After a long hiatus, I am ready to take up a number of the other points raised in the four Disorder of Things posts on my book The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations.
II. ethics and politics, which are good things but not science
At the end of the first part of my reply I suggested that the "gang of four" interlocutors (Paul, Joe, Nick, and Meera) who commented on the book are quite correct to point out the importance of my professed but not expansively justified position on the irresolvable nature of value controversies to the overall argument, because many of the points that they raise -- the absence of a unitary and uniform metric for scientific progress, my refusal to defend any of the four parts of my typology as uniquely scientific or to disqualify any of them as somehow not worthy of that title, my studied inattentiveness to the politics of methodology or to the implicitly value-laden character of seemingly instrumental definitions -- relate quite strongly to my position that fundamental differences on points of philosophical ontology dealing with mind-world relations are not resolvable. If it were possible to actually resolve these controversies, then the engaged pluralism for which I call would not only be unnecessary, but would actually be a detrimental impediment to scientific progress. What, after all, would be the point of continuing to engage discredited positions? Although Paul Feyerabend suggests that we always need alternative research traditions to generate anomalies with which others have to grapple, this presumes a certain fundamental commensurability between claims which might be meaningful within a given philosophical ontology, but could hardly apply to those philosophical ontologies themselves. If we're all neopositivists or critical realists or analyticists or reflexive scholars, then we have a common methodological basis on which to compare claims, and "discredited" research traditions can always be utilized as a source of claims and findings that provide a spur for continued innovation in the dominant approaches. But if we're not all working in any one methodology, and if (as I have argued) methodologies are in effect different ways of worlding, this argument for diversity and pluralism falls short. So either there is a way to resolve methodological controversies, and we should all simply adopt the correct answer to the mind-world conundrum, or there is no such way, and we are fated to irresolvable and irreducible pluralism and plurality.
None of my interlocutors are entirely comfortable with this dichotomy.
31 May 2011
The Conduct of Inquiry: part the second of my contribution to a symposium
New Research on Global Agenda-Setting
A couple of years ago I wrote a post entitled the "Top Twelve Emerging Human Security Issues of the Next Decade." Those of you who have followed my writing know I'm especially interested in candidate issues that for one reason or another get neglected relative to others that end up being more prominent in global policy networks.
As many of you know, this is part of a longer book project on the politics of issue selection in advocacy networks. Since blogging from me will be slow for the next few months as I make headway on the book version of what I've found on that score, I thought I'd at least leave you with the slick glossy report version of a piece of the project: our descriptive findings from focus groups with human security practitioners.
We've written that report so as to be fun and easy to read by non-academics, but as an academic let me just highlight an interesting finding we downplay in that report, on the composition of the human security network itself. Roland Paris some years ago critiqued human security in a classic essay, arguing that human security is nothing more than:
"the glue that holds together a jumbled coalition of 'middle power' states, development agencies and NGOs - all of which seek to shift attention and resources away from conventional security issues and toward goals that have traditionally fallen under the rubric of international development."Well, we operationalized the network empirically by studying survey citations to different organizations by individuals on human security mailing lists, and by studying hyperlinks between websites associated with the term "human security" and then coded nodes in the network according to thematic expertise and organizational type:
To me, these results suggest that Paris was both right and wrong. He was right about the human security network being a jumble of issue sub-networks. But he was wrong about development displacing security. What we are seeing is a fusion of and synergy across generally distinct global policy communities. In that sense human security creates cohesion among these disparate sectors precisely because it is a master frame, constituting a new landscape where issues at the intersections of these "silos" can be brought into relief. (Although it doesn't always happen. More about that when the book is done...)
Feminist IR 101, Post #8, Human Rights
Controversial feminist lawyer Catherine MacKinnon titled her latest book Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues. MacKinnon was, of course, referring to a feminist campaign to have women's rights recognized as human rights (see, e.g., the work of Charlotte Bunch) ...but what struck me about this title is the normalcy it implies - like, questioning women's humanity (and thus their eligibility for human rights) is as commonplace as any other international dialogue.
Feminist work on human rights has been very diverse - and by no means only a project of Feminist IR. Women, and feminist groups, have been interested in human rights generally and women's human rights specifically for as long as we have a history of those organizations existing. Somewhat unlike the study of war through feminist lenses, feminist IR is not pioneering into new territory when it thinks about human rights issues. So what is feminist IR work on human rights? And why does it matter?
30 May 2011
Notorious BIG Fish: Mladic and Munyagishari
The capture of Ratko Mladic and his pending transfer to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has become another boon for international justice in a year where war criminals seem to be dropping like flies. But there's an interesting debate to be had over whether this arrest signals a stronger commitment to end impunity on principle or its combined success with political and pragmatic imperatives. Of course, it's both. Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch argues that the international community's "principled pressure for justice" worked with Serbia - and the pressure came from conditioning Serbia's EU accession on Mladic's arrest. Similarly, Geert-Jan Knoops argues that Serbia's action to finally arrest him was based on "political and economic motivations" - irrespective of the international community's more normative appeals for holding Mladic accountable.
And hidden amongst the media and diplomatic excitement over Mladic was the important news about the arrest of Bernard Munyagishari by Congolese authorities in the DRC. Munyagishari is wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) for genocide and crimes against humanity committed in the 1994 genocide. He is alleged to have been the leader of the Interahamwe (an extremist youth militia) in the Gisenyi region of western Rwanda, responsible for training Interahamwe and ordering mass killings and rapes. There is little controversy over his arrest - it's a victory for both the ICTR and the Rwandan government. Of course, there's a pragmatic element at play here too. The presence of many former genocidaires in the Kivus in the DRC (Munyagishari was arrested in North Kivu) has been a significant source of insecurity and been used to justify Rwanda's military engagement in the region. Impunity and conflict are intricately linked in this region.
That there are pragmatic reasons for and benefits to arresting war criminals, however, does not undermine the apparent trend of a principled commitment to end impunity. They're often, but not always, mutually reinforcing.
Beyond the Big Fish....
29 May 2011
IMF: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?
