Mario Guerrero

Despite it being the constitutional amendment that most altered the design of the federal government, and despite recent efforts by many prominent figures to repeal it, little is known about why the Seventeenth Amendment passed in 1913. Existing histories of why the Constitution was amended to require direct elections for U.S. Senators, rather than having them appointed by state legislatures, cannot account for two major historical puzzles. Why were state legislatures eager to give away the power to choose Senators? And why was there virtually no discussion of federalism during debates over removing a key constitutional protection for states?

Using both positive political theory and historical evidence, this Article offers a theory that can provide an answer to these questions. Support for direct elections was, at least in part, a result of the rise of ideologically coherent, national political parties. The development of national parties meant that state legislative elections increasingly turned on national issues, from war to currency policy to international trade, as voters used these elections as means to select Senators. State politicians and interest groups supported direct elections as a way of separating national and state politics. Federalism was not invoked against the Seventeenth Amendment because state legislative appointment was frustrating a precondition for the variety of benefits that come from republican federalism, the ability of state majorities to choose state policies. Modern advocates of repealing the Seventeenth Amendment, from Justice Scalia to Gov. Rick Perry, claim the mantle of federalism, but they have the case almost entirely backwards. Repealing the Seventeenth Amendment would reduce the benefits of federalism, as it would turn state legislatures into electoral colleges for U.S. Senators.

While important in its own right, the history of the Seventeenth Amendment can also teach us a great deal about how federalism functions in the real world of politics more generally. First, contrary to the claims of scholars like Larry Kramer, national political parties do not necessarily serve as “political safeguards of federalism,” but instead can make state politics turn on national issues, reducing the influence of the preferences of state citizens on state policy. Second, certain state governmental powers – from the power to gerrymander to control over issues normally associated with the federal government – reduce the democratic accountability of state officials that undergirds most normative theories of federalism. Finally, despite the Seventeenth Amendment, state elections today still largely turn on national politics. Although state issues are sometimes important, the most important factor in state legislative elections is the popularity of the President. If the benefits for state democracy sought by supporters of the Seventeenth Amendment are to be achieved, electoral reform is a more promising avenue than structural constitutional change.

From a new working paper by David Schleicher.

I agree with almost everything Dan Kahan writes here, where he discusses how people’s attitudes about global warming could be changed by looking at the financial decisions of businesses:

Market actors are economically, not ideologically motivated. Moreover, cognitive biases are likely to cancel out, leaving only the signal associated with informed assessments, by multiple rational and self-interested actors, of the weight and practical importance of the best available evidence on climate.

Kahan points to examples such as “exploitation of oil reserves that can be accessed more readily as polar ice caps melt.” He continues:

The index, btw, has to consist in securities (and the like) that reflect economic opportunities created by global warming.

It cannot include economic opportunities created by government policies to promote carbon-reduction. That market will reflect expectations about political forces, not natural ones (a matter that might be interesting but that isn’t probative of beliefs in whether climate change will occur—only in what sorts of things will occur in democratic politics, which is governed by its own peculiar laws).

I know what he means here but I think you have to be careful in this sort of formulation. Investment decisions always exist in a political context. Tax policy, labor laws, fiscal policy, environmental laws, all of it. I don’t think it makes sense to talk about economic actions in the absence of politics.

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Tim Dunne. He is Research Director of the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect at the University of Queensland and the past editor of the European Journal of International Relations. tl;dr warning: ~2400 words.

In a recent lively and provocative post, Stephen Walt argues that liberal imperialists are like ‘neocons’ only more human rights-friendly. They are alike in the sense that both ‘are eager proponents for using American hard power’. And combined, these two sets of protagonists have been responsible for bad foreign policy decisions ‘to intervene in Iraq or nation-build in Afghanistan, and today’s drumbeat to do the same in Syria’.

To help cleanse the US policy community of liberal imperialist tendencies, Walt offers ’10 warning signs that you are a Liberal Imperialist’. If you fail the test, as I did, then you have the option of (1) coming out as an interventionist (2) engaging in a form of realist immersion therapy by reading texts about why interventions fail. ‘And if that doesn’t work, maybe we need some sort of 12-step program’.

The question I want to pose is whether failing the test commits you to being a liberal imperialist? Or does the particular identity construction creak and crack under scrutiny, such that it is possible to adopt a liberal position on intervention that does not ascribe to the folly and naiveté that is attributed to it?

To help address this question I’m going to offer an alternative 12-step program that critics of liberal thinking on intervention may want to enroll in. My principle reasoning is that Walt’s ‘warning signs’ lump together – and obfuscate – critical debates and distinctions within liberalism, which is why many liberals opposed the 2003 Iraq War just as they oppose a military escalation in Syria today. Some even plausibly argue that Libya came dangerously close to an illiberal intervention on the grounds that the mandate of protecting civilians morphed into the goal of regime change. Yet what no liberal countenances is ‘another Rwanda’ in which the great powers (individually and collectively) failed to take the decisive action that was being called for by the UN force commander on the ground in Kigali. Avoiding the twin problems of indifference and recklessness has been the driver of the intervention agenda that the UN has embarked upon since the turn of the new century. And this agenda has been drive forward by the search for an effective capacity to respond to mass atrocities that is anti-imperialist. I develop this point in stages 9-11 of the recovery plan.

1. There is no mention of liberalism in Walt’s essay that is not coupled to imperialism. Logically, this absence could either be down to the fact that non-imperial forms of liberal international thought are possible but have little or no traction in current US debates on intervention; or it could mean that he thinks imperialist impulses are inherent in the liberal tradition. Either way, Walt ought to concede that liberals have, for over two centuries, profoundly disagreed on both the means and the ends of so-called moral intervention.

2. It is initially necessary to separate wars of self-defense from other kinds of war. Walt does not do this; instead, wars of necessity and wars of choice are combined in his critique (Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq – with Syria going the same way if liberal imperialist win the day). Why is this move necessary? For two reasons; first, the right of self-defense pre-dates the emergence of liberalism as a comprehensive doctrine; second, almost all traditions of thinking about war and peace accept a right to use force in self-defense (pacifism being the exception). Remember here that the Afghan war was justified by a strong invocation of the individual and collective right to self-defense – one that was widely accepted as being legitimate in various capitals around the word, as it was in the UN Security Council and in NATO.

3. What generates controversy and critique are liberal justifications for going to war ‘for an idea’ when we ‘have not been ourselves attacked’, as J.S.Mill described the dilemma in his essay on non-intervention in 1859. The dominant ideas that liberals have advanced for warfare, other than self-defence, are civilization, trade/property, democracy, stabilization, and the protection of populations from genocide and other crimes against humanity. Only wars for civilization are unambiguously associated with liberal imperialism.

4. One of the few arguments that all liberals agree on, when it comes to the ‘international’, is that sovereign states possess not just rights but also duties; in this respect, the state is not a moral island that can somehow remain separate from what goes on beyond its borders. Here we arrive at a key difference between realism and liberalism. While realists can supply ‘vital interest’ reasons for intervention, they cannot coherently advance a principled argument (beyond their own personal moral integrity). This is evident in Walt’s brief discussion about when intervention is a reasonable option. He restricts his answer to (i) last resort interventions that meet the vital interest criterion, or (ii) when they can be undertaken when the likelihood of success is high. Interestingly, both examples he invokes as meeting this criteria relate to the deployment of US military forces in the wake of natural disasters such as the Haitian earthquake and Indonesia after the Asian tsunami.

Such a prudent approach has merit but begs many questions about how vital interests get to be defined (these claims were part of the rationale for the 9/11 wars) and how, precisely, can we figure out the returns on intervention in advance? Yet the biggest flaw in the realist argument is that it does not accept that other peoples have the same basic right to security from arbitrary violence.

Rather than starting out on the basis of the fact that genocide and other crimes against humanity are morally wrong and we have some responsibility for preventing them from occurring – or responding effectively when prevention fails – realists prefer to deny any obligation to protect peoples in mortal danger (especially when they live in ‘faraway lands’, as warning sign #3 puts it). Liberals, on the other hand, begin with the recognition that being serious about human rights means accepting a duty to protect – even if, in the last instance, it may be that the policy options for ‘doing something’ are limited for fear of making a bad situation worse. The difference here is that, for liberals, a prudence-led decision not intervene can only be a policy choice of last resort – it cannot be the opening premise.

5. No-one today self-identifies with liberal imperialism. This was not always the case. As several authors show in my forthcoming volume (co-edited with Trine Flockhart),  Liberal World Orders, nineteenth-century liberals advocated imperial rule in order to civilize ‘backward’ peoples (with the further embedding of European domination being a welcome side-effect). It was taken for granted by Mill and many other thinkers of the long nineteenth century that international society was divided into a civilized sphere in which the law of nations applied, and an outer zone where it had no place governing statecraft. Probably the clearest advocate of a dual system of order in which sovereign rights of independence and self-determination applied only between civilized countries.

Today liberal imperialism, as an ideological justification of rule by one polity over another, has been thoroughly deligitimated by the end of empire; so thoroughly discarded that it is now unthinkable for a political leader to stand before the UN General Assembly and call for the return of colonial rule – to do so would be to invite ridicule and isolation. Even the term ‘trusteeship’ has been deleted from the dictionary of diplomacy since it carried too much baggage from the League of Nations era when imperial polities used the idea to prop up their waning empires.

6. While discredited as a term, certain forms of argument associated with liberal imperialism were forcefully advanced in the early part of the last decade. In this respect, Walt is right to note that in the contemporary era neocons and some liberal internationalists advocated a return to ‘empire’ and imperial modes of ordering the world. Yet such claims were largely greeted with derision by those outside a narrow but influential band of Anglosphere ideologues: in the context of this ‘neocon moment’ in which empire made a comeback, realists kept their head while the intellectuals associated with the George W. Bush administration appeared to lose theirs.

