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THE EXCERPT

Introduction

How African Liberation Shaped the International System

It is March 1961. The blades of two United Nations (UN) helicopters blow dust off Maya-Maya Airport’s tarmac in Brazzaville. Rajeshwar Dayal, the head of the United Nations Operation in the Congo (UNOC), exits the first he li cop ter, while the doors of the second chopper remain closed. Rumor spreads that Antoine Gizenga, successor to Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Demo cratic Republic of the Congo, is hiding inside. The arrival of Congo-Brazzaville’s foreign minister, Robert Stéphane Tchitchéllé, prompts the head of security to inspect the helicopter to find out who is accompanying Dayal. Earlier that day, Radio Léopoldville announced that Gizenga was placing himself under Dayal’s protection.1 Lumumba had been murdered in January 1961 on the orders of the Katangese leaders, Belgian police inspector Frans Verscheure, and Belgian military police chief Julien Gat, allowing the Belgians, the Americans, and—reportedly—MI6 to all file away their assassination plans.2 Allen Dulles, head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), supported the elimination reportedly because he had heard US president Dwight D. Eisenhower wish for the Congolese prime minister to “fall into a river full of crocodiles.” UN troops had to be kept “in the Congo even if” that decision would be “used by the Soviets as the basis for starting a fight.”3

While Eisenhower’s involvement in Lumumba’s assassination remains speculative, what is remarkable is the president’s combativeness, since Africa in the 1950s offered little political or military gain, Communist intrusion was a minor

threat, and engagement with Africa entailed a tough choice between European partners and anticolonial nationalists. Why, then, was Lumumba suddenly a threat to international stability in the Global North? Conversely, why did leaders in the Global South, who had constructed their political identities on resistance to outside intervention, become ensnared by the Cold War? To answer those questions, one must acknowledge the Congo’s strategic importance and mineral riches. However, a principal part of the answer has to consider the ideological scramble for Africa, a struggle for hearts and minds in which African, US, Soviet, and European leaders propagated competing plans for Africa’s future. Seemingly inconspicuous machines, such as the transistor radio used by soldiers at MayaMaya Airport to listen to the news, became indispensable in the spread of PanAfrican, capitalist, Communist, and imperial visions of postcolonial order.

Rather than the place where the Soviet and US model competed for supremacy, the continent became the destination for a “crowded safari,” as famed British journalist Edward Crankshaw quipped in January 1960. The Observer even had to publish a guide to all of the African “isms” to paint a clearer picture of the “ferment of ideas.”4 Pan-Africanism, a liberationist interventionist ideology with universalist aspirations, prompted African nationalists to compete with imperialist, capitalist, and Communist development models. Nationalist leaders tried to attract others who were living outside of their newly established borders to their brand of Pan-Africanism while crafting an anticolonial route to modernity to replace the European version, which was exclusionary and racist. The liberationist case for progress, in contrast, was built on cultural integrity, the notion that successful modernization required an appreciation of African culture. This approach rejected colonial rulers as well as Soviet and US officials who had claimed that the destruction of tradition was indispensable for development.

The liberationist mission to rework colonial modernity, not the anticolonial engagement with the Cold War, shaped the postcolonial global order. The struggle between capitalism and Communism was undeniably intense but was only one of two ideological strug gles that marked the twentieth century, with the battle between liberation and imperialism ultimately proving to be more enduring. The liberationist critique of European modernity as inherently racist and unjust emerged in eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue, where a charismatic Black general, Toussaint Louverture, staged a revolt when the Napoleonic state reversed the abolition of slavery. African nationalists in the 1950s were all steeped in this intellectual tradition by way of the French and British West Indies. Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah enlisted the help of Trinidadian journalist Cyril Lionel Robert James and St. Lucia economist Arthur Lewis to replace colonial development with Nkrumah’s Pan-African path to modernity, while in Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor was joined by Aimé Césaire and Léon-Gontran Damas,

poets of French Martinique and French Guiana, to craft a vision of progress in which French and African civilizations were both indispensable.5

African nationalists were not a disjointed group who met at conferences, launched a dizzying array of nation-building models, and forged fragile AfroAsian coalitions to guard against Cold War intrusion and colonial oppression. Rather, their activism was born out of a common ideological ambition to attain anticolonial modernity and make real the promise of the Haitian Revolution. In that respect, liberationists were not that different from other nineteenth-century revolutionaries, such as Marxists who wanted to achieve the aims of the Bolshevik revolution, capitalists who were eager to export the ideas of the American Revolution, or imperialists who sought to spread the Industrial Revolution’s benefits.

Ideological deliberations between anticolonial leaders also created a liberationist international system, since Third World nationalists built different types of federative and cooperate structures beyond their own postcolonial state to marshal the economic, cultural, and political capacity required to attain modernity on the Global South’s terms. The Cold War was not exported to the Global South. Rather, the East-West division between the US empire of liberty and the Soviet empire of equality was submerged by a North-South conflict in which US and Soviet empires, together with European empires of exploitation, were rebuffed by Pan-Asian, Pan-African, Pan-American, or Pan-Arab federations. The Global South’s understanding of diplomacy as a perpetual strug gle between liberationists and neocolonialists crashed into the North’s tendency to define each political matter in the South as a development problem and hampered policymakers in the Global North, who were forced to constantly come up with new justifications when they meddled with liberationist principles. These principles—state building with respect for African culture and the creation of a nonracial international hierarchy—had emerged in the eighteenth century, were punctuated by decolonization, and had to be resolved by a modernist transformation. As Robert Komer, member of the US National Security Council (NSC), ruminated in 1964, “sovereignty, legitimacy of legally constituted governments, non-intervention” were “principles vital to” Africa’s “long-range independence and prosperity.”6 After 1945, those issues were nowhere more pressing than in Africa. Latin American countries had claimed their independence from Spain and Portugal between 1808 and 1826, as Suriname and French Guiana redefined their relationship with the metropole. In Asia the question of decolonization was settled in the 1940s with the independence of India, Indonesia, and the Philippines, underscored by the French defeat of 1954 in Dien Bien Phu. Great Britain, France, Belgium, and Portugal were forced to turn to Africa to salvage their great power status.7

AFRICA n l IB e RA t I on s HAP ed t H e I nte R n A t I on A l s Y stem

I nt R od UC t I

on

African decolonization turned diplomacy into a confrontation between Communist, capitalist, imperialist, and liberationist ideas, providing historians with a window onto how decolonization affected the Cold War (see figure I.1). The following pages, then, offer a reconfiguring of our understanding of twentieth-century international affairs from East-West to North-South.8

Figure I.1. Map produced by French military staff in April 1960, depicting the different threats to the French presence in Africa: Communism, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Africanism, and African nationalism. Image courtesy of AMAE.

the liberationist Ideology: Anticolonial modernity

International historians have set aside the powerful globalism of liberation and instead argue that decolonization globalized the Cold War. After the rubble of the World War II was cleared away, Odd Arne Westad famously claimed the United States and the Soviet Union became locked in conflict over the meaning of the Enlightenment’s legacy, European modernity. However, from the position of the Global South, that telling of international relations seems imprecise. After all, decolonization not only germinated modernity but also increased modernity’s complexity. In revolutionary centers in Accra, Cairo, and Dar es Salaam, an idealized “authentic” image of the past, such as the “African Personality” or Ujamaa, was held up as an impor tant corrective. Anticolonial movements did not define themselves in opposition to or in alignment with US or Soviet ideology. Rather, these movements wrestled with interpreting the legacy of the Haitian Revolution and worked to construct anticolonial modernity. For liberationists who wanted a radical break with the colonizer, such as the members of the Casablanca Group spearheaded by Nkrumah, as well as those of the Monrovia Group led by Senghor, who sought a redefinition of their relationship with the metropole, modernization and industrialization were not flawed models but powerful tools for progress that had been wielded by outsiders who had been misguided in their belief that progress required the cultural and psychological destruction of colonial peoples.9

From its inception, the very concept of modernity was contested by anticolonial thinkers. A fundamental critique of the European Enlightenment originated in the Haitian Revolution of 1791, when Louverture demanded the universal application of the French revolutionary principles of liberty and equality. That corrective to European modernity was not simply an act of subaltern resistance but also entailed a difficult search for an alternative, a problem exemplified by the fact that this Black revolutionary sought freedom through the same language that had enslaved him.10 Even though Louverture was leading an insurrection against France, he also wanted to retain the link with the French civilization. After 1945, finding a way out of the psychology and culture of colonial modernity therefore became the core objective of the liberationist modernization project, a search reflected in the contrasting accounts of Louverture’s life.

In Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James described the eagerness of Haitians to “go abroad” because it provided them with an opportunity to “clear from minds the stigma that anything African was inherently inferior.” In 1963, he rewrote his 1938 book because he could no longer see a future governed by anticolonial modernity. His lament that “Toussaint was attempting the impossible” points to

James’s disappointment with the results of psychological decolonization. Césaire, in contrast, saw Louverture’s death in a French prison cell as a “sacrifice” for Haiti’s future. While remaining skeptical about the civilizing mission, Césaire concluded that integration into a French republic on the basis of legal equality was the best guarantee for a type of freedom that included social and economic prosperity. The hunger “for some doctrine” that could lift Africans “from their servile consciousness,” in Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta’s phrase, thus gave rise to two opposing tactics: one stressing Eurafrican hybridization, another prioritizing radical separation from Europe.11 This fundamental disagreement over colonialism’s precise psychological impact, differences over the best way to attain modernity, and the fight over the Enlightenment’s legacy animated the debates at the first Pan-African Conference in London in 1900 and remained a problem at successive meetings.

