My third meeting with Dr. Hurrell about the thesis generated the third possible structure:
Category: Writing
Anything on the process or results of writing as an activity and a passion
Categorizing thesis sources
I am splitting the literature review chapter for my thesis into two sections: the first about general materials relating to the role of science in environmental policy, and the second about the specific case studies. This bit is for the beginning of the general section, intended both to demonstrate the scope of appropriate materials and put them into a kind of comprehensible framework:
Within the realm of the general scholarship about expertise, legitimacy, and the application of science to the development of political solutions to environmental problems, there is a spectrum of discussion. At one end is the work most explicitly and restrictively concerned with questions within science itself. The deliberations of Popper, Kuhn, and their colleagues are frequently of this nature. The next band in the spectrum is work that relates to the social roles of scientists, within a broader social context. Here, the work of Haas on epistemic communities is particularly important. So too are deliberations within the scientific community itself over what it means to be a scientist. At a still-lengthening wavelength are explicit discussions about the political role that scientists should play: how, for instance, they should present their findings to policy makers, and whether it is appropriate to adopt political stances. Next come discussions about the same question, only from the political – rather than the scientific – point of view. How do politicians and political theorists view the process of delegation to scientists and scientific bodies? Finally, there are the most explicitly political and philosophical questions about things like the nature of international justice and the relationship between humanity and nature. In the following extended discussion, I will employ this organizational structure: moving from the high energy, short-wavelength considerations of science from within to the long wave questions of abstract political theory, keeping in mind the reality that these discussions are entangled with one another at many points.
What do you think of the metaphor? Too simplistic for a work of this sort, or useful as a means of categorizing? If I had to place myself on this spectrum, I would probably be in the yellow band: closer to red than to green. Most of the reading I have been doing – and a lot of what interests me most – is in the blue to violet range, though blaring red is not without appeal.
Also, it should be noted that I have far more sources of the first kind (general) than of the second (case study specific). This has a lot to do with how people keep suggesting the former and not the latter. Anyone who knows of any especially good writing on either the Stockholm Convention on POPs or the Kyoto Protocol is strongly encouraged to let me know about it. The library resources at Oxford, especially on Stockholm, are a bit patchy.
Who art thou?
While more than 100 people a day consistently visit this site, less than a dozen leave comments regularly. A lot of the remainder seem to be people who search for something specific, either find it here or do not, and then depart. One recent query of the first sort: “how many chapters mphil thesis?” And one of the latter: “photo of two turkeys.” Discounting such visits, there still seem to be some silent readers out there.
I would be really curious to know a bit about those who read consistently. You don’t need to say who you are, but I would love to know where you are from and why you read this blog. Knowing that would give me a greater ability to write on subjects people care about (say, sandwich economics) and less on topics of lesser interest. I have never sought a mass audience, but I would like to please the audience I have.
People who have been silent thus far are especially encouraged to leave a note.
Blogging less of a priority
Today was really busy, as most days in the immediate future seem likely to be. As such, expect me to retreat a bit from writing excessively much here. This is a somewhat anxious time, and anxiety is best dealt with in less public places.
PS. This site and Papa Fly Productions have now been upgraded to WordPress 2.0.7. Here’s hoping that more than ten days pass before they need to issue another security fix. Thankfully, the installation seems to have been painless.
Document incompatibilities
The members of the M.Phil in International Relations programs have collectively embraced Macintosh computers. The only machines you ever see during our seminars are MacBooks, Powerbooks, and my lonely iBook. At the same time, Microsoft Word has generally been embraced by the academic community. I get about half a dozen Microsoft Word attachments from fellow students, instructors, and mailing lists every day. Every academic journal with which I have had experience (both editing and submitting) has used MS Word as their normal document type.
As such, the following error is especially infuriating. If you add images to a Microsoft Word document being produced on a Mac (in this case, a Venn diagram for my failed states paper), it will may load in Word for Windows with the following error:
QuickTime and a TIFF (LZW) decompressor are needed to see this picture.
First off, shame on Microsoft for not making documents from two pieces of their own software properly interchangeable. Secondly, shame on Apple. They say that Macs are machines for use in serious professional environments, and yet problems like this exist in the single most essential piece of professional software. This, and some other weird incompatibilities relating to fonts and formatting, make me a bit nervous about writing my thesis on a Mac, to be taken to a print shop that will almost certainly be using Windows machines.
People will say to switch to OpenOffice, but that is like replacing your car with a buggy because you don’t like the controls on the stereo. OpenOffice, like Linux, simply isn’t worth the bother in a world where everyone is using a near-ubiquitous alternative.
On a semi-related note, I am strongly considering using a non-standard font for the thesis (either Bembo or Perpetua, perhaps). Is it possible to have a document printed in a font that isn’t particularly standard, or will I get back something switched over to something generic but similar? If you turn a document using a non-standard font into a PDF, can people who do not have that font view and print it properly?
WordPress 2.0.6 update
Only WordPress administrators are likely to care much about the following.
