Latest Book Quiz: Am I A Good White Man?

This list of books all white men own is interesting, but I seem to be falling short.  What have I got on this list?

1. Slaughterhouse-Five?  Of course, as a relative tweeted a while back: "You know you're in college when half of the class responds with gleeful gasps to the mention of Kurt Vonnegut."
2. Some Song of Ice and Fire?  Yes.
3. Catch-22?  Used it for a paper in high school.
4. Catcher in the Rye?  Yes, all white boys think they are Holden Caulfield.
5. The Tipping Point?  Well, yes, I fell for some pop social science and found it a useful cheat for all of the psych and soc classes I didn't take.
6. Freakonomics?  Sure, again, pop social science FTW!
7. The Rainmaker?  Yep, Grisham.
8. Patriot Games?  Yes, I used to buy Clancy, and I am sufficiently embarrassed by how craptastic his stuff became.
9. Guns, Germs and Steel?  Have I mentioned that I am a sucker for pop social science?

Yep, 9/79.  Hmmm.  I need to get more Raymond Chandler, but no other regrets.  There is something to this list, of course.  Some of this was driven by what the average American was required to read in high school, but perhaps not as much as I expected.

Anyhow, I guess I have to turn in my white man badge...

ELF Must Die!

My elf lament:  I have written about this before, but need to revisit because the problem is still with us.  Which problem is that?  ELF?  No, not Santa's helpers but Ethnic Fractionalization Indexes.  Huh?  In the study of civil war and other topics, scholars frequently say "ethnicity may matter, so let's see if it does by tossing in this indicator."  Ethnic fractionalization refers to how diverse a society is by essentially measuring how likely is it for a person to bump into a person from another ethnic group. 

Scholars of ethnic conflict do not argue that more diversity means more conflict, but that the existence of some diversity means that ethnic conflict is possible.  Not so much ethnic conflict in North Korea, for example.  But if we care about ethnic politics, then we still have to think about demography--how ethnicity is structured in the political system.  Rather than focusing on more diversity--that there are many, many ethnic groups, we can and should think about whether they are polarized or concentrated.

Polarization: whether the political system revolves around a few large groups?  We might expect more ethnic conflict in such cases than when there are so many groups that no one dominates.  If ethnic conflict is driven by fears of domination (see Donald Horowitz and not just my take on the Ethnic Security Dilemma), then an ethnically polarized country is more likely to have ethnic conflict.

Concentration: are the groups intermixed or are they concentrated?  While the earliest versions of the ethnic security dilemma argued that intermixing created vulnerability and thus conflict, the statistical findings show the opposite.  Concentrated ethnic groups engage in more violence precisely because they are not deterred by their vulnerability.

Of course, the real answer to all of this is that ethnicity affects politics via institutions (probably not an accident this is my most cited work) so one might want to consider how ethnic groups are represented or excluded or empowered or repressed via electoral laws, federalism, and the like.  I used to be in that business and hope to do some more work in that area in the near future.

Anyhow, I keep seeing manuscripts that I review for journals as well as other stuff that keeps using ELF when the author wants to include ethnicity in their model somehow.  But again, the problem is this: what does diversity mean?  Dropping an indicator of diversity into a model does not "account for" or "take seriously" ethnicity.  It is absolutely the least one can do.  And if one gets results, what do those results mean?  If there is generally no theory of ethnic conflict included in the discussion, just a few lines justifying the need to think about ethnicity, then what would a significant correlation mean?

So, my advice to scholars and students is this: if you want to think about how ethnic politics might affect the dependent variable that you care about, then ... THINK about ethnic politics. 

Open Access or Open Wallets

I was chatting with a friend of mine who recently served on a grant review committee.  One of the things that apparently came up in the deliberations were requests for money to fund open access.  Whuck?

