Author: pstaniland

A week or two ago I got asked by Vox to respond to a couple questions about political violence in democracies, and in America in particular. My answers didn’t make the cut for the article (in favor of shorter and better answers by more famous people!) so I thought I’d just reproduce them below. But two additions. First, in the American case, the violence accompanying the overthrow of Reconstruction seems badly under-studied by political scientists interested in political violence, militia and paramilitary mobilization, sub-national authoritarianism and democratic collapse, and permeable boundaries between “normal” and “abnormal” politics. Second, a point that Christian Davenport has rightly pushed me on, even in “peaceful democratic societies” there is often extensive *state* violence that can be analytically hidden by reframing it as either apolitical (i.e., policing in the US, which is too often portrayed as a technocratic matter of law and order/bureaucratic processes) or as distinct from non-state violence. In the US case, the Department of Justice and local police departments have been deeply political actors, seeking to build and protect particular national and local visions of the state, nation, and contours of democracy.  Political scientists are now starting to study it (for instance, Soss and Weaver, Mummolo), which is awesome. Hopefully we will see a re-balancing toward these kinds of fundamental questions of order, state violence, and social control in the US as part of a process of deprovincializing the study of America.

Paul talks to Vox:

“Question 1) Why do peaceful democratic societies tend to descend into violence?
Paul: It’s extremely rare for fully consolidated, Western democracies to descend into large-scale political violence. However, violence in democracies remains quite common. Roughly speaking, we can see four patterns of political violence in democracies, in order from most to least severe. First, the most severe political violence in democracies occurs when central governments themselves split apart into warring elite factions, as in the American, Lebanese, or Spanish Civil Wars. This can lead to state failure and/or conventional civil war. Second, very commonly, we can see robust insurgencies in democracies. These are most likely when central governments are unable to extend total control over violence to geographic and social peripheries, and face either excluded ethnic groups or revolutionary movements able to mobilize poor, lower-class populations against the metropole. Colombia, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines are good examples, with electoral politics coexisting with pitched insurgent warfare.

Third, electoral violence is quite common in democracies, ranging from riots and pogroms to intense state repression of opposition parties and dissidents to the rise of armed political parties. This is most likely in weakly-institutionalized environments when contenders fear that if they do not win/hold onto power, they will be thoroughly excluded from political power in the future. It can also occur when the rule of law has been politicized to an extent that law and order becomes subservient to the needs of strategic politicians trying to win elections by polarizing the electorate or targeting the supporters of rivals. The politicization of policing can be particularly dangerous here, opening space for specialists in violence, thugs, and the armed militias of political parties to use violence without facing sanction or repression. Kenya, Weimar Germany, and India are cases in which electoral violence has sometimes been very intense. The same was true in some American cities in the 19th century, often linked to ethnicized patronage politics, and in the deep South as part of the maintenance of white supremacy.

Finally, there can be violence in relatively rich and consolidated democracies. There are radical revolutionary movements, generally separatist, leftist, or Islamist, that use violence to try overthrow the political system; these anti-systemic challenges see “mainstream” politics as a hopeless pathway for affecting real change. Northern Ireland, Basque country, Islamist militants, and leftist terrorists in the 1960s and 1970s show how diverse these anti-systemic militants can be. A more complex type of violence can come from the right, with groups like the KKK and radical militia movement in the US, that claim to be restoring/protecting the “true” nation/Constitution. They articulate their violence in terms of maintaining or restoring an idyllic past, not replacing it with a fundamentally new order. The past they claim to uphold was generally highly repressive/exclusionary, and these groups’ violence reflects their goal of a return to their own dominance. While the central state is comparatively powerful in these rich-democracy contexts, arms remain available to some extent, governments may misjudge the extent of the threat they face or only be able to contain rather than eliminate it, and political polarization creates segments of society that view violence, or its threat, as the only way to escape an otherwise intolerable status quo.

