Author: pstaniland

A pair of valualbe recent data projects were recently released that provide new insights into public opinion in India and Pakistan.

The first is this year’s version of the Observer Research Foundation’s survey of Indian urban youth regarding foreign policy. I’m excited about this survey, especially if it continues to be offered regularly – there are very few surveys regarding Indian foreign policy (sample-limited or not) that consistently track opinions over time. There’s lots of interesting time in there, so check it out.

The second is a fascinating new United States Institute of Peace report by Asfandyar Mir and Niloufer Siddiqui, which uses focus groups and surveys to explore the dynamics of conspiracy theory and misinformation in Pakistan. It’s important social science, with important implications; for instance, they conclude that “Many Pakistanis are aware of the prevalence of misinformation, but survey results suggest that simple corrections of misinformation do not effectively counter negative downstream social and political beliefs.”

I’m going to be posting a lot more here now. I finally bailed on active posting on Twitter, at least for the time being. I joined Twitter in February 2015 very soon after my first kid was born as something mindless to do during long immobile naps and the like. Then I started getting some followers and indulging my endless distractibility, and ended up with over 20,000 followers and a lot of posts.

The upsides of Twitter are clear:

• incredible access to news and expertise from all over the world (for instance, irreplaceably useful for following the Russia-Ukraine war or 2019 India-Pakistan crisis).
• numerous new connections can be made fairly easily – I discovered a lot of smart and interesting people whose work I now read.
• opportunities for wide visibility, including in policy and journalistic circles, as well as in Asia.
• the latter two points are especially useful for someone located in “flyover country” in the Midwest (Chicago is a wonderful city, but not Boston-DC-NYC or the West Coast for international connections), interested in a region on the other side of the world, and, initially, an untenured professor trying to get a bit of attention in a staggeringly crowded marketplace.

I benefited a lot from Twitter, and even ended up writing an article using Twitter data.

The downsides, however, became increasingly apparent (they were always obvious to people wiser than me, like my viscerally Twitter-skeptical wife). Contributions are ephemeral and quickly disappear, even compared to blog posts. South Asia twitter is incredible in many ways, but I wasn’t very good at ignoring the intense vitriol accompanying it – like in many other parts of the site, the path to engagement is either denouncing or being denounced. Academia is a world of endless comparison, so there was a certain amount of unproductive stress that came with seeing people accomplishing many wonderful things that I was not.

Most importantly, I eventually internalized the fact that I say much stupider things when I don’t have an editor, reviewers, or 24 hours of letting something sit. I definitely learned that the hard way, however, after too many cringe-worthy tweets. The inclination to shoot something, anything, off into the void was too strong. As a matter of limiting my own idiocy, a couple years ago I decided to only post news or scholarly articles or anodyne commentary that lacked any real value-added. Yet I still found myself unable to stop from checking notifications and the like, making it the worst of all worlds.

Throw in the Elon Musk misadventure and the chaos it suggested (i.e. Trump being invited back on, the Kanye stuff, etc), and it seemed like a good time to stop. I’ll definitely still read some Twitter, assuming it chugs along, to get up to speed on crises, elections, breaking news, and the NBA, but I’ve hit the flat of the curve in terms of the value I get from it.

I’ll thus be reinvigorating this blog for the couple dozen of you who ever read it. I’ll take a slower pace and a longer shelf-life over the vastly-higher-visibility but fleeting world of twitter. The goal is a mix of substantive commentary with, much more frequently, links, short notes, and photographs.

On November 14, 2022, I had the pleasure of making the case for The Strategic Superiority of the Latke at the 76th Annual Latke-Hamantash Debate (for some background on this long-running tradition, see here and here). You can watch my remarks here on YouTube.

I have a new piece up in Lawfare that builds on a research agenda I’ve been pursuing as a hopeful-third book project, and assorted scholarly and policy articles. The broader project explores how geopolitical rivalries intersect with the domestic politics of third-party states affected by these competitions among great powers. I took a couple years off of public-facing writing to both deal with various other things in life and to learn about a broader set of cases and dynamics than I’d previously explored; there’s no point just repeating the same arguments about the same topics and places indefinitely – sometimes it seems like I just need to re-tool and find something new to say.

