Tinariwen

Many of the "mercenaries" fighting on behalf of Gaddafi's regime in Libya are ethnic Tuaregs who fled conflicts in Mali and Niger in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1980, Gaddafi began encouraging the young Tuareg men -- illegally residing in Libya -- to join military service as "African regiments" within the Libyan military. The general reputation of the Tuareg are as fierce and brutal fighters and they appear to be the "foreign mercenaries" in many of the eyewitness reports of brutality in Libya.

My first exposure to Tuareg peoples and their relationship with Gaddafi came several years ago when I started following Tinariwen -- a group of former Gaddafi-trained rebels who floated for years from the refugee camps of southern Algeria to the deserts of Libya and Mali. Unlike the fighters in Libya today, this group of men put down their guns and picked up their musical instruments. The result is a special eclectic blend of North African folk, American blues and reggae.

Guest Post: What way will the guns point in the Middle East?

Building on Dan's observation this past week, Theo McLauchlin is a PhD student at McGill University offers us some insights on the role of the military in the various Arab revolutions we're witnessing. He works in the area of military defections and civil wars.

Which Middle Eastern regimes seem liable to fall? That's a popular question these days, and an important answer, as Dan Nexon points out, is that it depends on each country's armed forces. But what they are likely to do is something most people don't seem inclined to speculate about. That caution is warranted, as I'll argue below. But what can we say? What ideas do we have at our disposal for thinking through what militaries will do?

One important factor might be professionalization. Lucan Way notes that in comparison with the rest of the Middle East, Tunisia and Egypt seemed to have relatively professional, depoliticized armed forces, able and willing therefore to act in concert to say "enough". The regimes lacked the "coup-proofing" techniques that, according to a quite extensive literature, have helped prop up authoritarian regimes across the Middle East. You promote your friends, marginalize your adversaries, and don't trust anyone too much. Multiple different internal security agencies, for example, keep an eye both on officers and on each other. If an officer is plotting a coup, he stands an awfully good chance of being reported by someone else eager to curry the dictator's favour. These techniques really do seem effective at preventing coups.

Worst. IHL. Treaty. Evar....

Suspected Mercenaries in Libya

I really do more things than tweeting, but this morning I got up to find that the ICRC had sent out a message that simply stated the title of the Convention of the OAU for the Elimination of Mercenarism in Africa. Libreville, 3rd July 1977 and a link to the treaty.

I can only assume they're doing it in response to the situation in Libya where it has been alleged that Gaddafi has been using mercenaries (from Chad? Nigeria? - They seem to deny it, claim to be ordinary African migrant workers) to back up his regime.

I find this interesting for a few reasons. The ICRC has tweeted the treaty with zero context whatsoever. As if this was a normal thing to tweet out on a Saturday morning in Geneva. But I hear they're having a bad ski season, so that might explain it.

Norms Are What Analysts Make of Them...? And Other Thoughts About Targeting Killings, Sieges, and War Law Development

Professor Michael Gross left a lengthy response at Current Intelligence to my remarks about his characterization of asymmetric war. I'm afraid he seems displeased with me:

Far superior to faint praise, it is still annoying when reviewers pick out controversial arguments but leave the impression that the author did not address them.

Oh dear. It's true that, in my effort at brevity, I did give short shrift to many of the overarching strengths of the book: its breadth, up-to-date-ness, and unique and timely case studies on non-lethal weapons, assassination, the right to self-defense of national liberation movements and humanitarian intervention among others. But then again, this wasn't a book review, just a brief response to a specific set of points Gross makes. My other essay referencing his book responds to a different set of equally specific points, and should be read as such. Neither is or is intended to define or respond to the entire book, which is a broad overview of dilemmas states and irregulars face in winning wars against one another. (If you want to read such a review however, here's one. Professor Gross is also apparently writing an equivalent treatise on the moral dilemmas faced by irregulars, which I eagerly anticipate.)

At any rate, Gross goes on to engage the comments I did make at some length, for which I'm grateful. As one good turn deserves another, let me discuss some of his remarks and also try to clarify where I see the differences in our opinions - which are not so far apart really (we both care about war law and about protecting noncombatants) but which do differ somewhat on analytical, ethical and programmatic grounds.

Not-so Random Thought of the Day

Whether or not significant elements of the military defect continues to be the key factor in the Revolutions 2011.

(Photo: AP)

A Rare Georgetown Post

My University's relationship with the neighborhood's oligarchy really, really sucks.

Although our neighbors have some legitimate grievances, I find it hard to sympathize with the Advisory Neighborhood Commission's  particular brand of crazy. According to the City Paper:

Desperation in Libya

As reports circulate that the vast majority of Libya is in the hands of the opposition, Gaddafi blames al-Qaeda and drug-addled youth for the revolution:

Muammar Gaddafi, the Libyan leader, has said in a speech on Libyan state television that al-Qaeda is responsible for the uprising in Libya.

"It is obvious now that this issue is run by al-Qaeda," he said, speaking by phone from un unspecified location.

He said that the protesters were young people who were being manipulated by al-Qaeda, and that many were doing so under the influence of drugs.

"No one above the age of 20 would actually take part in these events," he said. "They are taking advantage of the young age of these people [to commit violent acts] because they are not legally liable!"

Who Needs Social Scientists When We Have the Onion?

 Many scholars consider "prediction" to be the goal of social science. They deploy fancy statistical techniques to create complex models that, if they're really good, reach the Olympian heights of 47% accuracy rates.

Then there's the Onion, who makes all of those technowizards with their "R" and their "LaTeX" look like a bunch of coin flippers.

Consider the its scarily accurate 17 January 2001 headline, "Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'".

So when I read its 2004 article, "National Museum Of The Middle Class Opens In Schaumburg, IL", I laugh and I cry, but mostly I just want to drink until I pass out.

"The splendid and intriguing middle class may be gone, but it will never be forgotten," said Harold Greeley, curator of the exhibit titled "Where The Streets Had Trees' Names." "From their weekend barbecues at homes with backyards to their outdated belief in social mobility, the middle class will forever be remembered as an important part of American history." [...]

