Stuff Political Scientists Like to Obsess About

 Not to step on Brian‘s territory, but I just wanted to cross-post here something that I wanted to propose.

One of the recurring themes on my blog and at the Poli Sci Job Rumor site is that of rankings.  See here, here, and here for a taste of my fixation.

Anyhow, I am always reminded of a simple fact when I see any political science ranking of journals, presses, departments whatever: that whenever a ranking is suggested or revised, it is always suggested by someone who benefits from the new ranking.  Nobody ever proposes a ranking that puts their department lower.  So, Godwin's Law--that the longer any internet discussion, the probability of Hitler/Nazis/Holocaust being mentioned approaches one--has inspired me to propose a new law.

What would we name the following law: Any ranking of any aspect of the academic enterprise will produce revised rankings that improve the standing of the folks who produce the revised rankings?  In honor of a semi-anonymous person who published amusing pieces at PS (see here for an example if you can--gated),* so how about Wuffle's Law?

* A scholar.google search of Wuffle will produce many more contributions than I had remembered.

Who Will Arrest Gaddafi? Not It!

On June 27th the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, his son Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi, and chief of military intelligence Abdualla Al-Senussi for:

crimes against humanity (murder and persecution) allegedly committed across Libya from 15 February 2011 until at least 28 February 2011, through the State apparatus and Security Forces.

The judges believe there is "reasonable grounds" to attribute criminal responsibility to these three individuals for the deaths of (at least) hundreds of civilians during the protests. There are no allegations of the mass rapes Ocampo publicly suspected were being fueled by the distribution of Viagra, and human rights groups claim there is no evidence to support such claims yet. Ocampo indicated it's possible that, upon further investigation, allegations of widespread sexual violence could be added to the charges.

So far there are a few issues related to the arrests warrants that are generating debate.

Skeptics of international justice claim that the ICC has complicated peace negotiations, that Gaddafi cannot be deterred, and therefore that the arrest warrants will leave him no option but to dig in his heels. For a typical articulation of this argument see Marc Thiessen's post here - where he argues that the arrest warrants foreclose the possibility of Gaddafi's vertical (voluntary) departure. Another variant of the skeptic position questions the timing of this judicial intervention, as Richard Falk criticizes here. He argues there is a political calculus behind the timing of the arrest warrant and essentially suggests that NATO and the ICC are colluding to wage lawfare (i'm not going to stoke the lawfare fire in this post).

Others, like Stewart M. Patrick at the Council on Foreign Relations, contend that these types of arguments present a false tradeoff of peace and justice. Human Rights Watch made a similar statement, which is consistent with their advocacy on international justice. David Scheffer makes the case at Foreign Policy to call of the missiles and send in special ops - to delink military and judicial intervention. Certainly there was never any indication that Gaddafi would negotiate and in that sense the ICC has a null effect. Realistic idealists (yeah - i just made that label up) would argue that no one expects Gaddafi to turn himself in or be deterred. But it is hoped that the ICC's intervention will delegitimize his leadership and encourage and/or obligate other parties to arrest him. This is the real practical challenge....

Partisanship vs. Policy: the Housing Bubble Debate

Morgensen's and Rosner's new book appears to have breathed new life into claims that responsibility for the housing bubble can be laid at the feet of Democrats, ACORN, and Fannie and Freddie. Given that buyers of the book at Amazon are also snatching up works by Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, and Andrew Breitbart, I'm pretty sure that it is on its way to becoming the housing-bubble bible for all those who also are learning how Constantine's conversion to Christianity and the Battle of Poitiers were key "tipping points" in the history of human freedom.

It strikes me as unlikely that a closer chronicle of the shady political dealings surrounding housing policy in the 1990s tells us very much new about the causes of the bubble. But I find it interesting that conservatives are so gleeful about their account because it implicates a lot of Democrats. As a partisan matter, that's obviously of interest. But as a policy matter? It seems odd that conservatives would be so eager to swallow a story ultimately more consonant with progressive goals than their own.

The Balkans after Mladic

With Mladic's arrest last month, Bosnia and the rest of the Balkans are getting some much needed international attention. The New York Times has a nice run-down of some of the debates about the situation in Bosnia -- especially the debate between Kurt Bassuener from the Democratization Policy Council and Gerald Knaus from the European Stabilization Initiative. The piece is a spin-off from a conference that Daniel Serwer from SAIS helped put together in Sarajevo earlier this month. Dan also has some excellent posts about the situation in both Bosnia and Kosovo on his great new blog peacefare.net.

Patrice McMahon and I also have a short piece on the Balkans after Mladic that is now on Foreign Affairs website. We argue that the arrest of Mladic is a notable bright spot in the region and for all the faults of the ICTY, it is striking that Mladic, Karadzic, and Milosevic all ended up in the Hague. But, more than that, the arrest demonstrates the continued ability and importance of international pressure and influence to alter the incentive structures of local elites -- especially with the leverage of EU conditionality. I'm sympathetic to the calls of Gerald Knaus and others who argue that the international community has to turn governing to the Bosnians. Yet, as Patrice and I argued two years ago, the institutions created at Dayton continue to privilege ethnically-based politics and nationalist demagogues and it has been international indifference and fatigue over the past five years that has allowed, and in fact, exacerbated the resurgence of nationalist discourse and politics in the country. Mladic's arrest demonstrates that the international community still has a role to play in the region -- it just needs to play it.

Stuff political scientists like #5 -- a Large N

I have been doing a lot of work with survey data lately, as well as some reading in critical theory. Maybe that inspired my deconstruction of the gendered language of stats. Or maybe I just like to work blue.

