international relations theory

Yesterday the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel to Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom for their work on what economists call "governance" and what political scientists call "politics" (and what Larry David would call "unwritten law").  In awarding the prize to one economist (Williamson) and one political scientist (Ostrom), the Nobel committee awarded exemplars in the study of political economy.

Lots of (positive) blog reactions to this Nobel.  Henry Farrell does note a trenchant irony: 

It is also worth pointing out in passing (as an email correspondent has brought to my attention) that she has received roughly a dozen grants under the NSF program that Senator Tom Coburn wants to abolish. Tom Coburn vs. the Nobel committee as a judge of scholarly quality – you decide.

And for those who would argue that Obama's Peace Prize makes that decision an easy call for Coburn, bear in mind that the two awards are given by different committees.   

Steve Leavitt has an economist's take: 

What’s interesting is that in the ensuing 15 years, it seems to me that economists have talked less and less about Williamson’s research, at least in the circles in which I run. I suspect most assistant professors of economics have barely heard of him. Yet I suspect the older generation of economists will applaud this choice....

The reaction of the economics community to Elinor Ostrom’s prize will likely be quite different. The reason? If you had done a poll of academic economists yesterday and asked who Elinor Ostrom was, or what she worked on, I doubt that more than one in five economists could have given you an answer. I personally would have failed the test....

This award demonstrates, in a way that no previous prize has, that the prize is moving toward a Nobel in Social Science, not a Nobel in economics.

I think Leavitt is overstating the case a little.  Looking at the last 15 years' worth of winners, I see a few winners who are more appreciated outside of economics than inside the profession (Amartya Sen, Daniel Kahneman, Thomas Schelling).  More of them, however, easily fall within the boundaries of mainstream economics (Lucas, Phelps, Hurwicz, Meyerson, Kydland, Prescott, Heckman, Merton, Scholes, Krugman, etc.) 

Nevertheless, Leavitt's conjecture raises four dandy questions for readers of this blog: 

1. Who will be the next political scientist to win this Nobel? 
2. Who should be the next political scientist to win this Nobel?
3. Who will be the next international relations scholar to win this Nobel?
4. Who should be the next international relations scholar to win this Nobel?

Fire away, readers! 

[And what are your answers to these questions?--ed.  They are closely guarded secrets that will be revealed at an appropriate time.]

So, how should you interpret the first round of P5 +1 negotiations with Iran that took place yesterday? 

The hard-working staff here at drezner.foreignpolicy.com would never want its readers to view material outside their ideological comfort zone -- that would be crazy talk.  Therefore, please go down this list of different ideological approaches to Iran and read only the one that fits you. 

Liberal internationalism:  An excellent first round of talks.  At a minimum, the Iranian pledge to permit IAEA inspectors into its Qom facility, and the agreement to have fuel encriched outside of Iran, help to lessen fears of a breakout capability.  This shows how a multilateral approach, linked to the threat of sanctions, can successfully bring Iran into a cooperative relationship with the West.

Neoconservatism:  These talks were a feckless and futile exercise.  Iran agreed "in principle" -- which means that it will likely not honor its pledges. This also covers part of the uranium that we know about, and only the facilities that we know about.  Anyone who thinks that this lying, odious, anti-Semitic regime is showing all of its cards on the nuclear question is deluding themselves.  The only thing these talks will accomplish is sapping the will of Americans to use any means necessary to overthrow the regime. 

Realism:  Iran's concessions reinforce the point that this regime a perfectly rational actor that is worthy of even deeper engagement.  We still have no evidence that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons, so we should not go looking for red herrings that do not exist.  A deal can be made with this government once we are able to ignore how its rulers treats its own citizenry.  Any failure from here on in is entirely the fault of Israel and the Israel Lobby in the United States. 

So, did I miss anything? 

Over at Duck of Minerva, Laura Sjoberg takes issue with my post from last week about the effects beautiful women have on men. 

Though I appreciate the effort, [Drezner's post] is not funny. Some would call me a spoilsport, and not up for a good joke. That might be also true, but isn't the reason I don't find this funny.

"Mainstream" IR engages gender issues rarely if at all, and when it does, it usually does so fairly trivially. I'm not a regular reader of the Foreign Policy Blog, but back searches say that this is one of the few times issues of gender have been mentioned on the blog... and the only time that I can find in the archive that the IR theorists on the blog have mentioned gender issues at all.

Sjoberg goes on to identify three reasons why this is not funny: 

1. "It trivializes gender-based work in IR."
2. The post denies "Agency" to women in world politics
3. By focusing on the beauty angle, I'm "Privileging Sex in IR." at the cost of other gender issues. 

