a short reflection on my grandpa and the state of things

It has been just over one month since I lost my grandfather, Sidney Greenwald, whom we, the grandkids, called "Bakka". I link to his obituary here because, as I said in my eulogy, I am so proud to have been able to call this man my grandfather. Other than his distinguished service to so many causes and his many "official" accomplishments, he was also a loving, equanimous, funny, and worldly man. Who else can claim that they love to talk politics with a grandparent? I had that privilege. As his good friend, Barbara, wrote to me: "He often thought the world was going to the dogs, but he never lost that glint in his eye, which seemed to say that it could be fixed if we all just tried hard enough."

Bakka (Sidney Greenwald) chilling in his yard (7/2014).

Bakka and me, at my cousin Stephanie's wedding (9/2014).

I can't help but wonder how my grandfather would have reacted to the recent tragedy in Orlando. I will confess that I can't remember ever having talked about LGBTQ issues with him. We had our fair share of conversations about extremism, Middle East politics, and the dangerous possibility of a Donald Trump presidency. For a 95-year-old, he was quite progressive. In some ways, though, I think he had a traditional conception of the United States' role in the world and our responsibility to lead. He was especially tough on our political leaders, of course, but I think he saw it as a responsibility that we all share. During times like these, after such a tragic loss of innocent human life, I think he would have shaken his head in disgust at the gunman and his ruinous and twisted sense of purpose. He would have read the devastating stories from victims' families and survivors. (Bakka read The Providence Journal in paper form every day until his death, with a giant magnifying glass, and was also quite tapped into online news and social media.) But in the end, he would have urged our political leaders, and all Americans, to look inward and understand where the rot was coming from. While the hateful ideologies of religious extremism would have earned his utmost contempt, Bakka never settled for placing full blame elsewhere. Having tried, and failed, to stem mass violence in this country wouldn't have been good enough for him.

I would have hated to disappoint my grandfather, so it was always hard to see our country disappointing him. What seems to me to be missing these days is a basic trust in one another to do the right and honorable thing. I don't think Bakka ever lost this trust in the individuals he met -- in Rhode Island and in his many travels around the world -- but I do think he sensed that we were losing this trust on a collective level. I hope, in memory of my grandfather, we can all start to put the pieces back together again.

if you need to defend ann coulter to make your point, maybe you should rethink your point.

I am already annoyed that I have to write this...

For those of you who missed the latest in our country's slow descent into idiocracy, Ann Coulter recently took to Twitter to complain about the number of references to Israel in the Republican debate, resulting in "Exhibit A" below:

How many f---ing Jews do these people think there are in the United States?

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) September 17, 2015

Somehow, Philip Weiss, the founder of Mondoweiss, thought this would be an opportune time to make the very original and constructive point that conservative Jewish donors have captured the Republican party. See, that was irony because it is neither an original point (I am pretty sure there is a book about it or something) nor is it very constructive (because it does not propose any way to change the status quo).

More importantly, it is utterly perplexing to me that Weiss — whose website has always been vehemently critical of the occupation, but often in a thoughtful and evidence-based way — would step up to defend Coulter for posing "a fair question", "leaving aside the invective". Many of us are unable to leave the invective aside. I feel like that is quite reasonable. But, even if we were, this is not a fair question and Weiss's is not a fair response. First, he defends Coulter by arguing that Jewish voters comprise a tiny proportion of the electorate, even in states like New Jersey and Florida (5.9 and 3.3 percent, respectively). The implication of this argument is that only Jewish voters can care about Israel and US policy toward it, and the amount of attention devoted to Israel by the Republican candidates is therefore outsized. Even Weiss admits that "there are a bunch of evangelical Christian Zionists out there", so it is pretty essentialist to even engage with Coulter's point about numbers.

Second, he goes on to argue that: "The point is, [t]he candidates are bending over backwards for Sheldon Adelson’s money, not for primary voters." There is obvious truth in this statement. But, hang on a sec...that point has nothing to do with Coulter's tweet. Nice bait-and-switch there, but forgive me for still being hung up on the actual language of the tweet, which I am pretty sure was about how there aren't even enough "f---ing Jews" in this country for us to care about Israel in the first place.