Your girlfriend has told you, "Honey, your data set is big enough for me. It's OK if it doesn't get you into the APSR." She might tell you, "It is not the size of p-value that matters, it is what you do with it." A good theory can make up for a large-N, she reassures you. But political scientists know the truth. Size matters. Political scientists like a large-N.

A large-N enables you to find a statistically significant relationship between any two variables, and to find evidence for any number of crazy arguments that are so surprising, they will get you published. Political scientists like to be surprised. Your theory might be dapper and well dressed, but without the large-N, political scientists will not swoon. They go crazy for those little asterisks.

Some qualitative researcher might come in and show that your variables are not actually causally related, but it will be too late. You will have 200 citations on Google Scholar, and their article will be in the Social Science Research Network archive forever. Your secret is safe. Go back to Europe, qually!

Political scientists also like a large-N because it gives you degrees of freedom. You can experiment with other variables in your model without worrying about multicollinearity. You aren't tied down to one boring variable. Political scientists like to swing.

Political scientists prefer it if the standard error in your data is smooth and consistent and does not increase as the X value rises. Consider waxing or shaving your data with simple robust standard errors if you have problems with heteroskedasticity. They also like a big coefficient that slopes upward. Doesn't everyone? And fit, don't forget about fit. Fit makes things more enjoyable.

En Garde, Lagarde

I happened to be walking up 19th Street in downtown DC today in the early afternoon. Numerous media vans were parked along the road, and the sidewalks between F and H Streets were filled with eager reporters and bemused staff, obviously enjoying a long lunch break. A stranger, clearly new to the area, came up to me and asked, "Do you know where 700 19th Street is?"

Me: "Are you looking for the IMF?"

Lost stranger (from the UN in New York, as it turned out): "Yes, I am,"

Me: "You just missed it. It's the big gray building with the excited crowd and throng of cameras in front of it."

Lost Stranger: "Oh, what's going on?"

Me: "They're getting ready to announce the new Managing Director."

Lost Stranger: "Really? You mean that lady? Is that a big deal?"

Me: "Yes, that lady - Christine Lagarde. And it is a big deal."


My answer actually surprised me. I had taken it as a foregone conclusion during the last several weeks that Christine Lagarde would be the next IMF Managing Director. Over the past two days, this became even more evident as Lagarde won endorsements first from China and then the US. It thus wasn't a shock when the Executive Board chose Lagarde today over her competitor, Mexican economist Agustin Carstens. So what's the big deal?

New Deal for BBC World Service Weakens Britain’s Soft Power?

Una Marson, George Orwell, T.S. Eliot and others at the World Service during WW2

The reputation of the BBC World Service around the world reflects that of Britain generally. It’s an institution tied to colonial history. It aspires to global reach. Through its journalism it tries to uphold values of impartiality and objectivity, and therein lies the attractive, soft power dimension. As an institution, however, it cannot escape appearing partial – it is funded by the British state, and that state wouldn’t continue to fund it unless it was serving Britain’s interests. Therein lies the appearance of hypocrisy that taints Britain’s soft power. But this week the British government announced a new funding mechanism, and yesterday Peter Horrocks, Director of BBC World Service, spoke about the changes to an audience in London.

Realist Dreams

 The Realist tradition in International Relations long ago won the big battle by getting the best name.  By calling itself Realism, the realist tradition makes all other approaches to IR seem idealistic, based in dreams but not realities.  Anything but grounded in hard, cold calculations of how things really are.  But the joy of realism is how often its acolytes indulge in fantasy.  Ah, but only if we could have the good old days of the cold war, for instance.* 

*  Insert gratuitous cite of Mearsheimer's piece in International Security.

Who do realists look to as their latter-day Bismarck?  Henry Kissinger, of course, who was a Realist thinker at Harvard before serving as National Security Adviser and then Secretary of State.  So, it is far from an accident that Gideon Rose cites the Kissinger/Nixon exemplar when suggesting to Obama a way out of Afghanistan.  Leave by lying.  The best way to preserve national power and enhance national security would be to get out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible, as frittering away more resources on an unwinnable war is anathema to a realist, just as it was when the drain was South Vietnam.  But just picking up and leaving quickly hurts the reputation, so try to leave in a way that provides a decent interval between exist and the collapse of one's ally.  And lie about it.

Rose acknowledges that this is hard, due to domestic politics, but more or less wishes away such constraints.  More problematically, he does not recall the consequences of the Kissinger/Nixon strategy, especially when you"lay down suppressive fire so the enemy cannot rush into the gap you leave behind."  That would be bombing Cambodia and Laos and invading the former (not to mention the War Powers Act).  Rose cites drones as being better than the "ham-fisted" approach.  Sure.  But what happened to Cambodia after the US left?  Just a smidge of genocide.  Ok, perhaps the most catastrophic episode of genocide in per capita terms--one quarter of Cambodia's population if I remember correctly.

So, the big question is really not so much what happens to Afghanistan after we leave if we do not leave well, but what happens to Pakistan?  A nuclear-armed Pakistan, with a most broken set of civil-military dynamics, on-going insurgencies, deep poverty, extreme corruption, an irredentist campaign targeting its larger and nuclear-armed neighbor.  Hmmm.  I guess it is better to be a Realist** and ignore this ugly bit of reality. 

**  Some of my friends and students confuse me for a Realist since I do tend to think that power has a great deal with shaping outcomes. I just don't think power or security influence the choices leaders and states make as much as Realists aver.

