Blog Archives

Cross-posting: The Will H. Moore Celebratory Revisitation of the Conflict Consortium Virtual Workshop, Episode 15

6/25/2017

19 Nov: Thomas Zeitzoff (Assistant Professor, American University), "Do Refugees Spread Social and Ethnic Conflict? Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Turkey," (co-authored with Anna Getmansky and Tolga Sinmazdemir).
Discussants: Ali Çarkoğlu, Jennifer Jerit, Nikolay Marinov , David Siddhartha Patel, Megan Reif, and Jacquelien van Stekelenburg

Watch the Video.

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Adventures with/in Will H. Moore, Part 8: We Don't Need No Conference, Let the MoFo Burn..... The Conflict Consortium Goes Live

6/25/2017

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The panel was typical regarding what now happens in conferences.

I was the discussant (or academic MC) on a panel with 4 papers and the topic of state repression/human rights violation – at least that is what I signed up for. By the time of the conference, there were two more papers added which were not quite as good as the original 4.

Why the addition? Well, as the Wutang clan would say:

Cash Rules Everything Around Me
C.R.E.A.M.
Get the money
Dollar, dollar bill Y’allllllllllll

Now, I’m not hating. Everybody and every entity has the right to flourish but had I been given the option to stay or go after the conference additions, I would have said no. Nobody asked me though. They just imposed their conception of what they wanted upon me.

And, I took it. I read 4 of the papers., as two were late (yeah, you guessed it, the two additions). I wasn’t going to read the late ones but decided to in the end. At the panel, each presenter was given 7-8 minutes and I was given 11-12.

When I was up, I did my best to summarize the common threads across the 6, pointed out some insights and then suggested some new areas of investigation. Once finished, the panel was opened up to the audience: 2 questions and 1 long comment. With that, we were done – in so many ways.

After I got outside, I reflected about the experience on the way down the elevator. Upon reaching the lobby, I ran into Will for our usual dinner. He was chatting with someone and finished up after a few minutes.

As we walked to the spot, I kind of stewed with my thoughts for a bit – pissed to have gone along with the charade. Perceiving that something was going on, Will asked what was up. Given the cue, I went off on what had happened and what I thought had been happening since we joined the profession. He then described something very similar that he had experienced recently. His additions included a horrible time slot and 4 out of 6 of the papers dropping out, after he read them.

At one point during dinner, I asked why we were accepting this. If you met new people, some energy from the audience that would be cool but that was not the case. Worst of all, the panelists got no good/useful/detailed comments. As a consequence of all this: papers did not get better, they just got completed. We had to be able to do something better than this. In this context, we came up with the idea for the Virtual Workshop.

The basic idea was simple:

We should try to get authors comments – detailed and helpful (diminishing the performative aspect of the exchange as much as possible where folks just wanted to show how smart they were by degrading/tricking the speaker).

We then added other stuff:

We should try to help younger scholars who were not yet networked and especially those from less privileged institutions;
We should try to get people from different ranks and types of institutions;
We should try to balance genders amongst participants;
We should try to give enough time for comments and exchange;
We should try to make it as public as possible so everyone could learn something;
We should try to have some fun.

When thinking of the format, I remembered how much I loved Charles (Chuck) Tilly’s workshop rules (recalled by Roy Licklider). We adopted these immediately and then got down to the business of inviting people.

Now, we have tried to be honest about all aspects of this process (most on Will’s blog):

our efforts to get people to submit their work and then again
the appreciation shown for providing comments and
trying to get some traffic to the site by blogging about the papers after: here, here and here for some examples

Some stuff worked: for example, the sessions were almost always fabulous. People were so giving with their time and to a person the authors were grateful. We even got some people to steal the format: as we asked them to do. Why not adopt the technology of the new age to improve what we were doing?

Some stuff was a little harder: trying to get non-political scientists was always a bit of a struggle but we were occasionally able to pull one. We seemed to always have a hard time trying to get a gender balance in the sessions but on more than one occasion we ended up with an all female panel. I joked that we knew we made it when we had an all African American one. Neither of us laughed that long because we knew it would be some time before that happened. We also got used to people saying no to us after they got the invite (some no's were just expected after a couple of prior rejections but we kept asking anyway). This was no joke actually We basically had to go through about 25 invites to get 5 people to say yes, which kind of wore on you after a while.