She observes:

Women matter, and have agency, in important ways in global politics - as leaders, as soldiers, as peacemakers, as seamstresses, as housewives, as prostitutes, as business executives, etc.; and where women matter (and even where they do not seem to), gender matters in the shaping of expectations associated with jobs and leadership positions, they way people in those positions are treated, and the way that they treat each other. Again, likely unwittingly, Dan's post replicates traditional assumptions that women are at once without agency and to blame for men's mistakes.

I am somewhat hesitant to respond to Sjoberg's points.  From my past experiences in the blogosphere, blogging about the politics of gender as a Man ranks right around blogging about Israel/Palestine as a Jew in the category of "Things I Do Not Like Talking About on The Interwebs."  These kind of debates have a disturbing tendency to devolve into invocations of Godwin's Law or retorts like, "some of my best friends are women!  Really!  Why are you laughing at that?" 

Still, Sjoberg wants to see more conversation on this topic -- so here goes. 

First, I don't think I'm trivializing gender-based work in IR.  As Sjoberg herself acknowledges, contained within a humorous post are some seriously interesting hypotheses that are worth testing. 

She states that, "this is not the way to encourage/develop the field and those research programs, which are already struggling for resources and legitimacy."  I agree that it's not the only way, but you'd be surprised sometimes what can emerge from a humorous post.  Take zombies, for example.

Part of the fun of blogging is being able to mix the serious with the light-hearted, the quirky with the conventional posts.  In denying the humor of that individual post, Laura (unwittingly, I'm sure) appears to be denying IR bloggers the ability to play with ideas in an admittedly silly, but occasionally productive manner.  Laura is also (again, unwittingly, I'm sure) perpetuating an unfortunate stereotype with this observation -- that gender scholars are both humorless and didactic in their discourse. 

Last I checked, IR research programs don't rise or fall because of my blog posts, and they certainly aren't obscured by them. 

On the denial of agency, a point of concession -- I think Laura is correct.  The linked article suggested that men acted stupidly in front of attractive women, but the title of my post appeared to blame women for a social phenomenon that is really the fault of men.  True, this was a humorous blog post, but that doesn't mean that one shouldn't be as precise as possible in one's blogging.  So, point for Laura.

As to whether I'm denying the importance of other gender issues in international relations, I'm going to put the ball back in Sjoberg's court.  Don't just complain about the absence of gender issues on IR blogs -- start posting about the actual issues. 

Surfing through the Duck's archive of posts about gender, I found little of substance about gender and international relations by Sjoberg.  Actually, to be honest, I didn't find a lot of blog posts by Sjoberg at all.  Memo to Laura:  start blogging more!

There are myriad ways in which gender affects international relations beyond sex and beauty -- click here and here, for examples.  And to defend my FP colleagues, some of them have raised the issue of gender.  But rather than belaboring the point -- or engaging in meta-conversations about it -- just talk about the issues. 

The Daily Telegraph reports scientific confirmation of something I have known deep, deep down in my psyche for going on three decades: 

Talking to an attractive woman really can make a man lose his mind, according to a new study.

The research shows men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive.

Researchers who carried out the study, published in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, think the reason may be that men use up so much of their brain function or 'cognitive resources' trying to impress beautiful women, they have little left for other tasks.

The findings have implications for the performance of men who flirt with women in the workplace, or even exam results in mixed-sex schools.

Women, however, were not affected by chatting to a handsome man.

Well, beyond proof that there's a very fine line between the truth and The Onion, I think there are several fascinating implications from this finding. 

1)  You gotta admit, this explains a lot about Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.  He is the foreign policy leader who seems most determined to be close to attractive women.  If you think about it, it's nothing short of miraculous that Berlusconi hasn't screwed up more than he actually has. 

2)  Attractive first ladies are trouble.  The closest the United States came to a nuclear confrontation was the Cuban Missile Crisis -- which just happens to be when Jackie Kennedy is first lady.  A coincidence?  Oh, I think not! 

One can only hope that Presidents Obama and Sarkozy will recognize this and prevent Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni from being the 21st century equivalents of Helen of Troy. 

3)  Suddenly my Britney Spears suggestion is making a lot more sense. 

4)  Add another explanation to Angelina Jolie's relative success as a celebrity activist.  Semi-seriously, it would be interesting if gender was a determining factor in the ability of celebrity activists to move the agenda. 

5)  Whichever country makes Salma Hayek their queen will have finally chosen the One Woman to Rule Them All!!!