Bizarro U.S.

Wednesday, February 23rd was certainly one of the stranger days of American politics.

Best I can tell, we decided that all those darn Middle Easterners were getting too much attention with their popular protests bringing down regimes, civil wars between pro-democracy and autocratic forces, and all that, so the US was all like, "dude, better turn on the crazy and get some freaking attention!!"

At least, that's the best explanation I've got.

Strengthening Civilian Protection

My review essay on the protection of civilians is out in Foreign Affairs. I discuss two books - Michael Gross' Moral Dilemmas of Modern War, and Stephen Rockel and Rick Halpern's edited volume Collateral Damage. All these authors clearly care deeply about protecting civilians in armed conflicts, and worry in different ways that the existing laws of war are flawed. I have somewhat more faith, particularly in the ability of global civil society organizations to build upon these foundations in order to fill the existing gaps; in fact, as I argue, this process is already underway:

In Moral Dilemmas of Modern War, Michael Gross contends that the current safeguards against civilian casualties are too stringent to address the complexities of today's wars, barring states from adequately combating irregular forces. Meanwhile, Stephen Rockel and Rick Halpern argue in Inventing Collateral Damage that the current international regulations are too weak, permitting and even enabling states to harm civilians during combat.

From two widely different perspectives, the books cast doubt on the value of the existing international regulations presumably designed to mitigate war's impact on civilians. But a closer look suggests that these authors overstate the tensions between the laws of war and the modern battlefield and underestimate just how well the existing statutes are working. Although the laws of war require strengthening, they constitute a firm foundation on which to better protect civilians.

Entire essay here.

Middle Eastern Dictator Speech Bingo: Threatened by Revolution Edition

From LSE to the ICC?

Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi's second son and purported successor, Saif Al-Islam Alqadhafi fueled the protests the other night with his disjointed speech. The irony of Saif's complicity in all of this is that he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation under David Held at London School of Economics titled: "The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Governance Institutions." From the Abstract:

This dissertation analyses the problem of how to create more just and democratic global governing institutions, exploring the approach of a more formal system of collective decision-making by the three main actors in global society: governments, civil society and the business sector.

The thesis explains and adopts three philosophical foundations in support of the argument. The first is liberal individualism; the thesis argues that there are strong motivations for free individuals to seek fair terms of cooperation within the necessary constraints of being members of a global society. Drawing on the works of David Hume, John Rawls and Ned McClennen, it elaborates significant self-interested and moral motives that prompt individuals to seek cooperation on fair terms if they expect others to do so. Secondly, it supports a theory of global justice, rejecting the limits of Rawls’s view of international justice based on what he calls ‘peoples’ rather than persons. Thirdly, the thesis adopts and applies David Held’s eight cosmopolitan principles to support the concept and specific structures of ‘Collective Management’.

I've read through the first couple of chapters and one question just jumps out from all of this:

Notes on Libya, etc.

If you've been paying any attention to the news, you undoubtedly know that Libya is in the midst of a revolution. The Libyan government understands that all too well; hence, the increasing force deployed against opponents of the regime. Tripoli can't be pleased that some of its military and its diplomatic corp are defecting from the regime.

Anne Applebaum has written a column comparing the revolutions to 1848. That's not a terrible comparison, insofar as we're looking at a combination of transnational networking and demonstration effects triggering modular uprisings in different countries. But similar processes were at work in the Colour Revolutions, the post-WWI upheavals, the Protestant Reformations, and, albeit in a very different institutional environment, the cascading uprisings that marked the end of the Soviet Union. The kinds of reforms sought by the "median" regime opponent in the Middle East of 2011 would also look pretty familiar to those in Europe of 1848. But there are some important differences with 1848 and not a few of these other examples.

Ducks in London

Dan and I spent the last few days in London doing a variety of talks that might be of some interest to the general Duck readership.

On Wednesday I gave a book talk at SOAS; I'm quite pleased at the way this one turned out. Podcast here; q and a here. And the sci-fi author part of the session is available to listen to here.

On Thursday Dan and I participated in the LSE's Literary Festival on a pair of roundtables entitled "Science Fiction an International orders." Liveblog by Stephanie (as most of you probably already know) here; my contribution podcast here; Dan's contribution here.

On Friday Dan and I did a joint talk at the LSE entitled "Conducting Inquiry in IR," which ran the gamut from philosophy of science to techniques for relational social inquiry. The talk is here; the q and a is here.

All in all, a very ducky few days in grey and chilly England.

India’s soft power is unclear

India has soft power to the extent that its values, its way of managing its affairs and its vision for the international system are so attractive to other nations that the latter start doing what India wants without India having to use the sticks and carrots of traditional international relations. By achieving relatively stable democracy in such a geographically large and religiously diverse polity, for instance, India may inspire others to emulate its institutions. Nevertheless, to understand Indian soft power, we must first ask how others see India. Indian soft power is a function of others’ perceptions of India. Hence it was a surprise that a conference held in London this week, India as a Soft Power, concentrated almost exclusively on India itself.

Apocalyptic Thinking in IR

I do not see the discussions about zombies as a type of new or out-of-the-box thinking. If anything, the discussions of zombies that I have noted so far are completely "in-the-box" thinking, except with a touch of geeky humor, parody, and wit that is usually lacking in the discipline. In fact, the discourse seems to consist mainly of exercises in applying existing theoretical tools to an impossible scenario for pedagogical purposes or to lampoon the generally stale pedagogy of IR theory. From my perspective, the question is not how well or fairly does this exercise treat particular theoretical paradigms, but why this apocalyptic theoretical exercise presents itself at all.

