Data, data on the wall

OK, OK, OK, I know life is short and some of us need to get a life (I'm not in Seattle by the way), but this is a really cool app from Uppsala:


















From the iTunes description: "Data on 300 armed conflicts, more than 200 summaries of peace agreements, data on casualties etc, without having access to the Internet."

I actually do think this is really cool and I can see real benefits to having this type of data at one's fingertips, but I do wonder how these dramatic changes in the ease of access to select types of data and data summaries (even from reputable places like Uppsala) will alter research strategies, research teaching methods, the research capabilities of future scholars, and ultimately research output.

With Kate's excellent post directly below, I wonder is this a good thing or not so good? Thoughts?

Oh, one other thing, any interest in an app for Duck?

Open Data, Open Sesame?

In an article last week in the Financial Times on "Sex, Lies, and the Pitfalls of Overblown Statistics," John Kay bluntly wrote: "Always ask yourself the question: where does the data come from?"

It's a good question, and one I frequently ask myself when I read yet another story about the hottest craze in the international development aid business today: the Open Data Initiative of the World Bank.

Don't get me wrong. I think the World Bank's Open Data initiative is freaking awesome. You can now get free access to the Bank's World Development Indicators (hitherto accessible, but by no means free unless you were a privileged academic in a research university that purchased a subscription to the database). You can now get extensive information on the Bank's financial activities, including lending data that previously you could only attempt to compile by patiently wading through turgid annual reports in PDF or hardcopy format. And now you can even get comprehensive information on the Bank's project-level activities, including links to multiple project documents. The World Bank is really the only international aid agency that has achieved this kind of transparency (kudos!). The Bank even created a new staff position, with the title "Open Data Evangelist" (hello, Tariq!). In short, the Open Data Initiative is a goldmine for aid nerds like myself, and I am both impressed and grateful.

But is the World Bank's Open Data Initiative really capable of "democratizing development" in the way envisioned by Bank President Robert Zoellick? Is open data going to be a panacea for the transparency and accountability deficits that have undermined international aid's legitimacy and effectiveness for decades? Will open data really empower the poor?

It is entirely too easy to get swept up in the romantic swell of the Open Data movement. Yet the idealism underpinning Open Data leaves me uneasy. Why? Here are some of my half-baked musings on the subject:

Priorities, priorities, priorities....

I have good friends a few miles north of here in Vermont who will be reeling from Hurricane Irene for months. One of my favorite places, Wilmington -- just south of Mount Snow ski resort -- was completely flooded and Route 9, the major road to the town (and all East-West travel in southern Vermont) will be out for weeks. It's going to be a long haul getting back.




Despite the devastation, we now hear that House Republicans are holding FEMA hostage by demanding the $3.6 billion in emergency storm relief has to be offset by cuts in other programs.

So where should we cut? National Priorities Project has this handy list of spending priorities. I bet we could find some money in there.

But, for my money, I think Vermont taxpayers should take a look at this tool to figure out which trade-offs work for them. Turns out they will be paying more than $750 million this year to support the Pentagon's budget. In the past decade, they've paid more than $2.2 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including nearly $250 million this year alone. Those would be the same wars that the Wartime Contracting Commission just announced lost as much as $60 billion "due to lax oversight of contractors, poor planning and corruption." I bet some of that could be spent at home helping them rebuild....

Armadillo

Last night PBS' POV program aired the Danish documentary film "Armadillo" (filmed 2009; released 2010) about a Danish-British Forward Operating Base in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

Although much of the documentary portrays standard tropes and follows a time honored narrative arc from a long line of war films, Janus Metz's work sparked debate in Europe because it appeared to depict Danish soldiers "liquidating" wounded Taliban fighters and piling up the bodies to take trophy photos. Thus, as the director notes, the film challenges the notion of soldiers as heroes while also showing the ways in which the experience of combat perverts the psychological state of the soldiers.

More subtly and perhaps more subversively, the film allows Afghan civilians, who are caught in the conflict between ISAF and the Taliban, to speak for themselves. Children beg for food, but they also heckle the soldiers for killing their livestock and wounding their family members and they bluntly tell the soldiers to just go home. Village elders seek compensation for destruction to their property and livelihood by ISAF forces while also trying to keep the somewhat oblivious soldiers off of their crops. There is even a wonderfully absurd encounter at a madrassa where the Danish troops try to secure support and information from the teacher at the madrassa by telling him that with his cooperation they will be able to build schools for children in the village -- as if a madrassa were not a school.  The arguments of the soldiers about creating security if only the villagers would collaborate with the ISAF troops are calmly defeated through knowing smiles and gestures explaining what the Taliban will do to collaborators... The hopeless and confused nature of the conflict where violence begets more violence becomes startlingly apparent in these brief interactions.

If you did not get a chance to see this film, the full length version is available at PBS POV.

Assessing the Arguments Against GI Jane: The Combat Exclusion for Women Part I

As American troops trickle back from Iraq and-eventually- Afghanistan, it seems like the perfect time to examine the lessons learned from the last decade of warfare. One of the policies requiring a review is the combat exclusion for women. Although most positions within the US forces have been opened up to women over the last 50 years, there has been adamant efforts to sustain rules which prohibit women from joining the so-called front lines of conflict in combat roles. Many of the remaining justifications for this exclusion are based on expired research (or no research at all), and outdated or irrelevant assumptions about military operations (including the idea of a clear front line).

First, some quick facts: over 130 women have died in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom; women are excluded from 9% of all army roles, and 30% of active duty roles and 38% of marine positions are closed to women; two servicewomen have been awarded the Silver Star- the military's third highest honor for valor in combat.
The arguments for sustaining the exclusion can be divided into three categories: physical standards, the moral argument, and the cohesion hypothesis.

The focus on physical standards is a legitimate one. Women and men are just different physically, particularly in terms of body fat and upper body strength- not to mention the fact that women menstruate and get pregnant. There are no feminist arguments that can undo these differences. There are a couple of worthwhile considerations here: 1. standards have increasingly been adjusted in training to recognize the difference in male and female bodies 2. there is growing research indicating that a single standard isn't necessary for operational effectiveness 3. some research shows that tasks can be adapted (using two people to lift, for example) to allow women to succeed.

Late Summer Tour of NATO

Happy NATO Day!  Okay, this is not an anniversary of anything NATO-esque.  But heaps of posts a-twitter about NATO, its members and so on.  So, some semi-random shots at some semi-random NATO members and NATO in general.

