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I inadvertently triggered an interesting Twitter conversation the other day. I’d been following the Corey Robin-Levitsky & Ziblatt-Jeff Isaac debates about authoritarianism and the US. I tweeted that a lot of very prominent Americanists don’t seem to have publicly weighed in much one way or another about whether we should be sanguine about Trump or not (Nathan Kalmoe and Jonathan Ladd interpreted this to mean I said no Americanists had ever said anything about Trump – I meant it to focus on the democratic stability question (per Brendan Nyhan); mea culpa if an inaccurate larger claim came across).

I actually thought this would lead to Americanists weighing on whether they thought these arguments were missing the mark (as Matt Grossman later did very valuably, arguing that “status quo expecting area studies specialists (Americanists) are more on target on Trump admin” than the non-US specialists), but it didn’t go that direction.

There were instead three very different reactions, all of which strike me as having real merit – but which also can contradict one another. I was off at the Field Museum for the majority of it and things kind of got away from me, but I’ll try to summarize the basic responses since I think they say interesting things (apologies if your involvement wasn’t noted!). Thanks to everyone who participated – maybe Twitter is more than just a total time sink.

Americanists Can’t Say Much about Trump (at least without comparative data)

The first set of responses agreed with my premise and suggested that Americanists aren’t well-positioned to study key debates around Trump because the relevant data is comparative. Jeffrey Lax wrote that “I think it’s because there is less to say if you study even somewhat “normal” AP. This is off the charts, so it speaks well that many aren’t extrapolating beyond what they study. Some know more & say more. CP more relevant to lots of current ?”.

Brendan Nyhan – who has been very vocal indeed about dangers surrounding Trump – wrote that, while “we can draw on topics listed above in American but whether they cumulate into threat is harder to answer w/just US.” Julia Azari suggested that “the relevant data for a particular kind of argument is non-US – institutional erosion and authoritarian rhetoric.” And Pippa Norris jumped in to argue that “I suspect Americanists lack the conceptual tools to handle this phenomenon”. W.K. Winecoff argued that “Comparativists think about qualitative variation in political institutions. Americanists mostly don’t, because (for the things they mostly care about) there hasn’t been any.”

Some Americanists Can Speak to the (Possible) Dangers of Trump, but Others Don’t Have Much to Say

Another set of respondents agreed with the general claim that a lot of Americanists are keeping their heads down, but suggested that some Americanists can speak credibly to key fears about Trump. A number responded that I was overlooking the public engagement of scholars associated with American Political Development (APD) and Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (REP) – Vesla Weaver, for instance, pointed to Theda Skocpol, Jacob Hacker, and Paul Pierson as prominent voices. Several pointed to a working paper by Robert Lieberman, Suzanne Mettler, Thomas Pepinsky, Ken Roberts, and Robert Vallely (which I mentioned on this blog). Rafael Khachaturian suggested that “AP has never come to grips with an unspoken exceptionalism about the society it studies.”

Corrine McConnaughy pointed to the neglect of REP by the “mainstream” of political science – “It is considered “niche” in political science when it is not actually “niche” in American politics. Hence those of us who do that work have a differently informed take on “American politics” – one that that this moment ought to be making use of.” Kimberly Johnson argued that “Some of us @ the intersection of Race & APD saw this.” Laurel Eckhouse indicated that “mainstream Americanists often ignore serious historical threats to democracy in the US, esp treatment of black activists/voters.” Rob Mickey suggested that there is a kind of assumed-stability bias in the study of American politics.

The basic claim here is that the mainstream of the field ignores many of the nastier and more problematic aspects of the American historical experience (especially as related to race), which leaves it unsure how to deal with authoritarian-tinged demagoguery and threats to basic institutional integrity.

Elizabeth Cohen also pointed out another set of political scientists who have something to say about the present moment – political theorists, including “Alison McQueen, Chris Lebron, Katrina Forrester, Corey Robin, Jason Stanley, Ekow Yankah are just a few names of theorists taking on contemp politics inc but not limited to Trump and doing so in very public venues.”

Paul, what are you talking about?!?!

The third response was dramatically more skeptical of the original premise. Jonathan Ladd pointed to forthcoming work on these issues. As noted above, Nathan Kalmoe thought I was over-claiming from the beginning.

Adam Berinsky (whose In Time of War I recommend in the strongest terms) offered the most sustained critique. He argued that “the assumption that am politics scholars are not engaged is flatly wrong” and that many Americanists are deeply involved in contemporary politics, even if it’s not publicly visible: “Is it more valuable for me to talk to members of multiple branches of the us govt and tech companies in an informed in depth way about the implications of my research for information transmission or get on a soapbox?” and “Smart people in industry and government are interested in serious research. And I am only one of many Americanists talking to them.”