Apocalyptic thinking has been a feature of IR theorizing for over a hundred years.  In fact, I would contend that the zombie fad is at least the fourth wave of apocalyptic thinking.  The four waves are:

1. Theories of Race War
2. Theories of Nuclear War and Deterrence
3. Clash of Civilizations
4. Zombie Apocalypse

The origins of IR as a discipline, is not in Ancient Greece or Renaissance Italy, but in the US at the dawn of the 20th century. Although the discipline has effectively purged its collective memory, the origins of the discipline were in concerns about race theory, race war, and colonial administration or "racial uplift" theories.  In some cases, these origins have been obscured through rebranding, as when the Journal of Race Development adopted its new name, Foreign Affairs. As Robert Vitalis (2002) has carefully documented, the first generation of American IR theorists expressed alarm over emerging challenges to the principle of White Supremacy. Concerns about "The War of the Color Line" became intense, particularly after the Japanese victory over Russia in 1905.  These concerns, coupled with racialism and outright racism, led to fearful imaginings of yellow, black, and brown hordes invading and overwhelming the white nations (only Europeans were considered to be divided into nations in these early formulations; the rest of the world was grouped by race).

Baron von Cut-and-Paste

Ooops. The young, charismatic, German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg is in trouble for allegedly plagiarizing parts of his dissertation. He announced that he is temporarily dropping his doctoral title. His defense? -- there were mistakes, but nothing plagiarized:

"It was compiled over the course of about seven years while I was at the same time working as a member of parliament and while I was a young father. It contains mistakes, no doubt about it. I am extremely unhappy about every single one of those mistakes."

Among other things, he apparently he lifted passages from a US Embassy website without attribution (even with attribution, that probably should still be a crime).

The media is having a field day. From the same BBC report:

the ZDF television website dubbing him "Zu Copyberg", Financial Times Deutschland naming him "Baron Cut-and-Paste", and Berlin daily Tageszeitung nicknaming him "Zu Googleberg".

Still the issues are serious and given the increasing frequency of high profile plagiarism allegations, it prompted me to take a look back to Dan's excellent post and the extensive comments on the topic here at Duck last fall. It's worth another read if you get a chance.

Human Rights: The Last Utopia?

I’ve just finished reading Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History and would highly recommend it to those interested in rights and norms.  I have written a review of it that will eventually appear in the American Historical Review.   Meanwhile, for those who just can't wait, my main points:

 

Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia is an erudite and impressive intellectual history, portraying the core principle of contemporary human rights--that individual rights transcend state sovereignty--as a strikingly recent invention. . . .Moyn argues that early views of rights were welded to the state or the nation. . . . Moyn also dismantles the widespread notion that post-World War II revulsion at the Holocaust and formation of the United Nations gave birth to human rights. . . . For Moyn, the modern human rights movement rose only as other “utopias,” especially nationalism and socialism, fully revealed their failures. . . .He spends less time analyzing the sturdiness of this “last utopia.”  Not only has it attracted political movements it once eschewed, but developments of the 2000s make its triumph appear less secure than in past decades—something which in fact fits well with his argument emphasizing change and challenging teleology.  It is not clear that human rights are in fact the last utopia.  Particularly in the post-9/11 period, state-level utopias—or distopias—threaten the rights ideal.  Most importantly, renewed cries of “national security,” have called into question cherished principles such as freedom from torture and even freedom of conscience. . . . Within U.S. law and politics, international human rights remain an alien concept, even if domestic civil rights, grounded in the Constitution, are revered.  On both left and right, American exceptionalism and sovereignty still prevail over international rights principles. 

Overall, an insightful, challenging, and beautifully written book.

Zombie Hunt!

In an public-service-minded attempt to hone our skills for the zombie outbreak due any day, Bloggingheads has embedded a zombie-detection tutorial within this diavlog:

Win a copy of “Theories of International Politics and Zombies"! Hidden in this diavlog are five different images from well-known zombie features (four movies, one TV show). The first reader of this blog to correctly identify when those zombie scenes appear in the diavlog and from what movie or TV show they were taken, gets a copy of Dan Drezner's new book. For a chance to win: send an email to bloggingheadszombiehunt@gmail.com. In the body of your email, include a link to this blog post, the five different times (minute and second) in the diavlog when the zombie images appear, and the movie/show from where the images were taken. Contest ends at midnight on March 1, 2011. Good hunting!

A Truth Commission for Iraq

Back in 2003, the name Ricardo Sanchez appeared in several posts on my personal blog. At the time, the now-retired General was "the top U.S. military official in Iraq."

Over the years, Sanchez provided honest and forthright assessments of the Iraq war. Even though I didn't always agree with his analysis of what should be done, I respected his contributions to the political debate. Lately, he's been pushing a "truth commission" for Iraq and I think that the U.S. should pursue something like that to document the course of the Iraq war.

Science Fiction and International Orders - Live Blog [UPDATED]

[podcasts of ProfPTJ and DHN's contributions to the afternoon sessions are now up:

PTJ: http://kittenboo.com/blog/2011/02/21/science-fiction-and-international-orders-ptj/

DHN: http://kittenboo.com/blog/2011/02/21/science-fiction-and-international-orders-dhn/

Also: the sci-fi author part of the session is available to listen to here.]

Okay things are getting underway here at the LSE. I have never live-blogged before, but I'm told there is a first time for everything. Professor Chris Brown is just starting the introduction.

Please note that I am trying to be as accurate as possible. I think there will be a pod-cast to check this up against later. However, I hope that the participants will feel free to correct or respond to what is, no doubt, my mangled and convoluted interpretation of their thoughts.

Of course having technical difficulties with the internet – working on it. EDIT: appears to be okay now. Fingers crossed.

1:32pm John Courtney Grimwood is starting by reading from his lastest book on a 15th Century world where the Mongols are the major world power. So far it is about a woman who is being forced to marry someone she really doesn’t want to in Venice. He's reading very quietly so it's a bit hard to make out.

1:39pm It's a big theatre and not full, but at least 100+ here. A good turn out for Thursday afternoon.

Science Fiction and International Orders

Today at the LSE there are two fabulous (read: fabulously nerdy) events on Science Fiction and IR. Even better, it's full of ducks! The event was organized by Chris Brown and features Dan Nexon and Prof PTJ.