So, I ask Weiss: What if, in a parallel universe, the largest Jewish donors were leftists, like Weiss, and were assiduously lobbying for the United States to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel for its policies in the occupied territories? Then, would it matter that the Jewish population only comprises 2.2 percent of the electorate? Would Weiss be dismissive of this effort, or instead might he tout the lobbyists, perhaps noting that "even Jews" can see what is wrong with Israel's policies? My bet is on the latter.

Instrumentally appealing to an ethno-religious group identity only when it suits your particular policy objectives is kind of smarmy, but I guess it's not unprecedented. However, I would offer that it is downright disturbing to argue that an ethno-religious minority group has too much influence on policy when you disagree with the policies that some powerful members of that group are advancing. It is fine to say that powerful special interests have too much influence over some aspect of U.S. policy. In this case, we might label this group "conservative, hawkish Zionists". However, implying that the entire ethno-religious minority group (with which these interests identify) has too much influence is dangerous ground. Maybe I am missing something, but this seems pretty damn obvious to me. Moreover, it is strategically unwise for reasons I suggest above: why not just say Sheldon Adelson has too much influence on the party rather than "Jews" as a whole? By implying that policies should only represent the interests of ethno-religious groups if they are "large" enough, Weiss already potentially alienates all Jewish-American voters, even those who might have otherwise been swayed to support his policies. But maybe he doesn't really care. They are just a minority, after all.

Also, Weiss really needs to revisit some of the disgusting and hateful responses Coulter's tweet have provoked. Claims like: "the shoah was grossly exaggerated, also the Jews had it coming for backing communism", "the truth is anti-Semitic", and "Jews must leave." C'mon, Phil: These are not like the "sharp comments on anodyne New York Times articles", and this is not "what democratic discourse is all about." This is hate, as was Coulter's original tweet. We should all condemn it.

cause and effect

After six days in Michigan (much of which was filtered through a strange, jet-lag- and adrenaline-induced haze), I am now halfway through a two-week workshop at Syracuse University on qualitative and multi-method research. Does the idea of a debate about what constitutes a "causal mechanism" get you hot and bothered? If not, stay far, far away.

Quintessential image connoting causation. (Sorry, I'm not feeling particularly creative.)

While I have publicly joined in complaints about how much we have beat this dead horse over the past week, I am still thinking about it, so maybe there is some life left in it yet. Or maybe I just need to write a little to clear my head. So...

...there's the fundamental problem of causal inference. In order to accurately measure the effect of a treatment on some unit, we would need to make an impossible set of simultaneous observations: observing the unit both when it does and when it does not receive the treatment. We can never actually be certain of the effect of a treatment if we do not observe the counterfactual: what would have happened had the unit not received the treatment? In social science, our units are usually people, or collections thereof (i.e. individuals, villages, countries, etc.), and our "treatments" are things like viewing a campaign ad, receiving a cash transfer, experiencing a certain type of colonial rule, or being "treated" with lax gun control regulations, for example. Our outcomes of interest might be how a person voted, how much economic growth an area experienced, whether a region experienced civil conflict, or a measure of gun-related violence. Obviously, these types of processes are quite different from the ones that natural scientists are interested in observing. The fundamental problem of causal inference becomes a much bigger problem when your units are conscious humans (usually out in the world, not in a lab, with political-psych experiments being the exception) and you don't have an exact replica of the individual or group who is receiving the treatment sitting in another beaker on the lab bench. (Humans in beakers is a weird image. Sorry.)

The way "large-N" researchers attempt to address this problem is to compare across groups of units that are otherwise similar -- either "naturally" (i.e. in natural experiments where proverbial lightning strikes and a population is "randomly" divided in some way, or examining a very narrowly defined population around a temporal or geographic discontinuity), through intentional randomized treatment (in a field or lab experiment), or through statistical techniques such as controlling for pre-treatment factors that are expected to be correlated with the treatment assignment and the outcome, matching units, instrumental variables, selection models, etc. The methods used by these researchers tend to be primarily quantitative.

This past week, I have been learning how "small-N" (or "within-case") researchers attempt to address this problem. On one extreme, within-case researchers essentially reject the proposition that cross-unit comparison allows for causal inference, and instead argue that we must trace processes at a very fine-grained level within units and look for the presence or absence of observable implications of our causal theory. This entails knowing our individual units (i.e. individual political leaders, governments, villages, countries) very well, understanding historical sequences of events and phenomena at a very detailed level, and as part of this, being very conscious of the sources of our observations. The techniques used by these researchers tend to be primarily qualitative, relying on sources such as archived documents and other media, interviews, participant observation, etc.

