What Would a Post-Masculinized Military Look Like?

On the road home from South Carolina I posted notice of Laura Sjoberg's critique of militarized masculinity in her analysis of DADT-repeal discourse. Now that I'm settled in, I've realized it's the comments thread on that post where the real action is and I feel compelled to throw in my two cents.

Laura's key argument:

That the military now includes gay people and (kind of) women openly does not mean that it is some how gender-equal or gender neutral. Instead, masculinity remains the standard of good soldiering in the United States military. Celebrating the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell the way it has been celebrated, I think, may obscure that point. It also obscures a long tradition in Western political systems of defining full citizenship by military participation/bravery.

Some important questions asked by commenters:

ProfPTJ:

So I wonder what a non-masculinist military would actually look like. Starfleet? Probably not. Do we have any models?... while I can easily think my way from a feminist analysis of the masculinized military to a call to replace the military and end the war system, I can't quite think my way from that critique to an alternative military.

Dan Nexon:

I'm interested in your critical imagining of what a de-masculinized way of killing people would entail, and why that would be preferable to the kind of de-gendering of biological sex implied by allowing non-heterosexual men into the role of "masculine solider."

Tallyrand:

I am quite interested in an answer to Dan's question. I think the really fundamental point in this comment thread is whether killing can be 'de-masculinized'. Given the problems I, PTJ, Dan and others are having imagining what on earth this would look like, it would be really helpful to have some suggestions, even if this means that you have to zoom out a little. What would a de-gendered war system look like?

Grigory Lukin:

Can you post a specific description of what a non-masculine and/or gender-free military would actually look like, how it would be different from what we have now, and how/why it would be more effective - in less than 100 words? Don't refer to feminist IR or deconstruct history through feminist/progressive/whichever perspective - just answer the question.

Sjoberg:

I don't entirely (yet) know the answer to your question, except to start with that it is the wrong question. Critique/deconstruction/ rethinking/reconstruction can't start with a small portion of the war system, but the whole thing... it is not just militaries, but militarism (and by extension militaristic culture) that would need to radically change operations in order to see any real "change" in the gendering of strategic cultures....There is no simple answer."

Hmm. Let me humbly offer one: it’s really about civil-military relations, not military culture or raison d'etre per se. A post-masculinized military, as I imagine it, would differ from the system she's critiquing not in its ability to use violence (in other words, I don't share Laura's view, finally, that it would look like a 'cross between the peace corps and a chain gang.') And it would not merely be constituted by who is in the military or what kind of masculinity the military privileges in its soldiers (though these things matter). More significantly, one would know a post-masculinized military system by the character of the military’s relationship to the civilian world it serves. And I would argue with Sjoberg that there is further (beneficial) work to do, but also that we are heading in the right direction faster that she might acknowledge.

What exactly does that world look like?

Well, it is a world in which women and men both have the equal right to serve.

And it is a world in which hetero-normativity is not a requirement for the sort of archetype we valorize in soldiers. Women’s integration and the repeal of DADT therefore do take us in that direction.

And it is also a world in which “normal masculinity” is delinked from the attributes we associate with hyper-masculine military culture. This is happening in many places already: men's groups, rap lyrics, third grade classrooms like my son's, where students are taught to include everyone, to use I-statements when they have hurt feelings, bond without smack-talk, to value other cultures and the earth, and to see "bad" not in the guy but in the behavior. These things are also happening in the military.

And it is also a world in which militarism is de-linked from its historical raison d'etre “killing bad guys to protect innocent women and children on the home front.” But there are many ways to do that delinking short of letting "'guys' who do bad" run rampant, and these things are also happening already. Since at least the early 1990s, the US military has been intimately involved in a variety of humanitarian and stability operations worldwide, where the vulnerable being protected are “theirs” not “ours”; where the enemy are not “bad guys” so much as disease, starvation or natural disaster; where the goal is not to kill but to “peace-keep”; where the tactics involve very “feminine” traits such as listening, intercultural dialogue, and the provision of comfort; and where the “good” and “bad” "guys" (when there is killing to be done) may just as easily be children or women. All of this, for better or for worse, is already destabilizing the conventional gendered war narrative that IR feminists use as a foil.

But “de-masculinizing the military” it’s also about at least three other things that are happening, if at all, much more slowly: a) balancing the esteem we pay to military service with the esteem we pay to traditionally feminized roles such as child-rearing b) making the same effort to gender-integrate traditionally feminized roles as we do to gender-integrate traditionally masculinized roles c) changing the relationship between the military and civilian sectors in security operations to be more collaborative and less hierarchical.