Question 2) Is America regressing back into a more politically violent society (as we were in, say, the 60s)?
Paul: We are certainly not close to the level of the 1960s, when a variety of non-state and government forces used substantial violence. But there is potential for real danger. Government violence, by local police departments, has become a much more salient focus of discontent, and requires urgent attention. On the non-state side of things, extremist groups on the right became far more vocal during the Obama years, and many viewed Donald Trump quite favorably. This movement will continue to draw on anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, and anti-immigrant sentiment to justify its existence. The armed left appears to be far smaller, but clashes in cities and campuses since Trump’s election suggest the possibility of escalation. America has a long history of political violence that is fundamental to its political development, from the Civil War to labor strife to lynchings to vigilantism to state repression to the cleansing of Native Americans. There is no reason to expect that it will go away, especially in these deeply polarized and uncertain times, but the current situation does not resemble the most dramatic instances of violence in the American past.”

Back in the fall of 2004 I found myself staring at the Wikipedia page for Mali, trying to code something about the nature of Tuareg rebels. This was for a stats class where I needed to supplement Nick Sambanis’ civil war dataset (I think I was trying to explain which civil wars end up conventional and which end up insurgencies; data later lost to hard drive crash pre-Dropbox). I found the whole affair fairly absurd, since I knew nothing about Mali, or anywhere else. Which is when I decided to focus in on more case-specific analyses, and eventually ended up specializing in South Asia.

In the last few years I’ve come back to the big quantitative, cross-national datasets. It began after I published a conceptual piece in 2012 on “wartime political orders,” laying the early basis for my current book project. I had grand ambitions of pulling some of the existing data on civil wars, armed groups, peace deals, ceasefires, and the like off the shelf (Walter, Fortna, UCDP, PRIO, Sambanis, Fearon and Laitin, etc.) to code these wartime political orders, and complement them with my own case studies – and voila, book!

But it quickly turned out that the landscape of political violence I was familiar with in South Asia was only partially, at best, represented in the most-cited and important datasets – some groups and conflicts didn’t exist in the datasets, some were coded radically differently across datasets (depending on who you believe among two of the most prominent early 2000s datasets, India’s Northeast got itself a civil war either in 1952 or 1990), others popped in and out for only specific years of their much longer existences, most of the ceasefires and some of the peace deals I was seeing in the cases were missing, etc.

Much of this was because I was interested in a broader phenomenon – the full range of armed group-government interactions, across levels of violence and state-group cooperation. So it was unfair to blame the datasets for that: they were just measuring something different. But some of the issues were because there were no or very thin/inappropriate sources, which led to lots of missingness even where there should have been data. It became clear that if I wanted to actually measure this stuff, I’d have to do it as a complement to existing data, rather than using them directly.

The toughest thing  was nailing down what exactly the dependent variable was I wanted to measure – I became dissatisfied with wartime political orders (what about non-wartime contexts?; the active/passive/no cooperation thing wasn’t ideal; the territorial segmentation wasn’t all that theoretically interesting in retrospect) – but didn’t know what to put in its place precisely, much less how to measure it.

This triggered a long process of conceptualizing, operationalizing, and, finally, now, building new data to represent these state-group armed orders, as part of a broader approach I call armed politics. A 2015 JCR piece, ostensibly about militias but really about all kinds of groups, started to think through these outcomes, but didn’t figure out how to measure anything and remained conceptually fuzzy in some important ways (was I looking at government strategy? Dyadic orders?). Fieldwork in India, Thailand, and Burma/Myanmar (plus some awesome libraries in Singapore), reading books, looking over datasets, and accumulating government reports and press accounts is how I had to figure this out.