I find myself impressed with the obvious talents of Christine Lagarde, the current French Finance Minister and lead candidate for Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s replacement at the IMF (just endorsed by the G8 today
28 May 2011
Five Myths About International Criminal Trials
On the basis of what empirical studies I could find about the effectiveness of international tribunals versus execution of mass-murderers, I debunk the following in my latest Current Intelligence essay, responding to effects-based claims on both sides of the debate about whether Osama bin Laden should have been tried instead of summarily executed:
MYTH #1: OBL Could Never Have Received a Fair Trial.
MYTH #2: OBL Would Simply Have Used the Court as A Way to Promote Jihadism.
MYTH #3: A Trial Would Have Become a Focal Point For Further Attacks.
MYTH #4: A Trial Would Have Helped Deter Future Acts of Jihadist Terror and Build a Culture of Human Rights.
And lowest but most:
MYTH #5: The Question is Whether Trials Work.
In the final analysis, whether summary executions of terrorist leaders are preferable to trials is not a question of pragmatics. It is a normative issue. It is about whether an easy, illegal option with few benefits and certain drawbacks is preferable to a harder, legal option with equally uncertain outcomes. It is ultimately about whether or not the leaders of civilised nations believe they themselves are above the rule of law.Read the whole thing here.
Ew.
Politics is always somewhat gross, but there seems to be an abundance of stories lately that make me queasy. In the tradition of saying to your friends, "You have got to try this; it's so disgusting" or to your wife, "I think this milk is going bad; taste it," I share them with you, my online friends (or if you like, wives).
Budweiser wrapping itself in the flag: This ad shows a split screen of an American soldier coming home and a family getting ready to throw him a homecoming party. There is, of course, an Official Bear of the Homecoming Party and it is not Coors. I have always hated ads that try to pull my heartstrings to buy some product. There is a special place in hell for the ad execs who guilt people to buy life insurance by showing pictures of kids playing on the beach to sentimental music. Should we buy life insurance? Yes. Do we want our kids to go destitute if we die early? Obviously not. Do they really give a crap about my family? No. Would I punch you, said ad exec, in the face if I ever met you? Absolutely. Am I irritated by people who use rhetorical questions to make a point dramatically? Yes.
I am growing tired of this marriage of capitalism and patriotism spawned by 9/11. Not every NFL game needs a fighter jet flyover. It is not an anti-machismo thing. I like football. And I am bowled over by the courage of the guys who fight, even for things I don't support. But people should not be making money off of them under the pretense of thanking them. A law to this effect shouldn't be necessary. It should be obvious to anyone with a shred of self-respect and shame. I personally attribute it to Reagan, who put that chocolate and peanut butter together. Good politics. Very icky.
Nicholas Kristof, International Agent: I appreciate the light that this New York Times columnist sheds on women's issues, child prostitution and sex trafficking in particular. I really do. But he is always the hero of his own story. This time he sweeps in with Indian police to a brothel with underage girls that he notified the police about. Do I admire that? Yes. Do I wish he could just tell it in third person and leave himself out so as to focus on the real story? Absolutely.
Anne Sinclair, wife of Dominique Strauss-Kahn: I'm a bit late out of the box on this one. But according to the New York Times: "Asked in 2006 by L’Express if she suffered from his reputation as a womanizer, she said: “No! I’m even proud of it. It’s important to seduce, for a politician. As long as he is still attracted to me, and I to him, it is sufficient.”" Ew. If a woman essentially gives a green light to her husband's infidelity, that is going to be a problem. Still, I want to know -- has this whole method of showing up naked in front of a stranger ever really worked? Because I just can't imagine that. Is this like the reverse of the pizza delivery guy thing in X-rated movies? In my experience, women are not instantly sexually aroused merely by the sight of the nude male form. Maybe it is just my form. Irrespective of whether he sexually assaulted this poor woman, which the courts will decide, it does seem that he decided to make a play in this particular fashion. I am guessing this is not the first time and that it actually has worked for him in the past. Double ew.
Reporting in the Middle East: Are Female Journalists a Liability?
Do the responses to the plight of Dorothy Parvaz, a journalist for Al Jazeera English who was detained in Syria and Iran for nearly 3 weeks, show continued resistance to female journalists pursuing particular types of stories?
Parvaz flew to Syria to gather information that could add to what little is known about local protests and government violence. She was arrested at the airport in Damascus and taken to a detention center- Parvaz likened it to a mini version of Guantanamo Bay. Three days after her arrival in Syria she was extradited to Iran as a suspected spy before being released without charge.
27 May 2011
Feminist IR 101, Post #7, Political Economy and Globalization
Why is it that women represent 70% of the world’s people living in poverty? What does it mean to have economic stability? How do international structures interact with local structures to produce or disturb that stability? Is economic stability something people (or states) only gain at the expense of others? Are sex trafficking, migration patterns, home-based work, and base economies, related? If so, what does gender have to do with it? These are some of the questions feminist IR political economists ask.
Women are the majority of people in poverty around the world. The percentage of women living in rural areas who can be classified as impoverished is actually rising, not dropping. Women who work for wages are generally poorly paid, and many women do home, care, and agricultural work that goes unpaid. Women have not been left out of the economic reforms planned by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, but their gender is often invisible to the planners and implementers of these policies.
Feminist perspectives on global political economy (GPE) are investigating the extent to which these disturbing trends should be blamed on gender discrimination. They are interested in the causes of women’s, and other marginalized groups’, economic insecurities, and potential solutions to these problems. Feminist work in political economy has recognized what scholars have identified as the gendered division of labor in global politics, and analyzed its impacts.
Fresh Meat
I am pleased to introduce a new crop of guest bloggers for the 2011-2012 academic year.
Catherine Weaver hails from the Lyndon Johnson School of Public Affairs at UT Austin where she teaches international political economy, specializing (among other things) the culture, behavior and reform of international financial organizations - a smoking hot IR topic if there ever was one. She is the author of The Hypocrisy Trap and the co-editor of Review of International Political Economy.