Let me expound a little on each, for they constitute answers to the question about how to translate feminist insights into policy.

Dr. Strangelove's Mineshafts

What would the world be like after a nuclear attack of some type? That's the question answered by the President's National Security staff in the June 2010 second edition of the Planning Guidance for Response to a Nuclear Detonation.

I haven't read the entire 130 page document, but I did read a chunk of it, as well as an interesting article about it by Ira Chernus, a professor of religious studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Here's the provocative opening paragraph that got me to click on his piece:

Good news! You’ve got a pretty good chance of surviving a terrorist’s nuclear blast in your city -- especially if you’re a rich white man.

Chernus seems particularly interested in the fact that the Obama administration has produced this report -- even though the first edition (available here) was issued on January 15, 2009, just before Barack Obama's inauguration. Moreover, the original report noted that a future edition would do "additional work" on "relevant topics" such as "psychological impacts to the population."

What does the second edition of the report say about psychiatric disorders -- and why will rich white men inherit the world?

Because we needed another illustration of the absurdity of thinking about academia in economic terms

Courtesy of our friends at The Economist:

PhD graduates do at least earn more than those with a bachelor’s degree. A study in the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management by Bernard Casey shows that British men with a bachelor’s degree earn 14% more than those who could have gone to university but chose not to. The earnings premium for a PhD is 26%. But the premium for a master’s degree, which can be accomplished in as little as one year, is almost as high, at 23%. In some subjects the premium for a PhD vanishes entirely. PhDs in maths and computing, social sciences and languages earn no more than those with master’s degrees. The premium for a PhD is actually smaller than for a master’s degree in engineering and technology, architecture and education. Only in medicine, other sciences, and business and financial studies is it high enough to be worthwhile. Over all subjects, a PhD commands only a 3% premium over a master’s degree.

Well, duh. Getting a Ph.D. is not, and should not be thought of as, a rational economic decision. It's a vocation, something you do because you can't not do it. Lots of people who get Ph.D.s should not, and lots of institutions over-produce Ph.D.s because they have lost the plot, and come to regard Ph.D. students as indentured servants who can teach the undergraduate students; in that way the article's analysis is spot-on. But the implied solution -- that we ought to re-think the Ph.D. in terms of the non-academic job-market skills that it can equip one with -- is, I would say, silly and absurd. "Academics tend to regard asking whether a PhD is worthwhile as analogous to wondering whether there is too much art or culture in the world," the article somewhat sarcastically claims, committing the basic fallacy that The Economist (and: economists) always commit and reducing the social to a mass of individuals; the proper parallel to art and culture is not the Ph.D., but theoretical knowledge. Do we really want to live in a world without anything but lifestyles selected by the almighty market?

The point is driven home with the observation that "doing a PhD may still be a bad choice for an individual." "Bad" how? In terms of financial return? Yes, granted. Don't do this unless you have to, your road is a lot easier and more lucrative if you don't. But some of us have to, since we're fond of preserving our souls intact, and that's not a rational decision. Does the academic system need work? Yes, it does. Ph.D. training has to emphasize teaching more, and colleges and universities generally have to stop talking so much about the increased earning potential of their graduates as if that was why one went to college (that might be a motive, but it's not the reason -- not a philosophically defensible one, anyway, and now we cue Socrates to say his bit about "the unexamined life"). And academics need to get away from the misleading delusion that it's their research that matters and not their teaching; theoretically-informed scholarship spurs thinking, nothing more and nothing less, even if various mundane spin-offs sometimes arise from such scholarship more or less by accident. Neal Stephenson, as usual, gets this right.

The bottom line: don't go down this road unless you can't not do it. The double negative here is deliberate, since the value of the academic vocation is a negative one: it's a refuge, a fallout shelter, what Nietzsche probably would have called the cocoon within which the philosophical spirit can survive, since we now live in a world where the figure of the priest doesn't play that role in the same way as it once did. Come shelter with us if you need to; I at least will endeavor to keep the light on and the door unbarred as long as possible. Economic rationality be damned.

Imperial Anxieties

Continuing the Duck series on highly improbable dystopian scenarios, here is an advertisement for the not yet released video game, "Homefront."  The story is set in 2027 when a united Korea under the rule of North Korea's Kim Jong Un invades a severely weakened United States.

Cold War buffs will note that the video game's narrative is from the writer of the awful 1984 film, "Red Dawn."  Personally, I would have preferred a scenario in line with the eighties board game, "Fortress America," but that is probably too sophisticated for a first-person shooter style game.

