Gender Discrimination in Security Studies

 Yesterday, I participated in a roundtable on gender discrimination in security studies at the annual conference of the European Initiative on Security Studies [EISS].  EISS is a relatively new network of European security scholars.  This is, I believe, my third time attending, as I have been seeking to build connections between the CDSN and Europe.  It doesn't hurt, of course, that the EISS conferences have been in Paris, Berlin, and now Barcelona.  I presented my very preliminary work on the next project--variations in what Defense Agencies (DoD, MoD, etc) do, receiving lots of very helpful comments during that panel and the lunch that preceded it.  

A couple of months ago, Hugo Meijer, the Director of EISS, asked me if I would be willing to join a panel on gender discrimination.  I had some hesistancy as I am not an expert--as I told the room yesterday, I am a feminist but my work does not take feminist approach to international relations and I don't study gender.  That last bit is not as true as it used to be, as I am involved in a project that has surveyed Canadian security scholars about their experiences, focusing on gender discrimination.  But I agreed to speak since I have seen a lot of problems over the years and was going to be the most experienced (oldest) person on the panel.  Plus I was the only one to give a North American perspective.  I was joined by fellow civ-mil scholar and super kind Chiara Ruffa of Science Po as well as two feminist scholars who were online: Annick Wibben of Swedish Defence University, and Vanessa Newby, Leiden University.

We were asked two questions: when did we first notice gender problems in the field and what is some advice we have for handling this stuff?  The first question was pretty easy: almost immediately as there was a case of sexual harassment in my grad program.  I then discussed that two of the places that I worked had toxic environments thanks to male profs preying upon grad students, as well as citation patterns and hiring stuff.  That men have often reported that women get all of the jobs, which is strange since there are still plenty of men in the discipline.  I didn't have time to get into the love of old boys networks by some senior scholars or how some post-doc funders tended to only give to men back in the day.  In short, lots of problems which I have discussed here from time to time.  Chiara, Annick, and Vanessa had much more to say on this, alas.  

For the second question, I cautioned that I can't really tell women how to behave--not my role--but I had some ideas for making some improvements--building from my CDSN experience--to be deliberate about panel organization--no manels, deny platforms to those who are known to be predators or otherwise assholes, find or found organizations that seek to elevate and mentor women and work with them, as we have with WIIS-Canada, WCAPS-Canada, as well as Out in National Security such as WIIS Europe.  

In the following Q&A, folks raised questions about the pace of change and what can we do in the face of structural problems.  I mentioned this meme: 

 But then I noted an earlier presentation that day invoked structuration theory (something I wrote about in my very first IR theory class in grad school, taught be the gone too soon John Ruggie)--that agent and structure shape each other.   So, we need to act individually and collectively to change the norms, the institutions, and the social structures that, well, maintain patriarchy.  I pointed out that when I started, the room would have been almost entirely male, and that EISS and CDSN are efforts to foster more diverse defence/security communities.  These folks have a right to be impatient, but we ought not be too pessimistic or deterred--we can make a difference and improve things.  

It was a good and important conversation to have, and I hope it spurs further conversations.  It was strange to be discussing this stuff on a day where the US Supreme Court made things worse for women, for LGBTQ2S+, and for other historically excluded groups... but definitely much needed.

Dumbest Thing Uttered by Strategy Professor

I was reading a sharp blog post by Josh Rovner that distinguished security scholars from strategists (I am of the former), but could not help but be astonished by a key quote:

"As Colin Gray recently put it, “If Thucydides, Sun-tzu, and Clausewitz did not say it, it probably is not worth saying.” Damn, this is dumb

— Steve Saideman (@smsaideman) April 12, 2016

Colin Gray is probably seen as one of the most premier strategists, but this is just about as dumb as anything I could possibly imagine.  There is so much wrong with this statement. 

First, one could spend all day coming up with a list of developments that happened after these dead guys that might just be relevant for strategy.  My quick attempt: electricity, railroads, chemicals, biological warfare, airplanes, nuclear weapons, missiles, democracy, mass media, the internet, submarines, satellites (space, not dominated allies), civilian expertise, Marx, Mao, end of colonialism, Geneva conventions, international organizations....  On twitter, I forgot to mention missiles, drones, autonomous weapons, and on and on.

