What's Intriguingly Not Getting Discussed at ISSS/ISAC...

... but is getting discussed at Women's Day? (Go figure.) Alex Wendt would be horrified but unsurprised.

[cross-posted at Lawyers, Guns and Money}

The Political Economy of Journal Citations

I'm writing you from the ISSS/ISAC conference in Providence, RI, the yearly guns 'n' bombs gala thrown jointly by the Security Studies section of ISA and the International Security and Arms Control section of APSA.

Drawing a large crowd this morning was the roundtable on "How to Publish in International Security," peopled by representatives from Stanford University Press, Georgetown University Press, the Journal of Strategic Studies and International Security.

Of course there were some standard nuggets of advice for aspiring scholars: 1) Make sure your paper is ready for publication first; 2) make sure you pick the right journal; 3) don’t submit to multiple journals 4) be persistent but polite in dealing with editors; and 5) beware of MIRVing:

"If you've put it out there on the Internet already we are less likely to see it as original work."

But among these, the one that stuck with me was this point:

"Cite the journals you want to publish in."

Now what caught my attention was not the suggestion but the rationale. It is not, Hoyt argues, because journal editors scan authors' submissions or previous work for evidence of favorable citations but for a more mundane reason I wouldn't have thought (and am still not sure whether I think) should enter into my citation practices:

"Journals depend on library subscriptions. Libraries are facing budget cuts and journals are a huge expense for libraries. As they decide which ones to cull, they consider factors like how often a journal is cited in the profession. Without library subscriptions these journals will simply disappear."

The implication, aspiring writers, is that we should cite early, often and strategically in the hopes of maintaining diverse venues for our work. But whether or not this metric will make for the best scholarship who knows. Hoyt's suggestion also implies that we should be using our libraries' electronic journal resources rather than reading from our own subscriptions, so libraries can track our usage of specific journals.

But most of all, it's also a healthy reminder that the political economy of our profession matters.

Credit and penalty

The Federal Government makes you pay a penalty if, among myriad other things, you: don't have children, don't get married, and don't take out a mortgage. Of course, we don't call these "penalties." We call them "not getting a tax credit." Yet some people think that reducing someone's tax liability if they engage in a particular behavior is different than increasing someone's tax liability if they don't engage in that same behavior.

The same people also believe, for incomprehensible reasons, in the existence of a meaningful legal distinction between forcing U.S. citizens to pay the Federal Government money if they fail to purchase a product called a "mortgage" and forcing U.S. citizens to pay the Federal Government money if they fail to purchase one called "health insurance."

Unfortunately, it seems that such irrational beliefs may also extend to a U.S. Federal judge:

"The individual mandate applies across the board," Vinson wrote. "People have no choice and there is no way to avoid it. Those who fall under the individual mandate either comply with it, or they are penalized. It is not based on an activity that they make the choice to undertake. Rather, it is based solely on citizenship and on being alive."

As a social scientists, I can't help but wonder what drives such obviously flawed reasoning. Is this an example of the psychology of loss aversion, the cognitive blinders created by partisan bias, or something else?

The Blogs of War

Later this week, I will be participating in a roundtable discussion with my esteemed colleagues Juan Cole, Manan Ahmed, Joshua Foust and Madiha Tahir on "The Blogs of War: The Analytical Terrain of the Af-Pak Blogosphere" at the annual conference on South Asia at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

For my contribution to this discussion, I have been scouring blogs from US/ISAF soldiers in Afghanistan. (I ignored the glossier blogs which are mainly exercises in official public relations and propaganda). Since I am up to my eyeballs reading blogs posts, I thought I would share a few observations...

Who is blogging?  Some soldier-bloggers are (as the derisive military jargon put it) Fobbits (i.e. forward operating base dwellers), Poges, or REMF (rear echelon mother fuckers) who rarely go outside of the wire and engage in direct combat.

Denied-ada. Canada fails to get a UN Security Council Seat. (But how many EU Nations do we need on there anyway?)

It was Canadian Thanksgiving this past weekend but Canukistan has one less thing to be grateful for today - it failed to get a UN Security Council seat for the first time in 50 years of trying.