Does Menstruation Explain the Gender Wage Gap?: A Kiwi theory

The CEO of the Employers & Manufacturers Association, an association that promotes New Zealand businesses, Alasdair Thompson sparked a heated debate last week when, during a discussion on equal pay, he publicly claimed that women’s productivity was impacted by their periods. He claimed that women “take the most sick leave” and explained “ you know, once a month they have sick problems. Not all women, but some do.” He later went on to say “Men and women are fortunately different. Women have babies. Women take leave when they have their babies.” In a subsequent interview he claimed: “Some women have immense problems with their menstruation – immense problems. You know they can pop a lot of paracetemol and drag themselves into work, but it's hard for them." Thompson seemed to only make matters worse when he later rationalized his comments by referencing one of his receptionists who he says told him that when some women call in sick they cite their periods as the reason.

Is it possible in 2011 that a top CEO could honestly believe that the main reason for pay disparity between men and women is menstruation? Really? This story is so frustrating that it is difficult to know where to start. Logically there are three main assumptions that Thompson is making that warrant examination: first, that women take more sick days than men; second, that menstruation is a major factor in women’s sick days; third, that these period-induced sick days help explain the gender pay gap.

Carlos

Cross-posted from my personal blog, by suggestion of a Vikash Yadav tweet.

I've now watched the first two parts of "Carlos," a three-part French-produced television miniseries that was broadcast on Sundance this past month. Édgar Ramírez is terrific in the title (star-making) role, though his character is hardly sympathetic. The notorious terrorist is portrayed as an unusual killer -- part playboy, part-diplomat, and part-frustrated middle-manager. Carlos is shown meeting with prominent international leaders and is called a celebrity by his fellow terrorists after the 1975 kidnappings at the Vienna OPEC convention. That event takes up a good portion of part 2.

Part 1 of the film opens with a statement warning that it is a fictionalized account and that only certain specific crimes were factually confirmed at trial. Thus, I was not sure of what to make of an alleged meeting in Baghdad involving Yuri Andropov (then-head of the KGB), Carlos and other desperadoes (one actor looked like Tariq Aziz). Allegedly, Andropov put a price on Anwar Sadat's head at this meeting.

Indeed, one important element of "Carlos" is the relatively clear state sponsorship the terrorist and his various organizations enjoy throughout most of his career. Support from Libya, Syria, Iraq, Algeria, East Germany and the Soviet Union all figure into the terror incidents portrayed on screen. It is no wonder that the Bush administration, circa 2001, believed that state sponsorship was the key element of its anti-terror campaign (despite facts suggesting a completely different kind of threat). This was not a matter of IR theory privileging states.

Friday Nerd Blogging: GoT IR?

I was recently asked whether Game of Thrones was going to become "the cult IR series of 2011." My initial response, spouted on a FB update was, "it remains to be seen," not least since by next Spring GoT will of course be competing with Blood and Chrome.)

As of today, however, "seen" it has clearly been, with multiple IR bloggers posting on various "IRGoT" themes. So I guess that answers that. We can look forward to a veritable bevy of GoT-blogging among IR types for the foreseeable future.

OK, let's see, Steve suspects the show can best be viewed through the lens of cognitive psychology, and Dan thinks it demonstrates the timeless wisdom of realism. Pablo K, however, in a remarkable, wide-ranging piece at The Disorder of Things takes a more critical view, interrogating gender and racial imagery in Season One with all the tenderness of Gregor Clegane:

The most common female figure is that of the whore; the most common male one a loyal killer. Physically weak, generically meek, hopelessly devoted to their menfolk, the women of Westeros cower and sob at violence and prove useless at the calculations of politics. Catelyn Stark provokes outright war by bowing to her maternal urges and kidnapping Tyrion Lannister on slim evidence that he tried to kill her son, a decision unlikely to have been endorsed had she consulted with her husband, notorious as he is for bad decisions. Cersei Lannister, as Queen of the realm, fares better, managing to manoeuvre her son onto the throne, at which point he becomes a power-mad sociopath, forcing Tywin Lannister to send his own imp son to the capital to pick up the pieces and rule from behind the scenes. Which leaves Arya Stark, everyone’s favourite tomboy, protected from the solid binaries of Man and Woman by the relatively ungendered space of girlness. Thin and still flat-chested, she is able to pass, Shakespeare-like, as a boy. For now.

Married off to Drogo as the bargaining chip for his army, Daenerys Targaryen becomes the sock-poppet for a Game Of Thrones version of feminism... In a parody of anti-rape politics, it requires the authority of this high-born Queen to prevent the conquering Dothraki army from sexually violating the wives, mothers and daughters of the conquered... Wilful in spite of her relative fragility, Daenerys derives her determination from the male heir inside her... empowered by protective feminine impulses over her precious boy cargo, she transcends the pliant object we first encounter to become a commander of men, but only so long as she can claim to speak for their true Lord (wait until I tell Drogo about this!)

Burn! [Sorry...] Seriously, read the whole thing. The discussion of the heavily racialized Dothraki is pretty spot-on - "like Klingons without technology. Oh, and they’re quite swarthy." The comments thread is also to be studied closely.

I do however see a few things differently from Pablo in terms of gender. I may develop a longer and more coherent essay on feminisms in GoT in due course (this one was drafted at 2am), but here are four initial thoughts:

Sleepwalking Towards Strategy

Must strategy be named to be practiced? Nowadays we tend to look for strategy as something that folk write down and codify. We live in logocentric times, where strategy is linked to formal declaratory documents, advisory councils and institutions dedicated to thinking about how to relate our power and our commitments, our resources and our goals.

Of course, that dubious definition would disqualify all sorts of states from having a grand strategy, when the historical record suggests that in fact, their leaders were attempting to prioritise and rank effort, allocate resources to deal with competing demands, and orchestrate ends ways and means to keep the show on the road.

