The Nixon administration’s 1969-1974 Nepal file

Posted on by pstaniland

All kinds of cool stuff in here, from the US government’s assessment of the new Nepali ambassador (“Although essentially a democrat, he has come to accept the need for increasing measures of discipline and authoritarianism to overcome the enormous problems presented by the challenge of modernization in Nepal”) to the disarming of the Khampas to drug smuggling to Indian foreign policy in Nepal (“WE ASSUME THAT INDIAN PREFERENCE WOULD BE FOR LIBERALIZED REGIME IN NEPAL IN WHICH NCP HAD SHARE OF POWER AND WHICH WOULD THEORETICALLY AT LEAST BE LESS OBSESSIVELY PREOCCUPIED WITH INDIA, WHILE AT THE SAME TIME MORE RESPONSIVE TO GOI DESIDERATA. IN OUR VIEW, HOWEVER, THIS PREFERENCE FALLS FAR SHORT OF DEFINITIVE COMMITMfNT TO OVERTHROW OF CURRENT REGIME OR TO INSTIGATION 0F COUP OR lNSURRECTION WE WOULD APPRECIATE HAVING EMBASSY DELHI’S VIEWS OF INDIAN ASSESSMENT OF INTERNAL SITUATION IN NEPAL” to the possibilities of revolt against the king. Go check it out.

The evolution of civil wars research

Posted on by pstaniland

The editors of the Journal of Civil Wars asked me to reflect on the evolution of the field since I entered graduate school, for the 25th Anniversary Special Issue of the journal. I was happy to do so. The full, open access text can be found here.

I made a few arguments:

  • We’ve seen three broad “waves” of civil war research that each was characterized by a particular set of areas of focus. I kind of “grew up” in the second wave, while much of my more recent work has been located in the third wave.
  • While there are general characteristics of each wave, the field has been enduringly fragmented across geographic, methodological, unit-of-analysis, and social network divides. These is inevitable but has some downsides; as any European reader will see, for instance, mine is admittedly a fairly US-centric view of the field.
  • I offer some specific thoughts/advice/self-denunciation on what has been most valuable in terms of process, feedback, and collaboration in making my own research.
  • The third, current, wave is moving toward crafting a broader “political violence” field. This is overall a good thing that explores exciting new areas that are related to but move beyond the central questions of the first two waves. It also, however, reflects the challenges of a saturated core of the civil war research area – it’s harder and harder to make major new contributions in areas that were central to the field 20 or even 10 years ago. This creates distinctive challenges for new entrants, and puts on onus on more senior scholars to encourage and reward innovation and new directions by younger researchers.
  • The subfield’s evolution shows a blend of intellectual innovation with direct responses to real-world political events, an interaction that extends back to the 1950s (when places like RAND and scholars like the modernization theorists responded to wars in Algeria, Malaya, and French Indochina by investigating sources of rebellion).
  • More embarrassingly, re-reading the abstract for the first time in awhile shows how much I apparently love to use some variant of the word “broad”!