7. A more common affiliation on the part of those interested in the politics of liberal interventions is internationalism rather than imperialism. These two modalities of ordering have often co-existed – indeed, the struggle between these two conceptions of international order better capture early IR than ‘realism vs idealism.’

Liberal internationalism was a doctrine that viewed the international as being modifiable through the gradual incorporation of values (justice) and institutions (law) that had made great headway in domestic liberal polities. Central to liberal internationalists today is a belief in conditional sovereignty. The American international lawyer James Bryce put this nicely, in the early twentieth century, when he argued that the ‘absolute sovereignty for each is absolute anarchy for all’.

8. Contemporary debates inside the UN about intervention draw from the tradition of liberal internationalism. A sovereign’s legitimacy derives from an acceptance of a responsibility to protect their peoples by ensuring their basic right to security from systematic violence. Should a state fail to exercise its responsibility to protect (or R2P) then this obligation is transmitted to the international community who must either assist the government in ending the atrocity, or intervene against their will if they are the cause of the crisis. If we take the distribution of responsibilities for ending mass atrocities seriously, there is not an option to ‘sit this one out’ (presumed in Walt’s warning sign #2) in either a moral or a diplomatic sense. When it comes to genocide, sitting it out has been the regular case in US foreign policy – not the exception.

While R2P is regularly invoked by UN institutions, liberal states, and human rights NGOs, the extent to which it has guided the foreign policies of great powers is underdetermined. What is undeniable about the diplomacy of responsibility over the last decade or so is (i) there is now much greater clarity about how responsibilities for ‘doing something’ about atrocities are distributed in the international community (ii) the normative status of atrocity prevention/response is sufficiently developed such that the UN Security Council has modified its mission to maintain international peace and security in a way that incorporates protecting populations at risk   (iii) partly as a result of the previous two points, it has become increasingly difficult for world leaders to ‘pass by on the other side of the road’ when an atrocity crime is occurring.

9. The absence of self-identification to the category of liberal imperialism does not mean the category is devoid of meaning from an analytical point of view. At what point, then, does liberal internationalism shade into imperialism? I would argue that liberalism becomes imperialist under the following conditions: first, when the goal of the intervention is a particular kind of regime change in which it is envisaged that liberal democratic institutions will be built after the old order has been swept away. Second, liberal imperialists are prepared to abrogate to their own state a ‘right’ of humanitarian intervention: internationalists, on the other hand, believe that intervention is a duty that must be sanctioned by the UN Security Council. Third, internationalists intervene (as a last resort) to save strangers not to civilize them (as previous imperialists believed).

10. Even when an R2P situation has met the ad bellum criteria (just cause, last resort, right intent, legitimate authority), this does not mean force should be used unless it can be shown that its application is likely to bring about the desired outcome. This prudential element is referred to by Gareth Evans as a calculus about ‘the balance of consequences’. Therefore, in contrast to warning sign #6, cool-headed military strategy will be of paramount importance in determining whether and how intervention proceeds. It is worth noting here that virtually no reputable advocate of R2P has been mobilizing for armed intervention in Syria on these grounds – even if they regret the failure of the Security Council to speak with a single concerted voice and their concomitant inability to impose stricter non-military sanctions on the Assad government.

11. Properly implemented, R2P is not informed by imperialist values or practices. Yet, in an imperfect world, we know that moral justifications for the use of force are often muddled. The 2011 war to protect civilians at risk from Libyan armed forces is a case in point. Within a few short weeks after Operation Odyssey Dawn began, Sarkozy, Cameron, Obama and co-signed an editorial in which they presented an outcome short of regime change as a ‘betrayal’ of the Libya people. Instead of confusing the normative justification for war, they should have stuck to the script of Security Council Resolution 1973. Some time previously, Bismarck well understood the importance of moral consistency when it comes to war: ‘woe to the statesman whose arguments for entering a war are not as convincing at its end as they were at the beginning’. This blurring of the mandate caused considerable difficulties for the legitimacy of the action, as R2P came to be represented by some intellectuals (and by President Putin) as being an imperialist doctrine rather than a model example of the Security Council taking timely and decisive action.

12. While much of what has been discussed above rests on the claim that liberal ordering does not have to be imperial in its form, there is a sense in which the historic tension between imperialism and internationalism is part of the history of the present. The agenda of producing freedom, installing democracy, and protecting rights – all entail policies that seek to control peoples, set conditions, and justify the application of coercive instruments. Being mindful of how internationalism and imperialism can become blurred in practice is a necessary corrective to the hubris that accompanies internationalism.

***

Early in the post Walt offers liberal imperialists the advice that Stanley Hoffmann (one of the most eminent liberal thinkers in the history of IR) once offered to would-be interveners: ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’.  This remains a salutary warning. But the road to hell is also paved with the tombstones of countless victims who were slaughtered because genocidal murderers were shielded by a presumption against intervention. Fashioning a politics of protection against the words crimes against humanity is a challenge that demands intellectual and institutional courage. It also demands – and here is where realists play an important role – that consideration be given to the perils of intervention and the limits force as a protector of the last resort.

Image from Wikipedia.

• The Hong Kong Duck is back!
• Not much point in having the “best” military R&D in the world if a potential rival can steal your most important designs. 
  
• A Law of the Sea symposium (and also) at Opinio Juris on “search and rescue operations.”
• LFC on Kennan’s opposition to the Vietnam War.
• Making the most out of Google dirigibles over Africa.
• Anti-vaccine themes in popular discourse.
• Jocelyn Cesari looks at France’s “peculiar same-sex marriage debate“; Zack Ford summarizes recent anti-gay violence at “demonstrations in Ukraine, Russia, and France.”
  
• Cranky sociologist reviews left-wing blog stalwart David Niewert’s And Hell Followed with Her: Crossing the Dark Side of the American Border.
• Life in Abkhazia. 
• And for starving citizens of Swaziland.

And also:

• Laura McKenna on Wall Street, women, and babies.
• Henry Farrell announces his series on “the sociology of Jack Vance.”

This is a guest post by Karolina Lula, a PhD student at Rutgers-Newark.
———-

The terrorism industry has grown exponentially since 9/11.  Whenever a terrorist attack occurs, a plethora of terrorism scholars eagerly spoon out their collective wisdom.  The chance to be included in the over-caffeinated media spotlight justifies decades cooped up in small offices pouring over data. In a certain respect, terrorism scholars mirror their subject.  They both love an audience.

Despite their growing presence in the media, academics fail to persuade others about what terrorism is in the first place.  Language evolves and academia is only one source of influence.  The media would do well to adopt their stricter definition.

Academics have their own set of rules for defining terrorism.  Despite intra-field debate, most North American scholars adopt the three-prong definition of terrorism:  it is politically motivated, perpetrated by non-state actors like lone wolves or organizations, and targets civilians rather than the military.  This means that when a government attacks civilians like in Assad’s Syria, when the perpetrators are motivated by pecuniary gain like on the streets of Detroit, or when they target military assets like the USS Cole, academic purists would distinguish such acts of violence from terrorism.

When it comes to defining terrorism, motives therefore matter.  Mass shootings—like the one in Tucson by Jared Loughner, the one in the Aurora movie theater by James Holmes, the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting by Adam Lanza, or the New Orleans Mother’s Day shooting—would be treated as something else.  Some scholars provide no distinction between rampage violence and terrorist acts.  But in reality, there is an important difference—rampage shooters are not politically motivated.

Another important criterion is target selection.  Guerilla attacks on military targets are often distinguished from terrorist attacks, which are directed against civilian targets.  Critics of the Obama administration have hammered him for his hesitancy to label Benghazi as a terrorist attack.  In fact, Benghazi was not a terrorist attack.  It was a guerilla attack against high-level U.S. diplomats, hardly a case of indiscriminate violence.  When most academics think about a terrorist attacks, we recall 9/11 and the Boston marathon because ordinary citizens were targeted, rather than agents of the state.

If Benghazi was not terrorism, was the Woolwich murder?  The video footage of the perpetrator reveals a clear political motive.  Bloody cleaver in hand, he speaks to the camera. “The only reason we have killed this man today is because Muslims are dying daily by British soldiers,” he says.  “Remove your government, they don’t care about you.”    But did he target civilians?  The soldier was struck en route to work wearing a military shirt.  And yet the man in the video shows little interest in harming civilians.  He even expresses a weird concern for the witnesses: “I apologize that women had to witness this today but in our lands, our women have to see the same.”  No, the perpetrator didn’t target aimlessly.

This stringent definition may seem silly to non-academics, but its value lies in predictive power. Those who lump other forms of violence with terrorism are clouding their ability to make accurate predictions.  Consider the divergent political effects of terrorist campaigns versus guerrilla campaigns.  Whereas terrorists have an abysmal track record of getting what they want, guerillas sometimes win against capable opponents—like when the U.S. withdrew from Somalia in 1994 after a black hawk was shot down.

Academic research at its worst is obscure and elitist.  At its best, it impacts policy.  Research that yields accurate predictions creates policy solutions that could prevent violent attacks.  Researchers who lump all violence with terrorism, on the other hand, are like doctors who can’t cure a misdiagnosed affliction.

Politicians are notorious for using language to disguise policy choices. Words, the DNA of language, can be exercised to change the way we feel.  Steven Pinker says a “taboo word” may be used instrumentally to trigger an emotional response.  In The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature he notes there is “something about the pairing of certain meanings and sounds [that] has a potent effect on people’s emotions” (326).   Although Pinker explains that the “pairing between a sound and meaning is arbitrary,” humans “can use a taboo word to evoke an emotional response in the audience quite against their wishes” (333).

