Yesterday Foreign Policy published the graphics-friendly results of the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP), as conducted by William and Mary’s Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations.  Some of the results -- there's a plurality of constructivists in the field -- have already provoked some interesting blog discussion.  There's also the more juicy debates over the best Ph.D. programs, best M.A. programs, and most influential people in our small, small universe. 

Your humble blogger must confess to having a different interest in the results.  The good folks running the survey were kind enough to add some questions about how scholars think Web 2.0 technologies -- blogs, wikis, tweets, podcasts, etc. -- fit into our discipline.  This is a natural follow-on to some research that Charli Carpenter and I published recently.  Since this is the first time these sorts of questions have been asked, this is strictly a "snapshot" of where the field was in 2011, not the trend over time.  Still, given the anecdotal evidence of prior hostility to these technologies, it's an interesting snapshot. 

Looking at the topline survey results, here are the most interesting tidbits I found:

1)  More than 28% of respondents cited a blog post in their scholarship, and more than 56% used blogs as a teaching tool.  The positive responses for newer Web 2.0 technologies -- Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube -- were much smaller on the research side.  On the other hand, a stunning 90% of respondents said they used YouTube in their teaching. 

2) 28% of respondents had, at a minimum, contributed to a blog.  7% of respondents "regularly contrribute" to a blog. 

3)  I tweeted some wrath last month about grading a paper that footnoted a Wikipedia page (for the record, I don't mind students using Wikipedia as a first-stop for research, but I do mind students who don't follow the hyperlinks).  I see I would be joined in that assessment by about 85% of my IR colleagues. 

4)  No respondent thinks that contributing or maintaining a blog is important for advancing their academic career.  Intriguingly, however, there is certainly more appreciation about the role of blogs in the discipline than is commonly understood.  To be specific:

a) 25% of respondents do think blogs devoted to international relations should count in evaluating a professor's research output.  I guarantee you that number would have been much lower even a few ywars ago;

b) More than 66% of respondents thought such an activity should count in evaluating a professor's service to the profession. 

c)  90% of respondents believed that IR blogs had a beneficial impact on foreign policy formulation;

d)  More than 51% of respondents thought that IR blogs had a beneficial impact on the discipline of international relations. 

There's a lot more data to discuss, but I would say that this veeeeery interesting snapshot should be enough to generate some discussion for now.  For example, do readers think that these numbers will plateau, grow or recede over time?   

So the eurozone crisis is metastasizing from really bad to even worse.  Over at The New Yorker,  James Surowiecki blogs that what's so frustrating about the situation is that the impediments to a solution are easily surmountable: 

[W]hat’s easy to miss, amid the market tremors and the political brinksmanship, is that this is that rarest of problems—one that you really can solve just by throwing money at it....

The frustrating thing about all this is that there is a ready-made solution. If the European Central Bank were to commit publicly to backstopping Italian and Spanish debt, by buying as many of their bonds as needed, the worries about default would recede and interest rates would fall. This wouldn’t cure the weakness of the Italian economy or eliminate the hangover from the housing bubble in Spain, but it would avert a Lehman-style meltdown, buy time for economic reforms to work, and let these countries avoid the kind of over-the-top austerity measures that will worsen the debt crisis by killing any prospect of economic growth....

So the problem is not that the E.C.B. can’t act but that it won’t. The obstacles are ideological and, you might say, psychological.

As someone who agrees with Surowiecki on the economic diagnosis, the political scientist in me is forced to call a flagrant foul on this kind of analysis.  In labeling the problem as one of "ideology" or "psychology," Surowiecki is explicitly arguing that it's just so absurd that the correct policy is not being pursued.  If only someone could talk some sense into the key policymakers, then -- snap! -- the crisis would be resolved. 

As someone who studies this stuff for a living, simply saying that political ideology, interest, or institutions can be easily changed borders on the comical.  Ideas, interests and institutions are the bread and butter of politics, and all of them are far stickier than economists would like you to believe.  There's more than seven decades of entrenched thinking that would require the Bundesbank and the ECB to alter their approach.  Crisis or no crisis, that's not just easily dismissed. 

Furthermore, looking at the Franco-German crisis bargaining, any actual deal to bolster EFSF resources, empower the ECB, and/or create something approximating a fiscal union would require that Southern Europe agree to remake their domestic economies to more closely resemble the German model.  This has always been Merkel's bargain:  she's been willing to cede greater power to the EU provided that EU policy preferences looks more like Germany.  This makes sense for Germany, but the kind of wrenching changes and adjustments that will be asked of Spain and Italy are massive.  The fact that Berlin -- rather than Brussels -- is the source of this diktat will add a fun new level of political difficulties as well. 

A deal could be reached, but no one should be kidding themselves -- it is fantastically difficult, and saying that just "politics" or "ideology" or "psychology" is getting in the way doesn't make it any easier. 

Your humble blogger has been rather persistent in pointing out the virtues of bridging the gap between international relations scholars and policymakers, and rather adamant in insisting why this hasn't happened: 

[T]he fundamental difference between economic policy and foreign policy is that the former community accepts the idea that economic methodologies and theory-building enterprises have value, and are worth using as a guide to policymaking.  This doesn't mean economists agree on everything, but it does mean they are all speaking a common language and accept the notion of external validity checks on their arguments. 

That consensus simply does not exist within the foreign policy community.... Many members of the foreign policy community explicitly reject the notion that social science methodologies and techniques can explain much in world politics.  They therefore are predisposed to reject the kind of scholarship that political scientists of all stripes generate.   This might be for well-founded reasons, it might be simple innumeracy hostility to the academy, or it might be a combination of the two.  I'd love to have a debate about whether that's a good or bad thing, but my point is that's the reality we face.

Now I see in The Forum that James Lee Ray is also arguing that political science merits a greater role in foreign policymaking. The abstract for his article:

Foreign policy decision makers tend to rely on historical analogies. The “surge” in Afghanistan, for example, was inspired in part by the “surge” in Iraq. Processes for dealing with foreign policy issues involving the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were substantially different from those processes in the Bush and Obama administrations aimed at dealing with economic crises in 2008 and 2009. The latter processes were influenced extensively by economists, especially in the Obama administration. The decisions to send additional troops to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan involved relatively few political scientists. More substantial input from political scientists in the decision making process about the surge in Afghanistan might have produced more knowledgeable and informative analyses of relevant historical and political data in the form of structured focused comparisons of the wars and counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as analyses and interpretations of data on larger numbers of cases pertaining to broader phenomena of which the US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan are examples. Perhaps political scientists deserve a role within foreign policy making processes more similar to that reserved for economists in processes focusing on economic issues.

