We Have Left the Dodgeball Phase of Trump's World Order: Allies Are Now Acting

 For the entire first Trump term and the second term's first year, America's allies have basically engaged in the five d's of dodgeball: dodge, dip, duck, dive, and dodge.  They have tried to avoid a major break with US, seeking mostly to soothe Trump's ego.  This week may mark the end of that.  First, there is the news of a number of European countries loudly participating in a Danish military exercise in and near Greenland.  Second, Canada just made a deal with China over electric vehicles and canola oil.  These are, as the literature I read long ago and am far from an expert in would say, costly signals.  Let me explain.

In international relations, talk is mostly cheap (although folks do argue cheap talk also matters).  How do we know a country is really committing to a course of action?  They engage in a costly signal--they do something that hurts themselves or risks real costs.  Economic sanctions are often not very costly signals because they signal precisely that a country is not willing to put their own people on the line.  Drone strikes do the same kind of thing, which is why boots on the ground is always seen as so important--they are credible signals.

In these two cases, the actors are risking seriously Trump reactions--they aren't disguising what they are doing.  They may have other interests as well, but they are clearly sticking it to Trump.  

First, let's discuss Greenland.  Sure, most of the Euro troops heading there for exercises may be part of decisions made long before Trump's latest threats, so this may not be a deliberate step this week to create a tripwire to deter American aggression.  But it sure looks like that, doesn't it?  That these countries are loudly sending these troops, that they are signalling that they are putting their troops bodies in the way is a very loud signal that they don't mind offending Trump.  Given all the work done previously to avoid so openly defying and seeking to deny Trump (see the five para NATO summit communique last summer as key example and the 5% bullshit), this is a huge turn for the Europeans.  

Why now?  Maybe they are looking at the US domestic stuff and Venezuela and realizing that Trump is actually serious about Greenland despite the utter stupidity of it all.  Maybe the Danes are terrific diplomats who have used every means at their disposal to get the Europeans on side.  Maybe the 1938 resonance is getting too strong.   Maybe the constant references in the US involvement in Ukraine negotiations of NATO and the US as two separate actors flipped a switch. I am guessing it is because they understand that the moment has come--if Trump aggresses against a NATO member's territory, the alliance is done.  Best to avert that outcome for however long, and maybe NATO's fate will be determined a bit further down the road. 

Second, let's get to Canada-China.  People have been critical of Mark Carney betraying his Elbow's Up campaign promise to fight hard against Trump's coercive tactics and bombastic threats that challenge Canada's very identity.  Well, there are few things that are more Elbow's Up than making a deal with China over EVs.  One key component of the very undisciplined, hardly a doctrine Donald Doctrine is to keep China out of North American markets.  So, this is very much in the face of Trump.  And it is a risky as hell step because the Chinese are shitty trading partners* with whom Canada has had a very fraught relationship.  But diversifying markets when the biggest trading partner is threatening to throw away the key trade agreement becomes more than just a priority but a mission.  Some will say that this will force Trump to toss away NAFTA 2.0 (USMCA or CUSMA or whatever you want to call it).  My take: if someone is punching you in the face whether you accede to their demands or not, then you might as well take the pain and do what is best for yourself.  

The other side of costly signals is restraint.  For coercive diplomacy to work, you have to keep both sides of your promises--to do the painful thing if the other side doesn't do what you want AND to refrain from doing that thing if the other side does what you want.  Trump's behavior was going to lead to these kinds of responses because he never restrained, only escalated.  Kept punching the Europeans and Canadians in the face even as they tried to go along with his unnecessary and unreasonable demands.  

That apparently ended this week.

Next steps?  Oh my.  I am just glad I closed most of my US dollar accounts... 

 

 

 

* I worry about giving into China's coercive diplomacy as well, but at least China is likely to keep a promise for more than a few hours. 

Intro to IR For Trumpers: Power, Soft Power, and Coercive Diplomacy

Back in Trump 1.0, I wrote posts explaining basic stuff like how the NATO 2% thing is not a tax that NATO members pay the US, but an expectation of what they are supposed to spend on their own defense--the equivalent of 2% and now 3.5% of their gross domestic product.

In the past week, I have seen so much dumb and wildly ignorant stuff that I think this might become an ongoing series.  I did already write about how Stephen Miller is a shitty realist, but let's go back to basics. Power is mentioned 13 times in the NYT summary of the interview.  I doubt we would find any President of the past 50 years being so focused on power.  "On topic after topic, he made clear that in his mind, U.S. power is the determining factor — and that previous presidents have been too cautious to make use of it for political supremacy or national profit."

To be clear, all Presidents understand that power is important, but what is it and how does one amass it or lose it?  The basic poli sci definition of power: the ability to get others to do what they would otherwise not do.  We tend to focus on stuff we can measure: the size of one's military, how advanced in tech it is, the size of the economy, how dependent others are on it, and so on.  A bully making threats is not by itself powerful.  One of the ingredients of power is one's reputation for using power, so, yes, bullying can increase one's power.  But it can also weaken it.