British Prime Minister David Cameron declared in the immediate aftermath of the Woolwich attack, “We will never give in to terror or terrorism in any of its forms.”  President Obama, by contrast, studiously avoided using the t-word on the heels of Benghazi.  Whereas Cameron was lauded, Obama was vilified.  Both men chose their words carefully.  In the face of terrorism, electorates tend to reward right-wing candidates opposed to government concessions.  It’s no wonder that Obama, a Democrat, wanted to eschew the word “terrorism,” while Cameron, the leader of the Conservative party, readily adopted it.

The media should take a higher moral ground than politicians and avoid politicizing the t-word. The age of Twitter dysentery calls for greater conceptual clarity.  The media are the wellsprings of information, but no longer serve as its gatekeepers.  While academics are still trying to figure out what terrorists really want, they at least agree on the meaning of the word.

Saw Argo the other day, was impressed by the way it was filmed in such a 70s style, sorta like that movie The Limey or an episode of the Rockford Files.

I also felt nostalgia for that relatively nonviolent era. All those hostages and nobody was killed. It’s a good thing the Ayatollah didn’t have some fundamentalist Shiite equivalent of John Yoo telling him to waterboard everybody.

At the time we were all so angry and upset about the hostage-taking, but from the perspective of our suicide-bomber era, that whole hostage episode seems so comfortingly mild.

Hopefully, another semester has come to a close for you and you’re catching up on some much needed research/sleep.   After I’ve doled out grades for my students, I usually get a nice big stack of evaluations of my teaching abilities, filled out by those very same students who squeaked by with a “C-“in my class. At my previous university, it was the ONLY way my teaching was evaluated; for better or worse, no senior faculty or peers ever evaluated my teaching content, style, or skills in the classroom.  A whopping 40% of my annual evaluation came from what my students recorded on bubble-sheets and, occasionally, their written comments.[1]

As a social scientist, I have had some general questions about the validity and the reliability of the whole process. [2] Do students really know a good teacher when they see one?  Isn’t this a little bit like letting the inmates evaluate the prison warden?  I was glad to know that there has been a ton written on the topic, some of which has been summarized as implying that student evaluations of instructors are “highly reliable” and “at least moderately valid.”  Others, however, disagree or call for more research.

As a political scientist, my understanding of power – especially power-through-manipulation- has also lead me to have some additional questions about the evaluation process.  Can’t a smart instructor manipulate the system?  Fooling a whole bunch of undergrads into thinking you are a better instructor than you are can’t be that difficult, can it? Evaluation-manipulation is widely practiced and discussed, both around the halls of academia and in the extant literature.  Colleagues have told me to hand out evaluations on rainy days, provide midterm evaluations (and don’t even read them), only hand out evaluations after providing extra credit points, and some colleagues have even suggested providing donuts on evaluation day.[3]  Social science research has shown that these manipulations can work, especially, perhaps, the most controversial manipulation of all: actually boosting grades and “dumbing down” a course to increase your evaluations.  As one summary article put it:

students tend to give higher ratings when they expect higher grades in the course. This correlation is well-established, and is of comparable magnitude, perhaps larger, to the magnitude of the correlation between student ratings and student learning (as measured by tests) …Thus, [evaluations] seem to be as much a measure of an instructor’s leniency in grading as they are of teaching effectiveness (Huemer 2005, np).

I’m not sure what to make of this, other than the fact that I now question my good evaluation semesters more (Did I really challenge the students enough?  Was I just lenient as a grader?). This brings me to my question for you: is there an alternative to evaluate a professor’s ability in the classroom?   I’m not sure but am definitely interested in exploring options.

Half my Twitter feed is convulsed by the discovery that terrorist organizations have office politics and management issues. If they’d been paying proper attention to the Monkey Cage, they’d have figured this out a little more than five years ago. From a more recent iteration of the Shapiro and Siegel project that I discussed back then:

From the mid-1990s through 2001 when one of them was killed by the U.S. military, two of the West’s most implacable terrorist foes, Abu Hafs al-Masri and Abu Khabab, carried on what appears to have been a long-running feud within Al-Qa’ida. …That their feud would entail lengthy arguments about reporting requirements, air travel reimbursements, and the proper accounting for organizational property does seem a bit odd. … This is all a bit puzzling in that covert organizations are commonly thought to screen their operatives very carefully and pay a particularly heavy price for such record keeping …

we provide an explanation for the seemingly odd facts that terrorist groups repeatedly include operatives of varying commitment and often rely on a common set of security-reducing bureaucratic tools to manage these individuals. Our core argument is that in small, heterogeneous organizations, longer institutional memory can enhance organizational efficiency for a variety of reasons … the greater the ambiguity about what the agents have done and whether failure is attributable to their shirking or to circumstances beyond their control, the greater the need for memory to establish a track record … motivating agents requires both the ability to punish and the ability to employ disciplinary strategies that fall short of firing wayward operatives … ‘managers’ are at high risk for being killed or captured, meaning that unless records are kept, institutional memory of past behavior is transitory. When past bad acts
can be forgotten, incentives for good behavior are weakened as are incentives for leaders to
follow consistent disciplinary strategies.

A few weeks ago I ran a conference in Florence, Italy on Social Media and Political Participation. We had 12 people people present papers and probably somewhere between 60-80 people who attended presentations. However, in addition to simply holding the conference, we also live-streamed it over the internet and gave the conference a hashtag: #SMaPP_LPD. The figure above shows all the twitter accounts that tweeted using that hashtag (weighted by the number tweets they issued) and their connections to other people who tweeted about the conference.

The benefits of live-streaming a conference in order to increase access to the conference are obvious: people who can not attend the conference can still watch the presentation. Our best guess is that we somewhere between doubled and tripled the number of people who could “attend” the conference, with over 130 people logging on to the feed on Friday and over 60 people doing so on Saturday. But the other great thing about live streaming is that not only can it extend your reach geographically, it can also do so temporally. So we’re in the process now of preparing a video archive of all the presentations (which will be up on the conference website shortly). We’ve already posted everyone’s presentation slides, so what this means is that shortly anyone will be able to download the slides for a presentation and then watch the video of the presentation whenever they like.

But the other point I really want to make is how much I felt the use of the conference hashtag improved my own experience attending the conference. Throughout the two days of presentations, I was able to communicate with other people – both in Florence and watching over the live-stream – about the papers as they were being presented. I got to see what other people found interesting about presentations and you could communicate in real time about issues being raised by presenters. Moreover, I personally found that – far from being distracting – the fact that I was looking at the Twitter feed and tweeting kept me more engaged with the presentation. You all know the feeling: no matter how interesting a conference, by the 6th paper of the day everyone (especially if they are jet-lagged!) starts to zone out a bit and get sleepy. I found the hash-tag conversation to be an antidote to this common feeling; it kept me alert and more engaged with the paper presentation. Furthermore, by “summarizing” what I was thinking about papers in 140 characters, I think I was actually more quickly processing what I was learning than simply by listening. As the conference moderator, I was also able to take questions over Twitter, thus allowing people who weren’t in Florence to participate in the question and answer session in real time, which is kind of amazing if you stop to think about it.

At a time when political science is increasingly coming under attack for not having enough to offer those outside academia, live-streaming and hash-tagging conferences seems a relatively simple way to make our research more accessible to a wider audience. And my experience is that this is a win-win situation: the same thing that allows more people access to our research can enhance our own conference experience, in addition to making it possible for us to “attend” more conferences beyond what our normal travel schedules/budgets would allow.

So consider this post a plea to conference organizers everywhere: please think about live-streaming and setting up a hash-tag as a part of your conference in the future! Adding a hash-tag is costless. Yes, live-streaming costs money, but so do a lot of other things associated with conferences, and my sense is that the cost of live-streaming is falling and will continue to do so. In the long-run, if we can make live-streaming a regular part of conference (much the same way “conference dinners” are usually automatically included in any conference budget) I think the payoff will be more than worth it.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of our first post at this blog. Since then, we've put out nearly 200 posts, which have received roughly 200,000 hits by the likes of you. So thanks to all of you who have helped make our first year a successful one by reading our posts, linking to us, citing our work, purchasing collectable MoF trading cards and sharing them with your friends, etc. For our second year, we promise... more.

A leading media fact-checking organization rates Republicans as less trustworthy than Democrats, according to a new study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) at George Mason University. The study finds that PolitiFact.com has rated Republican claims as false three times as often as Democratic claims during President Obama’s second term. Republicans continue to get worse marks in recent weeks, despite controversies over Obama administration statements on Benghazi, the IRS and the AP.

According to CMPA President Dr Robert Lichter, “While Republicans see a credibility gap in the Obama administration, PolitiFact rates Republicans as the less credible party.”

From this press release.  This is nothing new.  Almost 4 years ago, I found the same pattern in Politifact’s scoring of claims during the health care debate. But as I noted in that post and as Brendan Nyhan quickly pointed out regarding this CMPA study, you can’t draw any firm conclusions from this exercise. Politifact isn’t randomly sampling the statements of Republicans and Democrats.  They’re just examining statements they consider particularly visible, influential, or controversial.  The data are consistent with any number of interpretations and so we can’t say all that much about the truthfulness of political parties, about any biases of Politifact, etc.

Millennium. Journal of International Studies
Annual Conference
“Rethinking the Standard(s) of Civilisation(s) in International Relations”
19-20 October 2013
London School of Economics and Political Science
Deadline for abstracts: 7 June, 2013

The theme of this year’s conference will focus on the standard(s) of civilisation(s) in International Relations. In recent years, there has been a renewed scholarly interest in the concept of ‘the standard of civilisation’ in examining international norms, practices and policies entrenched in world politics, including international law, human rights, the status of women, good governance and globalisation, global markets, the EU policy of ‘membership conditionality’, and state-building. These are only some of the key aspects of international relations that illustrate the crucial relationship between civilisation and standards of conduct in global politics.

