But I Just Want an Accurate Count

How many people have been killed, maimed, raped, imprisoned without due process, tortured, etc. in conflict Z, Country Q?  News media focus on that number, and those of us who collect and analyze data on dissent and repression as part of our vocation are should be well aware of the fact that the numbers reported are not only guesstimates, but guesstimates produced by interested actors (i.e., individuals representing organizations who want to shape the future course of events).  Yet, we yearn for The Truth, and new technologies often produce the possibility that we will now be able to produce the truth.  Fuhgeddaboutit.  That’s not happening.

Why not?  Because human beings maiming, killing, raping, torturing, and otherwise abusing other human beings sometimes want that information known (and even exaggerated), and other times do not want it known.  Across different collections of human beings those interests vary, and even over time those interests may vary for a given collection.  Thus, if you wanted to discern The Truth you would need to account for that, which puts you in the land of modeling, and models have error…  So this is what I want you to burn into your brain: EVERYONE who tries to tell you something else is a charlatan selling a divining rod.  A deity, should one exist, may know.  We mortals cannot.

Please know that Christian Davenport did not listen to me when I tried to tell him that he was on a fool’s errand when he first launched the project that produced his book Media Bias, Perspective and State Repression.  After a few years of trying to divine the truth from the multiple source soup, he embraced Kurosawa’s Rashomon: we cannot know the truth, yet must press on nonetheless.  So, what are we to do?  Davenport helps us understand that those of us who are interested in developing theoretical accounts of human behavior (in his case, state repression in response to dissent) need not concern ourselves with The Truth, but instead peoples’ perceptions of reality (I like the generic term “beliefs”), how those perceptions are produced, and why people take actions given those beliefs.  Indeed, the BIG thing missing from the work of Charles Tilly’s 1978 masterpiece From Mobilization to Revolution was information (which informs beliefs).  This is something that Ted Gurr did well (from a psychological vantage) in Why Men Rebel. (despite the fact that the vast majority of readers trivialize the arguments in that book by reducing it to the frustration–aggression mechanism qua relative  deprivation upon which Gurr constructs his many hypotheses about different values of information, see chap 6).  But I digress.

That backstory serves to set up my primary reason for posting: to help distinguish between projects like the Syria Tracker Crisis Map and the efforts of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) to produce estimates of the number of casualties in civil conflicts (pdf).  Note first that HRDAG produces estimates, not a number.  Projects like the Syria Tracker Crisis Map do not produce estimates, but instead report counts.  That is your first indication that HRDAG is using scientific inference (in this case, statistical inference) whereas the other project is not.  Folks at projects like the Syria Tracker Crisis Map appear to be pursuing an accurate count (aka The Truth).  Patrick Meier posted recently about an article in New Scientist, “Mapping the Human Cost of Syria’s Uprising” [seriously NS, the uprising is responsible for the human costs?]. He quotes this waffle:

the crisis map “could be the most accurate estimate yet of the death toll in Syria’s uprising [...].”

Setting aside the “could be,” we see the desire for truth (qua accuracy) before us.  Meier continues quoting New Scientist:

Their approach? “A combination of automated data mining and crowdsourced human intelligence,” which “could provide a powerful means to assess the human cost of wars and disasters.”

And there we have the technological innovation: crowd sourcing is held to have promise for revealing The Truth (i.e., accurate counts).  Unfortunately, that simply is false.  We cannot know The True Count.  Admittedly, the target target audience for such projects is news reporters, advocates, and politicians, none of whom are especially likely to take readily to the ontological and epistemic points of this post.  Whether that excuses projects that report counts from trying to be forthright I leave for you to decide.