First, France is the best-est ally ever!  Lots of people linking to this article.  Yes, the Libyan adventure certainly raises France's profile as an active contributor, assertive military and the rest.  But to be fair to the French (yes, completely out of character for me, given how easy it is to make jokes in my big lecture class), the Libyan crisis is not the first time that the French have been assertive.
       During the Afghanistan war (which, by the way, is still an on-going NATO mission), France moved from being relatively restricted to being quite willing to take risks.  When Sarkozy replaced Chirac, we all got a NATO-friendly (to say the least) President.  Sarkozy moved some and then nearly all of French combat forces from the safety of Kabul to the more dangerous areas of Kapisa.
        Postwar French have never been pacifists--they just have been known for pursuring their own interests.  A lot of those interests were in Africa, with Qaddafi serving as a critical obstacle to French ambitions.  So, the French are so very bold now, taking the lead in the effort, even willing go without NATO.  Still a fun time and an interesting contrast to:

Second, the Germans look more feeble than ever, when the Foreign Minister (for at least a few more days) Westervelle* said that Qaddafi is falling due to economic sanctions.  Now, we have German politicians across the spectrum from Helmut Kohl to Joshcka Fischer saying that Westerwelle is as bad a foreign minister as Colin Powell Condi Rice they can imagine.

*Unless you are Italy, having a Foreign Minister named Guido is always going to raise questions about credibility.

Here is Fischer's first question and answer:

SPIEGEL: What is it about Germany's current foreign policy and Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle that bothers you?
Fischer: Pretty much everything. As the former foreign minister myself, the lack of fundamental convictions pains me. This is fundamentally much worse than losing your compass. We are being governed by those who have lost touch with reality and are denying what's obvious to everyone else.

Stuff Political Scientists Like #8 -- feeling terrible about themselves, or APSA

Every year political scientists make a remarkable pilgrimage towards a large American city -- Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia. Against all odds they push upstream trying to make a name for themselves. There is only room enough for a dozen or so great names in political science, those whose names will one day adorn a plaque in a graduate student lounge. We speak their name in hushed tones -- Dahl, Skocpol, Waltz. But this does not deter thousands from arriving each year -- yearning, striving, networking.

For graduate students political scientists call this 'socialization,' or learning how to feel insignificant. They feel violated as more established political scientists scan their badge while trying to sustain eye contact, instantly dismissing those with 'State' in the title of their universities. They seethe as they spot the renowned expert on the subject of their dissertation spend four hours at the bar despite an earlier email that their schedule was already full up. Outside they are stoic, but inside they are screaming, "Pay attention to me! I have things to say!"

I canna think of a good title, captain!

As the forces of nature marshall for an attack on the east coast, I thought I'd call attention to Belfer's new blog, Power & Policy (via SW). If it becomes a breakout hit, we just might have to think our whole lack of institutional affiliation approach.

(I thought of making some kind of lame "power" joke. Something along the lines of, "better check them out until they're just "policy." But then I thought better of it.)

My parents got an advanced taste of devastation when a microburst completely blocked their summer house from the road by taking down a ton of trees. I got them out with my trusty Subaru and an extra-large ice coffee. Because nothing stops a man with a gay-friendly car and lots of caffeine.

We've stockpiled wine, flashlights, and graphic novels. What about the rest of our right-coast bloggers and readers?

Semantic polling: the next foreign policy tool

George Gallup -
what have you started?

The traditional methods for a state to know what overseas publics are thinking are changing. Instead of relying on your embassy staff’s alertness, your spies’ intelligence and the word of dissidents, we’re reaching the point where foreign policymakers can constantly monitor public opinion in countries in real-time. The digitization of social life around the world  – uneven yes, but spreading – leaves ever-more traces of communications to be mined, analysed and acted upon.  In a paper that Nick Anstead and I presented in Iceland this week, we called this ‘semantic polling’, and we considered the ethical, political and practical questions it raises.

Semantic polling refers to the use of algorithms and natural language processing to “read” vast datasets of public commentary harvested from the Internet, which can be disaggregated, analysed in close-to-real-time, and which can then inform policy. It can give a general representation of public opinion, or very granular representations of the opinion and behaviour of specific groups and networks. Multi-lingual processing across different media platforms is now possible.  Companies already provide this service to pollsters and parties in domestic campaigns, and NGOs make use of it for disaster response monitoring. Given how public diplomacy has adopted many techniques of the permanent campaign, it will be no surprise to see semantic polling become part of the foreign policy toolkit.

Quote of the Day

Krugman:

In short, there’s no reason at all to consider microeconomics the “real” economics and macroeconomics some kind of flaky impostor. Yes, micro is a lot more rigorous — but if it’s rigorously wrong, who cares?

Precision Guided Words? Libya and International Law

Guest Post by Betcy Jose-Thota, Assistant Professor, University of Colorado-Denver.

According to al Jazeera’s English language website, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Mahmoud Jibril, head of the National Transitional Council, met on Wednesday to discuss what a post-Gaddafi Libya would look like. After the meeting, Sarkozy told reporters that NATO would continue its military operation in Libya as long as Gaddafi remained a threat, stating:

“We will continue acting within the mandate given to us by the UN to protect civilian forces.”

If President Sarkozy was not misquoted, his pronouncement contains two misstatements about both the NATO mandate and international humanitarian law.

What Exactly is the Point of Foreign Policy Analysts?: Lessons from Libya (and any other crisis in history)

I don't follow the news as closely as I should. I am not up on everyone's blogs. I don't check the Brookings Institution for every new report it issues. I am a lazy blogger. But I do seem to recall when this whole Libya thing started and didn't end successfully immediately that all kinds of "foreign policy analysts" came out of the woodwork to say it wouldn't work, that we were merely facilitating and prolonging a protracted civil war stalemate. We couldn't will the means that would be necessary.

Dumbasses.

I say that not because they got the prediction wrong, but rather that they tried to make a prediction at all. I wish we could just admit that we generally have no earthly idea how a civil war, humanitarian intervention, tsunami response, military coup, financial crisis, etc. will work out. I

Eat humble pie, boys. I said, "Eat it!"

am an international relations academic not because I don't want to be on TV, but because I have a sense of shame and dignity. I simply could not get up in front of millions, or even dozens, of people and claim that I had any notion of how any of those things was going to work out. We can only work out explanations well after the fact when we know what was going on on the ground, what people were thinking, etc. Every social phenomena of interest is simply too complicated. I appreciate it when folks like Steve Saideman tell us the mistakes of the past. But I wouldn't like it if he predicted the future. And he doesn't.

