others to “free ride” in a laboratory game, effectively exploiting other players for their own benefit."

I tend to agree with Hartford's supposition that what is really going on here is that economists--as well as political scientists and sociologists--are simply choosing optimal strategies based on the game theoretic models upon which the laboratory experiments are based. Cooperation is not inherently a good strategy, but rather one that is determined by the structure of a game or experiment (e.g. what is the payoff structure of particular combinations of choices, is the game a one-shot deal or is it iterated, etc). Social scientists are trained in, and therefore comfortable with, game theory and the various structures and payoffs that exist. It is reasonable then to assume that if placed in an experiment that mimics those structures and payoffs they are more likely to play the most dominant strategies.

For example, if I recognize that the experimental situation is a one-shot, Prisoner's Dilemma then I am going to defect rather than choose to cooperate. Why? Because the outcome depends on my choice as well as my fellow subject, and the structure of the game dictates that defection is the dominant strategy for both parties--why assume the other subject would choose differently, particularly given the risk I run of a huge loss if they don't choose to cooperate? Now, if they game is iterated and neither of us know when we will stop having to choose to cooperate, the shadow of the future makes cooperation a more dominant strategy. As Hartford noted:

[P]erhaps the budding economists are not truly mean and selfish, but are simply showing that they have mastered their studies by producing the behaviour described in simple textbook models. Arguably, the students of economics are not doing anything sinister, any more than if they calculated the roots of a quadratic equation.

There is also the possibility that those that choose to enter postgraduate training in the social sciences are simply more jaded, cynical, or "realist" in their worldview. And while they may hold personal views that cooperation and selfless behavior are desirable and moral endpoints, their research and training illustrates to them that in many cases it can be unproductive (or, in some cases, counterproductive) to cooperate oneself without taking into account what others will do.

[Cross-posted at Signal/Noise]

How ISA is Different from the Olympics

Blogging may be lighter than usual over the next week while I and many colleagues and co-bloggers descend upon the city of New Orleans for the International Studies Association Annual Conference – or, as I explained cheekily to my students yesterday, the “Olympic Games of IR geekdom” – a gathering where scholars from different schools of thought and methodological perspectives contend for the limelight, pitted against one another through the force of sheer intellect and passion for the study of world politics.

Upon further thought however, this probably ranks among the worst metaphors I’ve ever employed, for if there are any international relations scholars as megalomaniacal about their craft as are the athletes skating and boarding and luging their way toward gold up in BC, there is certainly no one in the academy cheering them on to such excess the way NBC has done the past few days.

Consider the coverage of the pair-skating competition, which I watched night before last with my daughter before departing. So maybe it’s a sign of devotion to their careers that gold-winning pair-skaters Shen Zue and Zhao Hongbo had to forego normal married life to live out of separate dorm rooms as they traveled to competitions; and that sweethearts on separate pairs of the US figure-skating team spent Valentine’s Day competing against one another on the ice; and that pair skater Yuko Kvaguti gave up her Japanese citizenship to pursue her Olympic dream. But valorizing the fact that Yao Bin, coach of the winning Chinese team, devoted his life to coaching a gold-medal winning team to the exclusion of being present for his son’s birth and childhood? (Because of his travel schedule, his wife named the child “Far Away” in Chinese.) I read such tales as signs of the dreadful interpersonal imbalance inflicted upon athletes and their families by the vissitudes of Olympic culture, but to sports commentators, these stories apparently signify Olympian credentials and global greatness.

I cannot imagine the President-Elect of the ISA, David Lake, being introduced to give his address this Thursday with commendations for neglecting his children, partner and country in the service of his commitment to the study of world politics. On the contrary, the ISA as a profession now includes childcare at its conferences, publishes articles in its journals on how to make the tenure, promotion and publishing process in the profession more amenable to families, and includes panels and workshops on work-life balance.

Why I wonder do we valorize athletes for exhibiting the very dysfunctional Type A tendencies that most of us are lobbying in our own professions and personal lives to counteract?

[cross-posted at LGM]

Dictators, Torture Conventions, and Signaling

Charli linked to a great round-up of theories circulating that propose to answer the rather interesting question of why countries that sign the Convention Against Torture seem to have a greater likelihood of committing torture.