This article zooms in on a set of lessons from Asia’s Cold War for analysts, scholars, and policymakers on how to think about the internal political dynamics within these third-party countries. The first couple paragraphs set the stage:

“Competition between the United States and China in Asia has generated ongoing discussion about whether Asia’s present will resemble its Cold War past. In one key area, the contemporary period is—at least so far—much less dangerous. From the 1940s through the 1980s, Asia’s Cold War intertwined major power rivalry with intense local struggles for power and influence. Domestic political competition was frequently embedded within and connected to external geopolitics, producing complex, and often violent, outcomes.

Classic questions of strategy and statecraft could not be cleanly separated from internal political struggles for power, legitimacy, and control. The “authoritarian Leviathans” of Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia deployed anti-communism at home and abroad. Marxist-Leninist regimes with strong ties to the Soviet Union, China, or both emerged and consolidated in Laos and Vietnam. Militaries in Thailand and Pakistan mobilized Cold War fears and U.S. support to protect their political power. South Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, and Cambodia experienced extraordinary levels of instability and civil war, with internal armed actors closely linked to, though not fully controlled by, external players. The Sino-Soviet split and India-China competition also influenced the internal politics of states in the region.

This fusing of the global and local was not universal—India was comparatively insulated from these Cold War currents, for instance—but it helped to spur extraordinary levels of violence and political instability from 1946 until the mid-1970s in Southeast Asia, and then the fragmentation of Afghanistan and its spillover in the 1980s.”

Two of my recent-ish articles are now ungated and available to read to those without university library access:

1. With the remarkably wonderful coauthors Asfandyar Mir and Tamar Mitts, “Political Coalitions and Social Media: Evidence from Pakistan,” Perspectives on Politics (FirstView): “Social media is frequently an arena of intense competition among major political actors across the world. We argue that a fruitful way of understanding this competition is as coalitions among key actors and their networks of followers. These coalitions can both advance a shared political message and target mutual rivals. Importantly, coalitions can be tacit or explicit, and they do not necessarily depend on direct state manipulation or repression, although they often do. This makes a coalitional framework particularly valuable for studying complex political environments in which online actors blend cooperation and competition. Empirically, we show the value of this approach with novel data collection and analysis of Twitter and Facebook content from 2018–19 in Pakistan, with a focus on the dynamics leading up to and following the controversial 2018 general election. We map out networks of narrative alignment and conflict on Pakistani social media, providing important insights into the relationships among the major political parties, military, media, and dissidents. Future research can fruitfully explore the causes and effects of powerful social media coalitions.”
2. “Leftist Insurgency in Democracies,” Comparative Political Studies (2021): “Leftist insurgency has been a major form of civil war since 1945. Existing research on revolution has linked leftist rebellions to authoritarianism or blocked democratization. This research overlooks the onset of leftist insurgencies in a number of democracies. This paper theorizes the roots of this distinctive form of civil war, arguing that democracy shapes how these insurgencies begin, acting as a double-edged sword that simultaneously blocks the emergence of a revolutionary coalition and triggers intra-left splits that breed radical splinters. Leftist revolts can thus emerge during “incorporation windows” that trigger disputes within a divided left over electoral co-optation. Empirically, the paper studies all cases of leftist insurgency in southern Asia since 1945, under both autocracy and democracy, as well as a set of non-onset cases. It offers a new direction for understanding varieties of revolutionary mobilization, highlighting ideology, intra-left debate, and the multi-faceted effects of democracy on conflict.”

Clary, Lalwani, and Siddiqui with an important new survey on Indian views of foreign policy issues; Confidence and Nationalism in Modi’s India:

“A new 7000-person survey conducted by phone in India between April 13 and May 14, 2022, finds: 

• high levels of support for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who likely remains among the most popular national leaders in the world today; 
• extraordinary nationalist sentiment among Indians, at high levels compared to prior cross-national surveys using identical question wording; 
• troubling signs of intolerance toward India’s large Muslim minority, which helps provide context to recent controversies;  
• strong confidence in the Indian government’s ability to defend India against potential domestic and foreign threats;  
• expectations among a majority of Indian respondents that the U.S. military would support India in the event of a war with China or Pakistan; and 
• large majorities in favor of Indian numerical nuclear superiority against its adversaries.”