Second, Thucydides and Clausewitz (don't know about Sun-Tzu) are kind of like the bible in that people can interpret much of the stuff in very different ways.  How much has been written on the real meaning of the Melian Dialogue?  Heaps (4000 articles or more). 

Third, and most importantly, the quest for understanding does not stop after a few smart people said stuff.  Physics did not stop after Einstein.  Not only is there new stuff to consider, but the old smart dead guys might not have gotten everything right.  Worshipping the dead strategists is a good way to avoid thinking. 

Fourth, lots and lots of generals and admirals have read these three strategists as they are on all of the required, and yet still mess up.  Riddle me that!  And for my interest as a security scholar, lots of people read the same stuff and then do different things. 

So, I know it was hyperbole, but, please.  I have a hard time thinking of a generalization about war or strategy or security that is as just incredibly stupid as this statement.

How Security Studies is Like Casablanca

There is gambling at Rick's?  Shocking.  There is sexism in security studies equally not so shocking.  I have been in this business for more than twenty years and you can add grad school to that.  Ever since I have been in it, I have heard stories and also witnessed a significant degree of sexism in this area (I am not as attuned to the sexism in other parts of IR or other parts of poli sci).

So, I found it particularly frustrating last night to be involved in one thread at PSR and another on twitter addressing the issue of women in poli sci and IR in very different ways.  At PSR, there are a bunch of folks repeating the same myths that women get heaps of jobs because of affirmative action.  On twitter, folks got riled up because there was not a single woman listed on the program of the next Aspen Security Forum.  A nice juxtaposition of myth and reality.

The reality is that both men and women are getting jobs and both men and women are not being placed and are frustrated about the academic job market.  In all of the searches I have been involved in at universities in the US and Canada, I have seen it happen one time that a women was offered a job because of her gender ... maybe.  That it was a situation where two candidates were quite good and the tie went to the woman.  Otherwise, my anecdata goes the other way--that I have seen colleagues say things like: "well, her husband has a job, so she doesn't need this one."

In security studies, there has always been a perception that there was an old boys network that favored men and the misogynists.  Perhaps feeling free to express nostalgia for the old boys network is some evidence of this.

I posted a list of books written by women about 18 months ago, mostly in the security area, as a list of my favorite books both to prove a point and because it was largely true. I was responding to a post somewhere (I forget) that listed the best books and omitted female authors.  It didn't take more than five minutes of thinking to come up with a list of ten (or more) books written by women that are among my very favorites.  I didn't label it as a list of ten great books written by women, just my ten favorite books.

As Aspen Security Forum proved, perhaps inadvertently, sexism is quite alive and well in the field of security despite the fact that women are doing excellent work in academic and making a difference in policy positions.  Getting the best speaker or the best person for the job should mean that women are among those chosen--not because they are women but because they are among the best.

Need a conference on private military contracting?  You better invite Deborah Avant.  Working on non-violence?  You better read and cite Erica Chenoweth.  Terrorism?  Chenoweth again, Mia Bloom, etc.  Pakistan?  Christine Fair.  Identity and violence?  Stacie Goddard, Erin Jenne, Monica Toft.  Alliances?  Invite Sarah Kreps and Stefanie Von Hlatky and read Patricia Weitsman. The US national security apparatus?  Amy Zegart. Civil-military relations?  Avant again.  Crime and international security?  Louise Shelley.  Nuclear taboo?  Nina Tannenwald.  Canadian defence?  Elinor Sloan and the aforementioned Von Hlatky.  Quantitative work on war?  Sara Mitchell.

I could go on and on.  It really is not that hard.  Indeed, as others have noted, leaving women out might actually require some work. 

I do think there has been a hell of a lot of progress made, but dammit, it is clear that there is still so much room for improvement.  Thanks to the Aspen Security Forum for reminding us not to take for granted that we need to more and better.

Relevant in International Security? Hell Yes

Last night, my chain got pulled by Tom Ricks, who has written some fine books on the U.S. military including the well-named Fiasco about the Iraq war.  He was frustrated with the content of International Security* and then went on a tear about how irrelevant and "made up" political science is.  Given my respect for his work and the importance of his blog within the policy community, I found this view profoundly frustrating.  I promised to come up with a list of relevant poli sci stuff, and here I shall do so.