The end of World War II was a watershed moment when this question of colonialism’s psychological and cultural influence gained new currency. Disregard for the contribution of colonial troops strengthened anticolonial leaders in their conviction that it was incumbent on them to reverse the psychological and cultural destruction brought about by colonial development. In Northern strategic blueprints, the “African mind” emerged as a security concern, and underdevelopment became a psychological infliction that could be treated through education. Communists and capitalists who wanted to destroy African “tradition” were unappealing allies for African nationalists who believed genuine modernity could be attained only if development was built on precolonial culture. Anticolonial modernity ties in with how many liberationist intellectuals, such as Aimé and Suzanne Césaire, viewed time as a process in which the past is not yet over and the present and future require constant reinterpretation.12 The Ghanaian “African Personality,” Zambian “humanism,” and Kenyan “African Socialism” were attempts to give new societies and their foreign policies direction.

In the 1950s and 1960s, policymakers and intellectuals in the North as well as the South thus all spoke the language of psychology and culture when they reflected on decolonization, despite fiercely disagreeing about what aspects were indispensable for progress. “Nation building” required leaders with a stable psychology, according to Lucian Pye at Yale University, while Mau Mau insurgents in Kenya were diagnosed with a psychological disease by British ethnopsychiatrist John Carothers.13 French and British colonial subjects could transform into “Black Frenchmen” or “Black Englishmen” by adopting the language, leading psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni to claim that the Malagasy could not bear the fact that they were not white.14 Mannoni’s Psychologie de la colonization prompted Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and key theorist of the Algerian War, to argue the “white man” had robbed nonwhites of their self-worth and instilled

Three QuesTions wiTh BURLEIGH HENDRICKSON author of Decolonizing 1968

1. How do you wish you could change the field?

First, I hope that when people study the global 1960s, they will consider some of the heroic activism that occurred in places like Tunis and Dakar alongside the more well-known cases in Paris and Prague. Second, I hope to advance debate on the role of decolonization in French and Francophone Studies. History is not always already either global, postcolonial, or decolonizing. But many parts of it are, and they can help us to identify patterns and experiences. Not every aspect of 1968 was about decolonization, but enough of its elements

3. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

I first began primary research for the book in France in 2009. In late 2010, I started to get really excited about my upcoming travel to Tunisia, and I wondered about the challenges of studying past revolutionary activity there under the Ben Ali regime. As I was finalizing my research plan and preparing for travel, Mohamed Buʿazizi self-immolated, setting off the Tunisian Revolution. Unintentionally, I ended up studying a period of revolt in the immediate aftermath of a full-on revolution. were to make it worthwhile to locate and understand them.

I ended up studying a period of revolt in the immediate aftermath of a full-on revolution.

Consequently, I learned a lot from Tunisians who were generally open to discussing politically sensitive topics.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book that you know now?

The first draft of the manuscript was divided up similarly to its current iteration, with six primary chapters on activism in 1968 and then in the 1970s in Tunis, Paris, and Dakar. At one point, I thought it would be a good idea to consolidate them by city into three large chapters. This took a lot of time and effort and, ultimately, the chapters became too unwieldy, so I basically went back to my original framework in the end. I probably could have saved myself some time and energy had I known that outcome!

an inTerview wiTh pEtEr andrEaS, auThor of Border Games, 3rd ediTion, hosTed by JonaThan hall

The Cornell University Press Podcast

The TranscripT

The following is a transcript of an episode of 1869, the Cornell University Press podcast. It has been transcribed using AI software. Any typos, errors, or inconsistencies may be the result of the transcription or the natural pattern of the human voice and speech. If you wish to listen to the origial, search 1869 podcast through whicever podcast service you prefer.

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I’m Jonathan Hall. In this episode we speak with Peter Andreas, author of Border Games: The Politics of Policing the US Mexico Divide, now out in a third edition. Peter Andreas is John Hay Professor of International Studies and Political Science at Brown University. He is the author, co-author or co-editor of 11 books, and has also written for a wide variety of scholarly and policy publications, including International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, Harper’s, Slate, Time magazine, and The Nation. We spoke to Peter about how the political games surrounding the US Mexico border have evolved since he first started studying the issue over 20 years ago, how the escalation to a more militarized border has had extremely negative and deadly side effects, and how he expects border issues to be utilized by politicians in the upcoming midterm elections in the United States. Hello, Peter, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Well, I wanted to give you a hearty congratulations on your third edition of your book, Border Games. The first edition came out in 2000. And it’s probably the most cited book about the US Mexico border out there. Nearly 2100 citations, congratulations on that second edition came out in 2009. And now, this month, your third edition has just been published. So what’s the backstory?

Sure, I started working on this issue in the early to mid 1990s. When, in retrospect, it’s clear that that was just a warm up to the border policing buildup. That escalated dramatically to the present. At the time, it seemed like, you know, dramatic and in and of itself, but it was, it was just a hint of really what was to come. So the book that came out in 2000 was really the story of, of of the 90s and didn’t include the aftershocks of 9/11. And it didn’t include obviously the rise of Trump and and the hyper-politicization of the border, through the through the Trump years. But you nevertheless, there is some consistency in the border politics from the 90s to the to the present. And so I sort of felt compelled, given the enormous attention to the border in recent years, to basically do a reality check to look back at the roots of where we are now and show that really, the escalatory border dynamics of recent years are not fundamentally new, but rooted in several decades of border politics, which have led to a seemingly endless process of escalation.

JonaThan

peTer

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peTer

Interesting, interesting, what I think is brilliant about even just the title of your book, you describe them as border games. And in the book you describe the border itself, is in many ways a spectator sport for politicians and political parties. And there’s a tension between image versus reality. Tell us a little bit more about that dynamic?

Yeah, I mean, the title border game. I mean, in retrospect, it’s a it’s a mixed blessing, because in some ways people might think I’m belittling, making making light of what’s happened at the border. And that’s not the intention at all. It’s a deadly, deadly serious game with enormous human human toll and collateral consequences. But why it’s a game is, is that so much of it is for an audience that isn’t actually at the border itself, right. Most voters, whether in Mexico or the US have never been to the border, never will go to the border, don’t know anyone at the border. So it’s not firsthand. It’s coming through media images and words of politicians and pundits and so on. And it does lend itself to, you know, manipulating some images, emphasizing some dynamics, ignoring others. And it’s, it’s the kind of imagery and language around the border does lend itself to sort of hyping of of a threat which You know, we see we’ve seen in an escalatory way for for years now, what I find fascinating is that before the 1990s, the borders really offstage politically untidily. But it was really more of a local issue. And then it became very much a regional issue. And then it was elevated to the national political spotlight. You know, what, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. So in some ways, it has been a border game all along. But it’s it’s escalating and in terms of what’s going on not just what’s going on the ground, but actually, the political attention, and the repercussions and the consequences and so on.

That makes sense. That makes sense. You mentioned in the book that, you know, this goes along to what we were just talking about the primacy of image management, and symbolic politics. That’s a that’s a heavy mix. But then that also, as you said, the majority of people in this country haven’t been to the border don’t really know what’s going on there. And so media narratives can feed their imagination of in an imaginary way that they can expand issues that aren’t even there. And then also they can these, this media coverage can also hide things that that don’t want to be seen. So you say that this image management has revealed that there’s actually persistent failures and negative side effects of this continued escalation that’s get glossed over, no one talks about it. And that just fuels calls for further escalation. Tell us more about this vicious cycle.

Exactly. I mean, the type of remedies that had been pitched for years at the border, to resolve this immediate parent crisis have have often actually contributed to making the problem even worse, even if sometimes politically expedient and and beneficial for the politicians promoting it. So for example, you know, before the real escalation started in the 1990s, crossing the border for migrants, they’re essentially almost transnational commuters. As they go back and forth, seasonally work in agriculture,

JonaThan

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go back home to Mexico, for the holidays, and so on. It wasn’t an easy crossing, but it was nothing like it is today. And so one thing that happened with the crackdown on border crossings was to make the hiring of professional people smugglers, a necessity, rather than just a luxury. So you could, you know, in decades past, you could kind of self smuggle yourself, but because of the crackdown, you have to turn to and put your life in the in the hands of people’s people in the people in the people smuggling business. And so in a weird, perverse way, the escalatory dynamics over years have have have been boom times for the people smuggling business along the border. That business has always been there. But it has just mushroomed in size, sophistication profitability. In the criminalization of migrant smuggling is also sort of making me a more sophisticated, hardened business, the stakes are much harder, higher, you’re more likely to, you know, leave your human cargo in the middle of nowhere rather than get caught because of the penalties and so on. So that’s just one example. Another example is just the geographic, you know, dispersion of flows. So for example, back in the 1980s, the US put an enormous amount of pressure on cocaine smuggling from Colombia to South Florida, and heroin and pitched his enormous success story when they were able to significantly reduce cocaine shipments from Colombia to South Florida. But the unintended perverse consequence was to not stop the flow but to divert it westward to Mexico. And so, you know, what was a success story in the war on drugs in the Caribbean was an absolute disaster for the US Mexico border, because suddenly excuse me, suddenly the US Mexico border was not just a highway for drugs entering the US, which had been for many years, but a superhighway for trans shipping Colombian cocaine into the US and that really changed transmitted transformer, the impact on the dynamics of drug smuggling across the border.

And you see that developing in To the growth of the drug cartels in Mexico, too.

absolutely I mean, Mexico, you know, I don’t want to suggest that drug trafficking or drug traffickers are a new phenomenon in Mexico, but the sheer size and power firepower, and where they’re challenged to the state is a relatively new phenomena, the sheer amount of violence in the drug trade in Mexico, which is what’s gotten most of the attention. In recent years, I mean, more people have died in Mexico and drug related violence in the last decade and a half that have died in most civil wars across the world, right. So this is this is new. Drug trafficking is not new, but the stakes have grown, the fight battles over turf of who controls the entry points, the gateway to the US market, has really intensified in recent years. And, you know, part of that is because of the geographic dispersion of the drug trade from from, say, the Caribbean, to Mexico, I mean, the other dispersion of flows, has been, of course, a people. So historically, migrants would, would take the simplest route to say Los Angeles, from from the most westernmost point of the US Mexico border, and

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go straight through that way. But with the crackdown on Southern California, Operation Gatekeeper in the 90s, it pushed migrants to try more dangerous and difficult crossings, elsewhere further, further, further east, and in other states, such as Arizona. So Arizona is suddenly, you know, caught up in the politics of the border game and the way it never was before, partly because the flow has been pushed from California to Arizona, this is, you know, the intention was to stop the flow or to do or to turn the flow or to curb the flow. But the effect was to actually rechannel it to another area of the border, and then all sorts of political consequences.

