The Duck of Minerva

What I Learned Teaching IR in Asia (2): Show me the Policy Relevance!

2012-02-01T00:00:00.000-05:00

The robot special effects are pretty funny

Part one is here, where I noted how teaching IR in Asia taught me how to stop worrying and love American empire, and that American social science’ monolinguism is actually a highly responsible research technique. Here are a few more:

4. Imperial Star‘Fleet Professors,’ or why everyone seems to want to work for MOFAT. In his essay in Cooperation under Anarchy (btw, was that sorta the bible for anyone else in their first year of IR grad school?), Van Evera had that good remark about ‘fleet professors.’ The German navy, in the race with the Royal Navy, coopted professors, through money, access, and prestige, to make an intellectual case for expansion and competition. We used that term in grad school to indicate PhDs who wanted to work for the government or DoD, or more generally, had possible conflicts of interest because of relations with the state. Yet connection to the state is fairly common in Korea and smiled upon by university administration. Everyone (yes, me too) seems to have some relation to government-affiliated think-tanks and such (here, here, here). Conferences routinely and explicitly invite policy-makers and expect academics to comment on current issues. I worry about this, because government preferences inevitably influence positions, and it is so easy to get pulled into predictions for which you have little knowledge beyond a few articles you’ve read. I am regularly asked when NK will collapse, e.g., or who should own the Liancourt Rocks, but as Saideman noted, it’s so easy to put your foot in your mouth when you reach like that. It’s also kind of easy for this to turn into an academic food-fight, as it did the first time I debated a Chinese IR academic. By contrast, I find Korean colleagues quite excited to engage in the policy-making joust.

The idea that this might damage the ‘speaking truth to power’ role of the professoriate is generally not worried about. (Read this on the issue.) Instead, following the yangban legacy (similar to the Chinese mandarins), the idea is that PhDs, with all their accumulated wisdom (hah! somebody call the Tea Party!), should help guide the state better. On the one hand, this is terribly flattering. Koreans, and east Asians generally, respect academics in a way I was wholly unprepared for, especially given the widespread American attitude that we are either overintellectualized ballonheads who lose our glasses on our foreheads, or a liberal atheist threat to the good values of Christian America. I get invited to speak at think-tanks and public events, talk on the radio, and write in newspapers in way I never was at home. On the other hand, it does raise the next issue…

5. Enough of your model-building, Poindexter! We need policy relevance! Walt regularly laments that IR, and political science generally, are too abstract and too distant from reality (certainly grad school was). Korea and China (although not Japan so much in my experience) are the opposite. Political science is so policy relevant that it often threatens to become public policy prescription instead. I remember this issue of ISR which pretty much found that outside the US and a few other places, political science isn’t really about basic research at all. I understand in Korea, with the enormous pressure of NK on everything we do in IR here, why this is so; bizarre and terrifying, NK inevitably dominates a huge amount of my teaching and conference time. But I do think this impoverishes Korean IR theoretically. (Here is the best IR journal to come out of Korea; let me know what you think.) And with Chinese colleagues, it is worse. It is hard to tell how much of their policy edge comes from ties to the state, and how much is ‘overseen’ by the state or required by the party (although like most people, I have found Chinese scholars in private to be far less ideological and aggressive than at the conference table). My experience is that Chinese political science is pretty much public policy, not what Duck methodologists would consider social science. At some point, this will have to change in order to address issue 3 (American IR dominance). In the Korean case, given the enormous amount of time devoted to NK in IR here, I can’t see this until after unification.

6. Springer’s Final Thought: Nobody wins when IR theory cheats on its cases. Dave Kang once told me that East Asia is a ‘candy store’ of cases for IR, and they are terribly under-researched. Teaching here has really shown me that. Forget all your standard (i.e., western) IR examples like the Cuban Missile Crisis, the inter-war period, or Napoleon. Undergrads here only know this stuff vaguely, and you can’t connect with them if all you’ve got are stories about white guys. Start thinking about the Imjin War or Qianlong, and if you don’t know what that means, that’s the whole point. There are lots of good puzzles. For example, why don’t Japan and SK ally balance against China as realism/balance of power theory says they should? What about a pre-modern Confucian peace? It is unfortunate that Asian work on this is underdeveloped. Asian history has many good cases that we don’t know about, because we are overfocused on conflicts that are both modern (after Columbus) and Western. That space-time limit (Western, post-1500) has really struck me most as an IR theorist living here. Just within the West, consider that Rome and Carthage have scarcely been explored a as bipolar system, even though modern IR is pretty much built on cold war bipolarity. Then think about the fact that China has been a reasonably coherent entity for something like 2200 years. The room for IR theory application and improved generalizability is huge.

Cross-posted at Asia Security Blog.

Superpowers Are What We Make of Them

2012-01-31T18:17:00.003-05:00

The Economist lead story this week on China's Paradox of Prosperity offers some fascinating fodder for a lecture on constructivism:

"In this issue we launch a weekly section devoted to China. It is the first time since we began our detailed coverage of the United States in 1942 that we have singled out a country in this way. The principal reason is that China is now an economic superpower and is fast becoming a military force capable of unsettling America."

What strikes me about this paragraph is the factual assertion that China is now a superpower. Perhaps I've been reading too much of Dan Drezner, but my first reaction was "really? Prove it." Yet now that The Economist - a leading authoritative news source - has stated this, is it now "fact"? Are superpowers what we make of them?

Toward Pracademia

2012-01-30T14:16:00.006-05:00

Among the assigned readings for my new doctoral seminar in Human Security this week are a number of pieces from last year's International Studies Review Theory v. Practice Symposium. There are numerous fascinating pieces here, including Dan Drezner's case study on the evolution of "smart sanctions," Roland Paris' discussion of "fragile states" as a case study in epistemic agenda-setting, and Kittikhoun and Weiss' debunking "The Myth of Scholarly Irrelevance for the U.N."

In particular, a quote from Jentleson and Ratner's contribution jumped out at me:

"The profession-based incentive structure and other aspects of academia's dominant organizational culture... devalue policy relevance. Doctoral students are cued early on that their program of study is more about the discipline than the world. Curriculua tend to feature courses on formal modeling, game theory and statistics far more than ones on policy areas, history or states/regions. Then when it comes time ot hit the job market, search committees give far more weight to a dissertation's theoretical question than policy significance, and readily ignore, if not look down upon, policy oriented publications outside of the scholarly peer-reviewed domain. It thus is quite individually rational for so few graduate students to take on policy-relevant dissertations - rational for working within the system as it exists, but cumulatively irrational for the intellectual diversity and professional pluralism that a discipline such as political science and field such as IR should manifest. It is also out of synch if not in denial of job market realities... not preparing graduate students for this wider range of options borders on malpractice."

We are beginning the term by thinking about "bridging the gap" for three reasons:

1) "Human Security" is, if neither a paradigm shift nor "hot air," usefully understood as a specific policy domain, and human security policies of all kinds are being shaped by causal understandings percolating out of the academy

2) Therefore the course is based on understanding the classic empirical research on key human security topics (human rights, humanitarian affairs, humanitarian intervention, the laws of war, peace-building, etc) with a view toward understanding how to transmit the empirical insights of those literatures to policy-makers in those domain, as well as an appreciate of why this is so challenging

3) This pedagogy is in both respects a deliberate yet already uncomfortable attempt to buck the trend Jentleson and Ratner correctly identify. Doctoral students need both the skills to do policy-relevant, practitioner-oriented work if they choose AND the ability to write for comprehensive exams / compete in academia. The trick is going to be teaching both simultaneously, so I figure the first step is helping them to understand the difference.

Will be reporting back on my attempts through the course of the term. Meanwhile, pedagogical suggestions are highly welcome.

GOP SotU Response Better than SotU (2) - Didn't Expect that

2012-01-29T10:00:00.000-05:00

Part one of my response to Obama’s 2012 State of the Union is here.

3. The foreign policy section was weaker and more militaristic than usual. The opening bit about the Iraq war making us ‘safer and more respected around the world’ was jaw-dropping. I guess this really is a campaign speech outreach to the right, because I can’t believe any of the president’s 2008 voters actually buy that line. Does anyone believe that anymore, except for the right-wing think-tank set or something? Wow. Didn’t we vote for Obama because of exactly the kind of Bushian American hubris that can read an unjustified, unprovoked, unilateral assault on another state (which would have provoked howls of rejection by Americans if done by any other country in the world) as a great American victory? Veterans too got a pander wishlist – even though even Michelle Bachmann (!) has come to realize that VA benefits will have to be included in any budget deal.

Next came the deeply disturbing comparison of the US democratic body politic to a special forces team. Wow, again. Really? A wildly diverse, sprawling, open, liberal culture should look to JSOC for its model? We are not a nation of armies, and the discipline and anti-individualism of the military is exactly not what we want in our politics. We want our politics to be open, rich, boisterous, a bit chaotic, even fun; we want a social culture open and tolerant enough to create artists and musicians, entrepreneurs and eccentrics, poets and hippies and weirdoes and all that. This is basic Mill here, not Starshship Troopers. This reminds me of Huntington’s infatuation with a military lifestyle compared to pluralism in the Soldier and the State. The militarization of American culture since 9/11 is terrifying, and that even the president would deploy such analogies is all the more reason to end the war on terror and slow the growth of the military-industrial complex.

Finally, I guess Israel now is pretty much a state in the union: our guarantee is ‘iron-clad,’ which sure sounds a lot like a blank-check for Netanyahu to do something erratic. Iran, here we come! And you’ll notice there was nothing on the much-hyped ‘Asian pivot,’ which I am convinced is bogus, because Americans don’t care about Asia.

4. The 2010 GOP response was so reliably jingoistic, shallow, and self-serving, I gave it its own post. But was anyone else really pleased to see how restrained, polite, and professional Daniels was? I was amazed; I expected Tea Party-style hysteria about un-American influences, appeasement on ‘islamofascism,’ incipient erosion of the Constitution under ObamaCare, betrayal of allies, etc. (Where’s Glenn Beck when you need him?)
Instead Daniels was measured and his concerns reasonable. He called the GOP a ‘loyal opposition,’ rejecting the extremism of the GOP presidential debates about Obama as the greatest threat to American since WWII or something. He noted the president’s upright personal life. Ideally this wouldn’t make a difference in a liberal state’s politics. I couldn’t care less how many wives Gingrich has had, but the GOP has become worse than the nuns of my Catholic grade school on sex. The modern GOP wants to regulate the bedroom and the family, so it is nice to see Daniels admit that Obama meets that standard (hint: Gingrich,Limbaugh, and Rove don’t). He also noted how Obama didn’t create the crisis, even if he bucked how much W is actually to blame.
The criticisms that then followed were fairly reasonable. He’s right that we can’t just keep spending like this. Our status as a reserve currency printer does not permanently insure against a Greek-style run (although it does give us a lot more room to misbehave than anyone thought). The math on middle-class entitlements and debt is pretty terrifying over the next generation.
Here’s Sully again on Daniels, saying something similar. See how nice is to have a midwest Republican speaking like a normal guy? Kinda makes you like Ohio after all, huh?
Cross-posted at the Asian Security Blog.

Friday "I Really Am Just a Nerd" Blogging

2012-01-27T14:19:00.039-05:00

I was shocked, shocked to read Brian Rathbun's characterization of me in a recent Canard as a "robot" who has only been posing as a Battlestar Galactica addict as part of my cover (!):

The academic and foreign policy worlds were rocked today by the news that Charli Carpenter -- prolific academic, policy wonk, and mom -- is in fact a robot. An anonymous source told this paper: "There were the academic writings, then all the policy work, the grant writing and management. She never missed her son's soccer games though... it was just too much. Her makers made a mistake by not giving her any weaknesses."

The revelation replaces the previous rumor among academics that Carpenter was actually an alien from the series Battlestar Galactica that she loves so much. That appears to have just been a hobby for the robot... Our CIA source said, "There is no room in this country for relentlessly hard-working academic robots raising well-adjusted families, no matter who it turns out they work for."

This bit of yellow journalism, peppered with conjecture and misinformation, regurgitates a malicious leak from the alleged intelligence community without corroboration, and ill-befits a blogger of Rathbun's caliber. The saddest part is that colleagues I know and love (to watch sci-fi with) have apparently taken these rumors at face value and are now doubting my status as a bona-fide nerd:

Friends were shocked, but not necessarily surprised. Dan Nexon, a professor at Georgetown University, said, "We always joked that Charli was a machine. She writes like a book a week. And good ones, too. Not the usual schlock we turn out." He added, "She was always so good with technology. And she really likes science fiction. We all hoped she was just a nerd though. I guess we were fooling ourselves. I feel so betrayed."

Well, to Dan and to anyone who has fallen victim to this conspiracy theory, I offer up the following as proof of both my humanity and my authentic nerd-dom:

1) Rathbun's source is mistaken in claiming that I never miss a soccer game. In fact, I missed one in April 2011 to attend a panel on Zombies and International Relations and one the previous year to attend a panel on Battlestar Galactica, both at the yearly geek-fest known as the International Studies Association Annual Convention and both about as nerdy as one can get.

2) Rathbun erred in taking Dan's statement that I write "good" books (that is, serious works of political science) every week at face value. A quick fact-check would have shown that I've written exactly three books since 2006, and one of those was only an edited volume - a weekly book-production rate of only .0096 even if you consider an edited book a book. In fact a comparison of my publishing record to those of my Duck colleagues suggests that if I'm an academic robot, they probably all are too, especially Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Rodger Payne (and these numbers do not even include their 'other publications'):*

Note however that my publications in the less-than-serious area of science fiction and politics outweigh those of several Duck colleagues, placing me firmly within the Duck nerd block - PROOF OF MY NERD CREDENTIALS.**

3) Regarding the robot conspiracy, nothing could be farther from the truth. While Rathbun unblinkingly echoes the CIA's claim that I'm heralding a robot takeover, I have in fact been constantly at the vanguard against such a threat, studiously tracking developments in autonomous lethal systems, training my son in weaponry and small-unit tactics in preparation for Judgment Day, and even sounding the alarm when powerful members of our own profession exhibit cyborg-like tendencies.

4) Additionally, I most emphatically dispute Rathbun's claim that "Battlestar Galactica is just a hobby" for me. This would be like saying that Star Trek, Star Wars, Firefly or Game of Thrones are "just hobbies" for me, or that Harry Potter is "just a hobby" for Dan Nexon. Perhaps if Rathbun would spend more time watching Portlandia and less wasting brain-cells on Downton Abbey, he would understand.

5) Finally, Rathbun might have thought twice about his source's credibility when s/he referred to my children as "well-adjusted." Clearly this is not a person who has ever had a look at my Friday Nugget Blogging posts from my days at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

Indeed this piece of writing is so far beneath the quality of Rathbun's usual astute investigative journalism that one wonders whether Rathbun himself is actually the author. I suggest instead that this particular Canard may be a politically motivated attempt by actual undercover robots within the (artificial) intelligence community to divert the general population from their impending takeover.

Note how the author of this post (whoever it is) makes it sound as if the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica are mere "aliens" rather than themselves lethal autonomous robots. I suspect government elements (including possibly Dan Drezner, a known CIA schill), are behind this blatant attempt at misinformation and mass distraction. I urge my good friend and co-blogger Brian Rathbun to check his anti-virus software, reinforce his fire-walls, and change his passwords. Networked computers will be the death of us all, and this Canard is likely just one more sign of the looming apocalypse.

___________________________
*Data includes only those Ducks whose complete CV I could find online; it excludes those who list only 'selected publications' on their websites.
**Of course, I'm clearly not as nerdy as Dan, but remember this is someone who named his child after a character in a fantasy novel so frankly I'd be out of my league trying to compete with him.

GOP Response Better than SotU (1) - Wow, How'd that Happen?

2012-01-27T10:00:00.000-05:00

Each year I try to write on the SotU (2010, 2011). I know they are preposterously scripted, usually forgettable, and almost meaningless as a guide for the upcoming policy season/budget debate. But the political scientist in me thinks that showing the whole panorama of democratic government in one room is hugely instructive for the both US citizenry and for foreigners interested in the US, as well as a great example of how democracies differ from oligarchies and dictatorships with their sycophantic, faux ‘legislatures.’ Let’s hope that somewhere some Chinese, or Burmese, or Syrians can see this and dream that one day they too can … play their own SotU drinking game.

Further the SotU’s often give insight into the presidential mind (however distorted by focus groups) – what he thinks is important or not, ideal preferences for the country, American ‘exceptionalism,’ etc. In this vein, George W Bush’s 2005 SotU was easily the most important of my lifetime, as W laid out a soaring and terrifying image of the US a global democratic revisionist prepared to war for freedom indefinitely. It scared the pants off the country and the planet, but that in itself made it a major, frightening moment in the W presidency. So I still think we should watch them. But, I will grant that you should probably play one of those drinking games while you’re at it.

1. Domestic’s not my area, but I have to agree with Sullivan that this was just a grab bag of bleh. Instead of the big issues like deficit control, entitlement restraint, broad tax hikes (to actually pay for the government we want), defense spending control, etc., it was a bunch of populist/protectionist tax alterations that, as Sullivan notes, will make the tax code even more impenetrable than it is. Isn’t there pretty much a national consensus now that the tax code needs to be simplified? And the protectionism masquerading as ‘bringing jobs home’ was ridiculous – an unworkable tangle of new law, more government, more lawsuits at the WTO. That’s the last thing the world economy needs in the great recession, and you know MNCs will fight this stuff tooth and nail, move resources even faster, relocate, lawyer up like hell to find the loopholes, etc. If you are one of those conspiracy theorists looking for socialism from Obama, you finally got some evidence. This verged toward old school Democrats-from-the-70s industrial policy.

2. What a lame sop to manufacturing. I understand why, and part of me appreciates it. I’m from Cleveland; I have seen lots of small towns in Ohio get hammered by globalization and contraction of manufacturing (it can be fairly depressing to drive around the state). For decades, I have seen Cleveland slip and slip and slip; the city’s east side is so violent now. But honestly, this is the sort of stuff politicians always say to Ohio and the Midwest when elections come up. Not only is it bad economics (hold that thought), but, as Michael Lind and Thomas Frank have pointed out for years, the Midwest has never seen a big industrial turn-around despite the bi-annual pandering we get as swing-states. The first half felt more like campaign speech on my old street to get the neighborhood out to vote for Democrats, because this is the type of stuff the Ohio Democratic Party has been saying as long as I can remember. I imagine other midwestern listeners would think the same, but this was pretty much the ODP’s playbook, and Obama even mentioned Cleveland.

Part two will go up in two days

Cross-posted at Asian Security Blog.

Friday Nerd Blogging

2012-01-27T09:24:00.003-05:00

Even Brian Fratbun will have to admit this is pretty brilliant!

More on the most anticipated Super Bowl Commercials of 2012.

BREAKING NEWS -- Charli Carpenter is a Machine!

2012-01-27T09:00:00.008-05:00

THE CANARD

"All the fake news that fit to print."

-- Amherst

The academic and foreign policy worlds were rocked today by the news that Charli Carpenter -- prolific academic, policy wonk, and mom -- is in fact a robot. She was taken captive this morning in a rare joint operation by the FBI, the CIA, and NASA.

Friends were shocked, but not necessarily surprised. Dan Nexon, a professor at Georgetown University, said, "We always joked that Charli was a machine. She writes like a book a week. And good ones, too. Not the usual schlock we turn out." He added, "She was always so good with technology. And she really likes science fiction. We all hoped she was just a nerd though. I guess we were fooling ourselves. I feel so betrayed."

Indeed it was this ferocious work ethic, combined with Carpenter's interest in robotic warfare, that first set off alarm bells in the CIA. Carpenter blogged frequently about issues of robotic warfare at the Duck of Minerva, monitored by the Company as a barometer of academic opinion on issues of international relations. It is believed that Carpenter's research on whether there was an emerging norm against robotic warfare was a either probe of the level of human resistance that would accompany the revelation of her race of machines, or an elaborate ruse to gain access to policy-making circles so that she could collect intelligence about the state of machine-led warfare in the U.S. in an effort to prepare for an eventual takeover of the world.

The 'human' Carpenter

However, it was only after the FBI began monitoring the droid professor that they began to suspect that she was a machine. An anonymous source told this paper: "There were the academic writings, then all the policy work, the grant writing and management. She never missed her son's soccer games though. And she is so pretty too. It was just too much. Her makers made a mistake by not giving her any weaknesses." He added, "And you would give a female robot a boy's name, wouldn't you? It was just too obvious." Surveillance revealed that Carpenter never slept.

Carpenter is currently being held in an undisclosed location thought to be somewhere near her home in Amherst. Our anonymous source said, "She can't do much harm there. There are more dairy cows than people." Previously used methods of enhanced interrogation are, of course, proving fruitless on the robot. It is not known where she came from or her precise instructions.

Carpenter's true "self"

The revelation replaces the previous rumor among academics that Carpenter was actually an alien from the series Battlestar Galactica that she loves so much. That appears to have just been a hobby for the robot. Carpenter also seems to have developed a taste for American fantasy literature as well. Our CIA source said, "It makes you think more about the boundary between man and machine. Where does one begin and the other end? Still it is our job to protect American security. There is no room in this country for relentlessly hard-working academic robots raising well-adjusted families, no matter who it turns out they work for."

Robotic Planes: Harbinger of Robotic Weapons?

2012-01-26T08:08:00.008-05:00

LA Times' latest article on drones raises the spectre of "robot weapons" in relations to the X-47B, Northrup Grumman's new drone prototype with the ability to fly solo - part of an ongoing force restructuring as the US military cuts back significantly on human personnel.

While one might well ask whether a robotic plane (i.e. one that can fly autonomously) constitutes a robotic weapon if a human is in the loop for any targeting decisions, what's notable about this narrative in press coverage is that the increasing autonomy of non-lethal systems is certainly being constructed as a harbinger of a slippery slope to a world of fully autonomous weapons systems (AWS). Anti-AWS campaigner Noel Sharkey is quoted in the article:

"Lethal actions should have a clear chain of accountability," said Noel Sharkey, a computer scientist and robotics expert. "This is difficult with a robot weapon. The robot cannot be held accountable. So is it the commander who used it? The politician who authorized it? The military's acquisition process? The manufacturer, for faulty equipment?"

And this is the first press coverage I've seen that invokes the evolving position of the ICRC on the topic:

"The deployment of such systems would reflect … a major qualitative change in the conduct of hostilities," committee President Jakob Kellenberger said at a recent conference. "The capacity to discriminate, as required by [international humanitarian law], will depend entirely on the quality and variety of sensors and programming employed within the system."