It was all worth it though. After each session we would debrief, going over what worked and what didn’t. Invariably, one of us would remark that we could not believe how good the session was, how surprised we were about the participants selflessness and willingness to assist their colleague. And, we would reflect on what the next one would be like and if our streak of winners would be over. Oddly, that never happened. We loved them all and Will felt that these represented one of the best things that he had facilitated within the discipline. As usual, I agreed.

Need some Moore?

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Cross-posting: The Will H. Moore Celebratory Revisitation of the Conflict Consortium Virtual Workshop, Episode 14

6/11/2017

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Konstantin Ash (PhD Candidate, UC San Diego), "Help Us Help You: Pro-Government Militias as Insurance against Leader Removal."
Discussants: Cristina Bodea , Shweta Moorthy, Brian Phillips, and Joe Wright

Watch the video here.

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Adventures with/in Will H. Moore, Part 7: We Don't Need No Conference, Let the MoFo Burn..... The Conflict Consortium Begins

6/10/2017

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Series Introduction

Will H. Moore had a kind of personality that is best described by the phrase: "down for whatever". For those that don't know, this is defined brilliantly by the "urban dictionary" below:

down for whatever
Ready and willing to participate in most any activity. If said by your homie it implies that he is ready to have a good time in any situation.

That was how Will and I interacted with one another. Sometimes, Will would set it off and I would be like "Let's do it!". Sometimes, I would set it off and Will would be like "how do we start?" Some of these efforts never got off the ground, but they were still fascinating to imagine. Some were partially successful and incredible to try. Some failed miserably but were fun to attempt. Some were more successful than we could have possibly imagined and these were just heavenly or the urban/funkier version of that (Mo' Betta Hevnly).

In my new series, I am going to explore Will, Willness (or, Mooreing) and my interaction with him. These adventures are useful to put out there because it is soothing to remember them now and because they not only tell us something about the type of human that he is but also the type of humans, situations and social science that he helped create - these were connected in his mind. Most of these are not on either of our vitaes - we just did them in an effort to start something, try something, create some resource for ourselves and others.

At its core, the adventures represent some bizarre mashup that is part buddy film, part travel story, part Mindwalk and part bromance set over 25 years. To help me tell these stories, I will use film, music, literature and perhaps a drawing or painting or two.

We Don't Need No Conference, Let the MoFo Burn..... The Conflict Consortium Begins

"Well that sucked." I forget who said it but as we exited a panel at the Midwest Political Science Association's national meeting, the words were spoken.

"Rather than again talk about what is wrong for the umpteenth time, why don't we try to figure out a way to fix what's broken?" Will said. Now, to be clear, the problem was not the MWPSA. We felt it was all conferences.

"To the bar brother Will.... To the bar" I added and off we went. There we sat for the next several hours in what was one of Will's mammoth sessions accompanied by wings and an occasional beverage.

I no longer have the napkins that I wrote down what we came up with that night but the list is below saved on my blackboard where I transcribed them later, under the title "Da Plan".

Over the next few posts, I will discuss what we came up with but I will begin with the upper right hand quadrant "ConEDU" where the "con" was for conflict and edu was for "education".

First, we concluded that many individuals went to conferences in order to interact with one another but we speculated that they were hindered by initial starting points (i.e., their institutional affiliations) as well as awkwardness/shyness. There had to be some way around this. Second, we thought that political science was limited by its exclusive attention to only political science. We thought that there needed to be some way that political scientists could meet non political scientists in a non-threatening, social setting from which other interactions could flow.

The answer was simple: let's have dinner (said with the energy of those old movies where they said "let's put on a show" which was !!! We figured that we would take advantage of having so many people in one place and put together dinners with folks that we thought should know one another as well as toss in some people from the host city that they definitely did not know but should (mostly from sociology but occasionally from economics or psychology). The invite looked like the following:

Christian Davenport/Will Moore and I (varying by the sender) would like to invite you to the Conflict Consortium's MPSA round of "Dinners of Contention, Coercion and Community" (hereafter Triple C or 3C). The Conflict Consortium endeavors to periodically bring together small groups of scholars in creative as well as interesting ways. We do so for the purposes of solidifying relationships in the field of subnational conflict. In addition to the gatherings we plan to hold at various conferences, the Triple C will be developing a list of best practices as well as most commonly utilized variables to assist in field development and to provide instructions for others in the fields of political science and sociology who wish to understand, use and create their own databases. This will fundamentally improve the current research in this area, lead to greater accumulation of findings in the future and provide guidance to those in as well as considering this area of research. The Consortium will also attempt to provide the framework within which data projects as well as scholars could be better coordinated with one another and courses taught on the subject at diverse venues around the globe.