How so? Bullying can reduce a country's power in several ways:

1. Wasting resources on lesser priorities so that fewer resources are available elsewhere.  A US aircraft carrier near Venezuela is not someplace else--they move but slowly.  Spending ammunition on tiny boats may reduce the available stocks for elsewhere.  Exhausting personnel on tertiary missions may mean less effectiveness in more important places.  
2. Bullying exacerbates the security dilemma--that others will respond by building up their own defenses against American power (speculation this morning about nuclear proliferation is not that wild), may look to other countries to ally with, and so on.  Countries, for instance, are going to find alternatives to US financial instruments so that future US sanctions don't bite as hard.  Trump's sanctions against ICC personnel may ultimate cause Europe to develop email/online alternatives.  If Trump breaks NATO through his aggression against Greenland, the US will have less power.  Greenland would not give the US more power than that which NATO does.  That can be an entire post or three.
3. If bullying fails, if a bullied actor resists, like maybe Denmark, others will see the bully as weak and resist as well.  
4. Then there is soft power, which I have to break out since it is so misunderstood. 

Soft power does not refer to economic sanctions and other less kinetic forms of coercive efforts.  No, it refers to the attactiveness of a model, the persuasiveness of one's ideology and brands, and the like.  The US had much soft power because it was so successful, so attractive in so many ways.  People around the world wanted to buy coca-cola and wear Levis, to imitate Americans.  This mattered not just for those American brands but also because it made it easier for the US to .... get others to do what the US wanted.  It didn't quite make diplomacy to be like pushing on an open door, but it did grease the wheels of many American efforts around the world for decades.  But bullying erodes soft power.  People hate bullies so they then hate anything associated with them.  Trump is destroying American soft power at a rapid rate, as the rest of the world is now finding the US to be gross, grotesque, and absolutely not attractive or a model.  

Final topic for today: coercive diplomacy.  Being coercive and negotiating is not coercive diplomacy.  Coercive diplomacy involves using threats and force in credible ways to get others to change their stances (compellence) or refraining from doing stuff the coercer does not want (deterrence).  The most important but underrated aspect of coercive diplomacy is restraint: that if the target does what you want, you will not do the thing that you have threatened.  If the target is deterred, then they are not attacked.  If the target complies and does the thing they are not attacked.  The problem with Trump and coercive diplomacy (other than everything else) is that his word is not good.  He does not worry about whether his threats or promises are credible.  As an uncertainty engine, Trump simply cannot assure anyone that his next move will be what he says it will be.  Trump is, alas, not a TACO, as he often chickens out but not always.  But when he is successful, he will often demand that an actor, such as a university, to give up more than what he had previously demanded, reminding us of Darth Vader and Lando Calrissian. 

Finally, to go back to the Trump quote about power being the determining factor, a couple more reactions:

a)  impunity is not power
b)  what determines Trump's foreign policy behavior is not either his thirst for power or the American thirst for power, but Trump's ego, resentments (which includes racism and sexism and xenophobia), and greed.  He wants Greenland because it would make him feel good.  That's it.  That's the entirety of it.  It is not about critical minerals or Russian/Chinese interests or ships.  

"When asked why he needed to possess the territory, he said: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.'” 

Sometimes he does not lie.  This is one of those times. 

 

 

 

 

 

Why Have American Political Scientists Largely (Not Entirely) Ignored Disease

People are wondering why there has not been much scholarship on the international relations of pandemics in the major journals

out of curiosity, looked at how many times the term “pandemic” has appeared in top IR journals

IO: 0
APSR: 0
JCR: 0
WP: 0
AJPS: 3
EJIR: 6
JPR: 8
JOP: 8
IS: 13
ISQ: 17

— Seva (@SevaUT) March 15, 2020

Trump and IR 101: Iran Edition

I am not an expert on Iran or on nuclear proliferation, but I have taken Intro to International Relations, so I apparently know more than Trump and his guys.  Yes, taken.  You don't have to teach Intro to IR to know more than these folks--the bar is low.  So, what did I learn in that class and what did I teach over the years that Trump,  Bolton and whoever else simply do not understand:

1. Sovereign countries have agency. Sure, countries may pay costs for disagreeing with the most powerful actor, but they have the ability to decide.  So, you can't just do X and expect everyone to go along, whether they are friends or foes.  Indeed, every country has its own domestic politics and its own national interests.  Sucks, but there it is. 
2. Which leads to: cooperation is not easy but generally required.  For instance, unilateral sanctions do not work unless one is the only supplier or buyer of a good/service.  The US sanctioning Iran can do some modest damage, but to really punish Iran, the US will need Europe and probably Russia and China to get on board.  Why should they?  Wishful thinking?
3. Strategic thinking is key.  To be clear, this means that one needs to figure out not just what one wants, but what others want, so that one can figure out ways to get others to do what you want.  My best illustration for this was always my dogs--who remain more strategic than Trump despite both dogs being dead for seven and ten years respectively.   
4. The security dilemma is a thing: unilateral efforts to improve one's security will cause others to react, improve their defenses, which ultimately leaves every less secure.  So, yeah, Iran pursuing nukes may very well lead to Saudi Arabia pursuing nukes.  Good times. 
5. Which leads to this: repeatedly issuing threats is a bad idea.  We IR folks tend to teach WWI for many reasons, but one of them is that the Germans thought they could cow everyone into bending to them.  Instead, they provoked alliances against them.  Trump thinks he got denuclearization in Korea (nope, he didn't) because he threatened a lot, so now he is going to apply "maximum pressure" everywhere.  This will only come back to bite in a big way.  I won't get into the details of Prisoner's Dilemma vs. Chicken here, but the basic idea is that if you keep on playing chicken, at some point, someone is going to escalate and it won't end well.  