Friday Nerdism, A Day Early

Charli Carpenter has thrown down the gauntlet.  She has pondered (on facebook) whether/why IR folks have not been blogging about Game of Thrones.  Why?  Because we are tired.  Every episode is such great TV that we are left in awe.  Our brains are so focused on getting the names straight, understanding the dynamics within each family and between them, that we no brainpower left to use.

Spoilers lurk below:

Visualizing the "Misery" of Failed States

Foreign Policy magazine has just released their yearly Failed States Index ("A Year in Misery: The 2011 Failed States Index"), which also includes their photo essay called "Postcards from Hell."

This photo essay raises the ire of those who criticize it as "poverty porn." This criticism is usually directed at aid organizations (see here and here) that exploit and misrepresent people's poverty and insecurity through shocking images to generate support and fundraising. As the infamous article "How to Write About Africa" satirically prescribed:

"Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wander the refugee camp nearly naked, and wait for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering."

The FP photo essay plays into this too. Many of the photos portray those living in so-called failed states as helpless victims or maniacal militants. This is not to say that extreme conditions of repression, poverty, and violence are not prevalent in these states and it's also important not to sanitize images just to protect our sensitivities. But the photos provide no context on the individual circumstances and strip those in them of their dignity. (See the photos of Haiti, Iraq, Kenya, Burma, CAR, especially). Nor do these pictures help us understand the causes and conditions of state failure and nor do they prescribe solutions. They simply invite shock and awe.

Groupthink at the IMF?

This week, the Independent Evaluation Office at the International Monetary Fund released its report on the relevance and utility of research at the Fund (see also today's Financial Times article on the report). The report itself echoes an earlier IEO report on the Fund's performance running up to the 2008 financial crisis, which found that the Fund's failure to foresee the crisis was in part due to pervasive groupthink within the organization.

The IEO report reveals much about the ideological culture of the Fund. Importantly, it draws from interviews and surveys with academics, national authorities, and staff with the Fund. According to the report, academics and national authorities think that the Fund's research reached "predetermined conclusions", driven presumably by biases inherent to the neoliberal orthodox training of most of its economist. That is not the surprising bit. The more shocking tidbit in the report is the finding from the internal survey, which revealed that more than half of the IMF staff interviewed for the report agreed that research findings at the Fund were altered to fit in-house views.

Niall Fergurson, International Many of History

Michael Lind treats Niall Ferguson to the contempt he so richly deserves (via). A sample:

The right-wing British historian Niall Ferguson seems to have conquered America: pushing his latest perishable book, "Civilization," this one based on the trendy and quickly dated conceit of the six (or is it seven?) "killer apps" of Western civilization; writing cover stories for Newsweek; debating foreign policy on TV with Zbigniew Brzezinski; and pouting and snarling his way through a debate about economics with Paul Krugman, Jeff Madrick and Bill Bradley. If you missed his Chicago lecture on the imminent decline of America, then at least on YouTube you can still catch him warning before the 2008 presidential election that "Islamic jihadists" and "Europeans" were hoping that John McCain would lose. Recently, it was announced that Henry Kissinger has made him his official biographer, perhaps in the hope that Ferguson, who thinks that the Kaiser should have been allowed to crush Europe, will be equally kind to Kissinger’s reputation. Time magazine in 2004 named Ferguson one of the 100 most influential people in the world, which might help to explain the condition of the world.

Lind doesn't mention that Ferguson also has a total of three sinecures at Harvard and the London School of Economics, nor that he has achieved a feat I would have thought impossible: making other celebrity professors look good.

Book Review: "The Possibilities of Transnational Activism"

Among the books I'm digesting this month as I work on my manuscript is this gem from Thomas Richard Davies - a case study of the transnational disarmament movement in the interwar period. I especially like two things about this book. First, it deals with a case of campaign failure, as the movement clearly did not meet its goals of general disarmament. This sets Davies' book apart from most of the transnational advocacy literature that focuses on successful campaign. But secondly, he uses his case very self-consciously as a lever to explore the merit of extant hypotheses about campaign success and failure.

Davies begins by culling a set of hypotheses from the earlier case literature on TANs, detailing factors said to facilitate and impede campaign success, and dividing these analytically between characteristics of the international environment, the national environment, the activists and the issues (not so different from the typology I'm developing in my book, except that he doesn't examine the impact of network structure on campaigns). He then asks whether any of these both help to explain the outcome in the disarmament case and are not refuted by the wider case literature.

Simply making the effort to test these hypotheses is a contribution - as he rightly points out, the correlates of campaigns success are often asserted but rarely demonstrated by comparison to unsuccessful campaigns. He concludes that of all the variables suggested by scholars, only one that is both constant across the case literature and sensible in the context of his case study: the promotion of a consistent/coherent framework for action:

Friday Nerd Blogging

1: A mysterious little Father's Day gift for certain Dads among us. Speculation here.

2: Your GoT satirical post of the week. (H/T Steve.)



3: No, I haven't read it yet, though this is definitely on my summer beach-book-list. Judging by the critical reviews (Robopocalypse is being compared to World War Z) my immediate sense is that the zombie craze of which Drezner speaks may be coming to its end, and that Glen Weldon's new novel may be the start of the latest greatest trend in " post-apocalyptic chronicle of decimated humanity" fiction.

It may be the presence of this beating human heart beneath Robopocalpyse's cold, genocidal surface that helps explain why Steven Spielberg has optioned, and plans to direct, the film version, due in 2013. The fact that Spielberg did so before Wilson had even finished his first draft, however, suggests that Hollywood sees something it likes in the way the book exploits our anxieties about artificial intelligence — something it finds very, very marketable.