When we speak of open access to academic work, the basic idea makes sense.  We are generating knowledge that should be disseminated widely, especially if we are using public funds to do the research.  The trick is how to provide access to our research.  The old/current model for much research is via peer-reviewed journals.  These journals are desirable outlets since review (usually double blind--the authors don't know the reviewers and the reviewers don't know the authors) are conducted by our peers who consider whether the work is relevant, well-executed, and novel.  Does it make a contribution? 

The problem of late is this: in the good old days, all of these journals were published on paper and subscriptions were bought by academic libraries.  Individuals and organizations could subscribe as they saw fit.  Once this stuff got online (and nearly all of it is online these days), the question of access became more salient.  The publishers gated the journals, and asked universities to spend quite a fair amount of money to have access.  Ordinary people cannot/will not pay for access, although they can buy individual articles.  The publishers make tremendous profits since they are not actually making anything--the creative efforts are by the academics who are seeking to both disseminate their findings and get the credentials they need to get hired/tenured/promoted.  With most of the stuff being digital, the real costs for the publishers has gone down, yet the gates remain up.  Why not?  They have captured a market, so why should they give it up?

So, how do we provide greater/open access in this reality?  Three alternatives seem to emerge:

1. One can pay a publisher to provide open access for a particular piece.  The price for doing so can be minor or quite steep.  
2. Publish your stuff in a journal  is aimed at providing open access to anyone without any fees.  The best example of this in Poli Sci is Research and Politics, which is "published" by Sage but seems but has wide open access.
3. Publish with normal journals but put the penultimate draft online on one's website.  This is usually kosher, although some publishers may have problems with it.  

My focus today is on the first method, as individuals seem to be applying for grants to do research but are asking for money to give to a publisher to allow their piece to be open access.  While the grant agencies want open access, I don't think they had in mind subsidizing the profits of these journal publishers.  But that is exactly what will happen if people spend their grant money by giving it to publishers to open the gates for their pieces.  

http://www.righttoresearch.org/learn/problem/index~print.shtml

So what to do?  I am bound by the new SSHRC policy for my new project, so I have to figure this out.  What about books?  Ah, let's not think about that.  What about articles?  I think what I will do is a combination of 2 & 3.  If my stuff gets accepted by gated journals, I will blog about the piece (this is actually the true path for open access since ordinary citizens are probably not interested in lit reviews, methodology sections and the like) and post the semi-final version online.  What I will not do?  I will not give money to journal publishers to provide open access. 

Mad Men Game Goes Down to The Wire

Quickly to the break given the spoiler-ific episode:

Profs Who Hate Students

Everyone is passing around the NYT op-ed by Mark Bauerlein about professors not mentoring and students not engaging.  The surveys cited might have something to them, but I cannot help but read into Bauerlein's likely prejudices given he wrote “The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30).” 

I have encountered many folks under 30 over the past twenty plus years of teaching, and I have been engaged plenty by sharp, inquisitive folks.  Sure, it happens much with those folks in my MA program who are choosing a life in and around international affairs, but it also happened much in my previous jobs.  At UVM, I had plenty of students who wanted to chat more about the stuff.  At TTU, a bit less so, but still the engaged students did want to carry on the conversations from class.  At McGill, I found it very hard to leave classrooms as I would always have a bunch of students who wanted to keep the conversation going. 

Maybe students are not seeking profs out as much during office hours these days.  Perhaps it is less about desire and more about time--that students who work 20 hours a week don't have time to seek out professors.  And, yes, there is more pressure to publish at places that didn't used to have any such pressures, so professors have less time as well.

I am sure things are not as wonderful as they were in the past, but I am also pretty sure the past was not as wonderful as we remember.  What I do believe is that if one calls the current generation of students "The Dumbest", that person has near zero credibility with me.  Every generation says that the next one and the one after that are lazy, dumb, whatever.  "These kids today" is a universal phenomenon, and so we need to discount our own prejudices that tend to make us feel better by insulting the folks who get to inherit our mistakes (and also the cool stuff that previous generations developed [that would be Star Wars]). 

Is my anecdata better than this guy's interpretations of the surveys and his own experiences?  Yes. Why?  Because I don't start from a standpoint of contempt.  Ok, I do, I have contempt for this guy.  Oh well.

