Today in my SF class the students discussed Schmitt's Concept of the Political in the context of Watchmen and the Battlestar Galactica episode "33." So when links to this Glen Beck video started filling up my twitter feed, I thought I might post it as an example of Schmittian conceptions of politics. But then I realized it was something far more profound: the necessity of theorizing the "frenemy."
Is "people power" contagious? It's easy to find examples of journalists, policymakers and/or analysts, and some scholars arguing that opposition to authoritarian rule is spreading like a winter virus from Tunisia to Egypt and Yemen. In this case, many optimists argue (though some merely hope) that the viral idea will result in more democratic governance for millions of people that have long lived under autocratic rule. Moreover, many think (or hope) that the contagion will spread to other similar states with large Arab or Muslim populations.
However, the skeptics and pessimists have keyboards too. IR realists have already provided plenty of reasons for skepticism. For example, even during the so-called "third wave" of democratization some years ago, many states merely transitioned from authoritarian to semi-authoritarian rule.
The worriers are concerned about the fact that Egypt has long been the second largest recipient of American foreign aid. Indeed, many believe that the American government is quite cautious and fairly openly favors the status quo. Egypt has received substantial aid in large part because of its continued support for the Jimmy Carter-brokered Camp David peace agreement; thus, many friends of Israel are more than a little concerned about the current situation.
In any case, I have been thinking about the prospects for internal upheaval spreading to Pakistan -- ground zero in the current war and a nuclear-armed state with a history of conflict with its neighbors. Vice President Joe Biden, who like me sometimes worries about the relationship between Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and its internal stability, largely dismisses the prospects of contagion effects. However, he acknowledged to PBS interviewer Jim Lehrer on January 27 that "there's a lot going on across that part of the continent, from Tunisia into -- all the way to Pakistan, actually." Lehrer explicitly asked Biden to compare the situation in Tunisia and Egypt to events in Eastern Europe more than 20 years ago.
I realize that this is not the Feminist IR 101 post that you may have been expecting, or some bright engagement with what's going on in that area we seem to be able to so easily group as "the Middle East ..." but it is something that I've been thinking about recently, so ...
In theory, journal review is double-blind: the reviewers shouldn't know who the author is, and the author shouldn't know who the reviewers are. In practice, this almost never works, and seems like a dying standard anyway. That said, for the purposes of this rant, take it as a given: reviews should be, and often are, double-blind. The question, for now, is how to best achieve that when cites to the authors' other published work are involved.
So there are two ways to accomplish anonymity: 1) remove the cites to the authors' work, replacing them with the word "author," or 2) leave the cites to the authors' work in the third person, as if they are being cited in the normal course of writing the article.
To me, if the authors have published anything of any note in the field, #2 is a clear answer. But in the last month, two very different journals have (in my opinion, totally wrongly) taken the other position. So, why do I think there's a clear answer? And what am I missing?
The prospect of a new government in Egypt opens huge uncertainties for the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East. At this point, no one can predict what that new government will be. But it is clear that there will be substantial change, even if Mubarak hangs on. A military regime is possible. A transition government, perhaps led by Mohamed ElBaradei, leading to democratic elections also seems possible--and would be the best outcome.
Notwithstanding the uncertainties, it is worthwhile to think more about the implications. In the long term, the events of last week would seem to mean more democracy or at least more democratic input into government in Egypt. Regardless, any new government will likely mean leaders less willing to do the bidding of the U.S., whether because of their own beliefs or because of the force of popular sentiment. (Certainly an important undercurrent in the journalistic reporting has been strong anti-American sentiments expressed by many of the protesters.) It is good that American policymakers seem to realize this. President Obama is quoted as stating several times at a high level meeting yesterday that “the outcome has to be decided by the Egyptian people, and the U.S. cannot be in a position of dictating events”--or, in my view, much influencing them.
In the longer term, the U.S. needs to accept the likelihood that a new Egyptian government might be “anti-American” and anti-Israeli. Certainly this is likely if elected democracy eventually ensues. Given huge, decades-long U.S. support for the unpopular and illegitimate government, it would be surprising if Egyptians felt differently. The result is likely to be an Egyptian government which--surprise, surprise--does not share American foreign policy preferences. Whether or not this is a more Islamically-influenced government matters less than the fact that it could better reflect popular sentiment in Egypt.