Dd I miss anything? 

To put it gently, international macroeconomic policy coordination has not had a glorious history over the past century.  Usually, the domestic political and economic costs were large enough to impede most efforts to coordinate.  Sham coordination was far more common than genuine coordination. 

Most successes in global policy coordination occurred when two of the following three conditions held.  First, when there was a state powerful enough to go it alone, coordination was usually a matter of the hegemon unilaterally providing the necessary public goods to facilitate coordination (see:  Marshall Plan, Dodge Line).  Second, when countries were being asked to take actions that boosted their domestic economies, they were willing to coordinate policy.  Contractionary fiscal or monetary policies have proven to be far more difficult to coordinate than expansionary actions.  Third, policymakers needed to be right on the economics.  Agreements to coordinate on an unsustainable set of policy prescriptions - such as the interwar gold exchange standard, Bretton Woods, or the Growth and Stability Pact - had a short half-life. 

Now, to give the G-20 some credit, this current crisis has led to greater levels of coordination than in the past -- and more than I expected.  This might be a function of policy learning from the debacles of the interwar period.  But it could also the fact that, to date, governments have been asked to pursue expansionary policies.  Each country was going to do something like what they are doing anyway -- the G-20 just acted as a useful focal point to cajole some of the more reluctant countries. 

What happens when it's time to clamp down?  Australian PM Kevin Rudd and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak proffer some recommendations in the Financial Times for the hard part of macroeconomic policy coordination: 

At Pittsburgh, G20 leaders should agree to a three-stage process. First, national governments should develop their own national strategies for recovery. Second, they should agree to deliver these strategies to the International Monetary Fund before the end of the year and ask the IMF to report back on their consistency with balanced and sustained global growth. Third, G20 leaders should meet again in 2010 (when South Korea is the chair of the G20) to agree their responsibilities and actions to achieve this goal within the framework of post-crisis global economic management. 

Steps one and two make a great deal of sense, and even have a good chance of being implemented.  The wording of step three is a bit vague, for it to mean anything it boils down to, "make everyone scales back on priming the pump in a coordinated manner." 

If that actually happens, well, tip your cap to the G-20, because the G-7 -- a much more homogenous group of countries -- never succeeded at that task. 

Question to readers:  does the G-20 have a chance in hell of succeeding in their next task? 

Alex Massie alerts us to this BBC story about modeling who would win if the dead actually did rise from the grave: 

If zombies actually existed, an attack by them would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless dealt with quickly and aggressively.

That is the conclusion of a mathematical exercise carried out by researchers in Canada.

They say only frequent counter-attacks with increasing force would eradicate the fictional creatures....

To give the living a fighting chance, the researchers chose "classic" slow-moving zombies as our opponents rather than the nimble, intelligent creatures portrayed in some recent films....

[T]heir analysis revealed that a strategy of capturing or curing the zombies would only put off the inevitable.

In their scientific paper, the authors conclude that humanity's only hope is to "hit them [the undead] hard and hit them often".

They added: "It's imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly or else... we are all in a great deal of trouble."  

Now, one could argue that this finding represents a Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious. On the other hand, the report has clear freaked out Alex Massie:

[The researchers] are cheating. It's like something out of Dad's Army: You can't fight like that, it's not in the rules... Then again, if we can be destroyed by Zombie 1.0, just think how powerless we'd be when confronted by Next Generation Zombies...

To try to make Massie feel better let's have some fun with this and ask a different question -- what would different systemic international relations theories* predict regarding the effects of a zombie outbreak? Would the result be inconsequential -- or World War Z? 

A structural realist would argue that, because of the uneven distribution of capabilities, some governments will be better placed to repulse the zombies than others. Furthermore, anyone who has seen Land of the Dead knows that zombies are not deterred by the stopping power of water. So that's the bad news. 

The good news is that these same realists would argue that there is no inherent difference between human states and zombie states.  Regardless of individual traits or domestic instiutions, human and zombie actors alike are subject to the same powerful constraint of anarchy. Therefore, the fundamental character of world politics would not be changed. Indeed, it might even be tactically wise to fashion temporary alliances with certain zonbie states as a way to balance against human states that try to exploit the situation with some kind of idealistic power grab made under the guise of "anti-zombieism." So, according to realism, the introduction of zombies would not fundamentally alter the character of world politics. 

A liberal institutionalist would argue that zombies represent a classic externality problem of... dying and then existing in an undead state and trying to cause others to do the same. Clearly, the zombie issue would cross borders and affect all states -- so the benefits from policy coordination would be pretty massive.