What Not to Do in Libya

I am pretty much as ignorant about Libya as the next person, so let me just suggest a few generic lessons learned from other conflicts:

• Don't hold elections immediately.  Everyone likes to do so to give the new folks legitimacy, but then it usually means empowering those who might not be the best folks to be empowered (see Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan).
• Think carefully about the guys with guns on both sides. Biggest mistake in early Iraq was firing the Iraqi military.  Helped to create the insurgency.  There has been a cottage industry in Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) and Security Sector Reform (SSR), so perhaps this time folks who know what they are doing in these areas might not be deliberately excluded?
• Don't expect tribal affiliations to go away.  Folks have been trying to ignore or do away with tribal identification and tribal loyalties in favor of national identities for generations in a bunch of places.  Don't expect it to happen quickly or at all.  Relying on extended kin is way too convenient for politicians, particularly if they cannot easily deliver progress.
• Promises are not reality.  The proposed constitution looks great, but it promises everything, including much stuff that cannot be readily delivered--everyone has a good job, for instance.  Don't expect the timelines to stick.
• The international community will not coordinate well.  I have no clue as to which elements of the international community will show up--UN, NATO, EU, UNHCR, World Bank, IMF, African Union (um, never mind), and so on.  But who ever does show up will be plural--heaps of governmental and non-governmental organizations with different mandates, missions, cultures, etc.  Even when they play well together, there are big problems in getting everyone moving in the same direction.  Easy to see multiple countries getting involved, picking favorites and trying to manipulate the situation (China?).  So, don't expect the international community to be as coherent as the word community suggests.
• Don't rely so much on the ex-pats.  They may speak English well, but if they have not been involved in the fighting over the past few months, they probably have limited credibility on the ground with those did risk and lose.
• Don't overestimate the power of the outsiders.  Yes, the outsiders will have money and influence, but between the competition among the outsiders and the need for the folks in the country to pursue their own interests, politics will remain more local than outsiders would like.  The people on the ground will have to live with whatever decisions are made. The outsiders always can go home.

There will be heaps of stuff on what will happen next.  I have no clue.  I just know that we will probably fall into the usual traps and have overblown expectations.  How democratic is Egypt today?

Anyhow, if you have additional lists of do's and don't's, let me know.

Resilience and the Future of Pastoralism in the Horn - part V (of the series on the 2011 East African drought)

Does pastoralism -- the livelihood of semi-nomadic animal herders like the Maasai -- have a future in East Africa? In my concluding post on the famine in the Horn of Africa, it seems like a fair question to ask, no more controversial than whether Somalia should be divided into several countries (see here, here, here, and here for previous posts).

I ask this because much of the commentary on the current crisis in the Horn of Africa suggests that "development" is the long-term solution for the region to ward off the potential for recurrent crisis. However, according to FEWS NET, parts of Ethiopia affected by the drought have lost 60 to 80% of their cattle, 25 to 30% of their sheep and goats, and 25 to 40% of the camels. I can only imagine that the situation is more dire in Somalia. Indeed, the region has been buffeted by droughts over the last 10 years, which has likely compounded the effects of this year's drought.

Source: Cecchi et al. 2009

Epistemic Communities and their Discontents

Of note to those following developments in autonomous lethal robots should be an article published this summer in the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, entitled “International Governance of Autonomous Lethal Robots.” It is co-authored by a bevy of individuals calling themselves the Autonomous Robotics Thrust Group of the Consortium on Emerging Technologies, Military Operations and National Security (CETMONS), a collection of ethics and technology experts from various North American universities. According to the article:

“A variety of never-before-anticipated, complex legal, ethical and political issues have been created – issues in need of prompt attention and action… The recent controversy over unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that are nevertheless human-controlled… demonstrates the importance of anticipating and trying to address in a proactive manner the concerns about the next generation of such weapons – autonomous, lethal robotics. While there is much room for debate about what substantive policies and restrictions (if any) should apply to LARs, there is broad agreement that now is the time to discuss those issues.”

This is only the most recent call for international policy attention to one of the most game-changing developments in military technology and military norms in history. In that, the ARTG joins other emerging networks of professionals bound together by the causal belief that nations will have interests in pursuing fully autonomous weapons and the normative belief that such developments should be subject to ethical regulation in advance - a precautionary principle, as it were. The International Committee on Robot Arms Control (ICRAC), for example, issued a statement in Berlin last year:

“Given the rapid pace of development of armed tele-operated and autonomous robotic systems, we call upon the international community to commence a discussion about the pressing dangers that these systems pose to peace and international security and to civilians, who continue to suffer most in armed conflict.”

At the same time, I see significant differences between the ICRAC statement and the argument in the ARTG article.

First, whereas ICRAC is concerned about the ability of weaponized robots to follow basic war law rules, ARTG suggests that "it may be anticipated that in the future autonomous robots may be able to perform better than humans [with respect to adherence to the existing laws of war]." This is not surprising since one of the ARTG authors is Ronald Arkin, who is pioneering designs for such a ethical soldier and has written an important book on the topic.

Second, whereas ICRAC has floated prohibitions on some or all uses of autonomous robots on a menu of options, ARTG authors argue "it remains an open question whether the differences between LAR and existing military technology are significant enough to bar the former's use" and moreover appear to assume such prohibitions would not, at any rate, check the deployment of such weapons: "the trend is clear: autonomous robots will ultimately be deployed in the conduct of warfare." ICRAC's position is far more optimistic about the potential of norm-building efforts to forestall that outcome, and far more pessimistic about the normative value of the weapons.

In short, both ARTG and ICRAC would appear to constitute examples of epistemic communities:

“networks of professionals with recognized knowledge and skill in a particular issue-area, sharing a set of beliefs, which provide a value-based foundation for the actions of members.”

But do these groups constitute nodes in a single epistemic network due to the shared causal and principled beliefs that the weaponization of robots is proceeding apace and that proactive governance over these developments is now a necessary public good?
Or do they constitute separate, competing epistemic communities operating in the same policy space with very different visions about what that governance should look like? If the latter, do they indeed constitute counter-communities, similar to the counter-campaigns Cliff Bob is documenting in the NGO sector?

Analytically, is there a standard for making this determination as an empirical matter or is it simply a matter of how one black-boxes the emergent norm under study? If I understand the "norm" in question as a precautionary principle in favor of some preliminary ethical discussion about AWS, then both these groups have a shared agenda whatever their different viewpoints on the ethics involved. If I focus on what they argue the outcome should be, my interpretation is that they represent different agendas (that may be true within each group as well, of course, as in any community there will be differences of opinion over outcome, process or strategy).

I put this question forth largely as a bleg since I am not an expert in the epistemic communities literature and yet probably need to become one as I develop this particular case study for my book. Has someone developed a typology that I would find useful? Other thoughts or useful literature you can point me to?

Entire Earth Asphyxiating, Zombie Book Blamed

The Canard

"All the fake news that's fit to print"

---Earth

The globe is suffering from a sudden decline in the volume of oxygen, sending world leaders scurrying to sustain life on earth. Although scientists recognize that there could be any number of reasons, such as increases in pollution and CO2, they believe that the drop is too steep to be explained by these gradual processes. Instead they are focusing their suspicions on the recent publication of Theories of International Politics and Zombies by Daniel Drezner, which is sucking all of the oxygen out of the earth.