The U.S. has had a difficult time accepting the possibility that “Islamist” or even radical governments might actually be put in office by free and fair elections--by thinking people who see no better alternative in their societies. U.S. opposition to the duly elected, Hamas government in the Palestinian Authority in 2006 is an obvious case in point. But it is not necessarily the case that Islamist governments are so hostile to democratic values that after winning election they would destroy democracy. Nor is it the case that, faced with the reality of governance, they would be unwilling to compromise. Leaving aside the irony of such views when the U.S. has long supported our own set of Arab autocrats like Mubarak, experience in other parts of the world suggests that governments influenced or run by Islamically influenced political parties are not necessarily hostile to democracy and can be pragmatic. Turkey is an obvious case in point.
Overall, the fact that soon we may no longer have pliable, autocratic clients in Egypt, Tunisia, and possibly other North African and Middle Eastern countries is, on balance, a good thing notwithstanding risks of short-term violence. First, a more autonomous Egypt--or even simply a more unstable one--could exert greater pressure on Israel, expressly or tacitly, to reach a settlement with the Palestinians. Added to American presidents’ ineffective “good cop” pressure on Israel will be another neighborhood “bad cop” that might help change the calculus of negotiation even among the Israeli right. It is of course unclear how that might play itself out. But a more democratic or more Islamically-influenced government will not necessarily mean war in the Middle East—and might even add pressure on Israel that would help promote peace.
Second, this and the Tunisian revolt once again demonstrate the force of “people power” seemingly untied to strong civil society associations. Although the power of “spontaneous” nationwide popular revolts, whether made possible by new or old media, is ephemeral, it can of course have great effect—as centuries of revolution attest.
But the lesson for students of civil society—and for the American and other governments that seek to foster civil society--is broader. When revolutionary moments end, civil society organizations probably will play an important role. But in Egypt and other Islamic countries, a freer civil society is unlikely to look much like America’s.
This seems to trouble U.S. policymakers. Consider this recent remark of Stephen J. Hadley, President Bush’s national security advisor: “We should not press for early elections. We should give the Egyptian people time to develop non-Islamic parties. The point is to gain time so that civil societies can develop, so when they have an election, they can have real choices.” Hadley tacitly acknowledges that there are civil society groups in Egypt already—only, problematically in his view, they and opposition political parties are often tied to Islam. That is in part a reflection of real sentiments on the ground, although in Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood seems to have been caught flat-footed by the popular revolt. It also reflects the kind of regime the U.S. has helped maintain in power with billions in aid for decades—one that has repressed much of Egyptian civil society, notwithstanding American lip-service favoring democracy.
A revived Egyptian civil society will not be wholly or perhaps even predominantly secular. Islamic organizations are likely to hold considerable sway. But there is no reason to fear or denigrate religiously-based civil society organizations. American civil society is of course replete with religious groups, and they exert great influence in politics. The fact that in the Middle East and North Africa these will inevitably by Muslim organizations is not necessarily problematic either. As long as they are willing to play by democratic rules, their presence should be welcomed. And many Islamic movements are willing to do so.
Finally and most broadly, an Egyptian transition unexpected by American officials would reinforce the need to curb American hubris about its role in the world. Too much of the U.S. foreign policy and military establishment believes and acts as if the U.S. has the right and the ability to manipulate other countries’ political systems, “in our favor.” This has created vast distortions in our own political system, starting with grossly outsized defense budgets completely disproportionate to the threats we face. For all that, we have never been able to “control” events overseas, as the Iranian revolution against America’s good friend the Shah demonstrated decades ago.
Leaving aside moral issues of America’s acting as if we are the world’s “indispensable nation,” the events in North Africa should again emphasize that we see no further into the future, and stand no taller than other nations--notwithstanding Madeline Albright’s delusions of grandeur. And because we cannot control events in other countries, we should curb our penchant for trying to do so.
The neocon blogoshere is lit up with more willow witching that the events in Egypt are vindication of the Bush's "freedom agenda." And, they are blasting Obama for his timid response -- apparently, Washington controls the destiny of this protest movement:
In yesterday's Washington Post, Jackson Deihl claimed that it's not too late to influence events. He called on the administration to support unidentified "democracy groups." But more curious was his criticism of the administration. He cited Hillary Clinton’s 2009 comments about her personal friendship with Mubarak as setting the stage: "Thus began what may be remembered as one of the most shortsighted and wrongheaded policies the United States has ever pursued in the Middle East.” Right -- let's just ignore the fact that the U.S. has been cozying up to Mubarak for the past three decades -- including a dramatic expansion of security and intelligence ties by the Bush administration after 9/11. Snippy political attack = 1; foreign policy analysis = 0.
