the toolbox’s dilemma, or why mass atrocity response advocates should think more about power

After many trials, tribulations, tabulations, and Chavez-esque levels of coffee consumption, I’ve finished my undergraduate thesis. I’ll make a couple of tweaks to the typological analysis tonight, in order to prepare for my 15 April due date, but I feel comfortable sharing the nearly-completed product. I’ve spent plenty of time blogging about the thesis, as well as distracting myself from it, in this space, so I figured I’d share:

Why do some responses to mass atrocities succeed in mitigating violence against civilians, while others fail? The nascent academic and policy literature on mass atrocity response emphasizes the varied functions of particular policy tools, emphasizing the dividends for mass atrocity response of economic sanctions, preventive diplomacy, or third-party military intervention. In this paper, I argue a greater role for power relationships, as opposed to tools of statecraft, in determining response outcomes. I posit a middle-range theory of relational power—an actor’s ability to influence organizational preferences, processes, and decision-making through social, interactive means—in mass atrocity response, through which I identify a taxonomy of social relationships between respondent actors and mass atrocity perpetrators. Using this theoretical framework, I conduct a typological analysis of mass atrocity response events between 1991 and 2011, and apply the social taxonomy to two case studies, in Sri Lanka and Darfur, Sudan. The case study analysis offers some support for the hypothesis that a perpetrator’s patron—an external actor, with overlapping social preferences—is the primary determinant of mass atrocity response outcomes.

If this seems like your run-of-the-mill, “undergrad-discovers-Wendt” analysis, I view it a bit differently: the “logic of consequences,” which undergirds realist interpretations of power in the international system, is important, but its importance emerges from the social implications of consequentialism, as well as their practical effects. tl;dr: tools of statecraft are important, but their social context bears further explication.

Far from a finished product, my thesis represents the contemporary consolidation of my thoughts about mass atrocity response, which I fully expect to evolve, in keeping with the field’s evolution. I enjoyed the process of qualitative research design, but it certainly has its limitations, as I discuss in the paper–with forty-eight mass atrocity events, limited capacities for statistical inference, and limited expertise in anything but a handful of case studies, my relational-power theory carries marginal weight. Over the next few years, I’d like to expand my research, and to develop the theory. How? Here are some ideas:

• Add a bit of quantitative grist: My history of “successful” Stata regression analyses amounts to a bivariate assessment of ethnic fractionalization and conflict, and it wasn’t statistically significant. Needless to say, my quantitative skills aren’t what they should be. My typological table, in progress until twenty-four hours from now, should underscore a few avenues for quantitative measurement, which would disaggregate my measurement of relational power in mass atrocity environments. Take, for example, the friendly exercise of compulsory power, which might occur in the context of trade incentives for mass atrocity mitigation. Without statistical inference, it’s difficult to identify the correlative relationship between a friendly actor’s trade patterns, a proxy for compulsory power, and response outcomes. As far as I’m aware, the quantitative models needn’t be complex, but a basic, applied understanding might be useful.
  
• Visualize the qualitative data: As I’ve noted in a previous post, the blogosphere’s preference for visually appealing, easily digestible data poses a (surmountable) challenge to qualitative researchers. Some platforms, like the World Peace Foundation’s Reinventing Peace blog, provide excellent case-study analysis, but three-thousand-word, no-visual posts about mass atrocity response have limited reach. In addition to the quantitative skills, a bit of coding might be useful, “at least” enough to design a rudimentary, quasi-interactive map of global mass atrocity events, and the vectors of local, national, international, and non-governmental response. I would scale up my two case studies, Sri Lanka’s civil war and Darfur’s conflict, to forty-eight, in keeping with my typological analysis. In the meantime, a Google Maps visualization, sans chronological analysis, might do the trick.
• Disaggregate the mass atrocity events: As I note in my paper’s conclusion, my rudimentary, middle-range theory of relational power in mass atrocity response opens several additional dilemmas: within relational power, broadly speaking, do different forms of power yield different response outcomes, as a result of different kinds of social interaction? Probably. Does the exercise of military force, which I describe as an idiosyncratic tool of foreign-policy statecraft, differ in its impact from other applications of relational power? Again, probably. But the most interesting question to me, which I didn’t delve into in much detail, is the sub-event implications of relational power. As I observe, most discussions of mass atrocity response refer to meta-events, or aggregations of political conflict between various parties: consider, for example, the “Rwandan genocide,” which we remember as the genocide per se, rather than the escalation of local grievances, local organization, and local violence. In some contexts, this tendency is understandable, but in others, as Severine Autesserre observes, it’s less applicable: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya’s post-election violence, and Pakistan’s micro-insurgencies, in particular, come to mind. In keeping with my emphasis on mass atrocity events as evolutionary, adaptive phenomena, I’d like to get a better sense of how we analyze the atrocities’ component parts through a similar framework.