You are invited to Consortium House (address and directions below) for the evening of

Whoever had the connection or was up sent the email.

We didn't just want to bring together political scientists who studied conflict/violence that did not know one another as well as other disciplines but we also wanted to make sure that we had representation of different ranks as well as genders. Early on we had to give up on racial/ethnic diversity because the numbers simply did not exist - a problem that persists to this day but that my project with Kathy Powers called "Pathways" was trying to fix.

As for the dinners, they were fabulous. They always started with some awkwardness. We went around and everyone introduced themselves. We ordered and then kind of laid out what we were trying to do. Things just kind of went from there. Some were clearly more successful than others. Some times we did not have enough diversity in terms of disciplines, ranks or genders but mostly we were able to pull it off. Dinner was always on us.

We felt that things went so well that we ramped it up a little bit and moved from Conflict Dinners to the Conflict House. As we described in our invites:

We are having aTriple C House at [insert meeting here]. What the heck is it? Instead of staying at the conference hotel CD/WM and I want to start renting a houses at the APSA, ISA and MPSA meetings and gather there somewhere between half a dozen to a dozen conflict researchers. The goal is to create informal opportunities to interact, and we plan to extend invitations with a junior (PhD student and faculty) skew, and generate interactions that aren't already baked in via Peace Science, etc. But the first task is to get this idea off of the ground.

You already know about the Triple C dinners. The folks living in the house will host these events (I plan to have one Fri and one Sat night at MPSA): we will invite others to come. And, of course, the dinner invitation will include hanging out afterward for drinks. Indeed, I plan to encourage the crew in the house to extend invitations to folks to drop by for a drink after dinner to whomever they wish.

What kind of a house are we talking about? A nice one! Here are the leading options for MPSA (assuming I can persuade critical mass). If you are game and have a preference, feel free to register said preference.

4 bedrooms: http://www.vrbo.com/311953

4 bedrooms: http://www.vrbo.com/153843

6 bedrooms: http://www.vrbo.com/373719

10 bedrooms: http://www.vrbo.com/59725

Food and drinks can be procured at Costco, Whole Foods, Trader Joes, or what have you. I will take the lead in addressing that.

So, what do you think? Are you game?

--
Will H. Moore
[email protected]
http://tinyurl.com/WHMoore

Again, the idea was great but the execution was a bit draining. Finding houses was not easy. Inviting people and trying to manage the appropriate balance of ranks, genders and disciplines became overly complex. Herding cats frequently came to mind as an image. The experience suggested to us that we were on to something however and folks seemed to be uniformly excited about the opportunity to meet others, share their work and trying to figure out how to create something that they wanted to participate in.

It was time to ramp it up.

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Adventures with/in Will H. Moore, Part 6: Let's Go to the Anti-G8/NATO protest and do some street social science

6/1/2017

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Let's Go to the Anti-G8/NATO protest and do some street social science

Will and I had just come out of the excellent social movement workshop being run by Rory McVeigh and Kraig Beyerlein at the University of Notre Dame and for some reason I asked him if he had heard of Clark McPhail the sociologist. He had not. I mentioned to him that Clark's work was really an earliesh foray into disaggregated conflict research. The short version: Clark maintained that what we generally describe as a single event (e.g., a protest or demonstration) was really many mini-events that took place in the same space and time but which were undertaken by different individuals as well as potentially involving different activities. In a sense, he maintained that researchers needed to leave the interconnected nature of contentious events as an empirical question. The cool part: to figure this out, Clark went to protest events, placed students into designated areas (some grid that he placed over the relevant events) and asked them to code specific activities providing a general sense of who was doing what, where and when. With this information, he could determine the singularity of particular contentious events - exclusively concerned with protestors.