Great powers find themselves compelled to support regimes they consider problematic, unpleasant, or even odious. The United States is no exception. Many of its friends and allies have far greater democratic deficits than Egypt, although few receive more combined U.S. aid than Cairo does.
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We haven't had much to say about these topics at the Duck. Which is fine, as there are much better academic bloggers to go to for informed commentary (e.g. Marc Lynch, Juan Cole, etc.). But I am struck by this AP story, which suggests Egypt is taking additional efforts to shut down internet communications (more here and here [note: holy &*!!, the whole country appears to be cut off]) as it ramps up its crackdown.
On a more abstract plane, Josh Tucker wrote an interesting post on revolution and revolutionary contagion that approvingly cites Timur Kuran's influential work on the inevitability of revolutionary surprises.
Drew Conway discusses the evils of word clouds. He doesn't go far enough: the meaning of speeches and texts depends on the order and proximity of words, not the frequency of their appearance.
Consider the two wordles below of famous addresses.
If you're looking for something to read for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, let me humbly suggest Adam Jones' volume Evoking Genocide, which has won a 2010 Outstanding Academic Title Award by the American Library Association's Choice Magazine. Here's their review:
This compilation has a simple yet fascinating premise: ask leading human rights scholars and activists to reflect on the art and literature that most influenced them. The result –60 two-to-three page essays mediating on a wide variety of sources, from the essential (Elie Wiesel’s Night, 1960) to the unexpected (Star Trek)—is highly engaging and thoughtful. The beauty here is that these well-known intellectuals and activists are honestly writing about the things that move them, capture their imaginations, and propel them onward in their work. Reading the book is akin to talking to a favourite professor about why he or she chose a specific field of study. The essays, covering events ranging from genocide of the indigenous peoples of the Americas to the genocide in Darfur, are not traditionally academic, a fact that may make this book more accessible to students. An excellent starting place for those interested in developing classes on the art and literature of genocide. Jones includes a list of resources for further reading.The credit goes, of course, to the editor Adam Jones, who conceived and shepherded this book into being, on top of countless other scholarly contributions to the subfield of genocide studies.
Thanks to Erik Voeten, I have just discovered a fabulous blog, Better Book Titles:
This blog is for people who do not have thousands of hours to read book reviews or blurbs or first sentences. I will cut through all the cryptic crap, and give you the meat of the story in one condensed image. Now you can read the greatest literary works of all time in mere seconds!Some of my other favorites from the site:
There's been a small break (understatement) in my posting as I dealt with some pressing stuff personally and professionally, and to post about some time-sensitive stuff (like Don't Ask, Don't Tell, which I couldn't resist, though I did resist talking about Wikileaks). I will now return to "Feminist IR 101," a series of posts designed to provide audiences that had (intentionally or not) an understanding of feminist approaches to IR that caused them to misinterpret the intentions, goals, and potential contributions of feminist work in IR, particularly when assigning reviewers and performing reviews.
The last few posts before Feminist IR 101's winter break were really an attempt to provide the basic tools that would help readers to understand the words and concepts employed in feminist research in international relations/global politics; the post-winter break posts will delve more into topic-based contributions that feminist lenses might make to seeing and understanding the ways that the world(s) 'out there' work(s), and how that is interdependent with, and intersubjective with, our theorizing about it.
I start where my work largely falls, in gender and security, or Feminist Security Studies - something I've written a fair amount about, theoretically and empirically, including, most recently, a feminist Special Issue of Security Studies, and a book, Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives. What does feminism contribute to thinking about security?
Feminists (including but not limited to Ann Tickner, Spike Peterson, Anne Runyan, Jindy Pettman, Christine Sylvester, Laura Shepherd, Annick Wibben, and myself) have argued that feminisms not only contribute to but transform both the central concerns of security studies and its methods, purposes, prescriptions, and performances.
Over the years, the so-called global "war on terror" (or "war on terrorism") has had its ups and downs as a foreign policy framing device. The George W. Bush administration, of course, relied upon the frame to sell virtually all its major foreign policies over a period of many years -- even though the Pentagon at one point preferred "struggle against violent extremists." Britain stopped using the phrase some years ago (at least in the Labor government).