What else should I be looking at? Keep me posted, and I’ll try to do the same.

the powers of human rights advocacy (or, happy almost birthday, #kony2012)

It’s been almost one year since Invisible Children released its #Kony2012 video, which sparked both viral enthusiasm and visceral controversy. At the time, I published a critical perspective, which to my satisfaction was distributed widely and, for the most part, favorably. I spent much of the ensuing month assessing, reassessing, and revising my analysis, attempting to understand why #Kony2012 was both important and problematic, and what the campaign’s impact implied about the contemporary value of domestic mobilization around international human rights issues. Others asked similar questions; if their answers varied widely, I found the discussion fruitful.

I’ve learned a lot since #Kony2012′s release about defining success and failure in human rights advocacy, both experientially, through my work with STAND, and academically. Those who are familiar with my STAND work, which focuses on mobilizing domestic constituencies around atrocity prevention in U.S. foreign policy, know that I have a particular concept of the organization’s value, which despite similar origins differs widely from Invisible Children’s. In short, I see STAND’s contribution to the United States’ broader atrocity prevention community as a “leadership development” role, due to its small footprint, its student-led function, and its consciously limited access to DC’s policymaking community. This priority places a stronger emphasis on long-term capacity-building, and the creation of domestic “communities of practice” around atrocity prevention. In defining this role, I consciously omit factors that, as my colleagues have identified, are critical to domestic political mobilization: why people act, how individual activists see their role in a broader community, and what activists want to see from their actions. Where this concept has generated discursive enthusiasm among STAND’s leadership contingent, it’s received understandably limited traction within the organization’s grassroots constituency, likely for the reasons described above.

Over the course of the past year, I’ve also thought a lot about power: what it means to hold power, which types of power influence politics, and how these power structures impact organizational processes, preferences, and decision-making. As my previous post acknowledged, most of my power-related thinking has occurred in the context of my senior thesis, which examines “relational” power’s impact on mass atrocity response outcomes. Domestic human rights mobilization is tangential to this larger focus, due to the myriad of power forms that impact policy- and non-policy structures. At the same time, my post-#Kony2012 concern for advocacy impacts was indisputably formative in my analytic understanding of power–see, for example, my two-part series on whether (and how) “advocacy works.” Given my recent emphasis on relational power, as well as #Kony2012′s upcoming anniversary, I thought it might be worthwhile to riff empirical on #Kony2012, a positive case study in human rights advocacy’s power.

As I suggested in my initial post, #Kony2012′s case study applications emerged as a cross-section of the organizing and transnational advocacy literatures. #Kony2012 intentionally framed its advocacy as a “people power” movement, encouraging students, especially, to conduct targeted actions around specific, domestically-oriented asks: guerrilla flyering would “make Kony famous” among U.S. political constituencies, while Congressional actions–call-in days, lobbying efforts, a mass petition–would “build political will” for U.S. policy against the Lord’s Resistance Army. Invisible Children’s campaign actions, scheduled over the course of several months, varied intentionally in participation rates: not everyone who shared the Facebook video participated in the 20 April “day of action,” and not everyone who participated in the “day of action” joined MOVE DC, a part-lobby day, part-summit, part-dance party that convened in Washington, DC. This participatory variation, which organizers often refer to as a “ladder of engagement”, is an intentional organizing strategy: scaled campaigns acknowledge variations in social incentives, motives, and capacities for action, and often structure events and opportunities accordingly. The campaign’s purpose, as Marshall Ganz instructs, is the activation of different levels of social influence, which construct “people power” in particular ways. If singular actions produce individual results, the purpose of an aggregated campaign is the creation of intentional, escalating social change.

In addition to its “people power” role, #Kony2012 also functioned as a transnational advocacy movement: Invisible Children operates on-the-ground reconstruction, early warning, and development programs in northern Uganda, and its networks are often global, due in part to its prominent reliance on evangelical Christian communities as its organizing base. In the case of #Kony2012, transnational media networks–both “traditional” and “social”–also proved influential, as non-American constituencies, especially throughout the African diaspora, interacted with the campaign’s content, impacts, and digital platform. If hashtags are any indicator of norm diffusion–and they might be, if in an ephemeral sort of way–#Kony2012 took the cake: #StopKony, #Kony2012, and, adversarially, #StopIC were trending for days. Invisible Children proved uniquely effective at setting national, international, and transnational agendas, as well: the UN Security Council, the U.S. Congress, and “gatekeeper” human rights organizations (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International) each brought #Kony2012 into public policy deliberations.

Invisible Children quickly raised these impacts to the fore, highlighting in a new video the campaign’s “people power” and policy outcomes. That #Kony2012 was influential is largely indisputable, but simply highlighting its positive consequences omits key factors in empirical analysis. How was #Kony2012 influential? Through which actors, and through which means? And, if we can use #Kony2012 as a qualitative case study, what is it about these institutions, communities, and structures that makes them especially susceptible to human rights organizations’ multi-pronged power?