While the discussion this past week has opened my eyes to many ways in which to effectively combine quantitative and qualitative methods, at other times it has been suggested that because of these different inferential techniques, quantitative large-N and qualitative small-N researchers are coming at this with a different epistemological understanding of what constitutes a causal mechanism. At first I thought that might be true, but now I don't. Some forms of within-case process tracing are built on Bayesian inference (see e.g. Bennett 2006, Humphreys and Jacob 2015) or probabilistic assumptions, while others are built on more deterministic assumptions (i.e. in the set theoretic tradition, thinking about factors, or sets of factors, as necessary and/or sufficient conditions for an outcome). Waldner (2012) argues that mechanisms have to be understood as "invariant" causal properties (i.e. "combustion" is what causes a car to move when you step on the gas; that is the mechanism, and combustion as a property exists, whether we observe it or not). At first, the word invariant made me feel weird. It is even farther than many qualitative scholars go, so perhaps it isn't a mainstream view. But, in any case, I found it provocative, and, at first, thought this might reflect a fundamental disconnect between within-case and cross-case (in particular, statistical) researchers in whether the social world is deterministic or probabilistic.

I have been trained (brainwashed?) to think that probabilistic models are the only ones that really make sense. There's unobserved "error" in all of our observations, so why not be honest and build that into our inferential strategy (i.e. assume what we are observing comes from a hypothetical distribution of all the possible outcomes that could have occurred)? However, it seems that, too often, this actually just allows us to get away with mis-specifying models. This is often the critique of qualitatively-oriented scholars when they view statistical analysis that does not seem to be sufficiently informed by a theory of how and why the proposed variables interact in the way they do.

One practical retort to that is that, well, it's better to build in the error than to pretend it isn't there. We are always going to have some forms of error that are essentially random (i.e. unbiased measurement error). If you believe in our ability to identify deterministic mechanisms in social science theory, then you are essentially assuming that you will be a good enough (or lucky enough?) researcher to observe some process with no measurement error or other chance event that could disturb your recording of an outcome into an observation. What if we were to allow this to be true, and a within-case researcher was able to perfectly observe a cause and effect within a single case and, further, to explain it with a causal mechanism (or set of mechanisms) that is "invariant", given a very strict set of conditions or scope. Now what? Don't you need to see if this mechanism applies in other cases that meet these conditions/scope? Because if you admit that this should be the next step, then I believe you are also admitting that variance is possible.

Over the past 24 hours or so, I have revised my view a bit, and I don't think the vision of mechanisms as invariant is necessarily at odds with statistical inference. Because in a perfectly specified regression, we are assuming that beta is the causal effect. Our estimate from a regression (i.e. beta-hat) is a random variable drawn from a distribution with some error separating it from the true causal effect. But regression assumes the true causal effect is unobservable due to a variety of ways in which our perceptions or observations will not be what actually "happened". This is where the modesty (or, one might say, at least the fixed positionality of the observer and the observed within a world that varies) is sort of built in, and where I think small-N research needs to think seriously about how -- even if it is able to present a more theoretically compelling and rigorous picture of the mechanism(s) at work within any observed process -- it is able to address the how the very nature of observation and the observational process is affecting one's conclusions. (And perhaps they are already doing this. In fact, I'm sure they are.) On the other hand, all of the above is based on an simplified characterization of qualitative research. Large-N scholars need to admit that it is still possible for within-case research to get a very good idea of what connects cause to effect in a way that large-N cross-case analysis cannot do without a detailed understanding of history or temporal processes.