Interesting. Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting to hear you, you mentioned that the flow is moved from California to Arizona. So then it becomes a state issue, but then it’s also a national issue. And your books as the, you know, the that the issue has moved from low politics to high politics, we have an election coming up in November. How do you expect the border issue to be used in the coming weeks ahead of these midterms?

peTer

That’s a really good, good question. I mean, I don’t I don’t know how successful pitching the border crisis will be, you know, for voters. But you can bet that, that Democrats are basically going to run from the issue because it doesn’t win for them politically anymore. And Republicans are going to try to push it as hard as possible and hope that that’s what voters care about. They’re midterms, so there’s going to be a lot of variation across different this is not a presidential election. But it’s to be seeing how much that sells politically. You know, for for Trump, interestingly enough, the midterms when he was president, he tried to make the midterms to be about the border and unauthorized migration. And frankly, it was a mixed bag. I mean, a lot of his fellow Republicans. Were hoping the voters, you know, to focus on other issues, and not just, you know, the border. So it’s unclear how much it will sell politically. But one big change is that, you know, in the 90s, and even through the first decade of the century, this is a bipartisan issue. Basically, both Democrats and Republicans gained political ground by touting how much they were for border security and toughening, building more fences and so on. It was, you know, there’s some consistency between Clinton, George Bush, Jr. and the Obama administration’s in terms of of consistent attention and prioritization of border security. That all changed when Trump basically said, Nope, I’m going to build a wall. Everything done before me has been anemic, the borders been wide open. And so suddenly, it was a much more polarizing issue than than ever before. More attention to it than ever before, but also more polarizing than ever before.

JonaThan

Yeah. In that vein, you’d mentioned Trump’s policies, were the escalation on steroids. What are your thoughts on that, you know, the border is now moving in a way with the Republican politicians send immigrants to Democrat run sanctuary cities and north. What are your thoughts on that this evolution of the border game?

peTer peTer

I mean, that is true. That’s the right word, the evolution of the border game is, you know, before they would, they would use, you know, the border itself for publicity stunts, and now they’re trying to basically take the border and move it elsewhere and get publicity for it. And so you have a Florida governor shipping migrants from Texas, from the Texas-Mexico border, to Martha’s Vineyard in in Massachusetts. So this does indeed take it to a whole new level, the border game is no longer at the border, essentially, right? The idea here is okay, you take and try to embarrass and shine a spotlight on Democrats who basically are for sanctuary cities and so on, and and get political mileage. I think it’s rightly been reported as a political stunt. But what’s interesting is the plane to the base, it’s actually arguably gotten its value for someone like Disentis. What’s what’s interesting is it’s quite possible that various laws were broken. And and Florida taxpayers footing the bill for the for the for the whole thing. So, but as we’ll see what happens, it’s still too early to tell. But you know, think they might backfire a bit, but he certainly got a lot of political mileage out of it.

Yeah. So so this evolution of the border game, from the first edition, not that not that your book is the lynchpin of the of the progress, but you started analyzing this escalation in 2000. We’re now 22 years later, in the third edition of your book, maybe there’ll be a fourth edition of the book, you know, in 10 years? And who knows, who knows, but let’s just say, you know, a magic wand appears, and you’re suddenly an adviser to the President of the United States. What would you recommend? Like how do you? What’s what’s the solution here? It’s getting out of control. What would be the sane political policy? What would be the policy that would would stop these games or make it more?

Yeah. I don’t have, you know you’re thinking of a magic wand? I don’t have a magic solution or magic bullet is a very complicated issue. And, and the first thing I would I would advise is de-border, the debate. I mean, basically, the borders really just a place a symptom of a much larger problem, you know, what’s going on Central America, restructuring of jobs and demand for low cost labor in the US demand for drugs in the US, shifting geographies of drug trafficking from South America to the US. So it’s really, you know, the borders just a entry point. But it’s, it’s not necessarily the source of the problem, or even the most appropriate target of a solution. So, you know, try as best you can to D border, the border debate, it should be about, you know, okay, what what is immigration, about human rights, humanitarianism? It’s also a labor market regulation issue. What’s the drug issue? Well, is it primarily law enforcement or military? Well, maybe we should recast as a, as primarily a public health issue. So the Attorney General, Surgeon General would be more in charge than attorney general or even real generals in Mexico case. So, you know, one would, and the other would just be, you know, take a deep breath. And so part of what the book tries to do is historicize, the escalatory dynamics, so people don’t think that what’s going on now is suddenly fundamentally new and unprecedented. I mean, this idea

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that we must regain control the border, the border is out of control, projects, this mythological impression. Nostalgia for a border that was once under control, you can’t regain control something that was never under control. So people need to sort of have a historical reality check to realize this borders, long been hyper porous. Its very founding was partly based on smuggling if you go back to the 19th entry, much of across the border after the war with Mexico was, in fact, smuggling of various sorts. And it’s not going to be solved, you know, over overnight. The other issue is many of the things that we, you know, associated with the border, don’t even actually even happen at the border. So for example, unauthorized migration, very few Americans realize that almost have been authorized migrant population in the US, didn’t even cross the border didn’t even come in through Mexico. There they are visa overstayers, for example. So if the issue is really unauthorized migration will then need to make it a much bigger discussion and debate than just just about the border. The other issue is just called nonsense on some of the language used to, you know, buy political opponents. I mean, you know, one of the favorite slogans for Republicans to sling at Democrats is called open borders, Democrats. And it’s idiotic, because Democrats and Republicans alike have for decades, been building up, you know, border enforcement measures, whether it’s doubling and tripling and quadrupling the size of the Border Patrol since the early 90s, to massively increasing border drug interdiction, and sending assistance and training to Mexico, for example. So it’s downright silly to say that before Trump, the border was wide open. And then since Trump left office, it’s now wide open again. But again, you know, that’s the sort of political logic of the of the border game is to is to project a kind of black and white image of you either, you know, total border security, or my opponents are open borders, people. So some historical, you know, learning, it’s easier said than done. Of course, sound bites don’t lend themselves to, you know, telling people, you know, take a deep breath. And it’s not, it’s not unprecedented crisis, it’s a serious problem and need serious attention. But it’s more of a, you know, manage the border, rather than solve the border, it’s not going to be resolved. overnight. I mean, the other really just heart wrenching issue that voters need to realize is, is just the high numbers of people arriving at the border today, claiming asylum, you know, to the refugee process.

And that was not true in the 1990s. Right. So this is a, this is a new problem, they’re actually trying to find the Border Patrol to turn themselves in and get a process through the asylum system. So that is, is something that needs to be fundamentally fixed. Because right now, it’s like, multiple years of waiting for your, for your, for your case, to be to be even looked at. So again, that’s not going to be solved overnight. It’s precisely because of this. I mean, Democrats are well aware of this. And so they, you know, there’s no simple soundbite to say what I just said. And so they’re hoping that voters will just care about other issues like inflation, and, you know, the economy and so on. And Republicans, even they’ve certainly know, it’s a complicated issue as well, but they’re going to ham-

JonaThan

mer as hard as they can that this is these are open borders, Democrats, when you vote for, for Democrats, you’re voting to keep the border open or open it more widely. So, you know, the last pages of the book, I mean, it’s not a prescriptive book. But in the last chapter of the book, towards the end of the concluding chapter, I sort of, you know, try to speculate on where this is all all heading. And the reality is, is pretty sobering. It’s not you know, I don’t see the all out full blown militarization, I think militarization of the border has certain building limitations, but it’s also not going to necessarily deescalate anytime soon, so it’s going to be sort of muddling through, in in, in the middle, you know, in the middle. And so I think the border game is is most likely to persist in some form or fashion. I mean, there’s certain things that, you know, whoever’s in office. Things Are, are taboo. So Democrats will not call any barrier construction a wall, because Trump is basically and his supporters that basically own that term. And so Republicans will call for a wall and if they’re in power, they will push For, for continuing building a wall. Democrats will call for more fences, more virtual walls using the latest technology and so on. But what’s interesting is the, you know, miles of wall built under Trump, it’s not like Democrats are tearing that stuff down, right? They’re just they’re building on it and making sure that to say that they’re against a wall, but they’re for border security.

Wow, wow. Well, I mean, this, this explanation is one refreshing because you don’t really hear this, that the complicated nature of it is pushed aside by the sound bites. And I’m so grateful that you’ve written this book, you first, you know, first coming out in 2000. But this third edition, brings clarity to a complicated issue that, as you just said, is certainly not going to be solved, simply anytime soon. But if we at least have the facts that you lay out in the book, we can at least move forward with eyes open rather than eyes closed. And so I really want to thank you again for for updating this new edition of board games and encourage our listeners to take a look at this book and learn some more about this complicated issue.

peTer JonaThan

Well, thank you. I hope I don’t have to do a fourth edition. But we’ll see. We’ll talk in 10 years or so.