As I highlighted in my previous post, Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall’s analysis of power in international relations offers a compelling framework for understanding political influence. Barnett and Duvall discuss power as a relational, social phenomenon, which I adopt to mean “an actor’s ability to influence organizational processes, preferences, and decision-making through interactive means.” As a social phenomenon, power is multi-directional, which means it can have an impact on its target, the target’s respondent actor, or the respondent actor’s component members. Barnett and Duvall identify four forms of relational power, each of which interact with one another to shape change in their proximate and distant environments: compulsory power, which functions through an institution’s political “technologies”; institutional power, which functions by changing, creating, and defining an organization’s standard operating procedures, processes, and rules; structural power, which defines social hierarchies (who rules/is ruled, who leads/follows, who is included/excluded, and so on) through existing norms; and productive power, which constructs new norms and identities for social communities and organizations. If these four power types impact diverse social interactions, their implementation relies on the type of actor, the actor’s context, and the community of actors participating in social exchange. That is, human rights advocates’ application of Barnett and Duvall’s taxonomy looks very different, and functions through different mechanisms, than mass atrocity response efforts’, writ large.

In Invisible Children’s context, we can differentiate between target and respondent actors. Three subtypes, in particular, comprise Invisible Children’s respondent constituencies: “in-group” activists, who participate in the organization’s campaign; “out-group” activists, who oppose the organization’s campaign; and “elite” movement leaders (Ben Keesey, John Prendergast, Kenneth Roth, Michael Poffenberger, among others), who function as “gatekeepers” of policymaker access, expertise, and, for the purposes of our domestically-focused case study, legislative outreach. Obviously, we can further disaggregate these actor subtypes, as attempts to classify individuals carry inherent observational problems. For example, there’s a quantitative and qualitative difference between an “in-group” activist who posts a video on Facebook, and one who participates in a Congressional action. Under the logic of community organizing, however, grassroots actions are “effective” at an aggregated level–after all, the term is “people power,” rather than “person power.” Accordingly, while discrete categories may exist within “in-group” activist constituencies, as well as “out-group” activists and movement elites, these empirical categories are not entirely off-the-mark.

As for target actors, #Kony2012′s was singular: the U.S. government. In theory, we can subdivide this further: the campaign included both legislative and executive branch-oriented components, and actively devoted resources towards both target actors. All other target actors, however, were indirect, at least on a publicly observable level: Invisible Children devoted financial resources towards “catching” Kony, in keeping with its programmatic priorities, but those efforts were tangential, rather than central, to the advocacy campaign’s messaging, resources, and design. The UN, too, was a secondary, rather than primary actor: Invisible Children sought to influence UN Security Council priorities through U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, rather than through, say, the Togolese consulate. Accordingly, we can restrict our target analysis to the U.S. government’s executive branch–in particular, the National Security Council/Staff–and the legislative branch.

Over the next week, I will assess the influence of Barnett and Duvall’s power taxonomy on Invisible Children’s advocacy outcomes. While acknowledging the influence of pre-#Kony2012 outcomes on #Kony2012′s relational power, I will restrict my timeframe to post-video events, in keeping with Invisible Children’s public analysis of the campaign’s success. By success, I refer to a publicly apparent shift in the target actor’s processes, preferences, or decision-making. This is not to suggest a coercive model of power, as Robert Dahl implies, but merely to view change as the logical outcome of a “successful” human rights advocacy campaign. I will conclude my analysis with a fifth post, which highlights “lessons-learned” for domestic mobilization around international human rights issues.

————————-

* For various reasons, I confine my empirical analysis to matters domestic, and will refrain from comment on U.S. foreign policy actions towards the LRA. Additionally, as scholars, activists, and practitioners have critiqued the campaign’s factual, ethical, and discursive elements, this analysis also omits those subjects.

wherefore qualitative blogging?

This being my final semester, I’m currently in the throes of my undergraduate thesis. While I’ve previously described my project, it’s changed enough to merit a revised summary. By my count, one of the central failings of the mass atrocity response literature is its failure to integrate power as a characteristic of qualitative analysis. Tools-based analyses are nearly ubiquitous among both academic and policy studies of mass atrocity response, while power gets the short shrift. Consider, for example, the interpretive framework of Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell, which is widely perceived as the literature’s formative text: Power dismisses the U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy’s willful negligence towards postwar atrocities as in keeping with Albert Hirschman’s “futility” thesis, despite the inconclusiveness of Power’s mass atrocity response counterfactual. Tools-based analyses often portray response mechanisms as inherently fungible (see, e.g. Rory Stewart and Gerard Knaus’ Can Intervention Work?), while underemphasizing the context in which mass atrocity response occurs.

For my thesis, I’m re-centering the varied functions of power in select case studies of mass atrocity response. As Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall’s taxonomy of power demonstrates, power operates in different ways, through different actors, and with different consequences. I’ve adopted a “relational” approach to power, which synthesizes Barnett and Duvall’s power taxonomy with Joseph Nye’s three “faces”. I’ve defined relational power as “an actor’s ability to influence organizational preferences, processes, and decision-making through interactive means.” tl;dr: power is a social phenomenon, and operates through relationships between local, national, international, and non-governmental actors.