Joshua Busby teaches with Kate at the Johnson School, but specializes in transnational relations, climate change, national security and energy policy. His new book Moral Movements in Foreign Policy has been hailed as "pathbreaking" by Thomas Risse and "nuanced and disciplined" by Robert Keohane - though all that discipline won't, I suspect, keep Josh from cutting loose on various topics: he is a contributor to policy pieces for a number of think tanks including Brookings, the Center for a New American Security, the German Marshall Fund, and the Woodrow Wilson Center, as well as numerous scholarly outlets (where his work on celebrity activism is some of the hippest in the TAN literature). Josh is a member of Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Megan MacKenzie is in transit from Victoria University of Wellington to University of Sydney, and will bring a critical-feminist-national-human-security-studies perspective to the Duck from down below. (Cynthia Enloe always did say that that's where you should look for the real story of power politics in IR!) Megan studied at University of Alberta and was previously a Research Fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center. Her work has focused on gender and post-conflict reconstruction in Africa. She is beginning a new project on gender integration in US, Canadian and Australian armed forces.
And last but not least please welcome our most junior Ducklet, Alana Tiemessen. Currently a Visiting Professor at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Alana just completed her dissertation at University of British Columbia. Her work centers on international norms and transitional justice and she blogs at Transitional Justice Blog, where she covers developments in Kenya, Rwanda, Bosnia and globally. We look forward to her coverage of the Mladic trial... or whatever else strikes her intellectual fancy.
Please stay tuned for an exciting summer of new coverage from these folks as well as updates from our regulars.
26 May 2011
EU Wins One, Right?
With Serbia arresting the last big PIFWC (person indicted for war crime--my favorite NATO acronym)--Ratko Mladic (see my post about the previous arrest, of Karadzic), does this mean that I was wrong about the power of conditionality? That is, the Steve and Bill book argues that we ought not overestimate the threats organizations like the European Union or NATO make about conditions for membership. We argue there and elsewhere that the requirements are unenforced (Cyprus gets in despite not settling its ethnic problems, Romania and Bulgaria get in with their shaky rule of law); that the rules do not apply to members so that once you are in, you can go back to violating the rules; and so on.
But Serbia seems to have knuckled under to EU pressure and will be sending Mladic to The Hague stand trial for genocide, ethnic cleansing and all the rest. But the pressure has been applied since 1995. Can we say that conditionality worked if it took 16 years? Oh, and enlargement is probably not a realistic option right now since the EU is focused on its own internal crises (driven by past poor decisions about ignoring conditions--letting Greece and others into the Euro zone). So, the timing here is interesting--submitting to the PIFWC conditions when the conditions are least relevant, as opposed to earlier when other countries were in the queue to join the EU (despite not meeting other conditions).
I have not been following Serbia's politics closely, but this is still a very important decision, whether it is to suck up to the EU or not. After all, a preceding leader of Serbia, Zoran Djindjić, was assassinated after sending Slobodan Milosevic to the Hague. So, the stakes are quite high domestically. Mladic was reputedly more popular than Karadzic, especially among Serbia's military and police. If there are no nasty consequences from this, then this is an important development for civilian control of the military and Serbia's democratization.
Getting Mladic to stand trial for his crimes is a big victory for Bosnia, for Serbia, and for justice. I just am not sure that the EU had a lot to do with it.
It's Coburn Clobberin' Time
U.S. Senator Tom Coburn has released a new report criticizing the National Science Foundation, in no small part because he is offended that the NSF funds political science.
This new, lengthy-for-Congress report is a slick and well-produced piece of agit-prop. In it, Coburn claims to have found billions (!) in mismanagement at the NSF, including plenty of made-for-journalists "scandals" like jello wrestling at the McMurdo Research Station in Antarctica and shrimp on treadmills. Drawn from inspector general reports and Coburn's staff's review of NSF grant awards, Coburn criticizes the agency for failing to create Internet-level breakthroughs and not creating the kind of transformative research Americans expect from the federal government. I will not rebut these in detail, but I will simply note (a) that any large organization will feature supervisors behaving inappropriately with subordinates, travel funds, or pornography (like, you know, the U.S. Congress, from time to time) and (b) that the fact that the inspector general has discovered many of these problems means that the system is working, not that it is broken.
Most important to readers of the Duck, he returns to the anti-political science themes he sounded in 2009 (e.g., Drezner, ThinkProgress, and Crooked Timber). Even those readers of the Duck who are sceptical of quantitative and experimental researchers' claims to epistemologial (or at least disciplinary) hegemony should join in resisting Coburn. But we shouldn't scoff. Coburn represents a real threat.
Mladic, OBL and International Justice
It's hard to overstate the significance of Ratko Mladic's arrest last night. Moreso that Slobodon Milsoevic, Serbia's president during the 1991-1995 war of ex-Yugoslavia, and moreso that Radovan Karadzic the political leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the war, Mladic is reviled by Bosnian survivors of the conflict as the former leader of the Bosnian Serb Army. Though best known for his his calculated role in the war's most infamous massacre of over 7,000 noncombatants at Srebrenica - along with the subsequent massacre at Zepa, this was his crowning achievement after several years of war marked by sexual assault, forced displacement, massacre and general butchery of civilians and detainees. Danger Room has a well-linked round-up of info on the snatch.
What I find fascinating about the international reaction to his arrest is the importance of this man being brought to trial. At no point I am aware of during his years of hiding was it argued that he should instead be taken out by a targeted killing - partly because it was recognized that justice for his victims required a trial. Recent empirical research demonstrates that these courts have not only been able to effectively carry out prosecutions, but have had a number of other important positive side-effects, with few of the negatives originally feared. I remain puzzled that the ad hoc tribunal model has not been seriously considered for KSM, OBL or other terrorist masterminds.