Alas, (eh?), Canada lost out to Germany and Portugal in the Western group (with India, South Africa and Colombia running uncontested for the other three seats.)

The Harper government, ridiculously, is blaming Liberal opposition leader Michael Ignatieff for the humiliating loss. This makes somewhere between zero and negative sense.

Instead, there are several factors to blame for this - the EU is a united front whereas Canada needs to lobby hard in the UN. Additionally, the electoral process seems to be pretty sketchy – and heavily dependent on gifts by suitor countries. (Apparently we went with vials of maple syrup. Way to go, guys.)And, as the Globe and Mail points out, the government hadn’t exactly had run a gung-ho campaign in order to secure it.

And the AL Cy Young Award Should Go To...

Time for a little baseball blogging.

There is quite a lot of buzz surrounding the AL Cy Young award this year. While there are a number of pitchers that possess a high number of wins (17, 18, 19, and even 20 games), there are many who believe the award should go to Seattle's Felix Hernandex.  Despite only winning 13 games and losing 12, Hernandez's performance this year has been nothing short of amazing.  His problem is that he played on one of the worst teams in the league.  He was 8th in the league amongst starters in terms of runs support (86 runs over 34 starts) and was actually dead last in terms of runs support per nine innings (3.1).  If you look beyond wins to the other two orthodox statistics that make up the pitching triple crown, Hernandez finished first in ERA (2.27) and second in strikeouts (233).  It is his performance in these other two categories that have many arguing for Hernandez to win the award, since he shouldn't be penalized for his team's lack of ability to score runs to support his dominance.

If someone like Hernandez wins this year it would truly represent a paradigm shift in the way baseball writers evaluate player performance.  In the history of the AL Cy Award, no starting pitcher has ever won with less than 16 victories (Zach Greinke won last year).  In the NL, only Fernando Valenzuela managed to win the award with as few as 13 wins, and that was in 1981, and no winner from either league had a record as close to .500 as Hernandez does.

That being said, I would actually argue that Hernandez is not the only "non-orthodox" contender.

Explosive Arguments

Recently, Stephanie made "the case against the case against blast weapons," - that is, "explosive weapons" as described by Landmine Action's recent report:

"The short version is that it is calling for a ban on so-called ‘blast-weapons’ as a method of warfare... I think that 1) the report is problematic; 2) that there may actually be a case for not banning such weapons – possibly even humanitarian ones. Instead, states AND humanitarians should look to regulation as a more effective alternative.

I have written a longer riposte to this argument at Lawyers, Guns and Money. But let me just say here that as I understand it, Landmine Action is not calling for a complete ban on the weapons. The report only calls on states and global civil society to "strengthen further an underlying presumption that the use of explosive weapons in populated areas is unacceptable" (p. 14). I recently spoke with Director of Policy and Research Richard Moyes and he confirmed that Landmine Action is not proposing an outright ban such as a codified rule in an Additional Protocol to the Convention on Conventional Weapons. Rather, he said simply, "I’d like to see us establish a terrain in which there is a general concern rather than acceptance about the use of explosives in populated areas."

In other words, Moyes and Stephanie seem to be on the same page with respect to regulating conventional explosives. Stephanie doesn't elaborate what regulations she has in mind or why they would be more humanitarian than Moyes', but some of the organization's specific proposals include establishing a mechanism to accurately count civilian casualties from explosive violence so some determination can be empirically made about whether these weapons can or cannot be used in a controlled manner; and in particular to reduce their use in specific areas where civilian casualties are likely to be highest.

Stephanie does have two deeper critiques about the report that bear further engagement. I think both may have some validity but in my view, the first doesn't actually undermine Moyes' moral point, and the second merely ducks that point (no pun intended). Read my entire response here.

Mobile Duck: Wireless for War?

I am going to try to keep this short, because the function to split the page is not available in this browser ...what browser, you ask? Safari for IPad, I'll tell you.