HRDAG is also interested in accuracy, but unlike other projects, they recognize that we cannot know The Truth, and since a census is not possible the best option is to estimate a count using statistical methods.  In a series of posts that begin here they describe how they did that in Syria here.  HRDAG’s methodology is scientifically defensible.  People may develop alternative defensible methods.  At present I am unaware of any, and it is important to underscore what I tried to explain to Davenport many years ago: multiple sources (including the crowd) cannot produce an accurate (ac)count.  Which leads me to KIA’s use of Fatboy Slim’s tune: You can roll with this, or you can roll with that…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOHwjjhFTac

Did I just call Patrick Meier a charlatan?  I don’t think so, in part because I haven’t seen him claiming the sorts of things he quotes New Scientist saying.  I do know this:  crowd sourcing is here to stay (assuming a relatively free web) and I plan to be involved in small ways along side those like Meier and the many, many others who are doing this kind of  work.  So this is definitely NOT A DISS of crowd sourcing work in the service of peoples’ rights, and especially not Meier’s work in particular.  This post hopes to increase awareness among those of us doing this work that we are either engaged in scientific work or we are not, and it is important to know what the difference is.  A record of verified claims is a very important thing: Amnesty International (AI) in particular has had an enormous impact by making public verified claims.  What AI is very careful not to do, however, is claim to have an accurate count of anything.   Projects like Syria Tracker Crisis Map should be very clear that they are reporting only verified counts (and should limit themselves to reporting only verified events), not an accurate count.  A verified count will always be an undercount of the unknowable true number, and we need to do what we can to make journalists, policy makers, politicians, and the public aware of that.

In closing, if that KIA video makes you need to see Christopher Walken fly in Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice,” here tis…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMZwZiU0kKs

@WilHMoo

‘Sup with no Love for Chuck post-1990?

Cara Jones tweeted in response to my Did Charles Tilly Labor in Vain? post

She is wondering about a parenthetical remark I made about Tilly’s work being better prior to 1990.  The short answer is: I didn’t learn anything from his post-1990 books.  In fairness to Chuck, I read few of those books.  Why?  The ones I did read (e.g., McTeam, 2007) exhibited little if any of what I value in Tilly’s work.  The concepts are ill defined, the mechanisms are vague, and proposed relationships are sloppy.  Compare it to From Mobilization to Revolution, which not only has precisely defined concepts, clear mechanisms, and precise relationships, but is also sprinkled with caveats that exhibit the shortcomings (most of which point out the static–cross-sectional–thinking, despite the fact that we all want theory about the dynamics).  Others may have learned from Tilly’s later work,  and if so, that’s wonderful. I only learned that I was disappointed.

It turns out that I am not alone.  William H. Sewell, Jr. wrote an essay titled “Early Tilly: The Vendée and Historical Social Science” (pdf).  In it he argues that in his

opinion, The Vendée is the best and the most original book Chuck ever wrote…. I miss, in the later work, the sense of creative tension between the particular and the general. Chuck’s style remained as lively as ever but never in later books did I have quite the same thrilling sense of looking over the shoulder of a master craftsman at work.

Sewell even offers a process based account for why this is so.

Chuck’s work speeded up drastically after 1964. The Vendée took nine years from the beginning of research to its appearance in print. For this book, Chuck took the time to gather more data, to weigh and perfect his arguments, to carefully shape his rhetoric. Thereafter Chuck published a major book about every three years – that is, until he learned that his life-span was threatened by Lymphoma and he decided to get into print as many of his thoughts as possible while there was still time. Between 2001 and 2008, Chuck published thirteen books…. I can’t help wishing he had decided at some point to drastically slow down and to write another book or two with the meticulous and patient care he lavished on The Vendée. We all miss Chuck’s eternally boyish character, his seemingly inextinguishable energy (extinguished at last), his vast knowledge, his theoretical fertility, and his unfailing scholarly generosity. But I, for one, have been missing something of that unique voice I discovered back in 1964 for a much longer time.

 

Did Charles Tilly Labor in Vain?

Last week Jonathan Panikoff posted a stream of clap-trap and nonsense at Small Wars Journal to support his headline that, in Syria, “The True Chaos Will Begin After the Fall of the Regime.”