Indeed, ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger's keynote address during last year's ICRC meeting on new weapons technologies in San Remo suggest that legal issues pertaining to autonomous weapons are indeed at least percolating on the organization's internal agenda now, as opposed to previously. Thinking ahead to norm development in this area - the interest of a key player in the arms control regime signals an emerging trend in that direction - it's worth having a look at the entire relevant text from that speech by Kellenberger:

Automated weapon systems – robots in common parlance – go a step further than remote-controlled systems. They are not remotely controlled but function in a self-contained and independent manner once deployed. Examples of such systems include automated sentry guns, sensor-fused munitions and certain anti-vehicle landmines. Although deployed by humans, such systems will independently verify or detect a particular type of target object and then fire or detonate. An automated sentry gun, for instance, may fire, or not, following voice verification of a potential intruder based on a password.

The central challenge with automated systems is to ensure that they are indeed capable of the level of discrimination required by IHL. The capacity to discriminate, as required by IHL, will depend entirely on the quality and variety of sensors and programming employed within the system. Up to now, it is unclear how such systems would differentiate a civilian from a combatant or a wounded or incapacitated combatant from an able combatant. Also, it is not clear how these weapons could assess the incidental loss of civilian lives, injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects, and comply with the principle of proportionality.

An even further step would consist in the deployment of autonomous weapon systems, that is weapon systems that can learn or adapt their functioning in response to changing circumstances. A truly autonomous system would have artificial intelligence that would have to be capable of implementing IHL. While there is considerable interest and funding for research in this area, such systems have not yet been weaponised. Their development represents a monumental programming challenge that may well prove impossible. The deployment of such systems would reflect a paradigm shift and a major qualitative change in the conduct of hostilities. It would also raise a range of fundamental legal, ethical and societal issues which need to be considered before such systems are developed or deployed. A robot could be programmed to behave more ethically and far more cautiously on the battlefield than a human being. But what if it is technically impossible to reliably program an autonomous weapon system so as to ensure that it functions in accordance with IHL under battlefield conditions?

When we discuss these new technologies, let us also look at their possible advantages in contributing to greater protection. Respect for the principles of distinction and proportionality means that certain precautions in attack, provided for in article 57 of Additional Protocol I, must be taken. This includes the obligation of an attacker to take all feasible precautions in the choice of means and methods of attack with a view to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental civilian casualties and damages. In certain cases cyber operations or the deployment of remote-controlled weapons or robots might cause fewer incidental civilian casualties and less incidental civilian damage compared to the use of conventional weapons. Greater precautions might also be feasible in practice, simply because these weapons are deployed from a safe distance, often with time to choose one's target carefully and to choose the moment of attack in order to minimise civilian casualties and damage. It may be argued that in such circumstances this rule would require that a commander consider whether he or she can achieve the same military advantage by using such means and methods of warfare, if practicable.

Three initial reactions, more later as I follow this issue for my book-manuscript-in-progress this Spring:

First, a distinction is being drawn in the legal discourse between "automated" and "autonomous" weapons, suggesting to me that the ICRC sees a soft and hard line here, one that is being obscured in the media and popular discourse. How this will play out in an efforts to apply humanitarian law to these new systems will be interesting to see.

Second, Kellenberger acknowledges the counter-claim that autonomous systems might have advantages from a war law perspective (this argument being put forth most famously by Georgia Tech's Ronald Arkin). This suggests that the ICRC is far from taking a stance on whether or not these weapons should be pre-emptively banned, as some claim, and as blinding lasers were previously. Instead they are still listening and observing. It will be interesting to see how this debate develops among humanitarian law elites.

Third, I'm glad to see Kellenberger focusing on the question of discrimination, but it should be pointed out that the concept of discrimination in IHL is more than simply about whether distinction between civilians and combatants is possible, but also whether a system is controllable by humans once deployed - whether its effects can be limited. Anti-AWS advocates are certainly making the case that they may not be, and existing humanitarian law provides them some legal leverage to develop that argument if they choose - even if it is shown that such weapons are highly discriminate.

Obama's Offshore Dominance

2012-01-25T11:31:00.005-05:00

Before I launch in, I just wanted to say quickly to Dan Nexon and all the folk at the Duck, thanks for letting me stay on board! I normally lose respect for institutions that decide to keep me as a member, but this is one exception.

Its a little late in coming, but I wanted to post some thoughts on Peter Beinart's thoughtful recent description of President Obama's evolving approach to US grand strategy as 'offshore balancing.'

Stephen Walt has already responded, and there have already been some great posts on the broader issue of what really counts as offshore balancing, here, and here.

One of the difficulties in the endless debate over how to taxonomise US strategic behaviour is that many folk naturally emphasise techniques or goals (or means and ends) at the other's expense. Perhaps this reflects a deeper reflex in Washington foreign policy debate, where the overriding goals of American diplomacy are debated far less intensively than the means. Muscular liberals might agree with Neoconservatives that the ultimate goal is American benevolent primacy in the world, which in turn would advance American and global security, but they disagree at times over how to get there (consensual multilateralism and institution-building or hawkish unilateral action, etc). At times this can lead to a certain 'narcissism of small differences.'

So there is a temptation to stress the 'offshore' aspect and downplay 'balancing.' As Peter Beinart characterises it:

<blockquote>One way of understanding America’s shifting policy in the Middle East is that we’re moving offshore. Instead of directly occupying Islamic lands, we’re trying to secure our interests from the sea, the air and by equipping our allies. That’s in large measure what the Obama administration is trying to do in East Asia, too.The central message of Obama’s trip last week to Australia was that the U.S. finally is focused on restraining China’s rise in the Pacific. And how will the U.S. do that? A token deployment of Marines in northern Australia notwithstanding, the Obama administration’s strategy will be to buttress America’s naval presence in the Pacific and aid those nations on China’s periphery that fear its hegemonic ambitions.</blockquote>

This echoes the approach of the likes of Robert Pape, who argues (especially in the context of how to reduce anti-American terrorism) for a lighter footprint and a more naval-oriented military posture. And to be sure, it is important to consider that a big part of driving down the costs of American strategy could be moving offshore and avoiding large-scale expeditionary land commitments.

But offshore balancing, at least as it has been formulated since the first generation of post World War Two realists all the way to contemporaries such as Barry Posen, Christopher Preble and Christopher Layne, is a bigger and more demanding creature than that.

It isn't just an alternative path to maintaining American hegemony abroad, or to making hegemony cheaper. It proposes a substantively new role for the U.S. in the world. As Brian C. Schmidt argues observantly in a paper he gave a while back, it is an argument that the US abandon the pursuit of unipolar primacy in the world. Its about 'ends' as well as 'means', or at least, it argues that America' security interests are better served by accommodating what is inevitable, the return of mulitpolarity.

Take Obama's recent Defence Strategic Guidance, and the stance he articulated recently, orienting the US strategically towards East Asia while scaling back its onshore commitments, de-emphasising prolonged counter-insurgency and nation-building missions and ramping up investment in drones and cyber capabilities.

While it may be tempting to define this - as some of Obama's defenders and supporters do- as a fundamental grand strategic shift, it really isn't. Its an attempt to pursue the existing, inherited grand strategic goal (the preservation of American primacy) while adjusting the ever-shifting mix of military supremacy, deterrence, reassurance, democratisation and liberalisation, in an apparently increasing important part of the world where the economic weight and political ambition is moving. (It is also, incidentally, a softly expressed but unmistakable confirmation that America is drawing down its military protectorate in Europe).

The title of Obama's Defence Strategic Guidance gives the game away: 'Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership.' Which is a polished, euphemistic way of saying that America is not abandoning its role as No. 1, the guardian of world order. Offshore Balancers who go beyond tactics and techniques and methods do not usually share this ambition.

In fact, they regard the pursuit of primacy and the vehicle to pursue it -a vast, forward-leaning military-strategic presence, a set of permanent formal alliances, and the attempt to remake the world in America's image - as pernicious, exhausting, prone to inviting 'free riding' from others and creating security dilemmas unintentionally, as well as damaging American democracy at home. If America isn't to embrace an amoral cynicism in place of the Pax Americana, they argue that it can better embody and repair its values at home, as an example to the world.

The main challenge for offshore balancing, in trying to navigate a mid-point between isolation and hegemony, is how to operationalise such a role, and how to give it geopolitical shape. In other words, precisely where would US forces be parked if they aren't just to pack up and go home, and how should the US prepare for the possibility of competitive balancing or even bandwagoning if its onshore presence its reduced? On that note, I'm writing a little pamphlet that will be published later in 2012, all being well.

The suspense must be killing you.

Cross-Posted at The Offshore Balancer.

Robots and Prejudice

2012-01-25T09:00:00.004-05:00

At ThinkProgress Alyssa Rosenberg shares a lovely new short film about robots and prejudice:

No Robots from YungHan Chang on Vimeo.

Rosenberg draws a distinction between the representations of robots in this film and the scarier representations in much popular culture:

Often, when we see robots in popular culture, they’re actually more powerful than we are. If the Cylons were a metaphor for, say, Irish immigrants to the United States, they’d be telling a story about workers rising up from the slums and engulfing us all in whiskey and potatoes. These metaphors tend to legitimate the fears of privileged class rather than debunking them. But a movie like No Robots has a different power differential. The shopkeeper is angry at a robot who is physically smaller than he is, who is annoying rather than intimidating. He commits an act of terrible violence against that much more vulnerable actor. And then he discovers that things he’s conditioned to want to protect and find adorable—kittens—are emotionally dependent on the robot, who has been stealing milk to feed them. It’s a narrative that questions the shopkeeper’s prejudices and assumptions, rather than suggesting he’s right to be angry and afraid of a new element in his environment.

I think she may overstate the case: there are an awful lot of pop culture archetypes of robots as a vulnerable, altruistic underclass even in the West (remember AI? Wall-E?) and in Japanese culture the Terminator/Cylon archetype is far less prevalent than a view of robots as cute, cuddly and benign. But still, on this blog at least we've certainly focused more on war-bots, and this film is a healthy reminder of the many ways robots can be used as metaphors for complex social relations and hierarchies. Kudos to the producers.

Bad Predator?

2012-01-24T17:18:00.009-05:00

Peter Singer has an op-ed in the Times which carefully makes the case against drones by carefully putting forth the proposition that their use undermines democracy:

What troubles me, though, is how a new technology is short-circuiting the decision-making process for what used to be the most important choice a democracy could make... We must now accept that technologies that remove humans from the battlefield, from unmanned systems like the Predator to cyberweapons like the Stuxnet computer worm, are becoming the new normal in war. And like it or not, the new standard we’ve established for them is that presidents need to seek approval only for operations that send people into harm’s way — not for those that involve waging war by other means... WITHOUT any actual political debate, we have set an enormous precedent, blurring the civilian and military roles in war and circumventing the Constitution’s mandate for authorizing it.

Well, as least this is a better argument than the other barbs against drones - the ones that focus on the weapons themselves as somehow uniquely offensive in terms of war law. (Last year, Lina Shakhouni and I bombed that set of arguments back to the stone age.)

But Singer narrows in on a different thread in this debate: that certain weapons are a game-changer not because they are useful, but because of how the conditions under which they are used affect our sense of how war is to be conducted, what it is, and who decides. It's an interesting set of arguments.

But is it any better in terms of the causal claims on which it rests? Dissenting views are rolling in. The Atlantic's Joshua Foust writes:

We should be criticizing Congress, not remote-controlled airplanes, for limitless militarism. Congress ceding all authority on lethal operations to the president is indeed a grave threat to democracy, but drones are only one tool the president uses to kill people. The bigger problem is that he was given the authority to do that.

Indeed, at Wings Over Iraq, Starbuck points out that the argument is older than the weapons system - the claim that remote-control weaponry facilitated devil-may-care foreign policy is at least as old as the Tomahawk Missile:

Though much ink has been spilled on “drone ethics“, these strikes are little removed from 1990s-era “Tomahawk diplomacy”. Though modern drones can loiter over the battlefield for hours–even days–at a time, and can hit small, mobile targets, they’re just another precision stand-off weapon. P.W. Singer’s op-ed might specifically target drones, he’s making a broader point that standoff weapons–missiles, drones, even computer viruses–might make warfare more common in the 21st Century.

As I've already written, I agree with Foust and Burke that "drones" are not problems in themselves but have become a synechdoche for a broader tension between the current security environment and the legal frameworks through which we're accustomed to thinking about and legitimizing war. And I also agree with Singer that that tension is genuine and needs to be addressed (for example, by updating the War Power Act - something within Congressional control).

But is this mismatch between norms and policy bringing about the specific political outcomes he (and others) claim - especially the idea that drones cause a democratic deficit? As a social scientist I remain unconvinced, and want to see more than rhetorical arguments. In fact besides the claim Burke identifies above, I think Singer posits a number of additional causal claims about the political impact of stand-off weapons in his piece, all plausible but insufficiently backed up. He also posits some perhaps unsustainable claims about the relationship of democracy to war (though one might hope that democracy might stand on its own as a value to be preserved)... and especially, I think it's a little fuzzy in his argument what aspect of "democracy" is really most at stake here and why.

Let's think through the claims, and I'll return in future posts to assessing them:

1) Proposition #1: Stand-off weapons make armed conflict easier and therefore likelier. For one thing this is a different dependent variable - war may be a public bad, but more more war doesn't by itself undermine democracy. Also, I want someone to show me that on balance the number of militarized interstate disputes is increasing as a result of stand-off technologies, or that countries with access to these technologies are likelier to be involved in MIDs, controlling for other factors.

2) Proposition #2: Stand-off weapons are likelier to be used in ways that lead to a blurring of civilian/military roles. Civilian supremacy is a cornerstone of democracy as we know it, and certainly there has been some fudging of the civ-mil divide in recent decades, and certainly the use of CIA drone operatives is a good example of that, but can the blame really be rested at the doorstep of these weapon systems? And how would we know? Among other things, Singer's own earlier writing on private military firms suggests this problem is not limited to stand-off weaponry...

3) Proposition #3: The availability of stand-off weapons increases the likelihood that democratic leaders will circumvent democratic deliberation about the use of armed force. It does seem to be happening in this case, but again is the technology causing this problem or simply making an old trend especially obvious?

4) Proposition #4: Democratic deliberation reduces the likelihood of militarized interstate disputes. Again, please, let's treat this as a hypothesis rather than an assumption. I will have more to say about how convincing it is after I revisit the more recent democratic peace literature with my doctoral students this term but my sense as a political scientist is that this was always simplistic at best and has been problematized further by some new studies.

5) Proposition #5: Citizens' and policymakers' estimate of physical risk from war to the nation's own citizens is a moderating influence over war initiation decisions. Makes intuitive sense, but I know too much about the strategies nations use to trick citizens into war to take this at face value. How true is this proposition in broad terms? If I wanted to find out, I'd probably look to compare democracies that did and did not have a conscription policy to find out whether institutionalized risks of war to citizens lead countries to be more risk-prone internationally, other things being equal. But I find myself doubting it, since historically war has declined along with conscription as a practice, so I wonder how this is presumed to work...

Point is, none of these propositions are obviously true or uncontroversial. I expect to explore several of them in more detail on the basis of the empirical studies I dig up in the next weeks. Readers: can you suggest sources, studies or other ways of testing these hypotheses to guide me as I dig? Or other testable propositions underlying the drone debate?

The ICC and Kenya: In the Thick of Deterrence

2012-01-23T21:58:00.000-05:00

Antony Njuguna / Nairobi

The big news out of the ICC today was the confirmation of charges against four of the "Ocampo Six" Kenyan elites accused of orchestrating and inciting the country's post-election violence in 2007-2008. Ruto, Arap Sang, Muthaura and Kenyatta had their charges confirmed and are expected to appeal; charges against Kosgey and Ali were dismissed by the Court's judges because of a lack of evidence.

The decision comes four years after the violence and almost two years after the investigation was opened by the Chief Prosecutor. In that sense it is an underwhelming "milestone" but it is nevertheless an important reminder of the potential significance of ICC justice for Kenyan politics and stability.

The Court is mindful of its impact on stability. In its summary statement today it expressed that

"The chamber is mindful of concerns regarding the precarious security situation in parts of the country. It is also attentive of its responsibility to maintain stability in Kenya, and to fulfill its duty vis-a-vis the protection of victims and witnesses....It is our utmost desire that the decisions issued by this Chamber today, bring peace to the people of the Republic of Kenya and prevent any sort of hostility."

Stability concerns are related to the upcoming presidential election. Two of those now set to stand trial - Kenyatta and Ruto - have both expressed their intention to run in the election but it's now unclear if that will be possible. But their rival ethnic and political factions are more likely to use domestic and international attempts to mete out justice as political engineering.

The International Crisis Group recently released an important briefing on these issues with several recommendation to the Court and Kenyan government:

"These cases have enormous political consequences for both the 2012 elections and the country's stability. During the course of the year, rulings and procedures will inevitably either lower or increase communal tensions. If the ICC process is to contribute to the deterrence of future political violence in Kenya, the court and its friends must explain its work and limitations better to the public. Furthermore, Kenya's government must complement that ICC process with a national process aimed at countering impunity and punishing ethnic hate speech and violence."

With respect to views on the ground, two recent polls show relatively divided, but declining, support for the ICC among Kenyans and notably increasing concerns about the impact of trials on security.

The link between human rights prosecutions and specific and/or general deterrence has been hashed out by various notable academics (see Vinjamuri and Kim and Sikkink). But the Kenya situation will provide for an excellent test case of such deterrence claims for several reasons. First, there is strong and active local civil society support for the ICC. This increases the chance that future potential human rights violations will be monitored and evidence can be collected and thus make prosecutions more credible. Second, the Kenya situation came to the ICC at the initiation of the Prosecutor after years of stalling by the Kenyan government - this underscores the Court's "court of last resort" moniker and that justice is possible in spite of politics. Third, those considered "most responsible" are high level political elites yet their domestic power has not prevented their trial. Of all the situations before the ICC, this will be the one to watch for deterrence effects.

Power Shift in Global Economic Governance

2012-01-23T21:48:00.004-05:00

Has the worm finally turned? Reuters today featured a story on the emerging market economies' push-back against the status quo of Western-dominated global economic governance. The piece features an explicit demand (and overt exercise of financial leverage) for a power shift in the predominant international financial institutions, specifically in the context of the IMF's recent request for an additional $600 billion in resources from its member states to help bail out Europe.

Former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal is quoted in the story as saying:"What we can be certain of is that large developing nations will not agree to provide additional funds without a greater say in the IMF, and this applies to all global economic governance organizations."

Interesting, the story also highlights the fact that emerging market economies, while demanding more voice and influence in the IFIs, are also turning away from existing international institutions in favor of regional alternatives, such as the Arab Monetary Fund and Islamic Development Bank in the Middle East and the Chiang Mai initiative in East Asia. This fact is neither new or shocking, but the tone of such a public speech is remarkable.

Ironically (or pathetically, depending how you look at it), there was also a recent news story that revealed that Obama is considering the nomination of Larry Summers as the next World Bank president when Robert Zoellick's term expires in May 2012 (note: thanks to Martin Edwards for alerting me to this one). This would, oh so predictably: (1) sustain the stubborn Western tradition of keeping an American at helm of the World Bank (and by corollary, a European at the head of the Fund); (2) uphold the image of the Bretton Woods institutions as being first and foremost accountable to the Wall Street-Treasury complex, and (3) continue to alienate the very countries upon whose financial generosity these institutions will increasingly depend in the coming years.

Martin Edwards and I are conspiring on an op-ed on that little tidbit of information and its implications for the legitimacy and relevance of the World Bank, so stay tuned.

Urination Distraction

2012-01-23T18:43:00.000-05:00

Over the past few weeks we’ve had to endure military brass and top government officials falling over themselves to condemn American GIs – first for urinating on dead Afghans, and more recently for beating a sheep. Earlier in the Iraq and Afghan wars, we’ve suffered through pious denunciations of soldiers who tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib or laughed as they targeted “dead men” with drones.

How noble the sentiment! Criticizing ordinary servicemen who do not abide by the rules of engagement or who break the laws of war. In fact, however, most of the official condemnation has ulterior motives.

The real purpose is not to shame or punish the soldiers, appropriate as that is. Rather it is to advance and legitimate the war effort, with all its attendant inhumanity and cruelty.This is clearest in statements that decry the incidents for comforting the enemy and incensing civilian populations. Such effects are indeed likely. But those who issue this kind of condemnation are in fact suggesting that what is really wrong is not the incidents themselves, but the release of videos about them. As long as such occurrences were kept quiet, there’d be little to complain of.

The same cover-up logic explains why the government has gone to such lengths to attack those, like Wikileaks, that release such information. Conversely, to answer Charli’s recent question, those who send such videos to the press are certainly protesting and are hardly “fools.” Meanwhile, those who originally took the videos and sent them to their friends are simply engaged in an age-old war custom, flaunting trophies. And those who urinate on corpses or cheer as they blow up supposed enemies are acting like men have always acted and will always act in war.

But there is a deeper explanation for the sanctimonious slamming of our errant troops. Too many such incidents cut against the well-honed spin that the U.S. military is a thoroughly professional fighting force. Even while they train soldiers to kill, military leaders must keep up the claim that our soldiers do so humanely! Only the exceptions – the vicious, the stupid, or the exhausted – would break the rules.

In fact, urinating on corpses, torturing prisoners, and cheering deaths is predictable in any war. Indeed, it shows that the military training necessary for most people to kill another human being is working. No doubt it also shows a failure in training on the laws of war – but there is little doubt which of these two courses of instruction is more fundamental to our military. Of course we should have laws of war and use them to prosecute violators. But we should not be surprised if ordinary people placed in contexts of peril and power act brutally.

Low-level prosecutions also divert attention from the higher-ups who are most responsible. Of course, some at the bottom may truly be sadistic. But for the most part, they are ordinary men and women caught up in the fury of warfare. Much of that fervor is in fact drummed up by superiors – through public statements or tortured legal opinions. Prosecuting a few small fry for understandable if condemnable behavior makes it less likely that those at the top, who made it all possible, will face prosecution.

Most fundamentally, condemnations and prosecutions preserve and legitimate the war itself. They portray it – or at least our side’s engagement in it – as rule-bound, controlled, rational. By making a show of censuring young men and women caught up in the awfulness of war, those in power deflect attention from the far greater awfulness and futility of the war itself – for which they are responsible.

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Happy Year of the Dragon

2012-01-23T15:05:00.011-05:00

I apologize to Duck readers for being such a slacker this past semester.