The first event, chaired by Chris Brown, features three prominent Science Fiction authors: Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Paul McAuley, Ken McLeod. The second event features several prominent academics who will be discussing the implications for IR. Chaired by Barry Buzan, it features our two ducks and Iver Neumann.

My only regret is a lack of female voices. So, in an attempt to rectify this, I will (read: attempt) to live-blog these events here at the Duck which start at 1:15pm GMT (8:15am EST - you'll have to work the rest out for yourselves).

It promises to be an entertaining (read: fabulously nerdy) day! (There may be a pod cast of both events as well. I'll post 'em if they got 'em.)

Getting Slizzerd with the Red Cross: Disasters and/in Social Networking

This is not my usual forte – Charli is much better on NGOs, networks and social things. (I just like tweeting.) However, last night when I checked my twitter, a fairly odd message came up from the American Red Cross:

Slightly different from their usual “please donate blood” or “how are you preparing for the blizzard?” kind of emails.

Within an hour, the tweet was withdrawn and replaced with this:

Colour me impressed. A 130 year old humanitarian agency with a sense of humour.

However, I’m drawing attention to the story because yesterday was also the day the ARC released research it has done (in infographic form!) as to how social networking might be used in an emergency. 28% of respondents noted that they would use social networking to let people know they were safe.

Bush's failed freedom agenda

Condi Rice writes some fancy words this morning:

As I watched Hosni Mubarak address the Egyptian people last week, I thought to myself, "It didn't have to be this way."

In June 2005, as secretary of state, I arrived at the American University in Cairo to deliver a speech at a time of growing momentum for democratic change in the region. Following in the vein of President George W. Bush's second inaugural address, I said that the United States would stand with people who seek freedom. This was an admission that the United States had, in the Middle East more than any other region, sought stability at the expense of democracy, and had achieved neither. It was an affirmation of our belief that the desire for liberty is universal - not Western, but human - and that only fulfillment of that desire leads to true stability.

The problem is that history is a tricky thing. Bush and Rice both gave wonderful speeches at times on the merits of democracy. But after 9/11 and throughout the remainder of his presidency, Bush expanded security cooperation with dozens of corrupt authoritarian regimes. These included, among others Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt (yes Egypt), Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Malaysia, Pakistan, Qatar, Syria, Uzbekistan, and Yemen. This expanded security cooperation often included additional foreign aid packages for military and security forces that repressed domestic oppositions, it included coordination on intelligence gathering that, again, frequently targeted domestic oppositions, and it included numerous instances in which the U.S. government supported torture, rendition, and secret detentions. None of these practices are consistent with democracy or human rights -- or an "affirmation" that the "desire for liberty is universal."

Norms and War

I have an essay online at Current Intelligence on Michael Gross's recent book. Moral Dilemmas of Modern Warfare explores the ways in which "new wars" are challenging the existing law of armed conflict.

I'll have more to say about his proposals in a forthcoming Foreign Affairs essay, but in this piece I focus on his characterizations of "asymmetric war" and on his notions of "norm change." I think the asymmetries to which he refers may be more apparent than real, and the norm "shifts" he describes - like the breakdown of respect for the civilian/combatant divide - are actually patterns of norm violations.

Gross' typology of “asymmetry” – material, legal and moral – as an explanation for war law violations is highly useful analytically. But as a description of what is new about war it holds up poorly. Material asymmetries between belligerents have always existed – both among states and between states and their many colonial, tribal or insurgent adversaries throughout history.

Neither is legal asymmetry anything new. In fact, war law was designed in part to distinguish ‘lawful’ from ‘unlawful’ combatancy, as nineteenth century European governments sought to privilege professional armies over nationalist insurgencies in territories under their control. And certainly, moral asymmetry has always been a feature of war. Combatants differ in the justice of their causes and of their means: guerillas, terrorists and even (at times) states have always sought to exploit the ambiguity between civilian and combatant.

In many ways, war law has in fact adapted already to these distinctions over time. It already recognizes, for example, a central insight that Gross articulates: that the appropriate distinction between civilian and combatant is not moral innocence but rather whether or not they are directly participating in hostilities. This is because indirect civilian participation in war is nothing new...

Indeed, the real logic of Gross’s analysis rests on a feature of contemporary war he under-theorizes: advances in technology, particularly aerial munitions. Indeed, many of the moral dilemmas he describes are based on the availability of air power to one (but not both) sides in such conflicts, and to the widespread assumption that it must be used as a tool to defeat the enemy. Such technological advances (along with other developments in non-lethal technology) exert two game-changing effects on modern battle-spaces, one practical and one normative. In practical terms, they alter the types of injury that can be done to civilians, particularly increasing the scale of indirect harm due to damaged infrastructure. But secondly, the availability of air-delivered explosives has contributed to casualty aversion in democracies, affecting nations’ willingness to expend military blood to achieve military objectives...

...But Gross’s suggestions that these and other political trends prove international norms are changing may be over-reaching. Much of what he documents – like the emerging practice of treating “associated civilian targets” as military objectives – is a set of deviations from international norms by states seeking to pursue their interests outside the bounds of the law. What this shows is not that “new norms” are taking shape, but that the existing norms need greater clarity and sharper teeth in order to shift the moral calculus of justifiably self-serving actors.

You can read the entire essay here.

On Why There is No International Law Against Using Very Large Rocks in Battle

I have a new article in the journal International Organization entitled "Vetting the Advocacy Agenda." It tries to explain why some issues get noticed by transnational campaigners and others don't, using weapons advocacy as a focal point of study. Key argument: it matters which organizations take up the issue; the global agenda is as much a function of structural relations within advocacy networks as of relationships between advocacy groups and states. You'll need an institutional subscription to access the article online, or you can read the proofs version here. Abstract below.