Within the article itself, Ray is quite explicit in comparing the influence of political scientists to economists:

[I]t is probably safe to say that no President would consider appointing anyone but economists to the Council of Economic Advisers. So perhaps there could be a space for political scientists in foreign policy-making processes analogous to that niche for economists on the Council of Economic Advisers in processes set in place by the U.S. government to deal with economic issues?...

It is true, perhaps, that economics  is a more coherent academic field of inquiry than political science, or than the subfield that deals with international politics. Perhaps for that reason, economists are better placed to offer advice to governmental decision-makers than are political scientists. Nevertheless, the argument here is that the greater deference shown to economists by government officials when economic issues are dealt  with than that accorded to political scientists when foreign policy issues arise is not entirely justified....

If the argument here is valid, then perhaps there should be more space set aside in foreign policy-making processes  in the U.S. government for political scientists. For example, perhaps National Security Advisers should be political scientists, for reasons analogous to those  that have up to this time led to the appointment of nothing but economists to the Council of Economic Advisers. 

I pretty sympathetic with Ray's conclusions, and therefore I really, really want to agree with his causal logic.  It's just that I don't. 

The gist of Ray's evidence is that the Obama administration relied on analogical reasoning in deciding on the Afghan strategy in 2009, and therefore concluding that a "surge" there would work as it did in Iraq.  If more political scientists had been in the room, Ray posits, perhaps this cognitive failure would have been avoided.  In comparison, Ray observes that the Iraq surge decision was lousy with advanced poli sci degrees (including David Petraeus, William Luti, Eliot Cohen, J.D. Crouch, and FP's own Peter Feaver). 

There are a few holes in this analysis.  First, I'm not totally sold on the cases used by Ray.  True, political scientists played a large role in the surge decision in Iraq, which is conventionally viewed as having worked.  The thing is, political scientists (Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol) played an even larger role in the decision to invade Iraq , which is conventionally viewed as having not worked.  Ray's case slection is too circumscribed. 

Second, had Obama consulted more international relations scholars, he would have received perfectly muddled advice.  Ray himself acknowledges this: 

The evidence just reviewed that is potentially relevant to the decision by the Obama Administration about the surge in Afghanistan tends to point in diverse directions. Some of it casts doubt on the prudence of the Obama Administration’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, while other findings could be used to support that decision.

Had Obama or his advisor consulted extensively with academic IR specialists, he still would have needed to exercise political judgment to determine which advice was worth following. 

To be clear, I strongly favor having more Ph.D.s in political science in the loop on foreign policy decisionmaking.  I'm just not sure Ray's case is all that persuasive. 

What do you think? 

Your humble blogger is currently knee-deep in dissertation prospectuses (prospecti?), a rather curious literary form.  Here at the Fletcher School, a dissertation prospectus is a Ph.D. student's attempt to describe his or her dissertation topic, including the central puzzle, the deficiencies in the existing literature, the proposed hypotheses and the testing strategy. 

A prospectus runs about 60-80 pages and, to be blunt, is extremely painful to both authors and readers.  It's painful for the authors because, after having spent most of graduate school ripping what they read to intellectual shreds, they discover that coming up with their own original arguments is actually a pretty challenging experience.  It's painful for the readers because it's the academic equivalent of teenage poetry -- there's a lot of strong feelings and beliefs surging through the text in a thoroughly out-of-control and ungainly manner (and that's the final version of the prospectus -- you can only imagine what the draft versions of these documents look like).  Indeed, the adolescence metaphor works astonishingly well -- I have engaged or witnessed many a conversation like the following: 

Ph.D. ADVISOR:  I think you should stop reading Wendt [or insert other trendy academic name here].  I don't like the way his arguments are shaping your argument.

Ph.D. STUDENT:  But you don't understand!!  I love him -- as much as love can be socially constructed!!  He's let me see the world in a whole new way.  He's the key to everything!!!

Ph.D. ADVISOR:  You're writing a dissertation on cooperation among transnational criminal groups -- I just don't think his argument works here.

PH.D. STUDENT:  How would you know which arguments work and which ones don't?!  When was the last time you read someone who moved you -- the Stone Age?!  I bet you've never read a piece of constructivist scholarship in your life.  You don't understand me at all!!!!!

Ph.D. ADVISOR:  Calm down -- I just think you might be better off if you read other people is all.  This is just an intellectual crush.  It will pass. 

Ph.D. STUDENT!!!  No!! Never!!  I've never read anyone else who can speak to my topic like him.  Wendt and I will stay together forever!!   

Usually, the final dissertations look significantly better -- and thank God for that. 

As you might surmise, this is not an easy literary form to conquer, and in most cases is just a hoop that should be jumped through as quickly as possible.  Reading a bunch of these back-to-back can cause one to start muttering about how grad students ain't what they used to be and what-not.  I am usually able to resist such mutterings by forcefully reminding myself that my own dissertation prospectus was such a bland and vague piece of crap ("I want to write something about sanctions") that I purged it from my hard drive as soon as possible in order to thwart all my future biographers achieve some peace of mind. 

Every once in a while, however, a Ph.D. student hits upon the delicate alchemy of fear and arrogance necessary to write an engaging prospectus that suggests an excellent dissertation.  Maybe not even an excellent prospectus, but just a scintillating paragraph or two that suggests the student's intellectual trajectory is really, really promising. 

This morning I stumbled across one of those paragraphs in a fascinating prospectus on international water boundary disputes (really!), which I now share with you: 

While other water law studies have attempted to analyze the origins of water law, the study of water law in ancient societies tends to be cursory and rife with misnomers and mistakes. For instance, most cite the Hammurabi Code as the oldest water law, when with little effort it is easily discoverable that both the codes of Lipit Ishtar and Ur Nammu both contain water provisions, pre-date Hammurabi by at least 250 years, and clearly provide the normative underpinnings on which the Hammurabi Code was constructed.   This study will therefore seek to build a solid historical foundation on which to ground further analysis of modern transboundary water law.

It's the phrase "easily discoverable" that tickled my intellectual fancy -- and, fortunately, the rest of the prospectus appears to back up the promise of that paragraph. 

It's moments like these that forcefully remind me that, for all of the problems and pathologies with the modern academy, I really, really, really, really love my job. 

