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Abu Muqawama: February 2013

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  • Policy Puzzles
    February 27, 2013 | Posted by aelkus - 2:50pm | 0 Comments

    What is the relationship between videogames and violence? Popular Science, reviewing a new psychology report, noted the obvious: it's inderminate. There are two camps of researchers, neither of which can collect enough conclusive evidence to provide strong confirmation for their hypotheses. It's also unsurprising. Human behavior is complex and messy, and questions of measurement, causation, and inference are difficult to sort out. In a bid for greater "policy relevance," researchers recklessly extrapolated beyond their data or failed to note conflicts and limitations. The media only reported on sensational research. And not all of the research was produced under a sufficiently objective rubric.

    But this problem is by no means unique to video games. This month's International Organization published two studies on the benefits (or lack theorof) of nuclear superiority with diametrically opposite conclusions. As Daniel Nexon argues, this poses an analytical problem for the policymaker. Here we have two articles that were judged to be of sufficient quality to be published in a top-flight journal, with completely different conclusions. Nuclear coercion, like the sources of violence, is a fundamentally messy and multicausal subject.

    Even if we can come to a general agreement as to which confluence of factors is important, as Daniel Byman and Matthew Waxman did for the use of airpower in Kosovo, we still face a fundamental problem of how to make policy tradeoffs. And this, of course, still presumes that we agree about the proper weighting of the factors. Whether airpower, the threat of ground forces, or any of the other defeat mechanisms Byman and Waxman specify should be regarded as necessary or sufficient conditions is a question that is unlikely to be resolved without a substantial degree of deep historical investigation. Kosovo happened close to fourteen years ago, and authors still argue about the causes of World War I. And I'm not going to even bring up the Surge because it will likely be impossible to have an intelligent conversation about it for a very long time. Likewise, Joshua Foust has often written sharp pieces about the data problems that hold back robust study of targeted killings in Pakistan.

    So we're back to the beginning: videogames. Public policy is always mostly normative choice, but indecisive science tends to highlight policy's subjective foundations. So in regards to videogames and violence, the following questions come to mind. What level of (un)certainty are policymakers willing to accept in making decisions to infringe on the freedom and choice of others? What level of potential harm do policymakers believe would justify such a decision? Should the infringement be cautious or maximal? Finally, would the government respond by heavily restricting the product known to contribute to the behavior, act primarily on other environmental variables that interact to produce the undesired behavior, or both? These are all choices that can be informed by science but not dictated by it. And in this situation the degree to which the choice can even be "informed" is fairly contentious.

    As this blog more or less explicitly and implicitly suggests, the same issues involved in the videogame dispute are also true of national security policy and their interaction with political science. That's why national security professionals tend to like Clausewitz so much. On War provides a general outline of the general thing called War. As with any work of gestalt theory that does not try to directly predict certain outcomes but describes a system as a whole, On War tends to be last longer than science that advances through conjectures and refutations.

    We should be looking to foreground what criteria we use when thinking about the messy problem rather than necessarily believing that research can always tip the scales one way or another. Of course you don't need a lifetime of political experience to know that not much "foregrounding" goes on in domestic politics. Hence the overlap between the audience willing to take this post seriously and those it would most help is bound to be fairly low.

    academia, national security, public policy

  • Paramilitarism and Governance By Other Means
    February 22, 2013 | Posted by dtrombly - 4:29am | 0 Comments

    It is a staple of much of postmodern political theory to posit the state as an “assemblage.” That is, the state itself is not static, it is an equilibrium between contending factions, bureaucracies, and stakeholding organizations. In the ideal-type scenario, they achieve a way of dividing labor and consolidating power in such a way that the ability to wage political violence is consolidated in responsibility and unified in the interests it serves.