Why do I sigh?  Mr. Panikoff is, of course, correct, if by “chaos” he means lots of people will be killed.  I’m not certain that’s what he means, but I think it is at least part of it.  Two things are troubling.  First, the point has nothing to do with Syria: it is a general point that holds anywhere that an irregular transfer of power takes place a new state must assert its authority.  Charles Tilly taught us this, first in his study of the French Revolution (The Vendee, 1964), and more generally in From Mobilization to Revolution (1978, see esp. pp. 191, 214-22).  Yet Mr. Panikoff fails to mention this.

Instead, and this is the second part that wears on me, he trucks in what used to be Sovietology, which is a form of interpretation and prognostication akin to what one finds on ESPN: experts familiar with the names of various principals opine about the interests of each, intrigue among them, coalitions, etc.  These folks are, as far as I can discern, blissfully unaware of the extent to which their ideas and interpretations are colored by standard narratives in their culture (ranging from children’s tales, fiction for adult consumption, and religious texts, to learned scholarship).  In that sense it is rather unfair for me to pick on Mr. Panikoff, for he is but one of literally thousands of analysts who engage in this practice.  Please take this critique, then, as targeting those analyses of which Mr. Panikoff’s is but one example.

Charles Tilly’s work (by which I am largely referring to his pre-1990 writing) was unusually informative.  But perhaps the point most strongly branded onto my brain by Chuck are points three and four on pp. 218-29 of  From Mobilization to Revolution.  It illuminates beautifully (1) why you are an ignoramus if you wear a Che Guevara t-shirt (he directly oversaw the slaughter of thousands of Cubans denied due process, but if you like mass murders, by all means, celebrate Che) and (2) why so many of us were stunned beyond words when the Bush administration banned Ba’athists, who made up the overwhelmingly majority of Iraq’s military and police forces, from government service, thus creating a “monopoly of coercion” vacuum.

Third, the revolutionary coalition is likely to fragment once the initial seizure of control over the central government apparatus occurs, and that fragmentation itself tends to produce further struggles involving violence…. Fourth, the victorious polity still faces the problem of reimposing routine governmental control over the subject population… As the government returns to its work of extracting and redistributing resources, it finds  people reluctant to pay taxes, give up their land, send their sons to war…. And so a new round of violent imposition and violent resistance begins.

Tilly continues to make several interesting claims, and I leave it to those interested to pursue them.  I wish to emphasize both the abstract concepts and his use of active voice.  Tilly’s work provides us with neutral concepts such as challenger, contender, coalition, and bureaucratic apparatus.  He speaks of mobilization processes, routine governance, and competition. He also recognizes that government impose control, extract taxes, and redistribute resources.  These are activities pursued by a self interested state, challenged by groups of people who prefer not to cooperate, if they can.  It is absolutely devoid of Manichean narrative: there are no “white hats” or “black hats” to be found.  Yet Charles Tilly is dead, and as I search for evidence of the impact of his work, I fear it may be shrinking, not growing.

Returning to posts like that offered by Mr. Pannikoff’s, such analyses of  ”coming chaos in Syria” fail not only to add content to what we learned from Tilly, they actually subtract content by leading us to view what might happen next through the same lenses we might use as we consume Survivor, a soap opera, or The Walking Dead.  And that, folks, is why I sigh.

@WilHMoo

Misheard: an Intergenerational, pre- Sri Lanka Trip Conversation

My 20 year old daughter is headed to a rural village in southern Sri Lanka this summer to do some educational volunteer work.  She met with my mom the other day to cull sage advice from a woman who was among the first handful UNHCR employees to arrive in Dadaab, Kenya in 1991 and establish the Ifo refugee camp, was the manager of an Albanian refugee camp for Kosovars in 1999 (you can read her Qatrom diary here), and has served as an election observer in Kosovo and the Ukraine, among other places.  One of the things my mom told Kevy was not to travel to the north.  Why not, Kevy wanted to know?  This is what she heard.

Because there are lots of Bengal tigers in the north of Sri Lanka.

You can imagine the look on my face.

No, not Bengal tigers, Tamil Tigers, though they were defeated several  years ago

I then gave her a quick sketch of the Sinhala-Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka.