Along with the writer of Red Dawn, the game makers apparently also hired CIA consultants to make a "convincing" fictional plot line.  You just gotta love the use of a sound byte from Hillary Clinton in the back story promo video...

Christmas Bonus Video

Merry Christmas! Happy Yule!

Whatever your relevant holiday is, if it happens tonight and tomorrow, then very merry.

And remember -- put Mithras back in Christmas!

The Opposition to New START and the Short-Term Future of Arms Control

Rob Farley notes the existence of long-standing conservative opposition to arms control. While the hacks at the Heritage Foundation lost this battle, Rob argues, their influence on Republican international thought is waxing rather than waning. Thus, more of opposition to New START was principled than many observers recognize, and this bodes ill for future arms control.

The New START debate over the last month has been held largely under the assumption that the treaty would die if it wasn’t ratified during the lame duck session. I suspect that this assumption is accurate. Moreover, the two most important potential GOP presidential candidates have “authored” op-eds that are essentially collections of Heritage Foundation talking points. Finally, the GOPsters who supported the treaty are mostly (although not all) old and outside of the GOP mainstream.

I’m afraid that I have to concur with Mary Beth Sheridan’s account; Heritage failed, but demonstrated its strength within the GOP caucus. The anti-arms control faction of the GOP was much more careful and serious about developing a network of institutional support than the pro-arms control faction, and at this point the latter is on life support.

Is Rob right? I'm not entirely convinced.

The Ugly Underside of the Repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell

The repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" is official now, signed by the President and a celebration of what is, by most accounts, an incredibly productive lame-duck Congressional session. It is certainly, in my mind, high time that this both on-face ridiculous and insidiously discriminatory policy make its way out of United States law and military practice. It is also, in my mind, just plain stupid the ways in which the United States does not recognize people it perceives to be homosexual as full citizens of the state; the repeal of one of them is a sign that maybe that will be (if slowly) changing.

So why am I, as a feminist and a queer theorist, not throwing a party for the repeal of this terrible policy? Is it because I just like to be contrary?

That too, but there's more to it. In celebrating the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the (important and well-deserved) removal of obstacles to gay people serving in the military, there's a lot of entrenchment of (masculinist) militarism as a standard for citizenship. In Derrick Bell's words, militarization has made exactly the concession to deconstructing sex/gender hierarchies that it needs to to maintain its dominance in United States political culture, no less, and no more.

Fun and Grisly Holiday Reading

I finally finished the final book in The Hunger Games trilogy. (I was not expecting that ending, though in hindsight I'm not sure why.)

For those of you unfamiliar with the dystopian premise: the United States is gone. Its successor nation, Panem, consists of an opulent, entertainment-obsessed capital somewhere in the Rockies and thirteen impoverished districts in which inhabitants farm, mine and manufacture. The Districts are kept in line partly through a Tribute system (developed after an uprising 70 years ago in which the thirteenth district was exterminated): every year a boy and girl are chosen by lottery to fight in an elaborate reality TV show for the entertainment of the Capitol. The winner and his or her family receive a life of ease; the losers die horrible deaths in the arena while all of Panem watches.

So far, not a terribly sophisticated plot, but that's just the first few pages. What's interesting are the industries surrounding the games: the audience can bet on the winner, there is a system for providing assistance to the favorites, an elaborate set of strategies for currying favor, and each contender works closely with a team of fixers whose professional success is based not only whether their tributes live or die but on how well they can serve the overall goal of entertaining the masses in order to uphold the fragile, fearsome stability of the system. And then there are relationships among the tributes themselves, who can form alliances and develop friendships even though only one of them will survive. And that's before things turn "political."

The books, which are currently being turned into mega-films by Liongate deal not just with survival under impossible conditions (for a taste, check out this fan-made video by an actress who hopes for a chance at the coveted role of Katniss). More profoundly, they are about repression and inequality, the socio-political-military-entertainment-industrial-consumer complexes that sustain them, and the continuum of resistance mechanisms by which people along a continuum of core to periphery inch toward revolution. (There's a lot more to work with here than Collins develops in the books; I hope the screenwriters will make the most of these subtexts.)

The Good Old Days....

...when ideology reigned over science in arms control debates. With the new START about to pass through the Senate, here's a classic from San Fransisco's KRON Channel 4 back in 1986:

PoliSci-unrelated post of the day: Visualizing Major League Baseball, 2001-2010

This post originally appeared at Beyond the Box Score.  If you are a baseball analysis fan and don't already read BTBS I highly recommend it.

2010 marks the end of the "ought" decade for Major League Baseball.  I thought I would take the opportunity to analyze the last 10 years by visualizing team data.  I used Tableau Public to create the visualization and pulled team data from ESPN.com (on-field statistics) and USA Today (team payroll).