* [Update] Tom's original post was how boring the latest issue of IS is.  The twitter conversation turned into a broader discussion, which is why this post is more about relevance than non-boring-ness.  Still, most of the stuff I list below is actually quite engaging.

But I would like to start with a few comments.  First, this entire effort may be wasted since Ricks believes that politics is an art and not a science.  He, like others, may think that we cannot generalize about political behavior, that there are not recurrent patterns of which we cannot make sense.  This post might be akin to a climate scientist explaining climate change to someone who does not believe in science.  He asked whether political science will be around in 200 years.  Well, since it has been around in one form or another since either Thucydides or Aristotle, and that politics is not going away anytime too soon, I doubt that people will stop trying to figure it out.

Second, Ricks in his books admires General David Petraeus.  While his record may not be spiffy in retrospect, there is no doubt that Petraeus was influenced by people who study political science.  Even if we forget about Petraeus having a PhD from Princeton in International Affairs (which is just chock full of poli sci), Petraeus included all kinds of social scientists in the making of counter-insurgency doctrine.  So, there is some inconsistency there.

Third, Ricks needs to look around his office. Nora Bensahel should kick is butt, given that she is a top analyst on alliances and other security stuff, and she happens to have a PhD from Stanford in Political Science.  My guess is that she ain't the only one at CNAS.

Fourth, one criticism of some political science work is that the findings of x or y are just "common sense."  Maybe.  But common sense is often not all that common.  Sometimes there is more than one thing that seems to be common sense but they are in conflict--how do those different views get adjudicated?  Perhaps with some analysis.  Sometimes the common sense is wrong.  Also, the best work takes something that people have thought about, points out a new perspective, and makes people think "huh, why didn't I think of that before, that makes so much sense," which then becomes common sense. 

Fifth, it is strange for me to arguing on behalf of International Security since I have never reviewed for them, nor have I have published anything in it.  I have tried, with the most recent effort turning into an ISQ piece because it was not sufficiently mature when we submitted it to IS.  The feedback we received from the IS reviewers helped us revise the piece so that it could make it into another journal. That article and the related book are very much policy relevant as they seek to explain why the various members of NATO behaved differently in Afghanistan.  This was not just a theoretical question but one so interesting to the policy community that the military head of NATO at the time, Admiral Stavridis, asked us if he could share the pdf version of the book with his staff. 

I could go on to address all of the debates about policy relevance of political science, but let's get to a  list of eleven scholars (fairly randomly selected) that are quite relevant for the people who analyze/write about international security.  At the end of this post, I will list a bunch of stuff people recommended but not provide any comments (this post is already long).

1. Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan,  Why Civil Resistance Works, convincingly demonstrates that the best way for movements to get their way is NOT to use violence.  This work has gained attention around the world from governments and private actors.  The International Security version of the book is here.  Chenoweth also works on terrorism, and has gotten the attention of multiple governments for her insights in that area (IS piece here).
2. Kelly Greenhill,  Weapons of Mass Migration.  A work that simply altered the way I viewed the flow of peoples.  Countries with lower standards of behavior can use the threat of forcing their people to leave, which would send a flow of unwanted migrants/refugees to democracies that would then have to deal with them.  It is very much an asymmetric approach for weaker authoritarian regimes to mess with advanced democracies.  Is this policy relevant?  You betcha, as democracies such as the US have to figure out how to react to these kinds of threats.  It certainly pressured France and Italy in different ways when Qaddafi was threatening to send refugees to Europe.  The article version is at Civil Wars, volume 10, issue 1, pages 6-21.
3. Debbi Avant is one of many scholars taking seriously the challenge of private military contractors.  How do governments grapple with their new dependence on these firms that they use in wartime?  I am sure you, Tom, have had questions about PMC's in Iraq, right?  Her first book is a nice companion to Feaver's stuff as she uses a similar framework but compares the British and Americans and how they adapt when faced with insurgencies.
4. Jennifer Lind has written pieces in Foreign Affairs and Security Studies on apologies in international affairs along with a book.  You might not think this is policy relevant, but the policy people do.  She has been sought out by the governments of US, Japan and South Korea to share her work. 
5. Page Fortna, Does Peacekeeping Work?  Is that relevant for policy-makers?  Probably.  
6. Scott Sagan has written so much it is hard to choose, but how about this IS piece on nuclear proliferation.  If we want to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, we need to know why countries develop them.  And it is not as simple as people think.
7. David Edelstein on Military Occupation.  Not that we really need to understand that in the 21st century, right?  The IS piece is here.
8. Jonathan Mercer, Reputation and International Relations, is one of those books that changed how I viewed pretty much everything.  The basic idea is that we attribute the behavior of our friends differently than the behavior of our adversaries, so that our friends can rarely fail us and our adversaries can rarely be seen as anything but implacable.  
9. Michael Horowitz, Diffusion of Military Power.  Pretty sure we care about which military technologies spread and why.  He also wrote on the duration of crusading.  Given the rise of ISIS, that might just be a bit relevant too.
10. Risa Brooks, Shaping Strategy: The Civil-Military Relations of Strategic Assessment.  Her work focuses mostly on Mideast militaries, and this book considers how the relationship of the civilians and the military affect how countries assess threats.  Given yet another American involvement in the Mideast, it might just be handy to understand how our adversaries and our "allies" assess the various threats they face--ISIS, the U.S., each other.  Like other folks, she is now doing some terrorism stuff.  Link is to a piece in Security Studies, which may actually have better stuff than IS (and I am not just saying that because I have a couple of SS pieces.  Ok, sort of).
11. Jason Lyall, doing heaps of stuff on whether counter-insurgency works.  I blame sleep deprivation for not including his stuff: here, here and here.

I could go on and on.  As someone tweeted to me last night, people who study international security start not with data and often not with theory but a policy problem that they seek to understand.  They then get the best ideas together to figure out how to explain that puzzle and then subject it to some tests (of logic, using simulations, experiments, case studies or even, dare I say it, statistics) to see if the idea holds up.  Articles and books contain a lot of stuff that may seem boring to outsiders--the "how do you know what you think you know" sections--but that is where we claim to be political scientists.  That we are not just speculating about stuff--that would be Sam Huntington's Clash of Civilizations--which is horrible social science--but also, alas, policy relevant.

The best work these days communicates clearly to non-academics what the claims are and their relevance while communicated to academics how that knowledge was gained.  Blogs, such as Monkey Cage, Duck of Minvera, Political Violence at a Glance, and others, do an excellent job of providing the wider community with the punchlines of the scholarly work.  But to be clear, without that scholarly effort to see how the question fits into past work (literature reviews), what are the causal dynamics at work (theory), and testing (that methods stuff), the punchlines have no set up, no legitimacy, and no veracity.  And, of course, even after all of that work is done, we will still disagree and argue with each other.  Out of that process comes stuff that policy-makers take seriously either directly (SACEUR reading our book) or indirectly (Nora Bensahel at CNAS providing keen analyses based on what she had learned in her training as a political scientist).

So, Tom, if you don't have the time to read a bunch of books, do visit the blogs to find the interesting stuff, and then maybe chase down a few articles and see what you find.  You might just learn something.



People also recommended:
Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception
Alexander Downs, Civilian Victimization in War
Erin Baines, Vulnerable Bodies on UN refugee policy
Darryl Press, Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats
Max Abhrams, Why Terrorism Does not Work
Stephen Rosen, Winning the Next War; Societies and Military Power; War and Human Nature
Lieber and Press, Why Countries Will Not Give Nukes to Terrorists, IS
Peter Feaver, heaps and heaps of stuff on civil-military relations.
Robert Farley, Grounded on how the USAF should be disbanded

Jessica Chen Weiss. Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China's Foreign Relations because Chinese nationalism might just matter soon-ish.
Michael Colaresi, Democracy Declassified: The Secrecy Dilemma in National Security
and on and on.

I have class now so I will not list yet more work.  Please do not take omissions as insults--just finite time and too much policy relevant security stuff to discuss in a "short" blog post.

Women and Security

Last night, today and tomorrow, I will be the outlier for a change.  Women in International Security-Canada is holding a conference in Ottawa, and I am serving as a discussant.  Which means that there are a whole bunch of women doing interesting work in various areas of international security and a few random males. 