    Of course, life is not always that easy. As Corey Robin provocatively pointed out, our theories of national security are Hobbesian, but our states rarely live up to the best aspects of his theories. Assemblages do not always capture a truly “national” interest and fall sway to faction, whether bureaucratic, regional, ideological or social in cleavage:

    To cite just one example:  it is a well known fact that African Americans have suffered as much from the American state’s unwillingness to protect them from basic threats to their lives and liberties as they have from the willingness of white Americans to threaten those lives and liberties.  Throughout much of US history, as legal scholar Randall Kennedy has shown, the state has deemed the threat to the physical safety of African Americans to be an unremarkable danger and the protection of African Americans an unworthy focus of its attentions.

    … At the most fateful moment of white-on-black violence in US history, in fact, the national government deemed the threat to African Americans a relatively minor item of public safety, unworthy of federal military protection; by contrast, it deemed the threat to employers from striking workers an public emergency, worthy of federal military protection.

    Indeed, the ability of the U.S. to retain control over the South always butted against a broad front of resistance that ranged from political opposition through rapidly “redeemed” formal institutions in Virginia to the highly paramilitarized environs of Louisiana. To the North and border states, the most essential and broadly accepted objective of the war was preserving the Union. Abolition was, among other things, an instrument towards that end. A broader program of equality was unnecessary or even abhorrent to those who merely sought to destroy the slaveholding South because it imperiled the country’s integrity.

    In a previous post, I noted how Reconstruction-era tolerance of anti-black violence shared some characteristics with Libya’s relatively laissez faire approach towards militias that were desecrating Sufi shrines, Western graveyards, and harassing, attacking, and then killing diplomats. The messy process of state-building could make room, or at least time, for this, but not for trying to bring to heel well-armed and organized militias with strong ideological objections to Libya’s nominal civil authorities. Libya’s new government limped along, not much a Mogadishu on the Mediterranean, nor one, even in moments of triumph, effective in Hobbesian terms. While Libyan militias and militants intervene in political processes, they do not, for the most part, appear to seek regime change, but rather to augment their political clout within the bounds of the new system through violence and intimidation.

    Similarly, in American Reconstruction, paramilitary groups neither themselves seized governments (although similar paramilitary groups did throw a coup in Wilmington, NC in 1898) nor created a real counter-state, but provided a specific political class with the means to win control of existing institutions - state and local governments - without attempting to recapitulate the goals or overall method of the original rebellion.

    While many Redeemer militias acted as the conservative wing of the Democratic party, these ought be considered distinct from the groups which were insurgents from the start of the war. Bushwhacker militias, such as the James-Younger Gang, went from participants in the civil wars within the civil war in the border states and West to criminal organizations which used attitudinal affinities to bolster their strength. Notably, in the case of the James-Younger Gang, another non-state entity, the Pinkertons, joined in a manhunt operation. Silas Woodson, the Democratic Missouri governor, secured pay to contract detectives, and tried (but failed) to fund a militia to assist in the hunt. As Robin pointed out, government responses varied with reference to the political interests. Federal, state, local, and private forces would continue to intervene in issues of outlawry and labor strife, but conceded, in ugly compromise, rights for blacks and patronage networks (the position of Postmaster General, for example) to their oppressors.

    If we take up Tilly’s model of state-building as organized crime, we note most criminal organizations cannot kill off every single competitor. Legitimate actors and trust networks integrate into the criminal enterprise, and even with rivals, cutting deals is often more appealing than cutting throats. In state-building, too, cooperating with illegal, extralegal, and paramilitary groups lends advantages to fruitless or premature pursuit of total primacy. For many political communities, non-state groups provide instruments of governance by other means.