The data is visualized through three dashboards.  The first visualizes the relationship between run differential (RunDiff) and OPS differential (OPSDiff) as well as the cost per win for teams.  The second visualization looks at expected wins and actual wins through a scatter plot.  The size of each team's bubble represents the absolute difference between their actual and expected wins.  Teams lying above the trend line were less lucky than their counterparts below the trend line.The final tab in the visualization presents relevant data in table form and can be sorted and filtered along a number of dimensions.

The first visualization lists all 30 teams and provides their RunDiff, OPSDiff, wins, and cost per win for 2001-2010.  The default view lists the averages per team over the past 10 years, but you can select a single year or range of years to examine averages over that time frame.  The visualization also allows users to filter by whether teams made the playoffs, were division winners or wild card qualifiers, won a championship, or were in the AL or NL.  The height of the bars corresponds to a team's wins (or average wins a range of years).  The color of the bars corresponds to a team's cost per win--the darker green the bar the more costly a win was for a team.  Total wins (or average for a range of years) is listed at the end of each bar.  In order to create the bar graph I normalized the run and OPS differentials data (added the absolute value of each score + 20) to make sure there were no negative values.  For the decade, run differential explained about 88% of the variation in wins and OPS differential explained about 89% of the variation in run differential.

The visualization illustrates the tight correlation between RunDiff and OPSDiff, as the respective bars for each team are generally equidistant from the center line creating an inverted V shape when sorted by RunDiff.  In terms of average wins over the decade, there are few surprises as the Yankees, Red Sox, Cardinals, Angels, and Braves round out the top 5.  However, St. Louis did a much better job at winning efficiently, as they paid less per win than the other winningest teams (<$1M per win).

(click for larger image)

The viz also illustrates the success of small market teams such as Oakland and Minnesota who both averaged roughly 88 wins while spending the 3rd and 4th least respectively per win.  If you filter the visualization for teams that averaged over 85 wins during the decade, it really drives home how impressive those two teams' front offices have been at assembling winning ball clubs with lower payrolls.  No other team that averaged >85 wins paid less than $975K per win.  Oakland looks even more impressive when you isolate the data for years that teams qualified for the playoffs.  Oakland averaged 98.5 wins during seasons they made it to playoffs, and did so spending only $478K per win.

What is Mark Zuckerberg?

An ideologue of information freedom?

A capitalist?

Something else?

Now that he's been named Time Person of the Year (Time readers' poll and the preferences of the Fuhrer notwithstanding), these are questions worth discussing.

A number of commentators, myself included, have positioned Zuckerberg within the wider hacktivist subculture in which Julian Assange is rooted - not because the two share a common objective (they don't: Assange targets powerful institutions, Zuckerberg targets the social fabric) but because of their seemingly shared belief that information wants, deserves, to be free - and that the wider sharing of once-private information is a social good.

Stephen Levy, author of Hackers, described Zuckerberg this way:

In a crazy way, he's arguing that people should share everything. He's like the early hackers at MIT such as [open source advocate Richard] Stallman who fought for people not to have passwords or secrets. Of course Zuckerberg has a commercial interest in this. But he's basically saying that it's better for society if people share things... Zuckerberg has that hacker DNA.

Kashmir Hill argues for the essential interchangeability of MarkZ and JA in re the Time Magazine debate (though she argues [I disagree] that Time already did Facebook in 2006):

The two main contenders for person of the year have privacy in common — both are helping people, governments, and a big bank sometime soon become more exposed, whether they want it or not. The Information Age is becoming The You-Can’t-Control-The-Spread-of-Information Age — Zuck and Assange are the faces of that, with regard to individuals’ personal information and that of major institutions, respectively.

Fun with Ngrams

If you're a nerdy professor trying to avoid grading, like I am, you might want to play around with Google Lab's new Ngram feature.  The feature allows you to see how often a particular word or phrase has appeared within a large number of books over time.  For examples, here is a chart comparing the use of the term "failed states" to "rogue states" from 1960 to 2010 in English language books scanned by Google Books:

Or, here is a comparison of the term "Human Security" with "Humanitarian Intervention" from 1900 to 2010 in the English language holdings:

Overall the specific terms are a minuscule portion of the total words found in the collection, but it can still be interesting to see trends...

Enjoy wasting time...

2010 US Grand Strategery

Dear Duck Readers:

I've been contemplating a post on the current state (or lack thereof) of public discussion on matters of US grand strategy. It occurs to me however, that I don't really know of any touchstone pieces on the subject published in 2010 -- except for the rather lackluster NSS, QDR, and QDDR.