[cross-posted at Lawyers, Guns and Money]
Standing Up against the "Patriot Act"
25 May 2011
Must Men Be Pigs? The C*jones Conundrum
24 May 2011
Cutting Edge Research on Popular Views of War Law
My Rules of War class this past Spring was an Honors version of the course, and to challenge my students I asked them to do original research on popular conceptions of international humanitarian law, an issue the International Committee of the Red Cross takes quite seriously. The assignment was to identify a concept in the rules of war, gain a firm understanding of the law, then identify a set of data on how people see those rules, and use content analytic or discourse analytic coding methods to study how far apart the representations of the law in text are from the rules as understood or represented in reality, and in which respects. It was a tough assignment!
The students were at liberty to choose any kind of text data they wanted. Some chose blog posts. Some chose news articles. Some studied internal DoD memos to try to understand the narratives of policymakers as they tried to implement the rules of war. One scoured the Star Wars Trilogy screenplays for evidence of inaccurate portrayals of just warrior-hood (see below). All were required to attend a coding workshop, explain their methods and their findings, and draw inferences about the dissemination of humanitarian law to the public, media and policymakers.
Having graded many an undergraduate paper in my day, I was mightily impressed by the quality of the papers I saw and the amount of effort and detail many of these students put into their projects. Below the fold are short descriptions of the five best papers in the class, with accompanying visualizations. Working papers are linked below.
The IMF Horse Race
1. Tharman Shanmugaratnam: I remember several years ago attending this Singaporean MP's meeting with local constituents. The meeting went late into the night as he and his volunteers attempted to sort out the various bureaucratic and some petty and not-so-petty social problems of the residents in the district. I was surprised to see a senior official (at the time he was the Education Minister, he is currently the Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister) in what is essentially a one party dominated state spend so much personal time working with his constituents. He is smart, tireless, and compassionate. Of course, the main drawback of Singaporean politicians is inexperience in dealing with strong public dissent.
2. Eisuke Sakakibara: Known as "Mr. Yen" and the man who coined the phrase "market fundamentalism" to describe neoliberal economic policies, Sakakibara is a well respected Japanese technocrat and intellectual who is not afraid to speak his mind. Sakakibara was Japan's nomination for the MD position 11 years ago. His tenure might signal a shift away from economic neoliberalism at the Fund.
23 May 2011
Do the ‘Securitweebs’ matter?: Between Facts and Snark
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Brian C. Rathbun now has 64 twitter followers! |
This article is about the twitter community who post content about human security or security in a non–traditional context – not just tanks and strategy but natural disaster relief, post-conflict reconstruction, low level political violence, and all the law and politics surrounding these issues.
So far as we can tell, this community seems to share the following characteristics:
- They are a mix of journalists, think tankers, academics, NGO staff, and students.
- While they frequently link to articles on traditional media websites, they frequently produce their own content, whether that is academic research, op-eds, or ‘reputable’ blog posts.
- Although anyone may have a twitter account, and it may be seen as an equalizer, these individuals seem to have ‘elite’ qualifications. They seem to have skills (languages), experiences (military, conflict zones, journalism) or qualifications (graduate education). They are engaged with research and researchers.
- They follow each other on twitter and engage with each other, forming a dense network. They often re-tweet each other’s links.
- The perspective is often US-centric but inflected with international experiences and views.
- The politics tends towards the centre-left on US terms or centre in Europe, but recent disagreement over whether to intervene in Libya shows there is no soggy consensus.
- The content combines expertise, news, and a high degree of snark.
21 May 2011
20 May 2011
Kicking the Can Down the Ring Road
From late 2003 to mid 2004, Robert Andrews, a CIA and DoD official and Donald Rumsfeld's head of special operations, began urging the US to undertake a "countrywide counterinsurgency" campaign in Afghanistan (WaPo, 8 August 2004). However, COIN in Andrew's outlook mainly entailed an effort to broaden the manhunt for terrorists by attempting to target drug lords who were thought to be propping up the warlords, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda. (In actuality, of course, it was the US which has paid, armed, and legitimated Afghanistan's warlords since 9/11. In turn, those warlords helped to maintain the central government's weakness thereby fueling the dramatic growth of narco-trafficking -- but these inconvenient contradictions in US policy were ignored by experts who never seriously contemplated the idea that the US itself could be the heart of the problem they were trying to manage.) Andrews, like his boss Donald Rumsfeld, thought that the idea of counterinsurgency could be used as an antidote to "overmilitarization" of the conflict. They still seemed to envision counterinsurgency as reliant on light, fast moving elite units linked to "local allies."
Other military experts did articulate a more conventional understanding of COIN doctrine, for example US CENTCOM Director, Brigadier General Douglas Lute, argued that COIN required a separation between the insurgent and his base of support. However, Lute said that it takes 20 years to develop a seasoned civil affairs officer or to train a linguist (Tampa Tribune 26 August 2004). In other words, he was skeptical of the ability to transform the US military to engage in a counterinsurgency mission in Afghanistan. Such frank and pessimistic comments would become a rarity or heavily diluted in order to be used as a plea for patience with an ever expansive COIN strategy in the years to come.
In November 2004, the US Army re-issued its counterinsurgency manual for the first time since the American defeat in Vietnam. Although the release of the manual was intended to address challenges being faced in Iraq, it would obviously become relevant in Afghanistan once the Taliban's Maoist-style insurgency would move into a more confrontational phase (Giustozzi 2008). Notably, this manual advised against a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign stating that the longer a counterinsurgency strategy is used the more resentment it breeds. Despite its flaws, the hastily published manual replaced the woefully outdated and Orientalist "Small Wars Manual" then being used in Iraq:
Obama's "1967" Play
What to make of it? Was it significant, or just more of the same?
Of course it was significant -- it is the first time a U.S. president has publicly claimed the "1967 lines" as the basis for negotiations and it came after an apparent "angry" phone call from Netanyahu to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanding that the language be removed from the speech. It was clearly meant to send a signal.
For the past five months, the Obama administration's reaction to the Arab spring has been a blend of soft rhetorical support with a wait-and-see approach. (This, by the way, was exactly the approach George H.W. Bush's team took during the East European revolutions in 1989.)
But, we now have a better picture of where things are likely headed. And, while the Israeli-Palestinian issue was a non-factor in the Arab revolutions thus far, that's about to change.