Some things on the home/work front have had me tied down a bit, and the truth is I won't be fully back in the saddle until after this manuscript is done.

But. In the words of George R. R. Martin, fire cannot kill a dragon, and my Chinese New Years' Resolution is to start posting again (at least semi-regularly) despite all.

So what have I missed the chance to gripe about during my quasi-hiatus?

Great snakes, we are apparently one minute closer to our doom! Besides the collapse of Obama's nuclear non-proliferation agenda, I see Iraq is erupting predictably. Guantanamo Bay lingers ten years later, though with our brave new National Defense Authorization Act it may turn out to be a bit of a redundancy. Oh, and it looks like we may be gearing up for a fresh war.

Meanwhile, I see some of our Marines have tried to piss away whatever moral standing we still have abroad. (So says the media narrative, anyway. And then there's the sheep-beating video. I have a few thoughts on the whole "war stress" angle: but my main question is why fools like these keep posting videos online. Could it be a form of protest?)

Of course there are a few bright spots (or maybe not, depending on where you sit) the Obama Administration is championing human rights abroad in significant ways. The world is down a few dictators. And PC Magazine reports on the very patriotic porn industry's new effort to help troops reach out and touch loved ones.

Well so much for the stories I wish I'd had the time to blog about when they were in the news cycle. I may return to some of these in future weeks, though most of my posting this term will relate to doctoral pedagogy (teaching new seminar), battlefield robots and civilian protection (must finish book must finish book) and of course my share of nerd blogging. If readers have specific requests, do leave them in the comments.

House MD Epistemologist

2012-01-23T12:00:00.000-05:00

Like many of my nerdy friends, I am eagerly awaiting the return of the second half of this season's "House MD." But let's be honest, the show basically substitutes a flow chart for a plot. No one with half a brain actually watches the show for the "medical mystery"; after all the show is premised on a suspension of disbelief. It's entertaining and a guilty pleasure because of the wit and antics of the ever gruff Hugh Laurie.

But the show can be read as more than a series of implausible medical escapades; it is also a commentary on epistemology and society. Here is a quick round-up of what I have learned from House MD:

1. House is the most rational person in the world; House is a complete drug addict. These two statements are not a contradiction within the parameters of the show. House is a calculating, self-interested, rational utility maximizer par excellence. His utility is pleasure and his pleasure is avoiding pain... and of course getting more pleasure. He is Bentham's man; he is John Stuart Mill's homo-economicus; he is a neo-liberal fantasy in the flesh. House is not a complete human being by any stretch of the imagination and yet this is the human being idealized by rational choice theorists.

Thus, perhaps it should not surprise us that the show's protagonist moves rather indifferently from the hospital to the prison and back to the hospital as if these were merely interchangeable backdrops from Foucault's carceral archipelago. House cannot be reformed, resocialized, or rehabilitated by social institutions -- he is hardwired, his preferences are (apparently) exogenous -- governmentality does not apply to House. Notably, his incarceration makes little real impact on his personality or on his medical practice (and why should it?).

2. Everybody lies. Everyone, particularly every patient, on the show lies constantly -- it's the motto of the show. The interviewed subject (i.e. patient) can never be believed. The subject is a knowing subject who willfully deceives the (medical) examiner by telling him or her what they want or expect to hear. More importantly, the body contains the truth of the subject, but even the body deceives the examiner. Of course, the truth would not be worth much without being defined by these lies. The lies are what make the show interesting; the reasons for the lies are what are worth investigating. The lies uphold the social order and their unmasking reveals the inner workings of that society. Without understanding the reason for the lies, there is no way to solve the mystery.

3. Differential diagnosis: The show is premised on the notion that law like generalizations are irrelevant and probabalistic knowledge is potentially fatal. House is only concerned with finding solutions to the most unique of cases. After all, House's patients are individuals; they are snowflakes. The accumulated knowledge of science is necessary but inadequate because of the specificity of his cases. These extreme outliers are not "black swans" however because their discovery does not have any impact on established theory or science. The outliers only help to confirm the belief that each individual is unique.

4. Power/knowledge: The production of knowledge is directly tied to power in the show. Wrong answers to House's quiz questions are immediately punished with mockery and humiliation in the hierarchy of underlings. House's own status and power are contingent on his unique ability to find the truth by the end of the show.

That Dr. House is also a raving sexist should not be surprising to any feminist theorist. Why House is not also consistently as racist and homophobic as he is sexist is a curious inconsistency or perhaps an indication of the normative (albeit relatively recent) "red lines" in the target viewing audience.

Knowledge is produced in a group setting a la Socrates. Despite House's incredible intelligence he cannot arrive at the truth all by himself. (Of course, some of his companions mainly provide him with social insights that he as a hedonist lacks and others provide social constraints upon/opportunities for House's preferred unethical techniques of diagnosis.) House has encyclopedic knowledge and rational thinking, but what makes him the best diagnostician is that he understands people are seeking pleasure and avoiding pain just like himself. The dictum that guided Hobbes' (auto-) dissection, also guides House: Nosce teipsum.

The show invariably requires the performance of a radical (and quite literally) critical test in part because House only deals with extreme anomalies and in part because he must eventually contend with increasing time pressures that will not allow for the continued reliance on conventional tests. Thus, the science of House is romantic or perhaps (more accurately) Puritan to the extent that his tests place the life of his patients at stake.

5. Biopolitics: The show is about the demonstration of power through the preservation of life from the clutches of death. The show is not about a flourishing of life, but about keeping people alive mainly to cheat death, i.e. to show the mastery of nature as an intellectual exercise. Oddly, however, House is never able to find redemption, his character must reset as irredeemable by the next episode.

So is it too obvious for me to suggest that House is both a satire and a study of us as Americans and the forms of knowledge that some wish corresponded to our society?

What I Learned Teaching IR in Asia (1): Learning to Love US Hegemony

2012-01-23T00:06:00.001-05:00

If you haven’t seen this yet, it’s pretty hysterical

I’d like to thank Duck contributors/editor, especially Vikash, for soliciting my contribution. The Duck is a great site, one I link to a lot on my own blog, so I am happy to come aboard. Thank you.

I have been teaching IR in Korea for almost 4 years. Generally, it’s a lot like teaching it in the West. The same theories get circulated, and we read the same journals. My university, a big state school, is organized a lot like any Big U in the US – dozens of departments, huge faculty, growing administration, a large middle class student body (but no student athletics). As at home, my department has theorists, internationalists, comparativists, and Koreanists. In fact, given how far away the Western system is geographically, it is almost a little too easy, too seamless. I guess this means political science really is a globalizing discipline.

So here are a few macro-lessons I have picked up teaching and conferencing IR in Asia:1. Your feeble skills are no match for the power of the American Empire, young PhD. Ron Paul voters and retrenchers beware. If you think America is an empire, bullying hegemon, overbearing interventionist, or otherwise enjoy Steve Walt’s blog, you’ll be a lot more struck by the obviousness of the US presence than in Europe. I lived in Germany in the 90s, but the US footprint here is a lot more outstanding. Korea is pretty much ground zero for the ‘empire of bases’ argument of Chalmers Johnson, and the State Department couldn’t care less about your hotshot PhD from the People’s Republic of Berkeley. At conference after conference, you see the American influence everywhere. I meet people from Heritage, CSIS, Brookings, the US State Department, and the US military on the rubber chicken circuit regularly, and the party-line on the American presence in Asia is enforced pretty vigorously. Even though there’s a deep IR consensus now that the US uses too much force and faces retrenchment due to overstretch, the US community here studiously avoids mention of things like the implications of the staggering US debt on its alliances. There is real collision between what I read as an IR guy, and what I hear on the policy conference circuit.

My own feelings are mixed: I worry a lot about overstretch and the growing excesses of the national security state, but I can think of few uses of US force more noble than defending a democracy like SK against the worst country on earth. Still, the commitment to forward basing and extended deterrence is all but universal, and don’t dare call it empire (as, ironically, do neocons when they’re candid, as well as a lot of my students). You can ask why the US should spend 5% of GDP on defense (actually its closer to 8%) when Japan spends less than 1%. You can ask if perhaps we should be ‘nation-building at home’ (Obama) with 9% unemployment, instead of semi-encircling China.You can ask if the massive US global footprint, including 28k warfighters plus another 100kcontractors and family members in Korea, might chain-gang the US into an unwanted Asian war even though SK’s GDP is 26x NK’s. But you’ll get no good answer other than suspicion that you like Neville Chamberlain. The think tank-industrial complex ‘fusion’ around endless engagement is deeply entrenched

2. English, English ueber alles. Cultural imperialism abets my laziness, or, as a professor in grad school once told me, ‘you don’t need to learn languages, because it all gets translated anyway.’ Ah, yes, luxuriate in your Anglo-American social science supremacy, because thankfully Asians actually tolerate your linguistic lameness on your behalf! My colleagues’ patience with my atrocious Korean is legend, but English is everywhere – conferences are offered with simultaneous translation (try to imagine that at APSA), journals will double-print with translations, Korean colleagues all speak English and don’t even bother to expect you to try anymore (so embarrassing that), support staff too speak fluently, and, perhaps my favorite, you can watch Korean, Chinese, and Japanese scholars duke it out among each other in English at the conferences (that was a real shock the first time I saw it – I guess I had a vague sense they would all speak Chinese). So if you think that culture is a tiresome linguistic quirk blocking your equations and Verstehen is ‘soft,’ Asian IR is here to vindicate your monolinguistic laziness masquerading as universalist rationalism!

3. One American IR ring to rule them all. Somewhere in grad school, I remember that whole discussion about IR as an American social science. Once again, you can really see that here. Korean PS journals are filled with regular laments about how little indigenous Korean political theory there is, and how concepts simply get pulled over from the US and maybe they don’t fit. IR here is most definitely that way. I’m 12 time zones away, but everyone around me still reads IO, IS, ISQ, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, OUP, etc., etc. In the same way I am uncomfortable with the cultural imperialist undertones of the ubiquity of English, I find the overwhelming dominance of US IR somewhat disheartening (as do many of my colleagues). In what had to be the most surreal and disturbing moment in this vein, I was in Beijing for a conference on China’s rise. A Chinese IR grad student was walking me around (showing me the Forbidden City and such). When the conversation turned to her training, there I was recommending to her what to read (Friedberg, Kang, Ross, and Hui), in English, on her own country! All I could think of was how much more this woman would ever know about China than me, and here I was telling her what to read - and it was a bunch of Americans. So embarrassing.

Cross-posted at Asian Security Blog.
Part two will go up in a few days.

Duck Stuff: In with the Old, in with the New

2012-01-23T00:00:00.000-05:00

We are pleased to announce roster changes at the Duck.

Patrick Porter and Brian Rathbun have agreed to become permanent contributors. Quacktacular!

And today we want to introduce a new guest blogger - Robert Kelly. Bob teaches IR at Pusan National University in Korea and writes a lot on East Asian IR now. He went to Ohio State; his areas are security and IO. He has own site, which we recommend: Asian Security Blog. His favorite work to date is this. We are glad to have him.

Damn Yankees!

2012-01-22T10:25:00.001-05:00

Wow. South Carolina took a cane to the "~~Mormon~~ Massachusetts Moderate" last night. This moves Nate Silver to write a longish post comparing the conventional wisdom (now embodied by my colleague, Hans Noel, and his co-authors) with the "This time it's different" crowd, in which Silver makes not a single, tiny, one-off mention of Citizens United. I'm not saying that it's certain that Newt's rich friends dumping millions of dollars through independent, pristine, non-corrupting, corporations-are-people-too UberPacs into a relatively small media market might have impacted the race (we'll wait for the capital-P, capital-S Political Scientists to prove it... or not)

Meanwhile, Romney has decided to heed campaign 101 and avoid the drip, drip, drip of TaxAvoidanceGate by releasing ~~all of his returns~~ his 2010 returns. Maybe Mitt can blow this, after all.

$h•! PTJ Says #3: protest banners vs. precise terms

2012-01-21T12:38:00.000-05:00

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.

"Many if not most of the terms we use to differentiate styles and traditions of scholarly inquiry are tools for positioning ourselves relative to other scholars. Names of schools of thought, incontrovertible assumptions that have to be agreed to in order to belong to a particular club, shorthand references to 'great debates' and 'key controversies' -- treating these as though they had positive content is basically the same mistake as treating a nationalist claim to possessing some patch of ground from time immemorial as though it were a factual claim. Positioning can provide a helpful signal to other scholars, but but one should be careful not to go overboard in trying to give serious content to something that is basically a set of mapping coordinates.

"This is particularly problematic when we are discussing methodological terms, which are supposed to provide actual guidance for how to do good research. The ordinary academic machine that translates such terms into shibboleths and slogans does an immense disservice to anyone trying to figure out how to do, or to teach others to do, scholarly research, because if open is not careful one can easily find oneself trapped in a hall of mirrors. Perhaps the worst offenders nowadays are words like 'qualitative' and 'interpretive,' which seem to say something important about a style of research but actually don't. Both are better thought of as hortatory protest banners: 'qualitative' means something like 'you don't have to use numbers in order to engage in systematic procedures of data-collection and -analysis' and 'interpretive' means something like 'get out of your office and go talk to some people, and not just in order to plug their responses into a regression equation'. Okay, fine, but this tells me basically nothing about how to actually do anything.

"Precise terms give us guidance about how to 'go on' in producing scholarship that is in some sense valid. Protest banners get our blood pumping and fuel our passion, and maybe get us out into the streets to complain about the lack of thinking space for our kind of work in our field or discipline, but that's all they are good for. Don't try to teach using them, and don't spend too much time trying to give them positive meaning in your own work. Use them to carve out a little academic space for yourself, if you must, and then move on. Because at the end of the day, if you don't show me the intellectual payoff of your conceptual apparatus, I am not sure what on earth it might possibly be for."

Friday Anti-Nerd Blogging: The Appeal of Downton Abbey

2012-01-20T10:39:00.009-05:00

People are going mad about Downton Abbey. The Rolling Stone calls it "crack for Anglophiles." The demand was enough to create a second "season," and is even giving PBS the notion that it might begin to draw in some of the types who watch Showtime and HBO series, maybe even Game of Thrones fans. I doubt it, if for no other reason that there are a lot more gratuitous boobs and f-bombs on the cable networks.

I have watched it. I like it. I will keep watching it. But I am curious as to why this particular British BBC import has done so well in the US, because, as I can tell, it is a pretty garden variety Masterpiece Theater-type show. It hits on all the usual themes of British period dramas -- class relations between nobles and the uppity bourgeoisie, upstairs-downstairs dynamics, the difficulties the British aristocracy faces in keeping their estates alive in a time of industrialization, the importation of wealthy American wives to solve that problem, soul mates who never love each other at the same time, the noble archetype character who loves so much but is too honorable to every say it because he feels so unworthy of receiving love (Mr. Bates), etc. And Maggie Smith as a bitch. Why do you all think it is so popular? No one has ever watched PBS before.

The thing that I find particularly interesting and noteworthy is that it shows how international conflicts change class dynamics at home. Most of these period dramas are set before or after WWI. Downton Abbey will straddle that war and show us the whole process. It is fascinating to watch the aristocracy bow to the inevitable decline in their position, even accept the legitimacy of that change, yet strive to maintain something of their former lives. But it probably appeals to me most because I am interested in war. Is that why everyone else likes it? I'd be curious to hear what you all think.

Except for you, nerds. Go back to your video games. NEEEEERRRRRDDDDSSSSS!

Friday Nerd Blogging

2012-01-20T07:53:00.006-05:00

Hey, don't say Lord Eddard didn't warn us...

Part II on the AIDS Crisis and Learning from History: Lessons from South Africa

2012-01-19T20:31:00.003-05:00

In my last post, I profiled the Origins of AIDS, JacquesPépin's masterful study ofhow the virus that causes AIDS in humans originated in chimps and then jumpedto humans and later took off as a result of a complex series of events involvinglocal populations uprooted from traditional practices, the spread ofprostitution, and widespread use of injections to fight infectious diseases,among other factors (see Donald McNeil's compact summary review inthe Times).

If Pépin's book is of a scholar/detective sifting andsorting evidence to advance an argument, Geffen's book represents the historyif somewhat impersonal memoir of the experienced social pugilist. Hisefforts remind the world of the achievements of the Treatment Action Campaign(TAC), the South African AIDS advocacy campaign that challenged the governmentof Thabo Mbeki to provide antiretroviral (ARV) therapy to those suffering from AIDS.

Geffen is one of TAC's longtime leaders, and this bookchronicles TAC’s clashes with both the South African government and a series ofquacks and denialists who sought to promote anti-scientific remedies thatlikely contributed to the deaths of thousands of those suffering from HIV.

Geffen casts Mbeki (and his health minister) asvillains in the struggle to extend treatment to those with HIV. For thosefamiliar with the work of Nicoli Nattrass, William Forbath, the political cartoons of Zapiro,and others, Mbeki's indulgence of AIDS denialism rings both true andfamiliar.

Alongside retellings of the legal wrangling by TAC with theMbeki government and the quacks and hucksters, Geffen peppers the narrativewith stories of people who took the their advice rather than the guidance ofthe medical community. The examples of failed and ultimately fatal vitamin andgarlic treatments are sober reminders of the price paid by so many.

Geffen's last chapter seeks to understand how it waspossible that the African National Congress government, the movement ofliberation from apartheid, could sully its legacy by embracing AIDS denialism.Here, Geffen engages a debate taken up in Evan Lieberman's important book Boundariesof Contagion: “Why have some governments responded to AIDS more quicklyand more broadly than others?” Geffen's asks a slightly different question:"Why did Mbeki's views on AIDS prevail for a while?"

Geffen writes:

As president of the ANC and by far itsmost powerful member, Mbeki was able to impress his personal positions onthe organisation. Despite an essentially democratic structure – branches andsectors elect their leaders, who in turn elect the organisation’s leadership atprovincial and national level – the ANC has much within its culture that isanti-democratic and renders it vulnerable to and easily manipulated by thepersonal views of its strongest leaders (p. 193).

This argument, essentially about Mbeki’s leadership, is contingentupon the ANC exercising significant, largely unchecked, power over thecountry’s direction. As Geffen describes, the ANC possessed such status:

TheANC together with its allies liberated South Africa from apartheid. It isrecognized and admired as the liberator by about two-thirds of the votingpopulation. This enables it to exert a powerful hegemony over South Africansociety (p. 194).

By appeals to African nationalism, Mbeki and his allies wereable to stave off vigorous contestation from AIDS advocates for several years. ThoughTAC was ultimately able through the court system to push the South Africangovernment to change direction, the damage was done with at least two studiesestimating that 330,000 plus deaths could have been averted with differentpolicy.

This explanation – emphasizing the leadership role of Mbekihimself and the dominance of the ANC – fits my own understanding of the SouthAfrican case as well as the Ugandan case where President Museveni took a muchmore aggressive stance in addressing the AIDS crisis.

Here, Geffen’s book intersects with the Lieberman bookmentioned above. The recent issue of Perspectives on Politics features three(!) reviews on Lieberman’s book by Macartan Humphries, Eduardo Gomez, andDaniel Posner. While Geffen's book is obviously limited to a single case andrepresents the work of an activist rather than academic, I found his answermore persuasive than the account, at least of the South African case, featuredin Lieberman's book.

Through mixed methods including sophisticated econometricanalysis, Lieberman attempts to show that the fluidity of ethnic boundariesexplains the reason why some countries addressed AIDS more than others. Whereboundaries are rigid, groups less affected fail to support policies to help outothers, as they see themselves less at risk and those communitiesdisproportionately affected by the AIDS crisis fail to mobilize, given theirmarginalized status. Where ethnic boundaries are weaker, there is a greatersense of shared fates.

Here, I share with Humphries and Gomez some of the concernsabout Lieberman’s treatment of key cases and rival explanations. Humphrieswrites:

But South Africa remains puzzling. One would expect that if therewere any place where the effects Lieberman describes would not bedeterminative, it would be in a case in which the affected group was both alarge majority and in control of policymaking (pp. 875-876).

Gomez echoes this view:

While he provides evidenceshowing that state capacity and the presence of NGOs is insufﬁcient forpredicting policy responses, it is hard to say the same for politicalleadership. The dismissal of AIDS leadership fell on President Nelson Mandela’savoidance of the issue in South Africa, Thabo Mbeki’s interest in AIDS prior toelection, and then his avoidance of it once in ofﬁce, notwithstanding ongoingpolitical support. In Brazil, Lieberman claims that aggressive policies predatedPresidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s politicalleadership. Yet this is factually incorrect. Prior to Cardoso’s and the WorldBank’s loans in 1993, there was no aggressive AIDS program. Thus, leadershipunder Cardoso, at the presidential and bureaucratic level, was important forreform (p. 878).

In Lieberman’s view, leadership is unsatisfying because: “Therelationship between cause and effect is so close that they are almost indistinguishable”(p. 19). However, one can identify differences in state structures wherepersonal rule is possible. As Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg argued intheir classic article “Personal Rule: Theory and Practice in Africa,” manynewly independent African states lacked institutionalized checks on individualleaders. While that portrait has started to change, it is still a recognizablefeature in many African countries. Though South Africa possesses more of thesocietal and institutional checks than the rest of the continent – anindependent judiciary, a free press, and a vigorous civil society – the ANC’slegacy as liberator and Mbeki’s privileged position within the party gave himsignificant scope to pursue an idiosyncratic agenda for several years.

While social scientists tend to dislike individual levelexplanations in favor of more domestic structural and international systemslevel explanations, one cannot understand critical cases like South Africawithout bringing in agency and leadership. For that matter, we can’t understandPEPFAR without acknowledging the role of President Bush and his personalinterest in the problem. Here, I’m reminded of the piece by Dan Byman and KenPollack in a 2001 issue of International Security, “‘Let us now praise greatmen: bringing the statesmen back in.” The challenge is to recognize theconditions under which leaders may exercise agency. The structuralimpediments to action vary bycountry and circumstance. Sadly, in these tough economic times, the scope for moreaggressive efforts to address the AIDS crisis appears much more circumscribedthan it was just a few years ago.

Leaving this more theoretical social science question aside,Geffen’s book supports the notion that the Mbeki government did the wrong thingwhen it could and should have done something different. It is heartening thatthe Jacob Zuma government did an about-face on AIDS and has dramaticallychanged course to extend ARV therapy, support male circumcision, and enacted a host ofother measures to treat and contain the epidemic.

New Georgetown Blog

2012-01-19T19:43:00.001-05:00

SFS undergrad Anton Strezhnev has a new blog called Causal Loop. Highly recommended.