Using Jay Ulfelder’s 110-n dataset of state-sponsored mass killing between 1945 and 2011, and Kate Cronin-Furman’s 80-n dataset of mass atrocities between 1970 and 2010, I’ve extracted a case population of mass atrocity response events between 1991 and 2011 (at time of writing, forthcoming). Due to time constraints, I’m only writing two case studies: currently, Sudan’s Darfur conflict, and Sri Lanka’s counterinsurgency against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), although these selections are subject to change. With that said, I’m enjoying my interpretive framework, and it appears to bear out as a descriptive mechanism, at least in my initial observations. And, more relevantly, I’m enjoying the process of qualitative case research. To leave Ulfelder and Cronin-Furman’s respective datasets to the perils of logistic regression analysis, therefore, seems unfortunate.

This enjoyment, however, is extracurricular–at this point, it’s difficult to fathom the case studies’ application beyond a blogging platform. To riff on Adam Elkus’ Abu Muqawama piece on policy relevance, it’s not unreasonable to argue that blogging platforms have a diffuse impact, at least in shaping how students, practitioners, and scholars of foreign policy, comparative politics, and international relations understand the world. There’s a “logic of presentation” here, I think, which Stephen Walt implies in his widely-discussed post on “why academics write poorly?”: scholars may “discover” a particular political phenomenon, but the blog’s primary value is its wide distribution capability–it costs five minutes of iPhone data to read this blog post, whereas your run-of-the-mill International Security article might cost fifteen dollars. And, as Jay Ulfelder hinted, academic journals have not adapted well to the creative possibilities of the “information age”.

The past decade has witnessed a broad proliferation of quantitatively-oriented blogs, as well as those by regional experts. The Duck of Minerva, the Disorder of Things, the Monkey Cage, and Political Violence at a Glance each diffuse political-science research in blogosphere discourse, often in idiosyncratic ways. With chance exceptions, however, there appear to be few blogs in the political-science space that embrace qualitative research as a defining methodology, and which apply case-based empirical analysis to cross-regional, transhistorical trends. This is not to construct a Waltian/Mearsheimerian fallacy about the poverty of theory, of course–plenty of bloggers theorize well, and frequently–but to make an empirical observation about the blogosphere’s discrete components.

It’s easy enough to speculate about why this is the case: qualitative methods are, to my understanding, less than “in vogue”; large-n visualizations are sexier than, say, 3,000-word essays; and, as Andrew Moravscik has recently implied (hat-tip: @stratbuzz), qualitative citations are a challenging beast. Harder, of course, is the process of identifying solutions. As I suggested above, I’m interested in expanding my thesis’ emphasis on relational power’s qualitative applications for mass atrocity response, although professional restrictions will continue to limit the scope and frequency of my analysis. Regardless, I’m interested in exploring platforms for engaging, effective qualitative research. In that vein, dear reader, a few questions:

• What would an accessible qualitative blog look like, aesthetically speaking?
• Assuming space limitations (<1500 words, as a standard practice), how would a qualitative blog apply theory to its component case studies? Policy applications?
• What kind of case studies would a qualitative blog include? Theoretical variations on the same event? Event variations on the same theory?

Let me know if you think of any more, and I look forward to your comments.

grand blog tarkin: there and back again: middle earth’s insurgency and the organization of violence

This post, on Thorin Oakenshield’s counter-Smaug insurgency, was originally published at Grand Blog Tarkin, a poliscifi blog.

“Help yourself again, there is plenty and to spare!,” bellows the Dragon, as the nimble-footed Hobbit scampers from his gold-bedecked lair. So begins Bilbo’s brief encounter with Smaug, the scourge of Dwarvish civilization. According to Tolkien’s legendarium, Dragons have maintained a mixed relationship with Sauron’s dark powers, reflecting a diversity of motives for inter-civilizational violence. Smaug’s seizure of Thror’s Erebor, the Lonely Mountain, stems from opportunistic banditry, as distinct from his successors’ annihilationism. Smaug’s intentions, however, have little impact on the scale of his invasion, which terrorized Erebor’s Dwarvish inhabitants, as well as the Men of Esgaroth, the valley’s township. For one-hundred and fifty years, Smaug slept, and napped, and dozed, and every-so-often, preened himself on his kleptomania.

As compelling as Peter Jackson’s computer-generated dragoneering may be, Tolkien’s death of Smaug is, by all readings, a marginal event. Bilbo’s intelligence-gathering effort, mentioned above, is operationally successful, revealing the Dragon’s physical vulnerabilities. Smaug seeks vengeance against the Men of Dale, whom the Dragon casts as disruptive Quislings. In an unusual occurrence in Middle Earth warfare, Smaug’s assault is a limited engagement, as Bard the Bowman pierced the Dragon’s underbelly. Of course, Bard’s defense of Dale permits limited relief; soon after Smaug’s death, an Orc horde swarms Erebor, prompting the Battle of Five Armies. If Smaug’s death bore local relevance, the impact of the Battle of Five Armies was cataclysmic. According to Tolkien’s narration, the Elves, Men, and Dwarves vanquished more than three-quarters of the North’s Orc population, a decisive victory. The counter-Orc coalition’s warfighting logic transforms a century of Middle Earth’s geopolitics, as Jon Jeckell’s survey of the War of the Ring details.