He further argued that critiques of the subfield emanating from REP and APD (i.e., the claims in the previous section) are “taking a provincial position as well.” Berinsky pushed back (about which I agree with him) against the idea that public engagement/studying important topics is intrinsically in conflict with using sophisticated methods.

This led to some pushback in turn by Dan Nexon and Julia Azari, who didn’t love the use of “soapbox” (which I also agree about). Mike Horowitz offered a broad and useful way to think about policy relevance. There’s a lot worth taking very seriously in Berinsky’s critique of my (rather more limited than it may have come across) critique.

What do I make of all of this?

I’m not 100% sure how to parse this as an outsider who was expecting a radically different set of discussions – some Americanists (and non-Americanists) argued Americanists can’t fully engage on big Trump questions, others argued that a small subset are (mainly drawn from REP and APD) but the mainstream was “unprepared” for Trump, and yet others argued that Americanists are in fact broadly engaged, in a wide variety of ways (some visible, others not), with the issues of the present. Some of this disagreement seems to be based on visceral and hard-to-adjudicate disagreements about what is, and should be, the center of intellectual and political gravity in the study of American politics, and I don’t see any easy resolution to that kind of debate (if it were up to me, American politics research would be exclusively about right-wing militias, leftist radicals, the FBI, security state surveillance, US defense politics, prisons, and the police, which I fully acknowledge would be ridiculous).

An argument that might be able to partially bridge some of the gap, however, also came up – my original tweet had in mind the kind of super-senior people with chairs at ultra-elite universities who you’d (or at least, I’d) expect to weigh in on a fundamental question like “Is America at risk of authoritarian backsliding?” That wouldn’t be soapboxing, but instead offering to the public the best, social scientifically-informed answers to a pressing and scary question (note: comfortable and secure academics on Twitter mocking political actors who have actual skin in the game doesn’t quite count, as much fun as it is for all of us).

Naunihal Singh instead remembers that “[Ken] Shepsle disdained engagement with “politics” & the Harvard Americanisms [sic] of that generation agreed & tried to inculcate that approach. Our generation is different, but I think there is a legacy.” Nyhan agreed but also pointed to important, commendable changes over time: “True that older gen of Am pol folks stepped away from public life [he links to a New Republic article from the 1990s]. . . .but I think those impressions are out of date.” Azari pointed to the online public sphere as a way for various kinds of scholars to engage, many of whom do; Berinsky argued it was “time to update.”

So maybe that’s part of what’s going on, in addition to deeper and enduring intellectual disagreements – shifts over time that lead to conflicting visions of what the level of public engagement actually is. Anyways, a fascinating set of discussions at an important time.

P.S. a thread that indirectly emanated from mine led to an interesting thread by Joe Soss, including the following:

“Scholars of race and US politics have been writing for decades about authoritarian modes of governance, the easy blending of law-and-order politics with official-led lawlessness, willingness to undermine liberal-democratic institutions to achieve repressive ends… 2/n

and their connections to xenophobic and racist strands of US politics. All along the way, such scholars have argued that their insights tell us something quite general about US politics, governing practices, and their future possibilities 3/n

And most of the time, the broader discipline of pol sci (like discussions of US pol in general) have treated these studies as a sidebar to the “real story” of American democracy. The experiences of subjugated groups (racial and otherwise) were treated as important, yes… 4/n

but ultimately distinctive in their departure from the main story of how US politics really works. Such studies illuminate a story of exclusion from the liberal democracy that is US politics, not a key and defining element of US politics itself. 5/n

So, many of us have seen something pretty familiar (and bitter) in the great wave of writings suggesting that, to make any sense of our ugly political moment today, we all must look outside the American experience. This is the point that began this exchange. 6/n”

 

Magnum Photos has a (low-resolution) set of online photos from the famous Indian photographer Raghu Rai’s book Bangladesh: The Price of Freedom. A usefully visceral complement to excellent recent books on 1971 by Bass, Tripathi, and Raghavan. And also a reminder of just awful warfare is to those of us who study abstractly and from afar the suffering of others.

A useful overview of the challenges India faces in its neighborhood:

“What is India’s key problem in the neighbourhood today?

It is simply that even though Delhi believes having friendly regimes is indispensable for its security, it has not been able to shape domestic political outcomes in key neighbouring capitals as it desires; where it has succeeded in doing so, the situation remains fragile; and Delhi’s favourite political allies are ranged against Beijing’s preferred political allies.”

