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The Year of Living (Slightly) Less Dangerously: Episode 6

2/25/2014

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The Year..:  2014 is the year of ENDKILL.  A 365 day journey into my research archive and active agenda, reflecting on what we know and do not know about mass atrocities and how to stop them (delivered once weekly so as not to burden the viewer/reader/audience).


Years ago (when I was working on some unpublished research with David Armstrong and Mark Lichbach) I had this idea that our understanding of civil war (marked by the dashed lines above) had limited our conception of contentious politics.  The concept seemed to suck all of the air out of the subject - getting us to think about only one form of violence, forgetting the forest for the trees as it were.  We then brought together all forms of contentious politics that we could get our hands on and began to then work through all civil wars to see what each of the cases looked like.  Nicaragua is below.
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As I reflect on the circumstances under which mass atrocities are ended, I am guided to think that the subject should not be separated from the broader phenomenon of political violence, writ large.  If diverse forms of conflict (studied individually) actually "move" together (i.e., are driven by similar forces), then we are missing something by isolating them from one another.  Note how in the Nicaraguan case the different "forms" of political violence first rise (in 1978) and then fall (1979+) together.  Also note how the dip in repression precedes the whole escalatory pattern?  We would generally miss this if we followed the existing practice in the literature where strikes, guerrilla war, riots, revolution, civil war, civil liberties restriction and personal integrity violations would be separated from one another.  

Current political science associations do not help.  The Conflict Processes section of APSA and their associated journal has largely been concerned with first interstate war and then civil war. The human rights violation people kind of have their own section and journal but the area has had a mixed reception for those who use data (no book awards yet for those adopting this methodology) and thus they are not always good at getting their work placed there. Quantitatively oriented human rights scholars thus try Conflict Processes or Peace Science.  I always wondered where the people go in political science that are interested in protest or, worse yet, protest policing.  This has not been something Conflict Processes has focused on nor Peace Science - although this has been changing as of late.  If the protest/policing was connected with democratization, then folks could find a home.  Or, if it involved some methodological innovation, then the individual could go to Political Methodology, but in doing so they kind of lose their broader audience who would not look there and might not have the time to search all relevant key words.  God forbid the researcher use an American case because that would lead the Comparativists and International Relations/World scholars in the opposite direction. And, don't even think about doing an African American case and try to convince someone that it is relevant for other places, other times.  I remember presenting something about US protest/protest policing at ISA one year and having someone ask me why I presented my peace at the meeting.  I simply responded: "American contention does not have relevance for the rest of the world?  We arm, train and act about as much as anyone when it comes to contentious political behavior, so why would I not do this?"  

As students and scholars go about their business of researching, writing and reading, we might guide folks away from the artificially created, reified and institutionally sustained areas of civil war, genocide, terrorism, human rights violation and political dissent and move them towards the broader phenomenon of political violence and a version of contentious politics where state behavior is more fully integrated.  If we are to keep the areas siloed, we might at least try to consult the Annual Review of Political Science to get some sense of what innovations, insights in the respective areas might hold for the particular form of political violence we are interested in.  The key to ending mass atrocities might just be found in some piece regarding ending gang violence or police harassment.  
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The Year of Living (Slightly) Less Dangerously: Episode 5

2/16/2014

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The Year..:  2014 is the year of ENDKILL.  A 365 day journey into my research archive and active agenda, reflecting on what we know and do not know about mass atrocities and how to stop them (delivered once weekly so as not to burden the viewer/reader/audience). 

Frustrated from reading social science literature related to the topic of why political violence exists and what could be done to stop it.  Just seems like folks are just running with what they know.  

The pessimists: nothing works. stop looking.
The optimists: what problem?  it'll stop - eventually.
The Freudian scholar: if you can bring their parents to the negotiation table, they might stop.
The social movement scholar: change framing, gut mobilizing structures and reduce the perception of opportunity.
The bargaining scholar: come up with a dollar amount that would compel them to stop.
The quantitative IR scholar: intervene (depending upon context and strategy).
The qualitative comparative scholar: it's complex. Let me tell you a story.
The psychological scholar: the answer lies in the human mind.  Make the perpetrator feel comfortable.
The economics scholar: it's the economy stupid and/or incentive manipulation.
The history scholar: it's complicated stupid. Let me tell you a story.
The sociology scholar: it's the society, networks or the various non-governmental organizations stupid.
The political scientist: it's political stupid.

I think that we need an "integral conflict studies" program.  We need individuals, perceptions, ideas, organizations and relationships involved.  Whatever happened to developing a test which compares all explanations against one another but allowing factors to concatenate or operate sequentially and reciprocally?  I don't want to go back to cybernetic models but they seemed more dynamic somehow.  

Reminds me of the Akira Kurosowa film Rashomon (like many things - actually) with each of the characters telling you something that was directly in line with making themselves look good/nobel.  Just once I would like to see a psychologist say that something is not psychological in nature.  Political scientists frequently yield to the relevance of other disciplines.  Sociologists occasionally defer to politics or psychology.  This said, where are the arguments and models that integrate insights from all disciplines.  Perhaps specific combinations work for onset and others work for variation whereas others work for termination?  Within the current way that the 

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The Year of Living (Slightly) Less Dangerously, Episode 4

2/3/2014

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The Year..:  2014 is the year of ENDKILL.  A 365 day journey into my research archive and active agenda, reflecting on what we know and do not know about mass atrocities and how to stop them (delivered once weekly so as not to burden the viewer/reader/audience).  


The original ideas about repression were largely structural-functionalist in orientation whereby some political-economic-culture system resulted in state-sponsored political violence.  Over time, something more akin to the model to the left has emerged whereby a political authority (principal) develops some policy and then they subcontract out to some coercive agent (i.e., member of the security apparatus) to implement it (the arrows that lead to the targets/victims).  While the idea of the repressive process is important, research has not exactly kept up.    

Accepting that the model above is where the field has gone, Below I list the 5 things that a rigorous investigation of Atrocity Endings must include: 

1) The "Kill" Order
•Plan/Preference:
•Party Manifestos
•Political Speeches
•Government Reports
•Memoirs
•Media Broadcasts

•Source: Political Communication, Cultural Studies

2) Order Diffusion
•Specific Information about Perpetrators
•Identity (name, unit, membership)
•How they receive orders
•How they are connected to political leadership
•How they implement orders

•Source: Security Studies, Criminology, Policing, Military Sociology

3) Victims/Targets
•Pre-violent status (i.e., size, location, resistance level)

•Source: Demography, Health, Public Opinion

4) Event/Campaign Engagement/Process
•Enactment of behavior of Interest (i.e., perpetrator-victim dyad by space/time)
•Range of activity, intensity at time t to t+n

•Sources: Micro-Foundational Research tradition (Ball, Davenport and Stam, Kalyvas, Strauss, Wilkinson)

5) Event/Campaign Termination
•Behavioral termination of campaign (i.e., killing stops)

•Sources: Micro-Foundational Research tradition (Ball, Davenport and Stam, Kalyvas, Strauss, Wilkinson)

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    Christian Davenport's Caveat Civis - Citizen Beware

    Given the elusive nature of state repression, it is crucial to be constantly aware of information as it becomes available.  This is not always easy to do and with the different tactics, perpetrators, locations and victims of domestic spying, torture, arrest, detention, disappearances and mass killing, it is necessary to keep one's eyes open, along with one's mind - Citizen's Beware.  The data is out there.  We just need to find it and figure out what it means.

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