The first piece to offer an empirical agenda for systematically(-ish?) measuring these orders just came out in the Journal of Peace Research. I’ve disaggregated the JPR version of coding slightly (as I note in a footnote, military hostilities can be broken further into containment and total war orders), but the basic approach is what a research team has been working on for the last year in my Armed Orders in South Asia (AOSA) project. They’ve been writing up case studies on each state-group dyad based on a variety of sources, many of them local or specialist. Some of the key characteristics we get at in the case studies are then quantified (in a way that allows many of the state-group dyads to be directly linked to Uppsala conflict dyads, though many of my dyads don’t show up in UCDP). Eventually both the cases and dataset will get publicly posted with lots of footnotes and bibliographies.

So what have I learned from all of this?

1. Taking a look under the hood of prominent datasets, and especially looking at their sourcing documents (if they exist), is incredibly valuable. There can be some interesting stuff under there. We face powerful incentives to grab data and run with them, while sidestepping questions of quality and sourcing. That’s fine and tons of great papers get into top journals doing so, but there are some issues that are rarely discussed. Open up the sourcing and take a hard look at the cases you know well, and see what you think – and what its implications are for description and inference.
2. Most of the cross-national and cross-dyad data are based on case studies that form the basis for quantitative data. Good qualitative evidence, in this context, is necessary for good quantitative evidence; if the qualitative data is bad, there’s no reason to expect good quantitative data. This is especially problematic if we have reason to think the quality of the qualitative sources is systematically biased, across regions, time, types of conflicts, etc (I have a sneaking suspicion that Manipur, Shan State, and Balochistan get way less international attention and scholarly coverage than, say, Northern Ireland or Iraq). All datasets, including mine, will miss or get things wrong; the question is how much bias there is in these misfires, and what you can live with for the questions you’re asking.
3. There are hard trade-offs involved, though – doing really thorough deep dives into local sources, the secondary literature, etc. is only possible for a subset of cases, rather than being able to cover everything all the time. Choices have to be made, none will be perfect, and there are a variety of legitimate bets to make on what will be most fruitful.
4. Going from concept to theory to data takes a very long time. Trying to figure out a new dependent variable at any of these levels is tricky. I don’t have the methodological firepower of many of my (brilliant) peers, so I make my living, in part, by coming up with interesting new ideas and concepts. At various points this ended up taking me down dead ends, aimless wanderings, and data approaches that unambiguously failed. And once I ended up getting grant money to do the broader armed politics data project and figured out the timeline involved, I realized the book would take a lot longer than I expected. The best-laid plans often fall quickly by the wayside; that’s just part of the business.

Ariel Ahram brought this fascinating report to my attention: Rex Douglass and Candace Rondeaux, “MINING THE GAPS: A Text Mining-Based Meta-Analysis of the Current State of Research on Violent Extremism”.

A few particularly interesting findings from their analysis of published work on conflict:

• It is impossible for anyone to keep up with the literature: “The sample of academic articles collected for this study contain over 14 million words. An average individual researcher would require over a year and a half to read that body of work.”
• We need more work on Asia! 🙂 “topics related to violent extremism in South and Southeast Asia, parts of Africa, and Latin America are underrepresented, while European and Middle Eastern conflicts are overrepresented”
• Qualitative and social network empirical research and formal models are all substantially under-used: “Few studies on P/CVE-relevant topics employ social network analysis or ethnographic methods—a stunning finding given the growing body of anecdotal evidence on the centrality of social bonds and and cultural currency in conflicts shaped by identity politics. Likewise, although they are a near prerequisite for theory development in many areas of economics and political science, formal models are a niche commodity rarely touched on in much of the literature reviewed for this study.”
• Very little use of local sourcing or data (a topic I’ll come back to soon, I hope): “Fewer still rely on primary source materials in local languages or locally collected data in their analysis. Almost none of the top scholars hail from the countries and regions most impacted by the threat of violent extremism”
• Jim Fearon, Ted Gurr, and Bruce Hoffman are pretty big deals when it comes to citations
• Citation clustering (something I particularly, though not exclusively, notice with economists – cursory cite to Don Horowitz or Thucydides or Hobbes, and then off to the races ignoring every other political scientist!): “We find that formal modelers cluster, as do economists and qualitative scholars”
• Figure 7 is pretty fascinating, on how citations around particular authors relate to another – you can see the OCV-ish cluster, the Peace Science cluster, the security studies cluster, the social movements cluster, etc.