Sex discrimination in the sciences
Please note that much of the following is shamelessly stolen from a blog called Pharyngula: a stage in vertebrate embryonic development where all species look similar. This post, specifically, made me aware of the issue and most of these sources.
A letter in the July 14th issue of Nature draws attention to the possibility of sex discrimination in the European Young Investigator Awards, issued by the European Science Foundation. The awards provide up to 1.25 million Euros for research, but only 12% of them went to women, despite more than 25% of applicants being female. The chances of that distribution occurring as the result of random variation is less than 0.05%. The September 8th issue features a response, but it isn’t terribly convincing.
Of course, it is possible that the work submitted by women was less worthy of funding. Further research, however, suggests that this is not the case. A study by Christine Wenneras and Agnes Wold (“Nepotism and sexism in peer-review,” Nature 387, 341−343; 1997 – Oxford Full Text) includes some very dispiriting findings. The study looked at applicants to the Medical Research Council in Sweden. As part of their consideration, applicants are given a score for ‘scientific competence.’ In the Wenneras and Wold study, the productivity history of male and female scientists in Europe was evaluated using ‘impact points.’ For example, a publication in Science or Nature is worth about 23 points, whereas “an excellent specialist journal such as Atherosclerosis, Gut, Infection and Immunity, Neuroscience or Radiology” would be worth three points. Based on this approach, Wenneras and Wold concluded that “a female applicant had to be 2.5 times more productive than the average male applicant to receive the same competence score as he.”
That’s really awful. Indeed, it goes a long way towards discrediting the notion that the scientific community is capable of unbiased appraisal. While the study doesn’t tell us whether problems extend beyond the Medical Research Council, it certainly seems to warrant further examination. A lot more studies are discussed in this article.
Would it be feasible or beneficial to introduce a system wherein those reviewing scientific work could be kept from knowing whose work they are assessing? While that is possible for individual articles, it doesn’t seem possible in the context of grants or promotions. I would expect that most scientific disciplines are small enough that reviewers could pretty easily identify the source of work, even if personal details are removed from the copies they examine. That is especially true in the context of choosing who to promote within a particular university department. How, then, could greater fairness be achieved? I would be especially interested in suggestions from women doing academic work in the sciences.
Logic and ethics
Without warning, my failed states paper has grown to include Venn diagrams and predicate logic. This is what happens when you realize that one sentence could be expressed more comprehensibly through the use of a few symbols, then allow yourself to run with it. The paper (previously mentioned here and here) now includes branched formulations such as:
(h) Any state within the international system has the:
- obligation
- option
to intervene in a failed state, so as to:
- help it return to a non-failed status
- protect the human rights of those within it
- cause the cessation of large scale violations of human rights, ie. genocide
Of course, the whole point is to prove that you cannot reduce normative considerations in international relations to such crude formulas. Logic is not a substitute for judgment, in the consideration of how to act in response to weak or criminal states. Also, any consideration of how to act morally in the international arena will involve the examination of multiple justifications and counter-justifications, weighing the importance of certain moral claims against alternatives. Logic doesn’t really help us with that.
It does, however, help with the writing of a paper that is at least likely to stand out from the rest of those submitted on the topic. I knew that symbolic logic course I took at UBC would be useful for more than just the Law School Admission Test.
Thesis literature review
The first substantive chapter of my thesis is meant to be a review of the relevant literature. Actually, it would be more correct to say ‘relevant literatures’ since so many different ones touch upon the subject matter. While climate science, ecology, and biochemistry are all relevant to Kyoto and Stockholm, they are not directly relevant to the thesis. The point is to examine the roles played by expertise in policy formulation, not engage directly with the scientific issues at hand. As such, the primary sources of interest are not studies of global warming of POPs, in their own right, but the discussions that took place within the scientific and policy community about what is going on (to be analyzed in Chapter 3: Information and consensus issues) and then about what should be done about it ( Chapter 4: Normative and distributional issues).
Having a look at the conversations that took place within the scientific community about taking a political stake against nuclear testing might be one way of gaining insight into how scientists deliberate about political matters, and how the legitimate role of scientists and the scientific community is seen. Likewise, the whole debate that arose about Bjorn Lomborg’s controversial book. While the public perspective on these debates is largely outside the scope of the thesis, it might be worth touching upon the relationships between public, expert, and political opinion in the chapter on consensus and information issues.
The relevant secondary literatures are various. They obviously include political and international relations theory, especially as they concern questions about prudent decisionmaking, the welfare of future generations, and other normative concerns. (On the normative side, Henry Shue’s work is both highly topical and likely to be considered essential reading by his colleagues here). In general, I am a lot more interested in the core issues of political theory (legitimacy, justice, etc) than in those of international relations theory, though some discussion of the nature of cooperation between states and the formation of international regimes is required. To some extent, international law is relevant, insofar as it helps to define how science relates to the policy process and the practice of states. Elizabeth Fisher’s work on public administration has made me think that the Rationalist-Interventionist and Deliberative-Constitutive frameworks she describes can be applied to international environmental negotiations. It is also fairly clear that some understanding and discussion of the philosophy of science is necessary to prevent the thesis from being overly naive in that regard.