In addition to these topics, the conference will ask crucial questions about western modernity and Eurocentrisism in international relations, democracy promotion, civilisational discourses and identities, the rise of Asia, postcoloniality and globalisation, the eurozone crisis and market civilisation, war and genocide, and empire and civilisation.

In contrast to mainstream International Relations theories, the conference seeks to highlight the normative asymmetries of power and hierarchies embedded in ‘civilisational’ practices, norms and discourses of global politics. In doing so, the conference aims at critically engaging with the concept of the standard of civilisation and investigating further the ways in which it remains relevant to the study of international relations today.

Confirmed speakers:
Keynote Speaker: John Hobson (University of Sheffield)
Opening and Closing Panels:
Brett Bowden (University of Western Sydney)
Edward Keene (University of Oxford)
Shogo Suzuki (University of Copenhagen)

Individuals interested in presenting a paper are requested to submit a 300 word abstract to: millennium@lse.ac.uk by 7 June, 2013. Submissions for panels are also welcome. A selection of the conference papers will be published in Millennium: Journal of International Studies, volume 42, no. 3.

Image source.

I understand that there’s been some recent blog-chatter on one of my favorite hobbyhorses, peer review in Political Science and International Relations. John Sides gets all ‘ruh roh’ because of an decades-old old, but scary, experiment that shows pretty much what every other study of peer-review shows:

Then, perhaps coincidentally, Steve Walt writes a longish post on “academic rigor” and peer review. Walt’s sorta right and sorta wrong, so I must write something of my own,* despite the guarantee of repetition.

What does Walt get right?

Third, peer review is probably overvalued because reviewers’ comments are often less than helpful and rarely decisive. By the time most articles are submitted for publication, they’ve usually been presented at academic seminars and have gone through multiple drafts in response to suggestions from the authors’ friends and colleagues. I’ve occasionally gotten useful suggestions from an anonymous reviewer’s report, but I’d say that more than half the comments I’ve received over the years were of no value at all and I simply ignored them. Indeed, a dirty little secret is that a lot of “peer reviews” are no more than a couple of cursory paragraphs along with a recommendation to publish, reject, or revise and resubmit. If that’s the reality of the review process, then why do we fetishize publication in “peer-reviewed” journals as much as we do? In other words, knowing that something got published in the American Political Science Review,World Politics, International Organization, or International Security doesn’t tell you very much about its real value. You have to read it for yourself to make a firm judgment [emphasis added].

The abysmal quality of a large percentage of peer reviews is an open secret in the field. Part of the problem is structural: as the field has placed greater and greater weight on the publication of peer-reviewed articles (in leading journals) for hiring and promotion, scholars have followed the rational course of increasing the number of articles that they submit for review. Indeed, this has been going on for decades. But individual scholars can proliferate their submissions much more easily than the field can generate more qualified reviewers. The math is simply dreadful: the effectiveness of peer review diminishes extremely rapidly as its importance increases.

But a lot of the problem is of our own making. Many scholars refuse to review manuscripts. For example, in 2012 about 65% of the scholars contacted by International Studies Quarterly eventually submitted a review (PDF). Reviewers often, as Walt notes, put little obvious effort into this aspect of their craft. I’ve noticed that reviewers almost never engage in an even cursory check of referenced material to ensure that an author accurately represents sources (and nobody really cares, anyway). There’s plenty of blame to go around, of course. Lack of transparency when it comes to the quantitative data used in manuscripts doesn’t exactly ensure rigorous peer review. Inaccessible primary-source material creates similar problems in qualitative work.

Moreover, Walt notes that he often ignores reviews. And given the quality of most reviews, combined with the stochasticity of the process and the number of journals out there, this makes sense. But it also diminishes the incentives for a reviewer to put in the effort. I once wrote a ~2,500 (sympathetic) review of a manuscript. Along the way I pointed out that the author was making claims to novelty that didn’t make sense, as some of the works cited advanced similar arguments. I recently re-reviewed the same piece for a different journal, and the author hadn’t even made the small effort required to correct this problem. So, yeah, hard to feel like putting in that much intellectual equity into the process.

We’ve been trying to figure out how to address these issues when we take over ISQ. We think that tougher screening of manuscripts might help a little bit — fewer pieces going out for review means less burden on reviewers — and I’m considering promulgating some formal guidelines for reviewers. We also hope that more extensive data collection might at least shed some light on the process. But this is pretty weak tea.

Anyway, I part company with one of Walt’s conclusions:

 I am not suggesting that academia discard peer review and discourage scholars from publishing in prestigious journals. Rather, I’m suggesting that the social sciences would be more useful andmore rigorous if members of these disciplines adopted a less hidebound approach to the merits of different types of publication. “Should it really be the case,” Bruce Jentleson correctly asks, “that a book with a major university press and an article or two in [a refereed journal] … can almost seal the deal on tenure, but books with even major commercial houses count so much less and articles in journals such as Foreign Affairs often count little if at all?”

There are good reasons to discount publications in outlets such as Foreign Affairs that have nothing to do with the unreliability of peer review.

First, what makes something scholarship isn’t the peer-review process, but the mode, style, and form of argument. Foreign Affairs pieces seldom, if ever, reflect the norms, standards, and purposes of writing in the scholarly vocation. And they aren’t supposed to. By design. We can argue over whether this makes them better or worse – and I would say “just different” — but I don’t think that we can argue that they’re the same kind of work.

Second, who gets to publish in  outlets such as Foreign Affairs isn’t precisely a function of position in specific elite networks, but it is heavily inflected by relations of friendship, influence, and patronage. Now, academic publishing in International Relations is far from a strict meritocracy. Some journals are arguably even clubbier than their non-academic counterparts. But we almost certainly overvalue those journals, and we should certainly not compound our mistake by assigning more value to outlets whose editorial decisions are guided by concerns, norms, and incentives very different from those we aspire to as scholars.

So, yes, we should wean ourselves from the organized hypocrisy surrounding peer review. But that doesn’t mean granting me promotion for blogging, nor granting someone tenure for getting some pieces into Foreign Policy. Those activities amount to “service,” and should be treated as such.

What else? Nothing for now. I’m late on a review.

——————————–

*Remember when XKCD was funny?

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Tobias T. Gibson, an associate professor of political science and security studies at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo. 

In the buildup to President Obama’s speech at National Defense University on May 23, the administration suggested that the speech would clarify US policy on the use of drones in targeted killing. Although the president took pains to describe the limitations set forth by his administration, the speech provided little genuine clarity.

The working definitions of three very important words play a key role in undermining the putative “transparency” provided by the speech.  In a key passage, the President states that

Beyond the Afghan theater, we only target al Qaeda and its associated forces. Even then, the use of drones is heavily constrained. America does not take strikes when we have the ability to capture individual terrorists – our preference is always to detain, interrogate, and prosecute them. America cannot take strikes wherever we choose – our actions are bound by consultations with partners, and respect for state sovereignty. America does not take strikes to punish individuals – we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people, and when there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat. And before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured – the highest standard we can set. [emphasis mine]

These three key constraints on the administration may amount to very little in the way of genuine barriers to the use of drone strikes.

First, what does the President means by “continuing” in this context? Must a potential target have never taken a break from a plan? Given the singularity in the passage (‘a plan’), that raises a further question: if there are multiple ongoing plans, and one ends, is the candidate for death stricken from the kill list?

Second, as has been noted by several national security experts, a explanation of imminence would help us understand who constitutes a legitimate target. At what stage in a plan does the threat become imminent? And, is there a minimum level of skill associated with the threat? Given the admission that “[c]ore al Qaeda is a shell of its former self” perhaps the answer is no.

Third, given the administration’s well known practice of redefining a “military age male” as a legitimate target, the working definition of “civilian” matters a lot for  whether or not President Obama’s speech describes a narrowed drone policy.

In sum, there’s a lot of wiggle room here.

I’ll be contributing a piece about once a week for the Guardian Australia, under a part of the web site we’re calling The Swing.

The set of graphs from my 1st effort were rendered in-line and rather low-res.

Bigger, full res versions appear below; click on the in-line versions.

It would be great to find a way to quickly make nice, web-friendly graphs out of R. Vega looks like a reasonable wrapper to d3. Datawrapper.de just doesn’t give me enough control over annotations, axes etc… I’m also looking at Rickshaw. Life is short, beautiful graphics are hard, sometimes…

In our continuing collaboration with political science journals, the following guest post is written by Thomas Hegghammer (@hegghammer), a political scientist and historian at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI). He is currently the Zuckerman fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (@CISAC).  His article in the February 2013 issue of the American Political Science Review to which the post refers is available ungated here through June 15, 2013.

*****

Last week, radical Islamists stabbed a British soldier to death in Woolwich, South London. Meanwhile other Western jihadists were busy fighting Bashar al-Assad’s army in Syria. Although these activities seem unrelated, they raise an interesting question: Why do some Western jihadists attack at home while others fight abroad? Moreover, if jihadists are so keen to attack the West, why do some of them leave, given that they are already “behind enemy lines”? And how worried should we be about the prospect of foreign fighters returning to perpetrate terrorist attacks?

My article in the February 2013 issue of the American Political Science Review tries to answer these questions by looking at where Western jihadists have chosen to fight over the years and why. I rely on open-source data, including a new dataset on jihadi plots in the West (1990-2010) and a set of numerical observations of foreign fighter flows. My five main findings are as follows:

1. Foreign fighting is by far the most common activity. Foreign fighters outnumber domestic attackers by at least 3 to 1 (over 900 vs. 300 individuals over 20 years).