There are many other issues that come up in the context of this discussion, other than the matter of deterministic versus probabilistic causal theories. (For example, are you interested in measuring the effect of a specific cause -- i.e. permissive gun control legislation -- or the entire cluster of causes that result in a particular effect -- i.e. gun-related violence?) Overall, I have been really encouraged by the workshop so far. There are a number of very smart people who are paying close attention to these issues, and working on, first, more clearly delineating areas of agreement and disagreement across the (in my view, much exaggerated) "quantitative-qualitative" divide, and second, identifying ways to leverage the relative strengths of various methodological strategies to ensure that our science is progressive and cumulative. There is still substantial debate and disagreement in both of those areas, but hey, acknowledging you have a problem is the first step. Or something.

it's good to talk to people

Tomorrow, I am leaving Timor-Leste. In addition to the elite interviews I have been conducting in Dili, I also piloted a small door-to-door survey in three districts: Dili, Bobonaro, and Baucau. I am actually quite happy we started with something at a small scale, because there are many kinks to be worked out in both survey design to implementation. In addition, each day was quite slow-going, because I did not have the resources to hire and train multiple enumerators, so it was just me and my translator going door-to-door. 

My interpreter in Maliana, Francisco, and me.

In the villages, homes can be far apart and it often took a long time at each house to introduce ourselves, make people feel comfortable, and identify an adult who is willing to participate in the survey. Most of the questions are multiple choice, but people often opted instead to provide long-winded responses. (Who can blame them? It’s hard to characterize one’s living conditions, or one’s preferences on tax policy, by selecting an item on a Likert scale.) Sometimes, people also offered us a Coke (or my interpreter offered one of the men a cigarette), and they asked questions about how long I had been in Timor and how I was finding the country. It is rude to refuse these offers or conversations, so my target of 20 minutes per household was usually too ambitious.

I only surveyed adults over the age of 25, because my questionnaire contains some items about the period of Indonesian occupation (1975-1999). While I am interested in young people’s impressions of this period based on what they may have heard from their families, I am mainly interested in people’s recollections of their own experiences.

At one house in Baucau this past Saturday, we spoke with a woman in her mid-60s who ran a small kiosk with snacks and drinks. We sat on wood planks propped up around a dirt floor, with a single, moving pile of laundry, live chickens, and a couple of small children off to one side. There were at least three other children, one of whom looked about 20 or 22 and had her own baby she was cradling during the interview. The family lived somewhere in the area, but I couldn’t really tell where they might have slept. (There was likely an attached shed behind the kiosk that was their house.)

The woman was happy to participate in the survey, but for many of the questions about how she’d like to see public revenues managed and spent, she would say “I don’t know, that is for our political leaders to decide.”

Today, a young woman from Baucau called me. I blundered my way through a five-minute phone conversation in Tetun with her, and grasped enough to learn that we had surveyed her mom on Saturday, that she wanted to speak to me about the survey, and that she was also looking for work. I worried that if she wanted a job I was not going to be able to help her, but I asked (in broken Tetun) if my interpreter could call her back. She said yes, so my interpreter returned her call a few minutes later. I found myself nervous about what she would say:  Was she upset about the survey? What if she thought I would be able to help her family in some way? I couldn’t promise to do this. I fretted a bit while I waited to hear back from my interpreter. (In the meantime, I had a nice night out with fellow "expat" friends in Dili where we ate “chicken-on-a-stick”, rice, and fish on the beach for about $2-a-head, surrounded by Timorese clients, and then drove a few minutes down the road for a $6 dessert buffet at Hotel Timor, one of the fanciest hotels in Dili, whose dining room was populated by a few groups consisting almost exclusively of foreigners. Only those with money can flow so easily across this divide.) I just got home to check my email and received my interpreter’s summary of his conversation with the young woman in Baucau. Below, I have omitted any potentially identifiable or sensitive information:

“I phoned Mrs. X today around 14:45 hrs, and heard about her concerns in relation to our survey. Mrs. X is a daughter of the woman we interviewed in a small kiosk where we bought water and cigarettes. She is a secondary school graduate, skilled in use of computer programs, hospitality management… She stated, she has been looking for a job so far, applied to several organizations … but she failed. Sustainability of the family life only depends on [sales from the] kiosk and her mother’s elderly payment [pension] by the government. Their present living conditions are neither good nor bad. Their living conditions now compared to one year ago is the same and she feels it will remain the same in a coming year. She described the overall economic situation of Timor-Leste in general is neither good nor bad…She feels that the present situation is better than the last year, but it will remain the same in a coming year. She described: it is better for our community to pay higher taxes if it means that there will be more services provided by government. She was optimistic about her future at the time of Timor-Leste restoration of independence. If a parliamentary election [were] to be held tomorrow, she will vote for X party.”

