We need to reinvent the way we think
about studying war and peace. War is an
easy outcome to measure. War you can
observe all the time but just knowing
how wars start doesn't give you that much purchase on how to end war. So we have to
find a way to think about modeling peace
as an outcome instead of modeling war.
Lots of people study protest behavior,
social movement behavior, but not in a
systematic way where you generate what
we call large end data. Lots of
observations and you model them
statistically. What I'm trying to do
which is my intellectual tradition you
see whether you can't develop
statistical models that have come for
the process over a broad swath of cases.
In my world climate change was really a
political problem not a technological
problem. One of the things we know from
the systematic literature on war is that
resources seem to be one of the reasons
that people go to war with each other. If
we heat the planet up to a level that
makes sustainability a real issue to
deal with then we're also going to have
to figure out how to prevent the
genocides and the armed conflicts that
come out of there.
That to me is the question of foresight
in politics. One of the things we don't
know in how civil wars start is how
nonviolent protest turns into armed
rebellion. A non-violent protester is
gonna be really reluctant to take up a
gun against their government. So I
started a project to generate data all
protest activity and I'm in the process
with with some graduate students of
trying to model the process as it
unfolds. To see whether there are
systematic patterns which compel the
protesters to arm. If we knew how that
happens then we'd have a much better
hand on preventing
the outbreak of civil war. I am teaching a
course called the Methods of Peace
Studies. It's for first-year graduate
students. In the class there are two
theologians, a historian, and two
political theorists and the objective is
to get them to be able to at least
converse with each other across their
disciplinary boundaries. The value to
that, which I think today is not
completely realized, that if the problems
are big and complex then the study of
them has to at least stand up to the
challenge of the complexity. When they
talk about the arguments and evidence
that provide an understanding of ethical
behavior then I can actually think about
how I might use those ideas in my own
model. We got to get different
disciplines integrated with the
political science so that we can use the
theoretical ideas to develop empirical
models so that we can actually figure
out how they all tie together. So if we
can pull that off it's a huge asset to
the world that's trying to manage peace.