Tolkien’s sprawling, grand-strategic analysis of the Battle of Five Armies overshadows a micro-perspective towards discreet violence. Tolkien’s Hobbit, the Five Armies’ chronicle, is quick to highlight the post-Five Armies unity of Elves, Men, and Dwarves, forged against the Orcs’ assault. The counter-Orc coalition equitably distributes Erebor’s spoils, recaptured from the Dragon’s lair. The successful conclusion of the Battle of the Five Armies reaffirms the existence of a “free peoples of Middle Earth,” an infrequent conglomeration of Elves, Men, and Dwarves. If we backtrack, however, corrosive, if justified resource squabbles comprise the aftermath of Smaug’s demise, a marked contrast to the triumphant, trans-civilization harmony of the post-Five Armies scene. Throughout the Quest of Erebor, Thorin’s Dwarvish company lays claim to both their mining kingdom and its riches. The Dwarves’ hereditary authority bears little relevance to the Men of Dale, who request a compensatory share of Erebor’s gold, due to the Dragon’s rampant, wanton destruction of Esgaroth. When Thorin rejects Bard’s claim, the Lake-men lay siege to Erebor, requesting assistance from Thranduil’s Wood-Elves. While Tolkien introduces the subsequent scuffle as a prelude to the Battle of Five Armies, the siege of Erebor is likely more revealing of the counter-Smaug insurgency’s internal politics.

Tolkien describes the fragmentation of the counter-Smaug insurgency as a moral failure: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world,” laments Thorin, following the Battle of Five Armies. In this way, Tolkien occupies a stark posture towards the civil conflict literature: greed, rather than grievance, drives Middle Earth’s violence. As Michael Ross conveys, the early civil conflict literature’s greed/grievance dichotomy is dated, both in its underemphasis on the particularism of resource types, as well as how violent organizations manipulate illicit economies. While gold’s influence is apparently significant, the counter-Smaug insurgency’s organizational structure may prove more significant, in keeping with recent scholarship on the “organization of rebellion.”

The Dwarvish company–Thorin Oakenshield, Gloin, Oin, Ori, Nori, Dori, Dwalin, Balin, Kili, Fili, Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur–is a familial organization, crafted in accordance with a broad edition of Thorin’s family tree. From a non-fantastical perspective, we can draw parallels to a criminal mafia, which often relies on hereditary networks to distribute resources, facilitate violence, and shape strategic decision-making. Thorin’s Dwarves create a formative nucleus of the counter-Smaug insurgency, which in its initial form maintains dual objectives: Smaug’s eradication, and the seizure of Erebor’s riches. As Bilbo burglars Smaug’s lair, the Dwarves form a temporary, informal coalition with Bard’s Lake-men, who possess the manpower with which to vanquish Smaug. The insurgency organization, however, lacks an “overlapping social base,” which Paul Staniland describes as a prerequisite for cohesive politics–the partnership relies on rent-seeking opportunism, rather than a communal logic. As the organization’s decentralization mounts, the incoherence of the insurgency’s political organization gives way to its second objective, prompting infighting and internal fragmentation.

In keeping with Tolkien’s moralistic standpoint, Bilbo’s crafty extraction of the Arkenstone, the crown-jewel of Erebor’s cache, allows Middle Earth’s free peoples to reach a negotiated settlement. Consistent with BlogTarkin’s recent tack towards alt-history, further poliscifi researchers may find it useful to conceptualize alternative trajectories of the counter-Smaug insurgency’s internal conflict mitigation.

of deans and down pillows: violent entrepreneurship in community’s great war

When I last assessed Community‘s civil war, that post was also an elaborate effort to avoid an assortment of homework assignments. Twoscore and one week later, the stakes are higher, but the analytic appeal of Troy and Abed’s fratricidal violence remains unshakeable. In rapt anticipation of next week’s Community relaunch, I recently revisited my “Pillows and Blankets”-inspired guide to mass atrocity mitigation. In the course of my brief reconsideration, I noticed–to my fond surprise–that a fellow Redditor had approvingly re-upped the post, provoking a brief, if useful discussion on its analytic shortcomings. While Ennil, the commenting Redditor, +1′ed my analysis, he questioned my dearth of detail on the contributions of “external actors.” As Securing Rights readers may have observed, I’ve recently approached comparative political and foreign policy analysis from various indirect standpoints, including American history, science fiction, and popular culture. To the extent that Ennil’s critique allows me to continue this trend, and given the timeliness of the cultural reference, I’d like to offer a brief reassessment of Community‘s external conflict drivers.

Indeed, although my initial post highlighted an iterative relationship between local and international conflict dynamics, I reduced my analysis of external drivers to a brief aside on “conflict entrepreneurs,” seeking to emphasize localized drivers. As Jason Stearns has observed in the context of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this analytic inclination is all-too-frequent among conflict watchers, who for various reasons view particular conflict components as more or less responsible for violence than others. Where Community is concerned, I prioritized the localized elements of the Pillowtown/Blanketsburg conflict, likely in an effort to simplify the war’s didactic purpose. On first view, a localized analysis is not hard to achieve, and bears out in an anthropological survey of both Pillowtownian and Blanketsburgian institutions, networks, and collective cultures. The Burnsian narrator conveys the existence of norms of military combat, which prove locally insalient: “rules are agreed upon, but casualties are inevitable,” he says, detailing Pierce’s unfettered melee during the Battle of Big Bulletin Board, after which the Show’s Worst Character experiences an “inaugural” case of erectile dysfunction. And, as I mentioned in the initial post, battles’ causes and drivers appear localized, oriented around the protection of particular pillow/blanket fort segments, rather than a supralocal structure (the blanket-state, as Troy might describe it).