Am I missing something?

Striking Blows Against Secretive Conspiracies....

To see the tooltip, go to the source.

Richard Holbrooke

I am sure there will be many views and probably a few forthcoming books on the life of Richard Holbrooke. To be sure, he was a tough and skilled diplomat. It is well known that at times, he was arrogant, self-absorbed, self-promoting, and occasionally petty. And at other times, he was engaging, generous, and charming. He was always smart and hard working.

I first met him shortly after his first visit to the Bosnian war in 1992. He went to Sarajevo as a private citizen to deliver humanitarian relief and with the intent to snap the international community into action. He was deeply affected by the seige of Sarajevo and the slaughter of civilians and was visibly angry that more wasn't being done to stop it. When I resigned from my position as a Bosnia analyst at the State Department in August 1993, he contacted me with kind words of support and reiterated his own frustrations with the US and international efforts to control the violence (at that point he was the U.S. Ambassador to Germany).

The final book on Holbrooke's efforts on Bosnia has yet to be written. His memoir, To End A War is a flawed and often self-serving account. Many other insiders hold a very different account of the Clinton administration's endgame on Bosnia. I tend to concur with the later and I suspect that as the archives open in the coming decades, there will be some less than flattering accounts of Holbrooke's behavior during the run-up to Dayton.

Nonetheless, for all his faults, throughout the war in Bosnia and throughout the negotiations at Dayton, Holbrooke was driven by his genuine conviction that something had to be done to end the slaughter of civilians. In this regard, Holbrooke was a special kind of diplomat -- not necessarily because he held such convictions (there were many who shared such views), but because he wasn't afraid to express them, defend them, and ultimately, use them as part of diplomacy.

The Constitutionality of the Individual Mandate

Perhaps because I am not a lawyer, I found the section of Judge Hudson's ruling dealing with taxation powers difficult to make sense of. Hudson argues that Congress did not intend to use its taxation powers, because (1) it removed the word "tax" from many points in the document and (2) it invoked commerce-clause powers in its preface to Section 1501.

I don't entirely understand how this is relevant to the constitutionality of the "mandate." If the act requires that individuals pay a penalty on their income-tax returns for failure to purchase health insurance, then isn't the question simply whether this is within the scope of its power or not?

Even here the reasoning seems strained, insofar as the quoted text itself reads "[T]here is hereby imposed on the taxpayer a penalty...." The question of the political resonance of "tax" versus "penalty" does not, in my mind, justify a "logical inference" that the penalty is not a tax penalty.

'Tis the season

This year began with a human tragedy of horrific proportions -- the earthquake in Haiti. We may never know precisely how many people died, but the government in Port-Au-Prince estimated 230,000 in February.

The news did not improve as the year progressed. Consider this ANI news report from Saturday about flooding in Pakistan -- and keep in mind that floodwaters have not yet receded in some areas even though the worst flooding occurred months ago:

It is estimated that the floods affected up to 20 million people, while over 750,000 homes were damaged or destroyed.

The UN had rated it as the greatest humanitarian crisis in recent history, saying that the number of people suffering from the crisis exceeded the combined total in three recent mega disasters - the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

In 2011, experts predict that thanks to La Niña, Kenya may well experience a humanitarian emergency. Zimbabwe is on the brink of disaster because of cholera, measles, and flu outbreaks.

Haiti itself is ending the year with a cholera epidemic that has infected 100,000 people and killed nearly 2200 already.

And yet, despite these truly heart-wrenching emergencies, the number of people harmed and killed in them is dwarfed by the ravages of day-to-day poverty of the type described in Paul Collier's work on the world's "bottom billion." A billion people live in abject poverty on $1 a day and roughly another billion live on $2 per day.

7/7 five years on: Conflicting memories make an official record difficult

Aldgate station plan, London underground

A month into the official inquest into the ‘7/7’ London bombings of July 2005, it is clear that the governmental imperative to arrive at a clear, authoritative and final account of what happened on the day might prove impossible because of the unreliability of human memory. This was an event in which cameraphone footage from the scene was reaching the BBC within 20 minutes of the first of four explosions, and iconic images and memorial rituals were in place within days and weeks. Yet it took police four months to take witness statements and now five years for witnesses to testify in court. It is no wonder that discrepancies emerge. Not unlike 9/11, there are significant differences between sweeping media- and politically-driven narratives of national mourning and the local, particular perspectives of those involved.

Feminist IR 101, Post #4: Common Myths about Feminist IR (and the 'truth')

Here are some common misperceptions of feminist IR; the "truth" is below the "fold" ...