Since its publication, bookstores have not been able to keep enough copies on their shelves and it is all that international relations experts can think, write or blog about. How would humankind in fact handle a zombie invasion? Has Drezner portrayed alternative approaches with the proper nuance we would expect from a facetious undergraduate textbook? Would other forms of goblins and ghouls provide better teachable models for the dynamics of international affairs?

For his part, Drezner has been ubiquitous, appearing on countless news outlets on any number of subjects, as well as continually maintaining his own personal blog on foreign policy. This has left all of his fans literally breathless and there is no oxygen left for non-zombie related discussion.

International climate expert Vert Monde personally blames Drezner for the global crisis. "If this guy would just stop tweeting, blogging, writing about Zombies, texting -- whatever the hell it is that he does -- for just a minute, we might have a chance to save the planet," he said.

Others place the blame more on self-serious readers. President Obama spoke at a new briefing on American efforts to solve the crisis. "You know this was just for fun right? This book was not meant to be the modern version of the Prince, to be dissected and parsed for every tiny nuance. Jesus, get a grip."

Drezner could not be reached for comment. His wife told this reporter that he was shopping for a Lexus. Neighbors saw him leave his house with his oxygen tank.

Sunday Productivity Blogging: Sciral

I procrastinate by reading productivity blogs, in the hopes that the Universe will somehow find the irony funny enough to let me avoid the consequences of procrastination. (In year ten of this experiment, I can only say so far that the results are not what I initially desired.) One happy consequence of this habit is that I have picked up a few tools which do actually make me more productive. So, in the spirit of Charli's nerd-bloggin' Fridays, let me fill up the dead space of Sunday afternoons with some productivity pr0n.

First up: Sciral's Consistency, the simplest and most rigorous app I've ever encountered.

Tasks fall into three categories: Goals you are highly incentivized to accomplish (viz., watching every episode of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer), projects you are forced to accomplish (viz., grading exams), and the vast Other Category. Into this last category falls everything that you would like to accomplish ("I'm going to learn Mandarin!") but which require the sort of daily dedication few of us can credibly commit to (in this case, speaking Mandarin every day). In the absence of a Tiger Mother, many of us often stop practicing languages, going to the gym, or whatever long before we've accomplished our goal.

Consistency (the app) aims to change that by simply keeping a record of whether you've actually done what you wanted to do.

The US Department of Defense Law of War Manual: An Update

They're updating this.

I have a report in the 2009 (they're a bit behind...just go with it) Yearbook of International Humanitarian Law on efforts to produce a new service-wide US Department of Defence Law of War Manual. This would replace FM 27-10 and (should it ever see the light of day...just go with it) will be an incredibly important statement of US practice on the laws of war.

I consulted on and observed this project from August-December 2009 and I keep in contact with some of the editors. The description of the Manual (and estimate of delivery) are now outdated, but there is a good description of the process and methodology behind it. I can't go into any more details than that (there is a crazy on-going process) but it is "an update" for those who are interested. Here's the abstract:

One of the major legal instruments the US Department of Defense (DoD) will be relying on in terms of planning and carrying out its activities in the near future is a new law of war military manual which is expected to be published sometime in 2011. While on the surface such a document may not seem of critical interest to those interested in security/strategic studies or to humanitarian activists seeking to ban rather than regulate violence, there are important reasons to place a certain amount of emphasis on this DoD product and to expect that it will have a significant impact, especially on issues that are presently widely debated within the humanitarian legal community.

Do words matter?

The Obama administration's rhetorical escalation on Syria this week seems to have generated quite a bit of skepticism that it will have any effect. Drezner sees it as mostly harmless and won't really do any good. Daniel Serwer thinks for it to be effective, others are going to have to push harder. Andrew Sullivan finds Assad unfazed. True to form, the Neocons see it as too little.

On one level these are fair points -- if the sole measure of this rhetorical shift is whether or not it will compel Assad to leave office then obviously this will be a failure. But, no one in the administration believes that simply calling for Assad to leave coupled with a new set of limited sanctions will compel him to magically pack up and exit. That's not what this is about. It's about finding ways to keep the pressure on Assad by using a U.S. presidential statement to reinforce the legitimacy of the protest movement and conveying to the protesters (and the rest of the world) that they are on the right side of history.

This may seem little more than diplomatic fluff, and perhaps history will show that it had little or no effect. But, occasionally words do matter and remarkably sometimes they even inspire -- in ways that many of us may not fully appreciate and that social scientists often find difficult to measure. For example, while many Americans (myself included) were critical of President Reagan's bellicose rhetoric during his first term, especially his infamous "evil empire" speech, most of the East European and Soviet dissidents -- Havel, Michnik, Geremek, Sharansky, among others -- have long noted that those words from a U.S. President helped them get through some of the most difficult moments of communist crackdowns and Poland's Martial Law. If we measure Reagan's evil empire speech by Moscow's response, it didn't seem to have any discernible effect. However, if we ask the dissidents in the trenches, they tell us a very different story.

My sense from the early reporting out of Syria over the past day or two is that at least some of the activists have been boosted by the new American position and that this may help sustain their efforts. We'll see....

Clashing Networks and Foreign Policy

Anne Marie Slaughter and Dan Drezner had an interesting debate last week on the role of nonstate actors in foreign policy. AMS stakes out a “modern/liberal-social” position highlighting the role of nonstate actors, whereas DD takes a “subtle realist” view, maintaining the priority of states and national interests. DD sums up their differences this way:

I'm skeptical about the viability of transnational interests to effectively pressure multiple governments to adopt a common policy solution, and I'm super-skeptical that these groups can supply broad-based solutions independently of national governments.

My own take is that DD underestimates the extent to which transnationally-linked domestic coalitions affect policy, but that AMS takes too narrow a view of the civil society actors involved. I agree with DD that nonstate actors alone will not provide “broad-based solutions” themselves--although I don’t think that AMS would go that far anyway.

Most international issues do not pit states against nonstate actors, with each lining up on different sides of the issues. Rather, what we see are networks on each side, usually with states representing key components. Keck and Sikkink made this point years ago in a book that revived the scholarly debate on transnational relations. But the presence and importance of states in networks is often overlooked. States must be a major part of network studies because, in the end of course, they make policies.

On a day to day basis within networks, however, states are not necessarily the leading forces. When it comes to projecting the ideas and rallying the interests that go into policy outcomes, civil society actors play key roles. Acting as interest groups within states, they seek to shape governments’ preferences. Acting as NGOs across state borders and in international institutions, they exchange ideas, personnel, and money, affecting both domestic and international policy.

Notably as well, these networks are not all “progressive,” although most of the scholarly and journalistic attention has focused on human rights, environmental, and global justice groups. Rather, there is huge diversity among transnational advocates, with powerful right-wing networks fighting the left. Nor is it simply the case that conservatives ally with states to oppose changes in the status quo. In the ongoing battles that comprise most of international policy making, all sides support or reject change at certain times.