Histories and analyses of the meetings and agreements leading up to the Stockholm Convention and Kyoto Protocol are likewise important secondary sources. Rather than repeat lengthy summaries of what happened in the limited space that I have, I can further summarize it and refer the interested back to more comprehensive accounts. Similarly, other secondary discussions about the nature, causes, and implications of the two agreements should be mentioned.
The last section I mean to include in the literature review is a listing of recent theses, primarily at Oxford, that have addressed similar issues. While it is probably better to engage with more widely known scholars than debate the arguments of these theses directly, there will probably be a bit of the latter in the final version as well. In particular, it might be a good way of making reference to other potentially relevant case studies. Also, since these works have often led me to useful sources, it seems only courteous to give a nod to their authors. Also, they may appreciate knowing that at least one person has dug up the document they spent so much time and energy completing.
If people can think of any other literatures I need to address – or can think of any really stellar sources within the disciplines enumerated above – please leave a comment.
Defining state failure
From writing about foreign aid, I have moved on to failed states. I am meant to discuss who defines states as ‘failed’ and what consequences it has for sovereignty. It seems to me that there are three general ways in which a state can be considered to have failed:
- States can lose their integrity, as viewed from the security perspective by outsiders.
- Alternatively, they can fail to maintain other characteristics that are considered essential in a modern state, such as a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
- Finally, they can fall below some moral threshold, below which their government or leadership is no longer seen as legitimate.
Of course, the relevance of a state being ‘failed’ or not failed lies primarily with how this changes the behaviour of other states and non-state groups towards it. If being a failed state suspends the traditional rights afforded to states – from territorial integrity to diplomatic immunity – being thus categorized could very significantly affect the treatment of both individuals and territory by outsiders.
In the first instance, a ‘failed’ state might be one that has lost control of what passes in and out of its territory, to the point where it endangers neighbouring states. This is a situation very specifically addressed in the United Nations Charter. Chapter VII specifically empowers the Security Council to “to maintain or restore international peace and security.” Generally, serious measures such as sanctions or interventions need to be justified as responses to such a threat. While the issue is sometimes fudged – for instance, by saying that possible refugee flows from an internal conflict threaten international peace and security – this is still quite generous amount of space to give states, in which to manage their own affairs.
There is a problem here, when it comes to states that have strong governments, and possibly even democratic legitimacy, but nonetheless either passively submit to or actively encourage activities that threaten international peace and security. Supplying weapons to illegal groups, for instance, is an activity that a very great many states have engaged in. It may be possible to be a criminal state without being a ‘failed’ state. If so, the difference in terms of treatment is worthy of consideration.
A definition of state failure based on the maintenance of certain characteristics by the state under consideration necessitates a setting out of what the essential characteristics of statehood are. In The Neutrality of Great Britain during the American Civil War, Montague Bernard explained it thusly:
a Community or number of persons permanently organised under a Sovereign Government of their own, and by a Sovereign Government we mean a Government, however constituted, which exercises the power of making and enforcing law within a Community, and is not itself subject to any superior Government. These two factors, the one positive, the other negative, the exercise of power and the absence of superior control, compose the notion of Sovereignty and are essential to it.
Here, non-failed states need to do more than control their borders; they also need to maintain the capacity to enact and enforce laws. Probably, this requires more resources than just maintaining territorial integrity, though it is hard to imagine a state with impeccably policed borders and a largely lawless interior. The bigger issue with this expanded definition is that it begins to subject the internal structures of a state to external scrutiny, in a way closely tied to the ability of that state to maintain international legitimacy and recognition.
(I know we discussed a formal definition of statehood in international law, in the class I took at UBC on that subject. I can’t remember which specific document was involved, however. Anyone who does is very much encouraged to comment. All my notes and textbooks from the course are back in Vancouver.)
The definition of state failure with the widest scope is some kind of affirmation of moral codes that non-failed states must obey, even in the conduct of their internal operations. This is, of course, a conception that arises hand in hand with the idea of human security. The idea that governments that either actively engage in crimes against humanity or allow them to take place unchecked have foregone their sovereignty is one that can be easily justified within a liberal tradition of political theory. Of course, it is a step beyond that to affirm the right of other states, or of the international community, to intervene in such circumstances.
Other problems arise when the above criteria are considered in combination. Take the example of Pakistan. By many measures, it is a strong state. There is an organized central government with a clear structure. There is an organized military and police forces. The state is externally recognized by the international community. At the same time, Pakistan either cannot or does not control the flow of materials and individuals across its northern border with Afghanistan, despite a recent and bloody effort on the part of the army to take control. Also, Pakistan has been shown to be involved in international illicit trade in nuclear materials and information on making nuclear weapons. While few would call Pakistan a failed state, it does demonstrate characteristics associated with state failure.
In the end, it isn’t clear to me that the failed / non-failed dynamic has much usefulness, when it comes to states. It is too simple to allege that a right to intervene arises from failure to comply with one or another set of requirements. Some kind of more sophisticated moral and legal conversation is necessary, making this binary distinction just one point of discussion in a broader dialogue.