1. Feminist IR is a paradigmatic alternative to other IR paradigms - there's realism, liberalism, constructivism, poststructuralism, and then ... feminism. It is its own "ism," and therefore should be a chapter in each textbook proposed as a dialogue with and/or critique of International Relations.
2. Feminists are whiners - either the field of IR see, e.g., this debate nor global politics (see, e.g., Barbara Ehrenreich's discussion of Abu Ghraib) are sites of rampant gender subordination.
3. Women are feminists, and feminists have to be women; feminist research in IR is about women (see, e.g., some of the conceptual errors in Adam Jones' most recent book).
4. Adding gender as a variable to existing analysis satisfies feminist research concerns. Feminism can fit comfortably within the traditional boundaries of IR (see, e.g., Ann Tickner's discussion of this issue).
5. Adding a "gender week" on the syllabus of classes on IR theory, IPE, security, and the like does pedagogical and theoretical justice to feminist concerns (see discussion in International Studies Perspectives special section "Mainstreaming Gender into the IR Curriculum," edited by fellow Duck blogger Charli Carpenter).
6. Hiring more women addresses feminist critiques of IR as a discipline. Feminists think there should be hiring discrimination against men.
7. There is one "IR feminism" to which all IR feminists subscribe.
8. Feminism in IR is particularly relevant to things that "concern" women (like wartime rape), and things that women are (perceived to be) good at (like peace, and negotiation).
9. Feminism in IR assumes that women are/should be equal to men, and treated that way, but valorizes women and femininity, picturing women as without men's flaws and femininity as by definition better than masculinity.
10. Feminism is irrelevant to the traditional concerns of IR (like nuclear war, trade imbalances, levels of analysis, and the like), but can have its niche studying the things it is relevant to.
11. Feminists are humorless (see blog discussion with Dan Drezner)

All of these are misguided. I will discuss each in turn.

To science or not to science -- is that a question?

Dear American Anthropological Association:

According to recent reports, you are considering dropping the term "science" from your long-range planning document. You propose replacing it with the phrase "public understanding," and also including a long litany of the variety of things that fit under this umbrella:

This includes, but is not limited to, archaeological, biological, social, cultural, economic, political, historical, medical, visual, and linguistic anthropological research. The Association also commits itself to further the professional interests of anthropologists, including the dissemination of anthropological knowledge, expertise, and interpretation.

All that really changes here is the term "science," since this kind of diversity was and is already characteristic of the discipline of anthropology; the change is therefore symbolic, as you note. But it's a powerful symbol, perhaps even more powerful than you realize. I'm not an anthropologist and so I don't really have a dog in this fight, except for the broader philosophical and cultural issue of what "science" means. But since that's largely an issue of "public understanding" -- or, better, "public misunderstanding" -- I would really urge you to think very carefully about this move.

Svalbard blogging

From the comments thread on the A/V Club's review of Voyage of the Dawn Treader (NSFC):

Lego Antikythera Machine and musings prompted thereby

Massively cool.

Course: Interstellar Relations -- The Politics of SF

I'm teaching a seminar on science fiction and politics next semester, which I am really, really looking forward to. PTJ's been teaching a similar course for years, but this is the first time I've had the opportunity offer it. Given the discussions of the SF genre in general, and steampunk in particular (e.g.), that have been making the rounds, I thought it might be interesting to see get feedback on the syllabus from our readers.

I've designed the syllabus to capture a number of major (inter-related themes), including: shifting imaginaries of apocalypse/post-apocalypse, states of exception, encountering the other, liberalism and empire, and games/society/subjectivity.

But one of the things I'm most looking forward to is seeing what unpredictable routes the students take the class.

On the Wikileaks Manifesto

I hope most of you following the Wikileaks story read Aaron Bady's essay at zunguzungu last week, in which he examines two early essays attributed to Julian Assange and provides his explanation of Assange's broader theory. It's a sophisticated read with at last glance 567 comments - the sort of blog post political theorists will (or should) assign to their graduate classes.

I also think Bady makes some mistakes in his interpretation of Assange's essays - or at least glosses over some of the more disturbing implications in his zeal to paint Assange as smarter and less objectionable than might be assumed by those not familiar with his writings.

Let's begin with what Robert Baird at 3QD argues is the central insight of Bady's essay: "the recognition that Assange’s strategy stands at significant remove from a philosophy it might easily be confused for: the blend of technological triumphalism and anarcho-libertarian utopianism that takes 'information wants to be free' as its gospel and Silicon Valley as its spiritual homeland."