2. Western jihadists seem to prefer foreign fighting for normative reasons. They heed religious authorities who consider fighting in warzones more legitimate than killing civilians in Western cities.


3. Most foreign fighters appear not to leave with the intention to train for a domestic operation.  However, a minority do acquire this motivation after their departure.


4. Most foreign fighters never return for domestic plots. In my data, at most 1 in 9 foreign fighters came home to roost.


5. Those foreign fighters who do return are significantly more effective operatives than non-veterans. They act as entrepreneurs and concoct plots that are twice as likely to kill.

For policymakers, the main takeaway from the article is that foreign fighters as a group pose somewhat less of a terrorist threat to the West than is often assumed. The widespread view of foreign fighters as very dangerous stems from their documented role in several serious terrorist plots in the past decade. However, this reasoning selects on the dependent variable, because it considers only the small subset of foreign fighters who returned to attack, disregarding the majority who were never heard from again. A related, but equally flawed assumption is that all foreign fighters leave for training, as part of a cunning strategy to “come back and hit us harder”. The fact that some foreign fighters trained and returned does not mean that all foreign fighters departed with that intention. As it turns out, not even those who did train and return say they planned it from the start. It follows from this that a government approach which treats all foreign fighters as domestic-terrorists-in-the-making risks wasting resources, because so few foreign fighters, statistically speaking, will go on to attack in the West.

A first step toward a more efficient counterterrorism strategy is to differentiate between outgoing and homecoming foreign fighters and focus resources on the latter. Some countries might consider going a little lighter on outgoing foreign fighters. The US government today spends considerable resources investigating, prosecuting, and incarcerating Muslims who merely attempt to join conflict zones like Somalia. While there should clearly be sanctions in place to deter foreign fighting, the deterrence effort could be better calibrated to the documented threat. By contrast, Islamists returning from conflict zones or neighbouring countries should be watched very carefully. This is hardly news to Western intelligence services, but the fact that the last two major attacks in the West, the Boston bombings and the Woolwich murder, involved unsupervised returnees – from Dagestan and Kenya/Somalia respectively – suggests an even greater effort is needed.

A second step is to distinguish between subsets of foreign fighters according to the rate by which they “produce” domestic attackers. This issue is not addressed in my article and will require new research and analysis. We do not yet know why some foreign fighters and not others move on to domestic operations. Nor do we know why some destinations produce more domestic attackers than others. The AfPak region, for example, has produced tens of foreign-turned-domestic fighters, while Somalia has hardly produced any.

Understanding these “determinants of differential returnee production” will be key to managing the future threat from the foreign fighters in Syria, a challenge that is not to be taken lightly. Just two years into the war, there may be over 500 Western Muslims fighting in Syria, more than in any previous Islamist foreign fighter destination, including the Afghan jihad in the 1980s. Most of these individuals are unlikely to pose a threat, but some will, so we should start thinking soon about who they are and when we might expect them. The most important indicator to watch is probably the declared strategic intent of jihadi organizations in Syria. If a group such as Jabhat al-Nusra should decide to systematically target the West, then the foreign fighter threat from Syria would increase substantially, as did the threat from Afghanistan when al-Qaida “went global” in the 1990s. In the meantime, we can take comfort in the finding that most jihadis choose foreign fighting because they do not want to be terrorists.

Now through June 15, 2013, my research from the APSR will be freely available to the public.

 

The lesson apparently is that Lucasfilm still exists?  This is the second year that the Nerdist folks have combined with Lucasfilm to raise money for charity.  How so?   By having a relay of folks carrying a lightsaber to Comic-con in San Diego.  Oh, and posting a series of silly youtube videos.  Here is the first one for this year:

 

Elvis Duck because I’ll be drinking Bourbon in Memphis tomorrow night.

• Julien Barnes-Dacey and Daniel Levy want de-escalation, not more arms for Syria
• Unintended consequences? The Syrian conflict has been good for American-Turkish relations.
• An “ancient” U.S. weapon makes an appearance in Syrian fighting:  the M40.
• A new Gallup Poll:  64% of Americans say the US shouldn’t use military force in Syria if diplomatic efforts fail to end the conflict. 
• Oops.  John McCain posed for a nice picture….with Syrian rebels accused of kidnapping Lebanese Shiites. ht: Taylor Marvin.
• Sven Biscop looks at what Europeans will do on the question of military power.

and…

• really cool photo of volcanic lightning

Alright folks, I don’t really have much to say here. Instead, I’ll provide a link (PDF) to a copy of the bid we submitted nearly a year ago. Be warned that it includes some egregious typos and other fun* stuff.

Why do I think this will be of interest? For some time, I’ve been making noises about the future of journals in terms of how they interact with Web 2.0 technologies. There seem to be a number of different, if related, models.

1. Arrange a distribution deal with a prominent blog. This is what The Monkey Cage has done with Cambridge University Press. Authors write a short blog post summarizing their research, the good folks at TMC publish it, and Cambridge makes the relevant article available at no charge for a limited time (for example). This is a great way both to bring political-science research to a larger audience and to attempt to increase citations for articles.
2. Make the journal entirely online, perhaps as an open-access journal. There are a lot of these in existence  and some have been around for quite some time. One of the most interesting (in our field) is SAGE’s forthcoming Research and Politics. The journal will be edited by a capable and prominent team — headed by Bernard Steunberg  and including Georgetown’s (and TMC‘s) own Erik Voeten. It includes a stable of associate editors to facilitate a quasi-silo model of fast but attentive review. As I understand it, Research and Politics will break the tyranny of the issue and volume; it will publish articles online the moment that they complete the editorial process. The main articles will be short and accessible: no bloated literature reviews — just the facts, so to speak. Research and Politics, in this sense, seeks a happy equilibrium among the immediacy and accessibility of blogging, the rigor of academic work, and the prestige of selective peer review.
3. Wrap the journal in a blog-like environment. Ethics and International Affairs has implemented something like this. It had a rocky start — as I think I’ve mentioned in earlier posts — but there’s more supplementary content now, including audio interviews and transcripts. However, the “blog” still doesn’t update frequently enough to draw readers back. Governance‘s blog, on the other hand, updates regularly. It mixes teasers for articles and debates over published work. Both of these models reflect in-house variants of what The Monkey Cage does, but with the constraints produced by being organs for the journal rather than semi-pro bloggers.

The plan for ISQ combines elements of all three models, but most resembles an amalgam of the first and third… with a bit of Foreign Policy added into the mix. As a “flagship” association journal ISQ provides an opportunity to produce an intellectual community with a highly-selective peer-reviewed journal at its core, and to collaborate with the specialized ISA journals.

I’m pretty excited about this, especially as PTJ will be serving as a dedicated online editor.

The major kinks right now involve laying the groundwork. ISA has a terrific programmer and the new website runs on a platform that will enable us to build it there. Issues of design — of look and feel — present major challenges, but we have some time left. I hope that the site will go live in January, but we’ll see.

Take a look at the proposal (PDF) and let us know what you think. Note that I’ve cut some irrelevant material, such as the budget.

——

*And by “fun,” I mean “embarrassing.”

A twitter friend of mine was trying to figure out how to put together his proposal for the International Studies Association’s Annual Meeting.  The ISA has gotten into a nasty habit of having a really early deadline.  So, folks are thinking about it today since the deadline is tomorrow.  I have had a fair amount of experience on the other end, organizing the program for the Foreign Policy section of the APSA about a decade ago, doing the Ethnicity, Nationalism and Migration section of the ISA [ENMISA] a few years back, and then this masochism year of the Foreign Policy Analysis section of the ISA this past spring and the International Security section (with Idean Salehyan) of the APSA for the meeting in September.  So, I have opinions (no surprise to anyone):

To be sure, my opinions are not universally shared so take what I say with a big grain of salt.  With that caveat (I love saying caveat these days), here are my basic rules of conference proposals:

• If you can organize an entire panel, complete with chair and discussant, do so, as it will save the program organizer work.  Plus the panel will be more coherent. Not all panel submissions are accepted but I am pretty sure the rate of success is higher than for lone paper submissions.
  • If organizing a panel, have a mix of people–not all grad students from the same department.  This actually gives you an excuse to network and meet new people.  Identify who does work that is related to what you are doing, and invite them to the panel.  Don’t be afraid to invite junior AND senior faculty from other places.  Many will thank you for taking the lead, saving them from doing the work or risking a lone submission.  Ask your adviser or friends for suggestions and even help in getting a discussant (usually cannot be and should not be a graduate student).  The bigger the name, the more likely the panel will be accepted.*  People like to get a big name to be chair but I never understand that–the chair just keeps the panel running on time (or not).
  • If you are on an organized panel, do not also submit the paper individually.  You can submit a different paper but do not do the same one twice–more work for everyone.

*  Why?  Because panel allocations for future years tend to be driven by attendance, and people tend to go to the panels with the bigger names.  The bigger names are not always smarter but they tend to be more articulate, which makes for a better panel.  Some folks are know to be excellent discussants, which are a rare commodity.  They may or may not have big names.