Barack Obama's administration allegedly abandoned the phrase very early in his term -- in favor of alternatives like "overseas contingency operations." However, with a little searching, it's not difficult to find official spokespersons (like Robert Gibbs) -- or even the President himself -- continuing to use those words after announcing that they wouldn't.
Somehow, I missed the Obama administration's similar early announcement that it was also going to stop using the phrase "war on drugs." The Wall Street Journal reported this story May 14, 2009:
I run a small international-relations reading group at Georgetown University, and thought some of our readers might be interested in the list of books we're tackling this semester.
So, this is it -- Tunisia is vindication of the Iraq War. Here's Jennifer Rubin's great insight:
Recall when President George W. Bush talked about democracy taking hold in Iraq and then the region? Now Bush's vision seems very prescient.
...One question that deserves further consideration: How much did the emergence of a democratic Iraq have to do with this popular revolt in Tunisia?
In 1991, with the Soviet Union on the verge of collapse, the rump regime of Mohammad Najibullah finally cut a deal with Iran. The Iranians were allowed to supply the Hazarajat in central Afghanistan with armaments and other goods through direct flights to Bamiyan in exchange for supplying petroleum to western Afghanistan, including to the Kabul regime's military forces. The arrangement provided Tehran with unfettered access to an area which since 1981 was increasingly under its patronage. The Iranians hoped that they would be able to use this access to strengthen their proxies (i.e. Hezb-i Wahdat) in the conflict against Saudi backed Sunni groups (see Rubin 1995, p. 264). Throughout the tumultuous period that followed, Iran continued to expand its influence in western and central Afghanistan.
The deal highlighted the dependency of the Kabul regime on Tehran for petroleum and Iran's stake in the character of the government in Afghanistan. Twenty years later, Iran is again flexing its muscles in Afghanistan through petroleum politics. Iran's decision to block (at least) 700 Afghan owned fuel trucks from transiting to western Afghanistan has resulted in a major spike in fuel prices just as winter sets in. Fuel prices in Herat are at an eight year high. Afghanistan has witnessed several protests directed against Iran in recent days.
Why is Iran doing this now?
The conversation on last week's tragedy in Tucson has gone from the absurd to the absurd to the absurd. The late George Gerbner who was the long-time Dean of the Annenberg School of Communication at UPenn and who later finished his career at Temple University was a pioneer in the study of media influences on society and violence.
He frequently warned against assuming or inferring a direct relationship from a specific media event or elite cue to a specific personal or political behavior. His research suggested a more diffuse, but real, effect of the constant media bombardment of images and messages on individual and collective perceptions. He is featured in a recent documentary from the Media Education Foundation in which he outlines cultivation analysis and the methodological complexities of media influences on public attitudes and behavior. MEF has a new post on its website with an excellent video clip from the documentary (sorry, but I'm not able to embed the code directly to this post). MEF's post above the clip captures the gist of Gerbner's views:
Setting aside whether or not this individual (Tucson shooting) case turns out to be linked to any one political philosophy – and given the shooter’s apparent mental illness, it seems unlikely to be – the fact is that over the past two years security officials have reported that threats to American politicians have increased by upwards of 300 percent....
...Gerbner, who urged us to think about violence in more nuanced ways, found in study after study that heavy exposure to media cultivates what he called “the mean world syndrome” – a heightened state of paranoia, fear, and mistrust that often leads to a dangerously reactionary worldview. From this perspective, the point isn’t whether the Arizona tragedy can be linked to a single outside influence, but whether or not our increasingly paranoid political culture makes it more and more likely that violence like this will occur in the future.
The visit of the Indian External Affairs Minister, S.M. Krishna, to Afghanistan a few days ago overlapped the Afghan High Peace Council's visit to Pakistan to establish a joint Afghanistan-Pakistan Peace Jirga. Although the overlap of the two events appears to be coincidental, it highlighted the complex trilateral dynamic that must be negotiated.
India has now fully backed the reconciliation process with the Taliban in Afghanistan, although India asserted reconciliation could only happen with those who "abjured" violence and broke links to terrorist organizations. In the past, India had reservations about the Taliban, who were viewed as a pawn of the Pakistani intelligence organization, the ISI. Most likely, the Indian government's change of heart is related to its concern to limit the resurgence of Pakistani influence in Afghanistan.
