IR Grand Theory and High Fashion

I am teaching a course on the International Relations of Central Asia. The course is half IR theory and half practical application to the particular region where I am living and teaching. This is the first time I am teaching the course in my last semester at Nazarbayev University.  I have enjoyed re-reading many of the papers that I haven't engaged with closely since my graduate school days.  The last three weeks we have looked at realism, institutionalism, and the debates between them during the mid 1990s.

One of my students came to me to talk about the readings.  They are hard to understand and put in context for many students who are not used to reading about theory at this high level. The students are particularly drawn to two papers that I assign by Mearsheimer.  The first was written right before the collapse of the Soviet Union that offers grave predictions for the security of Europe (Mearsheimer 1990).  The second is a Foreign Policy piece from 2014 that is an "I told you so" paper about the reasons for Russia's invasion of Ukraine (Mearsheimer 2014). Students are very interested in the back and forth nature of the papers and the passion which dominated the debates.  They were also unsure whether these debates really matter in the long run.

While talking to the graduate student I had a thought strike me. These debates are very similar to the dynamic of the fashion industry that is shown in the film "The Devil Wears Prada."  I hadn't watched the movie in a decade, but I remembered the scene where Meryl Streep's character cuts Anne Hathaway's character down to size after she scoffs at the passion with which the group is putting together an outfit for the cover of the magazine.

The gist of the speech is that powerful people making decisions in rooms like the one they were in influence the everyday fashion of those that don't really think about it.

I showed the above clip to my class and then made the analogy concrete.  The great debates that took place between the Mavens of the intellectual world are very similar to the choices of a fashion editor.  They set the terms of the debate, and set the tone for what is studied and how. Those who are "in the know" in the industry know that they need to know and understand the trends, the history, and the balance of power between the elites sitting in powerful rooms setting trends.

My own training and inclination is to be more open about theories and methods.  I'm a pluralist by training and inclination.  However, my training also took seriously the idea that the Great Debates shaped the study of international relations.  My advisor, Cameron Thies wrote a paper on this (Thies 2012) that directly examined how the discourses of realism built an academic community.  The elites in this case debate to reinforce the status hierarchy and to maintain boundaries.  Like any other elite-driven profession or endeavor (really all of human endeavors), the role of elites is very important.

I think that I understood all of this implicitly for a long time, but the inspiration to compare IR theory to the fashion industry helped me to think more clearly about the ways in which I produce and consume academic information.  And to think much more about how I teach that information to my undergraduate and graduate students.
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Mearsheimer, John J. 1990. “Back to the future: instability in Europe after the Cold War.” International Security, 15(1):5-56.

Mearsheimer, John J. 2014. “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin,” Foreign Affairs 93:1-12.

Thies, Cameron G. (2002) Progress, History and Identity in International Relations Theory: The Case of the Idealist-Realist Debate. European Journal of International Relations 8: 147–185.

Thinking about Teaching

This blog post from "The Professor is In" writing for "The Chronicle of Higher Education" is meant to provoke thought from job applicants.  The question asked is about how a candidate would redesign a major.  I was not asked that question in any of my job interviews, but a year and a half out of graduate school, and 2 months into my new job at Nazarbayev University I was asking my colleagues how we should number new courses we were offering in the spring.

That question led down a rabbit hole of discovery and confusion about the major as it had been designed (hastily) four years earlier before there were students and with only one or two faculty members had been hired.  It was a curriculum designed with good intentions (dual tracks for political science and international relations) and a capstone course requirement.  However, the curriculum didn't reflect some key realities of our situation.

First of all, our students all wanted to major in "International Relations" because that was something that translated into the local context - even if what they learned was different from diplomacy and history that constitutes such majors in local universities.  "Politologia"[1] just didn't translate.  The capstone courses had no guidelines, and scheduling hadn't been thought of, so not all of our senior majors were going to be able to take these classes - the ones they needed to graduate.  The undergraduate curriculum also hadn't accounted for the need for professors to split time between undergraduate and graduate teaching with the creation of a standalone MA program at the beginning of the 4th year - the same year I joined the department.

Using examples from our partner university - Wisconsin at Madison - and programs I was familiar with, I redesigned the curriculum to maximize flexibility for faculty and students.  We had some discussions as a department about what we wanted our students to master, and made decisions about requiring both research design and qualitative methods and quantitative methods for all of our majors.  We also had to make decisions about elective courses that could be dual-listed for MA and BA students.  In the end the curriculum changes were significant, but not necessarily revolutionary. 

Kelsky outlines the basics of an undergraduate curriculum in the social sciences, and it matches quite closely with what we did with our renamed major Political Science and International Relations (PSIR):

• (100 level) Introductory courses to acquaint students with the vocabulary and contours of the discipline.
• (200 level) methods courses that help students know the questions that can be asked, and how they can be answered.
• (300/400) courses where students think about knowledge production, debates, and more complex issues within the discipline.

The curriculum was approved by our school Teaching and Learning Committee, and took effect at the end of my first year.  In a few months our seniors will graduate - the first full cohort to graduate under the new standards.  In that time our department has grown and we've added majors, but the curriculum has weathered the storm.

I guess the moral of this story is that things worked out well.
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[1] Политология the Russian word for political science, but still not political science like we understand in the US context.

Is there a coup a-brew in Turkey?

Over the past 18 months I've read half a dozen books about Turkey and scores of articles.  I did this for a long-term project in which Turkey's position in the international network of rivalries is very interesting.  That project is looking at Turkey as a case for whether an unknown social position that is determined by the cumulative social choices of all states about which states pose a threat (rivalry) can affect state behavior.  There is also a question about whether factors within a state may cause it to become central in such a network.