Last week I received the following news release from the National Research Council:

A new report from the National Research Council recommends that the U.S. intelligence community adopt methods, theories, and findings from the behavioral and social sciences as a way to improve its analyses.  To that end, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) should lead a new initiative to make these approaches part of the intelligence community’s analytical work, hiring and training, and collaborations.

The report, which was requested by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, urges the intelligence community to routinely evaluate the performance of its analytical methods.  One important step in that direction is to attach whenever possible numeric probabilities with uncertainty estimates for the events that analysts assess and forecast.  Without explicit quantifiers, analysts cannot communicate their conclusions clearly or evaluate the accuracy of their analyses over time. Policymakers need to know how confident analysts are and how well they understand the limits to their knowledge, the report emphasizes.  It recommends many specific steps that DNI can implement as part of analysts’ everyday work. 

"The social and behavioral sciences have long studied topics central to analysts’ work, such as how people evaluate evidence and collaborate on difficult tasks,” said Baruch Fischhoff, chair of the committee that wrote the report and professor of social and decision sciences and of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. “That research has had some impact on that work. Our report shows how the community can take full advantage of that research – and of its dedicated analysts – by adopting an evidence-based approach to its own analytical methods.  We envision a community engaged in continual learning, both absorbing scientific research into the analytical process and evaluating its own performance."

Now, this all sounds good to this social scientist's ears, but there's one little thing nagging at me.  A quick glance at the "Committee on Behavioral and Social Science Research to Improve Intelligence Analysis for National Security" reveals the following membership:  four psychology professors, three political scientists, three business professors, and a public policy professor. 

Now, no offense, but is it really shocking that a group of social and behavioral scientists conclude that their work should be embraced more by the intelligence community? 

None of this is to say that I disagree with the report's findings.  I concur that the intelligence community should “ensure that the intelligence community (IC) applies the principles, evidentiary standards, and findings of the behavioral and social sciences.”  And I wholeheartedly agree that there should be more "exchange of expertise between the IC and academic research environments."  (Based on this survey, by the way, a fair percentage of IR scholars already do paid or unpaid work for the government). 

The tools of social sciences are not magic bullets, but they're actually quite useful, and I want analysts to rely on every tool in their cognitive arsenal.  To use a baseball metaphor, think of this report as suggesting that sabermetrics would be a useful complement to traditional scouting as a way of analyzing talent.. 

The thing is, as much as I might want to be viewed as a thoroughly detached and dispassionate expert on these questions, I fear that the rest of the world will view this an exercise in interest group lobbying.  The report would have been more persuasive if more "old-school" intelligence analysts had signed off on the report (though Thomas Fingar was one of the signatories). 

Erik Gartzke, an associate professor of political science at UCSD and a man who's Google Scholar citation count makes me feel very, very small, sent me the following thoughts on political science and policy relevance.  I reprint them, below, without edits or comment:

ZOMBIE RELEVANCE

by Erik Gartzke

Dan Drezner's penchant for zombies may have yet another application.  In the policy relevance debate, political scientists are like Renfield, Dracula's sidekick (or possibly like Thomas the Tank engine if children are present).  We really want to be "useful."  I know of no other discipline that is so angst-ridden about mattering, even those that don't matter in any concrete, "real world" sense.  Obviously, what makes us different from poets, particle physicists, or Professors of Pediatric Oncology is that we study politics and occasionally imagine that this gives us some special salience to that subject.  Policy makers, too, want us to be "relevant," though I think what they have in mind differs in important respects.

There are three ways that political science can be relevant to politics.  On both sides of the debate, attention seems focused on only one of these roles.  Interestingly, each side has chosen a different role to emphasize.  First, academics could have expertise that is valuable in connecting policies to outcomes.  We have lots of examples of this.  Economists invented theories like adverse taxation and tools like GDP to help policy makers more effectively manage the economy.  Unfortunately, there are very few insights or tools from political science, and those we do have are either very narrowly relevant (i.e. techniques for gerrymandering congressional districts to achieve affirmative action objectives), or very imprecise (i.e. nuclear balancing).  Academic political scientists consciously _want_ this role, but the complaint from policy makers is that they do it poorly, providing policy guidance that is not expert enough, or overly nuanced and complex.  This would seem to imply that political science should remain in the ivory tower, developing better tools.  Instead, however, the argument appears to be that political science should give up these tools and practice a form of political consultation more comprehensible by the policy community.  One then has to ask why, and what this will achieve.  Is it the case, as many argue, that non-expert political scientists will be more useful?  Why?

Interestingly, one of the critical exceptions to the general trend, and examples where political scientists have prospered in Washington as experts, involves pollsters.  Survey methodology got its start in political science and has penetrated deeply into the political process, precisely because pollsters can provide valuable information to politicians and policy makers about cause and effect.  Pollsters are now even regulars as pundits, asked to shill for policies and politicians on the basis of their expertise. 

The second thing that academics can provide is thus credibility.  We can "speak truth to power" or perhaps just generally speak the truth, at least as we see it.  This could be valuable if policy makers themselves have become zombies, enslaved to a process that prevents them from stating things, even when obvious, that are unpopular or controversial.  We see this happening in processes such as the Base Closure Commission, where outsiders helped to smooth a transition that was politically difficult.  This kind of relevance is difficult, however, as politics is not really about the truth.  Paul Pillar, one of the protagonists the debate ("In your face, political science!") found this out, much to his regret.  One of the least zombie-like people in the national security bureaucracy, Paul was the perfect foil as author of the national intelligence estimate that legitimated the Bush policy of invading Iraq.  In his, and his boss's moment to speak truth, they propagated a politically-expiedent myth.  This kind of policy relevance really _is_ valuable to policy makers, especially since credibility is such a scarce commodity inside the beltway, and so valued elsewhere.  The problem, of course, from an academic perspective is that selling credibility has nothing directly to do with expertise and everything to do with what, for lack of a better phrase, was once called "moral turpitude."  The value in academics in holding forth in Washington may have as much to do on occasion with their _lack_ of contact with policy making, as with their putative expertise, at least in terms of credibility. 

A corollary to this is the role of academistic consultants, some with faculty positions, others with beltway connections, that provide "research" that feeds the beast of the Washington policy machine.  This can be financially rewarding, but the desire for funding leads to varying degrees of compromise, a zombification by extension.