A recent RTI case in India asked whether the Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of Defence use the phrases “martyrs” or “shaheed” in official terminology. MHA and MOD both responded that this is not official usage:
“”The respondent from the Ministry of Defence stated that word ‘shaheed’ or ‘martyr’ is not used by the MoD. Instead the one used is ‘battle casualty’. The respondent from the Ministry of Home Affairs stated that in the MHA the word used is ‘operations casualty’,” Azad said.”

It’s worth noting, though, that the CRPF, BSF, and MHA use “martyr” in their website lists of killed-in-action (which Drew Stommes and I are just about done putting into dataset form). Not a particularly important issue, but worth noting the disjuncture between official bureaucratic policies and the actual languages of politics that those institutions use.

Aila Matanock and I have a new working paper out (link here for PDF).

Abstract
“Armed groups engage in elections in many regimes, and, in doing so, they pursue a surprisingly diverse array of electoral strategies. In this paper, we explore the strategies that armed actors seek to change electoral politics, and we identify four distinct electoral strategies by armed groups, compared to nonparticipation. We theorize that the specific dimensions on which participation types differ are directness, i.e. whether or not the armed group runs its own candidates in elections, and openness, i.e. whether or not the armed group makes official statements expressing electoral positions publicly. The strategies include openly fusing bullets and ballots to form an armed political party, controlling a political wing that stands candidates in elections, openly targeting particular parties or politicians, and secretly providing resources for separate parties. In contrast, some groups choose instead to target all parties and politicians or ignore electoral politics. Beyond laying out this new typology, and providing examples, we explore a first important question in this research area: why groups pursue different strategies. We argue, and show evidence in diverse case studies, that the support and cohesion of the armed groups, government tolerance, and party cleavages drive armed actors’ electoral strategies.”

I’ve blogged in the past about the challenges of both qualitatively and quantitatively measuring civil wars and “armed politics.” Right now, I’m having fun with cross-national civil war datasets as part of a project on leftist insurgencies in democracies (mixing Sri Lanka JVP micro-data with cross-national cases). Which requires figuring out which insurgencies were leftists, when they started, and which regimes were democracies in what years. I’ll bracket the latter question (anyone who’s tried to figure out what 1950s Pakistan counts as will be familiar with the vexations that can await).

I’ve been focusing on South and Southeast Asian cases, with Latin America up next.

Why can this be tricky? Well, take the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT). Much of the literature says it began in 1965 and Kalvyas and Balcells (2010 – data and appendix linked to here) code 1966 – but UCDP says 1974 was the year of onset. The Polity regime score of Thailand in 1965 is -7 (autocracy), but in 1974 it’s +3 (some kind of partial democracy or anocracy or whatever you want to call it). So the year of onset matters hugely if you are trying to figure out whether this was a revolt against a democratic-ish regime. Plus, telling a Thailand expert that the CPT revolt began in 1974 would probably be met with a incredulous look and then a dismissive eye roll about quantitative American social science.

Thomas and Wood (2017 – data here) code the CPP/NPA insurgency in the Philippines as a Marxist rebellion, but don’t list the 1946-1954 Huk rebellion because they focus on post-1979 cases. Kalyvas and Balcells (2010) agree on the CPP, but explicitly code the Huk uprising as a non-Marxist rebellion – even though many case experts would say was a Marxist insurgency. So who knows what the Huks were – do they count, or not? I’d say yes, but it’s a judgment call rather than a straightforward exercise.

UCDP says the CPP/NPA began in 1969 but Kalyvas and Balcells (2010) say 1972. Only three years off – but the Polity score of the Philippines in 1969 was +2 and in 1972 it was -9 (Marcos’ dictatorship). Either the CPP/NPA took on a semi-democratic regime – or it rebelled against a deeply authoritarian government (a similar quandary as with the CPT).

UCDP doesn’t have anything for Bangladesh in 1972-1974, when it was coded as an 8 in Polity (highly democratic). But the case literature points to the Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal (JSD) as a leftist insurgency during precisely this period. So if we put the JSD in, we have a leftist insurgency against a democracy. If we follow UCDP, there is nothing to see here. Once we add the Maoist Purba Banglar Sarbahara Party (PBSP) during the exact same period (the chaos leading up to Mujibur Rahman’s assassination in 1975), things get even wilder – not in UCDP, but definitely in case literatures. And both are leftists, but don’t appear in Kalyvas and Balcells (2010). We don’t know how many people (sources say things like “over two thousand”), or at whose hands, died during this period, so it’s little surprise it hasn’t shown up in datasets. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen or definitely doesn’t meet the relevant coding criteria.