Exactly, exactly. What was great talking with you, Peter. And again, congratulations on your new book. All right, many thanks. That was Peter Andreas, author of Border Games: The Politics of Policing the US Mexico Divide

Two QuesTions wiTh EMNILY MARKER

author of Black France, White Europe

The book makes two primary critical interventions, one in postwar international history and the other more properly in the history of modern France specifically. First, it reconsiders the ostensible world-historical opening of the postwar conjuncture. A robust literature on late colonialism and decolonization insists that national sovereignty was not the only viable route out of empire, and yet, we still do not have a clear sense of why alternative visions failed. Black France, White Europe shows that conflicting models of pluralism animating Franco-African and European integration projects are an essential piece of that enduring historical puzzle. Second, the book de-

book is the story of Amadou Booker Sadji, son of prominent Senegalese writer Abdoulaye Sadji. When the younger Sadji graduated from the recently desegregated Lycée Van Vollenhoven in Dakar in 1955, he intended to study German at a university in France. That same year, French, German, and other West European leaders committed themselves to a “European relaunch” after the French parliament voted against political and military European integration in 1954. Pro-Europe activist successfully pivoted to narrower forms of economic and technical cooperation, which led to the creation of the EEC and the Euratom in 1957. Excitement about the new European Communities stoked a surge in support for “Eurafrica” among colonial policymak-

centers the myth of a seemingly timeless, and distinctly French, tradition of colorblindness and secularism rooted in republican universalism. It does so by emphasizing the impact of young Africans’ activism and transnational processes of European integration on racial reconstruction in postwar France. Despite decades of research that has shown that republican ideology did not constrain discriminatory state practices and policies in any of the twentieth-century French republics, scholars return to this myth with ritualistic precision and continue to invest it with extraordinary explanatory power. Black France, White Europe charts a path out of that interpretative cul-desac.

2. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

One of the most poignant anecdotes from the

ers and educators in metropolitan France, but local officials in Dakar evidently deemed deepening West European integration irrelevant to the rising generation of francophone African elites like Sadji; they considered his ambition to study German in the metropole a foolish waste of time and pushed him into a different course of study at the Institut des Hautes Études in Dakar instead. But Sadji did not relent. The following year he secured a scholarship to study German at the University of Toulouse, but he was underprepared for intensive German-language study and quickly fell behind his French peers. He decided he would have to study German in Germany to catch up and was completely crestfallen when he learned that he could not use his scholarship to study abroad, even if his intended destination was France’s most important European partner.

“The book’s core arguments still speak directly to our current moment.”

1. How do you wish you could change the field?

Don’t forget. You can view our entire International studies subject catalog by scanning the QR code below with your smartphone camera or clicking on it.

SCAN ME

THE EXCERPT

Introduction

A Great Power Peace?

Many people view the Cold War as a natural political outcome. Conflict, they believe, was inevitable because the Soviets were so committed to their Communist ideology that any sort of accommodation between the superpowers was simply impossible. “I know of no leader of the Soviet Union since the revolution, and including the present leadership,” President Ronald Reagan proclaimed at his first press conference in January 1981, “that has not more than once repeated in the various Communist congresses they hold their determination that their goal must be the promotion of world revolution and a one-world Socialist or Communist state, whichever word you want to use.” And because the “only morality they recognize is what will further their cause,” Reagan declared, the Soviets, in effect, “reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat, in order to attain that.”1

Others also see the Cold War as natural because of the anarchic structure of the international system, which they believe forces states to engage in intense security competition with one another. John Mearsheimer, one of the most prominent realist scholars in the field of international relations, maintains that cooperation between great powers “is sometimes difficult to achieve and always difficult to sustain.” “Ultimately,” he writes, “great powers live in a fundamentally competitive world where they view each other as real, or at least potential, enemies, and they therefore look to gain power at each other’s expense.”2

These sorts of views are common among those who study the rise and decline of US-Soviet détente in the 1970s. Regardless of whether the superpowers could have reached a compromise in Europe during that period, Jonathan Haslam maintains: “The tensions arising from ideological rivalry in the Third World would have continued to poison relations, above all, with the United States. . . . The revolutionary inheritance from Lenin was not so lightly cast aside despite [the] Comintern’s abolition.” “However reactionary in preferences,” he believes, “Soviet leaders were driven by the nature of the system to

pursue the expansion of the revolution.” “Moscow,” Haslam concludes, “had no intention of ending the Cold War through compromise.”3 “The primary responsibility for the decline of détente,” John Lewis Gaddis agrees, “must rest with the Soviet Union.” Whereas Washington was interested in developing a more cooperative relationship with Moscow, “The Russians now believed it necessary to sustain [Marxist] governments, whatever the effect on the Soviet economy, on relations with the West, or on Moscow’s overall reputation in world affairs.” As a result, “[General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Leonid] Brezhnev and his associates . . . could not bring themselves to refrain from exploiting opportunities as they arose.”4 “Until [Mikhail] Gorbachev,” Ambassador Jack Matlock claims, “we had a leadership that lied and cheated and they were almost impossible to deal with. . . . They simply weren’t willing to negotiate.”5

Likewise, many writers maintain that the Soviets were bent on shifting the Cold War balance of power in their favor during this period. “The 1970s,” Stephen Sestanovich writes, “amounted to the realization of all major Soviet military and diplomatic desiderata.” 6 But according to Eugene Rostow, by 1978 it was “obvious and beyond dispute” that Moscow was “engaged in a policy of imperial expansion all over the world, despite the supposedly benign influence of SALT I [Strategic Arms Limitation Talks] and its various commitments of cooperation to President [Richard] Nixon in the name of détente.”7

To the USSR leaders, Adam Ulam wrote in 1976, détente did not imply that Moscow “would refrain from extending its influence wherever it was safe and profitable for it to do so.” “It is probably genuinely incomprehensible to Brezhnev and his colleagues,” he argued, “that anyone can seriously believe that in 1976, détente places them under the same obligations it did in 1972.”8 The “conciliatory policies” that the Americans pursued, Richard Pipes writes, “were accompanied by a relentless military buildup and foreign intervention that culminated in the invasion of Afghan istan.”9

Scholars make similarly unflattering claims about Soviet policy in the Middle East. Many analysts maintain that Moscow was determined to prevent a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict—and even to destroy the state of Israel—for both ideological and power political reasons. It was arguably the Soviet Union’s “most important consideration,” Alvin Rubinstein wrote in 1977, “to keep Egypt from negotiating a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict lest this eliminate from the Middle East the festering problem that helped the Soviet Union intrude itself into the politics of the region.”10 The Kremlin, one historian argues, “aimed to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist.” The Soviet goal, he writes, was to bring about “the destruction of the state of Israel in the 1970s or 1980s and with it the expulsion of almost two million Jews from the region.”11

But was the Cold War—and tension between the superpowers in the Middle East—really as natural as these analyses claim? Even at a basic conceptual level, one has to wonder whether this sort of conflict was inevitable.

After all, both the United States and the Soviet Union had a strong interest in reaching an accommodation to avoid getting drawn into dangerous situations where their core political interests were not at stake, but which could nevertheless lead to a war between them. As even Kenneth Waltz—who tends to be skeptical about the ability of states to cooperate under international anarchy— once claimed, great powers have a substantial interest in maintaining the stability of the system as a whole. “Great power,” he writes, “gives its possessors a big stake in their system and the ability to act for its sake. For them management becomes both worthwhile and possible.” Waltz noted that both superpowers had a major incentive to manage “areas whose instability may lead to their involvement and, through involvement, to war.”12 And by the 1970s, the Americans and Soviets had demonstrated their ability to work together in this fashion on some key issues.13

Did it really make sense, then, for the two sides to risk a major war, whether for ideological reasons or for the sake of unilateral— and essentially marginal—advantages? Would it not have made more sense for the two great powers to lower their sights somewhat and try to work with each other on a more businesslike basis, as classical realpolitik thinkers such as George Kennan would suggest, with the aim of reaching mutually acceptable agreements that took into account one another’s fundamental political interests?14 Particularly in situations where they shared similar objectives, did they not have a major incentive to cooperate?

My main aim in this book is to understand that basic issue—to get, in other words, at the whole question of how much this sort of thinking counts for in international politics—by closely examining the diplomacy of the Arab-Israeli dispute during the 1967–79 period. How much weight, in practice, did these sorts of considerations carry in shaping US and Soviet policies in the period that followed the June 1967 Middle East war?

When I began doing research for this book years ago, my starting assumption was that great powers should be expected to pursue policies that protect their core political interests. I imagined, in other words, that the United States and the Soviet Union would want to avoid situations that could lead to war—indeed, to a general war that might conceivably escalate to the nuclear level—and, in turn, that they had a common interest in cooperating to bring peace to the Middle East, a region that they both viewed as potentially explosive. In addition, I expected that the superpowers would want to work together because they, and especially the United States, had other key interests that were linked to an Arab-Israeli agreement, such as energy security, relations with important allies, and the long-term safety of Israel.15

Key US policy statements from this period embraced that basic philosophy. The Nixon administration’s “State of the World” reports are a good case in point. “Any nation today,” the 1970 report stated, “must define its interests with special concern for the interests of others. If some nations define their security in a manner that means insecurity for other nations, then peace is

threatened and the security of all is diminished.” With that in mind, the Americans claimed to be prepared to put ideology to the side so that “a structure of peace” could be created, one built on “a realistic accommodation of conflicting interests.”16 The Nixon administration, in other words, would not make “the internal order of the USSR . . . an object of [its] policy,” but would instead relate to Moscow on the basis of “its international behavior.” And whereas adversaries had traditionally “demonstrated a compulsion to seek every gain, however marginal, at the expense of their competitors,” the Americans now claimed to believe that it was “folly for the great nuclear powers to conduct their policies in this manner. For if they succeed, it can only result in confrontation and potential catastrophe.”17 Thus, “To the degree the USSR exercises its influence in the interest of restraint, the USSR and the U.S. could act on parallel courses.”18

Likewise, the Nixon administration declared that it was interested in cooperating with Moscow in the Middle East. The superpowers, it claimed, had an obvious interest in not being dragged into a war in the region. With that in mind, when it came to the Arab-Israeli dispute: “Each nation concerned must be prepared to subordinate its special interests to the interest of peace.”19 “Any effort by any major power to secure a dominant position,” the Americans declared in 1971, “could exacerbate local disputes, affect Europe’s security, and increase the danger to world peace. We seek no such position.” The great powers, then, had to “be free to pursue [their] own legitimate interests, but within the limits imposed by respect for the legitimate interests of others and the sovereignty of the nations of the area.”20 Thus, the administration stated that it was ready “to work with the Soviet Union for peace and to work alongside the Soviet Union in cooperation with nations in the area in the pursuit of peace.”21 The Americans claimed that “a lasting settlement cannot be achieved unless the Soviet Union sees it to be in its interest.” “To subordinate our own hopes for global peace and a more stable relationship with the Soviet Union to the local animosities of the Middle East” was deemed “intolerable.”22 It certainly seemed like Washington was interested in cooperation.