I am far from an expert on Turkish politics, but my foray into the academic international relations and historical literature about that state has made me curious.  The events within Turkey over the past six months have made the country even more interesting from the standpoint of someone who is interested in civil-military relations.

The reporting on the abortive coup and its aftermath has been interesting and scattered.  On the one hand, it seems as if the coup itself was largely theoretical and ineffective.  The prolonged and continued effort to blame the coup on Gulen and his followers has seemed like a naked political maneuver to minimize any influence that Erdogan's former ally has within the polity.  However, Michael Rubin from the American Enterprise Institute has been writing about other issues with Turkey, and specifically about the chance for a real coup to take place sometime in the coming year.
(article)

Much of the reporting about Turkey in the West focuses on either President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s efforts to draft a new constitution or the aftermath of the abortive July 15 coup. But, behind-the-scenes, there is a story with ramifications as great: the competition for control of the military between followers of Erdogan on one hand and those of ultra-nationalist and former Maoist political leader and businessman Dogu Perincek on the other. Perincek’s followers have long occupied top role in the Turkish military which was fine when Erdogan and Perincek sought to take on common enemies: Kurds, liberals, followers of Fethullah Gülen etc. I had previously written about the Erdogan-Perincek struggle within the Turkish military here, but now it seems that the conflict may be accelerating. 

In recent days, Perincek has appeared on television and insisted Erdogan give up on his dreams of changing the constitution. He has cited a letter from a member of his political party calling for a popular rebellion and has now openly called for a change in government. Perincek has also suggested that Turkey could be aflame by March. One prominent Perincek supporter, prominent retired air force officer Ahmet Zeki Ucok has openly said there will be a new coup, but with full buy-in from all levels of the Turkish military.

 The continued unrest within Turkey, including the murder of Russia's ambassador, attacks carried out by ISIS, and Kurdish restiveness provide the military with plenty of arguments for the need to change the leadership of the state in order to right the security situation. While the idea that there may be a coup in Turkey is still speculative, the growing instability in the country's security situation heightens the risk that such a change could occur.

I am teaching a course this semester on civil-military relations, and we will be doing a lot of Turkey watching.

Arms Procurement Links: Japan Jumps in and India Sinking

One area that I neglected (out of ignorance and not deliberately) in my dissertation was the effect of domestic arms arms procurement procedures on arms exports and imports.  This is an area that I covered recently in a course that I am teaching on the Politics of Arms in International Relations.  I think that I have been primed to see problems of acquisitions because of the readings that we did in class - along with my own personal epiphany about the lack of such thinking in my earlier work. At the bottom of this post I'll post the readings that I had my class look at that turned my own view on the subject.  First, however, I am linking to two stories about domestic arms acquisitions that caught my attention in the past few weeks.

1. Japan to Launch a Defense Procurement Agency (LINK)

Japan's Ministry of Defense will use its new constitutional powers to set up an agency to manage international trade of weapons and military equipment. 

The ministry confirmed with IHS Jane's that the new agency will be named the Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency, and will begin operations on October 1. 

The agency's key objectives will include promoting international cooperation on the procurement of defense equipment, enhancing project management, and enhancing development for Japanese defense production and technology bases. 

The Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency is set to become one of the most powerful wings of the Japanese Ministry of Defense, and will employ 1,800 people.

It is interesting to think that Japan did not have this agency earlier.  The country obviously has the capacity to engage in defense acquisitions, but those functions were not concentrated in a ministry that was part of the defense establishment.  This new move may not necessarily make acquisition more rational (Caverley and Kapstein), but it will make the Ministry of Defense more powerful.  This will be an interesting subject to follow over the next few years.

2. India's acquisitions process is corrupt and broken (LINK)

In a long and interesting story, the details of India's decades-long failure to replace its rapidly aging and diminished artillery is still not complete.  Problems of corruption meant that the acquisition agency changed its rules.  These rules have negative consequences:

The other problem involved India’s Ministry of Defence. India’s defense procurement establishment has shown an extreme risk-averse behavior and Defense India observes external link that when a competition devolves to a single-vendor solution, the practice is often to re-tender. Soltam and Denel’s exit left just BAE Bofors, until they, too were eliminated by allegations that Bofors had paid INR 640 million (about $16 million) in bribes, trying to secure the order. 

The net effect of corporate blacklists, plus single-vendor prohibitions, is a process that can’t field equipment to India’s military when it’s needed – and sometimes ever. Unfortunately for India’s front-line soldiers, their need for working artillery hasn’t changed.

Things only got worse and weirder.  I recommend that you read the entire article.  The more I think that I understand the dynamics of the arms trade, the more new information like this appears.  I guess I should be happy that there is still plenty of research for me out there!

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Class readings related to (at least tangentially) to domestic arms acquisition processes:

Kovacic, William E., and Dennis E. Smallwood. 1994. “Competition Policy, Rivalries, and
Defense Industry Consolidation.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 8(4): 91-110.

Mayer, Kenneth R., and Anne M. Khademian. 1996. “Bringing Politics Back in: Defense Policy and the Theoretical Study of Institutions and Processes.” Public Administration Review
56(2): 180-90.

Pearson, Frederic S. 1989. “The Correlates of Arms Importation.” Journal of Peace Research
26(2): 153-63.

Caverley, Jonathan, and Ethan B. Kapstein. 2012. “Arms Away.” Foreign Affairs 91(5):
125-32.

Qingmin, Zhang. 2006. “The Bureaucratic Politics of US Arms Sales to Taiwan.” The
Chinese Journal of International Politics 1(2): 231-65.

Smith, Ron, Anthony Humm, and Jacques Fontanel. 1985. “The Economics of Exporting
Arms.” Journal of Peace Research 22(3): 239-47.