Finally, the means by which policy change happens transcend the staid “logics” of persuasion—framing, shaming, grafting, deliberation, dialogue, etc.--on which much of the literature has focused. Network members do use such tactics. But these are invariably countered by opposition networks. They smash frames and deploy their own equally resonant ones. They shame the shamers and honor those who the other side seeks to embarrass. They sever grafts while making their own.

Zombie Objections

Rodger's post about the commercial success of Dan Drezner's Theories of International Politics and Zombies joins a long line of fellow Ducks' quacking about this book. I've been a part of the conversation, too, but I can write about the book from a perspective that I think is unique: I've just finished teaching an introductory course where I assigned the book. (Hence my complete lack of posting over the past several weeks.) In other words, not only have I read it, I've seen whether undergrads get anything from it.

The verdict is clear: Zombies is a great complement for any introductory course, and many of the book's purported weaknesses or omissions are in fact its strengths.

Understanding Zombie Comedy

Earlier this week, Tufts professor Dan Drezner tweeted that his Theory of International Politics and Zombies book has now sold more than 10,000 copies. That's a huge total by academic standards and I sincerely congratulate Drezner on his success.

Fellow Duck of Minerva bloggers have previously written a good deal about zombies and Drezner's book. For Foreign Policy, Dan Nexon wrote a brief comment about Drezner's original article suggesting that we should think (naturally) about IR in terms of hierarchy and empire:

America's unmatched global-strike capabilities will lead most other remaining states to acquiesce to U.S. leadership over the zone of the living.

The result will not, unfortunately, be Liberal Order 3.0, but a global Pax Americana supported by regional client-empires tasked with controlling and eradicating local zombie eruptions.

Likewise, Laura Sjoberg argues that Drezner reifies masculinization in/of IR.

Reviewer Adam Weinstein argues that the book is "a light, breezy volume" laced with "quick dry punch lines" (Drezner is said to have a "weakness for the cheap joke"). While Charli Carpenter conceded that "the book can and must be read as parody," Vikash Yadav more critically writes that this hint of humor does not compensate for the mainstream thinking he finds both in Drezner's book and the larger debate about it:

I do not see the discussions about zombies as a type of new or out-of-the-box thinking. If anything, the discussions of zombies that I have noted so far are completely "in-the-box" thinking, except with a touch of geeky humor, parody, and wit that is usually lacking in the discipline.

So what would constitute an out-of-the box critique of Theory of International Politics and Zombies?

Friday Nerd Blogging

I was not inclined to see this film because the trailers made it look like a dumb comedy about an annoying Jar-Jar-Binks-esque alien with a potty-mouth and some equally dumb human sidekicks.

But having been force-fed Paul by my kids, I can now attest that it's not actually about aliens at all. Instead, it's about nerd culture and its antinomies in Western society. (Any film that incorporates spoken Klingon is ok in my book.)

Best exam question EVER!

I know it is hard to believe, but while most of the academic world is enjoying the last few weeks of university break, down under in Kiwi-land we're in the thick of the academic year. This year I tried out some new essay questions for my Gender and Post-Conflict Development and Feminist International Relations courses and I have to say- I created the best essay question ever. The suspense is killing you right? Here it is:

You've been asked to help create a realistic video game that illustrates women's experiences of war and insecurity. Referring to readings covered in class, what types of activities, challenges, and events would you include in the game? How do you think the public would respond to your game?

The best part about this question has been the incredible debates and discussions it created in class and the amazing answers students came up with. I had to share a couple.

One student designed the game to follow a family forced to flee their village. The family faces numerous challenges at each level of the game, including finding food and daily necessities through the black market, hiding from rebel attacks, and eventually joining and adapting to life in a refugee camp.

Another student created a female soldier character that survives war by joining in atrocities such as amputations. In the last phase of the game the player has to find a way to get included in the disarmament process- at the disarmament camps the female soldier character has to avoid sexual abuse and physical violence. Another student gives the player the option to choose from the following characters: a woman caught in a civil war in East Africa and a Western woman fighting within a peacekeeping unit. Both women face different sets of obstacles- including the threat of sexual violence from their comrades.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. The question was meant to be thought provoking (and quite frankly was a last ditch effort to create an exam that I thought might be more interesting to grade!). There were no limits to the ideas on how to create a game, but when it came to thinking about how audiences would respond to such a 'realistic' video games students were less enthusiastic. I guess it is worth asking: Would a truly realistic war video game, one that represented men and women's experiences of war- complete with sexual violence, food scarcity, amputations, and refugee flows- flop? No answers here, but would love to start a discussion. Or to hear what your video game would look like.

Syllabus Bleg: Science Fiction (Updated)

I could use some help. As I did in the spring, I'm teaching a seminar on "Science Fiction and Politics." I'm working on some significant changes to the syllabus. The class will now meet twice a week, which has implications for its flow, and I want to teach some different works. But I'm flailing a bit about some aspects of the syllabus, particularly with respect to (1) short readings to pair with books and (2) some specific assignments. A rough outline follows, including some notes about the kinds of pieces I'm looking for. A major issue concerning the latter is that I generally want supplemental readings that are short.

Crunching Drone Death Numbers

The Monkey Cage has published a detailed guest post by Christine Fair on the drone casualty debate. Fair takes leading drone-casualty-counters (Bergen and Tiedeman's New America Foundation database and new numbers out from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism) to task for their methodology, in particular focusing on their sourcing:

While these methodologies at first blush appear robust, they don’t account for a simple fact that non-Pakistani reports are all drawing from the same sources: Pakistani media accunts. How can they not when journalists, especially foreign journalists, cannot enter Pakistan’s tribal areas? Unfortunately, Pakistani media reports are not likely to be accurate in any measure and subject to manipulation and outright planting of accounts by the ISI (Pakistan’s intelligence agency) and the Pakistani Taliban and affiliated militant outfits.

Pakistani journalists have readily conceded to this author that perhaps as many as one in three journalists are on the payroll of the ISI. In fact, the ISI has a Media Management Wing which manages domestic media and monitors foreign media coverage of Pakistan. Even a prominent establishment journalist,Ejaz Haider, has questioned “What right does this wing have to invite journalists for ‘tea’ or ask anyone to file a story or file a retraction? The inquiry commission [to investigate the death of slain journalist Shehzad Saleem] should also look into the mandate of this wing and put it out to pasture.”

Pakistani journalists have explained to this author that, with respect to drone strikes, either the Pakistani Taliban call in the “victim count” or the ISI plants the stories with compliant media in print and television—or some combination of both. In turn, the western media outlets pick up these varied accounts. Of course the victim counts vary to give the illusion of authenticity, but they generally include exaggerated counts of innocents, including women and children. Of course as recent suicide bombings by females suggest, women should not be assumed innocent by virtue of their gender.

