CIA Interrogation Memos

Incidentally, just read a fascinating post from Mind Hacks on the (sometimes flawed) psychological methods and theory behind CIA interrogations.

Read the recently-released memos yourself on the ACLU's website.

Ideas I thought I had

First in what I have no doubt will be an ongoing series.

A post from The Duck of Minerva critiqued an article in FP analyzing the Taleban's operations, framing them in terms of organized crime. This reminded me of a train of thought I hopped on when reading Joel Migdal's book on Israel, reading about how the various militarized Zionist movements developed civil institutions that would eventually become the State of Israel. I was trying to figure out how to conceptualize the transition of armed guerilla groups into states. Quite often these groups try to capture an existing state apparatus, but the conceptualization of states underlying data sets that code conflict and transition don't seem to do a great job at capturing the continuity between rebel movements and the states they create, or the discontinuity between nominally similar states with different regimes (caveat lector: I'm shooting from the intellectual hip here and would welcome rebuttal).

This lead me to thoughts along these lines:

Thinking about the modern state as an organized crime syndicate/protection racket - with variations in size, scope, degree of monopoly over the use of force and (occasionally) legitimacy.

Now, I certainly didn't think I had one-up'd Herr Weber (I at least knew that much) and it seems like such an obvious insight now, but my training in political science has largely focused on current empirical work, rather than theory (with the notable exception of Nazih Ayubi's theoretical approach to the Arab state assigned in the above-mentioned class - a Marxist approach that, while infuriating to read, nevertheless had a lot of interesting ideas) so I was given to random musing about such things on my own. I remember talking about this idea to my colleague and some-time poker buddy Brian Early (perhaps the most dynamic young scholar I know) who had published something along those lines earlier, specifically in reference to Hizbullah's role in Lebanese politics,but he didn't mention where he'd got the idea.

I guess I can't feel so bad: there's some satisfaction in arriving at these kinds of ideas oneself and if it's Charles Tilly who's scooped you (when you were only recently born), it's probably okay.

In fact, upon consideration, I feel like this might have been one of the (few) readings I skipped in my intro seminar on comparative politics. Hmm....

Tilly, Charles. 1985. "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime" in Bringing the State Back In ed.s Evans, Dietrich, Rueschmeyer and Skocpol. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press

Danger!

It's a good thing that social science is such an empirically squishy field, or else I'd be more worried by the fact that Reuters is reporting that:

'Robot scientists can think for themselves'

It's when they start putting on little tweed jackets and complaining about undergrads that you'll know we're all screwed.

photo: flickr/jurvetson