Via Jay Ulfelder who, naturally enough, critiques Anton's "first substantive post."

Creeping Illiberal Democracy

2012-01-18T18:13:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post had a fine op-ed this weekend by law professor Jonathan Turley asking the provocative question, Is the U.S. still the “land of the free?” He gave 10 compelling reasons that it is not.

Turley’s op ed has the legal issues well-covered. He also draws telling comparisons between U.S. laws and practices—and similar ones by countries that the State Dept annually condemns as human rights violators.

True, in the U.S., most of the new policies don’t affect most of “us”—at least if we are not Muslim, politically militant, or poor. On the other hand, the result of these new policies is that only the whim of our great leaders protects the rest of us from the same arbitrary and abusive practices now regularly rained down upon others. Worse, with Barack Obama having promoted, implemented, and deepened many of these Bush-era policies, there is now little chance that a change of administration will lead to a change. Sadly, the elevation of “security” over individual rights now enjoys broad bipartisan support.

These developments should be of concern to all citizens—though the fears of “terrorism” trumped up by our leaders have damped dissent. From the standpoint of political science, they also raise interesting questions: First, why is the U.S. human rights record so little studied by IR scholars? I don’t have the statistics to prove this, but it would be useful to ask the question—and, more important, to remedy this situation, as John Tirman has started doing at least with regard to casualties of America’s wars..

Second, these developments might breathe life into a line of research that, to my knowledge, has gotten too little attention: the transition from liberal to “illiberal democracies.” I have not followed this literature closely since Fareed Zakaria’s decade-old Foreign Affairs piece and more recent, if looser, book. Zakaria focuses on new democracies that don’t provide their citizens with civil liberties protections.

But there are also questions about how and when citizens in democratic countries forfeit long-held rights and legal protections. The following questions are just some of the fascinating and important ones that might be asked:

What factors lead to the forfeiture of long-established rights? Who leads the assault and why?

To what extent is this the result of consent by the citizenry? What role have political leaders played in generating “consent?” How have they done so—and why?

How, if at all, can we step back from illiberal to liberal democracy—in which individual rights are more securely protected against the power of the state?

It is perhaps trite to end with the words of concentration camp survivor Bishop Martin Niemiller, but they are worth remembering, considering—and acting upon:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out --
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out -- Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out -- Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me -- and there was no one left to speak for me.

###

Iran Attack: National Journal #Fail

2012-01-18T15:59:00.002-05:00

UPDATE: Deazen has made significant corrections to the article. It still implies, I think, more than is warranted, but the egregious misrepresentations in his article are gone.

SECOND UPDATE: In case anybody thought that this was anything other than a National Journal fail, it it turns out that Matt himself was instrumental in getting Deazen to correct the story.

Yochi J. Deazen of the National Journal details a high-level fight in the Administration about whether or not to attack Iran. His evidence? The juxtaposition of Matt Kroenig's and Colin Kahl's pieces in Foreign Affairs.

Now, however, competing essays by Matthew Kroenig and Colin Kahl, who just stepped down as the Pentagon’s top two Mideast policy officials, are offering an unusual look inside the White House deliberations about how far to go to stop Iran.

With American-Iranian tensions rising by the day, the essays in Foreign Affairs—one making the case for striking Iran and one making the case against—illustrate why the U.S. and its allies are having such a difficult time deciding how to respond to Iran's ongoing progress toward building a nuclear bomb. The White House declined comment on the essays.

Kroenig, one of the protagonists in the debate, left the Pentagon last summer after serving as a special adviser on Iran policy to then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The title of his essay, “Time to Attack Iran,” leaves no doubt about his thinking.

For reasons that I detailed in my earlier post, this is bull$h*t.

Matt was not a "special advisor to Robert Gates." He describes himself as having been a "special adviser in the Office of the Secretary of Defense." He was engaged in advisory activities in International Security Affairs-Middle East, a division within OSD(P).

But Deazen's description is ludicrous. As an IPA in ISA-ME, Matt was beneath (at least) a Director and a Principal Director, although I'm sure he had direct access to his DASD, Colin Kahl. Next in the chain of command was the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary (PDASD), followed by the Assistant Secretary of Defense (ASD) for ISA, then the Undersecretary.... you get the picture.

~~To be blunt,~~ The piece still implies that Matt was an administration official and that he "stepped down" from his position. In reality, his one-year fellowship ran out. [T]o the extent that their is a constituency favoring military action against Iran, Matt's views are his own---they say nothing about the state of play in the Obama Administration.

Romney: A Charmed Life

2012-01-17T22:17:00.000-05:00

The McCain opposition-research file circulating on the internet (if genuine) is just devastating in its picture of a man without any convictions whatsoever. It makes one thing crystal clear: Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee, and quite possibly our next President, because he faced a GOP field made up of incompetent, unserious, and underfunded rivals. A serious contender would have eviscerated him.

Many of the positions that should have made him toxic to the Republican base will be far less damaging the context of a general election. Still, the total insincerity of the man has to be a liability. While my structuralist instincts tell me that Romney has an extremely good shot at becoming President, my "campaigns matter" side whispers that, if up against a halfway competent Obama organization, this guy is toast.

Colin Kahl responds to Matt Kroenig

2012-01-17T18:32:00.001-05:00

Foreign Affairs has gone live with Colin Kahl's explanation of why we shouldn't commence bombing in five minutes. A sample:

In arguing for a six-month horizon, Kroenig also misleadingly conflates hypothetical timelines to produce weapons-grade uranium with the time actually required to construct a bomb. According to 2010 Senate testimony by James Cartwright, then vice chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and recent statements by the former heads of Israel's national intelligence and defense intelligence agencies, even if Iran could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb in six months, it would take it at least a year to produce a testable nuclear device and considerably longer to make a deliverable weapon. And David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security (and the source of Kroenig's six-month estimate), recently told Agence France-Presse that there is a "low probability" that the Iranians would actually develop a bomb over the next year even if they had the capability to do so. Because there is no evidence that Iran has built additional covert enrichment plants since the Natanz and Qom sites were outed in 2002 and 2009, respectively, any near-term move by Tehran to produce weapons-grade uranium would have to rely on its declared facilities. The IAEA would thus detect such activity with sufficient time for the international community to mount a forceful response. As a result, the Iranians are unlikely to commit to building nuclear weapons until they can do so much more quickly or out of sight, which could be years off.

There's no question in my mind that Colin gets the better of Matt in this debate, but I think a bit of background might be of interest to Duck readers.

Colin (who is literally "one of the smartest guys in the room") recently stepped down as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (DASD) for the Middle East in the Office of the Secretary of Defense(Policy). Matt had an International Affairs Fellowship (IAF) during the 2010-2011 academic year; Colin arranged for Matt to spend the fellowship in his office. Matt worked there part time, as I understand it, writing and assisting with analytic reports. I did a similar stint in Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia (RUE), although I did less analytic work and more backfill. In other words, Matt was basically a high-level intern and Colin was his boss. That, of course, doesn't invalidate Matt's arguments--they rise and fall on their own. But it does provide some reason to put more faith in Colin's expertise (and hands-on knowledge of) Iranian-US security dynamics than in Matt's.

Strategic narratives: An uncertain science

2012-01-17T06:44:00.004-05:00

Timing is everything; I'm not sure its good to be publishing a paper about strategic narratives just as the US cuts its Advisory Commission on Public Dipomacy, although RAND have begun exploring this field. National-level policymakers still try to tell stories about where their state and the international system are heading and should head. To the extent these narratives create expectations, shore up identities, create buy-in from partners, or have other discernible effects, we can say strategic narratives matter. The investment states have made in their international communications infrastructures in the past decade indicates the hope that aspiring or existing Great Powers can get their story out to overseas publics and elites. At the same time, sometimes just having an ambassador who carries his own bag can create a good impression. The 'science' of strategic narratives remains uncertain.

Hence, colleagues and I are trialing a working paper 'Forging the World: Strategic Narratives and International Relations', available to download here. It is authored by Alister Miskimmon (Royal Holloway), myself and Laura Roselle (Elon/Duke), and is based on the keynote Miskimmon and I delivered to International Studies Association (ISA) South at Elon University in October 2011. It comes from our long disatisfaction with how IR scholars treat media, communications and questions of influence, and how media and communications neglect many of the power dynamics of IR. It also comes from our experience working with foreign policymakers as they try to show measurable 'impact' of the narratives, and their attempts to harness new digital methods to monitor overseas public opinion. We plan to publish a book developing these ideas late in 2012, and we have panels on the subject at ISA San Diego in April and BISA/ISA Edinburgh in June with some great scholars (Neta Crawford, Karin Fierke, Antje Weiner, Robin Brown, Monroe Price, Amelia Arsenault), so if you're interested in please come along or look for the papers. For now, we'd really appreciate it if the Duck commentariat have comments on the paper.

Learning from Histories of the AIDS Crisis

2012-01-16T17:34:00.000-05:00

What can we learn from histories of the AIDS crisis? Jacques Pépin's The Origins of AIDS and Nathan Geffen's Debunking Delusions: The Inside Story of the Treatment Action Campaign are two important contributions to our understanding of a disease that has now claimed nearly thirty million lives.

In different ways, both books raise interesting questions about what we can learn from history about causal mechanisms and wider sets of issues. In this two-part blog post, I'll talk about each book and a recent set of review essays in Perspectives on Politics on Evan Lieberman's important 2009 book Boundaries of Contagion: How Ethnic Politics Have Shaped Government Responses to AIDS.

Pépin, a Canadian medical doctor with a specialty in African sleeping sickness, has written a compact yet magisterial book that traces how the virus that causes AIDS leapt from chimpanzees to humans and then became a generalized epidemic in Africa that radiated around the world.

Pépin asks and answers a number of important questions in the book to weave a complex narrative of the worst health crisis since the Black Death. Could animals other than chimpanzees been the cause of transmission of HIV? (No. A hunter likely came in contact with chimp blood and picked up the disease and passed it on.) When and where, to the best of our knowledge did HIV originate? (Much earlier than we thought, perhaps as early as the 1920s and probably in central Africa in or near present day DRC). What role did colonial governments play in dislocating rural African societies and fostering the growth of male-dominated urban centers susceptible to prostitution? (By creating towns where only African men could legally live or by uprooting men to work on the railroads or the mines, the colonial powers disrupted rural populations and left large numbers of men without families and more likely to procure the services of the "oldest trade"). How did colonial era medical interventions to protect against other diseases like yaws and syphilis likely engender the spread of HIV? (Injectable drugs helped reduce the burden of infectious disease but poorly cleaned equipment likely helped spread HIV more widely). How did AIDS likely spread from Africa to and throughout the Americas? (One of 4,500 Haitian teachers in the Congo likely acquired the virus and brought it home where it became amplified through sexual tourism from the United States and the trade in blood which both spread the virus to hemophiliacs but also back to blood donors through efforts to separate out plasma).

As a political scientist, I found it fascinating how Pépin explicitly addressed alternative explanations for different facets of the argument. Even as Pépin sought to answer questions about AIDS, I learned a great deal about colonial era health practices, key protagonists in the fights against yaws and sleeping sickness, among other diseases. At each step, Pépin sought to engage rival explanations, "Could it have been this?"

At the same time, he consistently assembled a variety of evidence including colonial era statistics on trends in treatment of infectious diseases to sophisticated genetic evidence dating the origins of particular varieties of HIV with a margin of error.

In terms of policy and the present day, I was especially troubled how even well intended interventions to deal with other public health problems likely helped set the stage for the spread of HIV. This observation made me wonder how modern practices intended to enhance health and save lives (like the widespread use of antibiotics in animal feed) may create unanticipated consequences of grave proportions later on (such as drug resistance).

Even as AIDS continues to cast a large shadow over global health efforts, I wonder about our readiness for the next crisis and the leap of infection from animals to humans that proves both especially transmissible and deadly (or in light of the reports of manmade bird flu, from the lab to humans). Just this week, the Washington Post ran a story on the CDC's efforts to test confiscated African bush meat for potentially lethal pathogens. The budget of this program: $59,740.

While I can't say whether or not this amount of money is enough, I am worried that health agencies are being called upon to do more with less, in some cases much less. With the WHO having experienced unprecedented budget cuts in 2011 (nearly $1bn or almost 20% of its biennial budget) and the CDC having significant cuts of its own ($740mn or nearly 11% of its budget was cut between FY2010 and FY2011, are we becoming less capable in this time of economic crisis, even as our global health needs have grown?

In the next post, I'll focus more on Geffen's book and understanding the role of leadership in national efforts to address HIV/AIDS.

Visas and scholarship

2012-01-14T04:36:00.002-05:00

Sarah Duff (who has contributed to this blog before) had a very interesting piece in the UK Guardian this week on the hurdles scholars in developing countries have to face in order to engage with scholars in the developed world. Rather than focusing on whether or not the visa system is fair, she describes exactly what she must do in order to present a paper in “the West” how this impacts on the development of her research:

I describe the expensive, time-consuming, and often quite invasive procedure of applying for a visa to explain why they influence my work. Because my American visa is valid until 2015, I jump at the chance of attending conferences in the US. Next year, I hope to present at a conference in Australia, but I will only attend if I manage to secure travel funds that will cover the cost of the visa (another £65). I recently presented a paper at a conference in London via Skype because I had neither the time nor the funds to apply for a British visa.

Given what we hear in the media (and how Europeans complain to me of lines at US airports) it’s interesting here that the US system (which can provide up to a 10 year visa) is almost enlightened by comparison. Certainly it is fairer to scholars who are trying to network and get their research noticed.

However, the point I want to raise is (writing as a Western academic) more selfish. While Duff’s article suggests the way that these expensive and complicated visa systems have an impact on scholars in the developing world and how they do research, it seems clear to me that these systems are also affecting, if not damaging, research in the West. If scholars “in the West” cannot get access to scholars in the developing world, surely this is also affecting our ability to carry out research and exchange information and ideas as well. Yes, of course there is the internet, Skype, online journals, etc. The research is there if you look for it. But don’t we learn more at conferences when we have better global representation and views? Additionally, aren’t our students (who may not have large grants /funds to travel) better off when they can meet with and speak to scholars from the developing world? These things just seem self-evident.

Given recent trends in the West, I don’t expect this visa situation to be changing any time soon. But I think it is important for scholars to consider the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that the absence of voices from the developing world because of their inability to engage and network is affecting the way both groups of scholars carry out research.

"I am not a Chicken!": Social Mobilization at Its Best

2012-01-12T16:06:00.002-05:00

I can't resist sharing this wonderful news clip from Malawi. I challenge Duck readers to have fun with this: What might the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street movements learn from Malawi?

Malawi protests scheduled for January 15, Chilembwe Day
12 January 2012
tags: chilembwe day, malawi, protest
by dadakim

The following call to protest in Malawi on January 15 (Chilembwe Day) was sent as an email, and has been reported on by opposition online news agency Nyasa Times.

***********************
CONCERNED CITIZENS OF MALAWI — PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 11 JANUARY 2012

TIME FOR ACTION AGAINST ECONOMIC FAILURE

My Fellow Malawians.

I greet you in the name of the Lord our God.

97 years after Rt Rev John Chilembwe sacrificed his precious life to fight colonialism, Malawi is at the Crossroads again. Our leadership has failed us big time.

With their own hands, our leaders have created gargantuan problems for the ordinary people. With their own hands, our leaders have depleted all our forex reserves on luxuries such as the presidential jet, Mercedes Benz vehicles for members of the Cabinet and grand high level corruption.

With their own hands, our leaders have left the country’s health delivery system in a shambles. With their own hands, our leaders have facilitated the deaths of thousands of ordinary poor Malawians through failure to supply hospitals with basic essential drugs.

With their own hands, our leaders have rendered the public ambulance system which serves the medical emergency needs of 90% of Malawians ineffective leading to massive deaths.

With their own hands, our leaders are failing to support private sector growth, denying companies the much needed foreign exchange needed to import raw materials. With their own hands, our leaders are forcing companies to cut jobs, rendering thousands of Malawian jobless.

With their own hands, our leaders are forcing people to spend long unproductive hours and sleepless nights queuing for fuel at pump stations without any hope.

Yet, when the suffering public raises their voices to complain about the deteriorating life standards, with their own mouth, our leaders are happy to call its people chickens.

Are you really chickens Fellow Malawians? This is the question that we, as Concerned Malawian Citizens (CMC), would like every Malawian to reflect on as we commemorate the Rt Rev John Chilembwe’s uprising of 1915.

Let there be no doubt, my Fellow Malawians. Malawians succeeded to remove colonialism and one-party dictatorship despite immense resistance. There is absolutely nothing that can stop Malawians today from removing the current dictator and save the nation from further economic deterioration. We must remain united and focused on rescuing our poor people.

WAYFORWARD

The commemoration of the 1915 Chilembwe uprising gives us a window of hope. As Concerned Malawian Citizens, we would like to reject in the strongest terms possible, that Malawians are not Chickens. In view of that, we would like to appeal to all Malawians to unite and take the following peaceful actions in protest:

Effective today, 11 January 2012, all Malawian motorists are asked to blow their vehicle horns three times a day at the following times: 0830am, 1230pm and 1630pm. This must be done continuously for some 30 seconds. This also applies to motorists camping at a fuel stations.

Every Friday, all Malawians are requested to put on red attire or a red scarf in protest to continued suffering of the people.

All Malawians are requested to get a small red flag or red card. This red flag or red card should be waved in the air, everything you see any member of the Cabinet or other senior government officials. This must be done in the same way as Football Referees do when sending off a player who has breached football rules. Where possible, when raising the flag, you must shout: “I am not a Chicken”.

On Chilembwe Day, which falls on 15 January, all Malawians are asked to put on red attire and peacefully converge at the following places for a three-hour vigil. The vigil will start at 0900 am.

· In Blantyre, Kamuzu Upper Stadium

· Lilongwe, Area 18 Tower

· Zomba, Academic Freedom Park at Chancellor College

· Mzuzu, Katoto Freedom Park.

Activities will include poetry recitals, traditional dances and songs.

THE TIME FOR ACTION IS NOW OR NEVER. SAY NO TO ECONOMIC FAILURE

YOURS

CONCERNED CITIZENS

Information wants to be free. Congress wants it to be held for ransom.

2012-01-11T08:22:00.000-05:00

It's bad form to criticize other
disciplines' journals based solely
on titles, but Annals of Tourism Research?
This is the sort of thing libraries
spend their budgets on?

Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) is trying to end taxpayer access to publicly-funded research. The article is worth reading, not least because it is the only time that you'll ever see the term "powerful publishing cartels" in this age of disruptive new-media innovation.

And yet the academic publishing market really is different, as one UC-Berkeley professor argued last year. When Nature tried to extort a 400% subscription fee increase from the University of California system, there was very little to do except engage the nuclear option--that is, threaten to boycott the journals entirely. Academics, whose lives are shaped by publishing in journals, are at the mercy of those journals' publishers. In such negotiating positions, it's unsurprising that publishers have managed to steadily increase their yield from universities that--as you may have heard!--are otherwise struggling to get by.

In the long term, the disjuncture between stagnant or shrinking university resources and increasing fees for access will lead to a rather severe readjustment. The same thing will happen to the plethora of new journals that is happening to the plethora of newly-minted Ph.D.s. That is, they will starve, wither, and -- well, only the journals will die. The Ph.D.s will move on to jobs in industry. (I hope.)

What could help, of course, would be a far-sighted policy that would guarantee that the fruits of taxpayer-funded research would be available to taxpayers. This utopian dream is easily oversold. Let's be frank: the general public doesn't particularly care or directly benefit from research. The indirect benefits are pretty good, but no single journal article is likely to matter much to the public, which is simply unable to read and evaluate the articles unless they ~~get their union card~~ earn their doctorate. But it's reprehensible that universities, which even if "private" are tax-supported by their nonprofit status, are given federal money to produce research which is then given to private publishers which, in turn, take quite a bit of money from universities to let them see that research in slightly better-formatted versions.

The good news is that the publishing house Elsevier has managed to rent their very own congressperson for, apparently, only a couple of thousand dollars in campaign contributions. At this point, even academics can scrape together a few shillings and find a senator or two to champion our cause. But please: let's stick to the small-state legislators. Their campaigns are cheaper and some of us have a pay freeze.

Politics, Intelligence, and Academic Analysis

2012-01-10T12:16:00.003-05:00

Writing in Foreign Policy, Paul Pillar makes the case that most so-called "intelligence failures" stem from bad leadership rather than problems with the US intelligence community. He touches upon a number of cases, but Iraq looms large:

Had Bush read the intelligence community's report, he would have seen his administration's case for invasion stood on its head. The intelligence officials concluded that Saddam was unlikely to use any weapons of mass destruction against the United States or give them to terrorists -- unless the United States invaded Iraq and tried to overthrow his regime. The intelligence community did not believe, as the president claimed, that the Iraqi regime was an ally of al Qaeda, and it correctly foresaw any attempt to establish democracy in a post-Saddam Iraq as a hard, messy slog.

Pillar's discussion of proliferation is a little more nuanced. He writes:

The intelligence community was raising no alarms about the subject when the Bush administration came into office; indeed, the 2001 edition of the community's comprehensive statement on worldwide threats did not even mention the possibility of Iraqi nuclear weapons or any stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons. The administration did not request the (ultimately flawed) October 2002 intelligence estimate on Iraqi unconventional weapons programs that was central to the official case for invasion -- Democrats in Congress did, and only six senators and a handful of representatives bothered to look at it before voting on the war, according to staff members who kept custody of the copies. Neither Bush nor Condoleezza Rice, then his national security advisor, read the entire estimate at the time, and in any case the public relations rollout of the war was already under way before the document was written.

I can't speak to all of these claims, but the evidence seems pretty overwhelming that "intelligence failures" -- understood as erroneous conclusions produced by the intelligence community in which Bush administration pressure played no role -- cannot be blamed for the catastrophic decision to invade Iraq.

This discussion provides a nice pivot to something that's bothered me for quite some time. Robert Jervis wrote a scholarly book on intelligence failures that, inter alia, places responsibility for the WMD-debacle on the CIA. In response to a negative review in the New York Review of Books, Jervis wrote:

Powers’s other point is that the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence, Jami Miscik, threatened to resign unless the White House stopped pressuring her. But her complaints were about the CIA’s refusal to affirm links between Saddam and terrorism, not about its WMD findings, which was the topic of my analysis. This is a key point. If politicization explained intelligence assessments, we would find them converging with administration preferences. But on Iraq and terrorism, they never did.