I've decided to make this my first IPad post in part because I was itching to try it, but also because it seemed fitting for it's subject matter...a talk that Peter W. Singer gave at ISA-West in Los Angeles on September 25 on his book,Wired for War. So I thought I would write about Wired for War wirelessly. Funny, right? Maybe I should keep my day job. Maybe.

Ok, my thought about this talk and the book is relatively straight-forward, but perhaps still important. Singer started his talk with a commander's letter "home" to a "dead" robot's company, thanking the manufacturer for sparing the military the need to write a letter "home" to a soldier's mother ...as if a mother's grief was the true tragedy of a soldier's death. Elsewhere in the talk, Singer noted that many people who oppose the use of robotics in the US military or criticize it from an enemy or victim perspective attack the masculinity of its users. They argue that the use of robots is cowardly, and that 'real men' face and fight their enemies.

Singer's analysis, of course, did not highlight the gendered dimensions of these discourses. Still, as important work in this field like Lauren Wilcox's has demonstrated, this is not the first time that gender discourses have been key to debates about the use of new technologies in war. While, in Singer's terms, whether 'we' are 'wired' for war or not seems to matter, being 'equipped' at whatever technological level seems include meeting standards of masculinity.

The Osirak Myth (again)

I failed to comment on Jeffrey Goldberg's September 2010 Atlantic Monthly piece about US or Israeli responses to Iran's apparent nuclear weapons program. Goldberg has the threat meter set to nearly 10 as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates reportedly said this summer that Iran is one to three years away from building a nuclear weapon (p. 60).

A lot has been said and written about this piece, but this claim has not received enough attention (p. 58):

Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting—forever, as it turned out—Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean–built reactor in Syria. An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.

Dan Reiter of Emory, however, has published some work that directly challenges the claim that the Osirak bombing was a success.

Whither Human Security?

In an International Affairs article earlier this year, Mary Martin and Taylor Owen point out that the term is all but dead, both in the UN system and within the governments who once championed the concept:

"The term 'human security' has all but vanished from the reports of the UN Secretary-General and high-level panels, and from branch organization use... Canada, one of the principal initial proponents of the human security agenda, is also going through a period of withdrawal from both the advocacy and use of the concept... 'human security' was among a group of term blacklisted in government parlance."

But Martin and Owen also show that human security concepts are increasingly penetrating and transforming state practice - even among governments, like the US, who once obstructed norm development in the broad area of human security:

Kandahar and My Lai; Drone Strikes and Carpet Bombing

 The New York Times recently posted reports about the U.S. military's trial of soldiers accused of randomly killing civilians in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province, “for sport.”  Apart from the horrors of the alleged crimes, there is a terrible irony in the stories.  This goes beyond the fact that these kinds of incidents are hardly news.  They are completely predictable in any war, even among the best-trained and most disciplined armies—let alone those in which governmental and military leaders provide signals that make incidents like Abu Ghraib possible.  

The irony also goes beyond the coincidence that this story appeared in the New York Times the same day as another, titled “CIA Steps Up Drone Strikes on Taliban in Pakistan.”  That story re-emphasized the open secret that Pakistan has become the new Cambodia.  Like that other unfortunate nation, Pakistan is being targeted because another of America’s wars is not going well.  But rather than accepting the original war’s folly, our military and civilian leaders, in their consummate wisdom, have expanded it to nearby countries.  Supposedly, it is these nations’ failures to control their populations and borders that explains the war’s failures.

A gulf in understanding?

Last week I participated in a workshop at the Al Jazeera Center for Studies in Doha, Qatar, which brought to an end the ESRC’s Radicalisation & Violence programme of research projects, led by Prof. Stuart Croft. I was one of several researchers invited to present recent research on ‘terrorism, resistance and radicalisation’. My fledgling experience of academia has thus far been that debates rarely get politicised. It is noteworthy when it happens, triggering a visceral thrill or horror as we depart from our scripts of professional civility. The Radicalisation & Violence programme has been politicised from the outset. Anthropologists and sociologists were unhappy that researchers might apply to carry out fieldwork in dangerous regions, that the FCO was offering some funding towards the programme and hence it was ‘state-sponsored’ to an extent (although so is the ESRC), and nobody carrying out research could be unaware that in the UK in the 2000s people at universities were being arrested for having ‘radical’ material on their computers, even if they were carrying out legitimate research. It is no surprise, then, that the concluding event retained this political edge. Talking about terrorism in this particular region could not be otherwise.