(And not a moment too soon, if you ask me.) Now, back to work on my case study about autonomous warbots...

What We Talk About When We Talk About Neoconservatism

A Guest Post by Jonathan Caverley in reply to Dan Nexon

The irony of being accused of taking texts in directions their original authors might not have intended by the scholar behind Harry Potter and International Relations is too delicious to pass up. Plus I am sensitive to accusations like Nexon’s (might as well confront that elephant head on).

I am not slighting Professor Nexon’s excellent TNR piece and book. In fact our approaches are quite similar; we both drag a body of writing into a discipline to which the original authors evinced little desire to enter. There are always problems inherent to this, but it can be productive. Nexon used Harry Potter to make cogent observations on globalization, and this justifies a somewhat (ahem) esoteric reading of JK Rowling. Whereas Harry Potter-related injuries are limited to scrapes on the pale, tender skin of the privileged, neoconservative-informed policies have killed a lot of people and cost a lot of money. So considering neoconservatism systematically and from a variety of perspectives seems a useful exercise.

Papa Don't Preach: Rationalism is an Ism

Just yesterday I cautioned a graduate student not to get on the wrong side of some powerful people for the sake of principle if he could not truly effect change. And yet here I sit typing this right now, about to begin a rant on David Lake's new ISQ article: "Why ''isms' are evil: Theory, Epistemology, and Academic Sects as Impediments to Understanding and Progress." Nexon started it. It is his fault.

The piece is taken from David Lake's keynote address as ISA president and identifies five pathologies with dividing our field up the way we do, along 'ism' lines. We reify research traditions, reward extremism, mistake research traditions for actual theories, focus on the things that our approach is best at explaining so as to confirm our biases, and insist that our approach is the genuinely scientific one. I am going to assign this to my graduate seminar. I agree with every word. That is why it drives me so crazy.

It is not the message. It is the messenger.

Visualizing the Human Rights Issue Agenda

Part of the research project that is keeping me too busy to blog involves capturing, coding and visualizing the issue agenda for various transnational networks. Here is a visualization of the core human rights network on the World Wide Web, circa 2008.* (Nodes represent organizational websites and ties represent hyperlinks between them. Node size corresponds to in-degree centrality within the network.)You can click for a larger view.



It looks to me as if there are really two networks here: a human rights network and a development network, all tied together conceptually under the rubric of human rights. Whether this means that the human rights movement has been colonized by the development community or vice-versa is hard to say from this.

Now here is another visualization: of the human rights issue agenda, circa 2008, as represented on the same websites.** Here, nodes represent issues; ties between nodes represent co-occurrences of the same thematic issue on the same organization's website.



One might think, given the predominance of development organizations in the human rights network, that economic and social rights would be front and center on the overall network's issue agenda. But no:

Hegemony and Influence

Dave Noon Erik Loomis relates two anecdotes about the workings of US power. Both are a bit extreme. The US-Haiti relationship, in particular, is about as unequal as you can get in contemporary world politics.

Still, Loomis' stories illustrate why some of us leave short-term stints in government with the impression that Washington is both much more powerful and much weaker than US academics often assume.

US officials find themselves significantly constrained by America's web of alliances and economic interdependencies, but that web also privileges their voices in day-to-day interactions throughout the globe.

Against Esoteric Readings of Neoconservatvism, or Always Check the Footnotes

I'm currently working on a few difference pieces that deal with the relationship between liberalism and empire. I also, as long-team readers of the Duck know, consider neoconservative understandings of international politics as a variant of liberalism that constitutes a specific flavor of the US commitment to democratic enlargement as transformative of international politics. Neoconservatives reject the idea that international institutions, at least as currently configured, and US self-restraint pacify global politics; their liberalism is strongly inflected by particular currents of American nationalist exceptionalism.

Most published international-relations scholarship concurs with this assessment, thus I read with great interest Jonathan D. Caverley's “Power and Democratic Weakness: Neoconservatism and Neoclassical Realism" which appeared in Millennium: Journal of International Studies (May 2010, pp. 593-614) [earlier, but ungated, version]. Here's the abstract:

While realists and neoconservatives generally disagreed on the Iraq invasion of 2003, nothing inherent in either approach to foreign policy accounts for this. Neoconservatism’s enthusiasm for democratisation would appear to distinguish the two but its rejection of all other liberal mechanisms in world politics suggests that the logic linking democracy and American security shares little with liberalism. Inspecting the range of neoconservative thought reveals a unifying theme: the enervating effects of democracy on state power and the will to wield it in a dangerous world. Consequently, the United States enjoys greater safety among other democracies due to a more favourable distribution of relative power. Viewing regime type through the prism of state power extraction in a competitive, anarchic world puts neoconservatism squarely in the neoclassical realist camp. The article concludes by suggesting why the rest of International Relations should care about this new ‘neo–neo’ debate.

Caverley contends, in consequence, that we should see neoconservativism as a form of neoclassical realism. After all, neoconservatives see anarchy as characterized by unforgiving power-political competition and worry that the domestic politics of liberal states render them vulnerable to authoritarian and totalitarian rivals. They recommend civic virtue and strong political leadership -- along the lines of Theodore Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" -- as an antidote.

The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission: an outlier in the international transitional justice industry

Did you know Canada has a truth and reconciliation commission operating right now? It seems neither do most Canadians. The Canadian TRC was initiated to address the history and legacies of the former residential school system for Canada’s indigenous population, or First Nations. First Nations children were taken from their homes- siblings often separated- and placed into residential schools, which operated from 1870 until 1993. These children were forbidden from, and punished for, using their native languages or practicing customs or religious ceremonies. Within many of the schools children were sexually, verbally, and physically abused. Shame, silence, cultural degradation, separated families, and inter-student and intergenerational abuse include some of the many detrimental legacies of the residential schools.