An interesting Noria Research piece by Lola Guyot on the evolution of Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora politics since the destruction of the LTTE:

“The divisions between these different political groups are not only due to rivalries between former sections of the LTTE. There are also generational and ideological elements. While members of the TCCs are typically first generation immigrants mainly socializing with their community, the new lobbying organizations are usually run by well integrated individuals, and in certain cases, by young second generation immigrants who became activists only after the war. These groups do not always have the same views on the goals to pursue and the strategies to adopt. With the defeat of the LTTE came a liberation of speech that made room for all these different views. But activists and organizations face contradictory pressures from the diasporic community and their Western interlocutors that affect their position.”

Dawn has tracked down key documents laying out the scope and ambition of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). It’s quite something:
“thousands of acres of agricultural land will be leased out to Chinese enterprises to set up “demonstration projects” in areas ranging from seed varieties to irrigation technology. A full system of monitoring and surveillance will be built in cities from Peshawar to Karachi, with 24 hour video recordings on roads and busy marketplaces for law and order. A national fibreoptic backbone will be built for the country not only for internet traffic, but also terrestrial distribution of broadcast TV, which will cooperate with Chinese media in the “dissemination of Chinese culture”.”

Go read the whole thing.

A piece in The Diplomat on the charmed life of the Myanmar military these days:
“While everything else is in flux, the position of the Tatmadaw in national affairs appears more stable than ever. Snug in its constitutional bunker, it can reap the fruits of improved foreign relations, a cooperative civilian government, solid public support for their crackdown on the Rohingya, and the increased revenue that comes with a rapidly growing economy. The taciturn senior general can afford a brief, complacent smile.”

This is a truly stunning op-ed by the former GOC-in-C of the Indian Army’s South West Command, particularly these selections:

“Public censuring and reprimanding of the security forces by senior officials and political leaders has steadily eroded the status and authority of the security forces. There is, therefore, a need to restore the primacy of the uniformed forces in society by concerted effort, at all levels.”

‘The anti-national elements in Srinagar thrive on the politically-motivated, anti-national, pro-Pakistan statements of the National Conference and PDP leaders”

“The example of the Ikhwanis is a good way of redressing the Valley’s situation. The Ikhwanis broke away from the militants, came overground and assisted the army in eliminating foreign terrorists”

I’ll write more about the convergence of hard-line Indian views with the long-held views of Kashmiri separatists later. Things will only get worse.

A smart intervention by Ken Opalo here in response to my post below.

I was particularly struck by this passage:

“Completely anarchic conflicts involving collapsing states and incoherent hyper-localized rebellions — your stereotypical African conflict, if you will — are a unique historical experience rooted in the states that did really fall apart in the late 1980s to early 1990s (pretty much in the midst of Africa’s continental economic nadir). It is instructive that these states were concentrated in the Mano River region and Central Africa, some of the regions worst affected by the socio-political challenges of Africa’s lost long decade (1980-1995). ”

As Opalo suggests, for outsiders like me reading mainstream political science civil war studies rooted in African cases, this is indeed what we see presented as “how Africa is” – a lot of the literature I’ve read uses phrases like “warfare in Africa” and “ethnic politics in Africa” that asserts a particular politics – generally of greed and fear amidst neopatrimonial corruption – for the whole continent (a recent exception is Straus’s 2015 book, which focuses on ideology). I’ve always been struck by this, and wonder where its historical/sociological roots lie. It would be tricky for me to write something like “in South Asia, politics are characterized by X” since Nepal doesn’t work the same way as India, which in turn is a very different political kettle of fish than Sri Lanka.