While a number of significant campaigns since the early 1990s have resulted in bans of particular weapons, at least as many equivalent systems have gone unscrutinized and uncondemned by transnational campaigners. How can this variation be explained? Focusing on the issue area of arms control advocacy, this article argues that an important influence on the advocacy agenda within transnational networks is the decision-making process not of norm entrepreneurs nor of states but of highly connected organizations within a given network. The argument is illustrated through a comparison between existing norms against landmines and blinding laser weapons, and the absence of serious current consideration of such norms against depleted uranium and autonomous weapons. Thus, the process of organizational issue selection within nongovernmental organizations and international organizations most central to particular advocacy networks, rather than the existence of transnational networks around an issue per se, should be a closer focus of attention for scholars interested in norm creation in world politics.

I'll have some findings on that latter written up in book form in the next year or so, Gods willing.(This of course means the larger project is still in progress, so feedback on this short early version quite welcome.)

This ain't gonna cut it....

Friends at the National Priorities Project have a quick assessment on President Obama's budget. Here's their take on the defense and security budget:

Defense spending, which accounts for roughly 58 percent of discretionary spending and 20 percent of total federal spending (both based on FY 2011 estimates), will continue to grow, albeit at a slower pace than in recent years.

The $553 billion base-line Department of Defense request is approximately 3% higher than current funding levels. This figure does not include funding for nuclear weapons or $117.6 billion for the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

...The chart below shows defense spending as 58% of all requested FY2011 discretionary spending (left bar) and security spending as 66% of the total (right bar).

This means that the projected freeze and subsequent savings on non-security discretionary spending in FY2012 will have to be absorbed by an even smaller percentage of the overall discretionary budget.

Random Thought of the Day

"Much contemporary post-prefixed critical theory seeks to re-enchant the word."

Call for Nomination: the 2011 Yale H. Ferguson Book Award

The Internnational Studies Association-Northeast is pleased to announce the inauguration of its book award, named for Yale H. Ferguson. Information on the award below the fold.

Fortune-Tellers of Foreign Policy

 Congressional hand-wringing over America’s inability to forecast the Egyptian and Tunisian revolts is unsurprising given the foreign policy hubris that dominates in Washington today.  How can it be, the cry goes out, that America, was blindsided by these earthshaking events?  Doesn’t “exceptional” America see further and act more wisely than other nations? 

Sadly, that arrogant and delusional mindset is unlikely to be changed even by this latest “intelligence” failure.  Rather than questioning whether anyone could have predicted this kind of event—let alone whether we should be trying to control the future of other societies—the response is likely to be:  let’s throw more money at the problem! 

In fact, this “failure” is part of a broader, failed effort to know and control the foreign policy future, led by groups like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and its Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS).  As Noah Shachtman points out (h/t Dan Nexon), this project has gobbled up hundreds of millions of dollars.   Yet its predictions are no better than those of a handful of area specialists—or, probably, a cup of tea leaves.

In that light, ICEWS and DARPA are useful primarily to keep Defense Department and "intelligence" budgets growing.  What better way to generate a constant flow of dollars than having not only trumped up "threats" like terrorism--but also " crisis forecasts" that would require immediate, costly "readiness" efforts?

Consider, for instance, what might have happened if ICEWS had in fact foretold Mubarak’s resignation a year ago?  What could the U.S. have done with that information?

Obama and Egypt: The Power of Inception?

On 4 June 2009 US President Obama went to Cairo to make a speech to the Muslim world, where, among other things, he addressed the question of political reform and democracy in the Middle East. In February 2011 one Al-Jazeera columnist has associated the tumultuous changes in Egypt and Tunisia to the persuasive technique Inception, the film in which Leonardo DiCaprio tries to plant ideas in individuals’ minds by infiltrating their dreams. Larbi Sadiki writes, ‘A precedent has been set in Tunisia, and Egypt is on the move. Whilst the challenges are awesome, the seeds for planting democratic dreams have begun by the display of people's power in Tunisia.’

We are all Khaled Said, We are all Mohammed Bouazizi

Apparently separate and relatively peaceful revolutions have now toppled dictatorial regimes in two North African states. What provoked these events?  While there are a wide range of political and economic factors as well as organizations that had been building for years, the proximate causes that triggered the call for protests were quite similar.

A cartoon by Carlos Latuff depicting the late
Khaled Said's revenge on President Hosni Mubarak

The trigger for both events can be traced to two individuals. The outrage that started the January 25th revolution in Egypt was the brutal death of a 28 year old Alexandrian businessman, Khaled Said on the 6th of June last year; and the self-immolation of the 26 year old Mohammed Bouazizi in December started the Sidi Bouzid revolution in Tunisia.

The narratives of both men revolve around difficulties at the hands of arrogant and corrupt police officers. In the case of Khaled Said, he refused to show his identification to police in a cafe as they did not have the right to make such a demand and he knew it was only a ruse to get a bribe. (Anyone who has lived in Cairo long enough has encountered this scenario). The police responded to Said's defiance by hauling him out of the cafe, and as he pleaded for his life, the police beat him to death over the course of twenty minutes. The Egyptian government attempted to explain the death of Khaled Said by discrediting his reputation and claiming that he died of asphyxiation from trying to swallow a bag of marijuana. The circulation of graphic photos of Said's dead body made it plainly evident that he had died in the most horrible manner. It should not be surprising then that the protests which erupted under the banner "We are all Khaled Said" occurred on January 25th which was declared National Police Day in Egypt in 2009.

In Tunisia, Bouazizi had his only means of supporting a family of eight, an illegal fruit cart, seized by the police, who also apparently insulted him. Unable to bribe the police or gain an audience from a local magistrate and upset at the fine he had to pay to recover his fruit cart, the young man set himself on fire in protest on December 17th and died on January 4th.

Political Models vs. Current Events

Noah Schachtmann at Wired:

In the last three years, America’s military and intelligence agencies have spent more than $125 million on computer models that are supposed to forecast political unrest. It’s the latest episode in Washington’s four-decade dalliance with future-spotting programs. But if any of these algorithms saw the upheaval in Egypt coming, the spooks and the generals are keeping the predictions very quiet.