Thus, these reports mobilized by NAF and BIJ, despite the claims of both teams of investigators, cannot be independently verified. At best, their efforts reflect circular reporting of Pakistani counts of dubious veracity.

I think this is a really important analysis and share Fair's concerns about the reliability and validity of these methods. I haven't looked closely at BIJ's dataset, but I've written previously about not only the sourcing problem, but also coding anomalies and conceptual problems with the NAF methods. The Jamestown Foundation, which has another drone-casualty dataset that Fair doesn't address, has its own problems.

All that said, having made a clear case that we can't really verify the numbers, I think it's very strange that Fair arrives at the conclusion, by the end of her article, that drones must therefore be a pro-civilian technology:

U.S. officials interviewed as well as Pakistani military and civilian officials have confirmed to this author that drones kill very few “innocent civilians.” Indeed, it was these interviews that led me to revise my opinion about the drone program: I had been a drone opponent until 2008. I now believe that they are best option.

It's hard to argue with her claims that drones might be more discriminate than 'regular airstrikes,' an argument that largely resets on her observation that the drone program is more highly regulated and this would be obvious to the public if the CIA didn't have a variety of incentives to keep mum about the details. But in the absence of good data comparing the kill ratios - which we really don't have for non-drone-strikes either - it's hard to make this case definitively. Also, relative to what? A law-enforcement approach that involved capturing and trying terrorists rather than obliterating them might or might not be more 'pro-civilian' - though it would certainly be more costly in terms of military life and assets. We simply don't know.

Regarding how we might know, I also don't buy Fair's argument that attempts to verify the civilian status of victims through interviews would be fallacious.

$h•! PTJ Says #1: justifying your theory and methodology

I am going to try writing down pieces of advice that I give to students all the time, in the hopes that they might be useful for people who can't make it to my office hours.

"The fact that no one else has approached topic X with your particular perspective is not a sufficient warrant for approaching topic X with your particular combination of theory and methodology. In order to get the reader on board, you have to basically issue a promissory note with a grammar that runs something like:

'Here's something odd/striking/weird/counterintuitive about X. Other scholars who have talked about X either haven't noticed this odd/striking/etc. thing at all, or they haven't found it odd/striking/etc. Furthermore, they haven't done so because of something really important about their theory/methodology that -- even though it generates some insights -- simply prevents them from appreciating how odd/striking/etc. this thing is, let alone trying to explain it. Fortunately, there's my alternative, which I am now going to outline in a certain amount of abstract detail; but bear with me, because there's a mess of empirical material about topic X coming after that, and I promise you that my theoretical/methodological apparatus will prove its worth in that empirical material by a) showing you just how odd/striking/etc. that thing is, and b) explaining it in a way that other scholars haven't been able to and won't be able to.'

Almost no one is convinced by theory and methodology, and absolutely no one is or should be convinced by a claim that existing approaches aren't cool enough because they aren't like yours. The burden is on you to give the reader reasons to keep reading, and at the end of the day the only reason for theory and methodology is to explain stuff that we didn't have good explanations for before. So you have to convince the reader that other approaches *can't* explain that odd thing about topic X. (And if you can do this without gratuitous and out-of-context references to Thomas Kuhn and being 'puzzle-driven,' that's even better, because I won't have to make you write an essay on why basically nobody in the social sciences actually uses Kuhn correctly.)"

Taking David Cameron to School......(Literally. This guy is stupid.)

I get most of my European news from the Financial Times, which I admit does make for a somewhat skewed perspective on British politics. You all do still wear top hats and monocles, right? But apparently Britain's Prime Minister is promoting, earlier than expected in the wake of the London riots, a tax credit for married or co-habiting couples with the belief that a two-parent family makes for a more stable home and fewer young thugs (or righteous freedom fighters railing against the system, either way) looting cell phone stores in the future. Politicians are so stupid.

Let's take it for granted that the cause of looting lies in the failures of parents rather than of the social environment in which the poor grow up in. I actually do believe that a loving, two parent family is the best way to raise kids, even as it is by no means the only factor. But David Cameron needs a basic lesson in positivistic research design and causality. (Don't do it, Patrick T. Jackson! Do not pull your hair out every time I use that word inappropriately in a way inconsistent with how science actually operates! It is not worth it! You have lovely hair!)

The causal logic behind this scheme is that two parents simply sleeping under the same roof leads to better-raised kids. If we simply create incentives for the father to stay in the house, surely good parenting will result. Obviously this is silly. It is the quality of parenting that matters. Having two good parents is better than one good parent. But having one good parent is better than two bad parents who hate each other, or two parents who don't like one another or one good parent and one bad parent.

Generally when single mothers are raising children it is because the guy is kind of a d!&k to begin with. That's why he left. Or if not, the mom and dad are ill-suited to one another -- they fight like cats and dogs. In other words the fact of the single family is endogenous to the crappy relationship, rather than the exogenous cause of the f*&cked-up kid. The Tories are getting the causal relationship wrong. We see this all the time.

So how is providing a financial incentive to keep them in a loveless relationship or keep a deadbeat around going to make for better adjusted kids? Well, it isn't, David. The key to better kids is better parents, which means some kind of social engineering at a young age to help them learn, ideally before puberty, to resolve conflicts peacefully, not act like they are the center of the universe, etc. Not to change sleeping arrangements.

Also, are the type of people who shack up purely to get a tax write-off the kind of people we want having babies? This is a strange marriage of Reaganite/Thatcherite incentive economics and social conservatism. Those should be separated. Good parents need good values, not more money. Good luck!

How do we do that? I have no idea, but my guess would be education. Yes, that very education budget that is being slashed in the UK right now by the Tories. (That is true, right? Again, I just read the Financial Times, so I only know the market for yachts is stronger than ever. I'm serious-- that was an actual article).

Famine and Conflict Resolution in Somalia - part IV (on the 2011 East African drought)

So, I mentioned in a previous post on the debt ceiling that my wife and I were expecting the birth of our first child. Our son, Guy William, was born this past week, and I couldn't resist sharing our news. His namesake is my friend Guy Hughes, who died tragically five years ago in a climbing accident.

Guy was a tireless advocate for global justice, and I have no doubt that he would have fiercely been defending the needs of those suffering from the famine but with organizational panache, sensitivity to the inherent humanity of the people in the region, and appreciation of the wider currents in local and global politics that shape these unfolding events for both good and ill.

I suppose the birth of our son and the famine in Somalia are coupled in my mind since a disproportionate share of those affected by the current drought are children. Maybe it is a little maudlin, but I have a new appreciation for the lengths to which people will go to protect their children.