One working paper in particular , by James Hollyer and Peter Rosendorff of NYU, has caused quite a stir. They propose that dictators use the signing of such a treaty as a costly signal to domestic opposition groups that they fully intend to continue torturing those that oppose their regime. How does this work?

We argue that authoritarian states ratify human rights treaties explicitly because they do not intend to comply. And it is important to those signatories that all observers understand that they have no intention of complying at the time of accession. The logic, while counterintuitive, is straightforward: an elite facing threats from a domestic opposition can mitigate these threats by engaging in torture. If there is any additional cost to the elite of signing and then being found to torture, the act of signing the agreement signals to the opposition the strength of the elite's commitment to remaining in power. Accession is a signal to the opposition of the very high value the elite places on holding onto power and its willingness to use torture if necessary. On observing the government's accession, the opposition - now better informed about the value the elite places on holding power - will rationally reduce its anti-regime activities. The government continues to torture, but will torture less. On the other hand a regime that doesn't sign shows itself to be vulnerable to the added costs associated with the use of torture. Thus, the opposition will increase e orts to remove the regime on seeing that the government does not sign.

It's an intriguing theory, and the authors do a good job of linking their claims to empirical evidence. However, I am skeptical regarding their proposed mechanisms and whether they actually obtain:

1) If it is well known that the conversion rate, if you will, for bringing accused torturers to justice in connection with the CAT is quite low, then why would a domestic audience see this as a credible signal? Any dictator could sign the treaty regardless of whether their type was of a moderate or an extreme–if the signal could easily be sent by either type it can’t differentiate. Additionally, the more credible signal is one that actually demonstrates the will and, more importantly, the capability of the sender. In this case, if a dictator’s real aim and desire is to signal that they will do whatever it takes to stay in power why not just make an example of revolutionaries, rebels, etc? Show that you have the will and capability to do whatever it takes to stay in power (thinking here of Barbara Walter's work on why some states negotiate with separatist groups and others choose violent repression).

2) Given that, I am more inclined to see it as a low-cost, public relations move to placate domestic and international critics. By signing the CAT a dictator can point to his/her efforts to play by the same rules as other governments and to treat their citizens humanly. The next time they are getting reamed out at some summit or UN meeting they can say “yes, but, we did sign the CAT”. They don’t really need to send a credible signal with the move, just create a useful tool in their public relations arsenal.

3) Additionally, violent, repressive dictators are less likely to fall from power. Therefore, they are less likely to be placed in a position where they could be prosecuted for their actions under the CAT. Combine this fact with the potential usefulness of signing the CAT from a public relations standpoint and you have another potential explanation aside from signaling. Moreover, it would also explain why 'moderate' or 'competitive' dictatorships are less likely to sign the CAT--precisely because their are more vulnerable to losing power and could therefore be brought to justice under the CAT. Given that the public relations gains are modest compared to the potential costs of actually being prosecuted, moderate dictators would be less likely to sign.

Just my initial thoughts. In general, the data is quite intriguing as is Hollyer and Rosendorff's theory--certainly a puzzle well worth exploring.

Google On The Defense

Google is backpedaling amid the buzz about Buzz, apologizing for its premature launch and the privacy issues it created, and promising to make Buzz more like other social networking sites, where users can choose the friends they associate with.

The brou-ha-ha goes to show that "privacy is still a social norm," to contradict the claim of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg last year that people these days want the whole world to see what they put online. It's heartening to see Google acknowledge this openly and take immediate remedial steps. Will they be enough? Keep watching to find out...

Who Dat? Old Chap!

The International Studies Association meeting is getting underway shortly in New Orleans. I’m not sure who’s very strange idea it was to combine academics and “Mardi Gras” – (I can’t wait to see the “Professors Gone Wild! Video…. Actually, I can… ) but we’re here and letting the bon temps rouler – as it were.

Of course this year’s Mardi Gras has a very important unofficial theme – the New Orleans Saints – who won the Superbowl this year. There are gold fleur de lis everywhere and on everything. I ran into a publisher last night who swore that he ran into a group of people who hadn’t stopped celebrating the victory since last Sunday.

Yet the joy of the Saints isn’t for New Orleans alone. It seemed that much of the Western world was cheering for them to win too (outside of Indianapolis, I guess.) Even in the UK, the Times posted a video (linked above) with their very posh writers saying “Who Dat?” to the camera.