This young woman independently phoned me with her own responses to my survey. While I did not leave a copy of the survey with each household, she clearly remembered many of the questions I asked her mom, and wanted to provide her own responses. (Surveys are often not fully confidential in Timor, since other family members will often be gathered around, and respondents note that they feel comfortable this way.)

I will have my interpreter call her back and make sure she is clear about the purpose of my survey and my research (i.e. I hope my research will have long-term benefits for people like her, but unfortunately I cannot provide anything in the short-term). In the meantime, I find myself really wishing I could go back and chat with her more. Earlier, I was concerned that perhaps the population of Timor-Leste would be over-surveyed -- with donors doing impact evaluation surveys and large foundations conducting public opinion polls in such a small country, surely people were sick of talking to random strangers that wander into their neighborhood, gather information about their living standards and such, then leave, never to be seen again? In a way, it was really nice to hear from this woman, as some reassurance that perhaps some people are not being asked for their views enough...

This, and some other experiences, have made me think a lot about social science research ethics these days. I will share more once my thinking on the subject is a bit more coherent. For now, all I can say is: it's complicated, and we (or I, for one) definitely need more training on these issues.

riots and the breakdown of order

Because no one else is saying anything on the internet about the riots in Baltimore (ha), I thought I would fill the void for you.

Coates writes: "When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con." This is basically the same story that people tell about failed states. Robert Bates says:

"Order prevails...when rulers choose to employ the means of coercion to protect the creation of wealth rather than to prey upon it and when private citizens choose to set weapons aside and to devote their time to the production of wealth and to the consumption of leisure. And a state is said to exist when the choices that characterize political order form an equilibrium."

So, lol political economy jargon, but basically two things have to happen for order to break down: the state begins preying on its own citizens, and the citizens revolt. If only the first happens, we might just call it a good, old-fashioned authoritarian regime. If only the second, then it's a revolution, or perhaps civil war. Regarding the first -- the state preying on its citizens -- Tilly (1985) famously describes the blurry line between governments and organized criminal rackets:

"Apologists for particular governments and for government in general commonly argue, precisely, that they offer protection from local and external violence. They claim that the prices they charge barely cover the costs of protection. They call people who complain about the price of protection 'anarchists,' 'subversives,' or both at once. But consider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat and then charges for its reduction. Governments' provision of protection, by this standard, often qualifies as racketeering."

In the breakdown of order in Baltimore, we see traces of both of these things: unchecked police violence (against taxpaying citizens, lest the protection racket analogy was unclear!), and then, by way of response, civil disorder and destruction of wealth.

Lots of people seem to be arguing about whether the riots "should" be happening or not. That is a vague question, and to make sense of it at all in my pea-brain, I have to break it down into at least three questions:

1. Are the riots understandable? (Can we explain them?)
2. Are the riots justified?
3. Are they likely to be productive or effective? 

My gut responses to those questions, in order, are "yes", "ehhh, don't know, that word makes my brain explode", and "not really."

I find myself really wondering about #3, though. If, rather than producing wealth and consuming leisure, enough people decide to allocate more of their time to arming themselves and destroying wealth -- if enough people, in Coates's words, come out to demonstrate "disrespect for the hollow law and failed order" -- then, one presumes, either the state and its leaders will be forced to reform or we will end up with a failed state (or city). In the US context, fortunately, some kind of reform seems more likely.

So, might the riots be effective? Only if they destroy enough wealth and productivity to force such reforms. It seems that the number of people taking part in the Baltimore riots and the scale of the destruction might not have reached that point yet. But perhaps the threat of violence on such a scale seems a bit more credible this Tuesday morning. And if seemingly "senseless" destruction of wealth can bring about serious change, then (returning to question #2) might the riots eventually be "justified"? For this, I would need to go properly read more Fanon and Arendt and loads of others.

Honestly, I haven't got the faintest clue. And even if there is some positive change on the horizon, I still seem to feel very sad.