The Canadian case, and its position as an outlier provokes provocative questions about so called international transitional justice mechanisms, tensions between local and international justice norms, and accountability for the legacies of colonization.

Determinants of Outlier Status
No “Complimentarity” with other international justice mechanisms: After the South African TRC, most truth commissions were established to compliment punitive judicial institutions. Unlike other recent commissions such as the ones in Sierra Leone and the former Yugoslavia, in which the TRC operated alongside an international court, the Canadian TRC was the result of a court order and “The purpose of the commission is not to determine guilt or innocence, but to create a historical account of the residential schools, help people to heal, and encourage reconciliation between aboriginals and non-aboriginal Canadians.”

Timing and Funding: The Canadian TRC has an initial operating budget of $60 million and a mandate to operate over the course of 5 years. In addition, the Canadians set aside almost 2 billion dollars for Common Experience Payments- restitution payments for survivors of residential schools. In contrast the Liberian TRC had a meager budget of only a couple of million dollars. After only 3 years of operation (from 2006-2009) the TRC in Liberia had its funding slashed, leaving thousands of testimonies were out of the archive and pages of the report unedited. Sierra Leone’s TRC only operated for two years from 2002-2004. Initially it had a paltry budget of $1 million but the final costs of the commission were closer to $9 million.

Local versus international: The truth is that most ‘international’ TRCs- including those in the former Yugoslavia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Kenya, and Uganda- are largely initiated and directed by western institutions. In particular, the United Nations and the International Center for Transitional Justice has been the driving force behind global TRCs. With funding coming from external donors (George Soros was a major funder of the Liberian TRC, for example) and international experts steering the process, questions remain as to the local relevance of truth commissions. In initial research done by myself and my co-authors- Mohamed Sesay and Michal Ben Joseph-Hirsh- we found that the majority of Sierra Leoneans did not understand the mandate of the TRC in their country. The majority never had access to the final report and few link the TRC to lasting peace in their country. Conversely, the Canadian TRC has been funded and guided by Canadians. National events, including an upcoming event in Northern Canada are being held across the country to allow different populations to participate and the commission mandate includes the establishment of healing practices relevant to Canadian First Nations populations, including healing circles.

While most Canadians would be hard pressed to tell you anything about the commission, the motivation behind the commission and the way in which its mandate is being implemented has important implications for those interested in international truth commissions and transitional justice. The Canadian TRC is one of dozens of truth commissions operating internationally today. After the South African TRC, truth commissions became normalized as a necessary element of recovery after atrocities or conflict. By 2006 over 40 truth commissions were operating globally, vigorously supported by both the United Nations and the International Center for Transitional Justice.

Certainly the Canadian TRC is not perfect and without its challenges- several of the commissioners resigned in the early stages and national events had to be delayed. However, the commitment and locally relevant approach to the commission should inspire the international transitional justice industry to rethink their own mandates. Perhaps more importantly, the commission will shed some light on race relations more broadly, the potential for colonizing governments and formerly colonized peoples to learn from their shared history, and the significance of colonizer governments acknowledging their role in past atrocities as well as the legacies of those actions. Canadians and the rest of the world should also be watching to see how former colonizing forces are able to acknowledge past atrocities and possibly repair a historically antagonistic relationship.

Ned is dead, baby. Ned is dead.

So I have finally caught up on all the back episodes of Game of Thrones, so I know what the hell you are all talking about. I thought I'd take up Charli's challenge about the paradigm that Dead Ned represents because I think that it says something deeper (always deeper) about something missing in IR theory these days.

Ned represents duty, honor and integrity as opposed to old school Machiavellianism (although I guess duty, honor and integrity are even more old school). But that is not liberalism, not at all. Those are all deeply conservative virtues. They are more romantic than rationalist, more nationalistic than internationalist. Who is Ned Stark loyal to? His king, despite that the fact that he rules arbitrarily. No liberal would do that. And I don't recall Ned calling for some type of constitutional monarchy.

Beware the Blog?

Being new to the blogging world, I have been thinking a lot about the utility and influence of blogs. Blogs seem appealing in so many ways. They appear to be an effective means of disseminating facts and views quickly to a wide audience, facilitating timely responses to emerging policy issues (and other fun pop politics). At the same time, blogging is a way of discussing real intellectual ideas free of many of the pitfalls of peer review and academic publishing (see last week's Duck entry by Brian Rathbun). More importantly, blogging is concise, pithy and entertaining and can potentially appeal to wider audiences, thus expanding the field of debate and influence. For those of us interested in bridging the academic-policy world divide, blogging seems promising.

But this past weekend's news about the "Gay Girl in Damascus" blogging fiasco got me thinking about the ethics of blogs. Point blank: what is the responsibility of the blogger - normally one committed to speaking truth to power - to give power to truth?

Criminalizing Medical Aid

The crackdown in Bahrain hasn't received as much attention as those elsewhere in the Arab world. In part, that's because what's happening in Syria and Libya are more spectacular. In part that's because Bahrain doesn't have many enemies among western regimes. Still, the regime smashed down an iron fist, one that hit the Shia community particularly hard. Although the government has officially lifted marital law, it continues to stifle political expression.

International Studies Association-Northeast Conference: One Week Left

Proposal for the conference are due 20 June 2011. Details here.