A revised perspective on the Community civil war, however, bolsters a pluralistic interpretation of political violence, one which acknowledges the varied and dynamic salience of local, national, and international factors in facilitating and driving conflict. In my initial post, I described Pillowtownian and Blanketsburgian identities as “contested, yet transient,” whatever that means. At any rate, my initial interpretation cast the divided societies’ communal identities as intensely localized, dismissing supralocal networks’ political relevance. On second glance, this analysis does not hold, and I’d like to apologize to those for whom Pillowtownianism and Blanketsburgianism are historically, personally, and culturally salient. In reality, “Pillowtownian” and “Blanketsburgian,” like “Union” and “Confederate,” are both positive and negative constructs–that is, each identity is defined by what it is (positive), as well as by what it is not. To be Pillowtownian is, as Abed would say, to embrace the true meaning of “pillowness,” while Troy’s “blanketness” possesses its own, internally coherent cultural, social, and political characteristics. Pillowtownianism’s existence, however, is also explicitly contingent on the genesis of Blanketsburgianism: according to the Burnsian narrator, Pillowtown, née New Fluffytown, emerges as a political institution only after Blanketsburg’s secession. For comparative perspective, consider James McPherson’s linguistic analysis of the Civil War’s impact on American identity: “Before 1861 the two words ‘United States’ were generally used as a plural noun: ‘the United States are a republic.’ After 1865 the United States became a singular noun.” Extracting localized identities from their supralocal context, therefore, diminishes their political meaning.

In addition to their social efforts, the political contributions of external actors are also difficult to pin down. Much due to Human Rights First’s research,  policy and non-governmental actors over the past half-decade have exhibited a mounting interest in mass-atrocity enablers. As the term “external actors” implies, analysts often view “enablers” as ambiguous third parties, operating at a calculated distance from violent conflict. Community‘s civil war reveals a flip-side to this analysis, one which, in evading definitional certainty, bears important considerations for conflict mitigation. In contrast to my initial assessment, in which “conflict entrepreneurs,” the Dean’s Guinness World Record aspirations, and mercenary networks play a marginal role, the external involvement of conflict third-parties varies, often dynamically, between embedded engagement and cautious detachment.

In my initial post, I referenced Chang’s Changlorious Basterds as a “pubescent group of rag-tag mercenaries,” using “mercenary” as a pejorative, rather than analytic term. On second glance, Jeff’s mercenary role is more revealing of the political dynamism of external actors. Vadim Volkov uses ”violent entrepreneurship” to refer to Russia’s post-Soviet criminal networks, which filled political, social, and economic space made vulnerable by the Russian state’s institutional absence. However, as the Pillowtown/Blanketsburg war indicates, “violent entrepreneurship” also conveys an interaction between international material networks, national opportunists, and local perpetrators of political violence, each of whom wield conflict as a means towards political and social control. Jeff, for all intents and purposes, is an entrepreneur of violence, inciting both Pillowtownian and Blanketsburgian forces in a cynical, elaborate truancy effort. Prior to the “Pillows and Blankets” episode, John Goodman’s Vice Dean Laybourne, who seeks Troy’s air-conditioning repair talents, is the ultimate violent entrepreneur (a less-poetic variation on Ice-T’s Original Gangster), as he exploits Troy and Abed’s pillow/blanket dissonance for his building-maintenance ends. Jeff and the Vice Dean’s diverse conflict engagements underline a typology of violent entrepreneurship, through which conflict’s local, national, and international levels interact.

Also, no one likes Britta.

why rebels commit mass atrocities: the american civil war

A commemorative sign at the site of the Shelton Laurel Massacre, from North Carolina History Today.

As Alex Bellamy observes in a recent post, the human rights abuses of Mali’s myriad insurgencies highlight the role of mass violence in rebel military strategy. Mass atrocities often–in fact, overwhelmingly–occur alongside the violent give-and-take of insurgent and counterinsurgent forces, due to the insurgency’s inextricable reliance on civilian intelligence, resources, and sustenance. According to Bellamy, two factors drive rebel atrocities: the context in which violent conflict occurs, and the rebel movement’s ideological predisposition towards violence. Contemporary case studies–Central Africa’s Lord’s Resistance Army, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s M23 insurgency, or unrestrained factions of Syria’s opposition forces, for example–bely these micro-level functions of mass atrocities in rebel mobilization. In keeping with my American-history-as-political-science experiment, however, I find it useful to turn to a home-front case study, a mere four hundred miles from my Georgetown abode.