P.S. The photo above is the first thing that came up when I did a Google Image search for Baltimore riots. It is from the Baltimore riot of 1861, which you can read about here. Plus ça change... [OK, it is quite reductionist to imply that this riot was similar in any meaningful way to what we are experiencing today, but, you know, some similar themes. Hand wave, hand wave.]
[P.P.S. Some other people have emphasized the valid distinction between violence against property and violence against human life, i.e. MLK Jr. here (h/t Bonnie Washick). I think this is important, and something that is largely black-boxed in the political economy model of state failure.]

on being "in the field" (and that pesky task of rationalizing one's existence)

I have been spending the past six weeks 9,499 miles away from Ann Arbor in Dili, the capital of Timor-Leste (East Timor). I have another six weeks to go, so it seemed like a good time to reflect on some of the challenges I am facing as a researcher "in the field." (I put that in quotations because I am lukewarm about the phrase, in part due to its various negative connotations. See for example this recent post on the subject by a political science PhD student doing work in sub-Saharan Africa. My post here is meant to speak to some of these issues of researcher-subject / outsider-insider dynamics that are raised by those who suggest that "fieldwork" is an outdated and potentially harmful concept. Insert the usual disclaimer about how this post is only scratching the surface of points that others have made more thoughtfully elsewhere, and you probably won't ever learn anything from my blog, ever, but hey, you are here anyway so you might as well keep reading.)

Anyway, as an American social science PhD student trying to do dissertation research in Timor, I feel subject to competing expectations:

1. Sample, collect (and eventually analyze) your data in ways that minimize the role of your own subjective biases as a researcher.
2. Convince your (future) audience that you, as a scholar, have some knowledgeable insight into a place or community that your audience does not have.

Maybe it isn't obvious how these expectations are in competition with one another. I find that it becomes especially difficult with one, particular form of qualitative data collection: the semi-structured interview. I'll clarify. First, note that we all experience things subjectively. Everyone is in on the joke that complete objectivity is impossible, so let's just get that over with. Of course, there are ways to minimize (or at least estimate and correct for) ways in which subjectivity (a.k.a. bias) may be influencing our research. With a semi-structured elite interview, this is really hard. For example, what if  we wanted to know whether having a "knowledgeable" interviewer affected an interview subject's responses? (I'll elaborate on "knowledgeable" in a minute but, for now, say someone who has been reading up quite a bit on state revenue mobilization strategies in Timor-Leste interviewing a public finance expert in Timor-Leste, just as a random example.) What if they had been interviewed by someone who was handed the same list of guiding questions for the interview, but who had no knowledge of the topic? This counterfactual is almost always nearly impossible to achieve: you can't go back and interview the same elite twice (within a practical timeframe), and even if you outsource your interviews to local research assistants, for example, they are almost certainly going to be at least as knowledgeable as you.

There is a specific reason I raise the issue of the knowledgeable interviewer. Namely, I think that this is the basic question (or doubt) that floats around in the head of many more quantitatively-oriented (or less human subject data-oriented) scholars that may be the eventual audience for the research: "What if I had gone to do these interviews in East Timor, would the subjects have told me the same thing?" In this sense, your relative knowledge about a place or topic -- a quality that is generally held in positive regard and is used as the main justification for investing in fieldwork in the first place -- may make some people trust your work less, not more.

This is of course why there is a large literature on interviewer effects (and, errr, writing this post is making me realize that I should read more of it). There are ways to address some of these issues in interview question design, subject selection, and in the analysis and presentation of your findings. However, in general, semi-structured interviews are not as popular a form of data collection in comparative politics as they once were. Seemingly "cleaner" methods such as experiments and surveys are far more popular. Other comparativists avoid these problems by foregoing the use of human subject data altogether (a decision that is often motivated by the particular research question they are pursuing). Indeed, my own work will use a combination of human and non-human subject data.  Although I am not an experimenter, I reckon that well-planned experiments do require at least several visits to the field site by the researcher, but perhaps not an extended stay. Surveys can be conducted almost entirely from a distance. (Although, I came into town with a prepared survey instrument, and after two weeks I realized about one-third of the questions I was hoping to ask would be ridiculous or irrelevant. Some of this could have been obviated by more extensive outreach and preparation before I left for Timor, but I promise that I did a fair amount of that, and there really is no substitute for getting to the country, testing out one of your questions on an acquaintance, and being met with a blank stare.) And finally, non-human-subject data is often available electronically and may not require a trip to the research site at all (although, importantly, historical data and archival records are often an exception). Ergo, the decline of extended periods of field research in comparative politics?