Drezner blogged today (ish, since I am living in tomorrow for the moment), arguing that agreements are always flawed so the question is not whether an agreement is flawed, but do you have a better one in mind and a plan to get there.  Trump has no plan because that would require some knowledge of international relations, some ability to engage in strategic thinking, some discipline, and some work.  So, nope, not going to happen. 

One last thing: as old IR colleague of mine commented on my fb page: individuals matter.  Trump reminds us of this everyday.   Not all Intro to IR classes take individuals seriously.   I had a lecture or two on individuals, but spent most time talking about the importance of domestic politics and the dynamics of the international system.  Why?  Because the "great man" view of IR, including its inherent sexism, is what students get before they show up at college.  But if I were teaching Intro to IR these days, I would probably spend a smidge more time... not just because of Trump but also because folks are thinking more seriously about it (we did in our NATO book).  

The New Final Exam Question

If I were teaching Intro to IR, I would be mighty tempted to ask this question:

How is this new cold war similar to and different from the old cold war?

Students could argue with the premise--this ain't a cold war.  They could focus on the multipolarity of it.  They could write whether there is ideological competition this time (democracy vs. illiberal democracy) or not.  They could focus on proxy wars and arms races.

Anyhow, just an idea that I thought I would put out there.  I actually don't want to write that essay right now as I am hip dip in grading.  So mostly short posts this week.

Star Wars and IR Panel

We had a good time today with five papers addressing the relationships between pop culture and international relations.  I have a storify and two vines of the event:

From the Playground to International Relations

I was helping my daughter with her homework--throwing drills from her college ultimate team--this afternoon, and I was reminded of something that may (or may not) apply to IR.

As we were leaving the field, a small boy and small girl were running back to the playground, having dodged our disks.  The girl was ahead of the boy, so the boy shouted "we are not in a race."

Why?  Because he was behind and was going to lose the race, so he declared that the competition did not exist.  The person behind often declares it is not a race, and the person in front tends not to listen to the person that is behind.

How does this work in IR?  The most obvious application would be arms races (races are races?).  The current arms race between China and the US is kind of like this: China accumulates and the US insists that it is not in an arms race.  That increased numbers and some increases in technology do not affect the game.  Of course, China is in the same position with its neighborhood, as it insists it is not in a race as pretty much everyone else is buying submarines, to provide some anti-access/area denial capabilities of their own.

The same goes for the international economy: that as China rises, the US denies that there is a race for economic supremacy....  Maybe.

Anyhow, I was inspired on the playground, and like any good kid, I have lost my train of thought.  So, any better examples of this "I am winning the race--it is not a race!" phenomenon?

Resistance is Futile

If I had to list my greatest weaknesses, they would be: chocolate chip cookies (fresh), cinnamon buns, apple pie and troll bait.  I have a hard time resisting any of these.  Why mention this?  Because Stephen Walt posted something today that was tasty bait--a  five minute B.A. in IR.  His premise is cute, relying on an old Saturday Night Live bit to inspire the post, which is fine.

One can criticize the post for omitting all kinds of stuff that we might teach someone in a four year BA, and many will or have already done so.  My problem is that his effort is simply ill-conceived.  He says that students may remember five things from four years of undergraduate work on IR:

• Anarchy
• Balance of Power/Threat
• Comparative Advantage
• Misperception/Miscalculation
• Social Construction.

One reason why I say this is ill conceived is that I would expect my students from Intro to IR to remember this much and more: collective action, tit for tat, prisoners' dilemma, and logics of comparison (apples/oranges/frisbees), and maybe something about nuclear weapons (entirely omitted by Walt) such as mutual assured destruction.

Remember, Walt promised a four year B.A. in five minutes, but Walt's post seem to be focused on just the first class.  So, I might not mind his selective post if it were his take on the five minutes to cover Intro to IR but not an entire four years.  Indeed, he has argued frequently of late about the need for policy-makers to have some history background.  So, wouldn't a five minute BA on IR also have some history nuggets as well as some big IR concepts to remember, like Napoleon was short, that Bismarck (and other faves of realists) was really smart, that bipolarity was really sweet, and so on. 

I also find this post to be problematic because I find it a bit of a betrayal.  How so?  Well, it betrays the students who might actually remember more than five things after four years of classes and heaps of debt.  It betrays the faculty who work really hard not just to get the concepts of Intro to IR across but lots more than that (see below).  Given the attacks universities are facing these days, why give ammunition to the folks who think we can just MOOC it up?  To those who think the political science we do is not worthy of federal funding?

The biggest reason why this post is problematic is that it completely undersells what the four years are supposed to be about.  The four years is not just about dropping concepts into students' heads but encouraging their ability to think analytically so that they know which concept they should apply and how to apply it critically.  When I introduced my Intro to IR class, I told the students that my hope was to confuse them with a variety of ways to look at the world.  That no one approach (theory/paradigm/model/perspective) will always be correct and that it is up to them to figure it out.  That by the end of the course they would have multiple frameworks that they could apply as the world around them changes.