India’s Naxalites are coded as getting going in 1969 in UCDP, 1967 in the case literature, and 1989 in Kalyvas and Balcells (2010, see Table A3). So either at the passionate height of Sino-Soviet split in the international communist movement – or in the final year of the Cold War when the whole Marxist thing was going out of style.

UCDP says the second JVP revolt in Sri Lanka kicked off in 1989. But the case literature and Kalyvas and Balcells (2010) say 1987. Who cares about two years? Well, Sri Lanka in 1987 was the year of the arrival of the IPKF, JR had been the president for a decade, and there hadn’t been a parliamentary election since 1977. In 1989, Premadasa was president, the IPKF was starting to back for the exits after having been around for a little while, there was an early-year parliamentary election – and the JVP’s strategy was totally different than in 1987. In 1989, it’s total war, total onslaught especially by the summer, targeting especially the security forces. In 1987, it was a much more selective focus on the UNP cadres while leaving open the possibility of some kind of deal (on JVP take-over terms) with leftist mainstream political forces. So your story about onset in 1989 would have to be very different than for 1987.

To be clear, there is also a ton of important agreement across datasets and case literatures. Everyone agrees that the CPB began its revolt in 1948 Burma, that the CPN-Maoist started its rebellion in 1996 Nepal, the Huks in 1946 Philippines, and the first JVP revolt in 1971 Sri Lanka. And many of the disagreements come down to specific, defensible coding criteria that come with many good things (UCDP knows its emphasis on verifiable battle death thresholds will lead to undercounting of particular types of phenomena, for instance – it’s a trade-off with the clear upside of comparability across cases). And I’m using all of this stuff for my more medium-/small-N-ish research project.

So this isn’t a cri de coeur against cross-national datasets, at all. But since we’re not dealing with many cases and we are grappling with very complicated questions, getting under the dataset hood is really important. Pulling stuff off the shelf to mix-and-match, by contrast, may not always be wise, since coding decisions can have inferential consequences.

This Dawn article by Kalbe Ali is sobering reading. In a profile of Khadim Hussain Rizvi, the Barelvi cleric who has been leading pro-blasphemy law/anti-Ahmadi protests with military backing, we have this passage on why the security establishment has lent its support:

“Incidentally, a senior security officer also claims that the matter relates to more serious issues that is beyond politics and elections. “This will eventually lead to de-radicalisation of the society away from the clerics who preach violent extremism and are secretly affiliated with banned groups such as the TTP,” he says.

The strong reaction on social media to video clips of DG Punjab Rangers distributing envelopes containing Rs1,000 to the participants of sit-in who were released from police custody generally been based on criticism against the military’s involvement in local politics and on it being seen as rewarding those who had defied the state. The senior security officer, however, asserts the need to consider the other side of the coin too.

“The involvement of the establishment in local affairs is nothing new in this country, but it has never been in such a way,” he says. “This distribution could be indirect too but it was open and so obvious that the religious majority will develop a liking and attachment towards the armed forces, and not believe in what is being said by some clerics.”

The officer says that the main problem in eradication of terrorism was that very small number of sleeper cells were present in the society, operated by experts who have had hardened training in Afghanistan.

“Only clerics can counter the extremist narratives, and if Barelvis become organised and active, they will eventually prevent the youth from falling into the hands of extremists,” he adds.”

If this is accurate (a caveat throughout), I’m not even sure what to say, beyond that it’s extremely obviously not a good idea. The notion that Rizvi isn’t an extremist is only not laughable if your definition of “not extremist” includes “big supporter of Salman Taseer’s assassin” and “hates Ahmadis.” It’s a reminder that perceptions of moderation and extremism are contextual and ideological.

The Army’s support for the TLYRA is presented in this article as a coldly strategic calculation to abandon Pakistan’s Ahmadi citizens (and likely others, from Shias to “blood thirsty liberals”) in order to undermine the TTP among the so-called “religious majority.” It also shows the Army’s simultaneous deployment of and vulnerability to religious languages of legitimacy. Even if officers themselves are personally not particularly Islamist, the institution has regularly fused Islam and nation in ways that provide advantages in domestic politics (as the guardian of Muslim nationalism, however one might try to actually define that) – but also make it difficult to credibly criticize and crack down on large swathes of Pakistan’s Islamist landscape, since they often use similar discourses and symbols.

(This is why I don’t have much patience for “Well, the officer corps isn’t personally Islamist!” argument – analysts shouldn’t care what they do at home if what they do in the public square is different. That’s what matters. Same deal with the Jinnah historiography.)