Sunday Silliness: The Real Conspiracy Theory

Cannot help but post this given my focus over the past several years on #VoterFraudFraud:

Brian McFadden, NYT

Not sure the rest of this connects, but some of it does.

Is the Answer to Ambiguity Clarity or More Ambiguity?

I was at a very interesting roundtable at the Lithuanian Embassy in Ottawa a couple of days ago.  I cannot say what others had to say due to Chatham House Rule, although a former CF general had some interesting things to say that I will need to think about.  But what I can discuss is what I said and what the conversation provoked me to think about more.

One of the themes of the conversation was that Putin uses ambiguity to his advantage.  Who owns those little green men who show up?  He only claims credit for sham referenda after the fact.  He has stretched plausible deniability to the breaking point or perhaps not, as Europeans of various stripes still consider Ukraine in ways that buy some of Putin's spin. 

So, I wondered is the best way to respond to ambiguity is with more ambiguity or with clarity?  My bet is on clarity, and that is what drove my comments/recommendations.

How best to make the situation less opaque?  How to make it easier for outsiders (and insiders) to understand and assess?

1. Make the condition of the Russian-speakers in the Baltics better.  Putin has claimed the plight of Russians in the near abroad as a justification for Russian aggression.  While he will always be able to say that Russian speakers are oppressed, the more obviously false this is, the better.  Citizenship for Russian speakers varies among the Baltics.  My recommendation in Brussels two weeks ago and since is for the European Union to dump a heap of cash on the areas where Russian speakers live in the Baltics to improve the local economies.  It would also make sense to run an info ops campaign showing the Russians of the Baltics what life looks like in Moscow, Crimea and Eastern Ukraine (not to mention Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, etc). 
2. The governments of the Baltic Republics should make it abundantly clear that any effort to subvert or salami slice will be met aggressively.  My recommendation, which is plenty provocative, is that the rules of engagement for the Estonian, Latvia, and Lithuanian militaries should be to grant the low ranking officers on the ground with the authority to shoot at "little green men" if their communications to their headquarters are disrupted.  Yes, shoot first, and ask questions later.  Actually, that is the first step, and the second step is to let everyone (Putin/Russia, NATO) know that they have delegated this authority.  This would mean that any Russian effort here would immediately spiral.  This is good, yes, good, because Putin is an opportunist and, as far as we can tell, not suicidal.  The threat to use nuclear weapons is always incredible, but the threat to start something that might spiral out of control is not.  Any Russian attack (cyber, unconventional, whatever) will lead to discussions at the North Atlantic Council (NATO's decision making body) that may take days, and Putin wants to get inside that decision loop, acting faster than NATO and then presenting with faits accompli.  Delegating authority to soldiers on the ground AND letting everyone know that would make those faits accompli have an automaticity to them--of escalation.  
3. The Baltics should try to entice the US to base troops on a more than just continuous basis.  Give the US discounts on property, subsidize exercises or even the movement of stuff to be based on their territory.  Anything they can do to make it easier for the Americans to base permamently is a good thing.  Continuous exercising, the NATO fudging, is not clear, and we need more clarity.  Ambiguity in this might be good for getting consensus at the NAC, but the US can do this on its own.  It might hurt NATO solidarity a smidge, but Putin acting in the Baltics would do far more damage.

I did suggest one other thing--that the more pressure NATO faces, the more the stakes become about NATO, the more NATO will respond.  NATO's history is one of reluctance until pushed and then unity: Bosnia 1995, Kosovo 1999, Afghanistan for years (even those who left early returned in another capacity).  So, the more Putin makes NATO his target, the more NATO will show up and unite.

More in the Annals of Bad Saideman Predictions, Ukraine Edition

I wrote this last year with the, um, semi-accurate title: Why Crimea is Likely Limit of Greater Russia.  I basically argued that Greater Russia might not go much further than the annexation of Crimea, yet Russia's aggression continued with the influx of Russian forces into Eastern Ukraine to "support" the separatists there.  Ooops.  Guess I was wrong.