Plumpy'nut Goodness

So, with these thoughts and associations, in my fourth post on the crisis in the Horn, I wanted to write about the region's long-term needs and how to transition from crisis management to conflict resolution. In my first post, I assessed the role climate change had played, if any, in the current crisis. In my second, I examined the drought signal and politics as causes of the famine. In my third post, I focused on what was needed in the short-run in terms of emergency finance, access, and sources of food. This one examines conflict resolution. Because I've been too long-winded in this post (shock!), I've got a fifth post in the works on the future of pastoralism.

Crimes in and of Famine

If you find the argument that famine is man-made to be credible, then famine is not just an inevitable outcome of the structural conditions of "failed states" but rather it is purposeful, systematic, and systemic human rights abuse and therefore criminal.

Those who make the argument that the current famine in East Africa is man-made place more blame on political problems of restricted access, entitlements and aid management than the environmental factors of drought, overpopulation, and food scarcity. That Somalia has been hit harder by famine than neighboring Ethiopia and Kenya underscores this point. If famine is, at least predominantly, man-made than by extension there are individuals or groups responsible for causing the famine or exacerbating its effects of death and displacement. As Charles Kenny argues for Foreign Policy, "In order to ensure widespread death by starvation, a governing authority must make a conscious decision: it must actively exercise the power to take food from producers who need it or deny food assistance to victims."

Paintball and Pedagogy: A Bleg

Syllabus-revamping time this year coincides with the last few quiet, pre-soccer-season weekends available for paint-balling with my son. With both BT Omegas and class prep on the brain, thought I'd reach out for ideas on how to integrate class trips to the arena into a course on the laws of war.

I've done this once before, when I taught "War and Gender" back at Drake University. In that case, the students organized it as an experiment in sex-specific tactics on the field. They ran variations, pitting all male and all-female teams against one another, or working in mixed-gender teams. It was voluntary, so more boys showed up, though the girls who self-selected in were just as likely to beat the boys. There was also some 'finding' that teams with girls on them were more cooperative and less devil-may-care. I used it mostly to help them think critically about making inferences from small-N non-controlled experiments, but it was also great to see them self-organize some class-related fun.

I've also known a colleague or two to use paintball a little more systematically as a pedagogical tool. At the same time, I don't know how common this is and haven't seen an article in International Studies Perspectives or anything describing the value or pitfalls of this approach for different kinds of classes.

So my bleg is three-fold.

1) First, have any Duck writers or readers used paintball pedagogically (or been in a class where it was used) and if so how did the prof make it work as a teaching tool (v. just a fun class-building activity)?

2) Second, is anyone aware of scholarly articles or resources on using paintball to teach international relations, international security, or military affairs? (I'm certain there are military and law enforcement training materials that use paintball to teach small-unit tactics, but what I'm looking for is pedagogical strategies for supplementing liberal arts political science courses with paintball for students who like to study war but may have never picked up a gun.)

3) Any specific ideas on teaching Rules of War in particular through paintball? The course is about the Geneva Conventions and more broadly the role of ethical norms in armed conflict. Here's a link to last year's syllabus.

4) If you think this is a horrible idea (particularly as a required activity) please expound.

Are You Ready for Some Football.....Analogies?

Recently I offered an "argument" about what conservative males find attractive about Sarah Palin -- her attractiveness -- and I provided some "evidence" by reference to the parallels between pretty female candidates and women sideline reporters with two XXs (Chromosomes, you creeps! Get your mind out of the gutter!). I made the claim that Bachmann's support rested more on her craziness than her beauty, but then I found this. I am recalibrating my argument.....

But I want to push the analogy further, and ask -- who gives a f*#k about the Iowa Straw Poll? Why, when Michele Bachmann wins, do they drop confetti? Don't they usually wait to the convention for that? Winning the votes of 4,000 Iowans now gets you what American GIs had to fight the Battle of the Bulge for? Is ticker tape that much cheaper these days, that we can just use it wily-nilly?

I realized that a similar thing is happening on the NFL football field. It used to be that before a game the announcer would simply introduce the visiting team, it would run out, and everyone would boo. Then the announcer would raise his voice and cheer for "YOUR [insert city and mascot]." Everyone would cheer. And then they would play a football game. At the Super Bowl, though, they would bring giant inflatable helmets and place them in front of the tunnel to the locker rooms. They would shoot off fireworks when the teams came out. This added to the pageantry (wc?), the significance (wc?) of the ultimate game, the fight for the championship.

Now everyone has got an inflatable helmet for every regular season game. For all I know they use it in the preseason. It's exactly like dropping confetti at the Iowa Straw Poll, a game that doesn't mean a thing (unless you are Tim Pawlenty). Why is everything So Very Important Now so that we are all spent, jaded and unimpressed by the final contest? Seriously, unless someone's nipple slips out, I just don't care. (Don't get any ideas, Romney. That was metaphorical.)

The same thing is going on at kids' birthday parties. (Stay with me.) When I was a kid, the only place you found a bouncy house was at the State Fair. These were not available on an everyday basis, in your Personal Home. Maybe this is just Southern California, but there is a guy down the street with three kids who has a bouncy house three times a year in his backyard for every birthday. At my house, we put out some folding chairs in the backyard for the parents and turn on the sprinkler. The kids love it, but they are young. I know I am about two years away from a total meltdown when my son begins to demand a temporary rollercoaster be set up to mark the anniversary of his passing through my wife's cervix. It's just a birthday (straw pool, regular season game, etc)! I just want to understand this phenomenon.

Pornography and National Security: The ever expanding threat

In today's 'horrors of bad social science', we have a piece by Jennifer S. Bryson, director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project, (which seems to be a conservative think-tank) who has written a piece for the Institute's blog on the threat of pornography for national security. (No really.)

Bryson asks the question that no serious scholar has ever, ever addressed and comes up with an argument to be considered. In fact, she is getting right on top of this hard and pressing issue.She reaches around the boundaries of conventional thinking about terrorism and slowly but steadily penetrates the burning question as to whether pornography drives a serious challenge to National Security:

With the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks staring us in the face, we already know that our failure to have an approach to security that is robust and accurate has dire consequences. Pornography has long circulated nearly unbounded due to calls for “freedom,” but what if we are actually making ourselves less free by allowing pornography itself to be more freely accessible?
Are there security costs to the free-flow of pornography? If so, what are they? Are we as a society putting ourselves at risk by turning a blind eye to pornography proliferation?
I wonder further: Could it be that pornography drives some users to a desperate search for some sort of radical “purification” from the pornographic decay in their soul? Could it be that the greater the wedge pornography use drives between an individual’s religious aspirations and the individual’s actions, the more the desperation escalates, culminating in increasingly horrific public violence, even terrorism?

Let me tell you, now that we’ve been stirred to this threat - of young men somehow being converted to wicked, wicked ways - we need to act now, right here and now, damn it! Clearly the perpetrators of this filth have been very, very bad and need to be punished.

