Author: pstaniland

Ashu Varshney has a long and fascinating interview with Walter Andersen about his new book (co-authored with Shridhar Damle) on the RSS. Read the whole thing.

This review of Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now is one of the most sustained demolitions of a book I’ve read in a very long time. And a nice reminder that technocracy-as-politics is rarely a good idea – even if it is being advocated by a famous Harvard professor.

The Stimson Center’s South Asian Voices program interviewed me on a wide variety of questions related to South Asia’s politics and international relations – check it out.

From McMurdo and Hocking in War on the Rocks:

“Citizens cannot be expected to hold institutions and leaders accountable for issues on which they have not been properly educated.

Even at America’s most elite institutions of learning, there is work to be done. In an international security course that one of us attended at Yale last spring, approximately 40 undergraduates were asked what event led to America’s military involvement in Afghanistan. The most common answers were: to unseat Saddam Hussein; to dismantle Afghanistan’s weapons of mass destruction; and “oil.” Eventually, the only student who could correctly name the 9/11 attacks as the impetus was a student born and raised in another country.”

One of my favorite articles is Sheri Berman’s “Civil Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic” because it pushed past the blandly positive celebrations of civil society that have been very prominent in political science.

UChicago Ph.D student Sana Jaffrey has a fascinating preview of ongoing dissertation research in New Mandala. It explores how civil society in Indonesia has become an increasingly illiberal force:
“Yet instead of advancing progressive reforms that guarantee civic equality, these energies are being deployed to articulate illiberal demands that emphasise communitarian differences. . . .

Unlike the New Order, however, there is considerable slippage in the way that local leaders interpreted and executed their reinstated social control functions, far beyond just reporting suspected terrorist activity. They have, in fact, expanded to regulate a host of activities that allegedly “agitate” residents.

Most frequently, these efforts target individuals belonging to religious and social minorities. These include rejection of “deviant” sects, prohibition of worship by minority religions, punishment of alleged fornication and even the forced eviction of homosexuals, transgender people, and families of suspected terrorists. Troublingly, most of these interventions are made in consultation with local law enforcement officials, who acknowledge RT/RW chiefs as representatives of their residents’ demands and facilitate their requests as part of community policing.. . . .

recent events indicate that the RT/RWs may also be resuming their political control functions amid contests over the allocation of state funds by rival candidates”

 

 

This is a thoughtful piece by Shoaib Daniyal; I’ve long thought that the particular fusion of violence and party politics West Bengal (and Kerala) is among the most under-studied topics in Indian politics:

“What makes politics in West Bengal express itself with such blood and fury? The answer might lie in the structure of rural politics in West Bengal and the existence of the “party-society”: a system where political parties dominate every strand of rural life”

The vast majority of research on civil war and political violence focuses on the “developing world.” Which makes sense, since that there is where we find most contemporary conflict.

But it’s worth remembering how widespread violence has been in what we now consider the relatively calm, stable, non-violent developed world as well. And often very recently.  Here are a few works I’m familiar with – staggeringly far from complete, of course – that provide insights into this history and its implications for the present. I’ll be adding new items as I remember them, come across them, or get recommendations.

Siniawer, Ruffians, Yakuza, Nationalists: The Violent Politics of Modern Japan.

Obert, The Six-Shooter State: Public and Private Violence in American Politics.

Mobrand, “The Street Leaders of Seoul and the Foundations of the South Korean Political Order,” Modern Asian Studies.

Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion.

Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End.

Diehl, Paramilitary Politics in Weimar Germany.

Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence and Klansville, USA: The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-era Ku Klux Klan.

Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.

Bloom and Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party.

Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.

Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877.

Balcells, Rivalry and Revenge: the Politics of Violence During Civil War (about Spain)

Gerwarth and Horne, War in Peace: Paramilitary Politics in Europe after the Great War.

Della Porta, Social Movements, Political Violence, and the State: A Comparative Analysis of Italy and Germany.

Kopstein and Wittenberg, Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust.

Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen, Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics.

Soss and Weaver, “Police are our Government: Politics, Political Science, and the Policing of Race-Class Subjugated Communities,” Annual Review of Political Science.

Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps.

Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (chapters on Greece).

Hoffman, Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917-1947.

Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism.

Jake Shapiro, Oliver Vande Eynde, Katherin eIngram, and Emefa Addo Agawu have written a really useful piece outlining the nature and timing of counter-Naxal strategies by the Indian central government and by various states. In addition to the case studies, they do some preliminary statistical analyses and find that “it is striking that no policy intervention was followed by marked drops in violence across the 8 states we study.” The Naxalite conflict has received too little scholarly attention, so it’s great to see this.

David Scott Mathieson’s piece on the remarkable paucity of research on civil conflict in Burma/Myanmar within the study of civil war is a must-read:
“There is lamentably little known about the history of the civil war or about the micro-dynamics of conflict. It begs the question: why is Burma almost totally absent from the academic and reportage canon of conflict literature? In academic research and related human rights documentation and journalism, there is generally only passing mention of Burma’s conflicts within historical and academic surveys of civil war.”

And to bolster his point – even if we accept that there are serious problems with quantitative data on Myanmar, in the current UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict dataset, almost 12% of the entire dataset’s dyad-year observation occur in the country.

This is a great piece by Reuters on the Pakistani military’s kneecapping of a free media:

“After Geo TV, Pakistan’s most popular station, was taken off the air across much of the country at the end of March, military representatives pressed the channel to cease favorable coverage of ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and stop any criticism of the Supreme Court and the “establishment”, according to the two people, who had knowledge of the negotiations.

The “establishment” is a commonly used euphemism for the military in Pakistan.

Written instructions by Geo management to staff last week that were reviewed by Reuters spelled out “key editorial points that we have to manage and implement” to be restored to the airwaves.

Besides banning negative portrayals of the “establishment” and any allegations the Supreme Court might be interfering in politics, the instructions said there should be no reports on Nawaz Sharif’s ongoing corruption trial “that helps build a narrative that he and his children are innocent”. . . .

Three major cable operators, who spoke on condition of anonymity, earlier told Reuters they had pulled the channel from their rosters after direct instructions from unidentified military officers, even though the army has no official authority over the media. . . .

Five of the Geo insiders said they knew the widespread cable blackout was a result of military pressure. However, only two were willing to talk about the conditions laid out by military officials to Geo for restoring the channels, and they said they were doing so against direct orders from the company’s owner.

One executive at a leading cable company that covers more than a million households in Pakistan told Reuters he received a telephone call at the end of March from a senior officer in the ISI telling him to take Geo TV off their roster. . . ..

There was never any question of refusing the order, he said.

A second cable executive said his company shut down Geo broadcasts after receiving a telephone call. Asked who made the call, he said: “I can’t say the name, you know, big brother, the boots.””