I asserted that Russian nationalists might not want to add hunks of Ukraine beyond Crimea because these hunks would be harder to digest as they are more diverse, would represent even further drain on the Russian economy, and so on.

How could I get this wrong?  Well, actually, I might not be.  Creating frozen conflicts to disturb, distract, and undermine neighbors ain't irredentism but is a frequently tactic in the Russian tool box: Abkhazia, Transnistria (opportunistic thanks to principal-agent problems in mid-1990s Russian military), South Ossetia.  As far as we can tell, Russia's aims towards Eastern Ukraine is not union/annexation but messing with Ukraine's stability.

Of course, this is cold comfort to Ukraine, but might provide the Baltics with a smidge of relief--that Russia may not be trying to re-create the old borders of Russia/Soviet Union pre-1991.  Putin may want to salami slice away at the Baltics, mostly to disrupt NATO, but that is a bit different than Russia borrowing from Saddam Hussein's 1990 strategy of overrunning their territories.

It is up to my readers to figure out if this is an artful artless dodge or a reasonable assessment of my prediction last winter. 

Tin Hat Shortage

I really wish I had invested in aluminum, as the folks who wear tin hats seem to be proliferating wildly.  This whole Jade Helm thing is just so incredibly ridiculous.

Um, how do we know the moon is not made out of cheese?  I wonder what the Venn diagram would be of those who believe the US is about to take over Texas (whatever that means) via the Jade Helm exercise and those who believe the moon landing was faked.  I would estimate the degree of overlap at 93%, but what do I know?

All I know is that Texas gets so much out of the bases in Texas and the defense contractors that moving them elsewhere, which would be delightful in my mind, would be a body blow to the Texas economy. 

That Governor Abbott and prominent GOP folks are joining this idiocy is the key thing.  There are always random conspiracy theorists who believe the strangest of things, but when they actually wield real power (to be fair the TX governor has less power than the Railroad Commissioner) or are running for President, that says something about the state of the party. 

Of course, this is where I return to a recurring theme: damn, I am glad I got out of Texas.  Bad enough to have George Bush and Rick Perry as governors, but this loony? 

Lit Review Redux

A friend asked how much lit review should be in a dissertation.  I know I have talked about this before, but I will post here what I posted on his fb page:

Rule 1: Listen to your adviser and the rest of the dissertation committee--they are your gatekeepers, not random facebook friends.
Rule 2: Read a bit of other dissertations that made it through your program and were seen as successes--read for style, not content.  If you want your dissertation to be a book someday, then skim your favorite books that are in the same area as your dissertation and see what works in their style.
Rule 3: If brevity is rewarded, or at least not punished, then there should be no section called "lit review" but rather you should demonstrate your mastery of the literature via how you address

• why this question is important (the literature says it is important)
• why this question needs to be asked (the literature has f-ed it up)
• potential answers to the question come from the literature
• your answer probably builds on existing approaches (from this arena or elsewhere).

So, the literature matters and shows up but only in ways that help you construct your argument.
My students tended to have lit heavy intro chapters and theory chapters, but I would criticize them if they had sections called lit review since nothing is more boring than endless lit review.
 
Which leads to my real number one rule: if it does not fit, drop it. So, cite the literature that is relevant for the building of your argument but not extraneous stuff.
 
Again, your mileage may vary depending on the standards of your committee and your program.

Message Mismanagement FTW

The government of Canada has insisted in restricting access to the soldiers and pilots operating in and over Iraq (and now over Syria).  No pictures of faces as that would provide the bad guys with people they can target at home down the road.  Well, unless one is making a campaign video for the Prime Minister.

This is not just hypocrisy but an abuse of power.  That is, the government can violate its own rules as long as it is for promoting the Prime Minister.  This is part of a larger problem that has become my obsession lately--the ability for various folks in and out of the Canadian government to know what is going on so that they can evaluate the PM, his Minister of Defence and put pressure on these folks. 