The Afghan perspective on the India-Pakistan conflict taking place on their soil is complex. While Afghans are wary of Pakistan's hegemonic aspirations, and grateful for Indian assistance in reconstruction, they are also disconsolate about their territory being used for another proxy war. Here is a small sample of opinions in the Afghan Press:
Vesla Weaver and Amy Lerman have published a study in the American Political Science Review on the relationship between contact with the US criminal justice system and disaffection from US government and politics. They find that even after controlling for other important factors, contact with the criminal justice system is a significant predictor of civic and political disengagement and mistrust of government.
Contact with the criminal justice system is greater today than at any time in our history. In this article, we argue that interactions with criminal justice are an important source of political socialization, in which the lessons that are imprinted are antagonistic to democratic participation and inspire negative orientations toward government.Since you won't be able to access the article unless you subscribe to the journal, and since there's a lot of interest in the blogosphere right now in how social scientists generate probabilistic causal claims and what can be inferred from them to specific cases, let me explain a little bit how the authors conducted the study.
Although it received comparatively little attention in the US, the State Department's attempt to push for Turkish-Armenian normalization was one of the great foreign-policy follies of the early Obama Administration. There was little chance that the Turkish public would accept normalization absent some kind of Nagorno-Karabakh (NK) settlement; the political viability of normalization in Armenia wasn't much greater, particularly given hostility among the Armenian Diaspora to normalization sans recognition of the "Armenian Genocide."
To make matters more fun, successful normalization would have further isolated Azerbaijan, jeopardizing the Northern Distribution Network and possibly convincing Baku to attempt to seize NK by military force.
But, the process failed, and thus merely strained US-Turkish and US-Azerbaijan relations.
I mention all of this because RFE/RFL has a story that encapsulates this comedy of errors:
It was meant as a symbol of friendship that would help to heal the wounds of a long history of bloodshed, bitterness, and recrimination between Turkey and Armenia.
Instead, an imposing monument in the eastern Turkish city of Kars near the two countries' border threatens to become yet another victim of their tortured relations after incurring the wrath of Turkey's mercurial prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
In a visit to Kars on January 8, Erdogan showed emphatically that he was unimpressed by the sculpture's subliminal message of peace by denouncing it as a "freak" and calling for its demolition. The prime minister, a former Islamist, voiced particular display that the towering structure threatened to overshadow the shrine of Hasan Harakani, a revered 11th-century Muslim figure. [...]
One can say that there is (moderate) evidence supporting the argument that violent rhetoric makes violent action more likely. But this does not and cannot show, in the absence of other evidence, that any particular violent action is the product of a general atmosphere of violent rhetoric.Still, I find myself compelled to comment.
The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that the hackitivist collective [?] "Anonymous," famous for DDOS attacks on Mastercard and Paypal after the Wikileaks Cablegate fiasco, is attacking the government of Tunisia's website in support of the growing and increasingly violent protests there:
"But the unrest has since spread to a wide cross-section of Tunisian society, reflecting broader discontent with inequality and autocratic leaders perceived as corrupt figures who live high on the hog while blocking free expression by average Tunisians (see map showing protest locations). The pro-Wikileaks hacker group "Anonymous" has even joined the fray, launching cyber attacks on the Tunisian government."It is difficult to judge the impact of Anonymous so far, but it is at least an interesting show of solidarity. Although the proximate cause of the rioting is the self-immolation of a university graduate who was arrested for selling fruits and vegetables without a license, the Wikileaks documents are apparently fueling the protests (again from the Christian Science Monitor article):
John Sides at the Monkey Cage weighs in with some social science on the relationship between militant metaphors in political speech and individuals' willingness to engage in actual political violence against government officials. The findings he cites: an experimental study has shown there seems to be no effect on the overall population of exposure to "fighting words" in political ads, but there is an effect on people with aggressive tendencies. Moreover:
This conditional relationship -- between seeing violent ads and a predisposition to aggression -- appears stronger among those under the age of 40 (vs. those older), men (vs. women), and Democrats (vs. Republicans).But his real point is that we should be cautious of inferring from this or any wider probabilistic data causation regarding a specific event:
To prove that vitriol causes any particular act of violence, we cannot speak about "atmosphere." We need to be able to demonstrate that vitriolic messages were actually heard and believed by the perpetrators of violence. That is a far harder thing to do. But absent such evidence, we are merely waving our hands at causation and preferring instead to treat the mere existence of vitriol and the mere existence of violence as implying some relationship between the two.