Instead, the head of the CIA is getting hauled in front of Congress, making calls about Egypt’s future based on what he read in the press, and getting proven wrong hours later. Meanwhile, an array of Pentagon-backed social scientists, software engineers and computer modelers are working to assemble forecasting tools that are able to reliably pick up on geopolitical trends worldwide. It remains a distant goal.

Who's Your Grand-Advisor? Crowdsourcing an IR lineage map

There are a series of jokes floating around academia about "academic relatives," most recently this little bit of brilliant whimsy from Jorge Cham's Piled Higher and Deeper entitled "Your Academic Genealogy." Funny, yes, but there's also something potentially important here about the lineages of academic thought, so I did a little digging and thus far have been completely unable to locate something that I would have thought that someone would have already assembled: an online searchable database that mapped adviser-advisee relationships in IR. So far as I know, there is no such thing. Not yet.

I think that a map like this would be a very useful tool for all kinds of research on the sociology of the field, besides all the ways it would serve as fodder for intriguing hallway and bar conversations at conferences ("I never knew that X was your grand-adviser; did you ever meet her? What was she like?") It would also be a tool for a certain amount of reflexive self-discovery; I recently learned that my grand-adviser was a labor historian named Henry Pelling, and that my PhD adviser Ira Katznelson's undergraduate thesis was supervised by none other than the brilliant American historian Richard Hofstadter (which makes Hofstadter what, exactly -- a "grand-influence" on me? We may need a whole new vocabulary for this map). I can think of dozens of interesting questions one might productively ask if this data were available to help produce answers.

So I have two questions for the community at large.

Good N' Red Plenty

Henry Farrell mentions Francis Spufford's new book Red Plenty. Before proceeding, you should know three things:

1. I have no connection, social or otherwise, with Francis Spufford.
   
2. I am a philistine made almost incapable of reading literary fiction by years of journal articles and serious journalism.
   
3. I am in no way an expert in any aspect of Soviet culture, politics, or history.
   

Bearing these facts in mind, let me give the book my highest recommendation. A colleague brought back a copy from the UK at my request, so I've read the book well in advance of its American release (which has still not taken place).

It is by far the best novel I have ever read about the Soviet nomenklatura, about the management of a planned economy, and about the transition from the excitement of the Khrushchev years to the Brezhnev stagnation. That obviously undersells the book's real strengths, which is to attempt to suggest the excitement of building socialism and the stench of its decay. And it is not quite a novel--more a documentary, or even better a much more scrupulously accurate biopic. (In the film version, expect Colin Firth to play the part of the planned economy.)

Whatever it is, it is well worth your time, and certainly worth the price of admission.

Mubarak's Ceausescu Moment?

Marc Lynch calls Mubarak's speech "The Worst Speech Ever."

His assessment:

With the whole world watching, Mubarak instead offered a meandering, confused speech promising vague Constitutional changes and defiance of foreign pressure. He offered a vaguely worded delegation of power to Vice President Omar Suleiman, long after everyone in Egypt had stopped listening. It is virtually impossible to conceive of a more poorly conceived or executed speech.

Maybe, but watching Mubarak tonight reminded me of watching the delusional Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu in Nicolae's last speech on December 21, 1989. Apparently they thought increasing wages by a 100 lei/month (less than $10 bucks was all that was needed to avoid the revolution). The disconnect from what's happening in the streets coupled with the vapid bureaucratic language was eerily similar in the two speeches. The crowd turns on Ceausescu at the 2:30 mark leaving both he and Elena stunned:



Don't know what will happen to Mubarak, but it didn't end well for the Ceausescu's....

Battlestar Blegging

This scene from the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica pilot - the first in which Commander Adama and President Roslin meet - is emblematic of three politically significant conversations underpinning the series. First, what is the appropriate role of the military with respect to the society it presumably exists to serve? Second, who decides? Third, what are the means by which that role is to be executed? All these conversations map broadly onto what Peter Feaver has called the “civil-military problematique;” and they cut across an emerging conceptual distinction in security studies between national and human security.

A graduate student and I are currently working on a paper that explores how those conversations play out over the course of BSG and examines how the show’s messaging is positioned in current debates about both civil-military relations and human security. In the paper, we elaborate on each of the three tensions exemplified by the initial conversation between Roslin and Adama in the pilot episode, and tie it to civ-mil/human security debates.

Wikileaks, the Daily Telegraph and the 'Special Relationship'

In his Introduction to the recent New York Times collection of materials on Wikileaks, Open Secrets Bill Keller comments on the way in which the newspapers involved shaped the leaks in accordance with their own agendas. Thus, the Guardian gave extensive coverage to leaked US army accounts of civilian casualties in Afghanistan, reflecting their scepticism about the war; the NYT, on the other hand, took the view that they had already given front page coverage to all the major incidents and so gave this matter much less emphasis. There is no doubt that the Guardian’s perspective was much more in line with that of Julian Assange – but that hasn’t prevented a major fall-out between Wikileaks and the Guardian over the latter's book and its portrayal of Assange and so now, rather incongruously, the Daily Telegraph, the voice of the Conservative Party in the UK, has become the major recipient of new Wikileaks material. It is interesting to see what they have made of it, where their emphasis lies.

The short answer seems to be that they are interested in highlighting the extent to which Anglo-American relations have soured in recent years. This partly comes through in the material on Libya and the release of al-Mehgrahi in 2009, which admittedly could be seen as serving a Conservative agenda given that it was the last  Labour Government that behaved disingenuously, but goes wider than that.  For example, we have also been told how the US spied on the Foreign Office and gave British nuclear secrets to the Russians. This is all pretty much on a par with telling us about the religious affiliation of the Pope but the emphasis given by the Telegraph suggests that for this newspaper at least  the ‘Special Relationship’ is no longer very special and they are happy to advertise this fact.

New book - Radicalisation and Media - out now

Routledge has published Radicalisation and Media: Connectivity and Terrorism in the New Media Ecology, co-authored by Akil Awan, Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin. The book presents results from our two-year ESRC-funded project on Radicalisation & Violence, which was awarded the maximum ‘Outstanding’ grade by the Economic and Social Research Council in 2010.