In Bady's words:

According to his essay, Julian Assange is trying to do something else. Because we all basically know that the US state — like all states — is basically doing a lot of basically shady things basically all the time, simply revealing the specific ways they are doing these shady things will not be, in and of itself, a necessarily good thing. In some cases, it may be a bad thing, and in many cases, the provisional good it may do will be limited in scope. The question for an ethical human being — and Assange always emphasizes his ethics — has to be the question of what exposing secrets will actually accomplish, what good it will do, what better state of affairs it will bring about. And whether you buy his argument or not, Assange has a clearly articulated vision for how Wikileaks’ activities will “carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity,” a strategy for how exposing secrets will ultimately impede the production of future secrets.

Baird usefully describes Bady's argument analytically as follows:

For Assange in 2006, then, the public benefit of leaked information is not the first-order good of the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world (free information is its own reward), nor is it the second-order good of the muckrakers* (free information will lead the people to demand change). What Assange asks of leaked information is that it supply a third-order public good: he wants it to demonstrate that secrets cannot be securely held, and he wants it to do this so that the currency of all secrets will be debased. He wants governments-cum-conspiracies to be rendered paranoid by the leaks and therefore be left with little energy to pursue its externally focused aims.

Here are my reactions. First of all both Bady and Baird, who seem in agreement about Assange's "clearly articulated vision" and offer a very helpful analytical typology to situate his ethics in relation to others like Mark Z, both discount the inconsistencies with which he has articulated that vision. If Assange truly fit the "third-order" mold when he wrote those essays, his thinking today seems to draw on all three discourses to fit his audience and the moment. He has said third-order types of things, but he has also said on the Wikileaks site  "transparency creates a better society for all people" and that "all information should be free" (ala Zuckerberg); he has argued at times that his goal is reform, not revolution; and as Baird acknowledges in a footnote, Assange's Time interview reflected the second-order position.

If he has a consistent position, I'm not sure even Assange knows what it is. And considering that he is using the nuclear threat of releasing his entire archive (presumably irrespective of any harm minimization tactics the organization would otherwise claim to employ) as a bargaining chip to deal with his legal troubles, I have a hard time agreeing with Bady's claim that Assange always emphasizes ethics.

But let's suspend disbelief for a moment about whether Assange's 2006 essays provide a useful road-map to his current position or political behavior, and simply examine his writings. What surprises me most is that Bady, and to some extent Baird, seem to accept many of Assange’s central claims. Here are several I find very troubling - even moreso if they indeed tell us something about his current agenda.

Facelift.

Thoughts, please.

Wikileaks “Document Dumps” vs. Government Secrecy Dumps

The Wikileaks releases are political dynamite not just because of the specific issues they discuss.  Also, and more importantly, they challenge a dominant mode of foreign policymaking in the U.S. and many other countries:  government secrecy dumps—routinely stamping vast amounts of information “top secret,” thereby placing it beyond the eyes of all us "untrustworthy" citizens.  For this reason alone, the Wikileaks releases are important—and important for us to continue discussing on this blog.

To take a minor issue first, pooh-poohing the releases as “nothing new” is misplaced.  This is obvious from the facts that the releases have dominated headlines worldwide for days, that authoritarian governments have tried to keep their publics from seeing any of them, and that democracies like our own seem to be trying to do the same.  (Recently, for instance, I could not access Wikileaks from its U.S. site, although it was easy enough to do so from a European one.)  At a minimum, we are getting a detailed look at diplomats’ interpretations of events and relationships that most of us knew about only in broadest stroke.  That is very worthwhile—and in any case, there is in fact lots that really is new too.

What about the alleged harm to America’s security and diplomacy that the Wikileaks releases will supposedly cause?  

Feminist IR 101, Post #3: What is "feminist" about "feminist IR"?

So I've been accused elsewhere in the blogosphere (not linked here because of profane language) of just posting a lot of overlong (language cleaned up) definitions in service of a poststructuralist cause which is "irrelevant (insert choice words here)." I could get all defensive or argumentative (insert sarcastic comment about feminists here), but I think that I'll those comments as proof that perhaps the explaining needs to continue.

I posted all those definitional discussions because it would be easy to misread what came after them without that foundation, which is not obvious or intuitive to most IR scholars. The next series of posts (this one, #4, "common misconceptions about feminist IR," and #5, "what feminist IR can do for you") lay out generally what feminisms in IR are and what they do. Posts that follow those will discuss particular theoretical areas or empirical puzzles of interest to feminisms and IR.