This line of reasoning strikes me as a classic "academic logic" blunder, one that I'm surprised that Jervis, as a former scholar-in-residence at the CIA, would make. Bureaucrats and officials pick their fights; they are much more likely to fall on their swords (or threaten to) over battles they believe they can win than over battles they see as losers. Whatever the truth of the matter, Miscik's behavior is in no way inconsistent with the claim that politicization drove intelligence analysts to overstate the threat of Iraqi unconventional-weapons proliferation.

Blondie

2012-01-10T10:46:00.020-05:00

If you are running for the nomination of the Republican Party for President, there are a few

indispensables – you have to hate welfare recipients, oppose gay marriage, and have fired a gun at an animal at some point. (But apparently you no longer have to support a robust military presence overseas. Or have fired a gun against another person in a foreign war. That has not been a requirement since Eisenhower.) But it seems there is another sine qua non. If you are a man, you need a blond wife.

Here are pictures of the wives of all the major contenders for the Republican nomination for President. You will notice a similarity. They are not all skinny, or pretty, or young. But they are all blond. Even Ron Paul’s wife. You can want to legalize marijuana but do not, under any circumstances, marry a swarthy woman.

This inspires so many questions. Why is a blond wife such a necessary accessory? Is blondness just white skin in hair color form? Or are blond women a kind of status symbol, the diamonds of hair color because blond hair is relatively rarer?

Do male politicians in training go looking for a blond wife before they run for office for the first time? Or is there an endogeneity problem with that explanation – that is, do they realize after they marry a blond woman that they might have a productive career in politics? Are these women all blond to start with? Or do they change their hair color to suit their husband’s ambitions. That would be quite sad.

But it appears to be something of an iron rule. Here is the wife of Tim Pawlenty, who was the first to drop out before the race really began. Notice something – brunette. Brown, but still.

It does seems though that Herman Cain got an exception. His wife is not blonde. After all, nothing would upset Republican primary voters more than a black man with a blond woman. Oh, yeah. That’s what sunk him.

Many Republicans pinned their hopes on this guy, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey. But those hopes were false. Look, she’s dark-haired. It does beg a completely different question though. Why is Chris Christie meeting the Queen?

Pentagon as Economic Dynamo: Not

2012-01-07T16:56:00.000-05:00

The Pentagon is remarkable for its ability to contrive reasons to justify its bloated budgets. In recent years, it and the gaggle of contractors, analysts, and journalists that support it have found military-security risks in everything from “hot zone" diseases to global warming. But with looming budget cuts, the defense establishment is being forced to downsize, albeit modestly.

To protect itself, it has now taken to fear-mongering. Some of this is the usual: the supposedly dire threats we face abroad – e.g., from distant, 10th rate military powers like Iran or Pakistan or al-Qaeda, or from major trading partners like China. All of this, of course, is stated with a straight face even while our military spending dwarfs that of other nations combined. Somehow, however, and even with the natural geostrategic advantages provided by two oceans, the U.S., at least in the eyes of our panicky military brass remains forever UNDER THREAT.

In addition to such perennial hyperbole, the Pentagon now warns that cuts will have nasty domestic consequences, raising unemployment and killing economic innovation. It’s hard to argue that major military cuts might lead to job losses, not only among uniformed servicemen but also among the hordes of government contractors who’ve grown fat on defense budgets paid for by taxpayer dollars.

But that’s a good thing! If in fact it happens – and, unfortunately, that remains a big if given the proven power of the military-industrial complex to defend its narrow self-interest – ex-soldiers and ex-contractors will find other ways of getting along.   Sure there will be some temporary pain for the displaced, but this will in the end help the larger economy and certainly the government’s budget picture.

As for innovation, the New York Times’s Binyamin Appelbaum has a front-page article today about that issue – one that’s worth reading as much for its misjudgments as for anything else.

The article strives for balance, including a number of different viewpoints on how much impact military spending has on economic dynamism. But its take-away lines, signaled by its original headline, “A Hidden Cost of Military Cuts Could Be Invention and Its Industries,” are that the Pentagon has an “unmatched record in developing technologies with broad public benefits – like the Internet, jet engines and satellite navigation – and then encouraging private companies to reap the rewards.”

“Unmatched?” Really? How can one possibly make such a statement without placing it in context? But for the Pentagon’s pull on the purse strings, those contracts might have been administered through other government agencies, rather than the military. And they might well have been far more efficient. Alternatively, the money sucked out of the private economy by taxes to fund the military might have been used for R & D directly, by investors and entrepreneurs. And what of the countless amounts of R & D spending that have ended in nothing – or nothing better than a more efficient killing machine, usable only in wars?

Nowhere in the article is there anything but assumption that only the military, as some kind of beneficent and far-seeing midwife of invention, could have fostered these and other innovations. Nowhere are there convincing arguments that most if not all of these developments wouldn’t have been made either through some other government R & D agency or through the market itself.

The article’s claim that 59 Nobel Laureates have received funding from the Navy fails to impress. The fact that future Nobelists took money from a rich vein of governmental fat says nothing about whether the Pentagon’s influence led to their prizes. It certainly doesn’t justify the claim that the military has had a “remarkable record of success.”

Nor does Appelbaum provide a convincing explanation for this unproven success. One factor he raises is the “Pentagon’s relative insulation from politics which has allowed it to sustain a long-term research agenda in controversial areas . . . [n]o matter which party is in power.” This view is myopic. Certainly Congressmen are reluctant to halt weapons programs – because they are strategically sited in every Congressional district around the country. That is not insulation from politics. It is the very essence of politics, and for that reason leads to vast amounts of waste.

One expert is quoted as saying that the Pentagon is superior to other government agencies because “they are the customer. You can’t pull the wool over their eyes.” But the Pentagon buys its products with taxpayer money, not its “own” money. It feels little pain when, for instance, boondoggle aircraft carriers like the Gerald M. Ford, have billions of dollars in cost overruns. Cosy relationships between the military, contractors, legislators, and journalists make for few if any incentives for economic efficiency. Worse still, many new weapons systems have had poor safety records, resulting in injuries and deaths to our servicemen.

The article, to its credit, includes quotations from economists who raise such fundamental questions, showing just how inefficient Pentagon expenditures are compared to other government spending. Yet Appelbaum fails to see that these studies call into question his bold claims.

Meanwhile, Appelbaum’s view is backed only by those who don’t appear to have thought enough about the issues.   One expert says he’d “like to see a lot less weapons and a lot less focus on them, but [defense spending is] not all about that.” According to him, “If catalyzing innovation is going to be an important part of our economic strategy, then we better be careful how we handle” the military budget.

But if we really care about innovation in our economy, why would we ask the Pentagon to take part, much less take charge? A shocking 55% of all government R & D spending is allocated to the military. In fact, the military is a remarkably poor vehicle of economic dynamism – hardly surprising since, of course, that is not its mission. If innovation is our goal, why not better fund government agencies tasked precisely with the goal of innovation?

One answer seems to be provided by another expert who is said to believe that “the Pentagon [has] an inherent advantage in funding research and development” and is quoted as saying that “War matters more. People take it more seriously.” In other words, only the Pentagon can convince our short-sighted Congress to provide money for long term R & D.

How sad. But the bright side for the future is that if less tax money is squandered on the Pentagon, there will be more funds for private sector investment. True, some innovations that require long-term R & D might be missed without a government hand in the process. But if as a result the U.S. loses its competitive edge, Congress might even see fit to provide such funding to new agencies aimed precisely at creating technological advances – not to a Pentagon tasked with fighting wars.

Other economists are cited as arguing that Pentagon spending saves money by providing security within which economic growth can occur. Even if true, that claim, of course, says nothing about whether the Pentagon is a good place to spend America’s innovation dollar. It also assumes that there are threats severe enough to jeopardize growth. Yet the spate of warfighting that the US has engaged in since the end of the Cold War has cost trillions. And one of the main reasons we engage in so many of these operations is not because our nation’s security is truly threatened—but because we can, because we have the overblown military forces and high technology to do so. Worse still, there is a good argument that these wars have created more enemies than they have destroyed.

My heart bleeds for the thousands of workers in Northern Virginia and around the country who have fed at the Pentagon’s trough for so long. But why should they be any different from the rest of the U.S. economy, which must suffer through the adjustments that our economy periodically requires? The Pentagon and military contractors have for decades been a bastion of privilege – a protected little socialist republic within our capitalist state – immune from the laws of economics. After a decade of gluttonous expansion, there is now a modest effort to rein it in.

I look forward to the possibility however small of more cuts – and to the increased innovation and dynamism it is likely to spark in our economy.
####

The DC Government's Priorities

2012-01-07T16:13:00.002-05:00

Last year I mentioned an editorial in the Washington Post decrying the District's decision--prodded by a small number of wealthy Georgetown residents--to force the University to meet unrealistic targets. A refresher:

A recommendation by the city’s office of planning would require the university to provide housing for 100 percent of its undergraduate students by 2016; failure to do so would force cuts in enrollment starting in 2015. Georgetown houses a higher percentage (84 percent) of undergraduates on its campus than most of the other universities in the city. Not only is it unfair to hold Georgetown to this new standard, but it’s unrealistic to expect the school to raise the money or find appropriate sites. The city’s suggestion that the university consider an off-campus site outside the university’s Zip code (Arlington?) is laughable.

What’s most troubling about the city’s posture is the notion that an increase in young people, particularly those in search of an education, is somehow undesirable. What happened to the idea that these are the very kind of people that should be lured to make the District their home? Here’s how Sally Kram of the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area put it in testimony supporting Georgetown: “Given that students are one of the District’s most assured conduits for new residents — a lifeline for any urban community — it seems particularly odd that the District’s Office of Planning seems committed to restricting student growth, particularly graduate and continuing education students.”

There is no question that the neighborhoods surrounding Georgetown have some legitimate complaints. There have been issues of noise and litter and other problems by students living off-campus. But the solution isn’t to banish students or punish the university. Georgetown has increased police, provided additional garbage pickup and disciplined chronic troublemakers. Besides, for all the complaints, the neighborhoods — which, it must be pointed out, came long after the university — still are desirable places with steady demographics and increased home prices.

The editorial, predictably, caused one influential neighbor to accuse Georgetown of underhandedly influencing the Washington Post. Lydia DePillis of the City Paper, though, gets it right:

Can't disagree with the ed board here. Requiring a university to house all of its students on campus is unrealistic and unreasonable, not to mention counterproductive to the goal of getting them involved in District affairs, which Mayor Vince Gray has explicitly pushed. At the same time, Gray says he "supports the community" against the "creeping presence" of universities into neighborhoods. But does the administration really want those jobs to be housed at satellite campuses in Arlington? If so, it's done a pretty good job so far.

Well, not content with going after undergraduate enrollment, the community has been gunning for graduate students as well.

This might be simply in retaliation for their failure to recognize that moving into a neighborhood that has housed a university for over three hundred years might entail dealing with drunken students and traffic. It might stem from the belief that the only drunk young people in Georgetown must be students at the college. It might also stem from their refusal to believe studies that show adding graduate students won't, with proper mitigation, seriously impact commuting in and around Georgetown.

But, whatever the reason, they are seeking a cap-and-reduce policy towards post-graduate students that treats full-time and part-time graduate students as equivalent. The zoning board appears to be siding with them, and Georgetown is taking voluntary action.

If you watch the zoning board hearing from November of 201, you'll soon realize what a joke this is. The community representatives have trouble distinguishing between "trips" and "students," accuse the studies of being improper because they didn't consider the possibility that some students and/or faculty might park in a neighborhood about about a mile away, and so forth.

The net result? People will lose their jobs. Less funding will be available for the graduate school--and hence for fellowships for PhD and MA students. There will be enormous pressure for MA programs to cease to admit part-time students, thus preventing Georgetown from serving the career needs of DC and US government employees.

Grand Strategy or Glossing Over Budget Cuts: Q&A

2012-01-05T17:59:00.000-05:00

The twitter-verse, or at least, one of the corners I follow, had heaps of tweets dedicated to the rollout of the US defense review, with Obama playing a starring role. Apparently, Obama briefing at the Pentagon is a new thing. Anyhow, it raised all kinds of questions, so I thought I would answer them all here. Yes, all of them. Ok, some of them.

Q: Is the review really a review of what the US wants to do, or is it a gloss over the requirements imposed by the fiscal crisis?
A: Yes, it is a gloss, but it is more significant than that. In the good old days, Grand Strategy meant the overall approach a country took to pursue its interests and match commitments and capabilities. So, having less money than planned (note, less money than planned, not significantly less money than before these wars of the Aughts) means adjusting commitments. Which leads to the next question:
Q: All this talk of the Gulf and East Asia, and cuts to the Army, focusing on the Navy and Air Force means that Europe is taking a back seat in US grand strategy, right?
A: Yes.
A: Oh, you want more than that. Well, to be honest, that change happened the second week of my time on the Joint Staff, when the daily/weekly urgency about the Balkans dissipated as a war in Central Asia and then a second war took the focus and the resources of the US. The Balkans became an afterthought. Other than providing a handy set of bases for the Libyan enterprise, Europe has not been a place that American defence planners have spent much time thinking about.
Q: But what about Russia?
A: Good question. Well, my guess is that Russia is not seen as a conventional military threat to Europe right now or the near future. That European forces could potential deter the Russians. Ok, that makes us both laugh. With Europeans cutting their defense budgets in ways that do far more harm to readiness (as in: no more fighter planes or no more armor), Europe is not going to be that fit to take care of itself. But it has as much economic capability (once the Euro crisis settles down) to provide defense for itself, or at least supplement an American effort to "spoil" an attack. Plus the reality is that any Russian invasion of Europe would require invading countries we do not care about unless we are stupid enough to let Ukraine into NATO. Oh, never mind.
Q: Back to the core of the new strategy, what is this one war and one other thing?
A: The previous strategy had the goal of fighting two major wars at the same time and winning both. The new strategy is not that new but a bit more honest: fight one major war and have enough left over to deter adversaries and even mess with the plans of one attacker.
Q: Is this realistic?
A: Actually, yes. That is, even during the two wars being fought for the past ten years, a significant hunk of American fighting capacity was barely touched, more or less. This would be the Navy and the Air Force. Sure, they came in handy at times, but for most of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, the US still had enough fighting power to be someone else's Air Force and Navy (such as South Korea's) to challenge the adversary. Plus we have those handy nukes that do some deterring of some kinds of attacks as well.
Q: But isn't the army going to be mighty small now?
A: Smaller is not small. It will still be one of the largest armies in the world. And larger than other post-war US armies. No, a smaller army would not be able to do another Afghanistan and Iraq at the same time. But perhaps tying the President's hands so that we don't do that again is not entirely a bad idea. For instance, any President would have to ponder what it would really take to invade Iran and ask what else might happen. And then realize that invading Iran is an incredibly stupid idea. Yes, a President Santorum could not make such a calculation, but I am pretty confident that such an outcome is unlikely in the extreme.* The words of former SecDef Gates are still ringing about how stupid it would be to engage in another land war in Asia (he must have seen Princess Bride recently).

* I am conflicted between the joy that would such a train wreck a Santorum nomination would be and how embarrassing it would be.

Q: This means that the era of counter-insurgency is over, right?
A: Wrong. As long as the US maintains significant conventional superiority (and this budget will not end that era), its adversaries are likely not going to make Hussein's mistake of putting a conventional force in the field and hoping the US does not shred it. Instead, insurgency will be the strategy of choice. Well, that and terrorism. The danger in having steep cuts is that the military will lose heaps of people with lots of experience and expertise in such warfare. But then again, given how long these wars went on, I am pretty sure that there will be plenty of folks left in the Army and Marines who have significant COIN and CT experience. Even if the Army wants to forget everything it learned. Plus, well, politicians have a way of putting the military in places they don't want to be. And a stabilization operation can turn into an insurgency under the ~~right~~ wrong conditions.
Q: Is China really the threat that the US should be focused on? Doesn't this strategy make the Pacific the priority? Is this wise?
A: Maybe not, yes, and yes.
Q: Huh?
A: China is not going to attack Pearl Harbor anytime soon, and it does lack some basic capacities to dominate the Pacific. War is not likely soon or in the medium term. However, being prepared is one of the better ways to avoid war. Further, it is a matter of priorities and threats. Is the Pacific a more uncertain, less institutionalized environment than the Atlantic and the Mediterranean? Yes. No doubt. Europe has its problems, including an increasingly authoritarian Hungary (oh my!), but we have a much more stable status quo there. The fears are about whether Germany will exert enough leadership, not whether various actors within Europe will drop out of NATO and start attacking others (well, except for the constant Greece-Turkey thing). In Asia, there is China, making threats to its neighbors, North Korean being North Korea, lots of other hotspots, and, oh by the way, India is in PACOM's area of responsibility. Plus Europe is closer and has much more infrastructure so the US could surge there more quickly and more effectively. Again, less resources (less than previously planned/dreamed) means prioritizing, and the Pacific is simply of greater concern.
Q: Does this mean that Mearsheimer's Offshore-Balancing is the way forward?
A: I would hate to say that Mearsheimer is right, but, well, fu@#$. Maybe he is. Maybe the US will focus its efforts on not fighting land wars and spend its effort trying to deter bad guys via sea and air-based power. Double damn. But I am pretty sure that the US will still feel compelled to put troops on the ground in places Mearsheimer does not care about for stakes he does not care about and not for the reasons Mearsheimer suspects (ethnic lobbies, imperfect marketplaces of ideas, lying politicians), but because the world is a complex place, and with great power comes .... great opportunities to get involved in places. Does this mean that offensive realism is correct? Well, no. Off-shore balancing and offensive realism might seem perfectly compatible to some people, but other theories might also be compatible with off-shore balancing (including defensive realism, liberal institutionalism and who knows what else). But that is an academic debate for another day.
Q: Best part of this discussion of American grand strategy:
A: Drezner's post of videos that help to illustrate 21st American grand strategy.
Q: Why did Obama show up at the Pentagon?
A: Um, it provides lots of cool stories. Or at least I think so. My students may think otherwise.

The Peacenik Profession

2012-01-05T17:07:00.000-05:00

Given some of the recent discussion on the Duck about the use of force in the Arabian Gulf, I thought I'd point out something interesting from the recent TRIP survey of international relations scholars. It turns out that between 60 and 90 percent of IR scholars surveyed simply reject the U.S. use of force in five hot-button regions. Asked "Would you approve or disapprove of the use of U.S. military forces in the following situations?", scholars responded:

War between North and South Sudan: 84.6% disapprove.
If it were certain that Iran had produced a nuclear weapon: 79.9% disapprove
If extremists were poised to take over Pakistan: 63.3% disapprove
To support democratic transition in Syria: 78.6% disapprove
To support democratic transition in Yemen: 84.4% disapprove

The repository of all human knowledge on the Internet suggests that this means that IR scholars, as a community, are more hostile to the U.S. use of force in these cases than economists, as a community, are hostile to raising the minimum wage.

This raises a new wrinkle for the discussion that we had last week. Should IR scholars advocating for the use of force be required to add a disclaimer that they are--given the TRIP data--arguing against the judgment of the mainstream of the discipline?

(Note that I'm not taking a position on this question or the five questions raised above. Indeed, on at least two questions I would be prepared to contemplate the use of force, given more information about the circumstances. Nor do I think that heterodoxy is invalid!)

Addendum: The Use of History in IR and the Causes of World War II

2012-01-05T10:06:00.000-05:00

So, in my last post, I critiqued Rosasto and Schuessler's realist take on the causes of World War II, repeating the IR conventional wisdom of liberal internationalism (that it was reparations and beggar-thy-neighbor policies that worsened the Depression and created the conditions for the rise of Hitler). I ran that interpretation by one of my colleagues at the LBJ School, Frank Gavin, a historian who knows this literature much better than me but also one who has engaged the IR literature quite extensively.

I wanted to quote his email to me at length about how historians now understand WWII, which may be conventional wisdom in IR among those who follow the issue closely, but I'm not sure. It certainly hadn't permeated the readings I was assigned in grad school a decade ago.

Frank's intent was not so much picking one or another historical interpretation, as suggesting a greater, mutually beneficial dialogue between historians and IR specialists. I think what emerges from this discussion is that any particular -isms centric perspective on the causes of World War II may do violence to the complexity of the historical record. It raises questions about how to do theoretically informed work that necessarily simplifies a complex reality without reifying erroneous tropes about the past that then get locked in and passed down to IR scholars in ever simpler form as conventional wisdom.

Here is what Frank wrote:

The LI interpretation of WWII is no longer conventional wisdom among historians. This is an interesting area where archives are important. Take Germany in the 1920s — it used to be thought that Gustav Stresseman was the "Monet" of the interwar period, reflecting the more peaceful side of politics in Germany, and that they economic decline turned the populace against those types. Well, when his papers were opened, it turned out he strongly supported Germany acquiring all nearby German speaking territories — which had been allocated by Versailles to Poland, France, and Czechoslovakia — once German strength returned. In fact, great historical work by Schukur, McDougall, Maier, and Trachtenberg demonstrated that the reparations/Ruhr crisis was the German challenge to Versailles, that the US and UK failed to full back the Frenc, the Germans "won," and Versailles was more or less dead by 1924.

War was likely just a matter of time at that point, though this is not to deny the particularly virulent, bizarre, racialist war Hitler pursued. The same goes with beggar thy neighbor policies — due to the great work of Barry Eichengreen, no one really believes that story any more. In fact, those economies that devalued quickly did much better, while those who pursued restrictive monetary policies to maintain parity and stay on gold, did much worse. As as Trachtenberg shows, the reparation question was more a political issue — a "willingness" to pay (and a willingness of others to enforce), rather than a "capacity" to pay (it is interesting to compare the huge reparations the French were forced to pay Germany in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussion War).

Finally, the standard LI interpretation does not explain why the Depression made one authoritarian dictatorship — Germany — aggressive, while another — the Soviet Union — remained passive abroad, at least until attacked. So here again is another area where the traditional IR interpretation may be a few decades behind the historical one, or at least an important interpretive strand. I wonder too whether the LI interpretation has wrestled with Adam Tooze's "Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy," one of the most important books of international history produced in years; Tooze argues that Germany was, in many ways, responding to the threat ofAmerica's geopolitical rise during the interwar years.

Hu's Culture War

2012-01-04T21:41:00.000-05:00

Building on PM's earlier post, "Cultural Weapons and International Relations" I'd like to look at an example that helps to illustrate the ways in which Realism misunderstands the role of culture in global politics. In his blog post titled, "China's War Against Harry Potter," Stephen Walt analyzes President Hu Jintao's attempt to defend Chinese culture by increasing its production of local culture. What is interesting is that Walt has plenty to say about culture, but he wants to separate cultural production from the state and to portray the state's attempt to manage culture as irrational.