The history of such divide-and-rule strategies in Pakistan is of course disastrous –  the 1971 war, the very rise of the TTP, the expansion of sectarianism, etc all have involved the Pakistan Army trying to be clever in manipulating identity cleavages and/or discriminating between armed groups. Propping up one set of extremists against another is a hard-to-control process – it will entrench and legitimize the further exclusion and marginalization of people who the Army is technically supposed to be, you know, protecting, while allowing deeply destructive forces to further implant themselves in society.  The Army’s calculations, if correctly presented in media accounts, blend myopia and malevolence. This won’t end well.

Devesh Kapur in The Print:

“over the period 2006-14, personnel increases in the MHA (thanks to CAPFs) were more than six times the net increase in personnel of the entire central government. . . .

his expansion has proceeded much more rapidly than that of the other security-providing instruments of the state, the army and the police (Table 2). In 1998, CAPFs were less than 58 per cent of the size of the army. By 2015, this had increased to 82 per cent – and the number is climbing. . . .

At the other end, the size of CAPFs relative to the civil police has increased by nearly 15 per cent over the last two decades, which means that basic law and order – which is the first line of defence and is already under severe stress – is being neglected at the cost of a more militarised approach to policing. . . .

IPS officers have a stranglehold on top paramilitary positions, even though the service was never meant to lead a paramilitary force, and most have little experience of leading from the front in insurgency areas.. . . .

Internal officer recruits in these forces know they have little chance to get to the top, undermining motivation and how they care for their troops. Little wonder that the officer-to-soldier casualties in the CAPFs are much lower than in the army.”

Fascinating piece in The Irrawaddy on how the Myanmar military has taken on the NLD since the election.

I’ve recently done some freelancing on Twitter about future research on political violence and thought I should make something a little more solid than tweets. In the political science literature on violence, my sense is that we’re starting to hit the flat of the curve on the conventional “why violence in village A but not village B?”-type question – unless you have a really innovative re-conceptualization or theoretical move, exceptional new data, or new methodological innovations. There’s still room to make big contributions there, but it’s increasingly tough compared to fifteen or even five years ago. It’s the same deal with a lot of important questions about the hard core of civil conflict (violence, organization, rebel governance, etc) – lots still to be done, but with an ever greater degree of difficulty.

For instance, the civil war onset literature has gotten pretty sleepy, with the exception of the enormously impressive and, I suspect, staggeringly expensive Ethnic Power Relations project – which is not even remotely the kind of thing an ABD can pull off in a dissertation. Nothing on insurgent organization (my own work very much included) is likely to have the same impact as Jeremy Weinstein’s massively influential Inside Rebellion any time soon, no matter how sophisticated or clever. Arjona, Kasfir, and Mampilly got into the rebel governance game in a way that will have people responding to them for a decade. The transition to normal science is important, valuable, and needs to continue, but changes the nature of the work.

Where I’ve been trying to move (starting in 2012, and most recently, and most focused on laying out a systematic empirical agenda, in 2017) is toward the “blurry edges” of civil war: topics that occur in the absence of a state monopoly of violence, but that don’t revolve entirely around a direct clash of arms between state and armed rebel. There’s plenty of space here to do new stuff, from conceptual work to nitty-gritty empirics.

The areas I personally find particularly intriguing include electoral violence (especially beyond election-season riots), criminal conflict, militia politics, armed political parties, state-armed group deal-making and cooperation, black markets, corruption within security apparatuses, drones, the infiltration of “mainstream” politics by non-state armed groups, how external states try to manipulate, prop up, or tear down actors within political systems, lynching and vigilantism, the behavior of internal security forces beyond COIN (killing dissidents, buying off opposition, shaping journalistic coverage, etc), and “dark side of civil society” actors willing to risk violence to in pursuit of hard-line demands (like the pro-blasphemy law protesters in Pakistan right now). I’m most interested in all of these things in democratic-ish places, since they can become intertwined with “normal” politics in fascinating ways.

Obviously, some of these already have substantial and important literatures already – but they seem ripe for further exploration as overlapping with the increasingly saturated civil war literature.The world is a lot bigger than the important but highly specific problems of insurgent mobilization and counterinsurgency. Eventually there will be a return to non-normal science on the narrower civil war side of things, so the field won’t continue to look this this forever. Electoral violence or militia stuff will saturate, and ambitious grad students will start saying “You know, we missed X in the COIN literature and here’s a way to totally rethink it ” or “here is a crazy new method that solves previously insoluble problem Y in the study of temporal-spatial patterns of micro-level violence.”

But for now at least, I think it’s a nice time to be pushing into cognate topics that look for cool new angles to research.