The 18 January 1863 Shelton Laurel massacre, which took place in North Carolina’s mountainous Madison County, is a minor, if well-documented historical snippet of the American civil war. Where the massacre graces the historical record, historians often describe the event as a representative counterpoint to conventional depictions of the American civil war as, well, conventional. Indeed, the massacre took place several counties away from the  center of Union/Confederate exchange; with the Emancipation Proclamation seventeen days prior, and the Battle of Chancellorsville a couple of months away, the Shelton Laurel massacre is something of a sideshow. The exceptional cases, however, often yield the most compelling reflections on micro-dynamics in civil conflict.

According to Rick Beard‘s recent Disunion post on the Shelton Laurel incident, Madison County was ripe for political violence: in 1861, the county boasted a Unionist delegate to North Carolina’s secession convention. Confederate military authorities viewed the county’s infantrymen with suspicion, as North Carolina was known for its disproportionate population of deserters. By the middle of the conflict, in late 1862, restricted flows of food and supplies left Madison County civilians to face widespread scarcities. Salt-provision gaps were particularly acute, little improved by Confederate soldiers’ persistent search for Union sympathizers. These scarcities prompted local civilians, many in fact harboring Union sympathies, to develop small guerrilla forces, which conducted salt raids against Confederate supply stores. In early January 1863, the 64th North Carolina Infantry’s Lawrence Allen and James Keith, stationed in eastern Tennessee, received approval to march on Laurel, North Carolina, with the express purpose of holding the Unionist guerrillas accountable for their salt raids.

By the time Lawrence Allen and James Keith’s counter-guerrilla force reached Laurel, the majority of the salt raiders had fled, according to eyewitness accounts. Instead, the 64th Infantry picked up a small contingent of thirteen civilians. After unsuccessfully torturing Laurel residents for actionable intelligence, Allen and Keith marched the thirteen civilians to the town’s outskirts, proceeding to shoot each, including youths, at point-blank. Despite efforts to hold Keith, in particular, accountable for his role in the massacre, the Confederate lieutenant general managed to skirt extended imprisonment until President Johnson’s 1868 general amnesty.

The Shelton Laurel massacre is a useful case study in evaluating Bellamy’s analysis of rebel motivations for mass violence. To convey the illegitimacy of the South’s secession, Unionists often referred to Confederate forces as the “rebels.” As a Yankee, I’m admittedly sympathetic to this perspective, but it also carries a modicum of historical truth. Matt Dickenson’s recent post on “moonshine and state-building” in the postbellum Mountain South indicates as much: prior to the expansion of the Reconstruction-era Revenue Service, informal institutions, rather than state authority, were the predominant mode of political organization in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. To describe the Confederacy’s Shelton Laurel counter-guerrilla efforts as a contested interaction between sub-state actors, then, is not entirely off the mark.

In keeping with Bellamy’s analysis, the Shelton Laurel case palpably demonstrates conflict contexts’ importance in shaping in the severity and scope of mass violence. Lawrence Allen and James Keith were local boys, so to speak–their hometown, Marshall, was the most prominent site of the Unionist guerrillas’ salt raids. Acknowledging the likely non-cooperation of local residents, Allen and Keith chose to extract intelligence through gruesome force. The Confederate officers’ violence was, in a sense, performative–that is, the officers indirectly displayed accountability for Unionist salt raids, rather than seeking it directly. Given the region’s Unionist sympathies, and the deep-seated class divisions that framed them, the 64th Infantry could expect little more than mass violence to be effective in controlling the population. Context mattered, and framed the 64th Infantry’s strategic environment.

As the Shelton Laurel case demonstrates, ideology is a necessary, but insufficient component of mass violence. Bellamy cites dehumanization, in-group/out-group designation, and scapegoating as representative forms of atrocities ideology. According to Drew Gilpin Faust’s cultural history of death during the American civil war, however, each ideological form was ubiquitous throughout the American civil war, regardless of civilian atrocity environment. Wartime correspondence offers anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon: in several circumstances, Civil War soldiers conducted American “Indian war dances,” donned “Indian-style” war paint, and imitated war whoops, casting themselves as elated savages amid the battlefield melee. These acts show Bellamy’s dehumanization as a common quality of warfighting in Civil War soldiers’ perceptions of both themselves and their military opponents. Lawrence Allen and James Keith may have harbored resentment towards the Shelton Laurel Valley’s Unionist population, but their violence was opportunistic, rather than ideological.

private security and public violence in nascent states: a lesson from america’s frontier

I saw Django Unchained last week. For those who haven’t monitored the vibrant cultural conversation on Quentin Tarantino’s posture towards slavery’s historiography, it’s worth following–Tarantino’s portrayal of U.S. race relations is intentionally provocative, and contributes to an important, if underrepresented body of cinema on slavery, resistance, and the antebellum South’s infrastructure of oppression. If slavery’s racial overtones are Tarantino’s primary theme, the commercialization of violence is a close second. Django‘s “companion Western” narrates the exploits of Christoph Waltz’s Dr. King Schultz, a German-American bounty hunter, and Jamie Foxx’s Django, a freed slave and Dr. Schultz’s companion. In a revealing bit, Schultz explains bounty-hunting to an uninitiated Django: “Bounty hunting is like slavery, it’s a cash for flesh business.” In Tarantino’s antebellum landscape, violence is a private good*: in the absence of state institutions, a commercial logic determines who dies, who kills, and where slavery is concerned, who gets purchased. Where public bureaucracies exist–the U.S. Marshals, the public magistrate, the Records Office–they reinforce varied forms of commercial violence, including bounty-hunting and slavery, rather than mitigating them.