It was kind of funky to look around last night at the reception at the US Embassy (my first time in the Ottawa embassy), which is co-sponsoring the event, and notice how much of a minority I was.  Even more so then when I taught classes at McGill.

Given the sexism that had been rampant in the Security studies community and that some still long for the days of the old boys network, I do think that facilitating networking among the women in this area makes sense.  I have also been a huge fan of the work women have been doing in this area.

Anyhow, I look forward to today's and tomorrow's conversations.  I will try to report in my blog tomorrow what I have learned.

Gender and Syllabi Creation

The recent debates about gender in the poli sci/IR profession, including discussions of the sources of under-citation of women and posts about revising syllabi, have caused me to think a bit more as I prepare a new course for the Winter term (there is no Spring in Canada).

The course is Contemporary International Security, and my semi-final tally seems to have 15 pieces written by either a female or a team of others including a female out out of 37 or so, which is about 40%.  Had I not been thinking about inclusion of women, I probably would have had four or so pieces less.  I don't think I sacrificed anything, as I found interesting and relevant pieces without sacrificing depth or breadth or significant content.

I don't think 38% is bad, especially given that this particular area has a history of male domination, unlike perhaps the study of contentious politics or ethnic conflict (no facts about the latter, just going on anecdata).  I am not sure we need to aim for 50% in every class or every syllabus, particularly as some areas of research tend to have more or less women working in them.

This particular class, like the Civil-Military Relations course I am teaching now,* is in an area where a lot of the most interesting work is by women, so I did not have to go far out of my way to find relevant stuff.     
 *  I wrote that syllabus before the events of this fall raised my awareness about the gender    citation problems.  I will think a bit more next time.
The course is constructed as a survey of different issue areas in this subfield, so some weeks did not require any thinking or searching

• Work that opens up the idea of security
• Counter-insurgency
• Alliances and Coalitions
• Identity, Religion and Nationalism

Other weeks required me to do some search perhaps because they were farther out of my expertise and perhaps because the lit might be more male-dominated at the moment:

• Crime
• Drone/Cyber
• Canadian military stuff

My syllabus is biased towards policy relevant, positivist stuff both because that is how I am wired and because the course is for Masters of International Affairs students aimed at the Canadian policy community.  It probably would have been easier to come up with more female-authored work on the syllabus if I had any weeks dedicated to gender and security or post-modernist approaches to security.  The former is very much a female-dominated area, as far as I can tell, although again it is not an area I read much.  Given that much of the study of Canadian IR is post-modernist, my guess is that by avoiding this stuff, I am probably then omitting many of the females working in areas related to the stuff in syllabus.  That impression comes from the years of reading the Canadian Political Science Association's IR program at the annual meetings.  I could be wrong.

I am sure that my syllabi have plenty of holes that I have not addressed in method, in other biases (mostly North American stuff), entirely English stuff.  The joy of teaching is that syllabi keep changing, and I keep learning.  I would appreciate any suggestions for the new class as I will be revising it for 2015.  

Musical TSA Criticism

Fun song, but could have used some video:

Marketing Opportunity of the Week

Also known as reason 434958 that the terrorists can not beat us.

This site is selling shirts and underwear with the fourth amendment written on them in metallic ink to show up on the x-ray.

The combination of snarkiness and entrepreneurialism in some ways defines the American spirit. 

It takes guts to wear something like this through security, as TSA has shown no sense of humor on this.  Buyer beware, indeed.

Roger Ebert's New Job

TSA Monitor.  I am linking his blog here--he has had some problems with folks hacking the sites to which he links but this youtube post should be ok (but I am warning folks anyway).

The short story is that a woman brings bottled breast milk to security following TSA protocols, but does not want it x-rayed.  There is an alternative procedure for medicinal stuff (and breast milk counts as such).  The TSA folks ignore her explanation and make her wait and wait and wait, so that she misses her plane.  They give her a pat-down for no apparent reason except that she refuses to go along with their orders to x-ray the milk.  She even hands the supervisor a set of TSA instructions she downloaded from the web, and they refuse for a while to go along with them.  They basically treat her like a threat and as an abusive passenger.  You cannot see what she is saying, but her gestures indicate a normally frustrated person. 