 

A Black Rock City Moment on Campus

Walking to my office this morning I ran across a microcosm of Burning Man, here at Florida State.  To tag this as a Burning Man moment is a bit unfair, as these moments do not originate in that event.  Rather, that event celebrates, encourages, and nurtures such moments.  What was it?

A group of three women and two men were standing along the side of the walk, gayly encouraging passerby to make a pass through a hop-scotch game they had chalked on the walk.  A few folks skirted the game, preferring the edge of the walk, but several took them on, hopping and skipping through the boxes.  The five instigators, clapped, whooped and cheered them on.  Those who played along continued on their way with a smile on their face.

Back in 2002 my camp, 7:15 Gut, created a sustained moment in which we riffed on a Ramp of Death another camp had created a few years earlier on Esplanade.  You can read my account of Ramp of Death II here.

Garland Turns Ignorant Media Coverage Inward

Riffing on Sara Kendzior’s post on Terrorism and Ethnicity in the American Media, Eric Garland imagined what a foreign media report written in that style might look like covering a killing in, say, Alabama or Georgia.  This is what he conjured.

Now imagine that some foreigners slapped a crappy pseudo-anthropological analysis on top, full of weird historical references, non-sequitur references to the church, and misguided assumptions about ethnicity.

DATELINE APRIL 21, 2013

IT HAS HAPPENED AGAIN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:

Yet another massacre has occurred in the historically war-torn region of the Southern United States – and so soon after the religious festival of Easter.

Brian McConkey, 27, a Christian fundamentalist militiaman living in the formerly occupied territory of Alabama, gunned down three men from an opposing tribe in the village square near Mobile, the capitol, over a discussion that may have involved the rituals of the local football cult. In this region full of heavily-armed local warlords and radical Christian clerics, gun violence is part of the life of many.

Many of the militiamen here are ethnic Scots-Irish tribesmen, a famously indomitable mountain people who have killed civilized men – and each other – for centuries. It appears that the wars that started on the fields of Bannockburn and Sterling have come to America.

As the sun sets over the former Confederate States of America, one wonders – can peace ever come to this land?

Sometimes, people are in a cult of violence tied up with religious fundamentalism and nationalistic terror groups.

Sometimes, they are just savages who come from a place that might have churches and politically-motivated knuckleheads.

Being a real analyst of international affairs, you need to understand how subtle that difference can be.

 

h/t Page Fortna for posting Garland’s piece.

What Obama’s Failure has Wrought

The Weather Underground

The news media gets more online hits, higher ratings, etc. when it sells fear.

Ted Kaczynski (The Unabomber)

So we get news stories, like those documented by Sarah Kendzior, that “link,” without evidence, alleged perpetrators to shadowy networks of enemies: waiting might make it clear no such tie exists, so they pounce on it right away, especially when xenophobia makes it easier.

Eric Rudolph (Army of God)

Elected representatives in a democracy worry about being blamed for violence committed against their constituents, and demonize those who commit such attacks by also tying them to shadowy networks.

The Symbionese National Liberation Army

Many of them succumb to the temptation to undermine the rule of law, which exists in no small part to protect the innocent from state persecution, by calling for the suspension of rights because we are “at war,” national security is at risk, etc.

Timothy McVeigh

Candidate Obama ran against George Bush’s use of the enemy combatant designation and enhanced interrogation, arguing that these undermined American legal practice and were a threat to US security.

Sirhan Sirhan

As President, Obama has failed to close Guantanamo, thus sustaining the Bush Adminstration’s practice of the enemy combatant designation.

Dzhokar Tsarneav?

I leave you with John Adams, speaking as the defense attorney for British Troops (enemy combatants?) at their trial for the Boston Massacre:

It is more important that innocence be protected than it is that guilt be punished, for guilt and crimes are so frequent in this world that they cannot all be punished.

But if innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, perhaps to die, then the citizen will say, “whether I do good or whether I do evil is immaterial, for innocence itself is no protection,” and if such an idea as that were to take hold in the mind of the citizen that would be the end of security whatsoever.