First, Walt argues that cultural and artistic production is something which authoritarian states cannot manage well. He writes, "What Hu doesn't understand is that you can't just order creativity up by fiat or by making a cheerleading speech." For Walt, the cutting edge of creativity comes autonomously from the state.

Walt's argument is flawed because all states are involved to varying degrees in cultural production, including liberal democratic states. Canada and France are perhaps the most prominent examples of states that seek to enhance and shape cultural production through bureaucratic regulations. Other states effectively subsidize the arts and cultural activities through tax codes as well as national institutes and the US is no exception. Even the general income tax code can provide incentives for artists to be innovative and unique so that they can try to join the top 1% of the income bracket. The same tax code can provide incentives to patrons of the arts when they decide to donate their purchases so that they can be viewed by the plebeians. Moreover, cultural production does not have to be at the cutting edge of global culture to serve the interests of the state -- particularly when the Chinese state's main concern is to defend against a growing domestic preference for American popular culture.

Why might Walt view cultural production as ideally a distinct activity from the state? The answer probably lies in Realism's relatively narrow and often materialistic conceptualization of power and its understanding of the proper functions of a statesman. Of course, we've known at least since Gramsci (and probably as far back as Plato) that states are not merely territorial actors; states must secure allegiance by colonizing the minds and tongues of their inhabitants. This is why all states are concerned with the cultivation and preservation of culture, although some states may have a relatively more sophisticated and indirect approach.

Second, Walt depicts President Hu's defense of culture as somewhat irrational or at the very least misguided. Walt writes, "Forgive me, but China's leader sounds a lot like a stodgy high school principal trying to stop teenagers from wearing gangsta rap T-shirts, and telling the Music Department to get more kids into the marching band instead. More importantly, this campaign is a losing game."

I would argue that Hu's speech is in no way irrational -- far from it -- it was entirely predictable. Hu Jintao is widely expected to retire in 2013 when he will most likely be replaced by Xi Jinping, the son of Xi Zhongxun, a founder of the CCP. Any China expert worth his salt would already have predicted that we should expect to see increased efforts to stabilize domestic politics (through the repression of dissent) and a non-confrontational foreign policy until the transition in power is complete. As an institutional actor and a value rational actor it makes sense for the President to ensure the longevity of the regime.

Hu's focus on culture as a key mechanism to ensure domestic stability at a time when China is being rocked by protests is not at all an irrational impulse. The management of culture is at the heart of statecraft. Moreover, claiming that protesters are only protesting because they are misguided by foreign ideas is a classic deflection strategy. Even states in a global economy can manage the production of domestic popular culture and prevent much of the penetration of foreign cultural products through censorship, although perhaps not quite as bluntly as Hu may desire. Nevertheless, the attempt to reinvigorate Chinese popular culture at this point in time may ultimately prove futile as Walt argues, but one can understand why it is a pressing concern for the Chinese ~~Premier~~ President simply by adding culture to the domain of state power.

Really Real: Take II on the Chicago IR Guys

2012-01-04T16:19:00.001-05:00

In my last post, I offered a friendly critique of Nuno Monteiro's piece on how unipolarity has been less peaceful than other periods (debatable) and that U.S. power alone explains why minor states feel insecure and trigger conflicts with the unipole (same - the domestic politics of the U.S. and minor states are important in my view).

In this post, I want to provide a similar albeit friendlier critique to Rosato and Schuessler's article (not least because Sebastian introduced me and my wife!). Rosato and Schuessler (R&S) make the case that realism can and should be taken as a prescriptive theory to guide U.S. foreign policy, and had their advice been followed, the U.S. might not have had to go to war in World War I and II (essentially a problem of underbalancing in both cases) and wouldn't have gone to war in Vietnam and Iraq (basically both were unnecessary wars in either strategically unimportant places or areas where deterrence could have worked).

What's more, R&S make the case that liberal theories held by policymakers (belief in international institutions, support for democracy, promotion of trade) actually made conflict more likely.

Let me offer a few reactions in this post, mostly dealing with their concept of security and controversial claims about World War II.
The starting premise of the article is based on familiar assumptions from structural realism including (1) anarchy (2) the inability to trust the intentions of other states and (3) the uncertainty of outcomes of wars, with weaker powers sometimes winning against stronger adversaries.

Balance, Ignore, Deter

Based on these assumptions, R&S make a number of claims that they suggest should guide U.S. foreign policy. Namely, that the U.S. should balance against potential rival states but ignore minor powers unless they are located in strategically important regions (i.e. those that have important industrial resources or oil). In those cases, the United States should make clear its red lines to deter minor powers from acting against its wishes. What this means in the case of Iran is interesting:

Given the power disparity between the two sides, containment should be a straight-forward matter, and it would be preferable to a preventive war that would at best delay Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons while inviting almost certain retaliation (813).

Of course, I think this is based on the Waltzian logic that leaders of nuclear weapons states would understand the gravity of the situation and embrace the logic of MAD and ensure the sorts of careful security mechanisms to prevent accidental or hasty first use. I wouldn't go so far as to claim that Iran will be nondeterrable, but I'm not sure if containment will be as straightforward as R&S suggest (though mostly because the United States might not follow their prescriptions and overreact to Iran's possible acquisition of nuclear weapons).

Before reading the piece, I worried that this would be one of those vacuous articles that suggests prudence and pragmatism are the essence of realism (A quick aside: As a nonrealist, that always drove me crazy that realists could claim pragmatism as their strategic advantage. I mean, who is against pragmatism? It's like saying I support dumb power. Ok, rant over). There has always been a somewhat protean quality to realist-informed foreign policies, where one could make a good case for contrasting policies and still call oneself a realist. Fortunately, this piece is more consistent and substantive than that.

That said, I have a couple of concerns, stemming from a truncated view of security and a misreading of the WWII case. Let me tackle each of them in turn.

Critique I: Security is More than Deterring Armed Attack by Great Powers
First, I think the piece has an overly restrictive view of what constitutes security, for which balancing behavior and self-help may not be sufficient and for which cooperation, support for trade, multilateral institutions, and cooperation might be necessary.

While I think this piece does a good job laying out what approach states ought to take vis a vis potential state challengers, it doesn't say much about the kinds of problems that liberals and constructivists frequently write about, economics, health, the environment, or even terrorism. For these kinds of issues, self-help is generally inadequate advice. Indeed, states have to be careful to protect their own national security (narrowly defined as protecting their territorial integrity from armed external attack) while also thinking about other processes that give them long-run material wherewithal to survive, namely economic development.

The structural logic of modern interdependence and capitalism make the economy as if not more important for security as self-help. States need to collaborate through international institutions and multilateral approaches to ensure an open trading regime and financial stability and to protect the commons from pandemic disease, environmental damage, piracy, and terrorism. For these kinds of things, which may not always pose existential threats, unilateral self-help will simply not do. About these things, the piece is largely silent.

What you do about China is not simply about self-help and balancing but also about ensuring the health of the international economic order. There may be trade-offs between the promotion of state security and the stability and vibrancy of the global economy. How to manage such challenges before China makes its intentions clear about becoming a peer competitor is the essence of grand strategy today.

In the case of terrorism, for domestic political reasons, it won't be sufficient to downplay the threat as a nuisance that hardly rises to the level of the Soviet Union. That still doesn't inform policymakers with a coherent strategy of what to do.

Critique II: Was World War II Really Caused by Insufficient Realism?
Second, I think the claim that World War II was caused by underbalancing misses the earlier problem in which insufficient recognition of liberal insights created the conditions for Hitler's rise. Beggar-thy-neighbor policies on trade made everyone worse off and deepened the Depression, creating possibilities for the emergence of demagogues. Overly punitive German reparations weakened the Weimar Republic and its creaky democracy. Failure by the United States to provide liquidity led to a weak financial system and also contributed to tough economic times (these are familiar arguments for readers of Ruggie, Ikenberry, Kindleberger, among others).

So, while later underbalancing could be said to be a function of insufficient recognition of realist insights, the problem had as much to do with the prior failure to embrace liberal insights.

In sum, while the piece has much to recommend it as policy-relevant scholarship that is theoretically informed and provocative, it still tries to stay too wedded to a rigid defense of a particular -ism, which I think is helpful for creating intellectual distance from others but may be limiting as a guide to actual foreign policy in the 21st century.

What does Mitt Romney's victory in Iowa tell us about who the Republican nominee will be?

2012-01-04T09:10:00.000-05:00

Unless...

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

Four years ago, we knew neither Ron Paul nor Rick Santorum would be president.

Six months ago, we knew neither Ron Paul nor Rick Santorum would be president.

One month ago, we knew neither Ron Paul nor Rick Santorum would be president.

Two days ago, we knew neither Ron Paul nor Rick Santorum would be president.

This morning, we know neither Ron Paul nor Rick Santorum will be president.

Given the cavalcade of crazies that has populated the Republican primary to date, amazingly, the party is on the verge of nominating Willard Mitt Romney--the heartfelt choice of nearly 22 percent of GOP voters--by acclamation.

In the meantime, though, perhaps Chuck Norris, Amy Grant, and some of the other PAX network luminaries can come up with a new version of "Yes We Can" celebrating Senator Santorum's photo finish.

Cultural weapons and international relations

2012-01-03T12:01:00.004-05:00

At The Monkey Cage, Erik Voeten notes the ascendancy of constructivism within International Relations (although "non-paradigmatic research" is an even more popular category).

I suppose that's it for realism, then. So much for the null hypothesis that every article in IR published in the past 20 years has treated as a punching bag. From now on, I hope that we can all agree that theory articles don't have to start by attacking the bogeyman of structural realism and can instead begin with a more interesting discussion of the problem at hand.

Next from Steve Walt: Cultural Revolution and War

Nevertheless, I can't help but think that the categories the TRIP survey has chosen to ask IR scholars to slot themselves into are too neat. After all, the traditional problematic of realism--power--is hardly absent from contemporary IR, even if the terms of contestation have changed recently. That means that scholars--and policymakers--should begin looking at old problems in a new light. And that means that there's room for realist temperaments in a constructivist world.

Take Samuel Barkin's Realist Constructivism. It strikes me that Barkin more intuitively understands Chinese President Hu Jintao's recent missive condemning the Westernization of Chinese ideas than a 1990s-vintage constructivist. After all, Hu is speaking a constructivist dialect, but it's not the cheerful liberal one that we grew most familiar with in the 1990s. Instead, Hu is lending his name to a point of view that is a little different, one that views ideas as a site of contestation in which states qua states (or at least regimes qua regimes) can play a major role.

Consider the policies that Hu, according to Bloomberg News, is introducing:

New Communist Party-led promotion of TV and cinema programming
Limits on "vulgar" reality shows
Supervision of online criticism

Some of these policies have already been put into place. Last September, the Chinese TV show Super Girl, which attracted hundreds of millions of viewers, was canceled because it fell afoul of China's State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television, possibly for being too vulgar, and possibly for being too democratic. Earlier, China banned depictions of time travel, on the grounds that it promoted disrespect toward China's history. Cynics point out also that alternative representations of that history are now out of bounds, too.

Obviously, I'm only making an armchair assessment. Nevertheless, these moves are at least consistent with the behavior of a state that takes ideas seriously and is trying to shape debate and foreclose opposition using the sort of censorship that wasn't supposed to exist anymore. That states can take part in the construction of new ideas and the performance of social roles is not a novel insight, either for Hu or for constructivists. But a shift in emphasis is often sufficient to bring new anomalies (and, one hopes, new theory) to light. Hopefully, our newly constructivized discipline will foreground such considerations even more than it has in the past.

Get Real! Chicago IR guys out in force

2012-01-03T00:05:00.001-05:00

In light of the recent exchange on the Duck about Matthew Kroenig's work on Iran and policy-relevant research, I thought I'd flag a couple of articles from three University of Chicago alums from International Security (where Nuno Monteiro has a piece on unipolarity) and Perspectives on Politics (where Sebastian Rosato and John Schuessler have an article [Ed: behind paywall] prescribing a realist foreign policy for the United States).

While I disagree with a number of their conclusions and theoretical observations, these are the kind of pieces that I think will generate a lot of healthy discussion in the discipline because they are accessible, address important topics in the real world, and yet are theory-driven inquiries. Kudos to them for that!

For our Duck readers, in summarizing their main arguments and conclusions, I wanted to throw out a couple of concerns that stuck out for me. As is my wont on this blog, this is going to take a couple of posts to get out.

Both of these pieces are structural if not in Monteiro's case unabashedly realist inquiries into the nature of unipolarity and implicitly U.S. foreign policy.

Monteiro's piece “Unrest Assured: Why Unipolarity Is Not Peaceful” basically takes issue with Bill Wohlforth's earlier work on unipolarity and tries to ask a slightly different question. Rather than assess whether unipolarity is stable, he tries to evaluate whether it is peaceful. And his answer is that unipolarity is not at all peaceful and much less peaceful than other periods and then seeks to explain why.

Is Unipolarity Peaceful?
As evidence, Monteiro provides metrics of the number of years during which great powers have been at war. For the unipolar era since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been at war 13 of those 22 years or 59% (see his Table 2 below).

Now, I've been following some of the discussion by and about Steven Pinker and Joshua Goldstein's work that suggests the world is becoming more peaceful with interstate wars and intrastate wars becoming more rare.

I was struck by the graphic that Pinker used in a Wall Street Journal piece back in September that drew on the Uppsala Conflict Data, which shows a steep decline in the number of deaths per 100,000 people.

How do we square this account by Monteiro of a unipolar world that is not peaceful (with the U.S. at war during this period in Iraq twice, Afghanistan, Kosovo) and Pinker's account which suggests declining violence in the contemporary period?

Where Pinker is focused on systemic outcomes, Monteiro's measure merely reflect years during which the great powers are at war. Under unipolarity, there is only one great power so the measure is partial and not systemic. However, Monteiro's theory aims to be systemic rather than partial. In critiquing Wohlforth's early work on unipolarity stability, Monteiro notes:

Wohlforth’s argument does not exclude all kinds of war. Although power preponderance allows the unipole to manage conflicts globally, this argument is not meant to apply to relations between major and minor powers, or among the latter (17).

So presumably, a more adequate test of the peacefulness or not of unipolarity (at least for Monteiro) is not the number of years the great power has been at war but whether the system as a whole is becoming more peaceful under unipolarity compared to previous eras, including wars between major and minor powers or wars between minor powers and whether the wars that do happen are as violent as the ones that came before.

Now, as Ross Douthat pointed out, Pinker's argument isn't based on a logic of benign hegemony. It could be that even if the present era is more peaceful, unipolarity has nothing to do with it. Moreover, Pinker may be wrong. Maybe the world isn't all that peaceful. I keep thinking about the places I don't want to go to anymore because they are violent (Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Nigeria, Pakistan, etc.)

As Tyler Cowen noted, the measure Pinker uses to suggest violence is a per capita one, which doesn't get at the absolute level of violence perpetrated in an era of a greater world population. But, if my read of other reports based on Uppsala data is right, war is becoming more rare and less deadly (though later data suggests lower level armed conflict may be increasing again since the mid-2000s).

The apparent violence of the contemporary era may be something of a presentist bias and reflect our own lived experience and the ubiquity of news media. Even if the U.S. has been at war for the better part of unipolarity, the deadliness is declining, even compared with Vietnam, let alone World War II.

Does Unipolarity Drive Conflict?
So, I kind of took issue with the Monteiro's premise that unipolarity is not peaceful. What about his argument that unipolarity drives conflict? Monteiro suggests that the unipole has three available strategies - defensive dominance, offensive dominance and disengagement - though is less likely to use the third. Like Rosato and Schuessler, Monteiro suggests because other states cannot trust the intentions of other states, namely the unipole, that minor states won't merely bandwagon with the unipole. Some "recalcitrant" minor powers will attempt to see what they can get away with and try to build up their capabilities. As an aside, in Rosato and Schuessler world, unless these are located in strategically important areas (i.e. places where there is oil), then the unipole (the United States) should disengage.

In Monteiro's world, disengagement would inexorably lead to instability and draw in the U.S. again (though I'm not sure this necessarily follows), but neither defensive or offensive dominance offer much possibility for peace either since it is U.S. power in and of itself that makes other states insecure, even though they can't balance against it.

US troops in Afghanistan
Source: GORAN TOMASEVIC/REUTERS

A brief version of Monteiro's argument was posted on Steve Walt's blog, and I was surprised the piece did not do more to reference balance of threat theory. In Walt's view, the United States is violence prone because we can be; there is no countervailing power to dissuade us from using our power. Like John Ikenberry, Walt has counseled that we restrain ourselves and moderate our behavior, lest we encourage the kind of balancing behavior that revisionist powers have traditionally inspired. But, Walt's argument isn't based on power alone, a host of largely domestic factors have made the U.S. more willing to use force in the unipolar era.

However, in Monteiro's view, the U.S. power position alone, even where the U.S. seeks to defend the status quo, is enough to generate conflict with "recalcitrant" minor powers. Here, "recalcitrance" seems to be cover for some domestic-level variables, either quixotic or idiosyncratic leadership characteristics by the likes of Saddam and Milosevic or attributes of authoritarian regimes. I'm not sure that U.S. power is doing the work for Monteiro.

Rather, I suspect that aspects of U.S. domestic politics (a la Walt) intersecting with domestic attributes of "recalcitrant" regimes are doing much of the heavy lifting. If we were or become different (practice restraint, focus on the home economic front for a bit) and if the regimes we face become less recalcitrant (post Arab-spring if we're lucky, post-Kim Jong Il if we're really lucky and something different in Iran if we're really, really lucky), then unipolarity is not structurally determined to be violent.

In any case, I enjoyed this piece and understand how difficult it is to draw theoretically and empirically informed conclusions from a single episode in world history. In my next post, I'll address Rosato and Schuessler's equally provocative piece that suggests acting more realist might have prevented World War II!

Happy New Year!

2012-01-01T10:18:00.002-05:00

Actual blogging soon.

Happy Mithras' Day

2011-12-25T08:43:00.000-05:00

Or, as SEK writes, "Somehow, it fell upon the resident Jew to wish y’all a Merry Christmas…"

Transnational Battle over Gay Rights

2011-12-22T16:05:00.000-05:00

The transnational battle over gay rights took an interesting turn last week when the Obama administration announced that it would work hard to promote gay rights worldwide. The gay community welcomed the news. But more strategic thinkers also raised questions. As Neil Grungras of San Francisco’s Organization for Refugee, Asylum and Migration cautioned:

“In countries where U.S. moral leadership is not high and where increasingly Western values are [seen as] negative . . . there is a real danger people can use this issue and say, ‘No, we are cleaning up here, we are going to reject this American imposition of decay.’” As an example, Grungras pointed to last year’s gay pride event at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan. This sparked large demonstrations against the U.S., gay rights, and homosexuals.

Also of interest is the reaction from American religious conservatives active in the fight against gay rights. They decried the Obama initiative, and vowed to oppose it. In the past, they have scored successes. They have formed a “Baptist-burqa” network of religious conservatives, both state and nonstate, including Mormons, Catholics, Muslims, and more, spanning the world, just like the gay rights network. They have successfully blocked major new UN initiatives on gay rights and excluded gay activists from participation in international institutions. They raise rival norms, primarily to religious freedom and cultural autonomy, as a means of attacking gay rights. And they are supporting the backlash against gay rights in many countries, especially in Africa.

This may be a rearguard action, but there is little doubt that it has and will slow the progress of gay rights around the world. True, there have been major, hard-fought advances for gay rights in some countries in recent years. But many countries remain indifferent or, if anything, have become more overtly hostile as gay rights advance. Uganda’s horrific Anti-Homosexuality Law, complete with death penalty provision for “aggravated homosexuality,” is an example.

Scholars who study such issues sometimes ignore “retrograde” networks, in favor of studying progressive new norms and their moral entrepreneurs. Yet in the transnational battle over gay rights at the UN and in many countries, opponents are powerful and important. One can’t understand the politics of gay rights without examining their sworn enemies. One can’t appreciate the framing of a “new” norm without noting its rivals' frmaing. One can’t explain the shifting policy outcomes without analyzing the bitter conflict among hostile sides.

Beyond gay rights, this is true of countless other policy issues, from global warming to global health. One side’s solution to what it portrays as a pressing crisis will itself be a problem for another group, generating fervent opposition activism. One side’s initiatives are invariably matched by a rival’s counterpunch.

[SELF-PROMOTION WARNING!] For those interested in transnational battles over gay rights and other issues – as well as the implications for understanding global public policy more broadly – my book, The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics – is due out next month from Cambridge UP. [STORY IDEA for Brian Rathbun: Things PSers Like: Ironic attitude toward shameless self-promotion.]

Scholarship and Advocacy: Bomb Iran Edition (UPDATED)

2011-12-22T15:12:00.003-05:00

My colleague, Matt Kroenig, has generated a ton of buzz (and not a little vitriol) for his Foreign Affairs piece in which he advocates imminent US military action against Iran. What's probably less well known, however, is that Matt and Mike Weintraub, a graduate student at Georgetown, have a working paper in which, as they write:

We argue that nuclear superiority, by increasing the expected costs of conflict, improves a state’s ability to deter potential adversaries. We then show that states that enjoy nuclear superiority over their opponents are less likely to be the targets of militarized challenges. Arguments that contend that a minimum deterrent posture is sufficient to deter militarized challenges do not find support in the data.

As I've been discussing with Matt on Facebook, I see a real tension between these findings and claims that a nuclear Iran poses such a grave danger to US national interests that Washington must, as soon as possible, launch a military strike against Iranian facilities. After all, if Matt and Mike are correct then we should expect both that the massive asymmetric nuclear advantage enjoyed by the US will deter Iran, and that Iran's possession of a few nukes will not greatly alter its behavior.

If I am right, then Matt joins a long line of international-relations academics whose policy advocacy doesn't entirely cohere with their scholarship. For example, a significant number of offensive realists signed letters opposing the Iraq war, even though their theories suggest that states should, and will, maximize power in the international system.

Given all this, I'm curious what other Duck readers and writers think should be the relationship between academic scholarship and policy advocacy.

Do we have an obligation to be completely consistent across both domains, or do the real differences between our political and academic roles suggest otherwise? How much "policy weight" we should give to any particular academic finding? If we are skeptical of extrapolating too much from one or more pieces of international-relations scholarship, does it matter if that scholarship is our own and we are making the policy recommendations? Does the methodology of the work matter, e.g., if the piece involves a linear regression such that we expect individual cases to be outliers? And what is the comparative "truth value" of our policy advocacy?