Our chief finding, in a nutshell, is that despite the potential connectivity between radicalising networks like Al-Qaeda and ‘vulnerable’ youth and ‘terrorised’ publics, there is in fact a profound and structural disconnection. Security policymakers, journalists and audiences have little agreed understanding of what ‘radicalisation’ might mean, but a residual sense of anxiety that there is something threatening out there, possibly close to home. That diffuse threat is often spoken about as radicalisation through the internet, over the web, which could happen anywhere, to anyone, "at the click of a button". Such statements do not aid public understanding of how individual opinions are shaped by on- and offline experiences, nor offer any evidence base of how and why individuals have turned to violence. Caught in the middle of this confusion are mainstream Security Journalists who deliver to audiences spasmodic episodes of bombings, arrests and warnings, the occasional, subtitled glimpse of an angry jihadist, but little insight or explanation of how political and religious violence is generated or prevented. Such news contributes to assumptions about an enduring social mainstream and radical margin; this may indeed feed back into potential disaffection by those identified as potentially radical. In short, we suggest that discourse about radicalisation may be as significant for Western societies as discourses of radicalisation, i.e. actual jihadist propaganda.

The study offers a cross-section of global (un)connectivities across a series of critical security events since 2006 by integrating three strands of data: audience research from the UK, France, Denmark and Australia, an ethnography of jihadist culture, and analysis of English and Arabic-language news.

Please contact Ben.OLoughlin@rhul.ac.uk if you require further information or wish to receive a review copy from Routledge.

More on Zombies and Drezner

Charli's post raises a number of good points about TIPZ. I've written elsewhere about how much I enjoyed Drezner's presentation about the book, but until today I hadn't confessed that I've taken my enjoyment one step further ... by assigning the book for my summer school Intro to IR course.

This will be my first time teaching. I hope assigning TIPZ doesn't mean that it will be my last.

Dan Drezner, Postmodernist

Adam Weinsten has written a delicious appraisal of my friend Dan’s newest book, Theory of International Politics and Zombies. I think he’s mostly spot-on, particularly his genealogy of Dan’s position in the discipline and his implication that TIPZ represents Dan having the last laugh on the Chicago Department of Political Science and its stale, antiquated notions of what matters in statecraft:

This is the university that gave us supply-side economics, Straussian neconservativism, and David Brooks. It is, in short, a haven for very smart people who live to confound undergraduates, worship Thucydides, and subvert the global order. Small wonder that Chicago hardly knew what to do with Dan Drezner, a (relatively) young right-of-center political economist with a penchant for pro sports and stream-of-consciousness intellectualism. In 2002, he started blogging about "foreign policy, economic policy, public intellectuals, pop culture." In 2005, Chicago passed him over for tenure.

Fortunately for us (and, I suppose, for all those Chicago-trained libertarian economists), Drezner's done very well in the marketplace of ideas beyond Hyde Park. He scored an appointment at Tufts' Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy; gained admission to the Council on Foreign Relations; and went pro in the blogging business, taking his daily insights to the website of Foreign Policy magazine. Along the way, something amazing's happened: Open debates about global affairs have flourished... Whatever the reasons, academics and think-tankers are joining ever more laypeople in frank, smart, and often levity-laced discussions of world events... A light, breezy volume, TIPZ is a valuable primer in international relations theory for laypeople, and thank God for that—it's been a long time coming.

Indeed! However, based on my reading of TIPZ, I must take issue with this statement:

But Drezner's real genius is that he's written a stinging postmodern critique of IR theorists themselves... It's both a pedagogical text and a lampoon of pedagogy.

A stinging critique I'll grant: the book can and must be read as parody. But a postmodern critique? This is an extraordinary claim given that the book actually scarcely mentions critical theory, post-modernism, feminist theory or pretty much any scholarship falling on the “reflectivist” side of the discipline, much less utilizes their tools. (Though to be fair, Dan doesn't claim to do so, either.)

But if I have one critique of this otherwise brilliant little book, it's that as
a description of “the field” of IR, TIPZ' relentless focus on rationalist theory to the near-exclusion of identities, language or embodiment frankly bites. (Hey, critical theorists deserve to be made fun of too!)

Random Thought

Modern realist theory contains no arguments (of significance) absent in the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli or Francisco Guicciardini.

Preview of an immanent online symposium

Here's a quick heads-up about something that will be concluding here -- and over at The Disorder of Things -- in a couple of weeks:

"This is the third in a series of posts by several of us at The Disorder Of Things on Patrick Thaddeus Jackson‘s The Conduct Of Inquiry in International Relations: Philosophy of Science and Its Implications for the Study of World Politics. Paul started things off with his post setting up Jackson’s methodology of politics in order to ask important questions about the politics of Jackson’s methodology. Joe continued with his post and a discussion of the relationship between the scientific and the normative, and their institutionalization within IR. Next week will see a final post, followed by a reply by Jackson himself."

Four very bright graduate students are working their way through my book and posting some extremely detailed engagements with it, so of course the least I can do is to post a reply of my own to their great set of engagements once they finish their series. And they all seem to come from the PTJ School of Methodology Blogging, which means essays of a substantial length rather than the sharp quips that the blogging format so often features; hence reading through their essays before I post my reply might be advisable. I've been having a lot of fun reading through their pieces and taking copious notes for my reply, so I thought I'd share the fun and let everyone know where they too can get their philosophical fix for the semester.

"State" Multiculturalism

This is England?

I woke up this morning to discover that apparently “state multiculturalism” has failed. According to Prime Minister David Cameron:

...when a white person holds objectionable views, racist views for instance, we rightly condemn them. But when equally unacceptable views or practices come from someone who isn’t white, we’ve been too cautious frankly – frankly, even fearful – to stand up to them. The failure, for instance, of some to confront the horrors of forced marriage, the practice where some young girls are bullied and sometimes taken abroad to marry someone when they don’t want to, is a case in point. This hands-off tolerance has only served to reinforce the sense that not enough is shared. And this all leaves some young Muslims feeling rootless. And the search for something to belong to and something to believe in can lead them to this extremist ideology. Now for sure, they don’t turn into terrorists overnight, but what we see – and what we see in so many European countries – is a process of radicalisation.