• Whether you put together a panel or just submit a paper, you have to provide a description of the panel.  Try to keep it short and clear.  Some program organizers get hundreds of submissions (FPA gets around 500 papers and I forget how many panels).  If you have an overly long abstract, it sends a signal that your paper might be very long (I have been a discussant for papers over fifty pages on a few occasions–not fun), and that your presentation may go long.
  • So, keep it simple: what is the question, why is it important, what is your answer, how do you propose to test it (that might just be four sentences!).
  • The paper is not going to be written until many months from now so you don’t have to go into great detail.  If you look at articles in journals, notice the abstracts–150-200 words that explain what the paper is.  That is the goal (again, this is for poli sci/international studies, I have no clue about history or sociology or econ or whatever else).
  • Aim for a title that is clear about the topic but not incredibly boring.  
• Some people get really into linking the paper to the grand theme of the conference.  For APSA and ISA (I cannot say about other ones), you don’t have to match the big theme to get on the program.  It can help but pay a bit more attention to the call for the papers that the particular section posts (if they do).  Even then, it is better to have a coherent, interesting paper idea than one that is a mess because you tried to tie it to some broader theme that does not fit.
• Do make sure you send it to the right two sections (other associations may have one or three options), with the preferred section first.  Do not just submit to one panel if you can avoid it.

That really is about it.  Perhaps too late, but there is always another conference down the road.  Good luck.

The following post is provide based on research conducted in the past 24 hours by NYU’s Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) laboratory.  It is written by lab members and NYU Politics Ph.D. candidates Pablo Barberá and Megan Metzger.

*****

Over the past several years the role of social media in promoting, organizing, and responding to protest and revolution has been a hot topic of conversation. From Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring Revolutions, social media has been at the center of many of the largest, most popular demonstrations of political involvement. The protests taking place in Turkey add to this growing trend, and are already beginning to add new layers to our understanding of how social media can contribute to public participation.

Protests have been ongoing since early this week in Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Organized in response to government plans to tear down the green space in the center of the square and replace it with a shopping center, the protests have morphed into a more visceral expression of the general discontent with the government’s policies over the last several years In response, the police fired massive amounts of tear gas and pepper spray into the crowd and set fire to tents set up for protesters to sleep in, leaving several people injured.  Protesters have begun wearing homemade gas masks while continuing to protest on the street. As of 2 AM Turkish time on Saturday, the protests are still in progress and some protestors have reportedly breached the barrier and entered the park.

The social media response to and the role of social media in the protests has been phenomenal. Since 4pm local time yesterday, at least 2 million tweets mentioning hashtags related to the protest, such as #direngeziparkı (950,000 tweets), #occupygezi (170,000 tweets) or #geziparki (50,000 tweets) have been sent. As we show in the plot below, the activity on Twitter was constant throughout the day (Friday, May 31). Even after midnight local time last night more than 3,000 tweets about the protest were published every minute.

What is unique about this particular case is how Twitter is being used to spread information about the demonstrations from the ground. Unlike some other recent uprisings, around 90% of all geolocated tweets are coming from within Turkey, and 50% from within Istanbul (see map below). In comparison, Starbird (2012) estimated that only 30% of those tweeting during the Egyptian revolution were actually in the country. Additionally, approximately 88% of the tweets are in Turkish, which suggests the audience of the tweets is other Turkish citizens and not so much the international community.

These numbers are in spite of the fact that there are reports that the 3G network is down in much of the area that is affected. Some local shops have removed security from their WiFi networks to allow internet access, but almost certainly the reduced signal will have impacted the tweeting behavior of those on the ground.

Part of the reason for the extraordinary number of tweets is related to a phenomenon that is emerging in response to a perceived lack of media coverage in the Turkish media. Dissatisfied with the mainstream media’s coverage of the event, which has been almost non-existent within Turkey, Turkish protestors have begun live-tweeting the protests as well as using smart-phones to live stream video of the protests. This, along with recent articles in the Western news media, has become a major source of information about this week’s events. Protesters have encouraged Turks to turn off their televisions today in protest over the lack of coverage of the mainstream media by promoting the hashtag #BugünTelevizyonlarıKapat (literally, “turn off the TVs today”), which has been used in more than 50,000 tweets so far.

What this trend suggests is that Turkish protesters are replacing the traditional reporting with crowd-sourced accounts of the protest expressed through social media. Where traditional forms of news have failed to fully capture the intensity of the protests, or to elucidate the grievances that protesters are expressing, social media has provided those participating with a mechanism through which not only to communicate and exchange information with each other, but essentially to take the place of more traditional forms of media. Further, this documentation through multiple sources in public forums serves to provide a more accurate description of events as they unfold. The coming days in Turkey will give us more insight into the processes by which this takes place, but it is certainly an impressive realization of the potential for social media to be used in overcoming barriers to diffusion of information regarding and motivation for protests.

******

Update: we also wish to acknowledge the contributions of NYU Politics Ph.D. candidates Batuhan Gorgulu and Emine Deniz.

 

A very discomfiting article (gated):

A growing interest in and concern about the adequacy and fairness of modern peer-review practices in publication and funding are apparent across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Although questions about reliability, accountability, reviewer bias, and competence have been raised, there has been very little direct research on these variables.

The present investigation was an attempt to study the peer-review process directly, in the natural setting of actual journal referee evaluations of submitted manuscripts. As test materials we selected 12 already published research articles by investigators from prestigious and highly productive American psychology departments, one article from each of 12 highly regarded and widely read American psychology journals with high rejection rates (80%) and nonblind refereeing practices.

With fictitious names and institutions substituted for the original ones (e.g., Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential), the altered manuscripts were formally resubmitted to the journals that had originally refereed and published them 18 to 32 months earlier. Of the sample of 38 editors and reviewers, only three (8%) detected the resubmissions. This result allowed nine of the 12 articles to continue through the review process to receive an actual evaluation: eight of the nine were rejected. Sixteen of the 18 referees (89%) recommended against publication and the editors concurred. The grounds for rejection were in many cases described as “serious methodological flaws.” A number of possible interpretations of these data are reviewed and evaluated.

[UPDATE: A commenter draws my attention to the publication date of this article: 1982.  That’s what happens when you learn about something from Twitter: you assume it just happened today.  Sorry.  But this raises an interesting question: would the same thing happen again if this study were done today?]

Paul Krugman, Daniel Drezner, and others slam fabled contrarian Michael Kinsley for his argument that we need to cut the budget deficit now because “we have to pay a price for past sins, and the longer we put it off, the higher the price will be” and that this attitude follows “the lessons of Paul Volcker and the Great Stagflation of the late 1970s.”

You know you have a problem with Drezner when, instead of calling your work “piss-poor monocausal social science,” he doesn’t even call it “social science” at all.

I have some sympathy for Kinsley, though, not on the merits—-I have no idea on the merits, for all I know he’s exactly correct on the economics—-but on his reactions to this event.

I think I’m well qualified to write about this because I know about as much of macroeconomics as Kinsley does (or so I suspect).

I think Kinsley’s economic argument goes roughly as follows: with the economy in depression, what you need to stimulate it is for businesses to hire people and for unemployed people to work. How do you do this?

– Cut taxes on businesses and lower their per-worker costs so they can afford to hire people.

– Cut taxes on rich people so they can invest more money.

– Make life more uncomfortable for unemployed people so they are motivated to work, and make life more uncomfortable for low-income people so they won’t be tempted to leave the labor force.

OK, I’m not saying the above recommendations are a good idea. They’re pure microeconomic thinking and not necessarily applicable at all to macroeconomics. But my guess is that’s roughly how Kinsley is thinking. After all, microeconomics is simpler than macroeconomics. I understand micro but not macro, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Kinsley is similar.

OK, bear with me here. Suppose Kinsley does believe the above recommendations are correct, in the sense of ultimately helping the economy and making everyone richer. As Kinsley might say in one of his phrasemaking moments: Making Donald Trump more comfortable is a small price to pay for bringing millions of Americans into the middle class. (Or something like that. There’s a reason why he writes for the New Republic and I’m just a blogger.)

Anyway, if Kinsley does believe that, then he also knows enough to realize that the above recommendations scream “conservative Republican” not “liberal Democrat.”

But Kinsley is a liberal Democrat. And, rather than saying he’s been “mugged by reality” and will now be joining the Paul Ryan campaign, he wants to make it clear that his views are coherent. He doesn’t want the Krugmanites to vote him off the island.

So, given all these premises, I can see where Kinsley’s coming from. He wants to be a charming contrarian and occasional gadfly. He wants to feel safe enough in his liberal perch to advocate conservative policies without losing his parking space on the center-left side of the street.

But that’s the problem with being contrarian. Sometimes it pisses people off.

P.S. In searching for kinsley krugman, I found this amusing bit from anti-Krugman blogger Robert Murphy from March, 2010:

But the thing that’s really aggravating about all this, is that if, say, the dollar crashes in 8 months and we start running 12% annualized CPI growth, it’s not as if Krugman, Yglesias, et al. are going to say, “Gosh, I apologize for trashing Kinsley back in March 2010.”

I guess Krugman, Yglesias, et al. are off the hook on that one!

I can’t be the only one disturbed by the triumph of (aging) hipsters and nerds that is the Obama Administration.

 

• More of the same with the Syrian opposition.
• Will H. Moore really takes issue with Jonathan Panikoff on how to think about what comes next in Syria.
• Visualizing the Syrian conflict with the new GDELT event data set.  GDELT is about to go live (in the next couple of days or week) with daily updates on Syria.
• Meanwhile, Jay Ulfelder roadtests GDELT as a resource for monitoring atrocities.
• Roland Paris on What Went Wrong in Afghanistan.
• Seven lessons for the next time we end up in a small war.  Call me a skeptic.
• Joshua Keating asks what Chaos Theory can tell us about IR.

and…
apparently Singapore’s “generosity” has its limits…

The following is the first in our series of collaborations with journals to feature guests posts from authors of recently published political science research in conjunction with ungated access to the article that is being discussed.

The guest post is written by political scientist Roland Paris, of the University of Ottawa (@rolandparis).  An ungated version of his article is being made available temporarily by Cambridge University Press here.

*****

In the June 2013 issue of Perspectives on Politics, I have a review essay based on four books that offer insights into “what went wrong” with the international effort to stabilize Afghanistan after 2001.