When I taught the students in the senior classes, in seminars and lectures, the focus was on getting them to apply what they learned over four years.  And damn, they knocked my socks off.  They would integrate their IR, their Comparative, their Political Theory, their econ, their Sociology, their History, their Psych courses and work into analyses of important, interesting stuff.  I learned a lot especially from the senior seminars.  Why?  Because these folks could think.  I would like to believe that the four years of courses from the profs and learning from each other had something to do with it. 

To be fair, Walt was trying to be snarky and glib (sins I commit on a regular basis).  But it was also troll bait, and, as always, I fell for it.

Pre-empting Preemption

As 2014 is exactly 100 years after 1914, we are going to see a lot of stories saying something about how 1914 speaks to today.... as if World War III may break out soon.  Of course, anytime somebody says it ain't gonna happen, folks mention the various experts who said in 1914 that war was not going happen.

Well, I am not afraid to be wrong--I tweeted a few minutes ago that if Vegas set an over/under line on World Wars in 2014 at 1, I would bet on the under--that there will not be a world war this year.  Of course, this depends on what one means by a World War.  How about a conflict that takes in multiple hemispheres (north and south or east and west--I am not picky)?  How about one that involves more than three great powers with at least two great powers on either side (or just two superpowers like if the cold war got hot, but there is only one superpower still, right)? 

Of course, then we would have to figure out who is a great power, and that is not always easy.  But any half-assed list of Great Powers would include: US, China, Russia .... maybe Japan, Germany, France, UK, and if we stretch further perhaps Brazil, India, Indonesia and a few other places.  Great powers are those who can project power and can make a difference around the world, so all those with nukes and the ability to deliver them around the world stand up (US, UK, France, Russia, China, India [if you have a space program, you can drop nukes far away]).  We can come up with other lists, but the question of WW or not WW basically entails whether some combo of US, China and Russia (with European countries to be named later) will get in a war together. 

So, what is the likelihood that the US will engage in a war with China and/or Russia?  Pretty close to zero.  Why?  Those aforementioned nuclear weapons have a great deal to do with it--MAD and all that.  The difference between 1914 and 2014 is precisely the reversal in preemption temptation.  In 1914, there was a sense that moving first had great advantages and most countries had war plans built on those assumptions.  Now, attacking first just means you make more rubble bounce, but that your own country will be destroyed as well.  So, even if North Korea does its damnedest to suck us all into a world war, it is far more likely that China and the US will not get sucked into a war.  MAD ain't perfect (there is ye olde Stability-Instability Paradox), but pretty sure the preemption temptation is not relevant 100 years after WWI.

Furthermore, we are likely to see far less US intervention in the next couple of years.  Politicians can read polls, too, so the numbers on Afghanistan speak to them (and the numbers on Syria and Iran do, too).  We are exhausted.  So, don't expect much in the way of new wars this year for the U.S. 

China? No need to engage in war anytime soon.  Russia?  Not until after the Olympics, right?

Anyhow, the point here is that numbers are fun, anniversaries are swell, and we like to think about how the past matters for today (which it does).  But don't buy into what the fear-mongers want to ... monger.

You Play or You Die .... Or You Go Viral

As it turns out, my biggest contribution to IR theory this year was ... silly:

Our most shared article this year: 'The Game of Thrones and Popular Understandings of IR' by @smsaideman - http://t.co/YHGvdoCBik
— e-IR (@e_IR) December 22, 2013

E-IR is an online archive of international relations theory stuff, and I wrote a piece on what game of Thrones and reactions to it says about how non-specialists think about IR.  And it was apparently a popular post.  If only each of these folks who read it buy the Dave and Steve book (Dave has his copies!)...

Anyhow, pretty cool.  We shall see soon enough what season 4 (third book, part two) does to how people think of the IR in Westeros and beyond.  

May your new year be full of white walkers!  Or not.

Fun Lesson ... Bad Lesson?

Over the past decade, there has been a bunch of scholarship challenging the conventional wisdom about credibility and international relations.   Dan Drezner summarizes it and the context.  While I have been struggling with Schelling and the logics of coercive diplomacy lately, Dan's piece suggests that I might have been doing my students wrong.

You see, every year I taught Intro to IR, I would compare and contrast prisoners' dilemma and chicken as two ways to think about IR.  I would always reference Footloose (the original) when talking about chicken as the tractor scene was a great exemplar.  As time went on, I had to show the scene with the new generations of students who did not grow up on Footloose (yes, our culture is in decline).  The scene was great because it showed multiple dimensions:



The youtube version starts too late for my purposes but has most of the key content--that Kevin Bacon becomes tied to the tractor, that their race is being watched by friends (audience costs), and so on.  What the shorter version misses is that the bad guy smokes some pot beforehand, which would allow me to ask the students what he did wrong, and when they said that he smoked pot, I would say: no, he failed to tell his opponent he smoked pot.  All about the signaling.

But perhaps this is all wrong--that reputation matters not that much.  That countries do what they do because of the stakes involved and not so much the credibility of the other guy.  Which means I wasted much time over the years teaching something that might be wrong.  Well, not entirely a waste, since this is how the folks in national capitals think about it even if they are wrong.  The game is played even if the outcomes are driven by other stuff than credibility.  The other saving grace, I guess, is that chicken does work for a metaphor in IR in some ways, even if it is less about the signaling stuff and more about the problem of a game where giving in is often the best strategy.  Hmmm.

So, I give in.  And I am glad, for a change, that I am not teaching Intro to IR right now--I would have to change one of my lectures...