Which is why it’s important, and valuable, to see pushback that emphasizes instead variation, both across countries and over time.

I recently came across an old camera that I took around Asia back in 2013. It still had a few shots from time in Assam and especially Nagaland, which I uploaded and fixed up a bit (Flickr album here). And it reminded me much I hated that camera, which I’d bought after a few minutes of cursory googling – terrible in low-light because of a tiny sensor and unreliable autofocus, especially at the long telephoto end. The Nagaland photos show it at its best, since it was bright and sunny and the ISO was kept nice and low, but the sunniness created the problem of blown highlights and thus lost details in the sky. I’ve always regretted taking it, rather than something better, on research trips in India, Thailand, Myanmar, and Singapore during that year. Taking photos in dim libraries/archives was a disaster, with illegible photos and endless autofocus hunting and weird distracting/embarrassing whirring noises.

So what should someone heading out to do some kind of fieldwork buy? I’m assuming this is a grad student (or possibly aid worker, Peace Corps, etc) who wants to capture their experiences, but also possibly to take lots of photos of documents, maps, etc in dimly-lit archives, have survey teams use it in their activities, etc. Thus the parameters are 1) decent image quality, better than a smartphone, 2) very small size that is highly portable (so no RX10 III or most DSLRs), and 3) a tight budget, ideally in the $200-600 range used (so no Leica M Monochrom).

There are four basic categories I would recommend.

1-inch sensor compacts. I think they are the best bets for most – solid image quality in low light, useful zoom ranges (though much shorter than the cheaper, smaller sensor compacts), reasonably responsive, and very very small. The Sony RX100 series, which ranges massively in specification and price from models I through V, pioneered this category (here’s a nice summary from DPreview). The Panasonic LX15 and, with a longer zoom but slower lens, ZS100, and the Canon G7X II are other excellent options. A DPreview overview of this category recently came out.

Large-sensor compacts. These are probably outside the budget of the average grad student, but used options may be affordable. These tend to have a single focal length, equivalent to either 28mm or 35mm, and a larger sensor. The Fuji X100 series and X70, Ricoh GR/GR II (though beware dust on sensor), and Nikon Coolpix A are the standard possibilities. The Panasonic LX100 is an exception in this category – an “in-between” sensor size plus a zoom. There are real trade-offs with these – can you afford them, do you need a large sensor, and can you live with a fixed or limited focal length?

Interchangeable mirrorless cameras (with small lenses). I’m leaving aside classic DSLRs here, like the Canon Rebels, Nikon D3400, etc for size reasons. Instead, for people needing high levels of portability, the newer breed of mirrorless cameras makes sense. They are excellent – very good 4/3 or APS-C sensors, fast and accurate autofocus, and a wide range of lenses. Olympus E-M10/II and E-PLs, Panasonic GX850/GX85, Sony a5100/6000, Fuji X-A3, and Canon M6 are plausible options here, plus various other used options in the Fuji X, Sony E-mount, Canon M, and Olympus/Panasonic Micro Four-Thirds systems. There are small, if not always very good, collapsible zoom lenses for Sony, Panasonic, and Olympus that can make the body + lens package extremely compact.

The downside is that often there are few small lenses, and once the lenses grow larger, portability decreases. The kit zooms that come with these cameras are sometimes not great and on their own might undermine the advantage of such a camera over a smaller sensored compact with a faster, sharper lens. Buying new lenses blows the budget, so a lot hinges on money and the likelihood of/interest in expanding one’s lenses collection over time.

Specialist cameras. For people going to very challenging physical environments, an Olympus TG-4 Tough camera might be good – not great image quality, but built to withstand sand, rain, snow, freezing weather, extreme heat, etc. For large “full frame” digital sensors, we’re way beyond budget, but a Sony A7/A7 II might be a good option. If you want a film camera, a good condition Olympus XA/XA2 is a nice highly portable possibility.