Managing the messages is good for Harper's election chances but bad for democracy and civilian control of the military.  This one incident demonstrates all of this quite clearly: the PM has a big advantage--information.  And this is perhaps the least subtle and perhaps least relevant way that this advantage is deployed. 

I will be expressing some of my frustrations with this in Lessons Learned: The Politics of Canada's War in Afghanistan, my next book, due out of U of Toronto Press either late this year or early in 2016.  And this information problem is at the heart of my new project--comparing the roles played by legislatures in civil-military relations around the world.

If I Had a Vote In Canada's Election This Year

If I had a vote In Canada's election this year,* I would vote Liberal.  Why?

#LPC will create a new CDN Child Benefit – one that’s simple, meaningful and tax-free. #fairness #MayThe4thBeWithYou pic.twitter.com/cf2cxruRn3

— Justin Trudeau, MP (@JustinTrudeau) May 4, 2015

Yes, I am easily pandered to, and I have no shame. 

*  My citizenship process is not going to be completed in time.

NATO Is Not Ready

I wrote this piece and it is now at OpenCanada.org.  It is more op-ed-ish than my usual posts for a reason--I was very motivated after my trip to Brussels to try to write something for a major North American newspaper.  Alas, that did not work out.  But the joy of blogging and of having a perch at CIC is that I can write what I want and get it out there to smaller but attentive audiences.  I hate the waiting for the big papers to respond, but was willing to do so this time as this issue is not so time sensitive.  We are going to be dealing with Russia for quite a while...

Anyhow, check it out and let me know what you think.

Mad Men Game: Antepenty Time

On Wisconsin!?

Baltimores

I am heartbroken about Baltimore.  While the problems presented over the last couple of weeks are not unique to Baltimore, I know something of this place and not just because I watched The Wire.  I spent eleven summers of my life at a camp in Maryland where the kids and counselors mostly came from DC and Baltimore suburbs.  Because one of my best friends lived in Baltimore, I visited quite often once I got my driver's license. 

So, it is with heavy heart that I post this Brian McFadden cartoon:

Again, it is not just Baltimore, just as The Wire was about the decline of American cities and not just one city. 

Confidence Building Measures At Home

So, yeah, Texas.  The governor is actually deploying the Texas State Guard to monitor military exercises as there are some folks who think this is part of a conspiracy to gain control of Texas.  Conspiracy theorists imagining Obama engaging in totalitarian measures is nothing new.  But to have a sitting governor act on such silliness?  New.

I have a simple recommendation: if the governor of Texas is suspicious of the US military, how about we move the military's bases out of Texas?  This would be an excellent confidence building measure--withdrawing forces to a distance to assure a fearful population.

Sure, this would cause many jobs to be lost as these bases are major employers, but security from imaginary threats has got to be the highest priority, right?

Update:  This tweet provides some inconvenient truths for the governor:

Texas Gov. Abbott is skeptical of the US military. Here's how much his state benefits from it: http://t.co/KKORhgzoXt pic.twitter.com/kpbrtNMCrh

— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) May 3, 2015

Where should we move Fort Hood? Oklahoma should be far enough, and those folks would not mind profiting at the expense of Texas.  On the other hand, they probably have both conspiracy theorists in abundance and craven politicians, so maybe Nebraska?  Kansas?

All I can say for certain is that I am glad that I left Texas in 2002.  I enjoyed my visit last fall to Austin, but once I left, I was never applying for jobs in that state again.  Yeesh.

Figure 4.3

Some Thoughts on Canadian Forces Sexual Misconduct Report

There is much to think about in the aftermath of the report on the challenges women encounter in the Canadian Forces.  The striking piece, of course, is the finding that there is a culture of misogyny in the CF--not because we are surprised it exists but because it so completely wipes away the denials of the past year or two.