But that is not what happened. In the end, the superpowers could not join efforts to get a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement. Instead, the Middle East ultimately proved to be a key contributing factor to the failure of the United States and the Soviet Union to work out a stable détente relationship. That they were unable to cooperate is surprising, given the incentives that existed for them to do so, and raises an obvious question: How is that outcome to be understood?

In the simplest terms, that puzzle is this book’s focus. By using the Middle East as a kind of window, my goal is to comprehend why Washington and Moscow ultimately could not reach a fundamental accommodation during this period of the Cold War. I want to understand why the superpowers were unable to cooperate for Arab-Israeli peace, which might have served as the touchstone of a genuine US-Soviet détente.

To solve this puzzle, I had to answer two questions. First, I wanted to see whether US and Soviet decision makers did, in fact, consider a comprehensive Arab-Israeli agreement a desirable outcome, one that they believed would safeguard their most impor tant political interests. And second, if they did, I wanted to find out why they failed to achieve that objective—to understand, in other words, what other factors came into play to prevent that shared interest in Middle East peace from resulting in a stable settlement.

The only way to answer those questions was through a close study of the relevant historical evidence which, in this case, is both massive and revealing. For example, much of the literature about this issue emphasizes the role that domestic politics, and in par tic u lar the “Israel lobby,” plays in shaping US policy toward the Arab-Israeli dispute.23 But many analysts take it for granted that evidence about domestic politics will simply not appear in the official record. US policymakers, Fredrik Logevall writes, “are loath to actually admit, especially on the printed page, that they can be influenced by personal or partisan political interest in their foreign policymaking. They wish at all cost to hide their ‘selfish drives’ in the historical record.”24 “Certain types of theories,” Elizabeth Saunders agrees, “may be difficult to test because the evidence required is not often found in textual or other records. Domestic political explanations, for example, are notoriously difficult to trace because politicians do not like to admit, even in private, that such calculations enter into national security decisions.”25

But it turns out that when one examines the documentary record, discussions of domestic political considerations are common. The real problem, in fact, is not a paucity of evidence but an overabundance of it. The body of evidence from this period is so enormous that one can make a persuasive argument supporting whatever interpretation happens to comport with one’s predispositions. It would, for example, be quite easy to argue that US policy was more or less determined by domestic political considerations without misrepresenting a single document. Indeed, one could convincingly make that sort of claim because US leaders were pulled in multiple directions throughout this period, such that they expressed different views at different times and with different people.

What that means is that the evidence must be weighed with some care, not only to lay out the history accurately, but also to be able to reach fundamental conclusions about the overall thrust of US and Soviet policy. This makes for a somewhat messy story, but it is still possible to come up with some important answers to the questions that motivate this study. And in my view, there are some real problems with how the existing literature has dealt with this set of issues.

As detailed in the chapters that follow, it turns out that officials on both the US and Soviet sides did at various times think seriously about the strategic advantages of cooperating to try to bring peace to the Middle East. That sort of approach— a policy based on the kind of philosophy promoted

by individuals such as Kennan—was an impor tant aspect of the story, and one that earlier writers have failed to appreciate fully. One repeatedly finds evidence of decision makers on both sides reasoning in those terms as they tried to wrestle with this problem. But even though that sort of thinking played a role, it obviously was not enough to determine basic outcomes. The question, of course, is why?

Contrary to standard accounts, Soviet policy was fundamentally not the problem. I argue that by the middle of 1971 the USSR leadership was interested in a comprehensive Arab-Israeli agreement and wanted to cooperate with the United States to achieve that objective. Moscow’s vision of what a settlement should look like, moreover, was in line with the basic American concept. The Soviets, therefore, increasingly took pains to distance themselves from the Arabs with the aim of reaching a common position with the United States. One of the main reasons why the Soviets wanted to work with the Americans was to help develop a better overall relationship with Washington. Particularly after the October 1973 Middle East war, a real opportunity existed for the United States to work with the Soviet Union to get a fundamental Arab-Israeli agreement.

Nor do explanations having to do with US domestic politics and the Israel lobby provide a fully satisfying answer. To be sure, those sorts of factors were constantly on the minds of US officials and, at certain times, had a substantial impact on policy. One repeatedly sees evidence that they constrained decision makers as they tried to come up with solutions.

But in the final analysis, the domestic factor was not decisive. Although it was certainly a significant variable and, as such, merits careful attention in any fair analysis, the domestic political constraint was not insuperable, and US leaders had a number of opportunities during this period to try to overcome it—in fact, they strongly considered making a major political effort to do so on several occasions. The evidence suggests that if the problem was handled the right way—that is, if US officials employed effective tactics and timed their initiatives appropriately—there was a good chance that such a campaign might have succeeded. If certain key events in the story had gone somewhat differently, it seems likely that that is what would have happened.

The real issue, then, had to do with basic strategic calculations on the US side. It turns out that US decision makers—although they were tempted at points to respond favorably to Moscow’s proposals—were not interested in working with the Soviets, and instead sought to expel them from the Middle East, with the aim of making unilateral Cold War gains at their expense. Especially after the October 1973 war, Washington’s basic objective was not to work with the Soviets for a settlement but to undermine the USSR’s position in the region. Fundamentally, a Cold War mentality of reaching for unilateral advantage prevailed over a philosophy that called for the superpowers, in the interest of having more businesslike relations and respecting one another’s core political concerns, to put ideology to the side and work together in areas

The following is a transcript of an episode of 1869, the Cornell University Press podcast. It has been transcribed using AI software. Any typos, errors, or inconsistencies may be the result of the transcription or the natural pattern of the human voice and speech. If you wish to listen to the origial, search 1869 podcast through whicever podcast service you prefer.

Welcome to this special ISA 2022 edition of 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I’m Jonathan Hall. This episode we celebrate our renowned and pathbreaking series, Cornell Studies in Political Economy, which after nearly four decades will be coming to a close upon the publication of the forthcoming book, Mediterranean Capitalism Revisited edited by Luigi Burroni, Emmanuele Pavoni, and Marino Regini. Our guests today are the instrumental players behind the series, series editor Peter Katzenstein, and acquisitions editor Roger Haydon. Professor Peter Katzenstein is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jrl Professor of International Studies at Cornell University. His research and teaching lie at the intersection of the fields of international relations and comparative politics. Katzenstein’s work addresses issues of political economy and security and culture and world politics. His current research interests focus on power, the politics of regions and civilizations, America’s role in the world and German politics. Roger Haydon recently retired as executive editor of Cornell University Press, where he sponsored books in comparative politics, international relations, Asian and Slavic studies, security affairs, political economy, and humanitarian and human rights studies. He always looked for the unconventional and the unexpected, and sought out authors who were consumed by new ways of thinking. In this episode, Peter and Roger give us the behind the scenes history of the Cornell Studies and Political Economy series, their insights into how scholarship in the field has evolved, and their seasoned advice for emerging scholars today.

How did it all start? It started with Walter Lippincott, becoming the director of the press, the press had been a pretty sleepy outfit, I had no contact with it. But I knew that it was important for Cornell faculty, mostly in the humanities...not so much in the social sciences. Walter came, I don’t know from where - full of beans, young, energetic and said, in order to wake up the press, we will do here what I’ve done at that other press, which is have a certain number of books published in different series, and what you’d like to do this, and I was, in year seven, I came in 1973. And I said, sure. And reflecting on why he asked me it was, I become full professor that year, which was young. I become editor of IO, at the same year, and therefore I will be on top of the field of manuscripts. And that was very smart, because one of the earliest volumes was in fact, the regime’s volume, there was a second volume out, which became I think, the all time winner, I mean, in terms of sales. So it was a textbook for 20 years, right? So Walter, Walter, calculated smartly. And, and I was hungry. I mean, that was really how it started. I don’t know why you picked me. The third reason is probably political economy as a field, what was in a

JonaThan

peTer

roger

takeoff stage. That’s really something which happened from the early mid 70s on and a lot, there was a lot of interest in political economics, which had basically not existed. I mean, Hirshman, who were two or three people did political economy. But it was really rediscovered as a subject in the mid 1970s. I was part of that generation. So there was a reason why he said, this would be a good thing to do. Right. So Walter always had impeccable taste, I think, you know choosing me was a sign of impeccable taste. But he had a very good nose, very good nose as a publisher, right. And he was very practical. He said, Well, who would be on top of the field? Well, the guy who was the editor of the journal, the leading journal for this stuff. So. So that’s how it all started? Why did I want to do it? So in Germany, when you’re an assistant professor, your job is for the next five to seven years, to review all the books of your elders, and to be incredibly critical. This is counterintuitive, because you still need to get tenure. But that’s how it is. You’re supposed to be a Young Turk, who tears down the work of others, then you win, become a full professor. You hand that over to the next generation, they tear you down - I wrote one book review in the late 70s. Actually, two. One was a review essay and I said, that’s something I can live with. But the book review I hate it. I hate the process of writing it and I hated it and was the only one which I wrote I think you know Because I said, why spend your time tearing things down? When, at the, at the back end, when at the front end, you could make it better. And so Walter’s invitation to become an editor is satisfied that need. Okay. So okay, here I can work with books and make them better. That seemed to me a more, yeah, a more palatable way of improving scholarship. So I think that is how it started. But that had nothing to do with Roger.