As Ryan Evans observes in his Tillyian analysis of state-building and organized crime in AMC’s Hell on Wheels, commercialized violence was an endemic characteristic of U.S. state-building throughout the nineteenth century. The securitization of the American state–that is, the transformation of violence from a private to a club good**–was a gradual process, which picked up in the aftermath of the Civil War. U.S. securitization had many causes, not the least of which was the entrenchment of law enforcement bureaucracies during the Civil War and postwar Reconstruction eras. While Johnson’s postwar administration modified Lincoln’s war-era taxes on whiskey, tobacco, and beer, successive Reconstruction governments relied on an expanded vice-tax bureaucracy to generate federal revenue. Where Democrats opposed most measures that expanded federal authority in the former Confederate states, Reconstruction-era Republicans supported the vast expansion of the revenue collection bureaucracy, often for the purposes of patronage. To ensure the forceable collection of federal vice taxes, often from armed distillery operations, civilian revenue officials rode alongside rag-tag posses. When Congress banned the use of posses in revenue collection operations, in 1879, U.S. soldiers filled the gap, blurring the distinction between military authority and law enforcement praxis.

If the Reconstruction-era South’s law-and-order activities comprised a gradual, if inconsistent creep towards public securitization, the American West was its historical foil. Take California, the historical center of commercial activity on the U.S. western seaboard. California’s popular historical debates on westward expansion are microcosms of contemporary race relations: bandidos, Mexican gangs who clashed with eastern settlers during the Gold Rush era, are a present-day symbol of both colonial resistance and of criminal violence, depending on who you ask. Bandido militias were early participants in the California Gold Rush, but arrived from Mexico, rather than the eastern United States. Their early affiliation with Mexican miners restricted their violence to American rancho raids. As retributive violence escalated, however, the bandidos’ violence proved increasingly opportunistic–Chinese labor communities were frequent targets. Bandido activity continued unfettered throughout the early 1850s. In 1853, acknowledging the bandidos’ security and commercial threat to California mining activity, the state legislature authorized the creation of the California Rangers.

Like their Texas counterparts of baseball lore, the California Rangers evade easy classification. Their central purpose was the violent elimination of Joaquin Morieta’s bandido militia, after which Ranger leader Harry Love disbanded the state-authorized militia. Despite their public authorization, the California Rangers were a privately-funded endeavor: their compensation came from the family of bandido victim Allen Ruddle, a California farmer. The reward allowed Mexican-American War veteran Harry Love to pull together a small militia of twenty Rangers, sourced from rural California’s community of experienced warfighters and frontiersmen. When Love presented decapitated Morieta’s head in Sacramento, the Ranger captain received a thousand-dollar reward. So, while California’s law enforcement community celebrates the Rangers as predecessors of the state’s policing enterprise, the Rangers do not conform to key characteristics of a public police force. Instead, the California Rangers’ origins more accurately cast the group as a prototypical private security contractor (PSC/PMC, in its military form).

PSC/PMC activity is among the most controversial characteristics of present-day international security. As Adam Elkus notes in his recent reflections on the Benghazi affair, the PSC/PMC “network of contractual relationships,” a legacy of the United States’ global reach, carries problematic consequences for U.S. foreign interests. The purpose of this post is not to probe these contractual relationships, but rather to assess the ways in which the historical United States, as a nascent state, used private security operations within its borders. As present-day states seek to expand the benefits of private security operations, while mitigating their negative consequences, the United States’ own state-building experience can be instructive. There are a number of important takeaways from the American frontier experience, but this one sticks out:

Just because institutions exist, that doesn’t mean they actually exist: The San Francisco Police Department was founded in 1849, the year before the U.S. government acknowledged California as its thirty-first state. The SFPD’s creation occurred during a first wave of growth in local law enforcement; the New York Police Department, where founding SFPD chief Malachi Fallon also served, was established in 1845. According to Roger McGrath, the early SFPD was incapable of stymying California’s early Gold Rush wave of organized crime, largely because of its proportionately limited human capital. McGrath describes an unruly scene, whereby “frustrated citizens, on several occasions, tried to take prisoners from the police and administer summary justice.” California’s law enforcement system only emerged as a (relatively) credible, effective policing body after a symbiotic, if competitive partnership with the Morse Detective Agency, a private firm.

That is to say, the privatization of security may be an undesirable outcome for a “consolidated” state, but, if the American experience is an applicable perspective, it’s likely integral to the state-building process.

—————-

* Private good (excludable, rivalrous): under a commercial logic, a consumer must purchase an act of violence (a bounty, a slave’s price), an act which prevents others from consuming the same.

** Club good (excludable, non-rivalrous): under a club logic, a consumer must purchase an act of violence by a community institution (taxation, gang dues), an act which others can also consume.