We both thought that this was cool for a variety of reasons. First, it provided an alternative source of data to the conventional alternatives (i.e., news papers, ngo reports and government records). Indeed, it gave us an important fourth source against which we could compare to the others. Second, it was something that we could not only do in the upcoming NATO/G8 meeting and protest/march in Chicago but something that we could do whenever NATO/G8 met - potentially involving research teams from around the world. That was the idea at least.

That's all it took. We decided to do it. To pull it off, we asked for volunteers (from friends and then different listservs), we worked out a coding protocol and tried to find funding. Very quickly, we ditched the coding protocol because it was kind of problematic to get folks in a short time period ready to code stuff on the fly - validly and reliably. We were like a month away from when the meeting was being held. Instead, we opted to have students video what was around them and we would just code later. For this, we tried to get a few companies to donate cameras but this did not work out. We then decided to go with people's smartphones.

Training

For training we went over what we were trying to do, what we thought we would get out of it, what researchers generally did to compile information about contentious politics, what the NATO/G8 meeting was about, why people were always going to protest it and then where the protest and march were going to take place. At some point, we walked the route and took the pictures of the end point (at least that which was identified as the end point).

Before we got started, everyone had to sign a form:

INDEMNITY AGREEMENT for NATO Protest Research Project Participation

TO:   Christian Davenport and Will H. Moore (the “Indemnitees”)

FOR GOOD AND VALUABLE CONSIDERATION (the receipt and sufficiency of which is hereby irrevocably acknowledged) the undersigned, …………………………………………, hereby indemnifies and saves harmless the Indemnitees from and against any and all claims, demands, actions, suits, losses, costs, charges, expenses, damages and liabilities whatsoever which the Indemnitees may pay, sustain, suffer or incur by reason of or in connection with my voluntary participation in the NATO Protest Research Project that the Indemnitees are conducting on May 20-22, 2012 in Chicago, IL, including, without limiting the generality of the foregoing, all costs and expenses (including legal expenses) incurred in connection with any such loss or damage.

DATED: May 20, 2012

…………………………………………..        ………………………………………….
            Signature                                                                     Printed Name

The Route

Closer to the event, we mapped out the route in more detail and gave the students the map below to help them figure out where we were going, what was along the route, where we would rendezvous if things went south and where we were meeting when everything was done.

The Plan

The basic idea was to put McPhail's grid over the protest and then do our best to keep it assembled as the march got underway. The outline of the protest was easy as we laid out the grid. The march was a little more complex. We went with the following:

Formation During March:

1st Row: Christian
2nd Row: Ari and Molly
3rd Row: Matt and Emily
4th Row: Brenna and Alexi
5th Row: Christie and Sam
6th Row: Cori and Bria
7th Row: Olivia and Montana
8th Row: Lizzy
Roving Team: Will, Douglas, & Charlie

The Protest/Counter-Protest as Will saw it

Everyone went to their designated areas and at 30 minute intervals (starting around 9am until about 4), everyone did a 360 and took a picture of where they were. I am putting these up so that people can see what we did/what we found and so that you can assist in figuring out what could be done with the material. In between the videos, people took pictures. Will's pictures are below.

He later provided his field notes about what he saw

20 May 2012
WH Moore
FIELD NOTES, NATO Protest, Chicago, Ill

11:40 CST Departed Petrillo Band Shell, walked south on LSD. East on Congress (snow plows blocked LSD south), walked through the snow plows and went south on Columbus.

12:05 CST Federal fence at Roosevelt (in front of Field Museum) forced us east to Indiana. East to, and then south on, Wabash to Cermak.

13:41 CST Wabash & 21st (Loreal R&D): 2 buses of cops [video]

13:xx CST Wabash & Cermak: spot CNN & Fox broadcsat trucks in out of business tire store lot. Cops interact throughout the afternoon.

13:xx CST corner of Cermak & Michigan Papa Johns: 3 feds in PJ's shirts [no photo]. Nice haircuts and cargo pants. Wanted to order a pizza, but didn't.

13:xx CST Lunch break at White Castle. NBC broadcast truck in lot. One fed dressed as bicycle rider (with bike), one as fly fisherman(?)/tourist. Nice haircuts, boys.