No for me, let me jump in for a little bit, okay. For me, I had moved to Ithaca in 1978, and spent a couple of years with short term contract writing jobs and freelance editing jobs of various kinds. Peter in, I think, in 1979, had done a monograph on Switzerland, which was to be published in the Western Societies Papers, which was, it was actually a fairly substantial piece of work. And he wanted an editor to work through it before it saw the light of day. And I got that job and worked through it and found out lots of things about Switzerland I’d never known before, from a very low baseline, I should add mistakes. Well, there were a few of those, but it was the Swiss stuff that I was interested in. And I’ve since learned more because my sister is married to a Swiss national and lives near Fribourg. So I worked through that. And then I went back to writing scripts for Teach Yourself Better English books for the education department for a while. And then in 1980, Peter brought the journal, it was Bob Kohane, who was editing it previously. Right? Right, he brought he brought it to Cornell and needed a managing editor. And despite the fact that he’d already seen my dubious talents down on paper, decided to hire me as the managing editor for the journal. And I did that for five years. And during that time, I continued I could I did some freelance work for the press did more and more of it as the years went by. And then in 85, with one year’s

notice, Peter decided to hand on the journal to to Steve Krasner. And Stanford’s a very nice place. But editing, as you may have noticed, doesn’t pay particularly well. And we were already Margaret and I were already pretty much committed to living in Ithaca. So I applied for a job as a manuscript editor at the press. And you could see the twinkle in Walter’s eye, because he thought, I here I have Katzenstein as the editor of the journal, and a rising star, a well known scholar already, and if I can take him, and then I can also offer the preview, the former managing editor of I O, as the person who will handle the manuscript through the press, I have a better package to sell as far as potential authors are concerned. So much to the dismay of the managing editor at the time, a marvelous woman named Marilyn Sayle, who didn’t think very much of the quality of journal editing. He, I think, forced her to hire me as a as a manuscript editor. And I started to work not only on political economy manuscripts, but also on whatever else needed to be prepared for the typesetter. This was a time where manuscript evidence has actually edited manuscripts, which was a long time ago. And then, pretty soon after I had joined the press, which would have been in late 1985. Walter applied for and got the directorship of Princeton University Press, but he was going to stay at Cornell for I can’t remember maybe three months, maybe more than that. And he decided at that point that he would stand back from the acquisitions part of his job, in part because Cornell and Princeton were competing over a couple of manuscripts at that time. And I was asked to take over the acquisitions part of the political economy series, at a time when there were actually two competitive works in play between Cornell and other presses. One was Jeanne Laux and Maureen Molot’s book about the political economy of contemporary Canada, which was actually we were up against a Canadian and publisher, I can’t remember which one it was. But Toronto, it was University of Toronto press. Okay. But I do remember that the Jeanne, later on showed me the comments that she’d received from the academic editor at the University of Toronto press, which stopped in mid sentence, which was the point at which he had heard that, that they had decided to sign with Cornell. And the other was Dick Samuels. Dick Samuels was at MIT, he’d already published one book on on contemporary Japan with Princeton. And the second book was called The Business of the Japanese State. It’s a really attractive project. And I asked him what he wanted. And he told me, and I said, Yes. And I managed to get him to sign the contract with the press. It’s the beginning of a long and very satisfying relationship that involved altogether five, or maybe six books over a period of 30 years. So there I was the first two books that I approached as an acquisitions editor, success on both of them both in in live competition, so I thought, this is dead easy. Walk up, why is there so much fuss about this job, piece of cake. And I soon find out found out why there was so much fuss about this stuff. I mean, it wasn’t exactly confectionery. But it was a good beginning. And it was good enough that as the press restaffed, with, with water having departed and other people taking over the various series that he’d started, I continue to work with Peter as acquisitions editor on just on the polit-

ical economy series for about five years. And then I left the manuscript editing part behind and became a full-time acquisitions editor.

It’s interesting, there’s a backstory, which I didn’t know about the inside of the press. Here’s the inside story, which big story which Roger doesn’t know. Cornell had, at the time in which I was looking for an associate editor for I O. had just gone through modern human resource management revolution, which meant hiring union busting officials out of Detroit, they had made, you know, a bankrupt industry lean and mean, and canals. That’s what we want. They couldn’t really do this with existing contracts, but they sure could do it with new hires. Okay. And Roger, I couldn’t get Roger on board. I said, No, he’s going to come with a decent package. And that was an enormous amount of fighting. And it delayed the appointment for about half a year. But no, I’m a persistent dog. And I had the team behind me if I wanted to, but I didn’t use it. Right. So eventually, that package came together. And then Roger, no, of course, there was a competitive editing, I interview two other people, no, but the work you’ve done on the series manuscript convinced me that is a really good editor. Plus, he’s fun. Plus, he knows it’s well organized. If you have an associate editor who’s incompetent as an editor, you did. Okay. And so this was an enormously important appointment for me, I spent a lot of time making it work. And then I had clear sailing. I mean, Roger, just think about the annual report. This is a pain in the back. And Roger did all of it, you know, and all the careful editing other manuscripts. And of course, he built up a reputation. I mean, that time we got what, 150 manuscripts or 200- 250 a year. You know, he built up a reputation right there with about 500 authors by the time he stepped into the Cornell University Press job. And it was clear to me that, you know, that needed a little massaging. So I told Roger, you should leave early in 1985, so that you’re not unemployed again, right? I mean, he wasn’t a very marginal position when he came in the late 70s. It was very difficult. So that’s interesting. Yeah.

Well, thank you, thank you for the effort. I didn’t know

It was pure self interest. It was pure self interest, but it was the enlarged self. Right. I knew that my interest in your interest in this were really parallel and had to work while they were thereafter because you clearly invested so much time and effort that I would have really had to do badly in order to lose the job.

That’s fascinating history. Thank you for sharing that and time in history is what you’re mentioning with the series 148 books published 131 Different authors and editors 25 Plus Awards, the amount sold 373,000 books. How did you see the trajectory of the series go? I mean, how did the, how did the field change from the 80s? To the present?

How did the series change? Well one way is it moved like the scholarship,

roger peTer

from Europe to Asia. We became a preeminent publisher of Japanese political economy as Japan was supposed to own the world, they would hire some American soldiers, but basically the software and the soft power all in Tokyo. That was sort of the image of the 1980s until the mid late 1990s. And then it branched out from there to other parts of Asia. And then of course, in the last 10-15 years. China, right. So there was in terms of a way from a Eurocentric worldview, to more of an Asian one, but we did not, I mean, Roger was very, very clear said there are certain kinds of reasons we will not do Latin America, for example, he says, that’s really much better done by Pittsburgh, you know, and Africa. So we were concentrating our regional focus. And the other one was analytical, you know, this started off as a new field, which I would call broadly institutional state became a big issue and how to theorize the state, state and economy, you know, institutions to argument or Marxist argument, right. That was the first 20-25 years. Then came rational choice and rationalism. And I got off the train and I was much more interested in economics, sociology. So the things which we tended to favor in the last 20 years were more sociological in their orientation. Those were the two broad themes, basically, Roger, you think that’s right?

Yeah, I think that’s right. Of course, for every exclusion. There are exceptions. And so for Latin America, we did Kat Sikkink’s, first book, for example. And on Africa that we didn’t do very much within the series, we did do Mort Jerven’s book Poor Numbers, which did very well and quite influential, and also got him on on a do not talk to lists for various various African bigwigs and people at the United Nations as well for a while. But, yeah, that sounds right, we probably did a little bit less on Europe. As the years went by, and the China stuff, at least at the beginning of the 2000s, we tended to leave alone, in part because there was this enormous rush of academic publishers trying to find stuff to publish about China. And so Routledge and Cambridge and two or three other presses had had books specifically devoted to China and Chinese politics. And it seems seem not a great idea to be focusing one’s attention very strongly on China at a time when there was over publishing of that particular country, however important that country might be. We did start to do more work on China over the last decade, decade plus in particular Yuen Yuen Ang’s book, which is a tremendous piece of work and was very successful. But But that I think, is something that actually that you brought in Peter, right, that you have the first contact with us.

Yeah, I mean, I think the first principle is the book had to be really good. Yeah, but it really fit or not was, was not so important. So we would publish outside of these mega trends, right. And I think the astonishing number of awards is a reflection of that overarching attitude, and Rodan I never disagreed on what’s a good book? I mean, that’s really astonishing. Over 35 to 40 years, you’d expect you know, there will be no one or two memorable fights. We never fought. Our intellectual tastes were very much aligned. Right?

Yeah. I don’t remember any big fights. I was less keen on edited volumes. There was did a few too many of those, but, but they were ways of planting flags in new areas, both geographical and thematic. But yeah, it sounds banal, but my job always to find the best books that I could and then make them better. And that’s something I think we agreed about even though I didn’t know anything about politics. I had no sort of academic background in the discipline at all. Five years that I oh really did provide me with something of an education as far as that’s concerned.

The issue of edited volumes as into This thing this really did become I mean, Roger and I think other presses to sit there too many of them. And as we work with a junior cohort in the 1980s, these people became senior. When you become senior, you don’t write your own books and you know, you tend to enforce. So they would come back with edit the volumes. And we would gently say, well, not now. Okay, try somebody else. And that became often actually the true for the trade presses like Routledge. And Rena. So and that explains, in part, I think, well, the total number of volumes in the last 10 years published under the imprint of the series, declined somewhat. We were we went for things which were harder to find really outstanding books. And Yuen Yuen Ang’s book on China is a field defining book. It’s it’s a dissertation. But it’s cited every place. She’s winning prizes, every place. Her follow on work is superb. It became clear defining it was probably the most successful book we’ve done in the last 10 years, you know, so?

Yeah, yeah, that’s that sounds right.