I believe that we all need to come together, scholars, government workers, NGOs, and throw caution to the wind. We need to straddle the division between us, fuse ourselves together and come up with an inspired solution. Let’s use each other to the very best of our abilities, and respond quickly to this vitally important need.

It’s Friday night so I’m just going to be at home thinking really long and hard about a solution to this problem. I’m just going to lie back right here by my lonesome self, thinking about nothing but pornography... for the sake of National Security.

Friday Nerd Blogging

George R. R. Martin to JK Rowling:

























via GameofLOLs:

Harry Potter spoiler: Snape kills Dumbledore.
A Song of Ice and Fire spoiler: EVERYONE YOU LOVE IS KILLED

Oh about that? here is one awfully funny ASOIAF essay (I really do mean 'awfully').

Impunity Gap: Syria

There is a near absence of calls for accountability in the international responses to the ongoing and escalating violence in Syria. Unlike in the Libya situation, where there was a swift UN Security Council Resolution mandating both the use of force and a referral to the International Criminal Court, influential states and human rights groups have yet to stand firm on either type of response for Syria. Is it simply premature or counter-productive to demand justice when violence has yet to cease? Or are the political and security implications of removing Assad greater than the risks of impunity?

There is some consensus that the scale and manner of the attacks by Syrian forces against civilian protestors constitute crimes against humanity and that President al-Assad is likely "most responsible" for such systematic violence. Estimates put the death toll between 1,600 and 2,000 so far. Comparable to other situations before the ICC, Syria would meet the "sufficient gravity" criteria that determine the selection of situations and cases by the Court's Office of the Prosecutor and Pre-Trial Chambers. But the much less impartial political criteria that guide the referral of situations to the ICC by the Security Council are more strategic.

While the Security Council has condemned the violence and the US is calling for consensus on stronger measures, there appears to be little political will for an ICC referral. The US, UK, and France have been the strongest critics of the Syrian regime's actions. China and Russia initially resisted endorsing UNSC interference but then supported the condemnations that were expressed in the Security Council's first Resolution on August 3rd and are unlikely to block a future resolution. Moreover, the Arab world is now breaking ranks with Syria as many states, notably including Saudi Arabia, recalled their ambassadors and demanded Assad end the attacks.

Film review: Godard's "Made in U.S.A."

“We were in a political movie ... Walt Disney with blood.”

I generally do not discuss films unless I enjoy them and intend to recommend them without hesitation. Jean-Luc Godard's "Made in U.S.A." is an exception, worth mentioning in part because it has so rarely been viewed in the US. Godard made the film in 1966, during an incredibly prolific period of his career. Ostensibly, the film pays homage to "The Big Sleep," a Humphrey Bogart-Lauren Bacall detective story based on a book by Raymond Chandler. That earlier film classic is well-known for the sizzling chemistry between Bogart and Bacall, as well as the convoluted plot and ambiguous resolution of the murder mystery.

For his source material, Godard used a book (The Jugger) by Donald Westlake. It is one of Westlake's Parker novels, penned pseudonymously as Richard Stark. Since Westlake did not authorize the use of his book and was not paid for his ideas, he sued successfully to prevent the film from being distributed commercially in the United States. The film premiered briefly at the New York Film Festival n 1967, but was not then shown again stateside until 2009 -- very soon after Westlake died. TCM recently broadcast the movie and I recorded it.

Artistically, the film is interesting, colorful, and quite odd.

Stability Ops Among Muggles

Foreign Policy's latest foray into the nexus between science fiction and political reality is a lively sketch on post-conflict reconstruction, Harry Potter style. Written by experts on the topic from the Marine Corps War College, Human Rights Watch and the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict, the key point is this: though the "story" ends when the bad guys are vanquished (be they Deatheaters or Saddam Hussein's forces) is is then that the real battle begins.

Former U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre and retired Gen. Gordon Sullivan have described four pillars of post-conflict reconstruction: security, governance and participation, urgent social and economic needs, and justice and reconciliation. Of these pillars, the magical world can currently afford to feel complacent about only one -- social and economic needs. After all, with the proper application of scouring, mending, and engorgement charms, much of the physical damage wrought by the war can be repaired, and food can be multiplied to meet the needs of the population. But with respect to the other imperatives, critical challenges remain.

Surviving Death Eaters will have to be brought to justice or reintegrated into magical society. Long-standing rifts among magical communities that the war widened must be healed. Most of all, we must ensure that the values that triumphed in the final battle -- tolerance, pluralism, and respect for the dignity of all magical and non-magical creatures alike -- are reflected in the institutions and arrangements that emerge from the conflict. What ultimately matters is not just whether something evil was defeated, but whether something good is built in its place.

Brilliant article; I must say, however, that I'm not sure the same dilemmas of post-conflict reconstruction apply to the end of all conflicts in the same way. Invoking "the recent experience of American Muggles in Iraq and Afghanistan," the piece would seem a rejoinder to Bush-era declarations of "Mission: Accomplished." But the defeat of Voldemort is more like the expulsion of Saddam Hussein from Kuwait than it is like the US' invasion and occupation of the Middle East and Central Asia post-9/11.

Voldemort, after all, is the invader; he is simply repulsed. It's not as if Hogwarts invades the Muggle world, wins, and then has to deal with all the thorny dilemmas of reconstituting Muggle society. Hogwarts basically just defended its own borders and identity. As such its reconstruction projects will be more like Kuwait's in the absence of Saddam's invading army (rebuilding walls and lives) than like those of the US in Iraq in the absence of the old order (rebuilding society itself from scratch).

Even in such instances, as Cynthia Enloe reminded us in her post-Gulf War book The Morning After, victory is never as straight-forward as it would seem. But how non-straight-forward may be a matter of significant degree.

Safeguarding medical workers in hostilities

Yesterday the ICRC released a report on the very scary and depressing trend of attacks on medical workers in situations of armed conflict and civil disturbances:

According to Dr Robin Coupland, who led the research carried out in 16 countries across the globe, millions could be spared if the delivery of health care were more widely respected. "The most shocking finding is that people die in large numbers not because they are direct victims of a roadside bomb or a shooting," he said. "They die because the ambulance does not get there in time, because health-care personnel are prevented from doing their work, because hospitals are themselves targets of attacks or simply because the environment is too dangerous for effective health care to be delivered."

This makes for some pretty grim and reading.

Yet the evidence is clear – whether it is the targeting of medical workers in Libya, the targeting of a hospital in Afghanistan by the Taliban, or the unwarranted persecution of doctors in Bahrain. (A problem that Dan Nexon highlighted earlier this year here at the Duck.)  Even the allegation that the CIA found Osama bin Laden using a vaccination program puts medical workers and vaccination teams at risk – a potential disaster for global health.

(Aisde: Most, if not all of these issues, are being followed by Christopher Albon at his excellent blog, Conflict Health. Go read it. Read it now!)