Pondering Prejuices in IR (Mine)

I was writing a piece at the Duck on the End of IR stuff and presenting some figures that test the hypothesis that IR Theory is dying, but I couldn't do it without facing my prejudices.  I am posting them here not to hide them (posting them online would be a stupid way to hide something), but to present them without distracting too much from the narrative flow of the piece at the Duck which is already long enough anyway.  So, below I discuss why Mearsheimer and Walt tend to get me fired up and how this particular piece upsets me.

My big prejudice has to do with the folks making the big claims here.  Mearsheimer and Walt have not been fans of my home institution, UCSD, for quite sometime, engaging in a war of letters in the early 90's just when I was on the job market for the first time.  They were upset with how UCSD engaged in hiring in Security.  So, I hold onto a grudge pretty well and tend to get a bit fired up when I read some of their stuff.  When they lament the death of the Old Boys network, as they did in the earlier draft of their hypothesis testing piece, I get even more fired up:

Instead of relying on “old boy” networks, a professionalized field will use indicators of merit that appear to be impersonal and universal. In the academy, this tendency leads to the use of “objective” criteria—such as citation counts—when making hiring and promotion decisions." 

The context here is criticism of the professionalization of the IR profession.  Funny, for those who write about civil-military relations to think that professionalization is problematic.  Anyhow, one could argue that their problem is with how professionalization has been operationalized, that they are not lamenting the demise of the old boy network, but I cannot help but think otherwise given the context.  They dropped the old boy reference in the final draft but kept the language about how problematic professionalization is.

Over time, professions also tend to adopt simple and impersonal ways to evaluate
members. In the academy, this tendency leads to heavy reliance on ‘objective’ criteria — such as citation counts — in hiring and promotion decisions. In some cases, department members and university administrators might think that they do not have to read a scholar’s work and form an independent opinion of its quality. Instead, they can simply calculate the individual’s ‘h-index’ (Hirsch, 2005) and make personnel decisions on that basis.

In the aftermath of the Duck crisis of August 2013 and of discussions of networking and gender before and at APSA, I simply cannot ignore this critique of professionalism here.  Perhaps citation counts and numbers of articles in top journals are simplistic measures of success and that the quality of ideas, which cannot be quantified, is more important.  But given the past (and presence) of discrimination, I think imperfect objective criteria are better than the old ways, even if it still cuts against women (since women are cited less).  We can figure out what the gender biases in citations are via, dare I say it, hypothesis testing (again, see the IO paper or see Sara Mitchell's stuff), and then address and control for such biases.  We cannot really do the same if we fall back on the old ways, which were unkind to women (not being boys and all).

, I really hope that the tenure letters that people write, which do get into the quality of work, matter or else many of us (including me right now) are wasting a lot of time.  Indeed, one of the M&W recommendations is for promotion committees to focus on just a few (three or four) pieces to evaluate a candidate, rather than the quantity, of output.  I don't know about them, but when I write an evaluation for tenure/promotion, I tend to focus on the quality of a few key works.  I do address the larger record, but I tend to only go into detail about a handful.  I have limited time and crappy time management skills.

Anyhow, I am very biased in all of this.  So, take what I say with a huge grain of salt, as illustrated by a student I once had in my big Intro to IR class.

My Favorite Recent-ish Poli Sci Books

I have been thinking of listing a bunch of my favorite 2000s+ Political Science books, and a variety of circumstances has inspired me to write the list today.  These books make my list because they made me see the world differently.  Most persuaded me of their core arguments, but all made me think and even ask questions I had never asked before.  My reading is fairly random as my interests are fairly wide (I read and research in IR and comparative, in ethnic conflict and civil-military relations).  I read some of these books because I was asked to review the book or the person while some were for courses I was teaching.  And some I just bumped into and then read.

In no particular order:

• Erin Jenne, Ethnic Bargaining: The Paradox of Minority Empowerment.  The book essentially argues that the more power minority groups have, the more they demand, and then the more likely it is that violence breaks out.  This challenged much of my thinking on ethnic conflict, since I tended to see the denial of access to be a key factor but she finds in some ways that empowering can be just as provocative if not more so.  Erin and I have co-authored since I read the book's ms.
• Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works.  They find that non-violence is far more effective than violent resistance.  The book is incredibly thorough and persuasive.  Perhaps one of the most important pieces of political science during my career as it has incredibly important ramifications for political change. 
• Stacie Goddard, Uncommon Ground: Indivisible Territory and the Politics of Legitimacy.  The book addresses the question of whether a hunk of territory is indivisible or not, which matters greatly since if the territory cannot be divided, conflict becomes zero-sum.  Using the hard cases of Ireland and Jerusalem, Goddard persuades me that indivisibility can vary over time--that it is not fixed but shaped by politics.  
• Kelly Greenhill, Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion, and Foreign Policy.  One of the most fun and mind-blowing books I have read.  Greenhill explains how and why countries may impose significant costs upon democratic countries by threatening or causing massive waves of migration.  I now see the world differently thanks to this book.
• Monica Duffy Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence.  Toft takes a variety of data and case studies to argue why territory shapes the likelihood of ethnic violence.  She does one of the best jobs of making the case for the role for group concentration, which is so much more important for ethnic conflict than ethnic fractionalization (my biggest pet peeve in the business).
• Page Fortna, Does Peacekeeping Work?  It is all in the title.  Using a heap of evidence, Fortna changes my mind about the efficacy of peacekeeping.  Another book with important policy implications.
• Judith Kelley, Ethnic Politics in Europe: The Power of Norms and Incentives.  I didn't need to construct strawmen for my second book--I had to deal with a pretty power and convincing existing target. Having to deal with this book, made the Steve and Bill book on the joys of xenophobia a better book.  Or at least, I hope so, as Kelley makes some mighty persuasive arguments.
• Milada Vachudova, Europe Undivided: Democracy, Leverage and Integration After Communism.  See what I said about Kelley.  Just a very good book that made me work harder.
• Sarah Kreps, Coalitions of Convenience: US Military Interventions After the Cold War.  As I got into the alliance/coalition business, the book helped me dodge the question of why the US chooses to engage in multilateralism or not and could focus on other alliance/coalition questions.  A fun and interesting book that does an excellent job of looking at recent US choices to figure out when the US seeks to use formal alliances or not as it wars.
• Patricia Weitsman, Waging War: Alliances, Coalitions and Institutions of Interstate Violence.  Weitsman and Kreps cover some similar terrain, but there are some fun nuances in each argument that lead in somewhat different directions.  Weitsman's book is slightly more recent so more of Afghanistan as well as Libya are covered.