Friday Nerd Blogging

And so on.* H/T WinterisComingBitch. Scott Meslow ponders the human security implications of Ned's choices.

*Oh, the pedagogical possibilities! Does Ned Stark represent constructivism? Or does he represent the mocking realist riposte to constructivists as naive fools? Or only a mockery of that riposte? (For readers not yet following Game of Thrones on HBO, this. For viewers who wish more depth on the Starks, this. To those viewers who've also already read the books, please no series spoilers in comments.)

Write less. Read more.

I thought I would offer my take on the series of posts below on how to reform the peer-review system. Part of the problem is bad reviews. We can remove the anonymity of them, but that raises the obvious problems (bad blood, retaliation, pulling punches, speaking truth to power, etc). A better solution would be to rely on the expertise of editors. A really stupid review is obvious to even non-experts. And if one reviewer says X and the other says 'opposite of X', then you should know that you have to get a third opinion, not just reject the piece for not garnering sufficient support from the beginning (this is Dan's point).

Why can't editors do this? The biggest problem seems to be workload. They just don't have the time to carefully sort through reviews and evaluate them as critically as the paper under consideration. But how do we lessen their workload? Write less. Read more. This goes for graduate students and professors. Graduate students are "socialized" earlier these days and this generally means they are pushed to publish. The tenure standards are higher everywhere now. None of this is good for the field. All of this means too many papers that don't tell us very much. And they make editors' jobs impossible.

Political science and IR today reminds me of elementary education. Most everyone in educational psychology seems to agree that kids really shouldn't be pushed early on, that the social part of early grade school is more important than the academic, that they aren't cognitively ready to do proper book learning. Yet we expect more academically of our little ones than ever before. They screen them in my town for their competence in the ABC's upon entering kindergarten, then tell us what to work on over the summer. Go f*&k yourself.

Most everyone also agrees that some kids, particularly boys, develop more slowly intellectually, but of course eventually catch up. And also that it is better to think creatively rather than to do rote learning. Yet homework starts in first grade and the first thing they focus on is penmanship. Ugh.

Without saying that grad students are just kids, we have to recognize that there is a growth process in graduate school, and frankly even in the assistant professor stage. By pushing younger academics to write too early and too much, we deny them to chance to read widely and think more creatively. We also encourage people to be carbon copies of their advisors because if people don't have a chance to develop their unique voice they will merely parrot their mentors. The metric of success becomes a simple process of counting journal articles and where they are placed, not WHAT THEY SAY THAT IS NEW AND INTERESTING. This gets to some of my earlier complaints in Stuff Political Scientists Like, that we fetishize new data to the detriment of new ideas.

This is partly because the people who are doing the judging (tenured faculty members, journal reviewers, search committees) are themselves writing too much and don't have time to properly read and critically evaluate other people's work. We have created an academic environment where everyone is in his or her own bubble. No wonder we all get (and write) lousy reviews. I personally don't keep up with the journals as I would like to and this makes me sad.

Maybe I am idealizing the (fairly recent) past, and maybe Berkeley was just different, but when I was in grad school, not so long ago, grad students didn't judge academics by how many APSR articles they had published, but by their ideas. Oh, Schweller, he is the 'balance of interest' guy. Oh, Moravcsik, he is the 'liberal intergovernmentalist.' I frankly had no idea about how much people had published, only what they had published.

Of course, this probably cannot be changed because it is an arms race. I can't tell my students to slow down, to stop and think, because they will get cut off at the knees by the more 'socialized' grad students in other programs on the job market. Or they might not get tenure at a university that simply counts beans. I find this not only sad but also deleterious to the discipline. I can't do much about it, but my kids are going to spend the summer in the yard, not with workbooks.

Visualizing the Correlates of Global Issue Creation

My big work-related task this month is to pull together my focus group findings into something approximating a theoretically relevant conference paper. I like to start with visualizations.

Targeting Targeted Killing

I was asked to step-in at the last minute to write a chapter on targeted killing for a textbook on isses in the War on Terror. Given the recent OBL killing and debate about raids, etc, I was surprisingly excited at the prospect of engaging with the issue.

Although my chapter is almost done (no really, Richard, it’s on its way!) I’ve noticed some problems with researching the topic and trying to draw general conclusions as to whether or not it is a good or a bad policy.


1.What are you people talking about?

When talking about “targeted killing”, everyone means something different. Some are talking about assassination (Michael Gross for example), some specifically are talking about the Israeli policy used against alleged Palestinian militants post-November 2002 (such as Steven David); some are talking about the targeting of terrorist leaders generally (decapitation in Audrey Kurth Cronin's book How Terrorism Ends). Nils Melzer on the other hand seems to be talking about every kind of state killing in and out of warfare from the CIA in Vietnam, to US tactics against Gaddafi in the 1980s to Israel-Palestine post-2000.

Feminist IR 101, Post #10, Feminist Scholarly Community

One of my favorite characterization of feminist theorizing is in Sarah Brown's 1988 Millennium article, where she calls feminist work "fundamentally a political act of commitment to understanding the world from a perspective of the socially subjugated" (p.472). From this and other reading in feminist theory and praxis, I've always seen feminism as not just an intellectual interest in gender as a force in global politics, but also as a politics of knowledge, and a politics of scholarship. As a politics of knowledge, to me, it is a commitment to multiple knowledges, perspective, (inter)subjectivity, and changing the power dynamics of science.

As a politics of scholarship, I've always thought that there are ways feminist thought suggest scholars treat each other and each other's research. I've articulated it as a research claim before: "I make an ontological, epistemological, and methodological choice that my process of knowledge-acquisition is constructive in nature ... in this spirit, I explicitly choose not to emphasize debates between or among feminisms. Instead, ... I note where feminisms disagree, but focus on how those disagreements can be seen as contributing to a more complete understanding of political situations rather than as confounding knowledge." (Gender, Justice, and the Wars in Iraq, p.41).