19 May 2011
Harold Koh at Opinio Juris: "Killing OBL was Legal."
Like Robert Haddick, though for different reasons, I was glad to see a State Department spokesperson publicly issue the legal justification for the manner in which the OBL raid was carried out.* Also as a blogger, I was delighted to see the explanation take the form of a much-trumpeted guest post at Opinio Juris.
Slightly disappointed, however, at the content of the post, posted earlier today.
To begin with, Harold Koh focuses solely on jus in bello concerns, although important legal questions were about whether it was legal to conduct the raid on Pakistani soil. I can imagine a number of ways you could argue that case, any of which would have been fascinating from a norm development perspective, so I'm disappointed the State Department is so opaque on this.
Koh also spends over half the post simply pasting in his comments on drone warfare last year - interesting since drones weren't even used for this operation. It makes some sense, however, given that the real issue with drones isn't the drones - it's targeted killings.
The most interesting part of the argument, however, and what we should watch for commentary on in the next few days, is Koh's comments on the law of surrender - addressing the conditions under which bin Laden would have been captured instead of killed. Here is what he writes:
The Door is Over There
I took part in a panel on Peacebuilding yesterday at the Center for International Governance Innovation [CIGI], which was part of the larger Canadian Political Science Association annual meeting. My panel was on Afghanistan, and it was most striking how most of the folks were already using the word "failure" to describe the mission. I was uncomfortable with that, not because I am a wild-eyed optimist about the international effort to help Afghanistan become a semi-stable semi-self sustaining state, but because I am reluctant to call it a day quite yet.
I have been arguing for a while that we have not really been doing "this" for nine or ten years, but that only in the past year or two have there been both enough troops and a relatively coherent strategy to do counter-insurgency. Before that, the Canadians in Kandahar and the British and Danes in Helmand and the Dutch/Aussies in Uruzgan and the Americans all over the place were mostly "mowing the grass" or serving as fire brigades--clearing insurgents out of a spot but not enough of them to hold the territory. The mantra of clear, hold, build was always problematic even before one factors in the Karzai government doing the building because there were not enough troops to do the holding. Anyhow, with the Obama surge, there are now enough troops to be effective.
So, the real test was not the violence last year but the violence this year. Last year was more violent with the influx of troops, which produced more patrols, more contact, and thus more opportunities for violence. This year, the expectation would be for less violence as the ISAF/Afghan National Army [ANA]would have more control over more territory (see Kalyvas for control and COIN).
Of course, the really big problem is that COIN and the surge are aimed at creating space for the politicians to do stuff to persuade the citizens that the government is deserving of their support--by providing services and improving their lives. Or, at the very least, not being rapacious and exploitative. We may be doomed to fail because our partners, Karzai and his pals, are so very flawed.
Beyond Qual and Quant
PTJ has one of the most sophisticated ways of thinking about different positions in the field of International Relations (and, by extension, the social sciences), but his approach may be too abstract for some. I therefore submit for comments the "Political Science Methodology Flowchart" (version 1.3b).
We Get Results! (Bahrain Edition)
Alex Cooley and I on Bahrain and US autocratic allies:
U.S. officials should make efforts to decouple the rationale of a given basing relationship from support for a particular regime. This means creating political space between Washington and the policies of authoritarian host countries whenever possible. With respect to Bahrain, U.S. officials should make clear that the U.S. military maintains its facilities for the defense of its territory and for regional stability -- not for the purposes of propping up the ruling family. At the same time, Washington needs to signal that it believes that both countries' interests are best served by greater political liberalization.President Obama:
Bahrain is a long-standing partner, and we are committed to its security. We recognize that Iran has tried to take advantage of the turmoil there, and that the Bahraini government has a legitimate interest in the rule of law. Nevertheless, we have insisted publically and privately that mass arrests and brute force are at odds with the universal rights of Bahrain’s citizens, and will not make legitimate calls for reform go away. The only way forward is for the government and opposition to engage in a dialogue, and you can’t have a real dialogue when parts of the peaceful opposition are in jail. The government must create the conditions for dialogue, and the opposition must participate to forge a just future for all Bahrainis.
Why Isn't Access to Pain Medicine a Global Public Health Priority?
The more I think about it, the more atrocious it is that a three year old burn victim in Pakistan or Libya cannot automatically access morphine.
Imagine being such a child's parent, watching her suffer without pain relief. Imagine being a “collateral damage” victim undergoing surgery for shrapnel removal without anesthetic. Or imagine being an earthquake survivor like the Haitian 10-year-old above, having your mangled limb amputated and then trying to recover with no means to manage your pain.
Recently I spent some time talking to Jason Nickerson, a PhD candidate in population health at the University of Ottawa with a background in anesthesiology and years of field experience in Ghana. That conversation was peppered with horrific anecdotes from his days in Africa: watching children undergo surgery without morphine, watching trauma victims of routine road accidents dying in agony from their untreatable injuries.
This is a simply grievous situation, particularly because it’s so preventable. Yet until recently, I had always imagined that the major travesty in such cases was the absence of rehabilitative care – 60 Minutes’ expose of the Global Medical Relief Fund a few weeks back, for example, emphasized inequities in orthopedic or reconstructive surgery for child trauma victims in developing countries, but didn’t mention the simple fact that these children also lack basic anesthesia to cope with their trauma – even when undergoing surgery.
Since I'm writing a book about why some social conditions get constructed as global policy problems and others don't, I'm primed to wonder why this issue has so little traction on the global agenda, why it's not front and center in more people's understanding of global public health. Based on my research about global agenda-setting dynamics, I have two answers and one policy recommendation for the campaign:
Cana-dammerung: A belated final post on the Canadian Election
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| Cry the beloved country. |
18 May 2011
The Pernicious Myth of America as Global "Manager"
Does America’s having great power mean that we must “manage” the global system? Fellow Duck Jon Western seems to think so. He writes in Current Intelligence that a major reason for the U.S. to reduce its military spending is so that other countries can be better “satisfied with American management of the [global] system” and “global public goods.” I do not want to pick on Jon, but I think that his views reflect those of much of our policy elite, both in government and nongovernmental roles. They believe it is America’s right, responsibility, or fate to manage the world.