Tips. For figuring out portability, the Compact Camera Meter lets you compare the size and weight of cameras and camera/lens combinations. Buying used is best through KEH, Adorama, B&H, and highly rated, frequent sellers on Ebay, Etsy, and Amazon (especially if Amazon fulfillment allows returns). Best Buy also has some great Open Box deals on their website and their Ebay Outlet store to check out; I’ve seen RX100 I’s under $300 there. Proceed with great caution on Craiglist, most Ebay sellers, etc. Reviews from DPreview, Wirecutter, Imaging Resource, and numerous other sites and blogs can be very helpful.

Ayub Khan is generally framed as an authoritarian modernizer who tried to build a centralized Pakistan run along technocratic lines. He is frequently set in contrast to the Islamizing Zia ul-Haq, who more aggressively pursued an Islamist ideological project after 1977. Huntington, in Political Order in Changing Societies, used Ayub as a classic example of the ambitious military modernizer bringing order from the wreckage of weakly institutionalized civilian democracy.

When it comes to Islam, Ayub is seen as personally not particularly religious, instead trying to mobilize a particular brand of Muslim nationalism for his own purposes, whilte set against the more ideological clerics and religious parties he despised. This is not wrong on certain dimensions (he certainly hated the traditionalist ulama etc), but it’s striking just how deeply his diaries reveal him to be obsessed with the question of religion and the Bengali. Hinduism is repeatedly equated to Bengali identity in his discussions of the problem of East Pakistan. I’ve found Ayub’s diaries (edited by Craig Baxter) quite fascinating; a few select excerpts on the Bengali issue:

• If ground given to Bengali regionalism, “the point of no return would be reached and East Pakistan will go under Hinduism and be separated forever” (25 May 67, 100-101)
• “when thinking of problems of East Pakistan one cannot help feeling that their urge to isolate themselves from West Pakistan and revert to Hindu language and culture is close to the fact that they have no culture and language of their own nor have they been able to assimilate the culture of the Muslims of the subcontinent by turning their back on Urdu. Further, by doing so they have forced two state languages on Pakistan. This has been a great tragedy for them and for the rest of Pakistan. They especially lack literature on the philosophy of Islam” (12 Aug 67, 132)
• “the two communities lived strictly apart with very little in common. This is because our philosophy of life was totally opposed and so our culture too had to be different. Our contact is perfunctory and shallow. I told them that through emotional upsurge the East Pakistani had cut himself off from Urdu, the vehicle in which Muslim thought and philosophy is expressed. If consequence, he was now totally at sea, drifting. This will prove very dangerous for their future. If not careful they will have no choice but to drift back to Hinduism and be engulfed by it” (23 August 1967, 137)
• “without meaning any unkindness, the fact of the matter is that a large majority of the Muslims in East Pakistan have an animist base which is a thick layer of Hinduism and top crust of Islam which is pierced by Hinduism from time to time” ( 23 August 1967, 138)
• in conversation with Khawaja Shahabuddin re: East Pakistan “we could not think of a worst combination. Hindus and Bengalis. I told the Khawaja not to lose heart. If worse comes to the worst, we shall not hesitate to fight a relentless battle against the disruptionists of East Pakistan. Rivers of blood will flow if need be, unhappily. We will arise to save our crores Muslims from Hindu slavery” (7 Sept 1967, 145)
• “I am surprised at the Bengali outlook. It does not conform to any rational yardstick. They were exploited by the caste Hindus, the Muslim rulers and even the British. It was at the advent of Pakistan that they got the blessing of freedom and equality of status and a real voice in the running of their government. . . any normal people should have recognized and rejoiced at this blessing. Instead, they urge to fall back on their Bengali past. This can only result in their complete absorption by Hindu West Bengal influence” (Jan-March 1968, 210 – date not given because during period of illness)