This week, the New York Times published a (largely true) piece about the evils of going to law school, echoed by my friends on twitter and in the blogosphere have responded quickly, and in agreement. Like many political science professors, I am constantly telling our students not to go to law school - when 53% of our majors list it as their primary goal after undergraduate school. I even spoke a seminar at UF called "Why NOT go to law school -" and I had a lot of good reasons. After all, I now have a degree I paid $150,000 for (a J.D.) that I use sporadically if at all, and a degree that I was paid to get (a Ph.D.) that got me an excellent job that I plan to keep for the rest of my life. Law school was at times intellectually unbearable (after the free-thinking ways of academia, the caged ways of legal analysis were ...caging), socially a nightmare (what do I have in common with these would-be corporate lawyers?), and one of the busiest times in my life (since I worked outside of law school to pay for it).
But almost four years out of law school now, would I trade my J.D. for a more peaceful three years and $150,000? I don't think so, actually - and I think that people should be aware of the pitfalls (financial and otherwise) of going to law school, but that they don't by necessarily make it a bad idea.
Glenn Greenwald reports on the case of Birgitta Jonsdottir, the Icelandic MP and former Wikileaks volunteer. The U.S. Department of Justice has subpoenaed Jonsdottir's Twitter records, as well as the records from many other users of the service, from November 2009 onward on the grounds that the department believes that the records may be used in a criminal investigation.
What is newsworthy about this is not that the U.S. DoJ continues to investigate what the American government must, by definition, regard as a violation of its sovereign prerogative to release classified information. Rather, it is that Twitter requested the federal court order be unsealed to allow the affected users to object to the government's investigation, which had hitherto been kept secret.
Twitter's actions allow us to further refine Charli's thoughts on the recent Foreign Affairs article by Clay Shirky. In particular, this should remind us that the U.S. can't rely on the public sphere to always advance its state interests, and that there are real dangers to relying on a "civil society" that is principally constituted by private corporate actors in order to advance democratization.
The treaties of Muenster and Osnabrueck in 1648—the Peace of Westphalia—and the earlier peace of Augsburg in 1555 established the principle in European international law that internal affairs were nobody else’s business.No, it didn't.
Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann at the New America Foundation are keeping one of the most useful datasets on drone strike fatalities that I know of. They've been tallying reports of strikes since 2004. They limit their data to those reported by:
"news organizations with deep and aggressive reporting capabilities in Pakistan (the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal), accounts by major news services and networks (the Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, CNN, and the BBC), and reports in the leading English-language newspapers in Pakistan (the Daily Times, Dawn, the Express Tribune, and the News), as well as those from Geo TV, the largest independent Pakistani television network."This gives them a systematic, if conservative, estimate of total fatalities. They then gather, archive and code the data in a transparent and replicable way - unlike other estimates of drone strikes that don't provide evidence of how they derive their statistics. Bergen and Tiedemann's results gives us a descriptive picture of how drone strikes have increased over time and changed by location and impact. Their website includes a set of helpful visualizations:
Annually, the University of Louisville awards significant cash prizes in five fields: Music Composition, Religion, Education, Psychology, and Ideas Improving World Order. Next year, the prize will be at least $100,000 in each category.
For over 15 years, I have directed the administration of the award for the World Order award. Basically, I chair the initial review committee that is housed within the Department of Political Science -- and oversee the rest of the process.
The World Order Award's basic purpose is described on our webpage:
Submissions will be judged according to originality, feasibility and potential impact, not by the cumulative record of the nominee. They may address a wide range of global concerns including foreign policy and its formation; the conduct of international relations or world politics; global economic issues, such as world trade and investment; resolution of regional, ethnic or racial conflicts; the proliferation of destructive technologies; global cooperation on environmental protection or other important issues; international law and organization; any combination or particular aspects of these, or any other suitable idea which could at least incrementally lead to a more just and peaceful world order.All relevant ideas published or publicly presented between January 2006 and December 2010 are potentially eligible. Previously submitted nominations may be resubmitted.
I just finished reading Dominic Tierney's new book How We Fight: Crusades, Quagmires and the American Way of War. As the title suggests, he presents the standard American exceptionalism argument about why and how the US begins wars -- that both the public and elites hold deeply entrenched beliefs of America's "benign power" to transform the world. But, these same wars often end when the public and elites turn against these "crusades" after those we are there "to help" fail to appreciate the self-evident benefits of American military support and liberal values and institutions.