So, I don't know if it should be reassuring or worrisome, but I think some of the difficulties I am experiencing are due to an overall uncertain relationship between fieldwork and social science these days. Perhaps less so than before, but it seems that departments still demand comparativists with country (or regional) expertise and knowledge. Presumably this means having spent a fair amount of time there, knowing a local language, having connections with local researchers, and/or being able to teach a class on the country or region. One's value-added is one's knowledge of a region or place that other scholars don't necessarily possess. But in order to make this valuable, one has to translate that knowledge into objective, replicable, unbiased findings. Scholars who are able to conquer both of these beasts are a rare breed worthy, in my opinion, of admiration and emulation.

the crime of caring

I should precede this post with a disclaimer: I am an American woman, I am a social scientist (in training), and I want to help people in other parts of the world.

Lately, staking out this position has meant submitting oneself to a firing squad of proud hipster cynics. Because my country -- its political leaders, its private sector, even its celebrities -- has done a lot of damage in the world, my position is seen as naive, selfish, or both. I should clarify: I am not seeking your sympathy. It doesn't suck to be me. I own the shame of coming from a country that has killed, tortured, and destroyed livelihoods. That sucks, but it sucks immeasurably more for the victims of these tragedies. I can deal with the hipsters, don't you worry.

I should also say that I don't think I am any better than you, or anyone, for that matter. Maybe you are someone who doesn't prioritize helping people in other parts of the world -- you prefer to focus on your family or your local community, where you feel you are most needed or can have the most impact. That's cool. I am glad we both exist.

The way many in my generation deal with the shame of bearing witness to the horrible things going on in the world is by self-atomizing into a landscape of honed and sharpened blades of snarky and incisive critique. (Or at least, that's what we like to think we are doing. "Yeah! I'm incisive!") Unfortunately, this only adds up to a universal feeling of despair. We tell the stories of those with naively good intentions, or worse, with naive and self-serving intentions, who say that they are going to "save the world" and end up failing or making it worse. "Look at the cultural imperialist," we say. "Look at the neoconservative", "look at the liberal interventionist," "look at the corrupt investor." Look at the Westerner who pokes and prods people in the developing world so that he or she can sleep at night feeling like a humanitarian who has served the greater good. Or so that he or she can sleep at night knowing they'll be rich the next day. "How does that person sleep at night?" [Pats self on back for pointing out other's hypocrisy; lies in bed staring at the ceiling feeling mysteriously unfulfilled.] How do any of us sleep at night?

There is an important wave of thought that claims that good intentions are not enough, and sometimes  well-meaning interventions by "the West" into the "developing world" backfire in ways that could have been predicted had we been a little more thoughtful. This is often true. It is also critical to note that many people in positions of power are more purely motivated by personal gain than improving outcomes for others. To me, there is a categorical difference between those who can sleep at night because they believe they did something good for others (however accurate that belief may or may not be) and those who can sleep at night because they believe they personally profited. I am sure there is a rich ethical debate to be had here, but that's my simplistic opinion for now.

In any case, to avoid becoming either of these stereotypes -- the naive and reckless humanitarian or the greedy and exploitative profiteer -- should we simply spend our lives watching human-made crises unfold and drag on? We Westerners shouldn't presume to know what's best for "other" people and "other" cultures. Sure. But how about we humans think about what's best for our fellow humans? It seems we can agree on some basics: like, man-made famine is bad. Destruction of livelihoods for those who already possess the least is bad. Kidnapping, raping, and torturing are bad. The pill that I refuse to swallow is that we, as humans, cannot do anything about these human-inflicted tragedies. The entrepreneurial maxim that it is better to try and fail than to never try may not always apply. Sometimes, trying and failing makes things worse. But what about when there is a positive probability that you might try to make things better and succeed? It seems unrealistic to insist that such situations do not exist. Alternatively, we may be doomed to keep making the same mistakes, but we all share the blame for that -- including those of us who have chosen to sit back and disengage.

P.S. Thanks to my friend Suby for passing along this piece on the destructive role of irony in art, but also in broader society. Read it. Basically, David Foster Wallace said all of the above, but better.

P.P.S. This is a blog, which means I didn't think much, I just wrote it. Please tell me I'm wrong.