The third contribution that academics can make to the policy community is one that all seem to agree upon, but which makes the least direct demand on political science as a substantive discipline.  The intellectual discipline of first getting a PhD and then practicing as an academic gives one an ordered, logical mind, which can then be applied to tasks in the policy community, as well as to more purely intellectual pursuits.  There is nothing wrong with this, but then again, there is nothing particularly unique about how political science does this that prevents scholars in other disciplines from applying themselves to policy making as well.  Indeed, this is what we observe.  Sociologists, economists, engineers and physicists (even the occasional poet) enter public service. 

-------------------------------------------------

What makes political science different from most other fields is that we have failed to resolve our conflict with our subject matter.  Poets report the human condition.  They do not expect to alter it, at least not permanently.  Physicians can make you better, so they do intervene, but their detachment is credible in the sense that they do not want to become illnesses.  No physicist I know of hankers to _be_ her subject matter, though of course we are all of us made of matter.  Political science alone wants to be different but engaged. 

Imagine suggesting to a congressional committee that Congress should abandon the forecasting models of the OMB as esoteric and speculative.  Try to suggest to someone like Paul Pillar that he should hanker after the "good old days" of pre-GDP census taking and data collection.  Economics became policy relevant in the first sense because it developed tools that could help policy makers better connect their actions with outcomes.  These are not perfect, as recent events illustrate, but they work better than the old way of doing things (i.e. whatever we did last time, or holding one's thumb up to the wind).  The problem is that political science does not yet have "killer apps" like GDP.  Optimists would say we are still working on these things.  Pessimists would say that they will never come.  I will not weigh in on that debate because in some sense it does not matter. 

The real point, however, is that the debate does not matter.  Either way, the search for policy relevance, as it is pursued by many in the policy community, makes no sense.
If you believe the optimists, then the correct role of political science is to get back in the kitchen (metaphorically) and cook up some good insights and tools so that we can eventually fulfill role number one.  If you are instead pessimistic and despair of political science ever achieving much headway in terms of expertise, then you should still prefer us in our academic enclaves, only occasionally venturing down from the mountain, since this is what gives us our credibility as unbiased agents.  The largely pessimistic perception of policy practitioners implies that they should treat political scientists like poets, or perhaps adherents of atonal music.  Someone gets it, but thank God it is hidden in academic cloisters!  This is perhaps what policy makers often do, as suggested by Paul Pillar's example of the debate between academics over perestroika witnessed by James Baker.

Another possibility is that those in the policy community wish academic political scientists were more like them for reason number three.  This, however, does not make much sense.  There can be no harm in making some political scientists esoteric if after all not everyone can move in policy circles.  The training of academic political scientists still provides disciplined minds.  Nor does it appear to be the case that there is a shortage of policy-eager political scientists to staff government bureaus and policy-focused beltway agencies and advocacy groups.  In this light, academic political science may be accused of leading the youth astray, but no more than poetry or physics departments.

So what is it that makes many in the policy community so uncomfortable with academic political science, and for that measure why are political scientists so anxious about being labeled as not policy relevant?  The best I can come up with again involves those zombies.  Zombies eat the living.  They move slowly, clumsily, if inexorably.  People who run away can escape the zombies.  So, the problem for zombies is that they cannot really catch unwilling prey.  Academic political scientists, for their part, are strangely attracted to these undead creatures.    They run, but not vigorously.  Having your brains eaten is bad, but still, it is nice to be valued for something in which you have considerable pride....
Academic political scientists keep looking back to see if they can make eye contact with one of those zombies, maybe share a good anecdote, provide some advice, secure funding for the next research project...

There is the hint of the symbiotic relationship between predator and prey, political scientist and policy community.  Each needs something from the other, even as both communities see the other as distant, alien.  Policy practitioner-political scientists who disdainfully remark that they cannot even read the American Political Science Review would never see the need to make such a comment about a journal like Solid State Physics, or the Journal of Philosophy.  Academic political scientists, for their part, should stop pretending that their main value to the policy community at present is in their expertise and fess up, if appropriate, to providing credibility or intellectual discipline (directly or through our students).

Becoming comfortable with this duality as a community also means embracing the differences that follow from that duality.  Some of us should be in the ivory tower, just like physicists, chemical engineers, and art historians.  In order for political science to fulfill the objective of expertise, it must --- like other fields of expertise --- become "expert", and unfortunately that really means becoming largely incomprehensible to all but those deeply enmeshed in the field or a particular subfield, at least for the purposes of "inhouse" debates.  Others will work best in applying, interpreting, or otherwise interacting with the "real world" -- though if this characterization of non-academia were true, we would not need anyone studying (i.e. how does one know the real world and still hanker after insights that would connect his-or-her actions with the (unknown) implications of policy?).  In any case, those of us on the academic side should stop teasing the zombies, just as the zombies should stop pretending that every academic brain is a ready meal.  "Policy relevance" is a complex set of social phenomena that both attract and repel political scientists on both sides of the policy divide.  Let some of us be more like our poet, mathematician or linguist brethren and become one with our academic-nerd nature.  Others can prefer to engage Washington more directly, but they will make themselves, and their sponsors happier if they are candid about the fact that those within the beltway want your brains (or your soul), not your incites.

Pundits are clearly scrambling to figure out what the hell is happening in Egypt, and what Egypt means for the rest of the world.  And I'm beginning to notice that some of them are blaming international relations theory for being asleep at the wheel. 

First, over at AEI's Enterprise blog, Apoorva Shah argues that these events suggest the poverty of modern political science:

Did anything in academia foresee the unrest in Egypt, and more importantly, can something explain how Western foreign policy can appropriately react to the events? Of all the “schools” of IR thought—liberal internationalism, realism, isolationism, etc.—did any theory make sense of this and guide us on what to do next?

My amateur opinion is no. Because of an academic world obsessed with increasingly complex empirical analysis where every revolution is a mere data point and every country a pawn in the great game, our political science departments and the scholars they have trained (many of whom serve in and advise our current administration) were caught flat-footed, searching for some logical, rational approach to a particularly unique and country-specific event. While digging for the right IR theory, they instead produced a mishmash of mixed messages and equivocation.

If I’m wrong, please correct me.

OK... you're wrong.  Let me correct you. 

First of all, let's clarify the division of labor in political science a bit.  Crudely put, international relations focuses on the interactions between governments and other transnational and subnational actors.  Comparative politics focuses on the domestic politics within countries. 

To put this in the context of Egypt, it's the job of comparative politics scholars to explain/predict when we should see mass protests and when those protests might cause authoritarian regimes to buckle.  It's the job of international relations scholars to predict what effects the regime change/authoritarian crackdown would have on both Egypt's foreign policy and the situation in the Middle East. 