In theory, this has meant to me that my purpose in feminist theorizing is solidaristic, bridge-building, and pluralistic. In Hayward Alker's terms, I've seen the substance of feminist IR in the debates, discussions, and disagreements. In Christine Sylvester's terms, I've seen it as art. In my terms, I've embraced feminist IR theories as multiple.

But I think that feminist research process is more than about how one writes one's research. I've done a lot of thinking about what feminist theory tells one about how to be a professor, a scholar, and a political scientist, but rarely articulated it. When I have, I've called it a "pay it forward" idea of how to operate in the academic community. But what does that mean, and how do I see it as explicitly (and necessarily) feminists?

The Rhino in the Room

Somehow I managed to delete my mediocre post on peer review. The gist: peer review is arbitrary and capricious; summary rejections offer a cosmetic fix; we need to reduce our reliance on counting peer-review journal articles as a basis for evaluating scholarly worth.

Jarrod Hayes commented:

I am struck by the arbitrariness of peer-review. I have at least once asked to come in as a reviewer when two reviews reached polar opposite conclusions about a manuscript. Both reviews were careful and conscientious, and I found merit in both when I saw them in the decision letter to the author. How could they both be right?

To which I respond: at least they were both conscientious! I sometimes play a game with a friend called "guess which review was mine?" It isn't much of a game, to tell the truth. Both of us tend to produce long reviews, often with full references and explanations for why citing particular omitted work matters, and that seldom use denigrating language like "this is obviously a seminar paper."

Unpacking the Anti-Drone Debate

My student Lina Shaikhouni and I have a new Foreign Policy piece in which we make "The Case Against the Case Against Drones," to paraphrase Stephanie.

Therein, we argue that although there are many good reasons why drones shouldn't be used as they are being used, or where they are being used, the arguments against drones per se are often based on misconceptions or assumptions for which we don't have good data.

In particular, we point out:

1) drones are not killer robots
2) there's no evidence that "video game" warfare makes war more likely
3) drones don't violate humanitarian law
3) we don't have good data on civilian casualties

We also argue that the focus on drones per se is a distraction from what are actually more profound and wider issues:

... Those who oppose the way drones are used should shift focus to one of the big normative problems touched by the drone issue: whether truly autonomous weapons should be permitted in combat, how to accurately track the civilian cost of different weapons platforms, and whether targeted killings -- by drones or SEAL teams -- are lawful means to combat global terrorism... Focusing on the drones themselves misses this bigger picture.

What you see above is a visualization of the data on which our argument is based, created with help from Dan Glaun (click here for clearer picture).

Crisis and Change in International Organizations

The ongoing saga over the leadership crisis at the IMF poses a bigger existential question about crisis and change in international organizations: do crises in fact provoke change?

This was the question at the forefront of my mind as I was driving from Texas to DC last week to start teaching a summer graduate seminar for the LBJ School of Public Affairs on, of all things, Crisis and Change in International Organizations. I was struck by the irony that the last time there was a major leadership crisis in the Bretton Woods institutions, it was at the World Bank. In May 2007, then President Paul Wolfowitz was ousted as the result of getting caught up in a nepotism scandal in which he arranged for a very generous secondment(and later return package) from the Bank to the State Department for his (by then former) girlfriend, Bank staff member Shaha Riza. The indiscretion of Wolf II (in Bank parlance) seems to pale in comparison to the actions of DSK. But it was extremely controversial back then because of the blatant hypocrisy of Wolfowitz's actions simultaneous with his very aggressive campaign against corruption in the Bank and its lending activities. (So how would Wolfowitz have scored on Megan MacKenzie's Sexual Scandal Scale?)

Goldstein: The World Has Never Been More Peaceful

Joshua Goldstein has a must-read book in press entitled Winning the War on War. I've seen the advance version and like many things about it, not least of which is the easy-reading style pitched at an informed lay audience, the way he begins with a thought experiment rather than with a bunch of statistics, then draws the reader through available scholarly research in an entertaining way to develop his argument.

The thought experiment: imagine you're in a time machine moving backward from 2011 to prehistoric times, comparing a) the past ten years with the past twenty; b) the past twenty years with the previous twenty; c) the past fifty years with the previous fifty, d) the past century with the previous centuries and so on.

The argument: though the media and twittersphere often make it seem that the world is an unstable, dangerous place, we are in fact living through the longest and deepest period of peace in human history.

Whither the Praetorian State?

As part of a forthcoming project to re-assess the analytical relevance of the concept of the "praetorian state" in contemporary South Asian and Middle Eastern politics, I've been fascinated by tracing the history of the phrase.

Although the term "praetor" or "Praetorian Guard" entered the English language from accounts of Roman history in the 13th century, the taxonomic concept (specifically as a Weberian ideal type) of the "praetorian state" first emerged after political upheavals following the Great Depression.  Max Lerner argued in 1942, for example, that a socialist state that becomes totalitarian indulges in the instabilities associated with praetorian states: a succession of garrisons and adventurist leaders (Lerner 1942, 44).  For the most part, however, Lerner associated the concept with the aggressive imperialism of fascism (Lerner 1942, 50). It is notable that while the modern concept of the praetorian state originated in discussions of what were then contemporary European regime types, in the post-war period the concept would only be applied to "underdeveloped states" that were striving toward "modernization."

Chart 1: Google N-gram history of the phrase "praetorian state" in English language books and journals