This would give states a great opportunity to cooperate on the issue by quickly fashioning a World Zombie Organization (WZO) that would codify and promnulgate rules on how to deal with zombies. Alas, the effectiveness of the WZO would be uncertain. If the zombies had standing and appealed any WZO decision to wipe them out, we could be talking about an 18-month window when zombies could run amok without any effective regulation whatsoever. 

Fortunately, the United States would likely respond by creating the North American F*** Zombies Agreement -- or NAFZA -- to handle the problem regionally. Similarly, one would expect the European Union to issue one mother of a EU Directive to cope with the issue, and handle questions of zombie comitology. Indeed, given that zombies would likely be covered under genetically modified organisms, the EU would trumpet the Catragena Protocol on Biosafety in an "I told you so" kind of way. Inevitably, Andrew Moravcsik would author an essay about the inherent superiority of the EU approach to zombie regulation, and why so many countries in Africa prefer the EU approach over the American approach of "die, motherf***ers, die!!"  Oh, and British beef would once again be banned as a matter of principle. 

Now, avid followers of social constructivism might think that Wendt and Duvall (2008) have developed a model that would be useful for this kind of event... but you would be wrong. Back when this paper was in draft stage, I specifically queried them about wther their argument about UFOs could be generalized to zombies, vampires, ghosts, the Loch Ness monster, Elvis, etc.  Their answer was an emphatic "no":  aliens would be possessors of superior technology, while our classic sci-fi canon tells us that the zombies, while resistant to dying, are not technologically superior to humans. So that's a dead end.

Instead, constructivists would posit that the zombie problem is what we make of it.  That is to say, there are a number of possible emergent norms in response to zombies. Sure, there's the Hobbesian "kill or be killed" end game that does seem to be quite popular in the movies.  But there could be a Kantian "pluralistic anti-Zombie" community that bands together and breaks down nationalist divides in an effort to establish a world state. Another way of thinking about this is that the introduction of zombies creates a stronger feeling of ontological security among remaining humans -- i.e., they are not flesh-eaters (alas, those bitten by zombies are now both physically and ontologically screwed). 

Unfortunately, I fear that constructivists would predict a norm cascade from the rise of zombies. As more and more people embrace the zombie way of undead life, as it were, the remaining humans would feel social pressure to conform and eventually internalize the norms and practices of zombies -- kind of like the early-to-middle section of Shaun of the Dead. In the end, even humans would adopt zombie-constructed perceptions of right and wrong, and when it's apprpriate to grunt in a menacing manner. 

Now, some would dispute whether neoconservatism is a systemic argument, but let's posit that it's a coherent IR theory.  To its credit, the neoconservatives would recognize the zombie threat as an existential threat to the human way of life.  Humans are from Earth, whereas zombies are from Hades -- clearly, neoconservatives would argue, zombies hate us for our freedom not to eat other humans' brains.   

While the threat might be existential, accomodation or recognition are not options.  Instead, neocons would quickly gear up an aggressive response to ensure human hegemony.  However, the response would likely be to invade and occupy the central state in the zombie-affected area.  After creating a human outpost in that place, humans in neighboring zombie-affected countries would be inspired to rise up and overthrow their own zombie overlords.  Alas, while this could happen, a more likely outcone would be that, after the initial "Mission Accomplished" banner had been raised, a fresh wave of zombies would rise up, enmeshing the initial landing force -- which went in too light and was drawn down too quickly -- in a protracted, bloody stalemate. 

Readers are hereby encouraged in the comments to posit other IR theoretical prediction of the response to a zombie uprising. For example, would the zombie uprising confirm Marxist predictions about the revolt of the proletariat? 

*Alas, your humble blogger does not have the time to puzzle out the zombie effect on two-level games. 

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Two interesting articles of note over the weekend.  The first is Clive Thompson's essay on Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (otherwise known as BDM) and his Fabulous Foreign Policy Game Theory Contraption forecasting model-for-hire.  Bruce is the leading proselytizer of using game theory as a predictive tool in political science -- and he has quite the forecasting business to back him up. 

Bruce seems to merit one of these every two years or so, and Thompson hits most of the same sources and critics of BDM's approach.  He does add this nugget of information, however: 

Those who have watched Bueno de Mesquita in action call him an extremely astute observer of people. He needs to be: when conducting his fact-gathering interviews, he must detect when the experts know what they’re talking about and when they don’t. The computer’s advantage over humans is its ability to spy unseen coalitions, but this works only when the relative positions of each player are described accurately in the first place. “Garbage in, garbage out,” Bueno de Mesquita notes. Bueno de Mesquita begins each interview by sitting quietly — “in a slightly closed-up manner,” as [U.K. telecommunications company Cable and Wireless Richard] Lapthorne told me — but as soon as an interviewee expresses doubt or contradicts himself, Bueno de Mesquita instantly asks for clarification.