17 May 2011
Wikipedia #Fail
An abortive comment on Phil Arena's "Rat Choice Apologetics IV" led me to a quick wikipedia check of "positivism." I often do this sort of thing, just as a kind of gut check when I want to be precise about terms.
16 May 2011
Worst. Argument. Ever.
Frank Pasquale at Balkinization:
The Dodd-Frank Act also promises to shed some sunlight on ever-rising CEO pay levels. As Sam Pizzigatti explains, "corporations must now also report their overall wage 'median' and the ratio between this median and their top pay." Seizing on some laughable comments on how "unduly burdensome" the law is, "the House Financial Services Committee’s Capital Markets Subcommittee [recently] approved, by a vote of 20 to 12 . . . legislation (H.R. 1062) to repeal the Dodd-Frank pay ratio mandate."
ISA-NE Call for Papers Reminder
Calling all (academic) Duck readers! The deadline for ISA-NE is approaching, albeit extended until 20 June. Don't forget to submit your papers, panels, and roundtables. And remind all your friends. Come for the stimulating intellectual conversations, the festive atmosphere, and the chance to observe PTJ in his native habitat.
Call for papers below the fold.
Congo Rape Study: Systematic or Simplistic?
I have not yet read the new report on rape in the Congo, but judging from the news coverage of its reported findings, I have three thoughts:
1) I am not as concerned as some critics about the methods used (a population sample of household interviews) or the staggering results: 400,000 women assaulted in a single year. I am concerned about the comparisons to the US (or other countries) since unless the same methods are replicated in the US (or other countries) there is no way to compare rape rates or to accurately call Congo the "rape capital of the world."
2) Though the emphasis is on the number of rapes committed by soldiers, the report also shows that nearly a quarter of the rapes recorded were perpetrated by the women's husbands or domestic partners. This is consistent with earlier Oxfam data that demonstrated the majority of rapes in the Congo between 2004 and 2008 were perpetrated by civilians, not soldiers.
15 May 2011
The Lighter Side of Public Opinion Work
I have long thought that political science Ph.D. students should be required to watch all of Yes, Minister and some of the better parts of Yes, Prime Minister. Without beating a dead horse too much, prolonged exposure to the cynical-but-accurate view of politics the show presents (it is like a curdled West Wing--or, perhaps, what the post-hegemonic West Wing will look like) would prevent people from too easily assuming that the adoption of a policy by a democratically elected government is equivalent to the approval of that policy by the voters who selected the government. (Via Chris Blattman.)
Graduate school and the culture of conformity
[Updated]
No sooner do I pen an intemperate, semi-coherent rant about the culture of pretending-to-know-things among graduate students, then Nawal Mustafa makes a probing comment:
From the student side of things Dan, it strikes me as a deeper problem that transcends the academy. Certainly, I concur students should take responsibility to ensure they are actually learning, and not view their seminars as merely an exercise in impressing others, or securing great letters of recommendation by purporting to "know" the material. That said, there is a deeper problem where success and achievement, even from a student's early years, is equated with perfectionism, control, risk-aversion, and there is a genuine fear of making mistakes in the process of learning. Students are encouraged to be safe and risk-averse thinkers because that provides better pay-offs. I've referred others to Sir Ken Robinson's rather infamous lecture on the matter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY.
Yes, yes! A thousand billion million times yes!
At his own blog, PM writes:
So why were my undergrad classes so much more educational for me? The simplest explanation is just that this was the second time I'd gone through the material, and so the review made clearer connections that had been obscure. The more profound difference, though, is that undergrads are more incentivized to ask questions. Graduate students are vastly more risk-averse about asking dumb-sounding questions, not least because their professors will also be their colleagues and one simply doesn't want to make a bad impression. (The reverse calculation--that failing to learn something correctly will lead to catastrophically bad impressions down the road--almost never seems to be made, which I leave as an unsolved puzzle for rational-choice theorists.) Accordingly, a great many people in every seminar--I will wager 80 percent of students in 80 percent of seminars--are faking it, or, worse, wrongly confident in their abilities. And 100 percent of students fall into those categories at some point.
Revolution, Revolution until Victory
"... Yet the crowds were not placated, and they spent the next hour in the courtyard repeating the classic songs of the uprising, "thowra thowra huta nasr" (revolution, revolution until victory)." -Al Jazeera (4/25/2011)The revolution which overthrew Hosni Mubarak is in danger. While Western media outlets have given primacy in their coverage of events to speculative discussions about the historic, current, and future role of the Muslim Brotherhood as well as the pivotal role of the Egyptian military, it is the organizations representing the rights of factory workers and allied leftist youth that actually did the heavy lifting from an organizational perspective before and during the revolution (see for example the April 6th Youth Movement). Thus, it is these same groups (whose demands include nationalizing textile factories, improving safety conditions, increasing wages for workers, and a maximum wage for the owners of capital) which will need to be addressed alongside more established political organizations if enduring stability is to be achieved.
But the demands of the workers are scarcely likely to be met given the severe economic challenges which lie ahead for Egypt and the broader global economic context in which this revolution is unfolding. The government has already turned to the IMF for $10-12 billion in financial assistance and $2.2 billion from the World Bank, citing a dramatic decline in revenue from the vital but perennially endangered tourism industry and a wave of worker strikes in recent months. Given the neo-liberal economic ideology and decisionist (Schmittian) political outlook toward developing countries that is prevalent among the Western governments that dominate the Executive Boards of the Bretton Woods institutions, as well as with military leaders and comprador economic elites in deveoping countries, the Egyptian state will undoubtedly face external pressure to repress worker demands. In fact, foreign pressure will most likely be used as a welcome opportunity by comprador elites to pursue preferred policies while placing the blame for repression on an external bogeyman.