Does this indict all of TSA?  No.  But it shows that agents will interpret their authority and their rules in ways that may not be what the principal anticipates.  So, the principal needs to consider such possibilities before crafting rules that have a significant risk of being mis-applied. 

My cynical reaction: too bad the women was not more obviously pregnant, as that would make the video even more compelling.  Our security system needs some serious re-thinking because it is raising costs and inconvenience without really demonstrating effectiveness.  They can cover up the statistics with secret sauce: " we cannot release information about the program as it would provide useful information ...."  But there should be ways that measures can be published that get at the essential questions.  And, because our congressional committees have security clearances, any argument that they should not see the real statistics is bullshit.

Canadian Take on New Airport Security

This is one of the big comedy guys in Canada riffing on the new scanners and pat-downs to continue the week's theme:

Drezner's A Better Blogger

No doubt.   Just check out his post on airport security and the reactions to it and mine.  He does a very nice job of integrating his experience and reactions into a larger question about Elite Americans and others. 

I would say that he could be making a significant mistake--by making it seem as if elites are different in anything else than exposure/frequency.  That is, Elites fly more and are more bothered by the various intrusions than ordinary Americans who do not fly.  His conclusion, "With travel season upon us during the next six weeks, we'll see.....," hints at the key reality--that folks who have not experienced the longer lines, the relentless instructions to surrender possessions and dignity (I hate having to lose control of my wallet and passport--that makes me very insecure), and so forth may soon do so and may join the backlash.

It may be that the resisters will be called out of touch, but isn't that a label applied to people who are not experiencing the realities of the situation.  Bush senior was out of touch for not knowing that prices were scanned at grocery stores.  But frequently flyers will understand far better than those who do not fly at all the tradeoffs of more illusory/real security vs. inconvenience.

I also think this whole Elites vs. Real Americans distinction is not going to center around airport security since that is something that is not relevant to most Americans, as opposed to jobs, education, pay, health care, and so forth. 

Of course, I write this from a very posh hotel in Quebec City before I present my research to a highly educated audience, so whom am I to say what is or is not Elite?  I'll just have to keep reading Dan to find out.

The New Rebellion

The effort to protect our airports is now running into much more friction.  The question of threat versus cost has generally been ignored because no politician wants to be accused of not doing enough.  

Another way to look at it is here (HT to Doug Gibler for the link).

But there is something else going on.  The American way of warfare has found its way to airport security: the US almost always chooses technology and capital intensive solutions rather than labor intensive ones.  Israel, the most vigilant country, does not use the new scanners, but relies heavily on well-trained folks who question folks and have been trained to observe people and assess. 

Can I expect the US to change?  Nyet.  We will always choose the expensive, flashy solution.

By Your Command

Cylon Security.  Ooops, make that cyber-security is coming to the foreground.  Ricks has a guest post today about the Senate hearings on LTG Keith Alexander's new role as commander of Cyber Command which is just now forming.  Cyber Command will be equivalent, more or less to the other Commands: the regional ones such as Central Command, but also the functional commands of Space, etc.  Given the news of late (China/Google, etc), this seems to be about time. 

Of course, there are heaps of complexities hinted to in this piece:

• Division of labor between domestic with the dysfunctional Department of Homeland Security
• Alexander will be double-hatted with Cyber Command and his continued role as Director of the National Security Agency.  Will this mean divided attention or fruitful interaction?
• Rules of engagement for commanders--what is an attack?  how can one reply? what permission is required?
• Congress is way behind the curve. 

Still, an interesting and logical starting point.

Speaking of Terrorism and National Security ...

Seems like we are doing a worse job domestically. No real surprises here, just a reminder that the urgency to appear to be doing something and the desire to avoid liability means that lots of effort and inconvenience are generated, but have no made a big difference on our security.

And this piece does not address the bigger gaping holes in Homeland Security (I hate that phrase by the way--makes me think of Motherland and Fatherland)--the ports. Containers are not inspected or regulated as they should be.

Again, it seems it is better to what is superficial and makes one appear to be doing something than do the hard work to get it right. Perhaps that works in academia, but is a poor prescription for national security policy.