So, that's ten terrific books in one decade.  I might have included this if I had been further along in my diaspora project as I would be engaged in more non-state actor stuff or this if I was caught up on my elections and ethnic conflict stuff since it addresses the international politics of elections.  There are obviously other great books that have come out the past thirteen years or so, but these are the ones that come to my mind first.

Sure, more than a few of these folks are now my friends, but I would say that for most, the causal relationship was: "hey, this is a cool book, I should meet them" -> I meet them --> friendship rather than me just listing the books of my friends.  But, as always, my readers should take all of my opinions with whatever grain of salt they find handy. 

Delayed Trip Report: Budapest and Deja Vu

Going to the Third Parties and Ethnic Conflict workshop at Central European University, organized by Erin Jenne, was all kinds of deja vu for me.  First, other than London (mostly one spring/summer program in undergrad plus visits back since) and Stockholm (one July in grad school),  Budapest is the city outside of North American in which I have spent the most time: two weeks of research in 2002-03, a week of summer teaching at CEU a year or two later, and now this trip.  Second, and, more importantly, outside folks getting involved in ethnic conflicts is where my career accidentally started.  I didn't go to grad school expecting to work in this area, but it is the way it worked out.  Third, the cast of participants included some old friends--Erin, Monica Toft, Will Moore, Idean Salehyan, Kristin Bakke, Sara Mitchell, Steffan Wolff and Brandon Valeriano.  The rest of the participants included people I met once or twice before and folks who I had never met, but the balance of people were old friends.  My unplanned journey the through the profession has meant
meeting a bunch of terrific folks along the way.

Anyhow, the real deja vu was the topic at hand--understanding who intervenes and to what effect.  Most of the papers related quite directly to my work and/or that of my students, so when I wasn't saying "this is what I would have done", which is the typical academic question, I was saying, "this is what my students did."  So, when Steffan Wolf spoke about success and failures of UN peacekeeping, I had flashbacks to Sarah-Myriam Martin-Brule's dissertation, especially as Steffan was taking seriously the partial successes (which SMMB broke down into partial successes and partial failures). 

Artak Galyan was focused on how political institutions interact with ethnic diversity in various ways, harking back to my CPS piece about a decade ago.  I liked how he thought about different combos of institutions and ethnic configurations (polarized, concentrated but not fractionalized).

Erika Forsberg, whom I bump into about every five years, has been working on ethnic ties and intervention for almost as long as I have.  So, it was interesting to see how she was doing it similarly to what I did and differently.

Monica Toft and Kristen Bakke presented back to back on North Caucasus stuff.  Monica's paper was an interesting analysis of data to contrast nationalist and religious dynamics within the region, including a very provocative finding about the timing of violence--the religious extremists tend to engage in violence on their holidays.  I pondered whether nationalists attack on their holidays or on the holidays of their targets (Boston Marathon came to mind).  Kristen's paper focused on the impact of outsiders--that the transnational extremists who joined the fray in Chechnya did produce some backlash.

I was a discussant for two papers: Sara Mitchell's on interstate conflicts and the related water disputes affecting internal conflict and Erin Jenne's paper on how regional contexts affect mediation.  Sara's paper was my most recent taste of water stuff, as my very first grad student, Sam Stanton, found that of environmental scarcities, water was the only one that really influenced ethnic conflict (if I am remembering correctly).  I found her finding that water quantity matters more than quality to be most interesting--downstream folks can subsidize the upstreamers to keep the water clean, but a distributional fight is still a distributional fight.  Erin's paper was striking in that regional strife makes mediation hard, but regional peace is no guarantee of success.  It reminded me of hegemonic instability theory.

Will Moore's paper was about as half-baked as mine, but showed how hard the "contentious politics" folks have it as their various obsessions tend to be very much inter-related--protest, rebellion and repression--requiring more complex modeling.  The best line of this session was when Idean, the discussant, said he wouldn't want to co-author with either of us.  You probably had to be there.