Still, the military is resisting: that most of the report's recommendations were met with "accept in principle" which really means: "we don't want to do it, and perhaps will find a way to evade as the spotlight shifts elsewhere."  That might be a smidge unfair, but there really has been an incredible lack of leadership here.  As Stefanie Von Hlatky asked, where are the defence minister and prime minister on this?   The Prime Minister is Iraq!  Well, isn't that convenient?  The defence minister deferred to the military: "Kenney’s spokeswoman said the issue was better left to military leaders to deal with."  Yeah, because that has worked so far.

The timing was not just convenient for Harper, but for the military.  The outgoing Chief of Defence Staff Tom Lawson has handled this problem poorly, but he is going away.  The new CDS, Jon Vance, can point to this report and the problems as being something that he inherited.  Which suggests something else about timing--there was a long gap between when the decision to pick Vance was leaked and when it was announced.  Which might be due to many things, but having this report come out before he takes the job is probably very much a blessing for the new CDS.

Anyway, back to the response with the typical first Canadian instinct--don't compare us to the Americans:

“Additionally, the American and Canadian processes are not parallel or identical,” Armstrong [DND spokesperson] said. “Canada’s military has taken an independent approach to investigating sexual misconduct within its ranks and is now implementing its action plan in response. The government supports that effort.”

How about Australia instead:


Instead,

"I was struck by the lack of comment from the prime minister and defence minister,” said Stefanie von Hlatky, who specializes on gender in the military at Queen’s University. “It signals that it’s not a priority, and it would feed some doubts in my mind about the government’s seriousness.”

In the days, weeks, and months ahead, we need to keep a focus on this.  How to do that?  Follow @svhlatky.

What Would You Ask A DASD?

Today, I had the chance, along with some other Canadian defence scholars, to participate in a small roundtable with a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense: Mara Karlin.*  It was covered by Chatham House Rule so I cannot say what she said nor what anyone else said. However, I can tell you what I asked her and it would be of little surprise to those who read my stuff here: the Eastern Front and the war cap.  I would have asked about other stuff, but time was finite and there were other folks who had important questions to ask and views to articulate.

* The last time I had the chance to be in the room with a DASD was, of course, during my fellowship at the Pentagon in 2001-2002 

So, question number one which was also request number one: can we do more to reassure the Baltics and deter the Russians?  Moving 24 Apache helos away from Europe at this time to save money seems to be a bad idea.  I referred to my recent trip to Europe, and how much of Europe may be eager to get back to business as usual with the Russians.  I suggested that the recent steps by France (increasing its defence budget, not selling the Mistral) were positive ones, but given what I learned in the Dave and Steve book, I doubt we shall see such movement from coalition governments (Germany).  I didn't mind the re-balancing, but really would like to see a tripwire in the Baltics staffed by permanent basing of American soldiers and pilots.

The second question was whether the DASD for Force Structure and Strategy was concerned about the US exceeding the war cap: has the US been fighting too many wars over the past 15 years at what cost for the present and future?

The ensuing discussion was very interesting and I learned a great deal.  I have now had two Chatham House roundtables with senior defence/defense officials from Canada and the US in the past couple of months.  The contrast was startling.  I cannot say what Dr. Karlin said, but she was open, engaging, was pretty willing to go off of the script.  I cannot say the same about a roundtable with a very senior Canadian military leader--which was entirely scripted and revealed very little.  It might be an organizational cultural thing, it might be just the current climate in Canada (one of fear induced by Harper message management), it might be civilians versus military.  I don't know what it is, but both sides got a lot more out of today's conversation than out of one that happened two months ago. 

Strange Stuff Abounds on Twitter

Today, we got this

So this is a relative scale of perceived political leanings based on following them on Twitter. All of these people are great.

— Syn (@synshow) April 30, 2015

Perhaps I might be right of center of the folks this guy follows except it puts a monarchist to my left, which seems strange to me.  Said monarchist suggested that I am to his right due to my views on faculty unions (blech).   Hmmm.  I am also slightly higher on the insane scale but not much. 

Something to think about in this Saideways week we have been having.