“His ability to pick up on body language, to pick up on vocal intonation, to remember what people said and challenge them in nonthreatening ways — he’s a master at it,” says Rose McDermott, a political-science professor at Brown who has watched Bueno de Mesquita conduct interviews. She says she thinks his emotional intelligence, along with his ability to listen, is his true gift, not his mathematical smarts. “The thing is, he doesn’t think that’s his gift,” McDermott says. “He thinks it’s the model. I think the model is, I’m sure, brilliant. But lots of other people are good at math. His gift is in interviewing. I’ve said that flat out to him, and he’s said, ‘Well, anyone can do interviews.’ But they can’t.”

Patrick Appel links to this essay because of BDM's Iran predictions (according to him, the student protestors will be more powerful than Khamenei by the fall).  He notes, "Let's hope his model is right, but I'm skeptical that these questions can be predicted by equations alone."  Except as the above quote suggests, it's not just equations alone -- it's knowing what values to plug into those equations.  This requires a different set of skills -- and rare is the person who excels at both. 

Speaking of brain skills, I found Emily Yoffe's Slate essay on brain chemistry to be kind of interesting.  The argument in a nutshell:

Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of dopamine in their brains, which a recent study suggests may be at the root of the problem. For them even small stretches of time seem to drag. An article by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic last year, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" speculates that our constant Internet scrolling is remodeling our brains to make it nearly impossible for us to give sustained attention to a long piece of writing. Like the lab rats, we keep hitting "enter" to get our next fix....

[O]ur brains are designed to more easily be stimulated than satisfied. "The brain seems to be more stingy with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire," [University of Michigan professor of psychology Kent] Berridge has said. This makes evolutionary sense. Creatures that lack motivation, that find it easy to slip into oblivious rapture, are likely to lead short (if happy) lives. So nature imbued us with an unquenchable drive to discover, to explore. Stanford University neuroscientist Brian Knutson has been putting people in MRI scanners and looking inside their brains as they play an investing game. He has consistently found that the pictures inside our skulls show that the possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one....

Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we're restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. [Washington State University neuroscientist Jaak] Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a "CrackBerry."

I fully recognize the biochemical reward system discussed in the essay, and I've certainly heard this argument applied to bloggers who allegedly lose the ability to engage in long-form writing.  But based on my own experience, I don't buy it. 

True, blogging, updating, etc. brings excitement.  But I get the same thrill from perfecting a longer stretch of prose.  When I'm polishing up a case study or trying to refine a theoretical argument, I usually feel the desires for new information that I get when I'm blogging.  Indeed, the biggest mental rush I get from writing is tackling a completely new subject and then, 10,000 words later, retackling the first draft with renewed vigor and the promise of molding it into something better.  Once I think I have something of merit, oooh, does the dopamine kick in.

But that's just me.  Tell me, dear readers -- are your electronic gadgets hampering you ability to do long-form work?     

My latest TNI online essay is now available for viewing on the interwebs.  It looks at recent U.S. foreign policy actions through the ever-useful lens of the good cop/bad cop routine.  Can a gambit that always worked on NYPD Blue work on the global stage?  I have my doubts:

On the whole, the good cop-bad cop routine is of limited utility in world politics. Iran appears to be unbowed in the face of a hawkish Israeli government (though, to be fair, they have been preoccupied with other matters recently). A protectionist Congress has not made it any easier to complete the Doha round. Bill Clinton’s good cop was able to secure the release of the hostages, but at the price of a photo op that looked bad no matter how necessary it might have been. And while no one doubts that Biden occasionally goes rogue, it remains unclear just what policy benefits that strategy yields.

In theory, the best kind of bad cop is the one that seems genuinely unconstrained and ready to strike. An independent but allied government plays this part much better than a subordinate member of the executive branch. In other words, if you want to successfully execute the good cop-bad cop routine in world politics, the odds are long to begin with. To pull it off, however, under no circumstances should you let Joe Biden be Joe Biden.

Go read the whole thing. 

[Would a threat to display more of Dennis Franz's posterior work as a compellent threat?--ed.  Hmmm... let me check the Biological Weapons Convention to see if it's a legit move and I'll get back to you.]