    As the Reconstruction example shows, paramilitarism, though obviously antithetical to democratic values, is complementary to democratic systems. In Colombia’s bloody internal conflict, paramilitaries became significant players in the Colombian democratic system, bolstering the candidacies of friendly politicians with funds and coercive influence. As Giustozzi notes in his excellent book, The Art of Coercion, irregular groups often provide highly beneficial roles, particularly when options for bureaucratization and institutionalization of a professional army are limited. Indeed, in some cases a weak bureaucratized, centralized army may be insufficient or an inferior alternative for local and regional elites who prefer decentralized security provision accountable to their interests and persistent at a local level. Of course, tolerance of and cooperation with these forces allowed counterinsurgents to engage in assassination, massacres, and enrich local elites. Yet the point remains that irregular groups, within limits, provide a force multiplier to state prerogatives. Ceding autonomy and some authority to paramilitary groups such as the AUC And Los PEPES empowers extralegal or illegal entities the state prefers to negotiate and collaborate with to destroy ones it considers more threatening.

    In Brazil, too, the rolling back traditional drug trafficking organizations relied not simply on special tactics units and community policing, but tacit or explicit sanctioning of paramilitary units occupying and extracting rents from neighborhoods. Indeed, the very political pressures that encouraged the Brazilian government to crack down on drug trafficking organizations with state force created power vacuums for militia groups to expand their reach within cities such as Rio de Janeiro. In all of the aforementioned cases, paramilitary groups have exploited cleavages in the interests of political assemblages, providing a tool to advance interests of actors participating within the state without breaking the state itself – and, indeed, feeding off the cooperation of state institutions. Indeed, if, as Javier Osorio notes in his excellently titled dissertation, “Hobbes on Drugs,” weaker criminal actors have incentives to step up violence against groups targeted by security services, emergent non-state actors have strong structural incentives to muscle in on the state’s foes, providing an unscrupulous government an opportunity to cut a deal.

    Particularly as the U.S. and other countries turn towards SFA and FID to offset its diminishing will and capacity to take the lead in counterinsurgency operations overseas, and as states such as Syria  the dynamics of paramilitarism ought register highly in importance for policymakers and academics alike. Although paramilitary groups are of most interest in instances of state failure and civil war, to dismiss them as mere warlordism ignores how paramilitarism may grow in prevalence even during periods of democratization and state consolidation. Similarly, without recognizing when and how elites will seek to decentralize the state’s use of force, attempts to build partner state capacity or engage in security-sector reform will likely fall flat. Finally, examining paramilitarism shines a light on the state as more than a mere set of institutions and bureaucracies, but as an assembly of actors with political interests that do not always overlap, nor see bureaucratization and institutionalization as the most natural or efficient manner of bolstering state capacity or instituting control. Not only do paramilitaries illuminate an ugly side of state behavior, but they also help reveal why successful states and elite coalitions, though they may be failed Hobbesians, remain so persistent despite their flaws.

    Brazil, Colombia, Libya, militias, paramilitaries, US history

  • Relevant to Policy?
    February 16, 2013 | Posted by aelkus - 7:02pm | 1 Comments

    Are we in a 1914 scenario in East Asia? How often do guerrillas succeed? Did counterterrorism law erode national sovereignty? These are just a few of the important questions that political science has some bearing on. Yet barely a couple months goes by without an op-ed decrying political science's alleged lack of relevance to the outside world.

    Political scientists are frequently told their research is too arcane, mathematical, and self-involved to be of possible value to anyone in Washington dealing with real-world policy problems. There's a grain of truth here. As international political economy whiz Kindred Winecoff observes, political scientists need to make a better “elevator pitch." But here's the problem: at the end of the day, there is a difference between what Max Weber dubbed science as a vocation and the subjective policy lessons we can take from our study. Part of that gap is reflected in the difficulties that people with purely policy interests inevitably encounter in PhD programs.

    From my own (minor) experience so far, it is grueling, necessitates the assimilation of difficult methodologies, and involves having to think about intellectual questions that many people would regard as hopelessly arcane. Even a good PhD program that directly tackles policy questions will likely demand the student grapple with questions of esoteric theory and method. And not all research that tackles highly abstract questions is policy-irrelevant. Highly technical analysis of game theory and economics generated useful policy applications form the World War II convoy system to nuclear strategy and wargaming.