With decades of wisdom that you have, with the series and the your work together, do you have any advice for emerging scholars?

Well, I do actually, and I won’t hold back. I gave a big fancy lecture last year. And the thing, and it was the lecture was followed by a give and take, because my very good friend and the best man at my wedding, David Laitin got the same price the following year. So they bunch them together. And then we had a back and forth. And so there was the last question posed by the by the host of the skitter Foundation? And I said, Yes, I do. Because I’ve observed that young authors in the last 1015 years I interesting drawn to the craft model of scholarship, they collaborate with large numbers of authors 3456, not not just one. Everybody specializes on something, data analysis, you know, qualitative research, the programming, you know, the typesetting, whatever, right. And thereby they crank out six to 12 articles a year. It shifts the it shifts how you spend your time, and thereby the requirements for getting tenure have shifted towards publishing more. Now, has this person been productive? has only written two articles last year, that’s not productive. Right? Nevermind, maybe there were two single-authored articles - it takes a year to write a good single authored article and get it published at least a year.

roger

It’s an enormous amount of work, getting through these elite journals, right. But what it avoids this mass production system is fear. Everybody specializes in something small, and they are no longer afraid. And I don’t think you produce good scholarship without being afraid that you feel like the whole damn thing could collapse on you. And I still live with it fear whenever I do a book, I’m right in the middle of it right now, is this going to work? I have no clue. And if you don’t have that, I don’t think you will really be creative. So you become an industrious tailor, there was a wonderful title of a book, Professor Russet: Industrial Tailor to a Naked Emperor. Here, the emperor is not naked, but he’s not well dressed. But industriousness does not go for me with scholarship, a certain amount for this, you know, and there’s a certain amount of blogging now and public discourse which used to exist. But if the core of your scholarship is not driven by saying, the idea which I have might not pan out, you’re missing, you’re missing an incredibly important aspect of generating knowledge. In the natural sciences, they are driven by that fear. It’s very expensive to create the experiments, and they really don’t know whether it’s going to work to talk to physicists or biologists. They’re full of that existential fear here and the social science becomes more like this humanities, you know, I can spin the story, and I get a publication out and the fear recedes. And I think that’s a loss. And, of course, they don’t want to write books. They don’t want to read books, and they want to write books. Writing a book is a very brilliant to Nicodemus, it takes too much time. That’s it, yeah. takes five to 10 years. You know, therefore, you write two or three at the same time, every four or five years, maybe you succeed and something comes up. That’s no longer how they read, write and research. It’s not the time perspective they have. So I think this scholarship, you know, I think books will eventually be left for dinosaurs to feed on. So I see in the social sciences, and economics now you, you co published three papers with your dissertation supervisor, and you get a PhD. Whenever you have to publish a single article by themselves, they never know what it’s like to be afraid. And that’s, that’s a model in political science touring now, not the only model, but it is ongoing. And that worries me a great deal about for the next generation that they’re missing something essential. By having an incentive matrix, which they cannot resist, I totally feel for them, which is misaligned with what scholarship ought to be in part about not wholly but in part. Anyway, that reaction, which I gave, I got probably 30 responses by email. I didn’t understand your lecture whatever, the lecture was unimportant. There was really as Wow, that talked to me. These were all older, older authors, all people above 50. So I don’t think it’s just my reaction.

Nice. Yeah. What he said. That, that sounds right. It’s certainly true that political science, I think has, has looked on economics ever more fully as a model to be followed over the last 30 years or so. And, and given the success of economics in studying subject matter, that seems to me to be undesirable in itself, even though they do come up with some very nice theories and some very attractive methods. There’s that same existential

fear, of course, for acquisitions as with the added free songs that that acquisitions editors actually don’t have tenure. And so the the testing out is not a matter of a large number of people collaborating rather, it’s one person who has sponsored this or that book, and look, here are the sales numbers, and what are we going to do about this. So although they are very different kinds of fears, they do articulate together in a fairly, fairly obvious way. And I was always very fortunate to that. That with Peter, and also with a couple of other series episodes with David Laitin, on the Wilder House series with Bob Art, and Bob Jervis, on the security affairs series, and much more recently, with Eric Helleiner and Jon Kirschner on the money series, I worked with individuals whose tastes I trusted. They knew what they were doing, even if I didn’t know what they were doing. And if they told me that a particular work was really top right, then I would do whatever I could in order to get the damn thing published. Usually, with success, there’ll be one or two failures, but I don’t think there were many as far as the political economy series was concerned. I mean, with regard to actually getting the thing into production and getting an actual book out of it. I’m, I’m glad I’m retired, because I do very much recognize the pattern that Peter’s describing, as far as, as far as more recent scholarship is concerned, in in quite a few different areas. And, and I suspect that that being an acquisitions editor really is no fun. It’s certainly not as much fun as I had when I was first starting out. Of course, that may just be sort of Golden Age nostalgia. But nevertheless, it’s um, it’s a new sociology as far as academic production is concerned, and one that I don’t find particularly attractive.

Although, and on the theme of fun, I mean, I think, you know, academia is a is a professional, where you can have fun. And Roger and I had fun. And that’s why it lasted so long. And, you know, this this little, which, you know, administration drives me crazy. I can’t do I mean, I’m a reasonable administrator, but it’s not something I like to do. Right. This was fun. Playing with ideas, how could they be better, you know, and I didn’t have to worry about the bottom line. That was Rogers problem, you know, so. So I enjoyed this. Totally. I enjoyed working with Roger getting to know him. We had fun. It was a wonderful experience. really enriching. Thank you, Roger.

It was for me as well. And I’m, I’m always grateful that you put up with me for so long, but thank you for that.

JonaThan

peTer roger peTer

Thank you both for sharing your time, your stories, the history behind the series, your experiences, and also the insights and wisdom that you can share to future scholars. So I want to congratulate both of you on a very successful series, the Cornell Studies and Political Economy. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Jonathan.

roger

JonaThan

Appreciate the invitation and thanks for hosting this.

That was Peter Katzenstein, Cornell professor and series editor of Cornell Studies in Political Economy, and Roger Haydon, former executive editor of Cornell University Press, and acquisitions editor for the series.

THE EXCERPT

INTRODUCTION

A reporter once asked me something that has stuck with me: “If the international community can’t make states abide by their human rights obligations, what’s the point of invoking them?” It’s a good question. Both common sense and the academic literature tell us that international human rights pressure is much too weak a stick to compel states to change behav ior they’re invested in. So why bother with, for example, the performative demand that a state whose military is actively committing genocide do more to protect the rights of its marginalized minorities?

There are two answers I give to this question, which is often voiced—in far more indignant tones—by my students as well. The first is a moral argument: even if it accomplishes nothing, it’s impor tant to identify and protest violations of human rights. But the second is: “shit’s complicated.” This is not a fatalistic shrug; it’s a position statement about the complexity of the international system and the central role that unintended consequences and unexpected audiences play in driving human rights outcomes.

This is a book about what human rights pressure does when it doesn’t “work.” It takes as its starting point the observation that many states facing the prospect of international censure choose a middle path between caving to human rights pressure or ignoring it. Because even if pressure doesn’t succeed in convincing violator states to remedy breaches of human rights, that doesn’t mean it has no effect on their behavior. Quite the contrary. Repressive states with absolutely no intention of complying with their human rights obligations often change course dramatically in response to international pressure. They create toothless commissions, permit

but then obstruct international observers’ visits, and pass showpiece legislation while simultaneously bolstering their repressive capacity.

An example: In early 2011, amidst the Arab Spring’s wave of prodemocracy uprisings, two hundred thousand Bahrainis—approximately 40  percent of the country’s citizens at the time—poured into the streets to protest their government. The response was ugly. Military and civilian security forces used deadly force, arbitrary arrests, and torture in an attempt to suppress the protests. Unable to quell the uprising on its own, Bahrain’s government declared a state of emergency and requested backup from neighboring countries.

In the weeks that followed, the regime pursued a vicious campaign of retaliation against suspected dissidents. Hundreds of public and private sector employees were fired from their jobs, students lost their places at universities, and popu lar athletes were publicly shamed and suspended from the national teams for participation in peaceful protests.1 Medical professionals who treated wounded protesters were arrested; twenty were convicted of antigovernment activity and handed lengthy prison sentences.2

By June 2011, the crackdown had largely succeeded. Hundreds of people remained in incommunicado detention. Four people had died in custody, and many of those who had been released reported being tortured in an attempt to coerce confessions.3 These abuses further enraged a domestic public that was already mobilized to demand political change. Bahrain faced growing criticism from international human rights organizations and UN officials.4 Human Rights First warned that “the situation on the ground is still dire for those calling for democratic reforms,”5 while the International Crisis Group noted that “none of the worst excesses—the lengthy prison sentences for political offences, job dismissals based on participation in peaceful protests, mosque destruction—have been reversed.” 6

With its legitimacy in crisis both domestically and internationally, the regime ended the state of emergency, asked the foreign troops to go home, and announced the creation of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI). Made up of foreign legal experts, the BICI was mandated to “investigate and report on the events occurring in Bahrain in February/March 2011.”7 The commissioners were tasked with determining what, if any, human rights violations had occurred and with making recommendations for responding to them.