In this speech, given in Germany, Cameron claimed that the West needs to “wake-up to what is happening to our countries” and basically realize that our tolerance of other people’s cultures is responsible for the terrorist threat, 7/7, etc.

And as if to perfectly echo the point, the rather fascist self-styled English Defense League – a full blown anti-Islam group that wants to ban mosques, people that are not white, etc had a large rally in Luton today.

Fabulous.

It seems ridiculous that I have to make the point that I DON’T think the PM is an EDL member, etc. etc. And I’m sure he felt the timing of his speech was unfortunate – but this does serve to highlight some points I’ve been unscientifically thinking about for a while.

ISA-NE Call for Papers

International Studies Association-Northeast
Annual Conference

4-5 November 2011
Providence Biltmore
Providence, RI, USA
Submission deadline: 20 May 2011

The annual conference of the International Studies Association-Northeast (ISA-NE) will be held 4-5 November 2011 at the Providence Biltmore in Providence. Rhode Island.

F for the Professor?

Have you heard about a new study, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, authored by academics Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa and released by University of Chicago Press? Their research question should be of interest to most of the people reading this blog: "are undergraduates really learning anything once they get" to college?**

The results are disturbing:

Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college.

According to press reports, "36 percent of students 'did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning' over four years of college."

The linked press report quotes education experts who frame this as a moral issue and describe the findings as "devastating." The halls of academe, write the authors, are filled with too many students "drifting through college without a clear sense of purpose."

According to Arum and Roksa, the greatest problem from the institution's perspective is lack of rigorous expectations for undergraduates:

For the Good Folks at Registan.net

They don't call him "Starrman Bashi" for nothing.

The "Professor of Repression" also had a nice ring to it.

The standard foreign office response in a time of crisis...

Snow day again -- I watched Al Jazeera, read up on the current US debates about whether or not (and how) to support the democratic revolution in Egypt, and then turned to watch one of my favorite episodes of Yes Minister, "A Victory for Democracy."

Classic and informative -- on so many levels. The real fun starts at the 4:00 minute mark and runs for the duration:



You can watch the whole episode -- parts 1 and 3 here and here. It's a great break.

The Shifting Civil-Military Balance in Egypt

President Obama expressed a general sense of relief tonight that the Egyptian military chose to side with the people over the state this week - an outcome not at all pre-ordained by the pre-existing historical relationship between the Egyptian military and the govenrment. In 2004, for example, Stephen Cook concluded the Egypt case study in a Council on Foreign Relations report on civil-military relations in the Middle East as follows:

The organic connection between the Egyptian armed forces and the existing political order is likely to place a drag on Egyptian reform and complicate US efforts to bolster change. With their influence institutionalized at the highest levels of the state, the
officers are likely to countenance reforms that merely shore up the existing regime, but do not effect in any way their highly influential role over the course of Egypt’s political development.

What happened? Mark Thompson at Time Magazine argues:

Ever since the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel, promising Egyptian military officers have come to U.S. military schools, including the Army War College in Carlisle, Penn., the Army's Command General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and the National Defense University in Washington, D.C. Inculcated there with U.S. ideals on lawful civilian control of military, such an education has helped act as a "safety" on the firepower of the Egyptian streets now massing in Cairo and in other cities.

"This new generation of Egyptian officers has been exposed to the American military and has had a very favorable impression of not just the way we fight our wars but also about the relationship between the military and society," says Robert Scales, a retired Army major general who served as commandant of the Army War College where he launched the international fellows program. "One of the reasons for the army's reluctance to follow Mubarak's intent and squeeze the population in Cairo has to do with the Egyptian military's exposure to the U.S. military."

Now, I hope that someone following civil-mil in Egypt more closely than I have will weigh in on the veracity of this analysis. But if this is indeed even a significant element of the basic story, then it confirms an argument by Carol Atkinson on the liberalizing effect of military-to-military relations globally:

The research presented in this article examines one aspect of state socialization, the extent to which transnational military-to-military interactions have served as an effective mechanism of the democratic political socialization of states. The socialization process described in this study is three level: (1) individuals acquire new ideas; (2) coercion, incentives, and persuasion aid in institutionalizing these ideas in the underlying political structure of the state; and (3) once institutionalized, these new ideas/identity of the state influence the material and ideational structure of international society. Using an original data set encompassing over 160 states during the years 1972–2000, the analyses find U.S. military-to-military contacts to be positively and systematically associated with liberalizing trends.

Food for thought.

[cross-posted at Lawyers, Guns and Money]

Space Cadets

SEK calls some conservative commentators out:

Anybody else notice the problem with Schweizer and Nolte’s defense? Of course you do. But in case either of them read this, I’ll spell it out: Palin woefully misunderstands the President’s argument, as is evident by the fact that in the terms of the analogy, she mistakes the United States for the Soviet Union. The President said that the United States now should be like the United States in 1959, not that it should be like the Soviet Union in 1959. To claim that the President wants the United States now to be like the Soviet Union in 1959 is to make an error worthy of the mockery it has received. Instead of recognizing Palin’s inability to comprehend a simple analogy, Nolte and Schweizer claim that the mockery is unfounded because bureaucratic excess eventually brought down the Soviet Union.

That's all well and good, but Palin's claim that its space program destroyed the USSR remains deeply, profoundly ignorant of twentieth-century history.

That being said, at least her defenders are willing to embrace a structural argument for the USSR's collapse. One usually finds posters at Big Hollywood claiming that Reagan's insistence on boondoggle defense programs and his willingness to call the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire" brought Moscow to its knees.

Comments

Yes, we've lost all our comments. No, I don't know if we'll get them back. Blogger knows they exist, but I can't get them to display either via blogger comments or import into disqus.

This makes me sad.