UPDATE: Matt weighs in below on the substantive merits. Someone also pointed to a draft of Matt's forthcoming piece, which I think reinforces the questions I raise, insofar as it is an example of an academic paper with policy recommendations. For example:

Given that the most likely conflict scenarios between these two states would occur in the Middle East, the balance of political stakes in future confrontations would tend to favor Tehran. The brinkmanship approach adopted in this paper concurs that proliferation in Iran would disadvantage the United States by forcing it to compete with Iran in risk taking, rather than in more traditional arenas. On the other hand, the findings of this paper also suggest that the United States could fare well in future nuclear crises. As long as the United States maintains nuclear superiority over Iran, a prospect that seems highly likely for years to come, Washington will frequently be able to achieve its basic goals in nuclear confrontations with Tehran.

As we all agree, Matt's model points to increased risk. But do such conclusions really support the notion that the United States must strike immediately or face apocalyptic consequences?

The Iraq surge: vindicated then exposed?

2011-12-22T05:11:00.001-05:00

We haven’t got all the details, but promptly after the departure of US combat troops the Iraqi Prime Minister is feuding badly with Sunni political figures, and a bomb blast suggests that Iraq may be escalating into more sectarian conflict.

If so, what does this say about the surge? On one hand, the relatively quiet withdrawal of American troops on Tuesday vindicated one objective of the surge: to create more stable conditions to that America could pull out quietly without it being humiliated and without the kind of chaotic flight to the exits that would polarize its society.

On the other hand, the major declared objective of the surge launched by President Bush II in 2006-7 was to depress levels of violence, secure the population and thereby create critical space in which there could be political progress and reconciliation.

Advocates of enlightened counterinsurgency and muscular state-building argued that Iraq vindicated their position. They argued that the combination of more troops and more restraint played a major role in depressing the levels of violence and giving Iraq a breathing space to recover from the communal bloodletting it suffered in the post-invasion years.

But if Iraq descends again into the traumatic violence of 2005-6, we must acknowledge that this approach had its limits. It bought time and got the issue off the front pages – no small thing for a superpower that has seen presidencies destroyed in the past by protracted small wars – but a new civil war of sorts would suggest that the surge did not achieve its most profound objective.

Its not actually obvious, historically, that gentler, more sophisticated ‘hearts and minds’ campaigns necessarily work, if we define success as marginalising insurgencies while leaving behind a strong state that governs in the interests of the departing occupier.

Successful counterinsurgency campaigns in the past relied on favourable geopolitical conditions and some pretty unsentimental techniques. Forced population resettlements, virtual concentration camps (albeit with well-run facilities), indiscriminate bombings, bribery on a massive scale, proxy violence, etc. Which is precisely one reason why I am uneasy with our countries doing this kind of campaign, given the dark price victory has often exacted.

In some ways, the Petraeus revolution mixed the fluffy, appealing liberal versions of hearts and minds (cultural literacy, heroic restraint, a population-centric view that you can’t kill your way out) with some hard-nosed methods, such as walling off warring communities, putting potential insurgents on the payroll, and sustaining a round-the-clock kill and capture programme.

And yet, car bombs are going off and there are new rumours of war.

Alternatively, there is the line being peddled that America should not have left. Making Iraq an indefinite commitment would be mightily expensive. And by shouldering this burden well into the future, it would come at other costs, putting the US in the eye of whatever storms were coming in the future.

Ultimately, Iraq showed in a brutal way how limited American power is. If the surge only bought some time and space, and postponed another round of internal conflict (possibly metastasizing into a wider regional one), then policymakers should not conclude that perpetual armed nation-building works if only we get our methods right. Ultimately, COIN just isn’t a venture that we should fatalistically accept as part of our strategic future.

Contrary to the late Christopher Hitchens, endless war is not only a bad idea. It is beyond America’s limited strength. And compared to its costs, its dividends, at least in this case, may be slight indeed.

Cross posted at Offshore Balancer.

Stuff Political Scientists (Don't) Like #13, Holiday Edition -- Explaining Themselves to Loved Ones

2011-12-21T10:52:00.002-05:00

Even political scientists have families. And during the holidays they are occasionally forced to talk to them. Not their spouses and children, who have already given up on them, but extended families, like aunts, uncles, etc. This puts political scientists in the awkward position of trying to explain just what on earth it is they actually do.

Non-political scientists, in their desperate effort to make small talk with someone they see just every few years, make the assumption that political scientists know something about politics. They will ask, “What do you think Obama’s chances are?” Or, “do you think Herman Cain really groped that woman?” At this point, they will be inevitably disappointed by the response, which will be straight from the New York Times, where all political scientists get all their information about real politics --that, or the New Yorker.

Non-political scientists think that political science is current events, high school civics for college students. So if a political scientist tells someone at the gym that he studies international relations, the response is always, “Boy that is interesting these days. There is a lot to keep busy with.” Until recently the political scientist could simply respond, “Yes, we are very close to knowing where Bin Laden is” and the non-political scientist would go away comforted that political scientists were on the case. Now he must simply nod, or risk crushing the non-political scientist by explaining what his new book is actually on – early 20^th century Portugese colonialism.

People get the wrong idea, however, when political scientists appear on the network news in their natural environment, a room shelved with what looks like two dozen complete series of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Political scientists feel very comfortable amongst reference books. Here they are asked to lend gravitas to already established and self-evident facts. Did you know that Newt Gingrich’s recent decline in polls suggests that he might have difficulty securing the Republican nomination? That the situation in Iraq will become more uncertain with the departure of U.S. troops? Some guy in a library told me so! This gives the impression that political scientists follow or care about politics, when in fact they just want to be on TV.

Political scientists are smart enough to know that politics does not matter. They are the keepers of the secrets, the underlying generalizable forces that truly explain the events of our time. Will Burma democratize? Well what is its GDP? Will Iran develop the nuclear weapon? Well what is the size of its selectorate? This makes them terrible at small talk. So if there is a political scientist in your family, stick to sports this holiday season. How about that Tim Tebow?

Kim Jung Il is Dead

2011-12-18T23:16:00.001-05:00

In a week filled with the death of intellectuals and political activists, we now have the death of Kim Jung Il. Other than the fact that this destabilizes an already crazy country (and I mean 'crazy' in that professional IR kind of way), I can't think much of us will miss him. Except maybe the creators of South Park.

But who knew Juche could be so funky?

Gingrinch

2011-12-17T14:45:00.007-05:00

I never, ever, ever thought I would write a blog post about Newt Gingrich's chances as Republican nominee for President, except perhaps to laugh at him. Yet here I am.

The Republican establishment is lining up against Gingrich, claiming that he is not conservative enough. This is laughable and a red herring. As opposed to Mitt Romney? Instead we should listen to those who were swept into office and/or positions of power with him in the revolution of 1994, like Joe Scarborough. They know him well. Gingrich's problem is hardly being conservative enough. Rather the real objections center on two other faults. First, he is a blowhard pseud0-intellectual in love with his own ideas and himself. Second, he is an asshole, and I mean that in the most rigorous, social scientific way possible. These are not unrelated, but the latter is I think what explains his rise in this particular climate. Allow me to explain.

If Gingrich gets the nomination, the media is going to make a huge deal of the egghead vs. egghead presidential race. That is silly. Gingrich's intellectualism is the intellectualism of a precocious 16 year old who just read the Fountainhead -- shallow, capricious and grandiose. Next year he/she will have gone goth, or something else. So it is with Gingrich, although though he probably won't go goth. I think people overstate Barack Obama's intelligence too. He is smart but not brilliant. Rather what seems him look so smart is his 'cognitive complexity,' as I wrote about in one of my first posts here, and is so rare in politicians these days. He can see multiple sides of an argument. But be warned -- this will be the narrative if he wins the nomination.

But his 'intellectualism' is not why Gingrich is so popular today. I think Gingrich is picking up the votes of the real Tea Party people -- those who resent what they imagine to be enormous sums of their tax dollars going to finance what they imagine to be the profligate lifestyles of those on Aid to Families of Dependent Children or Medicaid or both. We call this 'economic conservatism' but it is not a belief in the free market. It is a belief that we owe nothing to anyone else. In political psychology we know it has a strong association with a particular personality trait -- disagreeableness. In short, Tea Parties are meanies before they are anything else.

Social conservatives score much higher on other personality traits like conscientiousness. They are not nearly so uncaring. They might deny family planning services to unwed mothers, but this is because they think they are doing the right thing by not putting ideas into impressionable girls heads -- that it is OK to have sex. Of course this makes them likelier to get pregnant and have abortions. But it comes from a genuinely good if misguided intention. They are mean by accident, indirectly.

Newt's rise has to be attributed to his performance in debates, since, as was the case with Cain, there is nothing else to explain it -- no money, no organization, and only negative name recognition. What has he done at these debates? He has no gimmick, no 9/9/9 plan. He flips around all the time. But every time he shows up on camera, we see the same thing -- contempt, scorn, meanness. For everything. Newt is tapping into how nasty these nasty people feel. To others, and at previous times, this would have seemed unpresidential. But these are the times we live in. Newt Gingrich is an asshole, and many Republicans love him for it.

Bolt down your Christmas trees everyone. And for all the Muslims out there, get an alarm system.

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

2011-12-17T04:01:00.000-05:00

Christopher Hitchens has died. The world has lost one of its most luminous minds.

He will be acclaimed for his literary criticism, his political stances, and his raw physical courage as a writer-journalist, entering dangerous battlespaces from Belgrade to Baghdad. Not to mention his wit, occasional rudeness, his filthy limericks, and his dignified and reflective meditations on his coming death. His greatest work, I think, was Why Orwell Matters – a penetrating study of another brave and ferociously sharp Englishman.

I was lucky enough to meet him a few times, and interview him. He drank a whole bottle of whiskey and actually got sharper as the conversation went on. And it was great to witness his public fight with George Galloway at Baruch College in New York, an exhilirating showdown between the different tribes of the Left.

Some obituaries are summarising Hitchens’ politics crudely as an evolution from Left to Right. That is misleading. Like some other former revolutionaries, Hitchens came to believe that the most revolutionary force in world politics – the only viable remaining revolution – was the United States, and the most liberating instrument was its military power. We have seen the limits of that power, and the tragedies that flow from a utopian politics, but Hitchens believed himself to be on the side of revolution until the end.

I’ll never forget walking around the Quadrangle at Christ Church College Oxford with him for a few minutes, and arguing about whether it was religion or dogmatism of any stripe that was the true problem. It was a bit rash to pick an argument with the man who had been voted the world’s second ranked intellectual.

But it was a sparkling little moment, culminating in drinks at the Bear pub nearby. A drink and a row about God. He wouldn’t ask for anything more.

Well met, Hitch. It was good for the world that you were here.

Cross-posted at Offshore Balancer

RIP: Habeas Corpus . . . and Normative Power

2011-12-16T16:11:00.000-05:00

The news that President Obama plans to sign the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) permitting indefinite detention for Americans accused of supporting terrorism is a sad day for those who believe in basic civil and human rights. Equally, this move calls into question optimistic views about international norms and the power of human rights.

Glenn Greenwald and others cover the threat to basic freedoms in posts that are well worth reading. By comparison, the import for scholars of norms may seem minor but is nonetheless worth pondering.

Norms against indefinite detention have long been basic to human rights, along with prohibitions on torture and extrajudicial execution. Of course, we’ve seen those fall by the wayside too. National security, a norm backed by enormous material power, has made its dominance plain. However, in recent cases where the U.S. has engaged in torture or extrajudicial executions of American citizens, these actions have been purely executive, albeit with many a legislative, scholarly, and public cheerleader.

The NDAA, however, enshrines indefinite detention for American citizens in law passed by Congress and to be signed by the President. The magical incantation “terrorist” is all that’s been needed to throttle a core rights protection.

What has been the power of norms in this case?

It’s doubtless true that the human rights norms I’ve mentioned have more defenders than they once did. There are today many more NGOs who promote and support them than there were in the 1950s, the last time the U.S. passed similar laws (against the Communist menace, only to reverse them decades later after severe abuses). Today, there have been many voices, both domestic and international, raised against the indefinite detention provisions.

But in the end, these fell before trumped up security norms and terror fears. Many Americans appear all too willing to trade basic rights (and trillions of dollars) for an illusion of security against a minuscule threat. I am continually stunned when I hear American citizens saying we don’t need a judiciary to check the Executive in these cases because the President has sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution. So much for the judicial branch, so much for checks and balances, and so much for the power of centuries old domestic norms and laws.

Particularly striking in the debate over detention and the broader one over Obama’s civil liberties record is political opportunism. Many Democratic Party leaders who screamed that George Bush was acting unconstitutionally and illegally in the early years of the GWOT, have now fallen into line behind Obama’s continuation and expansion of Bush policies, including extrajudicial executions and now summary arrests. It’s striking too that we have seen so few resignations from top posts in the Obama administration even from those regarded as staunch defenders of basic rights. So much for the independent influence of norms.

More broadly, this suggests that other human rights norms are equally fragile and contingent achievements, with little if any independent strength. Of course, anyone witnessing the erosion of these rights over the last decade already knew that. All such norms exist at sufferance of state actors. To the extent states follow them, it is because the “norms” do not run contrary to their core interests, because a sufficiently large threat has not been invented to justify their subversion, or because the states are too weak to challenge them. Any real belief in state “habitualization” and the power of norms as such must be questioned.

Don’t get me wrong. I think it is important to promote and resurrect the crucial values and freedoms we have lost. But the only way to do so is through political organizing and activism--through material rather than normative means.

Friday Nerd Blogging

2011-12-16T13:23:00.008-05:00

I think I did a reasonable job restraining myself while suffering through Breaking Dawn this past weekend with my daughter and her friend. I didn't vomit once!

And fortunately I didn't have to. The pathetically destructive and sexist representations of romantic love, family, marriage and motherhood in the Twilight series were all the girls talked about on the way home. And they didn't even need the HP/SW allegories to notice it. The same night we saw the film my daughter sat me down unprompted to hear her guffaw loudly at this series of satirical YouTube videos making fun of all things Collins.

Young people get it. They do. And actually, as long as there are strong feminist role models for teen girls (and boys) out there, it's probably OK if there are also some godawful ones, if nothing else to incite discussion. But also for the satirical possibilities. Archetypal portrayals of bad relationships should be out there to be made fun of. And grrls just wanna have fun.

The Euro Of Magical Thinking

2011-12-16T10:49:00.001-05:00

Kathleen R. McNamara lays out the reasons to be skeptical that the euro can survive in anything like it's current form.

McNamara's brand of political economics begins from the right presumption: that in political economy, politics comes first. Models that fail to account for the role of institutions, of beliefs, or of power will fail to capture any of features that matter most when systems begin to fail.

Politics is an autonomous part of social life. It has its own logic and its own explanations. Although political science is a discipline of magpies forever borrowing from other fields' shinier epistemologies and methodologies, work such as McNamara's essay (echoed in comments such as Dan Drezner's) should remind us that paying attention to the core of our own discipline can lead us to novel and powerful insights.

We Now "Know": Diary of a Search Committee Member

2011-12-15T14:53:00.003-05:00

I have been sitting on the search committee for a couple of positions in my department, the School of International Relations at USC, and I thought I would share some observations that come from that vantage point. Anyone who happens to have been an applicant should not take this an indicating anything about their own individual case. Rather these are general trends I am noticing. I don't know if they surprise anyone, but I will offer them nonetheless.

I haven't done this at the junior level for quite a while, and what was obvious is that epistemology now largely dominates ontology. Granted this was a methods search but I still think it resonate with a broader trend out there. What I mean by that is scholars do face something of a tradeoff between saying something really interesting and knowing with less certainty that they are right and saying something really uninteresting and knowing with more certainty that they are right. The younger generation of scholars leans more towards the latter than the older generation does. If we can't establish causality with some degree of certainty then is it really worth talking about? This frustrates the older generation. It is not universally true of course. And it varies also by place of Ph.D., training, etc. I think it explains though the current fascination with natural experiments among other things, since to be able to randomly assign groups is so useful for eliminating confounding variables.

When we were deciding on our postdoc last year, we found a really creative person with a great record and very unconventional research agenda, and the only knock on him came from someone more towards the epistemology side -- I don't know if he can show he is right, went the critique. Having spent hours sifting through dozens of dissertations on selectorates, I screamed -- "Who gives a shit? At least I care if he is or isn't!" I probably reacted far too forcefully to what was a very benignly stated criticism, but that was because of my frustration.

We could blame the methodological fetishists out there, but that would absolve us from responsibility. We, by which I really mean people older than me, spent 10 years engaging the relative gains debate without once ever performing any kind of systematic test. We just made enormous assertions that THE WORLD IS MOSTLY CONFLICTUAL! NO, IT ISN'T. IT IS MOSTLY COOPERATIVE. No wonder the younger generation just gave up. It was all so pointless.

But something has definitely been lost. The relative gains debate, although vapid, was enormously important THEORETICALLY. Grieco's article exposed a potentially huge logical flaw in Keohane's argument. It was the first academic exchange that stimulated me. It probably got me into the business, as Grieco was an undergraduate mentor. Is it empirically true? Well, we didn't bother figuring that one out because we didn't have proper research design and, well really, never bothered doing any real research. I wish the pendulum would have swung a little less violently because now having original data and a good research design are the the things that get you the best jobs. The absolute gold standard is to figure out a way to measure what we previously have not been able to measure. These are important contributions but will it make you the next Robert Keohane? Or Alex Wendt? Will we be talking about you in 20 years? I doubt it. The pendulum will swing back.

Now, I am done. You kids get off my lawn!

Pop Culture and World Politics v5.0

2011-12-15T04:00:00.000-05:00

Pop Culture and World Politics v5.0

9-11 November 2012

Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Geneva, NY 14456 USA

What do zombies have to dowith world politics? How might the Twilight sagas inform and illuminateour way of understanding world politics and changes in the global politicaleconomy? In what ways do videogames, the sales of which now exceed those ofmusic CDs and DVDS combined, shape the identities and political understandingsof frequent players? Is visual media destined to replace print as the primarysource of news and entertainment in advanced industrial societies and how mightthis affect the construction of meaning of world affairs? As a means ofcommunication readily available to an ever-expanding number of individuals andgroups, how might the internet offer paths of resistance to corporate andWestern news and entertainment hegemony? How can tango dancing make the world amore peaceful place?

This conferenceexplores the multiple ways of investigating the intersections of world politicsand the production, circulation, content, and consumption of various popularcultural forms. Engaging a range of disciplines and practices in the social sciences,humanities and the arts, the conference encourages participants to question what terms such as ‘global,’ ‘popular,’and ‘culture’ mean both in isolation and when used in conjunction. It asks inwhat ways and with what effects popular culture has become a series of sites atwhich political meaning is made, where political contestation takes place, andwhere political orthodoxy is reproduced and challenged. The conference providesa highly-focused and interdisciplinary environment in which the increasingnumbers of scholars that are engaging in culture-related research can presenttheir work and participate in the kind of extended discussion that largerconferences do not permit. The conference aims to provide an intimate forum atwhich debates about interdisciplinary methods and theoretical approaches can bedeveloped to facilitate debate across disciplines that share interests in worldpolitics and culture. Wewelcome proposals for performances, screenings, panels, or individual papers,on any aspect of world politics and popular culture.

Building on the precedingfour PCWP conferences, version 5.0 will be held on the campus of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, a small liberal arts institution located in thebeautiful Finger Lakes (wine-making) region of western New York state.

Inquiries should be sent to PCWP@hws.edu

The deadline for proposals is 15 July 2012

A Reminder

2011-12-14T22:45:00.000-05:00

The United States is currently fighting wars in lands that, while distant to us, are not so distant to their inhabitants and US soldiers.

I am tempted to carry on about the "new normal," or compare the experience of peripheral wars to that of imperial Britain, France, and Russia. But the fact is that US forces have been engaged in some form of conflict--whether directly or indirectly--pretty much continuously since the start of World War II. And that's a conservative timeline.

Still, the most striking thing of the US wars of the twenty-first century is how incidental they've been to most people living in the metropole. David Remnick wrote a fantastic piece about this on the tenth anniversary of September 11. Indeed, during the year I spent in the US government a constant refrain was how everyone needed to be reminded that the US was at war.

I was working in the Department of Defense.

A View to Kill: Should states engage in assassination?

2011-12-14T20:47:00.001-05:00

I have a lengthy piece on targeted killing/assassination up at the Canadian International Council’s Open Canada blog. It touches on some of the issues I’ve raised in previous posts here and here.

The short version is that targeted killing/assassination advocates tend to rest their arguments on three assumptions: first, that it is morally legitimate on the basis of reciprocity, that it is easier than launching full-scale invasions or sending in troops to difficult/hostile terrain, and finally that it is effective.

I question these assumptions – first, tit-for-tat/"Golden Rule” justification and logic has been rejected by Western military forces for many decades. Second, while drones may be a more viable option in areas such as the mountainous regions of Afghanistan/Pakistan, you can’t generalize a rule out of this one particular example. Finally, that there is no reliable evidence that targeted killing/assassination actually works (or, to be fair, that it doesn’t work.) And even if we wanted to evaluate whether or not targeted killing is effective, what criteria should be used? The actual elimination of terrorists? The subsequent numbers of operations.? Or should we look at second and third order effects: impact on morale, recruitment, etc. And how could these factors be measured? Further, given the wide variety of actors, circumstances and context, and the many different historical cases, it is virtually impossible to extrapolate from one case to another.

If 2011 is any indication, drone strikes, targeted killing and “assassination” will be here to stay for some time. As such, it is worth asking certain question of our political and military leaders to encourage democratic accountability. What are the criteria to render someone a target? To what degree are these decisions subject to judicial review? And under what framework of law are these operations considered to fall under?

How to Blow a Perfectly Good Scam

2011-12-14T17:39:00.000-05:00

One of my colleagues had his email account hacked recently. I know this because I received the infamous "I've been mugged, send me money" email. This happened to my wife once. Our friend who alerted her also sent along a transcript of a hilarious email exchange in which the spammer tried to impersonate my wife ("how are your sons doing?"; "I'm sorry to hear that the job with the circus didn't work out"; that sort of thing).

My colleague is probably in a world of hurt right now -- I would be if my gmail account was compromised -- so I don't mean to make light of his predicament. But I did think it worth noting that if you are attempting this scam, and the story involves being stuck in London, asking for a money transfer in Euros might be a giveaway.