The format of the BICI was chosen with the resuscitation of Bahrain’s international reputation in mind. In the words of Bahrain’s foreign minister, “King Hamad wanted to clarify the facts about what happened through a mechanism that the international community would understand and accept.”8 And, indeed, international audiences initially responded with enthusiasm. The US State Department welcomed the BICI as a “significant and positive” step toward politi-

cal accommodation and reconciliation, and Human Rights Watch described the move as “promising.”9

The BICI’s report, issued in November 2011, ran nearly five hundred pages and described a culture of impunity as well as systematic violations of human rights by the Bahraini security sector and judiciary.10 The commissioners made twenty-six recommendations to promote accountability for, and nonrecurrence of, the violations. In response, Bahrain created a national commission to oversee implementation of these recommendations, as well as a “follow-up unit” in the Ministry of Justice.11 In March 2012, the national commission released its report, along with a press release stating that “unprecedented progress has been made in the implementation of the recommendations of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry.”12 The commission pointed to the recent establishment of a special investigations unit within the Public Prosecution Office and an ombudsman within the Ministry of the Interior as evidence of this “unprecedented progress.”13

But international observers found Bahrain’s implementation of the BICI’s recommendations disappointing. In a press release titled “Bahrain: Vital Reform Commitments Unmet,” Human Rights Watch criticized the national commission’s conclusions, saying that “serious concerns, like accountability for crimes such as torture and relief for people wrongly imprisoned, were not adequately addressed.” 14 Likewise, critics noted that the much-touted Detainees Rights Commission lacked institutional independence and that a number of its members were “from the same judicial and public prosecution office responsible for the sentencing of prisoners of conscience.” 15 Meanwhile, the regime took a number of well-documented steps to enhance its ability to repress, including passing harsher laws against dissent and protest.16

At the June 2012 United Nations Human Rights Council session in Geneva, twenty-eight countries joined to issue a declaration condemning ongoing human rights violations in Bahrain and calling on the government to implement the BICI’s recommendations.17 Although the United States (along with the United Kingdom) declined to support the initiative, in congressional testimony a month later, the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor described “continuing reprisals against Bahraini citizens who attempt to exercise their universal rights to free expression and assembly.” 18

What this brief example shows is that Bahrain engaged in significant activity responding to international pressure, without actually halting the repression international audiences were condemning. Bahrain’s lack of progress on its commitments was not indicative of capacity issues. Even as it insisted it was implementing the BICI’s recommendations, the government imprisoned opposition leaders and adopted legislation permitting the revocation of Bahraini citizenship from anyone convicted of terrorism (an offense defined to include “disrupting public order”

and “damaging national unity”).19 Over time, it walked back even the minimal progress it had made, including restoring the National Security Agency’s arrest powers, which had been revoked in line with the BICI’s recommendations in 2011.20

In the following chapters, I argue that states like Bahrain are gambling on doing just enough to escape punishment. I situate my argument within social science literature on human rights and compliance with international law and introduce the term “quasi-compliance” to describe behav ior that is clearly motivated by pressure to comply with a rule but is not undertaken with the intent of actually satisfying the rule’s requirements.21 This concept addresses what initially appears to be a puzzle—why do governments facing human rights pressure go to the trouble of creating institutions that obviously fail to satisfy international demands? I suggest that this behav ior is a product of the limitations on human rights enforcement in the international system and that repressive states deploy it strategically to preempt penalties for noncompliance.

I argue that these efforts often look deeply unconvincing because they don’t necessarily rely on persuading anyone of their sincerity. The strategy instead aims to exploit the uneven patterns of pressure and censure created by the profound structural limitations on human rights enforcement in the international system. The number of human rights crises ongoing at any given time far outstrips the international community’s available attention span and commitment to dealing with them. And in the absence of sustained political will or any hierarchical enforcement mechanism, a wide range of actors are potential veto points on decisions to censure human rights violators. Each represents an opportunity for a repressive state to protect itself from international action.

As a consequence, repressive states that fear that international pressure might escalate into enforcement action have clear incentives to mimic the outward forms of compliance, to a lesser or greater degree of plausibility depending on whom they hope to convince. And even if domestic political or resource constraints mean they can’t manage a response credible enough to persuade human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) or engaged foreign governments to dial back the pressure, there are still plenty of benefits to be gained by noncredible efforts. They may be enough to convince other members of the international community whose support would be needed to translate pressure into penalties for noncompliance.

In the case of Bahrain, domestic and international activists were quick to call out the cynicism of showcasing the BICI while continuing to violate human rights. “By establishing an independent commission of inquiry with the purported intention of noncompliance, the Government of Bahrain has strung along the international community while shielding itself from criticism,” wrote

the executive director of Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain.22 But the reaction elsewhere was quite di fferent. As Amnesty International colorfully put it: “British ministers have acted like overexcited cheerleaders for Bahrain’s woefully inadequate human rights reforms.”23

The BICI process, disappointing as it was, provided Bahrain and its allies with something to point to as evidence that the country was working on its human rights record and should not be censured. Indeed, the BICI’s report for years remained the focus of conversations about human rights in Bahrain, both at the domestic level and in international fora, where “international organizations and human rights NGOs also dealt with the BICI’s recommendations as an essential element of the standard according to which Bahrain’s human rights record and its efforts to institute political reforms were evaluated.”24

This example suggests that quasi-compliance can be a useful strategy in a repressive state’s arsenal for avoiding international enforcement of its human rights obligations. If nothing else, it can effectively delay international censure; a real benefit for a state that may simply need time to complete a crackdown.

The case of Bahrain also offers some insight into when we’re likely to see states do this. Bahrain could not outright ignore the international protests over its actions or bear the reputational costs of being designated a human rights abuser, but was at the same time unwilling to tolerate the threat to regime survival that ceasing repression of dissent could pose. This is a position in which many less power ful states, particularly those dependent on international aid, are likely to find themselves.

To flesh out the mechanisms that drive quasi-compliance and its impact, I focus on an area of human rights where international pressure is consistently strong, and where there are often very significant domestic political imperatives not to buckle to this pressure: accountability for mass atrocities. Decisions about what to do in the aftermath of atrocities are politically fraught and carry with them severe potential consequences ranging from the fall of a government to the outbreak of civil war. The issue area has a high likelihood of the sort of confrontations between domestic political imperatives and international pressure that would incentivize quasi-compliance for states that can’t afford to tell the international community to get lost.

One of the most striking changes wrought by the post– Cold War human rights project is that news of mass atrocities now quickly prompts demands for those responsible to be prosecuted and punished. These demands often originate with members of the victim community, but they are picked up by activists overseas, and by international civil society organ izations like Human Rights Watch, the International Center for Transitional Justice, and Amnesty International. Failures to provide accountability become the focus of statements by UN

officials, including special rapporteurs and the UN high commissioner for human rights, and of debates at the UN Human Rights Council. They also become sticking points in bilateral relationships, potentially leading to reductions in aid, trade, and military cooperation.

The range of possible responses to calls for accountability is broad. After mass atrocities, some states undertake massive programs of domestic prosecutions, convicting hundreds or even thousands of perpetrators. Others focus on a handful of leaders or target only low-level “trigger-pullers.” A number of postatrocity governments have chosen to outsource the pursuit of accountability to international courts, while others have opted to cooperate with the international community in the creation of hybrid tribunals. Some choose to create truth commissions operating alone or in tandem with prosecutions. Many choose denial, the suppression of evidence, and additional violence against victim communities to silence their demands for justice. But others do things that seem strikingly similar to Bahrain’s behav ior described above.

Consider an example from 2004, when international headlines blared that seventy thousand civilians had been killed in Darfur in a matter of months. Traumatized refugees fled across the border into Chad, following devastating violence unleashed against ethnic minorities by the Sudanese government and janjaweed militias. As the death toll mounted, the world began to wonder if it was watching “another Rwanda” unfold. In an impassioned New York Times oped, Samantha Power, who would later become Barack Obama’s ambassador to the United Nations, called on the international community not to allow another mass slaughter to go unchecked. An “emergency summit” of activists launched the Save Darfur Coalition in New York in July 2004, dedicating themselves to “mobiliz[ing] a massive response to the atrocities.”25

Activists and human rights advocates quickly called for the prosecution of those most responsible for international crimes. Writing in November of 2003, Amnesty International exhorted the Sudanese government to “hold the perpetrators of human rights abuses . . . accountable, by bringing them to justice in fair trials.”26 Six months later, in its first report on the crisis, Human Rights Watch also demanded that the Sudanese government “prosecute alleged perpetrators in accordance with international fair trial standards” and requested that the United Nations Security Council create “an impartial Commission of Experts” to investigate the crimes.27

Western governments soon echoed these calls. On July 22, 2004, the US House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution stating that the United States should “ensure the prompt prosecution and adjudication in a competent international court of justice or the United States–proposed Sudan Tribunal of individuals responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.”28

Three QuesTions wiTh SARAH

PARKINSON author of Beyond the Lines

1. What’s your favorite anecdote from your research for this book?

The research that I did for this book involved conversations with some of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met. People often shared stories that involved the most absurd, romantic, terrifying, joyous, and devastating moments in their lives. I value those moments of confidence and reflection for what they allowed me to share with and learn from people. The interlude that opens the book, with Munadileh the battlefield nurse, is a good example; the vignette in Chapter 3 where Abu Wissam and his family fled the 1982 invasion in his

the course of time. There are memoirs by some of the foreign providers who worked in the camps, and I’d love to see a more complete representation of local providers’ experiences as well.

cousin’s wedding car and wound up facing an Israeli tank in an orchard is another. It’s hard to say that there are “favorites” among them.

2. What do you wish you had known when you started writing your book, that you know now?

Since I’ve written the book, I’ve completed the training to be an emergency medical technician. People I interviewed for this project were part of the inspiration for this decision, as were experiences connected to the Syrian refugee crisis in Lebanon. I would love to go back and speak more deliberately to the care providers who worked in the various medical establishments to ask more about how they changed their practices and techniques over

3. How do you wish you could change your field of study?

People are complicated. They act against their interests. They believe seemingly ridiculous things. They take incomprehensible risks. Political science has frankly struggled as a field to capture that complexity while articulating clear, comprehensible, persuasive arguments.

“There is, quite simply, no armed conflict in the world that does not have a gender component.”

E.

The Prizes

OUR RECENT AWARD-WINNING BOOKS

International Political Economy Best Book Award

APSA Foreign Policy Section Best Book Award

Peter Katzenstein Book Prize

Giovanni Sartori Book Award

Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize

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