It's hard to say when the US will end the war in Afghanistan given that there is still a tenuous elite consensus backing it. But a majority of Americans want out and reporting like the clip shown below from the Pech Valley -- in which mid-level commanders and soldiers now openly question whether or not the US presence is making things worse in their area of operation -- directly challenges the pro-war narrative and will almost certainly weaken elite cohesion. (It's also striking to see a battalion commander state that the American presence helps the enemy.) Apparently, the Afghans are failing to appreciate the "self-evident benefits" of the American presence.
International relations, and especially (inter)national security, is the subfield of political science where the gap between policy makers and academics is most frequently decried. This is not because political science research on security is less policy relevant than in other subfields. Quite the contrary, it is because political science rather than law or economics is the dominant discipline in which policy makers have traditionally been trained. In short: there is more at stake.Erik takes as his point of departure an exchange between Justin Logan and Paul Pillar at the National Interest (itself riffing on a forum surrounding Michael Mosser's "Puzzles versus Problems: The Alleged Disconnect between Academics and Military Practitioners").
I understand complaints that much IR scholarship does not seem relevant to the kind of questions policy-makers are struggling with. Yet, incessant complaints about the rigor or difficulty of scholarly work reveal more about policy-makers than about academia. IR theory is for the most part not very hard to understand for a reasonably well-trained individual. The possible exception is game-theoretical work, which constitutes only a small percentage of IR scholarship. My bigger worry is that foreign policy decision makers are avoiding any research using quantitative methods even when it is relevant to their policy area. There is a real issue with training here. My employer, Georgetown's school of foreign service, at least requires onev quantitative methods class for masters students (none for undergrads). Many other schools have no methods requirement at all. By comparison, Georgetown's public policy school requires three methods classes. It is not obvious to me why those involved in foreign policy-making require less methods training for their daily work. The consequence is, however, that we have a foreign policy establishment that is ill-equipped to analyze the daily stream of quantitative data (e.g. polls, risk ratings), evaluate the impact of policy initiatives, and scrutinize academic research.I agree with Erik that policy students lack sufficient methodological training, but disagree with his sole focus on quantitative training. Policy makers are poorly equipped to deal with the daily flood of qualitative data they confront--including data best described as ethnographic, discourse-analytic, and narrative in character. They also need to better understand key social-scientific concepts, particularly those involving cultural phenomena.
Clay Shirky has the lead article in this month's Foreign Affairs on social media and world politics. Although both governments and activists both seem to be assuming that the effects are a boon to civil society, Shirky begins by pointing out that the record of such effects on political mobilization is a mixed bag:
"The use of social media tools - text massaging, email, photo sharing, social networking and the like - does not have a single pre-ordained outcome... the safest characterization of recent quantitative attempts to answer the question 'do digital tools enhance democracy?' is that these tools probably do not hurt in the short run and might help in the long run - and that they have teh most dramatic effects in states where a public sphere already constraints the actions of government."
Although the story of Estrada's ouster and other similar events have led observers to focus on the power of mass protests to topple governments, the potential of social media lies mainly in their support of civil society and the public sphere - change measured in years and decades rather than weeks or months... The US government should maintain internet freedom as a goal to be pursued in a principled and regime-neutral gashion, not as a tool for effecting immediate policy aims country by country... internet freedom is a long game, to be conceived of and supported not as a separate agenda but merely as an important input to the more fundamental political freedoms."
Just wanted to let everyone know that starting January 4th I will be writing a weekly baseball column (sometimes twice weekly if I am feeling especially opinionated) at Beyond the Box Score.
Beyond the Box Score is a fantastic site, examining baseball from an analytical perspective. The authors definitely embrace sabermetrics, but they don't beat readers over the head with complex statistics. As with most things that I do, the subject of my columns will vary quite a bit.
Generally speaking I'll likely focus on team performance, player valuation, and lots of exploratory questions about the game. Oh, and you can be sure there will be lots of pretty visuals and laments about the NY Mets.
Be sure to stop by if you are interested. You can read and subscribe to my entries here, but I encourage you to subscribe to the site as a whole (RSS feed here).
It hasn't exactly been getting great reviews: the 1982 version had a plump, red thumbs-up rating of 69% on Rotten Tomatoes, whereas the sequel is at a festering, sickly 49%. Most of the bad reviews fall into the "meh" category: all glitz, no story. But there's also push-back by those who see some 'big ideas' embedded in the film.