    All of these advances began from the desire to grapple with difficult questions to produce knowledge, something many critics of political science research do not acknowledge. Take Greg Ferenstein, who penned an article supporting Eric Cantor's call to defund the NSF. His gripe is familiar. Political science is obscuratist, hyper-mathematical, and disconnected from the policy world. Political scientists don't do enough to make their research accessible to policymakers. Ferenstein wants a political science that his mother-in-law can understand, and he thinks starving academia of resources will motivate hungry researchers to do better. So is modern political science irrelevant to policy needs?

    Contra Ferenstein, policymakers have thrown substantial $$ at the kind of research he regards as navel-gazing arcana. The RAND Corporation got a lot of mileage using what Ferenstein derides as "clever mathematical models" during the Cold War.  I'm not sure that Jay Ulfelder, who worked for the intelligence community-funded Political Instability Task Force, would agree that his quantitative forecasting methodologies must pass a mother-in-law test to be valuable. And when New York University's game theory guru Bruce Bueno De Mesquita speaks, the CIA listens. Drew Conway, a man that could easily teach a computer programming course just as well as poli-sci 101, gives invited talks at West Point on analyzing terrorist networks. I don't think Ulfelder, Mesquita, or Conway have sleepless nights pondering the relevance of their research to the govermment!

    Ferenstein also laments the decline of grand theory that policy-makers could comprehend and the rise of empirical research. Perhaps the most ironic thing about Ferenstein's citation of this trend as a bad thing is that the rise of empirical research actually does away with the worst tendencies of the "old" international relations. In the old days, people proclaimed their allegiance to warring theoretical tribes. Now the enterprising researcher will take whatever can get them from point A to B. That, and political scientists are actually interested in whether or not their theories are empirically correct! It is difficult to see why this is bad for policy and endless theological debates over theories first advanced in the middle of the 20th century is good.

    Of course method isn’t everything. The aforementioned Ulfelder is conversant in both important theories of the state and rigorous methods. My friend Aaron Frank has built rigorous computer simulations based on deep thought about the philosophy of science and human cognition. Dare I say that Frank, before generating his quantitative simulations, has to deal with policy-unfriendly concepts like "ontology" and "epistemology?" But Ulfelder and Frank aren’t hung up about whether their theories confirm realism, liberalism, or constructivism. And they are not afraid to use the best methods available to pursue their research, no matter how challenging they may be. On the more qualitative side, someone like Ryan Evans uses field work to come to fine-ingrained analysis of civil wars. Ryan's work, though leaning towards qualitative political sociology, is equally as demanding as the most rigorous quant work. But Ryan also is informed by useful theory.

    Ferenstein's "mother-in-law" test for policy relevance is also ridiculous. Economists looking to be policy-relevant don’t lose sleep over whether their mother-in-law gets their theories. Whether Timothy Geithner can pick it up matters. Much of what military historian (full disclosure: my military history instructor in Fall 2010) David Johnson writes about the future of land warfare is too esoteric for a mother-in-law without grounding in military history. But Johnson now heads a group that will likely decide the future of the Army. That's some policy relevance most academics can only dream of. And Ulfelder's mother-in-law would have to be down with Bayesian stats to get most of his work. Does the IC care?

    I can't speak for Ferenstein, but I can't help but ask: when critics claim that political science research is too esoteric, mathematical, and self-involved, are they are really unhappy that it has become more rigorous and empirical? There was once a time when a policy thinker could converse about the social sciences without making an effort to grapple with the methodological tools and theories that underpin those disciplines. That era is over and won’t be coming back anytime soon. The policy-academic bridge certainly does need fixing. But this requires effort and understanding from both partners.

    First, the blunt truth is that all of the policy-relevant research in the world won’t persuade a policymaker to deviate from something they ideologically believe in. And why should research alone dictate fundamentally political decisions? Politicians are not engineers or technocrats. Who believes political science research alone should decide the question of abortion? For supporters and detractors alike, it’s a question that touches on the most basic questions of human life and women’s autonomy.