Calling out IR scholars for not predicting the uprising in Egypt is like calling out a cardiologist for not detecting a cancerous growth.    

But here's the thing -- as Laura Rozen has observed, political scientists and those they've trained did call this one!! From her September 2010 story:   

A bipartisan group of senators and foreign policy analysts is pushing the Obama administration to prepare for the looming end of Hosni Mubarak’s rule in Egypt by putting a new emphasis on Egyptian political reform and human rights....

“The bottom line is that we are moving into a period of guaranteed instability in Egypt,” said Robert Kagan, a foreign policy scholar with the Brookings Institution who co-founded the Egypt Working Group with Michele Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “So the idea [that] we can keep puttering on as if nothing is going to change is a mistake. ... What we need now is to move to deliverables.”

The pressure from the academic and political community comes amid widespread expectation that the 82-year-old Mubarak — who reportedly is seriously ill — may soon cede power to his son, Gamal. 

If that's not enough, consider that Joshua Tucker blogged about the spread of revolutions last week, before Egypt blew up.  Even before that, my fellow political scientist and FP blogger Marc Lynch's January 5th blog post: 

 For years, both Arab and Western analysts and many political activists have warned of the urgent need for reform as such problems built and spread. Most of the Arab governments have learned to talk a good game about the need for such reform, while ruthlessly stripping democratic forms of any actual ability to challenge their grip on power....

Meanwhile, the energy and desperation across disenfranchised but wired youth populations will likely become increasingly potent. It's likely to manifest not in organized politics and elections, but in the kind of outburst of social protest we're seeing now in Tunisia.... and, alarmingly, in the kinds of outburst of social violence which we can see in Jordan and Egypt. Whether that energy is channeled into productive political engagement or into anomic violence would seem to be one of the crucial variables shaping the coming period in Arab politics. Right now, the trends aren't in the right direction.

 Not surprisingly, the Obama administration met with many of these people this week. 

Finally, a small point I made earlier this week regarding Mubarak's options: 

Everyone assumes that the Egyptian leader is a dead man walking, and given his speech on Friday, I can understand that sentiment.  There are, however, remaining options for Mubarak to pursue, ranging from a full-blown 1989 Tiananmen square crackdown to a slow-motion 2009 Tehran-style crackdown. 

Obviously, these aren't remotely good options for anyone involved.  The first rule in political science, however, is that leaders want to stay in power, and Mubarak has given no indication that he wants to leave.  (emphasis added)

Alas, based on this morning's events, it appears that Mubarak has selected the Tehran 2009 option. 

So I think Shah is pretty much wrong.  That said, I agree that there are profound limits on what IR theory can do in a situation like Egypt.  Ross Douthat sorta made this point earlier this week:

[Americans] take refuge in foreign policy systems: liberal internationalism or realpolitik, neoconservatism or noninterventionism. We have theories, and expect the facts to fall into line behind them. Support democracy, and stability will take care of itself. Don’t meddle, and nobody will meddle with you. International institutions will keep the peace. No, balance-of-power politics will do it.

But history makes fools of us all. We make deals with dictators, and reap the whirlwind of terrorism. We promote democracy, and watch Islamists gain power from Iraq to Palestine. We leap into humanitarian interventions, and get bloodied in Somalia. We stay out, and watch genocide engulf Rwanda. We intervene in Afghanistan and then depart, and watch the Taliban take over. We intervene in Afghanistan and stay, and end up trapped there, with no end in sight.

Sooner or later, the theories always fail. The world is too complicated for them, and too tragic.

Douthat is sorta correct -- but it's precisely because the world is so complex that we rely on theories.  While they're often wrong, they're vastly superior to the alternatives.    

Consider that, instead of explicit theories, a lot of commentators are simply asking whether 2011 Egypt parallels 1978/79 Iran.  This is a great question to ask, but the only way to answer it is to rely on explicit or implict theories of how revolutions play out and how the international system reacts to them. 

Of course the theories will fail from time to time.  Unfortunately, this is not rocket science, because rocket science is way easier than the social sciences.   There are too many variables, too many idiosyncratic elements to each case, too much endogeneity, and so forth.  But simply saying "the world is tragic" is a pretty lousy substitute to organizing foreign policy. 

Now is the winter of your humble blogger's discontent, only to be made glorious once writing letters of recommendation/grading papers has ceased.  After that, I'm looking forward to reading or re-reading the following six books and articles: 

1)  Charles Kupchan, How Enemies Become Friends.  A lot of international relations theory starts off with the basic question of "what causes war?"  Kupchan flips this question on its head, asking how enduring rivals decide not go to to war.

2)  Ben Wildavsky, The Great Brain Race.  The first discussion I've seen of how universities are competing in an era of globalization for the deepest pockets best minds to educate.  Plus, I was a big fan of this series as a kid.

3)  McKinsey Global Institute, Farewell to Cheap Capital?.  Think of it as a sequel to the global savings glut hypothesis. 

4)  Tyler Cowen, "The Inequality that Matters," The American Interest, January/February 2011.  I think Cowen is overemphasizing the role of finance in explaining rising inequality in the United States (my hunch is that the economics of superstars plays a big role as well), but he raises a very interesting question about whether the financial sector is the Achilles' heel of free-market democracies. 

5)  The Economist's year-end issue.  This is always a treat -- a double issue filled with articles about the interesting and the arcane.  This essay on the inefficiency of getting a Ph.D. ("America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships.") is a must-read for anyone contemplating getting a doctorate. 

6)  Linda Schlossberg, Life in Miniature.  All non-fiction and no fiction makes Dan a dull boy.  This delicate first novel, a child's narrative of her mother's descent into paranoia, will be of interest for those policy wonks currently working on the war on drugs:  it's a theme that runs through the book.  Full disclosure: Linda is a friend and gives a great reading. 

[What about John Mearsheimer's latest in The National Interest?--ed.  Already read it, and I'll have more to say about in a bit.] 

The post-mortems on the political journalism and political science APSA panel have been pouring forth like the body count in The Expendables.  There's one thread in particulat that has piqued my interest, however.  It starts with this Rob Farley observation: 

By and large, IR and comparative haven’t had the same impact on the journalist community in either their quantitative or qualitative forms.  I think that several major concepts/grand theories from both comparative and IR have found their way into the general policy conversation (deterrence theory, for example) but it’s more difficult to find uses of clear, sound political science research.  IPE might be an exception to this.  The immense political science literature on ethnic conflict seems utterly detached from the way that ethnic conflict is treated in the popular media.

To which, Matthew Yglesias responds:

I think you find almost no journalistic interest in comparative politics scholarship as just part and parcel of the overall solipsism of American popular political debates which take place in a kind of comparison-free void. The IR scholarship issue is quite different, since there’s tons and tons of journalistic work on subject matter to which scholarly IR research is plainly present. And the issue here, I think, is really primarily one of politics. The kinds of policy approaches that find support in the IR literature or can be usefully illuminated through it are just too far off the center of the American political consensus.

To which, William Winecoff responds with, er, some urgency:

There are all kinds of problems with this. To begin with, [Yglesias] basically starts by admitting that journalists really couldn't care less about educating their readers, at least if the prerequisite of that is having a basic familiarity with the subject they are covering. Instead, all journalists care about are the "bounds of the DC debate", not stupid boring messy things like facts or scientific inquiry. No, those get in the way of "catastrophically misguided" right-wing policies that Democrats supported, dammit! Better to have a purely insult-based foreign policy discussion, completely void of theory or substance....

I would be surprised if Yglesias could outline more than one or two "scholarly controversies" in IR in any detail, much less describe how foreign policy has no interaction with those arguments. Bush 43's entire foreign policy was based on a mutation of democratic peace theory, which is hotly contested in the academy and elsewhere. Clinton's foreign policy was the largest experiment in neoliberal institutionalism that the world has ever seen, and it too was vehemently debated in the scholarly circles, and still is. The whole Cold War was practically a petri dish for IR theory. In all cases American foreign policy was engineered in part or full by IR scholars. What on earth is Yglesias waiting for?

In other words, it's just not true that scholarly debates have nothing to say about political controversies, or that they are "too far off the center of American political consensus". Every foreign policy decision that governments make has been discussed and analyzed, however imperfectly, by IR scholars and has been adopted or denied by politicians and ideologues. Yglesias just hasn't done his homework. Which is sad, because "homework" in this case basically entails e-mailing Drezner. Or even me.

Boys, boys!!  Everyone in a neutral corner please!! 

There are a few things to unpack here.  In essence, I have to take issue with all of these excerpts.  Part of the problem is that the panel that inspired this whole discussion in the first place was dominated by people who blog/write/care a hell of a lot more about American politics than world politics.    Not that there's anything wrong with that -- but it's dangerous to tease out implications from such a group. 

As someone who has consumed and interacted with foreign affairs journalists from time to time, here are my observations: 

1)  The big mismatch between American journalists and IR academics is that when journalists are writing about international relations, they're likely focusing on a single event or episode -- a crisis with China, a disaster in Pakistan, sanctions against Iran, etc.  International relations scholars, on the other hand, tend to think in more abstract terms that involve multiple observations:  great power relations, humanitarian disasters, or sanctions episodes.  Because journalists are far more interested in the particulars of individual narratives, however, the skill set does not always match up.  Journalists writing about a particular case are understandably not fond of stating the average probability of policy success in a generic class of events.  Doing so eliminates the particularities and idiosyncracies of the individual event -- i.e., the very value-added provided by the journalist. 

This doesn't mean that IR scholars are completely ignored -- I find I get calls/queries when journalists are writing their "news analysis" pieces that take stock of a particular policy.  It does mean that our research is not likely to appear in the first wave of stories about an event, however -- and that wave has a way of framing the subsequent narrative.

2)  To be honest, I suspect that this state of affairs bothers IR scholars all that much, for two reasons.  First, as I suggested at the panel (and Yglesias blogged), there are a lot of professional reasons why political scientists don't want their work to break through to the public sphere.  Second, good IR scholars care less about access to journalists because they have better access to the actors they really care about -- the policymakers themselves.  There is a decent amount of interaction between mid-ranking officials and IR academics, and those channels can influence policy a lot more than talking to journalists.  Of course, this contributes to gaps between public opinion and foreign policy elites, but that's been going on for many a decade already. 

3)  To be honest, I'm not sure what Yglesias is talking about with respect to IR scholarship and political partisanship.  It might be that the IR paradigms don't map neatly onto political cleavages.  Realist and liberal approaches can be found in the mainstream of both party's foreign policy communities.  More broadly, rational choice thinking is shot through the foreign policy mainstream.  There are some schools of thought -- constructivism, feminism, etc. -- that might be thought of as outside the mainstream.  On the other hand, these approaches aren't exactly mainstreamed within the scholarly community either. 

Scholars who advocate policy positions out of favor with the current administratio n have opportunities to exercise their voice, through op-eds, congressional testimony, etc.  Once they've done that, political journalists can find them to get critical quotes, etc. 

4)  Drezner to Yglesias:  please call Winecoff before calling me.  My cup, it runneth over right now. 

Am I missing anything? 

Your humble blogger will not be blogging with great frequency over the next few days, as he'll be drinking power-schmoozing diligently going to panels attending the American Political Science Association (APSA) meetings in Washington.  I have to present at a few panels this year, so blogging will be on the lighter side (though if I have time, I want to revisit this question about millennials and foreign policy attitudes). 

Here's a topic for discussion.  Yesterday I had a disturbing dream involving some hybrid of a normal APSA meeting and The Highlander.  Today I finally went to see The Expendables with an IR colleague, which led us into a deep discussion of how much of a bad-ass Dolph Lundgren is how most movies that have any IR component are essentially idealist in their orientation.  This led my companion to ask me an interesting question:  "Has there ever been a film with an explicitly realist take on world politics?" 

I went back and consulted my list of top IR films and came up empty.  I then consulted Steve Walt's list and came up empty again.  In theory Independence Day has some very crude balancing behavior, but let's face it, that's pretty weak beer.  Both The Americanization of Emily (on my list) and Wag the Dog (on Steve's list) are very cynical movies, but I don't think the logic of realpolitik plays that big a role in either film.  The best example that comes to mind is an old Star Trek episode -- A Private Little War -- but that's not a movie. 

In the end, I can offer two proper film suggestions.  The lesser film would be No Way Out (1987), but I can't explain why this is a realist movie without spoiling the ending. 

The better example -- or, at a minimum, the better film -- would be The Godfather (1972), which is not exactly about international relations, but is about negotiating an anarchic environment.  For more on this selection, see John Hulsman and A. Wess Mitchell's The Godfather Doctrine, which started as an article in The National Interest.  As they argue: 

Unlike Tom [Hagen], whose labors as family lawyer have produced an exaggerated devotion to negotiation, and Sonny [Corleone], whose position as untested heir apparent has produced a zeal for utilizing the family arsenal, Michael has no formulaic fixation on a particular policy instrument. Instead, his overriding goal is to protect the family's interests and save it from impending ruin by any and all means necessary. In today's foreign-policy terminology, Michael is a realist.

Still, this is a thin list.  Additional suggestions are welcomed in the comments. 

I suspect everyone inside the Beltway will be discussing the first part of the Washington Post's "Top Secret America" series on the intelligence and homeland security apparatus that has mushroomed since the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, the 5,400 word opening salvo by Dana Priest and William Arkin doesn't pull any punches in its lead:

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

Priest and Arkin are top-notch reporters and analysts, and a lot of the material in this report is pretty damning. It's well worth the read.

I have one small quibble, however, which is with the "redundancy and waste" argument about multiple agencies doing the same work. This is a standard argument in favor of rationalization, and it's not always wrong. It should be noted, however, that some redundancy is actually a good thing, particularly on an issue like counter-terrorism.

Say a single bureaucracy is tasked with intelligence gathering about threat X. Let's say this bureaucracy represents the best of the best of the best -- the A-Team. The A-Team does it's job and catches 95% of the emergent threats from X. That's still 5% that is missed.

Now say you have another independent bureaucracy with a similar remit. This agency is staffed by different people with their own set of blind spots. Let's even stipulate that we're talking about the B-team here, and they'll only catch 80% of the emergent threats from X.

If thesr two bureaucracies are working independently -- and this is an important if -- then the odds that a threat would go unobserved by both bureaucracies is .05*.2 = .01 = 1%. So, by adding another bureaucracy, even a less competent one, the chances of an undetected threat getting through are cut from 5% to 1%. That ain't nothing.

Now, there are a lot of assumptions that need to hold for this effect to hold. Priest and Arkin suggest that some of these assumptions don't hold (many inteligence analysts relying on the same information). They also note the rise of segemented information, however, which leads me to think that some redundancy might be a good thing.

Admittedly, a world of 1,271 agencies tackling this question is probably one of redundancy run amok. I'm just saying that a little redundancy is a very good thing.

Two recent articles suggest that things in the ivory tower are really going downhill.  In the Boston Globe, Keith O'Brien notes that students aren't studying like they use to: 

It is a fundamental part of college education: the idea that young people don’t just learn from lectures, but on their own, holed up in the library with books and, perhaps, a trusty yellow highlighter. But new research, conducted by two California economics professors, shows that over the past five decades, the number of hours that the average college student studies each week has been steadily dropping. According to time-use surveys analyzed by professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today’s average student hits the books for just 14 hours.

Meanwhile, as Steve Walt noted, there's a new article by Lawrence Mead in the latest issue of Perspectives on Politics on "Scholasticism in Political Science."  (Full discosure:  I'm on the editorial board at PoP).  Mead argues that political scientists, "often address very narrow questions, and they are often preoccupied with method and past literature."  He demonstrates this by looking at the evolution of the American Political Science Review over the past few decades.  He ends with a plea for "political scientists to seek greater engagement with government" and for journalm editors to "shift research somewhat away from rigor and towards relevance." 

When I see essays and arguments claiming that things are going to hell in a handbasket in the academy, I get very leery.  I've heard this script before -- academics have been complaining about the decline of the academy since the days of Socrates. 

Sure enough, looking a bit deeper at both essays, it's not clear whether things are really so bad.  Deeper in O'Brien's article, for example, there's this small nugget of information: 

[T]he greatest decline in student studying took place before computers swept through colleges: Between 1961 and 1981, study times fell from 24.4 to 16.8 hours per week (and then, ultimately, to 14).

If the really big drop took place before 1981, then I'm not sure I buy the argument that things are worse now.  As the article notes, technological innovations like computers and the Internet have made students more productive with the time they do devote to studying. 

As for Mead's essay, well, again, there's less there than meets the eye.  His own data suggests two trends that somewhat blunt his initial argument.  First, one reason for greater specialization in political science nowadays is that there are just a lot more political scientists lying about in the profession.  Now I'm not a political theorist, but I vaguely recall someone somewhere saying that "the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market."  Mead wants political scientists to write for a broader audience -- a sentiment I partially share.  I'd like to see political scientists write both big and small, specific and general.  With more political scientists, it is possible to write more narrow, detailed work and actually have it read by an informed audience.  That ain't being a public intellectual, but it ain't nothing, either. 

More importantly, Mead's own data also suggests that this "scholasticism" trend peaked a decade ago and has been ebbing ever since.  The APSR data shows that after 1998 or so, more general and more empirical articles were published.  There are a lot of possible explanations for this contrary trend (shifts in the APSR editorship, the perestroika movement, the rise of poli sci blogs), but none of them are terribly persuasive.  Maybe, just maybe, things are naturally getting better. 

Shorter blog post:  the academy is not going to hell in a handbasket. 

UPDATE:  One last observation and link.  Mead argues: 

Anyone who has attended recent APSA conferences knows that the “audience” for many panels, even on the official program, is now no more than the panelists themselves.

Mayb e I'm going to different panels, but I honestly don't see this, either for panels I attend or for panels where I present.  And zombies aside, I don't pick particularly "sexy" topics to write or listen to either.  

On the other hand, Seth Masket's proposal for reforming APSA conference panels is officially the Most Awesome Idea Ever. 

I think it's safe to say that the financial regulation bill has not evolved the way that Simon Johnson predicted last year.  Johnson's thesis was pretty simple -- because of the structural dependence of politicians on financial capital, neither the executive nor the legislative branches would be willing to regulate that sector. 

Johnson wasn't necesaarily wrong in making that prediction -- when in doubt, political scientists follow the money as well.  Still, the regulation that is likely to emerge is clewarly stronger than expected.  In The New Republic, Noam Scheiber has offers his explanation for why: 

Basic political science tells us that, when Congress targets a complex industry with billions of dollars at stake, the legislation should weaken as it moves toward passage. The industry will plead its case with vehemence, while voters will be oblivious to the importance of subtle changes. “Words on the page are not that critical to the public,” one derivatives industry lawyer told me in March, conveying a general truism. But something unforeseen is happening as Congress wraps up its overhaul of Wall Street: Key elements of the bill are getting tougher—in some cases markedly so....

What explains the unexpected success? The financial-services industry had counted on public passion subsiding with time. As the derivatives lawyer told me a few weeks ago, “The current strategy you’re hearing is basically to keep Republicans together till cooler heads prevail.” But cooler heads aren’t prevailing. As the bailed-out banks have surged back to profitability while unemployment hovers near 10 percent, the public has, if anything, grown crankier. By holding the line on a tougher reform package, the White House has been able to ride the anger rather than get trampled by it. In a moment of rising public frustration, the populist argument gains force the longer the debate continues.

So does this contradict basic political science?  Yes and no.  The outcome is still consistent with political science odels -- just not the ones that focus on interest groups.  Any Americanist will tell you that interest group politics matters a lot.  If public opinion is pretty unified around a high-profile issue, however, then there are hard political constraints that block the ability of lobbyists to do that voodoo that they do so well.  And it's pretty clear that the public is thermonuclearly pissed at the financial sector. 

Still, this is pretty surprising, because financial regulation is so friggin' arcane.  Quick, what's a credit default swap?  A collateralized debt obligation?  Are they examples of derivatives or not?  Sure, readers of this blog likely know the answers to those questions, but I guarantee you that 99% of registered voters do not know the answer.  The fact that public pressure and attention is still mobilized on this issue is unusual. 

I think it's tied into the one part of the story that Scheiber failed to mention -- the SEC indictment of Goldman Sachs.  Whether what Goldman did or not was actually illegal is not the issue.  There was a lot of reporting about what Goldman actually did -- and it seems like they weren't acting like  just a couple of bookies.  The indictment changed the political optics of financial regulation and dramatically reduced the utility of lobbying from the financial sector. 

Finreg isn't law yet, and experts like Johnson might argue that their "capture" story works on other dimensions of the regulation.  Still, I don't think this is a case where basic political science failed -- unless you think that poli sci should have predicted the SEC indictment. 

What do you think? 

In light of the Moscow subway bombings, follow-up acts of insurgency, and vows from the Russian president to use "harsher" tactics, is there anything political science has to say about the situation? 

Why yes, as it turns out.  Jason Lyall, a post-doctoral research associate at Yale, has an article in the latest issue of the American Political Science Review on the effectiveness of Russia's counterinsurgency tactics conducted in Chechnya during the first half of last decade.  Lyall has some interesting findings:

In this article, I exploit variation in the ethnicity of soldiers conducting so-called sweep operations (zachistka, plural zachistki) during part of the Second Chechen War (2000-5) to test whether insurgent responses are conditional on soldier identity. More specifically, the large-scale defection of Chechen rebels to the Russian side enables us to compare changes in patterns of insurgent violence after Russian-only, pro-Russian Chechen only, and joint operations. While ethnicity cannot be directly manipulated, these sweeps are matched in a bid to isolate ethnicity's causal effects by controlling for observable pre sweep differences. I find substantial evidence to support the claim that insurgent violence is in fact conditional on the ethnicity of the sweeping soldiers.

Three findings stand out. First, there is nearly a 40% average decrease in the number of insurgent attacks following Chechen only sweeps compared with similar Russian-only operations. Second, Chechen insurgents display markedly different timing in their attacks conditional on identity of sweepers, with Russian sweeps being met by much swifter retaliation. Finally, the frequency and timing of insurgent attacks after joint Russian-Chechen operations resembles those observed after Russian-only, not pro-Russian Chechen-only, operations, suggesting that coethnics' informational advantages are not readily transferred across ethnic divisions.

So how does this information inform the recent bombings?  Lyall proffers the following in an e-mail:

In war, as in political life, today's solution is often tomorrow's problem. The twin Moscow Metro bombings offer a graphic example of this principle at work. While commentators have been quick to cite these attacks as evidence of the bankruptcy of the Kremlin's counterinsurgency campaign in Chechnya, the reality is perhaps the exact opposite.
 
Perversely, it is the very success of Kremlin-backed efforts by local actors --- most notably, Ramzan Kadyrov, the 33-year-old now ruling Chechnya --- in weakening the power, appeal, and geographic scope of the insurgency, that has prompted a radical about-face in tactics by its embattled leader, Doku Umarov.

This downturn in rebel fortunes is directly attributable to twin efforts by the Kremlin and Kadyrov to induce Chechen rebels to switch sides and join militia formations (collectively known as the Kadyrovtsi) designed to hunt their former colleagues and their supporters.
 
Driven by a mixture of disillusionment, greed, and intimidation, some 20,000 men have defected to the Russian side, leaving the insurgency a hollow shell of its former self.
 
Indeed, given the advantages of coethnicity, these militia groups have proven extremely, and lethally, effective at identifying and killing insurgents, while also cutting a wide swatch of fear and intimidation among the general public through forced disappearances, targeted home burnings, and extrajudicial killings. Yet the stability purchased by these militia in Chechnya is fragile, for three reasons.
 
First, suicide terrorism has reemerged as a effective, and perhaps the only, means for the insurgency's nominal leader, Umarov, to influence Russian audiences and within the internecine struggle for control among the fragmented leadership.
 
Second, while the brutality of these militia has sharply degraded the insurgency's effectiveness, it has also created widespread grievances among victimized populations within Chechnya, ensuring a trickle of new recruits that disappear into the forests each summer.
 
Finally, remaining insurgents have been forced to seek freedom of action in the neighboring republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan, mixing in with homegrown groups to diffuse the conflict  throughout the Northern Caucasus.

The choice facing the Kremlin and Kadyrov is a stark one. A comprehensive settlement to the now decade-long war would mean substantial political and economic reforms across the region, threatening the rule of the Kremlin's hand-picked strongmen without the guarantee of achieving any measure of stability, let alone peace. Yet a further tightening of the screws in Chechnya may preserve stability for a time but carries the risk of continually fueling a low-grade intra-Chechen civil war while pushing the war beyond Chechnya's boundaries. In the latter case, the attacks of 29 March may only be a harbinger of things to come. 

Lyall's research certainly provides an interesting window into Russian counterinsurgency tactics, and the ways in which the response to the Moscow bombings might be counter-productive in the long-run. 

There's something else that's interesting , however.  The American Political Science Review and Cambridge University Press had the good sense to send out a press release highlighting Lyall's research, and get follow-up quotes from Lyall on the salience to current events.  There's been a lot of complaints about "quant-wonk" political science recently.  Analysis like Lyall's is worth highlighting because it demonstrates both the utility and applicability of good quantitative work.  Kudos to the APSR and Cambridge University Press for highlighting salient political science for policy analysis.