Crowdsource Syllabus: Advanced IR Theory (Updated)

2011-12-14T09:15:00.002-05:00

I'm teaching a PhD-level advanced IR theory class next semester, and my syllabus is growing a bit stale. The idea of the course is to cover recent-ish topics (and necessary background, when appropriate) of importance in the subfield. For example, I usually do a week on "the practice turn," a week on "arguing and bargaining" that covers a range of approaches to the subject, and so forth. This year I'll be opening with PTJ's The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations.

I thought it might generate some good ideas -- both with respect to topics and to specific readings -- if I asked our readers for their suggestions. So that's what I'm doing. Right here. Right now. Thoughts?

Per Facebook request, Kate McNamara's syllabus for the first part of the IR theory sequence:

Kajaki and Power Politics

2011-12-13T15:51:00.001-05:00

Like the ancient Greco-Buddhist colossi of Bamiyan, the High-Modernist era Kajaki dam is a product of foreign influences and has been a mute witness as well as an occasional victim of domestic political disarray and failed attempts to integrate and incorporate Afghanistan into contending spheres of influence. Each alternate modern (i.e., capitalist, communist, islamist, praetorian) or anti-traditional/utopian fundamentalist (i.e., Deobandi) ideology has attempted to inscribe the future of Afghanistan on this palimpsest.

The dam was built from 1946 to 1953 as part of what became known as the Helmand Valley Authority (HVA) project in Afghanistan. It was funded initially by King Zahir Shah and later, as funds ran low, from loans by the United States (Washington Post 8/7/2011). The vast project was obviously modeled on the Great Depression era Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) project. The belief in the High Modernist era of development planning was that massive infrastructural investment was the key to setting off a virtuous circle of self-reinforcing economic growth. Although that model of development is highly discredited today for environmental and political as well as practical reasons, the dam, irrigation canals, and highways associated with the project did eventually help to transform the landscape into a fertile valley. By the mid-seventies, the dam had two Westinghouse 16.5 MW turbines to generate electricity for the entire valley. This project was for its time, one of the most expensive US foreign assistance projects in history.

With the Saur Revolution, insurrection, Soviet invasion, and civil war the dam naturally fell into a brief period of disrepair. The occupying Soviet forces prioritized linking Kabul directly to the Soviet power grid. However, they also built gas turbines and diesel generators in several other Afghan cities and towns. Czechoslovakia was given the task of restoring the dam and they provided much of the equipment to "modernize" the Kajaki dam and increase its irrigation capacity. By 1982, the dam's power lines were restored and power flowed once again to Alexander's city, Kandahar, in the neighboring province. Not surprisingly, the dam soon attracted several Mujahedeen attacks on Soviet and PDPA soldiers guarding the site. With the Soviet withdrawal and the warlord period, the dam and associated infrastructure again fell into disrepair.

By the late nineties as order returned across much of Afghanistan, the Taliban expressed hopes that their increasingly warm friendship with the US (which seemed all too willing to overlook Taliban abuses toward women and minorities at the time) would mean that Americans would return to Helmand to once again fix the dam's power generating units and particularly the silted irrigation canals (Philadelphia Inquirer 1/19/1997). The irrigation canals associated with the HVA were now vital to the production of the world's largest supply of opium and Afghanistan's main export, even though the Taliban had officially announced plans to stamp out the crop.

When US assistance for the dam did not materialize a few years later, the Taliban turned to Pakistan and China for assistance. The Pakistanis, who increasingly saw Afghanistan as a colony or at least a "gateway to Central Asia" after the Soviet withdrawal and collapse, were committed to restoring electricity and promoting a modicum of stability and development in order to consolidate the gains of their Taliban client regime. Under the Lahore Agreement, Pakistan planned to build a high voltage transmission line to connect the Afghan city of Jalalabad directly to Pakistan's own electricity grid. In Helmand, the Pakistanis proposed to build new sluice gates to increase the power generation and irrigation capacity of the dam. These plans obviously came to a screeching halt in September 2001.

During the initial US invasion of Afghanistan, the dam's power station was deliberately targeted by American forces (Guardian 12/20/2001). Once the US occupied Afghanistan, the teams switched sides and the dam became the target of the Taliban while the US played defense. In 2003, a force of sixty Taliban were captured after firing three rockets at the dam -- all of which missed the target (Philadelphia Inquirer, 5/3/2003).

In 2006, the US gave $1.4 billion to two private contractors to increase the amount of power generated by the Kajaki dam by adding a third turbine and also repairing a large power plant in Kabul. Adding the third turbine to the dam entailed a famous 2008 mission, Operation Kryptonite, in which 3,000 British troops protected 100 vehicle convoy as it hauled a gigantic turbine across a 180 km of insurgent dominated areas. Apparently between 15 to 200 insurgents were killed (depending on which account one believes) during this Hollywood style "Wild West" stagecoach mission.

The mission "succeeded" in reaching the forward operating base but repairs and installation of the new turbine was painstakingly slow - the third turbine has never been unpacked. Repairs to the dam were supposed to be finished by 2008. By mid 2009 auditors were complaining that the two plants (Kajaki and Kabul) combined were only generating 12MW instead of the originally contracted 140MW (USA Today 11/11/2009). Plans for adding the third turbine were deferred indefinitely after a Chinese subcontractor abandoned the site. US taxpayers have since paid a $1 million per month to guard the dam while the program was suspended to look for another subcontractor and to make the road to the dam "secure."

In the interim, US and ISAF forces performed annual surges to tame the provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. An inattentive and uncritical American and European public was repeatedly told by blatant propaganda that this time the province had finally been secured, only to witness a repeated need for a surge of troops and bribes the next year. Despite these surges, ISAF soldiers soldiers openly admit that their influence does not extend beyond 500 meters of their security bases (see Daily Mail 10/8/2011).

The electricity grid once again became a priority issue for American generals during a surge in the neighboring province of Kandahar in 2010, when the generals realized that restoring electric power was critical to winning over the civilian population and defeating the Taliban. They took $106 million dollars in discretionary funding to pay for new generators and all the diesel fuel necessary to power the grid for four years (Globe and Mail, 7/11/11). No provisions were made for the Afghan government to restock the fuel after four years and the government lacked the staff to monitor or repair the system.

Finally, having failed to stabilize the province, much less fix the electricity supply, ISAF forces have simply declared victory and they have begun to hand over responsibility to ill trained Afghan Security Forces in preparation for a withdrawal in 2014.

In November 2011, it was reported that water levels in the reservoir had dropped by 20 meters over several months endangering the ability of the dam to generate any electricity if another 5 meters were lost (Shamsad TV, 11/23/2011). The electricity generation which had reached 20MW was now back down to 12MW. The drop in water also threatened the agricultural capacity of the valley which was already threatened by drought.

This week (12/13/2011) with a 50% cut to the USAID budget, the US is considering permanently deferring the installation of the third turbine and instead calling it a day after simply refurbishing the existing two turbines, power lines, and substations. What was once seen as essential to winning hearts and minds is now on the chopping block of a cost-benefit analysis.

Thus, the dam remains a symbol of false promises and failed efforts to reorient decisively Afghanistan's future. But even if the dam were made operational, it would still remain problematic. Somewhere in the many struggles to "modernize" this modern dam, it became an end rather than a means to development. The broader failings of an unsustainable infrastructure-led development model were never unpacked and thought through. The dam represents a desperate hope that there is a short cut to development, prosperity, and peace.

[Cross-posted from Humanyun]

Russia's Elections

2011-12-12T11:42:00.004-05:00

Haven't had time to form serious thoughts on the matter, so outsourced to the Power Vertical.

Popular Culture and Politics: Russian Perceptions of the Near Abroad

2011-12-12T11:40:00.002-05:00

RFE/RL carries an interview with Susan Layton on her book, Russian Literature and the Empire. A sample:

Russian national consciousness began developing in the 18th century, on contact with foreign non-national entities. From the time of Peter the Great, Western Europe played the central role as a clarifier of "Russian-ness." But the Asian borderlands of the Russian Empire also contributed to this formation of Russian national, as well as imperial consciousness. As of the 18th century, ethnographic expeditions to the Caucasus, Crimea, Siberia, and so on produced huge compilations of data that had limited readerships but all the same exemplified a growing imperial consciousness. The Russian elite was beginning to form a mental map of the multinational empire, as this vast and colorful conglomerate of many peoples, cultures, types of terrain. And on this Russian mental map the Caucasus came to assume a special prominence as a version of "the Orient."

Peer Review Bites (and Quacks)

2011-12-12T11:34:00.001-05:00

Apropos Brian's justified rant against peer-review practices in our field, I thought I'd remind readers (or let new ones know) that the pathetic state of the peer-review system in political science is something of a running theme at the Duck of Minerva.

Samples include: Brian's call to "read more and write less," a note on the impact of one-strike rules given the stochastic quality of peer review, Laura's discussion of anonymity, PTJ's thoughtful thoughts on the subject, Bill Petti's sharing of a Hitler peer-review video, my call to refuse to review for journals that don't send decision letters to reviewers, a list of things not to say in a peer review, and five reasons academic peer review doesn't work.

Looking back over those posts makes clear to me that we've never produced a comprehensive indictment of the state of peer review. Perhaps one will be forthcoming. But anecdotal indictments often serve just as well. Via Henry Farrell, just such an illustrative example involving an attempt to replicate findings purporting to demonstrate ESP:

Here’s the story: we sent the paper to the journal that Bem published his paper in, and they said ‘no, we don’t ever accept straight replication attempts’. We then tried another couple of journals, who said the same thing. We then sent it to the British Journal of Psychology, who sent it out for review. For whatever reason (and they have apologised, to their credit), it was quite badly delayed in their review process, and they took many months to get back to us.

When they did get back to us, there were two reviews, one very positive, urging publication, and one quite negative. This latter review didn’t find any problems in our methodology or writeup itself, but suggested that, since the three of us (Richard Wiseman, Chris French and I) are all skeptical of ESP, we might have unconsciously influenced the results using our own psychic powers. The story behind this is that Richard has co-authored two papers where he and a believer in psi both did the same experiment, and the believer found positive results but he didn’t. However, the most recent time they did this – which was the best-controlled and largest size – neither found results. This doesn’t exactly give hugely compelling evidence for an ‘experimenter effect’ in psi research, in our opinion. Here’s that last paper, if you’re interested.

Anyway, the BJP editor agreed with the second reviewer, and said that he’d only accept our paper if we ran a fourth experiment where we got a believer to run all the participants, to control for these experimenter effects. We thought that was a bit silly, and said that to the editor, but he didn’t change his mind. We don’t think doing another replication with a believer at the helm is the right thing to do, for the reason above, and for the reason that Bem had stated in his original paper that his experimental paradigms were designed so that most of the work is done by a computer and the experimenter has very little to do (this was explicitly because of his concerns about possible experimenter effects). So, after this very long and unproductive delay, we’re off to another journal to try again. How frustrating.

Identity Under Threat

2011-12-12T08:18:00.002-05:00

Blackwater, the infamous private security contractor (that is, 21st century mercenaries), changed its name to Xe, but that didn't work. So now: ACADEMI. Really. I am not kidding. This seems to be a focus group mistake. After all, if you want to have the image of being decisive, forceful, reliable, and assertive, do you really want to identify yourself with academics who dither, passive, and cannot meet a deadline to save their lives? Sure, we are good at attacking strawmen (strawpersons?), but real people with guns shooting back? I didn't think so.

So, let's ask the interwebs: what should be the new name of ~~Blackwater Xe~~ ACADEMI?

Here are a couple of suggestions to get us going:

Mercs' R Us
Xarbucks
TMI [The Military Inc.]
Xpendables
The Starks
The Knights Who Say Ni!

What say you?

Dear Reviewers, a Word?

2011-12-09T10:56:00.003-05:00

Everyone gets rejected. And it never stops being painful not matter how successful or how long you have been in the business. Some of this is inevitable; not everyone is above average. But some of it isn’t. I thought that I would offer some ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ for reviewers out there to improve the process and save some hurt feelings, when possible. Some are drawn from personal experience; others, more vicariously. I have done some of the “don’ts” myself, but I feel bad about it. Learn from my mistakes.

First, and I can’t stress this enough, READ THE F*CKING PAPER. It is considered impolite by authors to reject a paper by falsely accusing it of doing THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what it does. Granted, some people have less of a way with words than others and are not exactly clear in their argumentation. But if you are illiterate, you owe it to the author to tell the editors when they solicit your review. It is okay – there are very successful remedial programs they can recommend. Don’t be ashamed.

Second, and related to the first, remember the stakes for the author. Let us consider this hypothetical scenario. In a safe estimate, an article in a really top journal will probably merit a 2-3% raise for the author. Say that is somewhere around $2000. Given that salaries (except in the University of California System) tend to either stay the same or increase, for an author who has, say, 20 years left in his/her career, getting that article accepted is worth about $40,000 dollars. And that is conservative. So you owe it more than a quick scan while you are on the can. It might not be good, but make sure. Do your job or don’t accept the assignment in the first place. (Sorry, I don’t usually like scatological humor but I think this is literally the case sometimes.)

Third, the author gets to choose what he/she writes about. Not you. He/she is a big boy/girl. Do not reject papers because they should have been on a different topic, in your estimation. Find fault with the the paper actually under review to justify your rejection.

Fourth, don’t be a b*tch. Articles should be rejected based on faulty theory or fatally flawed empirics not a collection of little cuts. Bitchy grounds include but are not limited to – not citing you, using methods you do not understand but do not bother to learn, lack of generalizability when theory and empirics are otherwise sound. The bitchiness of reviews should be inversely related to the audacity and originality of the manuscript. People trying to do big, new things should be given more leeway to make their case than those reinventing the wheel.

Fifth, don’t be an a**hole. Keep your sarcasm to yourself. Someone worked very hard on this paper, even if he/she might not be very bright. Writing “What a surprise!”, facetiously, is a dick move. Rejections are painful enough. You don’t have to pour salt on the wound. Show some respect.

Sixth, remember that to say anything remotely interesting in 12,000 words is ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE. Therefore the reviewer needs to be sympathetic that the author might be able to fix certain problems where he/she given more space to do so. Not including a counterargument from your 1986 JOP article might not be a fatal oversight; it might have just been an economic decision. If you have other things that you would need to see to accept an otherwise interesting paper, the proper decision is an R&R, not a reject. Save these complaints for your reviews of full-length book manuscripts where they are more justifiable.

Seventh, you are not a film critic. Rejections must be accompanied by something with more intellectual merit than “the paper did not grab me” or “I do not consider this to be of sufficient importance to merit publication in a journal of this quality.” This must be JUSTIFIED. You should explain your judgment, even if it is something to the effect of, “Micronesia is an extremely small place and its military reforms are not of much consequence to the fate of world politics.” Even if it is that obvious, and it never is, you owe an explanation.

Intervention and Prudence

2011-12-08T06:48:00.001-05:00

Finally after a busy teaching term I've got a chance to add some thoughts to the great post and articles by Jon Western and Joshua Goldstein on humanitarian intervention.

Bottom line: I think Jon and Joshua make a robust case that not only can intervention work, but that the international community is learning effectively how to go about it. As they argue, it is a technique of statecraft that is being refined and better understood. It might not necessarily transform societies on every metric of human well being, but prompt military action combined with due attention to the rule of law, security and institutions can fend off predators and give oppressed peoples a chance - a breathing space - to rebuild. East Timor, Sierra Leone, and who knows, maybe even Libya testify to this.

Nevertheless, when interventionism becomes a hard general principle based on moral duties, it can too readily eclipse the wider strategic picture and call for military action in a vacuum, with the perverse result that security is reduced elsewhere. And while a positive duty to protect might well result in a successful protection of a community, it also can have the unintended effect of abetting counter-atrocities.

Like much foreign policy debate in the US and also on the other side of the pond, the issue of intervention can suffer from the tendency of those on either side to rush to binary positions. Those tempermentally uneasy with intervention can be just as guilty of this as interventionists. Unless we are careful, the principle is wrenched out of any context and like the hollow catch-word of isolationism, the debate can degenerate into a contest between 'teams' and rigid dogmas, not a careful analysis of intervention in a wider context.

(NB Jon and Joshua don't do this - they argue that the doctrine and practice of R2P has contributed to an overall decline of worldwide violence). But the language of absolutes - of strict obligations - does violence to the discipline of strategy, of balancing morality with power, commitments with resources, the ecological effort to relate all parts to the whole.

To take the case of Libya, as others have argued here at the Duck, NATO's Operation Unified Protector was the decisive act in making possible the overthrow of a tyrannical regime. As Jon noted, 'In the absence of NATO's air campaign we would not be witnessing the celebrations today. The Libyans wanted to, but probably could not have, settled it by themselves.'

True enough. We might also add that without NATO's intervention, we probably wouldn't be seeing the torture or illegal detention of black Africans under the new order as reported by Amnesty International and the United Nations. If not intervening where we can amounts to a kind of complicity in what follows, the states that intervened are complicit in those atrocities, indirectly. We might think we have a responsibility to protect, but that should be tempered with a responsibility to first do no harm. We might approach civil wars as a conflict between predators and victims, but they are just as often vengeful power struggles that are hard to comprehend in stark moral terms. Was rescuing a large population worth the subsequent suffering of a smaller group? Perhaps, but by speaking the language of responsibility and rights, we set a standard we will (or should) be judged by.

But even if the Libyan war went perfectly and did not have this tragic internal consequence, how will this action shape the wider security environment? From the point of view of Tehran or Pyongyang, the West once again has attacked a regime that either did not have a WMD or nuclear deterrent, or had peacefully renounced it. As David Patrikarakos argues,

<blockquote>Hardliners in Iran have learned an important lesson from recent history. They have just seen Gaddafi overthrown after giving up his nuclear programme in 2003, the same year that Iraq, which never had a nuclear weapons programme, was invaded. And they remember that in 2001 the US invaded Afghanistan on the grounds that it harboured and funded the Taliban, while making Pakistan, which also harboured and funded the Taliban, but had nuclear weapons, a major ally in the war on terror. The message is simple: nuclear weapons mean security.</blockquote>
Of course, we can't be sure that we 'know' how strong this causal link is, and that the war on Libya has played a role in accelerating Iran's nuclear programme. But its possible enough to give us pause. And it probably has added a strong 'plus' to the argument for acquiring a nuclear deterrent in places like Iran. It would be a bitter irony if an intervention conducted in the name of human rights and wider security had the perverse result of making Libya more unsafe for black people and adding impetus to nuclear proliferation.

To set conditions, through a frequent use of military power as a tool of liberalism and regime change, that make nuclear insurance attractive - to set the conditions for spiralling insecurity and arms buildups into the bargain - would not only be dangerous but surely inauspicious for the cause of human rights. Libyan lives matter. So too does disarmament and non-proliferation. Means matter, ends matter, consequences matter, both intended and otherwise.

So it is probably better to approach these issues in a state of prudence rather than binary absolutes. Prudence as it is classically conceived recognises the conflicted nature of most political situations, and negotiates between competing interests, with an eye for the limits of power and the ever-present potential for self-defeating behaviour. Not acting, to be sure, can also be imprudent. To act or not to act, or to choose which tools to use and when, remains a hard call. But at least a prudent way of thinking can turn attention to the relative as well as the absolute, and the bleak reality that good intentions are dangerous things indeed.

UPDATE: It seems I missed some reports that Qaddafi did not fully disarm his WMD arsenal. However, it also seems that he did not keep up his nuclear programme. Regardless, I hope my point still stands that NATO's war against a state that did not have a nuclear deterrent may have consequences for proliferation elsewhere.

Pearl Harbor, 70 Years On

2011-12-08T05:36:00.002-05:00

I was lucky enough to play a small part in a Radio 4 documentary that went to air yesterday on the 70th anniversary of the surprise attack by Imperial Japan on Pearl Harbor. Here it is on iplayer.

#Insurgency: Warring Over Somalia....On Twitter

2011-12-07T15:42:00.001-05:00

Al-Shabaab, the Islamic insurgency wreaking havoc in Somali, appears to have joined Twitter. The @HSMPress (Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen press office) feed has a trickle of followers and posts today that offer some fighting words on the AU's peacekeeping efforts and the Kenyan military intervention, and laud al-Shabaab's cause and martyrs.

@HSMPress with the rising economic burden of operation Linda Nchi, the much-hyped #Kenyan invasion has faltered quite prematurely.

Reports are that Kenyan troops, who are retaliating for al-Shabaab's cross-border incursions, have gained ground. But critics question the legitimacy of the intervention, are concerned about regional spillover, and warn that the foreign incursions of the both the AU and Kenya play into al-Shabaab's propaganda. Kenya announced today that it will be integrating troops into the 9,000 strong AU forces in Mogadishu.

Not to be outdone, the Twitter propaganda machine has a Kenyan side. A Kenyan military spokesman has a Twitter account under @MajorEChirChir and regularly tweets about impending and successful attacks on al-Shabaab under #OperationLindaNchi.

@MajorEChirChir #OperationLindaNchi KDF bombed 2 Al shabaab camps south of Afmadow town, killing several Al Shabaab & destroyed technical vehicles.

(There is also a Facebook page for the Operation, in case you feel inclined to "like" it).

Reports are that Kenyan troops, who are retaliating for al-Shabaab's cross-border incursions, have gained ground. But critics question the legitimacy of the intervention, are concerned are regional spill-over, and warn that the foreign incursions of both the AU and Kenya play into al-Shabaab's propaganda. Kenya announced today that it will integrating troops into the 9,000 strong AU forces in Mogadishu.

@MajorEChirChir and @HSMPress are not following each other...yet. As others have noted, to follow is not to endorse.

My Payroll Tax Rant of the Day

2011-12-05T14:07:00.001-05:00

The payroll tax fight in a nutshell.

Republicans: Unlike every other tax cut we've dealt with in this congressional session, the payroll tax holiday must be offset. We demand spending cuts.

Democrats: Fine, we'll offset it with a temporary increase in taxes for the .01% of the population that makes more than a million dollars a year.

Republicans: No. We demand spending cuts.

Democrats: Wait. Are you saying that given the choice between two policies that lead to the same exact levels of aggregate taxation, you'd choose one that raises taxes on 99.99% of taxpaying Americans?

Republicans: Yes. We demand spending cuts.

Democrats: But why not offset a temporary stimulus measure with one less likely to reduce aggregate demand?

Republicans: ....

Democrats: Oh. ....That's not what you mean by "offset," is it?

Republicans: Took you long enough. We demand any economic benefit of the payroll tax holiday be offset.

I can't believe that we're even having this debate.