I have been doing this stuff for more than twenty years, with 2013 marking the 20th year of my PhD defense (the celebrations and re-enactments will occur in November).  When I started out, few folks were doing the IR of ethnic conflict, with David Carment, now a colleague, writing pieces justifying the endeavor.  No need to do that anymore.*  Now, there are heaps of folks out there doing very interesting and far more sophisticated, nuanced stuff in this area.  That is great because it just means more citations of my stuff ;)  Well, that and more criticisms, challenges, dynamic interactions (arguments) and workshops in cool places like Budapest.

* Only those with limited visions even dare to ask whether civil wars and ethnic conflict are relevant for IR scholarship.

Left to right: Monica, Kristen, myself and Erica

TRIP Workshop, Day 2: Electric Bugaloo

Second and final day of the TRIP workshop. I posted yesterday a series of live tweets, so I am doing that again for today's panels. Since I presented first, I didn't live tweet mine and my attention to my iPad and twitter was a bit sporadic. oops.

I am presenting a paper on testing Grand theory vs hypothesis testing today at #TRIPworkshop. very rough draft dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7252748/Appa…
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 24, 2013

Back to #TRIPworkshop, my paper got hit for using some broad indicators, need to go back and unpack. Was I fair to M&W? Not sure.
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 24, 2013

Quan Li presented fun paper asking whether quant dominates or not and why not (when it should).Most striking is 1/2 #TRIPworkshop
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 24, 2013

Is the concentration of quant articles in only hardful of depts,about 70% of depts have only produced 0-1 quant IR pieces #TRIPworkshop
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 24, 2013

Last paper of #TRIPworkshop focused on how generations of different IR scholars vary in terms of what they do, value etc.Fun, fun paper
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 24, 2013

Overall, I learned a great deal not just about the profession but how people vary in what they see, what kinds of questions they ask when the look at the same data as myself, and about the next generation of scholars.  I was not the oldest person in the room but I was closer to that than to the youngest folks.  And the young ones are sharp, as sharp as kniiiiiiives.  Several were former William and Mary students that were turned onto IR by Mike Tierney, Sue Peterson and others at W&M.  This is the kind of place I wanted to teach when I got my PhD, and while I am quite happy with my career, I cannot help but be jealous of Mike and the W&M faculty.

Ironies of Presentations

Today, I am presenting a paper that tests the assertions in the famous Mearsheimer and Walt paper that laments, among other things, the apparent demise of Grand Theory.  My findings: Twain is damn smart.  You can check out a very rough draft with heaps of figures and tables.

Comments, suggestions, reactions would be most welcome.

TRIP Workshop

I spent the morning and early afternoon at a workshop on the state of IR, run by the William and Mary folks who run the TRIP project.  Over the past decade, these folks have collected a bunch of data surveying IR profs and collecting information from the articles published in IR journals.  They are now seeking new eyes on the dataset, so a bunch of us have met to use the data and talk about it.  The papers today were most interesting, so I am repeating the live-tweets I sent out earlier today. *

* We finished early so that we could go hiking and be social, but the torrential rains meant Star Trek instead.  I don't yet have an IR angle on the movie, but may have something eventually.

Big challenge of making data public is that people can backtrack the survey data to figure out individual respondents #TRIPworkshop
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 23, 2013

Replicability, transparency are issues for #TRIPdata, but journals do make exceptions for privacy, proprietary data #TRIPworkshop
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 23, 2013

Fragmentation of IR is not new as old stocktaking exercises show #TRIPworkshop
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 23, 2013

Is fragmentation of IR scholarship a bad thing? #TRIPworkshop
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 23, 2013

We tend to compare IR to Econ, but in terms of fragmentation, compare to sub field of Comparative Politics #TRIPworkshop
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 23, 2013

David Lake does a great job of explaining how the relative gains-absolute gains bubble popped #TRIPworkshop 1/2
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 23, 2013

Brian Rathbun: paradigms are like drugs, gambling and other sins--ok only for adults, in moderation #TRIPworkshop
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 23, 2013

Brian Rathbun never fails to entertain #TRIPworkshop
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 23, 2013

Love the next slides: paradigm wars vs discursive community with Star Wars and Community pics #TRIPworkshop
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 23, 2013

Network cite paper: constructivists take others seriously but others don't take constructivists seriously #TRIPworkshop
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 23, 2013

Network paper: engagement among paradigms limited to cross cutting research topics #TRIPworkshop
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 23, 2013

Last from network paper: liberals are the hegemony #TRIPworkshop
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 23, 2013

Liberal dominance might be due to democratic peace debate dominating citation lit #TRIPworkshop
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 23, 2013

My question: topic focused citation bubbles might be warping outcomes (dem peace, political capital, etc). And bubbles pop #TRIPworkshop
— Stephen Saideman (@smsaideman) May 23, 2013

My ISA Trip Report

Erica Chenoweth does an excellent job of summarizing her ISA experience this year.   I am so drained from the trip and from the twitter-fighting that preceded it and overlapped with it, that I did not blog daily reports as I have done in the past.  But I do have some observations I noted during the time in San Francisco:

• Twitterfightclub and ISA are not a good match in that I had a hard time competing while ISA-ing (was not willing to roam on my Canadian cell phone).  But I was approached by people who were watching the competition, including a couple of the book reps.  
•  Live tweeting is very hard--as typing while keeping up with formal models is not easy.   More on twitter down below.
• The new work in bureaucratic politics and foreign policy is most promising.  I served as a discussant on a panel dedicated to the topic.  I have a dusty paper on a shelf somewhere on the topic, so I put myself on this panel to get inspired, and it worked.  I now have some renewed energy.  Why?  Because focusing on "Where you stand depends on where you sit" produces lots of problematic predictions, my approach (to be unveiled when I get more written) may gain traction by avoiding that part of the BP debate.
• With great power comes great responsibility, but it only works in one direction.  With great responsibility, power may not come.  
• Turns out the most contagious thing at the ISA was diffusion exhaustion. The theme of Diffusion was run slightly into the ground.  Having said that, I participated in a roundtable on the diffusion of nationalism, and it was pretty delightful.  I was a skeptic, arguing that confirmation bias and the complexity of nationalisms make it hard for any one nationalism to spread very far.  
• Bloggers are stars!  The reception was well attended, amusing and educational. I definitely think this will be annual tradition.  But as I also discussed, far fewer folks are blogging or tweeting than often seems to be the case.  I ended up in a twitter conversation with a bunch of folks while I was waiting for my plane to go home.  The topic was whether to organize a panel/roundtable next year on twitter.  Should we just run a session to teach people how to tweet? To compare strategies of our tweeting?  To consider the effects of twitter? 
• The best part of twitter is when virtual friends become real ones.  I had many conversations with folks who had only been twitter handles before.  Meeting these folks in real life, including a fairly raucous dinner at a great Chinese restaurant with some former twitter-fighters, was a big highlight of the week.   
• The other really fun part was when people would say: did they really say "old boys network" and I would say indeed they did.  The lamenting in that piece is so misplaced for so many reasons, but one demonstrated this past week is that the new folks, as Erica noticed, are doing such interesting and important work.  They are articulating their questions so very well, and taking quite seriously the demands of doing social science.  If the IR world is more of a meritocracy today than 20 years ago, we have much to celebrate given the kids today (even if one of them kicked my ass in twitter fight club's final match). 

Leaving Grand Theorists Behind

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have written a piece that is critical of the supposed move to hypothesis testing and the failure of IR folks to do grand theory.   I have many reactions to this development that I thought I would engage in a bit of listicle:

• My first reaction was: Next title: why too much research is bad for IR....  
• As folks pointed out on twitter and on facebook discussions, it seems ironic at the least that someone who made a variety of testable predictions that did not come true (the rise of Germany after the end of the cold war, conventional deterrence, the irrelevance of international institutions, etc) would suggest that testing our hypotheses is over-rated or over-done.
• When I was preparing for my comprehensive exams long ago, I worked with a member of my cohort who was a Political Theorist just trying to get through the process.  He would just read everything and ask "what would Ken Waltz think of this?"  Well, invoking the WWWD mantra here, I think he might wonder why M&W are writing this stuff when they could be producing yet more Grand Theory or more Grand Theorists.  Waltz produced Walt after all ....
• Which leads to the next question: what does this complaint say about their students?  Either they failed their students (their students did not learn to do good grand theory) or the students have failed them (their students have focused on stuff other than grand theory).  I know a good number of their students, and their work is often quite terrific and influential, so I am confused. 
• If M&W have failed to re-generate themselves, it could be because they and their generation of grand theorists have answered all of the big questions, leaving us with the small questions and the dirty work of testing hypotheses.  Perhaps they should be happy that their work is done and ride off into the sunset?
• Perhaps the utility M&W really seek to maximize is citations (given what they say at the end of the piece, I guess I am wrong here...).  I became convinced in the early 1990s that producing controversial work seemed to be more important than producing convincing work.  Mearsheimer's piece blasting the False Promise of Institutions seemed to be citation-bait to me.  Similarly, Walt's article finding fault with the move towards formal theory seemed aimed not so much at convincing people but at attracting counter-attacks. [It is interesting that their latest piece cites approvingly the Fearon 1995 IO piece on Rationalist Explanations for War that Walt considered old wine in new bottles way back when]. 

What really frustrates me is that their claims make them bad realists and make me a Marxist.  How so?

First Day of Classes

While classes started at McGill last week, today was my first day of teaching due to APSA and Labor Day.  I am teaching two courses--an upper level class on the International Relations of Ethnic Conflict and the big Introduction to International Relations class.  The big course is at 4:30, which is much later than I have taught it in the past.  Worse, the class before mine is the big Intro to Comparative Politics class, so many of the students will be sitting in their second monster lecture class in a row.  The good news?  IR is inherently more interesting.  Sorry but them's the facts.  Plus I have much more experience than the other guy in the art of teaching huge classes plus I am willing to stunt-ucate. 

The challenge is to bring enough energy at the end of the day, while the students are dragging (and so am I).  The key I have found before and continues to work: to play some energetic music before the class starts.  Turning it off signals the start of class as well.  Today, I played "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel to suggest that the dynamics of today did not just spring out of nothingness but are part of larger processes that might just be recurring.  I also played Angels and Airwaves' "The Adventure" to suggest that the class is, indeed, an exciting journal.  

For Friday's lecture on Theory, I will replace the opening song with a video.


Shows nicely that this is not really a theory but an ideal type.

I really do enjoy this class--heaps of fun stuff to play with, including lots of minds that are new to poli sci.  Alas, it is likely to be the last time I teach it for the foreseeable future, but more on that later.