The books, which are all excellent, approach the subject from different vantage points.  Astri Suhrke’s When More Is Less: The International Project in Afghanistan examines the internal tensions and contradictions of the overall international effort.  Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan focuses more narrowly on the US military and civilian “surge” in 2010 and 2011.  In Bazaar Politics: Power and Pottery in an Afghan Market Town, Noah Coburn conducts a micro-level analysis of the politics in one village near Kabul during the international mission.  Finally, Thomas Barfield’s Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History is a macro-history of Afghan politics and governance from pre-modern times to the present.

In spite of their differences, all of the books point to similar, underlying dysfunctions in the international mission.  The first dysfunction was the interveners’ inadequate understanding and knowledge of Afghan society.  Again and again, the authors point to cases of international action rendered ineffectual or counterproductive due to a lack of familiarity with the political and social environment. From the highest levels of decision making to the micro-dynamics of military patrols and aid projects, foreign organizations and officials seemed to be almost handicapped by their own ignorance of the country.

The second dysfunction was the persistent short-termism of international policymaking.  At each major juncture, decision makers seemed to reach for the most expedient fixes without fully considering the context or consequences of their actions.  This pattern was already visible during the 2001 invasion, when the United States paid Afghan militias to intercept fleeing Al Qaeda fighters in the mountains of Tora Bora, rather than sending American forces—a costly decision, since the militias turned out to be less than fully committed to the task.  Then there was the Bush administration’s lack of interest in devising plans for Afghanistan’s post-Taliban transition, and its eagerness to delegate this task to others, based in part on the assumption that the “problem” of Afghanistan had been largely resolved by the defeat of the Taliban regime.  Next came the UN-sponsored conference at Bonn, which produced an agreement for a political transition process.  This agreement, however, was reached “hastily, by people who did not adequately represent all key constituencies in Afghanistan,” as Brahimi, who chaired the meeting, wrote in a contrite essay seven years later.  With US and UN backing, moreover, the Bonn plan yielded a highly centralized system of government that was ill-adapted to the country’s needs.  Meanwhile, Washington had rejected the idea of deploying ISAF outside Kabul and refused to allow US counterterrorist forces to be used for “nation-building” purposes.  All of these actions reflected wishful thinking— or, more precisely, a dearth of serious thinking—about the viability and long-term implications of these decisions.

This mind-set continued in subsequent years.  As conditions worsened and the scale and scope of the operation slowly expanded, there was little reflection on the underlying assumptions of the mission.  When the US government, long distracted by the situation in Iraq, shifted its attention back to Afghanistan in 2008, decision making became more urgent, but was no less short-sighted. “Again and again,” writes Suhrke, “it was hoped that the latest change in strategy and personnel or increase in aid would be the silver bullet.”  I saw this for myself during visits to Kandahar and Kabul in December 2008 and January 2010.  Activity was intense, almost frantic, and driven by a sense that little time remained to “turn the situation around.”  But exactly how this would be achieved, and to what end, were never clear.  Even after President Obama entered office and conducted a lengthy policy review that resulted in a sharp escalation of US forces, these questions remained largely unanswered:  How would the United States convince the insurgency to capitulate or negotiate?  How would it persuade Afghan villagers to side publicly with ISAF and the Kabul government?  What, in short, was the purpose of the surge?  More broadly, why did the international operation, with its minimalist start and late escalation, seem so strangely out of sync with conditions on the ground?

If “strategy” is a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim, there appeared to be little strategy guiding the international operation in Afghanistan.  Instead, reliance on a series of quick fixes seemed to substitute for strategic thinking—or tactics without strategy.  I conclude the essay by discussing the dangers of repeating these errors and drawing the wrong lessons from the Afghanistan episode.

You can access the entire essay for free until June 23, 2013.

In line with both the mission statement of this blog and recent discussions about the continuing need to highlight to those outside the academy the importance of political science research, we are in the process of trying to offer a new service here at The Monkey Cage. The goal is to have posts from authors whose research is featured in just released issues of political science journals provide a short guest post highlighting the research in conjunction with an agreement from the press to make that article available ungated for a specified period of time. This will be similar to what I have done in the past with some of the section newsletters, but now will feature research articles from journals. And we have gotten journals in the past to ungate articles in conjunction with posts on The Monkey Cage (and will continue to do so), but the hope is that this new set up will help regularize process and make a bit less ad hoc.

This means that if you are a reader of the Monkey Cage and lack institutional access to political science journals, The Monkey Cage will now be a way to access some very recent journal publications. Moreover, our hope is that the guest posts will be written in a way that will quickly make it apparent whether the full article would be of interest to you. I will write more when I have details on which journals are participating, but I wanted to just make this brief announcement now because I will momentarily be posting the first article under this arrangement. Please be aware that the articles will be only ungated for a limited time, so this access will work better if you read the post in real-time as opposed to searching for them later, although I will use the category “Journal Collaboration” to tag these posts.

For authors who are requested by journal editors to participate in this program, I strongly urge you to consider doing so. It is a great chance to get publicity for your research, and also an opportunity to contribute to a public good of helping to create more links between published political science research and the wider community of journalists, policy makers, private sector actors, politicians, etc. who may be interested in the work that we have put so much effort into producing.

Comments from Rich Arenberg interpreting yesterday’s Senate floor dust-up between Reid and McConnell over changing Senate rules:

Maybe the confusing label “nuclear option” which has been given to potential procedural maneuvers in the Senate which could lead to a majority-only rewriting on the Senate rules is more apropos than we thought.

During the Cold War, U.S. and Soviet intelligence each analyzed even the most subtle moves of the other side. If Soviet subs moved a few miles closer to the U.S. shores, the Air Force might move its long-range bombers outside their normal hangers and park them on the tarmac. The subs would move farther away and then the planes would roll back into their hangars. Signals had been exchanged. Most of this was invisible to most people and at best, confusing.

Watching the Senate’s leaders execute the delicate dance which is so often a part of the Senate’s approach to difficult confrontations is similarly difficult to interpret.

Yesterday, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and Majority Leader Harry Reid exchanged their own signals on the Senate floor. Understandably observers were confused and interpretations varied widely.

For example, Sahil Kapur writing in TPM declared, Reid “rebuffed” McConnell’s “warning not to follow through with his threats to weaken the filibuster for nominations via the nuclear option.” The headline of Greg Sargent’s analysis in Washington Post’s Plum Line declared, “Harry Reid escalates ‘nuclear’ threat.’”

These interpretations were based on a Reid statement off the Senate floor. The majority leader said, “Despite the agreement we reached in January, Republican obstruction on nominees continues unabated. I want to make the Senate work again – that is my commitment.”

Others, like Tom Curry in NBC News First Read read the signals entirely differently. His piece appeared under the headline, “Reid appears to back away from ‘nuclear option’ on filibusters.”

That analysis, which I also heard from other sophisticated insiders in Washington, was based on Reid’s statement on the Senate floor: I am not saying we are going to change the rules, but I am saying we have to do a better job than what is going on around here. This is no threat.”

Clear right?

 

The conventional wisdom on the US presence in Asia is that we re-assure all players. Specifically, US allies don’t need to arms race local opponents, because the US has extended deterrence to cover them. Hence Japan and South Korea don’t need to go nuclear, for example. Among academics, this logic pops in the work of Christensen, Ikenberrry, and Nye; among policy analysts, here is the US military saying this, and here is the DC think-tank set.

But there’s flip-side to this logic that really needs to be investigated – whether the US presence also freezes conflicts in place, by reassuring Asian elites against their own reckless nationalist rhetoric, racially toxic historiographies, and Fox News-style inflammatory media (just read the Global Times op-ed page occasionally). I think the Liancourt Rocks fight is a particularly good example of this ‘moral hazard’ mechanic, as is the recent comment by no less than the South Korean foreign minister (!) that Abenomics’ threat to Korean export competitiveness is a greater danger to SK than North Korea’s nuclear program. That kind of preposterous, reckless myopia can only be explained by taking the US security umbrella for granted.

 

I am pleased to say that the following essay was printed simultaneously in this week’s Korean and Japanese editions of Newsweek. This is an initial effort in laymen’s language, but I think the possibility that the US is freezing Asian conflicts needs real investigation. So if you’re a grad student, and you need a paper topic, try this. There are no hyperlinks, because this was written for a print edition.

“Asia is one of the world’s most combustible regions. It is brimming with nationalism, territorial disputes, ideological divisions, and historical revisionism – all substantially aggravated by the region’s new found wealth. A war in Asia a generation ago would have been disastrous, but regional; a war today would involve the world’s largest economies. To soothe these tensions, the United States has begun to ‘pivot’ to Asia. By 2020, the US is scheduled to have the bulk of its navy deployed in the Pacific. Conversely, the US is seeking to wind down its Middle East conflicts. As a ‘new core’ of the world economy, Asia is more important to the US than ever before, and the pivot is to reflect that.

The pivot rests on the local embrace of the US as a powerful outsider, more trusted by each Asian player than they trust each other. The US is not really neutral, of course; it has its own interests in Asia too. But those interests mostly run toward trading issues, such as intellectual property rights or currency regimes. The US is not caught up in the sovereignty and national identity disputes that so divide Asia; the US has no territorial claims, for example. Hence the US enjoys greater strategic trust. The US can stand above the Asian fray and deploy its considerable power to balance threats – most obviously, North Korea, but also, possibly, China – and maintain local equilibrium.

But there is a danger lurking here for the US as well – that it will be instrumentalized by local parties for their own goals. Specifically, US policymakers worry that Japan may use the US as a bulwark to pursue a tough line against China in the East China Sea. For its part, China very obviously uses the US presence in South Korea and Japan as cause to continue propping up North Korea. And Japan and Korea both exploit the reassurance offered by the US to push maximalist nationalist agendas against the other over history and territory. Ironically, US reassurance serves to freeze, if not worsen, the very conflicts it is meant to soothe.