    Finally, op-eds like the piece Ferenstein penned offer no constructive advice for better academia-policy harmony. Political scientists already invest considerable effort and intellectual energy trying to “bridge the gap.” It’s time for the policy world to reciprocate. Yes, state of the art political science methods and theories take time and effort to learn. But couldn't a policymaker hire a political science grad to boil down research of interest to a few bullet points? There’s an army of Hill staffers already at work helping their bosses get smart on policy areas that Senator John or Jane Doe have to vote on. There really are many easy, commonsense solutions to the problem if one seriously thinks about it.

    The academia-policy divide isn’t unbridgeable. Both sides just have to respect each other’s needs and culture. Policy enthusiasts should acknowledge and respect the inevitably arcane rigor needed to make good political science research instead of bashing it for not being immediately comprehensible to one’s mother-in-law. Academics must understand that policy makers have unique needs, don’t have tenure to insulate them from the consequences of getting an issue wrong, and make choices about fundamentally normative questions that science cannot conclusively answer.

    More people get this than alarmist op-eds may lead us to believe. After all, love of Middle East studies and political violence research spurred a American University of Beirut and King's College London grad (who is now at the Pentagon in an one-year International Affairs Fellowship) to found this very blog. From late high school to the beginning of my PhD program, reading Andrew Exum's blogging of relevant political science research motivated me to view policy and academia as complementary. And surely I'm not the only one. Maybe the "policy relevant" crowd can take a hint too.

    international relations, national security policy, Political Science

  • Redemptive Violence and the Los Angeles Manhunt
    February 11, 2013 | Posted by aelkus - 2:43pm | 0 Comments

    Renegade former Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officer Christopher Dorner believes himself wronged by his superiors. In his manifesto, he repeatedly emphasizes that he embodies the honor and discipline of the paramilitary institutions he served and "died long ago" as a result of the betrayals he allegedly suffered. His solution: kill as many police officers and their relatives as possible. He threatens to eliminate police officers and everyone they hold dear, boasting of his military aptitude: "[t]he Violence (sic) of action will be HIGH. I am the reason TAC alert was established. I will bring unconventional and asymmetrical warfare to those in LAPD uniform whether on or off duty.” Dorner claims he will only stop killing when the police returns to him the validation he once possessed as an police officer. 

    Dorner is currently the subject of a massive manhunt conducted by California law enforcement with assistance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The UAV-phobic corners of the Internet buzz with thinly sourced rumors that the 21st century's most fearsome and dangerous weapon, the (unarmed surveillance) drone, may be unleashed. Potential sightings of the fugitive prompt evacuations. Dorner still remains at large, wanted for the ambush murder of a police officer, a basketball teacher, and her fiance. The slain teacher's former police officer father claims Dorner personally called to inform him that "he should have done a better job protecting his daughter." If true, this would resonate with Dorner's chilling threat to wipe out his enemies' families:

    Suppressing the truth will leave to deadly consequences for you and your family. There will be an element of surprise where you work, live, eat, and sleep. I will utilize ISR at your home, workplace, and all locations in between. I will utilize OSINT to discover your residences, spouses workplaces, and children’s schools. IMINT to coordinate and plan attacks on your fixed locations. Its amazing whats on NIPR. HUMINT will be utilized to collect personal schedules of targets. I never had the opportunity to have a family of my own, I’m terminating yours. Quan, Anderson, Evans, and BOR members Look your wives/husbands and surviving children directly in the face and tell them the truth as to why your children are dead.