Homeland Security Heads Roll in Pennsylvania—But the GWOT Keeps on Rolling

 Two weeks ago, I wrote about Pennsylvania’s Perverted War on Terror.   This week the state’s Homeland Security Director James Powers, Jr. resigned.  Governor Ed Rendell had refused to fire him, saying Powers was not the only one responsible for hiring the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR).  True, enough:  Rendell had command responsibility, and Robert French, director of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, apparently had oversight too (neither has resigned).  But it appears that Powers was the person who okayed the $103,000 contract that resulted in numerous “intelligence reports” on everyday political activities here in the Keystone State, including environmental meetings against natural gas drilling—then passed some of those reports on to natural gas companies.  

In his resignation statement, Powers still seems confused—not about our country’s First Amendment this time, but about his former office’s responsibilities.  He wrote that “the primary goal of commonwealth preparedness strategies” and “our greatest challenge” is "to prevent, prepare for, respond to and recover from incidents resulting from all hazards (terrorism attacks, major disasters and other emergencies).”  With such an unlimited conception of homeland security’s role, it is little wonder that his department happily paid ITRR for its “intelligence reports.”  Of course, the far bigger scandal remains the “global war on terror’s” waste, hubris, and threat to our liberties.

Fun and Games in Delhi

The Commonwealth Games begin tomorrow in Delhi, which offers a good excuse for some thoughts on two neglected topics in contemporary international relations – India and the Commonwealth. With 54 nations involved the Games are a major international sporting event, and were bid for by India as a way of demonstrating their emerging significance in the world, a kind of Olympics in a minor key that would do for the Indian bit of the BRIC nations what the Beijing Olympics did for China. To put it mildly, things have not quite worked out as intended. Some twenty plus firms were involved in the construction of facilities, corruption was near universal, and ten days ago the athlete’s village was still under construction and filthy. A small bridge collapsed injuring dozens. Part of the roof of the weightlifting venue fell down. A heavy Monsoon rain has led to dengue fever being epidemic in Delhi and – you couldn’t make this up – two days ago the Chief Medical Officer for the games went down with suspected typhoid. A plague of frogs is the obvious next step. In the insult to injury category, the Pakistani team have complained about poor security, a complaint that does seem to be justified; an Australian journalist strolled round the village with an imitation bomb in his rucksack without being challenged. A games official managed to make things worse by suggesting that complaints about hygiene and cleanliness reflected western standards which weren’t appropriate, a position that many Africans and Asians found rather offensive – strangely, their athlete’s didn’t appreciate the idea that they were OK with their beds being smeared with doggy-doo.

The Case Against the Case Against Blast Weapons

A (way) while back Charli posted a link to a report by Landmine Action. The short version is that it is calling for a ban on so-called ‘blast-weapons’ as a method of warfare.

From the outset I’m going to admit that it’s simply not easy to defend things that can blow innocent civilians to smithereens. And I don't intent to defend the weapons themselves as some kind of fabulous invention. I do, however, wish to take on some of the thinking and insertions in the report as I think that 1) the report is problematic; 2) that there may actually be a case for not banning such weapons – possibly even humanitarian ones. Instead, states AND humanitarians should look to regulation as a more effective alternative.

My response ended up being longer than what I thought so I’m going to attempt to do this over the course of a few posts. I feel that this is important because next year (2011) marks the next round of discussions on the Convention on Conventional Weapons where it is likely that proposals to ban such weapons will be discussed. At recent CCW meetings the inability of ‘militarily significant states’ and restriction-inclined states to agree on bans of certain categories of weapons have lead to separate treaty regimes – famously the 1997 Ottawa Landmines Treaty and the Cluster Munitions Treaty. While the CCW does not get a lot of love or recognition, it will be important for government lawyers and humanitarians to think through these issues now.