14 May 2011
Reciprocity and International Law: A reply to International Jurist
He also notes the commentary surrounding the fact that the debate over the issue seems to highlight the fact that within international politics we now seem to have two incompatible understandings of what international law is. Rauscher quotes American University Law Professor Ken Anderson who blogged at The Volokh Conspiracy on this point:
...what we call international law has been fragmenting for some time now into different “communities of interpretation and authority” as I somewhere called it. (…) Those communities have moved sufficiently far apart that they no longer share a common basis for authoritative interpretations of international law.
A Good Storyline Won’t Win a War – Did the Taliban out-communicate our Generals?
13 May 2011
Random Friday stuff
Blogger has finally started to restore posts, but it doesn't look like everything is back yet. Meanwhile, my partner's off to Kazakhstan, I've got 38 seminar papers and 16 short essays to grade, and my daughter's become obsessed with Naruto. So, in lieu of posting anything substantive:
- Rob Farley has some thoughts on the air campaign in Libya;
- PM's thoughts on qualitative and quantitative methods deserves more commentary from our academic readers;
- Al Jazeera chronicles how Saudia Arabia's new protectorate, the Bahrain's government, is using its Arab Spring crackdown to systematically destroy rival centers of power;
- Phil Arena's three posts on "Rational Choice Apologetics" lay out an important defense of his favored approach--if
PTJsomeone here doesn't take the bait, I figure I'll at least have to write something on the "Tyranny of Soft Rationalism in IR Theory"; - Five months in and I'm still really liking the Decemberist's The King is Dead;
- My aforementioned partner just finished John Courtenay Grimwood's Pashazade, and endorses it as much as I do -- and because it's something like six years old, you don't have to wait for Grimwood to finish the trilogy; and
- Grading Interstellar Relations final papers reminds me how Iain M. Banks returned to form with Surface Detail.
12 May 2011
The 1950s are calling -- they want their theoretical debates back
- Most voters are information specialists; they do not tend to specialize in the intricacies of policy debates. Thus, they are unlikely to know, for example, the actual distributional implications of the Bush-era tax cuts or understand the details of Iraq.
- Many of the more engaged voters are partisans; they process information through the cues they receive from party spokespersons. This is why, for example, a conservative health-care plan rapidly morphed into radical socialism over a period of roughly two years.
- Political elites, opinion leaders, and special interests know both of these facts, and they operate accordingly. Hence, while Dan is correct that TAARP received bipartisan support, he needs to ask why it became politicized along partisan lines. Or why it is that misleading cues predominate in political discourse.
11 May 2011
The Tea Party and the Future Face of American Power
With the politics of "budget crisis" dominating the political discourse, what does a Tea Party-dominated Republican foreign and defense policy look like? Not good. Gutting diplomacy and development and leaving defense spending largely uncut means American power becomes more blunt and unwieldy.
I've written up my take in the current issue of Current Intelligence. Here's a portion:
Republican Congressional leaders have pledged that nothing is off the table... Except of course, it turns out the Republicans aren’t really all that serious about cutting defense spending.Am I missing anything?
With nearly 30 million veterans and more than US$750 billion in defence spending spread out neatly across 435 congressional districts in the United States, Tea Partiers might like to boast about their commitment to fiscal discipline and the economic distortions of big government. But when it comes to defense sector jobs in their districts – well, that’s just paying the price for freedom....
...As a result, the face of American power abroad will increasingly be its soldier, not its diplomat or its aid worker. Not only will this cost exponentially more in budgetary terms, it also means the American soldier will be further tasked to do the traditional jobs of others -without the requisite skills, training, or sensitivities. And, that can only make it more difficult to for the United States to manage a complex and dynamic world.
Of Quals and Quants
Qualitative scholars in political science are used to thinking of themselves as under threat from quantitative researchers. Yet qualitative scholars' responses to quantitative "imperialism" suggest that they misunderstand the nature of that threat. The increasing flow of data, the growing availability of computing power and easy-to-use software, and the relative ease of training new quantitative researchers make the position of qualitative scholars more precarious than they realize. Consequently, qualitative and multi-method researchers must not only stress the value of methodological pluralism but also what makes their work distinctive.
Few topics are so perennially interesting for the individual political scientist and the discipline as the Question of Method. This is quickly reduced to the simplistic debate of Quant v. Qual, framed as a battle of those who can't count against those who can't read. Collapsing complicated methodological positions into a single dimension obviously does violence to the philosophy of science underlying these debates. Thus, even divisions that really affect other dimensions of methodological debate, such as those that separate formal theorists and interpretivists from case-study researchers and econometricians, are lumped into this artificial dichotomy. Formal guys know math, so they must be quants, or at least close enough; interpretivists use language, ergo they are "quallys" (in the dismissive nomenclature of Internet comment boards), or at least close enough. And so elective affinities are reified into camps, among which ambitious scholars must choose.
(Incidentally, let's not delude ourselves into thinking that mutli-method work is a via media. Outside of disciplinary panels on multi-method work, in their everyday practice, quantoids proceed according to something like a one-drop rule: if a paper contains even the slightest taint of process-tracing or case studies, then it is irremediably quallish. In this, then, those of us who identify principally as multi-method stand in relation to the qual-quant divide rather as Third Way folks stand in relation to left-liberals and to all those right of center. That is, the qualitative folks reject us as traitors, while the quant camp thinks that we are all squishes. How else to understand EITM, which is the melding of deterministic theory with stochastic modeling but which is not typically labeled "multi-method"?)
The intellectual merits of these positions have been covered better elsewhere (as in King Keohane and Verba 1994, Brady and Collier's Rethinking Social Inquiry, and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson's The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations). Kathleen McNamara, a distinguished qualitative IPE scholar, argues against the possibility of an intellectual monoculture in her 2009 article on the subject. And I think that readers of the Duck are largely sympathetic to her points and to similar arguments. But even as the intellectual case for pluralism grows stronger (not least because the standards for qualitative work have gotten better), we should realize that is incontestable that quantitative training makes scholars more productive (in the simple articles/year metric) than qualitative workers.