    If Dorner's actions were not so horribly real, they would be the stuff of bad direct-to-video action cinema. The honorable soldier/law enforcement officer pushed by corruption, turpitude, and injustice to wage a one-man war against authority? Check. Ditto to the cliche of the "rogue" operative that turns his deadly skills against the government. Hyperbolic promises of an orgy of bloodletting that spares neither "combatant" nor family member? Been there, done that. The spectacle of hundreds of men, machines, and animals on the trail of one man using his survival skills to elude them is also perennial. We could name dozens of films that fit this archetype, but the most recent that comes to mind is Antoine Fuqua's Shooter. In Shooter, Mark Wahlberg is framed for a crime he didn't commit and uses his Marine Corps training to rack up a body count that includes both humble henchman and high-ranking politician.

    When watching Shooter, the viewer does not think of the real-life parallel: the DC snipers. Of course, all of the people Wahlberg guns down are part of The Conspiracy. No basketball teachers and their loved ones, just the private military operators that Hollywood loathes enough to use as a stand-in for the Communist Chinese in the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate. The setup is identical in both films---the honorable fighting man wronged by a cabal buried deep within the bowels of respectable society. In Shooter, Mark Wahlberg has no choice but to fight The Conspiracy with the very weapons he once wielded in the service of the state. Of course, Hollywood rarely shows the deliberate killing of noncombatants or even sympathetic combatants by the lone hero.

    The only exception to this general rule is The Matrix, in which men and women in black leather gun down waves of hapless security guards unaware of their manipulation by the machines. Yet perhaps The Matrix (a work of science fiction!) is a more realistic portrayal of the indiscriminate nature of redemptive violence (and its intellectual justification) than Shooter. Dorner undoubtedly believes that everyone he kills is part of the general web of injustice. There is no typological difference between fellow law enforcement officer, political authority figure, or family relative in his mind. All can be targeted with a grim sense of calculation and premeditation. All must and will pay for the sins of the system.

    The idea of redemptive, even purifying violence has a long pedigree in Western life. At the end of his long journey, Homer's Ulysses returns to find his home defiled and reacts by concocting a situation in which he can slaughter those responsible. Shakespeare's Titus first kills his own sexually assaulted daughter and then tricks his nemesis Tamora into literally consuming her own children. And as Samuel Goldman notes, the major revolutionary terrorists and insurgents of the Cold War all stressed the purifying nature of violence as a means to self-actualization. The vulgar American derivation of this already ignoble narrative tradition can be found in the explosion of revenge-driven antiheroes, particularly those that seek to punish a system that they hold collectively responsible for their individual plight. There are both pro and anti-authority versions of this parable--Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry as the penultimate example of conservative reaction expressed through purifying violence and Alan Moore's V for Vendetta as a more explicitly anarchistic perspective. These tales all command wide audiences and fanbases.

    This should not be construed as a claim that there is a causal relationship between cultural tropes and Dorner's violence. Rather, we can deploy those tropes as a vehicle for understanding the violent aesthetics inherent in Dorner's perception of himself and how they really are not of his own making. Dorner is an actor on an already well-trodden stage, acting out a script he likely believes that he alone has authored. He may be violent and dangerous, but he is also little more than a copy of a copy. He plays to the well-established tropes of social banditry that his supporters also unconsciously draw from while cheering his massacres. The repetoire is tired and well-worn, however genuine or unique he may believe himself to be.

    Dorner sees himself as a man who played by the rules and was nonetheless driven to violence, instead of an indiscriminate murderer whose writings drip with bigotry and violent contempt towards his fellow officers and their families. Assuming Dorner did call Randy Quan to insult him over Quan's supposed failure to prevent his daughter's murder, it would complete the cognitive dissonance between the social bandit/conspiracy anti-hero Dorner (and his local followers) believes himself to be and the real man who would deliberately kill an unarmed schoolteacher in order to hurt her father.

    Whether or not Dorner dies in a hail of bullets or escapes the California law enforcement community and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, he may very well live on in some quarters of society with the same mixture of reverence and fascination that fellow murderer Jesse James continues to evoke. The only question is how many more people Dorner will kill in his murderous quest for self-realization before he exits the stage.

    christoner dorner, literature, political violence

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