It is hard to imagine, for example, that the Dokdo/Takeshima dispute would still be active after so many years, were it not for US reassurance to nationalists and die-hards on both sides that they would not suffer the consequences of their rhetoric. A war between Japan and Korea in the Sea of Japan/East Sea would be a disaster for both and a geopolitical gift to China and North Korea. Yet so long as the US is allied to both South Korea and Japan, neither side has any incentive to back-down, to compromise on the many issues that divide them.

The flip-side of the usual argument that the US reassures Asian states against hostile moves by others, is that the US presence also locks Asian conflicts in place. The US may indeed prevent Asian conflicts from spiraling toward war, but that very presence also reduces the incentives for all parties to compromise and solve those conflicts. Indeed, these tensions often serve a useful domestic purpose for unpopular national elites with no genuine interest in resolving issues. Whenever Asian governments need to whip up popular feeling, they can always wave the flag over nationalist disputes and distract voters at home from the more substantive issues that plague Asia like corruption, poor demographics, corporate interference in politics, and so on. It is far easier for the Chinese Communist Party, for example, to pick fights with Vietnam or Japan over maritime borders than to actually pursue desperately needed reforms at home. And in South Korea, it was widely understood last year that President Lee visited Dokdo primarily because his poll numbers were poor; mercifully, Korean voters did not fall for that cheap gimmick.

Economics has a term for this problem – ‘moral hazard.’ When a person is insured against the consequences of his actions, he is, ironically, more likely to engage in that action, because insurance makes the risks of the action less than they would otherwise be. The classic example of this phenomenon is a teenager with a driver’s license. Because the teen is likely driving her parents’ car, not her own, and because the car is insured, the teen drives more recklessly than otherwise. Once the teen matures and pays for her own car and insurance, she drives more responsibly. Insurance companies have wrestled for decades with both providing insurance while still incentivizing good behavior. There is no obvious answer.

This model can easily be applied to the relationship of Japan and Korea. Both are insured by the US, explicitly by the presence of US soldiers on their territory. As such, both are somewhat guaranteed against the consequences of their actions. Both can therefore indulge the luxury of conflict with the other. Because the US is handling the larger geopolitical picture – North Korea, China’s rise, the national defense of Korea and Japan – the strategic discussion in both countries can focus inordinately on the comparatively minor issues between them. Dokdo may indeed seem to Koreans like an issue worth going to war over, but in the context of Chinese strength and North Korean nuclear weapons, it is not. Such talk occurs only because Seoul and Tokyo have ‘buck-passed’ the momentous issues to the Americans.

This is both an extravagance and a mistake, despite what nationalist, vote-hungry politicians may say. It consciously avoids the larger issues, abuses the US position here, and misses the reality that the US will not in fact defend Japan and Korea unless they defend themselves first. Without the US in Asia, Japan and Korea would be immediately compelled to work together to deal with issues vastly greater than Dokdo/Takeshima and a war 70 years ago. For all the criticisms hurled back and forth, South Korea and Japan are far more politically similar to each other than to other states in the region. This is woefully under-admitted:

China is a nationalist, aggrieved, one-party dictatorship increasingly bent on regional primacy, and a permanent well of support for North Korea. Russia is an erratic, badly-governed, semi-autocracy happy to see North Korea stymie democracy and liberalism in Asia. North Korea is arguably the world’s most dangerous country with a human rights record ranked lower than the Taliban. By contrast, South Korea and Japan are both liberal, capitalist, human rights-respecting democracies. They should in fact be allies – and would be if the US were not in Asia.

Far-seeing elites in both countries know this fact. As an academic in this area, I frequently attend conferences on this topic, where I hear many cosmopolitan South Korean and Japanese statesmen and intellectuals make similar arguments. And US officials have clearly been hoping for decades that Japan and Korea would put aside their comparatively minor differences to focus on the much larger issues. But elites on both sides are trapped by their countries’ rhetoric in the media and education. Asian media are relentlessly nationalistic: Japan’s disturbing fetishization of Yasukuni alienates everyone in Asia, while a Korean newspaper once seriously suggested that Japanese samurai were going to invade Dokdo. And education systems that teach racial notions of national identity dramatically worsen the problem. If the Han race (China), the Yamato wajin (Japan), and the minjeok (Korea) go back millennia and are rooted in blood, then compromise becomes ‘race betrayal.’ This is extremely unhealthy and precisely the kind of ideological extremism that helped tip Europe into World War I and II.

Further, the US is unlikely to referee or mediate these disputes, especially among allies. To date, the US has tried to bolster the ASEAN states in their negotiations with China. And the US has argued broadly for liberal ‘rules of the road’ in the region – free trade, open seas, floating currencies, open economies instead of mercantilism, and so on. The US wants peaceful dispute resolution; contrary to Chinese paranoia, the pivot is not intended to contain China – although it will become that if China becomes very belligerent. The US is broadly comfortable with Asian regional organizations like the ASEAN Regional Forum. The ARF provides a venue for Asian states, including even North Korea, to debate security issues. The US has also supported trade pacts like the Trans-Pacific Partnership that would open Asian economies more to one another, hopefully increasing interaction and interdependence.

However, the US will not become a referee for an Asia insistent on militant nationalism, brinksmanship, and conflict, especially among allies who really should know better. South Korea and Japan’s pursuit of their disputes weakens the combined position of democracy in Asia. China and North Korea are cheered to see Japan and South Korea clash incessantly. If South Korea and Japan were to fight, the US would not take sides. Indeed, the US would almost certainly exit the region.

Similarly, the US will not arbitrate or get involved in the details of disputes here. As an American academic in Asia, I am solicited relentlessly on these issues. I am regularly asked what I think of Dokdo, the Pacific War, China’s claims in the South China Sea, and so on. And to my interlocutors’ great frustration, I refuse to answer what inevitably become ideologically-loaded questions. This is the US government’s own policy as well. America has regularly said these conflicts need to be worked out among the parties involved on their own terms. An American solution or adjudication would be politicized by the losing party anyway and rejected as an illegitimate outside intrusion.

Koreans particularly make tremendous efforts to recruit westerners to take up the Dokdo claim. But they should not, as this frequently amounts to manipulating impressionable young foreigners or English teachers in country. These young people have little knowledge of the relevant history but are desperate for cultural acceptance in Korea. They have little sense of what they are arguing for. And in fact, the US government is rather studious in its avoidance of this topic. US diplomats are told not to pronounce on the ownership of the islet.

So what should be done? US retrenchment would indeed force Japan and South Korea to come to terms, and quickly. But China is so vast, and NK so dangerous, this would be a mistake. With those autocracies, there is little to do but confront them when necessary and talk with them as much as possible. North Korea particularly seems hell-bent on making trouble permanently. There is little to be done except stare it down and wait for its collapse. The pivot should continue.

But between Korea and Japan, the US should make it very clear that there are limits to its patience. US weapons sales to each should be conditioned on their non-use against the other. A clear US statement that the US will withdraw from Japan and Korea should hostilities break-out between them would also help. At home, Korea and Japan should reform their education systems to encourage far less nationalistic history instruction. A fair amount of this is mythic anyway; Korea and Japan’s histories are both far more diverse politically than the Hegelian, ‘march toward the modern state’ that is taught today. Finally, some manner of negotiation on Dokdo/Takeshima should commence. Without some joint resolution of this issue, the Japanese-South Korean relationship will never heal.

Asia is a dynamic, critical area that merits the US pivot. But the US commitment is not a blank check, and Asian states – especially America’s allies – need to realize this. The United States will make a reasonable effort to restrain conflict and maintain equilibrium. But it will not umpire an Asia unwilling to bend and compromise. Post-Iraq War especially, America will not become embroiled in a local war over a few islands here or there with little or no demographic and economic interest. Asia has come a long way in the last four decades. Unprecedented growth has alleviated poverty, raised education, and opened Asia to the world. Asia is the emerging ‘cockpit of world politics.’ It would be a shame if Asians were to throw that all away under the spell of nationalism and racism, as Europeans did last century. And if Asians cannot mature enough to work-out their differences, the US is neither capable nor willing to do it for them. America cannot derail an Asia intent on conflict and tension; the sooner that fantasy is dispelled and Asians take greater ownership of their own security, the better for all.”

Cross-posted at Asian Security Blog.

Here is your Thursday Morning Linkage. I’m going to start off with my usual conservation theme before turning to some other topics like a kerfuffle over mapping racial tolerance and the World Health Assembly (going on this week).

• Amphibians are in trouble all across the U.S. and world (disease, climate change, farm chemicals), along with bees and bats, nature is trying to tell us something
• Chinese bear bile farms are generating an uproar – in China!
• Fish have been moving to cooler water for decades in reaction to climate change

Did you see the cross-national map of racial tolerance that lit up the blogosphere with back and forth?

• Max Fisher writing for the Washington Post posts a map of cross-national attitudes towards racial tolerance based on the World Values Survey
• Critics question (“the cartography of bullshit“) whether race can be measured cross-nationally, find errors, and hammer Fisher for being a public intellectual
• Drezner and Ulfelder think the critics go overboard
• Saideman weighs in, wonders about a single metric to gauge races and what the questions actually ask
• Aba Muqawama ponders the perils of data journalism

In other news, the World Health Assembly is meeting this week and Laurie Garrett is on it in a two parter (I, II) , for how the World Health Organization is trying to handle a very limited budget, big dreams for global health, lots of money tied up in infectious diseases, and a new big pushes for action on health systems and non-communicable diseases like diabetes.