So what is "feminist" about "feminist IR"? This is, to me, another way of getting at the question of "what is feminist IR?" There are some colloquial definitions that get us somewhere. In high school, I had a bumper sticker that said "feminism is the radical notion that women are people too." More helpfully, perhaps, Betty Reardon once described feminism as "the belief that women are of equal social and human value with men." That's a start, but not the crux of it.

Overdue introduction

We're pleased to introduce a new guest blogger, PM, whose first post -- on the contemporary field of International Political Economy (IPE) and the continuing financial crisis -- appears just below. He should do an excellent job of improving our coverage of multiple facets of international politics, and we're looking forward to his future contributions.

In political economy, politics comes first

Recent developments in Europe, and especially the ongoing meltdown in Ireland, should force political economists to reevaluate how well their theories can explain the perpetuation of current international regimes. The past twenty years of IPE theorizing has been exceptionally exciting and productive, but as Kathleen McNamara and others have argued the tendency toward intellectual monoculture may have left the discipline without a toolkit for understanding tectonic shifts in international actors' behavior.

Mega-Leaks: Right Idea, Wrong Strategy

I've been asked over the past week to comment on Wikileaks in the press, primarily to answer the question "is Wikileaks good or bad?" It may seem like a silly way to frame the debate (and I'm grateful to Vikash especially for trying to move the debate forward) but that's where the media cycle remains. And it's a fair question for the media to be trying to sort out: the Wikileaks site (currently down) claims that “publishing improves transparency, and this transparency creates a better society for all people.” The site's critics excoriate him for violating the law and putting (variously) national and human security at risk. Some are even branding him a terrorist.

Naturally, I've been giving an academic's answer to this question of Wikileaks' 'goodness' or 'badness': it depends.

Will transparency take a hit?

I really like the posts from Vikash and from Chris and at the risk of a bit of overkill on the topic (and upsetting Bill's stomach further), I'll add one more angle. This is from my monthly column at Current Intelligence:

...aside from a small cadre of foreign policy scholars, a few foreign national intelligence services, and Jon Stewart, I’m not sure who benefits from this release. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s stated intent for the disclosure was to reveal “the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors – and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what’s going on behind the scenes.”

...First, to the dismay of many of us who teach American foreign policy, we have plenty of data demonstrating that overwhelming majorities of the American public are not interested in foreign policy in general – let alone what happens “behind the scenes.”

... and... second, even if the country was interested in knowing what’s going on behind the scenes, it turns out that we already have a pretty good system of disclosure and transparency. We don’t need WikiLeaks to know what’s going on.

For elaboration on these points and why I think Wikileaks may end up harming the cause of transparency, you can read the rest of the column here. All right, I've said enough. I'll take a break from the topic for a while.

The Wikileaks Rap

In keeping with the Duck tradition of reducing IR issues to rap videos...
(It is worth sticking around until 4:55 for the cameo...)



From The Juicemedia and Mother Jones

Let's whack them

Got to love the neocons. They are outraged by Wikileaks and by the Obama administration's response. William Kristol challenges President Obama with a series of questions:

Why not use our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are? Why can't we disrupt and destroy WikiLeaks in both cyberspace and physical space, to the extent possible? Why can't we warn others of repercussions from assisting this criminal enterprise hostile to the United States?

Of course the irony here is that perhaps the top beneficiary so far from this batch of documents has been the neocons' number one project: strengthening Israel's position on stopping the Iranian nuclear program. In the cables from the Ankara, Amman, Cairo, Ryadh, and several embassies in Europe there is a strong and unambiguous consensus that Iran is isolated in its position. This has been reported for some time in the press, but the press reports have not always been consistent or clear. The raw language from so many foreign leaders disclosed in these cables now sends an unmistakable signal to Tehran and seriously limits Iran's room for maneuvering here. It also almost certainly lowers the risk of Iranian miscalculation (i.e., that they can play different regional and international actors off of one another and avoid serious repercussions for continuing their program). It's clear the Saudis and other Gulf States are serious in their objections and may well acquiesce to an Israeli strike , there is no room for Tehran to leverage Turkey, both Egypt and Turkey are aggressively working to pull Syria away from Iran, and the Russians can't be counted upon. Furthermore, the Israelis and others now have a comprehensive, and open record of Arab and European positions that they can exploit for stronger action against Iran.

It's probably too early to see any indication of the diplomatic implications of all of this next week when Iran and the EU resume nuclear talks. But, the release of the documents, despite the various embarrassments and other damages, does have the potential to alter the strategy and outcome of diplomacy on this. Through a new blend of pressure and engagement, we may be able to resolve this without war.

If that happens, Kristol and company may want to thank Assange and Wikileaks before they "whack" them.