I think this follows on my (slightly cranky) post this weekend which suggested that no one outside of North America was really interested in the Olympics, largely because Canada is boring (aside from other geopolitical considerations). Unlike the Beijing Olympics, there is no story behind the story.

But the same was not true for this year’s Superbowl, which NBC claims was the most watched TV event ever. (Although not everyone agrees.)Internationally, the Saints were so popular because they were seen as literally embodying New Orleans and its rise after Hurricane Katrina. The Superbowl in the UK was not just some strange American game broadcast on the BBC at 11pm. It was a highly symbolic match which represented a passionate American story… the kind the Europeans love to sink their teeth into.

The same thing could be argued about the New England Patriots when won the Superbowl in 2002. The nationalistically named team became symbolic of America’s rise after 9/11 and the imagery of that Superbowl was deliberately tied to 9/11. This may actually be a significant difference with the last Superbowl – that much of the linkage to Katrina was not as deliberate or politically motivated. Rather it this year it seems to have been done so by a media trying to push a story.

So, do we need stories behind the stories in order to better appreciate sports? Could the same be said about chess matches in the Cold War – where entire nations nervously bit their nails while uber-nerds of the superpowers battled it out? (I’m assuming that without the Cold War tensions that 99% of the attention to those matches probably wouldn’t have been there.)

I’m uncertain, but on the surface, it certainly seems to help.

The Hurt Locker

When I heard that the "Hurt Locker," a drama set in the midst of the Iraq War, was nominated for several Oscars, I was intrigued. Americans have not shown much interest as a people in either of the current official wars and even less interest in documentaries about and dramas set in these conflicts. My initial hunch was that this film, was selected to balance out "Avatar", the narrative of which clearly questions militarism and imperialism (while also reveling in astounding levels of mindless violence). So I assumed that "The Hurt Locker" would make a conservative counter-argument which justified the necessity of this war of choice. After finally seeing it, I was stunned that this film was nominated for any awards.

I would argue that the film is certainly racist/orientalist in the way in which the Iraqi population is portrayed. Iraqis are depicted as either villainous or as an undifferentiated mass of passive spectators and victims. There are no images of Iraqi women which do not depict them either wailing or otherwise "hysterical". The English speaking Iraqi men, all of whom have bit parts, are completely emasculated. The American soldiers are generally depicted as brave (if insanely reckless in a cowboy fashion) and highly competent.

The one chance that the writer and director had to stage a dialog between the protagonist and an Iraqi professor is completely squandered as the professor's "hysterical" wife throws the protagonist-intruder out of her home. Perhaps I should be thankful that the writer and director did not choose to try to speak for "the other."

There is the requisite paternal engagement with an Iraqi child. However, the child apparently is indistinguishable to the protagonist from all of the other masses of poor Iraqi children who chase and throw rocks at military vehicles.

The film may not be quite as aggressively racist as "Blackhawk Down," "300," or "Zulu," the defining films in terms of racist war genre, but it is certainly a contender. There are thankfully no scenes in which a brown or black horde attacks an outnumbered group of mainly white heroes. In terms of the anti-Arab content, the film is not as bad as "True Lies" or any of the worst Hollywood films in the anti-semitic/anti-Arab genre, mainly because it does not really engage "the other" at all... so none of the more complex racist tropes are brought forth. Nevertheless, the film does continue the long tradition documented in Reel Bad Arabs.

It will be argued that the film is true to the perspective of the main characters. The film shows how narrowly focused the life of the average soldier is. Of course, we do not get a portrayal of the level of boredom that often accompanies military duty. War is depicted as an exciting adventure, particularly in contrast to the bland challenges of raising a child and maintaining a household. So I question its realism. In showing us how soldiers view Iraqis and the Iraq War, it also gives the audience permission to see Iraqis (and by extension the Middle East) in the same uncritical way.

Does any of this matter, particularly in a forum where we discuss international relations? I think it does. War films become a part of a nation's memory and they have the potential to spark debate and dialog about the causes of war which shapes policy. Moreover, war films are often central to the cult of militarism. The "Hurt Locker" does nothing to interrogate the causes, meaning, or consequences of war, it dehumanizes the people living under occupation. As such it merely serves as propaganda for the war machine. Perhaps there should be a separate Oscar for this genre.