13:46 CST 18th b/t Wabash & State: Riot police bus

13:49 CST Under the L (b/t Wabash & State) is empty

13:59 CST Wabash, next to Hilliard Project: cops (no riot gear), chillin

14:00 CST Wabash, next to Hilliard: long row of cops chillin [video]

14:02 CST Wabash & Cermak: Cops ordered to "Suit up! Full BDU!" Officer Boudreau <[email protected]> explained that they had a report about a group of four with swords walking on Harrison & Michigan [which was ahead of the march, which was just getting started].

14:21 CST 1830 Wabash: one lot south, cops staged in parking garage; three lots south, handful of unmarked police cars in junk yard

14:30 CST Clark & 18th is a Police Precinct

14:39-41 CST 16th & Wabash: Fire Dept, CPD, and Riot Buses

14:59 CST Michigan & 14th: front of the march (looking north)

15:00 CST Michigan & 14th: front of the march (looking north)

15:06 CST Wabash & ~14th: Sent this text to team leaders: "Tell people: don't go to curb. Christian did and is now kicked out"

15:08 CST Wabash & 13th/14th: Phalanx of police roll south, fill side streets

15:12 CST bike cops and cars roll south on Wabash, turning east at 16th. Riot gear on

15:12 CST Buses, etc. no longer at 16th corner

15:20 CST Wabash & Cermak: Sent this text to team leaders: "Expect to be dispersed west at Cermak. Cops heavily deployed; riot gear, horses nearby. Be alert and have an excape plan! Pass this on.

15:23 CST Wabash, south from Cullerton: Empty buses (for arrests?); major police presence beyond the buses

15:25 CST 21st @ Michigan: Cops earlier at Loreal R&D now deployed, helmets off

15:27 CST Wabash & Cermak: Sent this text to team leaders: "Cell battery dying in prob 20 mins"

15:28 CST Wabash & Cermak: Firefighters and mounted cops at the ready.

15:29 CST Wabash & Cermak: CNN & Fox broadcsat trucks photo

15:40 CST State & Cermak: Sent this text to team leaders: "Juicing phone at Chicken Shack on NE corner of State & Cermak"

15:44 CST State & Cermak: Sent this text to team leaders: "CORRECTION: Rally is on. Location: Park on SE corner of Cermak & State. Grid there. Porta potties available. Please pass on."

15:47 CST State @ Cermak, looking south: Police lining the cattle shute into the Park [B&W png file from video stub]

16:00 CST State & Cermak: Sent this text to team leaders: "March is apparently stopped due to speeches. Cops want to move to park two blocks west, speakers don't. Have an exit plan if it gets unsafe! Be prepared. Please pass on."

16:12 CST State & Cermak: Sent this text to team leaders: "Please tell your team we are dispersing. Project over. Meet at Chinatown Gate."

16:21 CST Cermak @ State: Riot cops move east down cattle shute

16:21 CST State & Cermak: Sent this text to team leaders: "Riot cops moving to Mich on Cermak. Batons out. Disperse now."

16:22 CST State & Cermak: Dispersal Order

16:24 CST Cermak, west of State: Riot Cops looking west

The Protest/Counter-Protest as Christian saw it

I evidently took more pictures. Mine are below, starting from training to set up to the end of the day.

Note: we pulled the plug on the project when things started getting a little hostile. Initially Will and I were going to loop back to what was becoming a standoff between the police and the black bloc. We could not get back in however as the area got locked off - nobody in after they had left. With that we went to go get some food.

What else did we collect in addition to videos and photos?

we scraped all news reports: before, during and after the event
we scraped all tweets
we obtained all court documents concerning the event
we obtained all police press releases concerning the event
we began a video depository for people to give us their videos

What did we find?