10 May 2011
IR Theory and Policy Processes
A running theme around the office lately has been the deeply problematic character of causal mechanisms that international-relations scholars take for granted. For example, apparently simple claims about domestic institutions and credible commitments often require all sorts of heroic assumptions about public attention to policy processes, the degree of actual restraint institutions impose upon executives, and so on. They also have almost nothing to do with the way that policymakers assess the credibility of their counterparts. A related set of issues revolve around embedded neoliberal assumptions in US International Political Economy, particularly involving "free trade," but I'll save that for others.
This is all basically wind up for the part of this post where I tell you to go read Henry Farrell's response to Kindred Winecoff's critique of Paul Krugman's rebuttal to David Brooks (don't you just love the blogging world?).
Like Henry, I really enjoy Kindred's blogging and think that IPE at UNC is a truly outstanding addition to the academic blogssphere. But, also like Henry, I find his arguments here detached from real political processes in ways that reflect larger problems with contemporary US IPE.
Office Hours.....
Stacie Goddard and Tom Burke from Wellesley created this "typical meeting between a student and faculty member at the Political Science Department of Wellesley College" for their annual Political Science majors' dinner. Well done.
The bin Laden Killing and Assassination Explained in 4 Paragraphs Not By Me
At the risk of beating a dead terrorist horse, I want to cite W. Hays Parks (former Special Advisor to the Office of Legal Counsel on Law of War Issues at DoD, JAG and possible stand in for Clint Eastwood in that Grand Torino movie) on the Osama bin Laden assassination/murder/killing debate that has kind of been driving me nuts.
In a response letter in the Washington Post, Parks writes:
The May 2 lead story by Scott Wilson and Craig Whitlock on the death of Osama bin Laden was well written and reported. But on the continuation, the story referred to the deadly attack as an “assassination.” It was not.
Executive Order 12333 prohibits but does not define assassination. In 1988, as a civilian attorney in the Office of the Judge Advocate General of the Army, I researched the issue to define assassination. I coordinated my draft opinion with the judge advocates general of the Navy and Air Force; the general counsel of the Defense Department; the general counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency; and the legal adviser of the State Department. In 1989, the Army’s judge advocate general signed an unclassified memorandum defining assassination to provide clarity to the prohibition. It was provided to the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees and was published in the State Department’s volume of significant international law documents.
Assassination is murder committed for political purposes. The killing of enemy military personnel in time of armed conflict is not assassination.
Nor is it assassination to attack the leadership of armed non-state actors such as Osama bin Laden who have been and remain engaged in planning and executing armed attacks against a sovereign state. Because bin Laden was a lawful target, the attack was neither murder nor assassination.
09 May 2011
ICC Sheriff Too Quick on the Draw
This is a guest post by Leslie Vinjamuri and Jack Snyder. Leslie is Co-Director of the Centre for the International Politics of Conflict, Rights and Justice and a Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is also the co-chair of the London Transitional Justice Network. Jack is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at Columbia University
Last Wednesday’s announcement that the International Criminal Court will seek arrest warrants against three senior officials in Libya will come as no surprise to Security Council members who gave the ICC authority to investigate. They may soon find themselves regretting this decision.
The responsibility to protect and the duty to prosecute both have strong coalitions backing them, but these two norms do not always go well together. The duty to prosecute removes an indispensable strategy for inducing the peaceful exit of perpetrators. Unless NATO is prepared to put boots on the ground, its ability to negotiate a palatable exit for Qaddafi and his key supporters could become essential to bringing an end to this intervention.
Why the Geneva Conventions Need a Monitoring and Reporting Mechanism
Someone recently asked me whether, in the wake of the Richard Goldstone's qualifications of his infamous report, the UN was losing its credibility to issue fact-finding studies on humanitarian law violations.
In my view, no matter how "credibly" a study is conducted, it is vulnerable to such critiques under the existing system - in which all humanitarian law reporting is partial, ad hoc and selective. That's because unlike other international regimes, the Geneva Conventions comes with no official monitoring body.
At Foreign Affairs, I discuss this at more length and argue that it could and should be changed:
Bin Laden and the Paradoxical Logical of War
Strategist Edward Luttwak once observed that strategy has a paradoxical logic. The best way forward may be the longest way round, offence can be the best defence, and a seemingly victorious course pursued indefinitely will lead to over-reach. This is produced by the limitations of human strength, the resistance and friction of conflict, and the sheer dynamism and chaos of war.
This dynamic surfaces in the insurgency in Afghanistan and the terrorist-hunting campaign in Pakistan. Consider two headlines following Bin Laden's death.
Breaking News: International Relations Expert Nexon Responds to Leak of Dirty Pictures
"All the fake news that's fit to print"
07 May 2011
Structural Realism and the British Liberal Democrats
In the Duck tradition of offering analysis of elections in countries where we do not reside or where we have no citizenship, I offer you this. During the last UK election, I remember remarking that there was no way that the Liberal Democrats would form a coalition with the Conservatives. This went against everything that I have always written about parties -- that they are policy-seekers as much as they are office-seekers, that parties don't jump across other parties to form coalitions with parties further away from them ideologically. People wrote about how the Liberals and Conservatives were more alike in some ways, like their common commitment to individual liberty. I found that one kind of amusing in the country where there is a CCTV camera inside of everyone's pants. There was no way the Lib Dems would do this, I said. But they kept saying publicly that they were interested in considering a coalition with the Conservatives and were non-committal vis-a-vis Labour.
06 May 2011
The 2003 Iraq War will not be forgotten
The killing of Osama bin Laden allows political leaders to further disentangle Iraq, Afghanistan and the whole war on terror concept; to wind down some operations and refocus others; to bring some stories to light and push others aside, to be forgotten. But how do those who served in these wars feel about this? In today’s New York Times Captain Shannon P. Meehan, a US veteran of the 2003 Iraq War, published a powerful statement of alienation on this matter. Meehan felt no closure on hearing of bin Laden’s death. It only brought a sense of distance and disconnection. It reminded him he had been part of the bad war, the war whose meaning is already settled in what he calls the ‘shifting public memory of war’. And he must live with the severe injuries he suffered regardless. He writes: