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

Duch in the Dock

PRI's The World aired a story (3/31/09) about the Cambodian Tribunal on the 1970s politicide* at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. The reporter described the admission of guilt and what appears to be sincere contrition shown by the man in the dock, Kaing Guek Eav, aka Comrade Duch. Duch was infamous for his role as a head of Pol Pot's S-21 torture facility; now he is a born-again Christian who seeks forgiveness.

The dynamics of transitional justice and war crimes tribunals have been of (an academic) interest to me for some time, but it's a hard thing to wrap your head around. How does a society recover from a historical tragedy? It's one thing to demonize and ostracize an invading army or individual enemies of the state, but when a good deal of your society is complicit in some way, how is that rift healed? This is obviously a big question, and I'll take this post to pose a couple questions and see if I can lay out what the literature says about it in a few subsequent posts.

No doubt there are plenty Cambodians who had been waiting quite some time to see the day this tribunal would come. The Guardian managed to speak to a survivor of the camp who has a good deal of justifiable anger about what happened 30 years ago. But what is most interesting to me is how the sitting government is handling it. According to the reporter, many of the highest government officials in Cambodia are former Khmer Rouge. They would just as soon try the five defendants scheduled to come before the court, and get it over with without much fuss. The World also says that the tribunal has gotten no significant coverage in local media and that many are oblivious or just uninterested, to which the reporter asks (and I'll paraphrase here, until I can get a transcript): if a tribunal tries and convicts a former mass-murderer of crimes against humanity and nobody notices, does it even matter?

This question gets to the heart of the matter. Let's break this down really quick: One of the essential functions that a state provides is to establish order, generally in the form of written law, and to deal out justice to those who break the codes of the order that has been established. I take a functional perspective on this**: Societies achieve a consensus on what the order should be, and institutions of justice provide a means through which order can be restored after it is breached. So long as those who have breached the order are a very small part of society, they can be either removed from society (life imprisonment, capital punishment, ostracism) or brought back into society after undergoing certain ordeals (demonstrations of penitence, punishment, rehabilitation, etc.). The problem is, if enough people are complicit, something of an entirely different kind (and magnitude) is necessary. Hence war crimes tribunals, transitional justice and national processes of reconciliation.

But, considering the kind of task they do, it's not clear if the analogy between conventional justice and transitional justice of this kind is a perfect one. How are there goals different? What exactly do they accomplish? Do they change anyone's minds about the past? Do they provide catharsis to those who were wronged? What are the stakes to the victimizers and how should they be treated? To what extent is forgiveness possible (or desirable) with those who were members of the Khmer Rouge? If these trials come 30 years after the fact, is it still relevant to the present day society?

Most interestingly, to my mind: what about the reporter's question above? If it is in deed true that the majority of the people of Cambodia are oblivious to what's going on, is it possible that a potential goal of societal catharsis is not possible? What is the role of the public at large in a process like this?

I feel compelled to say that I fully support the work of tribunals like the one in Cambodia, but I ask these questions as someone making an attempt to approach the issue objectively: taking as a given that these tribunals happen, what are the desired effects and what are the actual outcomes?

More posts to come, but let me know what you think so far.

* I go with Ted Gurr's definition, because I don't think 'genocide' applies to this case, but that's kind of splitting hairs

** I will, right now, admit my utter ignorance of other approaches to this. I'm positive there are plenty of perspectives in the world of legal theory and philosophy, but I'm not familiar with them.

photo: flickr/lecercle

Hobbes, Human Nature...and primate grooming

An interesting post from Dr. Little at Understanding Society on Hobbes' Leviathan. I agree with his argument,  and it almost makes me want to read the damn thing. But I've got a couple quibbles:

Little argues that Hobbes was taking a line of argument right out of the institutionalist playbook, starting  from postulates about the micro-foundations of individual behavior and placing them in an institutional framework. He pulls a piece of text that includes Hobbes' most well-known dictum that life without the state is both short and unpleasant. Hobbes says that it is the Leviathan, an overwhelming centralized power that keeps people honest and makes society possible. Basically, if you think some creep is going to come along and steel your wife, burn your house and smash those nice ornamental urns you were planning on making, you're just not going to be willing or able to trust others or invest energy in producing, trading or hoarding. Incidentally: It brings to my mind the similar line from the Pirke Avot in the Jewish tradition, quite a few years before Mr. Hobbes:

Rabbi Chanina, an assistant of the high priest said: Pray for the Welfare of the government, since but for fear of it men would swallow each other alive.

Ancient wisdom notwithstanding, Hobbes may have been wrong on this point. (NB: I am now quite literally telling tales out of school, as it's been a little while since I've really read deeply into this kind of stuff, but...) it is worth looking into the extent to which cooperation is possible without the mediation of formal institutions, ie structures of power. Says Little: 

in fact, a number of contemporary political scientists argue that it is possible for men and women to create  non-political institutions within the context of what Hobbes calls the state of nature. Coordination and cooperation are indeed possible within a "state of nature"; it is possible to achieve coordination within anarchy. From a sociological point of view, this is really a friendly amendment; it simply adds a further premise about the feasibility of certain kinds of cooperation. So the "cooperation within anarchy" criticism of Hobbes is advanced as a substantive argument about the feasibility of durable social institutions that do not depend upon a central coercive authority.

He goes on to talk about forms of social order that do not rely on contracts and the rule of law to make equitable decisions about rights and responsibilities in certain small communities. I wouldn't dispute this. But if you look at it from an evolutionary point of view, this makes sense.

 

Little says that Hobbes most likely wouldn't be convinced by arguments about the possibility of effective collective action in the absence of strong central authority, but most likely Hobbes wasn't thinking about tiny hamlets engaging in small-scale agricultural cooperation. My entirely uneducated guess is that Hobbes was thinking about princely states and trans-national empires which require a good deal of force to get the job of collective action done. And this matter of scale is not a trifle.

I too would tend to believe that men (and women) do not cooperate solely because they fear the wrath of a despot, but there are distinct limits.

 

For example: Anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues that there is a limit to the size of an individual's social network, somewhere in the neighborhood of 150. The theory is pretty interesting in itself, in part based on an analogy with primate grooming behavior, related to the development of language and the size of the human brain as it evolved. Essentially, language - gossip, small-talk, etc - is the human equivalent of picking nits from your neighbor's pelt; it foments social bonds, but there are cognitive limits to how many folks you can keep up with. The underlying idea is that our neolithic ancestors could no longer cohere as an extended family unit beyond groupings of that size.

 

I'm reluctant to take Dunbar's findings on faith, but for the purpose of conjecture, let's assume he's right. I find it to be a very compelling story: While various technological innovations - food production, weapons, writing systems, transportation, and various forms political administration - have allowed larger human societies to develop, the mental hardware has been left largely in-tact. Likewise, our instinct to create cohesive groups within which we are able to cooperate quite well is strongly related to our instinct to oppose those we perceive to belong to other 'tribes.' This, of course, is not news. But my conjecture is that, beyond a certain threshold of size (whatever that magic number might be), the abstract idea of group membership (the 'imagined community' to put it in more familiar terms) is harder to manage without the proximity of actual interpersonal interaction with group members.

Let's put it another way, I may feel very strongly about my identity as a member of a nation, but my feelings do not necessarily jibe with the feelings of my neighbor. While I perceive him to be a member of my group, he does not necessarily agree with me. His loyalties might be to others than myself, even if he  sees himself to be the member of the same nominal group. This sense of group-ness has to be managed and reinforced through communal socialization and ritual. Without that, the content and boundaries associated with group-ness would be open to individual interpretation, not quite so predictable or homogeneous.

 

So, returning to our state of nature, the gloss we could put on Hobbes is that life may still be relatively nasty, but a significant part of this is because of conflict between cohesive groups. Within themselves, groups can develop customary , informal ways of dealing with their membership in order to preserve order, but they don't necessarily play well with others. It is only with the influence of somewhat centralized authority and rule of law that this instinct can be overcome by our better angels.

photo: flickr/samuelhteer

Old Order Worldviews and Comparative American Politics

NPR aired a great story Wednesday about the challenges of a mental health professional working with a community of people with very different values and assumptions about the social world.

One of the key rites of passage for some Amish youth is a tradition known as rumspringa, in which 16 year-olds spend a couple years sampling what the world of the non-Amish has to offer before they decide whether or not to dedicate themselves to the Amish community as an adult. Some kids are content just wearing jeans and listening to Kelly Clarkson for a little while, but for many it can lead not just into a severe inner-crisis, but also a descent into alcohol or drug abuse. This is where Jim Cates comes in. He helps them with substance abuse problems, as well as generally sorting out where they fit in the grand scheme of things.

What interests me the most is the extent to which Cates has to improvise to accommodate the Amish world view. Arguably, the very practice of therapy, from Freud's bored Viennese housewives on, is one based on a set of individualistic values. Some branches of psychology have sought to break from this trend, but a great deal of the normative psychological measures and practices used in traditional therapy are premised on the ability of the person seeking help to be self-reflective, to disclose one's thoughts and feelings, and to seek self-actualization as ends unto themselves. As Cates notes in the piece, not only are these things not necessarily valued in Amish society, but it would be counterproductive to the overall mission of a therapist to push this kind of approach. The Amish culture tends to value the group over the individual. While this dichotomy between group and individual perhaps oversimplifies the picture (it's certainly a well-worn trope in studies of cultural differences: c.f. an earlier post on 'Asian values'), Cates reports undeniable differences that inform his practice.

Here's where my interest comes in. It is clear that different societies have different worldviews that inform not just their overall social behavior but also their political behavior and attitudes toward authority. Is it possible that societies that rely on more traditional forms of sociopolitical organization (I'm thinking, for example, tribally-organized people in Pakistan's FATA or rural Afghanistan) are in any way comparable to communities that likewise ascribe great importance to the collective, to religiously-defined codes of behavior and share mistrust of outsiders? Clearly, beyond the immense methodological and logistical problems of conducting empirical studies of a group such as the Amish with regard to their political and social attitudes, the comparability of these groups with those in under-developed, conflict prone areas would be a stretch. Nevertheless, if the great contemporary struggle for global policymakers is the task of confronting those who are not easily or willingly integrated into a 'modern,' 'western' model of political and economic life, then efforts should be made to understand more fully how those who follow other ways of life can peaceably cohabitate in a liberal state with those who do not share their ways.

As a question of pure pragmatism, divorced from any normative presumptions about what the good life of all Americans should be, perhaps better understanding those who choose to live in illiberal, non-individualist communities of our republic could provide insight on those elsewhere.

photo: flickr/michelleBlack

The REAL Web of Science

Nature features a piece on the connections between academic disciplines by looking at data on whose clicking on what online. The long and the short is that academics are reading much more widely than they're letting on in their works cited pages. The graphic shows connections between disciplines with pretty clear clustering around the hard sciences, life sciences and social sciences; social sciences seem to be perhaps the most 'promiscuous.'

On a related note, here's an article suggesting how academic journals of psychological research can encourage interdisciplinary exchange of ideas. This comes from the most recent Perspectives on Pscyhological Science which has been opened up for free viewing online. It's a special issue dedicated to a discussion of how the field as a whole can be improved. There's a lot of great stuff in there.

[photo: Nature; hat tip: Zero Intelligence Agents / BPS Research Digest Online]