Contention Starts Earlier than event
Contention continues beyond the specific event
Protests are highly variable events as McPhail suggested
- Some elements are clearly diffusing across contexts
- Much of what happened was quite boring and uneventful
Policing is also variable which was something the McPhail did not discuss
- There was significant Intermixing of the police with the crowd
- There were mixed protest-policing dyads with black police policing predominately white protestors and white police policing predominately white protestors (not many black folk attended the event)
Coverage starts before the event and set the tone for subsequent coverage
- Conflict garners more attention than other activities
- The freakier/stranger the more likely something was to be discussed

Here is our pitch, approach and some of what we discovered

While excited about what we collected, we were kind of disappointed that no one seemed to want to follow up on our effort. We also got stuck with trying to code video. Clark did discuss some of this but we did not find that we were able to move it too far. We did make some headway though. We also found a number of hypotheses that we could explore with these data:

Hypotheses Regarding Repression and Dissent

Repression increases a challenger’s costs of collective action (Tilly 1978; Snyder and Tilly 1972; Hibbs 1973)
Massacres lead to backlash protests (Franciso 2005)
Repression increases protests (Fransisco 1995;1996; Carey 2006)
Repression has an inverted-U effect on dissent (Gurr 1970; DeNardo 1985; Bwy 1968; Fierabend and Fierabend 1972; Muller and Seligson 1987; Muller and Weede 1990; Olivier 1991; Khawaja 1993)
Repression has U shaped effects on dissent (Lichbach and Gurr 1981)
Repression has U shaped effects in democracies, inverted U shaped effects in non-democracies (Gupta et al. 1993)
Repression has a direct, negative effect on protests, but inspires micromobilization processes that encourage protest later on (Opp and Roehl 1990; Rasler 1996)
Repression of nonviolent protests lead to violent protests (Lichbach 1987; Moore 1998)
Repression of violent protests lead to non-violent protests (ibid.).
Indiscriminate repression leads to increased protests (Mason and Krane 1989; Goodwin 2001; Kalyvas and Kocher 2006; Kocher et al. 2011)
Indiscriminate repression leads to decreased protests (Lyall 2009)
Selective repression deters protest participation
Repression will deter protest during normal settings, but during periods of national protest waves repression will increase protests (Brocket 2005)
Repression radicalizes non-violent protestors (White 1990)
The ratio of state repressive order to challenger order determines the amount of information flowing to the state
Backlash protests occur when repression is perceived as extremely unjust by the general public and when information about the events is communicated to receptive audiences (Hess and Martin 2006: 249; Martin 2004, 2005)
Torture does not influence dissent (Sullivan 2011)
Leadership decapitation decreases movement mobilization (Jordan 2009; Nepstad and Bob 2006)
Individuals who are repressed will escalate their commitment, the non-repressed will drop out (Davenport and Sullivan 2011)
Individuals who strongly identify with the movement will protest more in the face of repression, others will drop out (Sullivan and Davenport 2012)
Repression inspires movements to change tactics (McAdam 1983)
Repression leads to less easily observed tactics (Sullivan and Davenport 2011)
Fear of covert repression decreases protests (Star et al. 2008)
Covert repression radicalizes a movement (Varon 2004; Zwerman and Steinhoff 2005)
Non-violent protestors often seek out repression (Ackerman and Duvall 2000, Chong 1991; Sharp 1973
Protests threatening the government increase repression (Davenport 1995)
Dissent in areas that the government weakly controls leads to greater repression than dissent in areas controlled by the government (Boudreau 2005)
Protests threatening the police increase repression (Earl and Soule 2006)
Sources directly influence what is reported and recalled (Davenport 2007)

Finally, we got a little disheartened when the venues selected for the meetings became a little bit harder to access and we then kind of left the topic on a shelf for a while until we could get our heads around it.

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Cross-posting: The Will H. Moore Celebratory Revisitation of the Conflict Consortium Virtual Workshop, Episode 15

Adventures with/in Will H. Moore, Part 8: We Don't Need No Conference, Let the MoFo Burn..... The Conflict Consortium Goes Live

Cross-posting: The Will H. Moore Celebratory Revisitation of the Conflict Consortium Virtual Workshop, Episode 14

Adventures with/in Will H. Moore, Part 7: We Don't Need No Conference, Let the MoFo Burn..... The Conflict Consortium Begins

We Don't Need No Conference, Let the MoFo Burn..... The Conflict Consortium Begins

Adventures with/in Will H. Moore, Part 6: Let's Go to the Anti-G8/NATO protest and do some street social science

Let's Go to the Anti-G8/NATO protest and do some street social science

Training

The Route

The Plan

The Protest/Counter-Protest as Will saw it

The Protest/Counter-Protest as Christian saw it

Analog - The Anti-Blog

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