Sources and Methods #18: Will McCants

 
 

Will McCants 101:

Will's books on Amazon.com

Will on Twitter

Will's Brookings page

Will @ Jihadica

Show Notes:

Alex’s blog post on Middlebury / Arabic language study

Press on Taliban Project (alexstrick.com blog link)

Tinderbox (Sources & Methods sponsor)

 

7:33 - What policy papers do is mark you as a person who has expertise on a particular subject and a certain point of view on that subject. So you become identified with a topic and a way of approaching it, and that is useful then as a calling card. But if you really want to influence policy makers, I think few things are more influential than the op-ed. Anytime you can place something in a major newspaper, that will have a major influence. And sadly, the more critical you are of current policy, the more circulation your op-ed will get inside government.

Marc Sageman

14:15 - As researchers, we forget sometimes that the government in many instances is playing with a different set of information. And we get upset a certain policy or a certain way of thinking and rarely do we pause and take into consideration the fact that they may see it different because they’re looking at a different set of facts than we are. Working in government gives more humility about one’s own research and where it fits into this big decision making process that is the government.

19:36 - Foreigners that come over and work in the US government - I’ve worked with Brits and Australians, and they are always - to a person - astounded by the size of the American bureaucracy. It is huge. In an ideal world, that whole Executive Branch machine would be humming along, generating policy options for their principles to consider and bring before the president. But that’s not really how it works in practice. They do generate those policy options, but really its the president and the few people around him that are deliberating on these things. And if they find a policy that suits their preconceptions or they find a policy they really want, they’ll select it. But my impression being in government that policy options go up - that’s not how it works in practice.

22:36 - The reality is that the Islamic State presents far less of a threat to the homeland as it does to our partners in the region and I think they understand that at the president’s level. If you look at the way he justified the bombings against the Islamic State in Iraq and then in Syria, it was about the threat to our regional allies. But I don’t think popularly that’s the perception in this country. And also from Congress, there’s a feeling that the Islamic State is going to launch waves of human attacks each day, and that’s just not the case.

23:50 - 9/11 was the moment that I decided to get into the policy world. I was at Princeton working on my PhD on Islamic history… and when they smashed the planes into the towers, I wanted to contribute to our response… and my first foray into that was translating The Management of Savagery (overview, Will’s translation).

Michael Scott Doran

25:40 - (On getting a PhD or not) I would say if you’re getting a PhD because you believe you’re going to get an academic job, that would be a terrible decision. You will probably not get an academic job and if you do it will probably not be at an institution or geographic location where you want to be. So if you go into it with that limited perspective, I think you’re going to be very unhappy. But if you go into it with the perspective of ‘I want to get some great training and study with amazing people and the world is my oyster, I can do anything with this PhD’ I think it’s a great thing to do and time well spent.

29:56 - (On sources of information for the Islamic State) And the fourth source would be the amazing reporting that’s been done in Arabic about the group. The Arab reporters have amazing sources, they are fearless, but a lot of times, the things that they report don’t make it into Western Media. So there’s a valuable gold mine there of information to be used… There’s also some great work happening in European languages that we’re not aware of.

Tinderbox (Sources & Methods Sponsor)

35:10 - (On the apocalyptic thinking of the Islamic State) I think it’s really important in terms of attracting foreign fighters from the West. If you think about what gets a foreigner motivated to leave their home and travel to an insanely violent conflict zone, there are few things that might motivate people more than the belief that the end times are right around the corner. So I see (it) as mainly directed to foreign fighters.

But also in the Middle East, after the Iraq War in 2003, apocalypticism began to get a lot more currency than it used to have. Before the war, apocalypticism among Sunnis was really something of a fringe subject, as compared to the Shia, for whom it’s been an important topic for centuries. for modern Sunnis, it’s something the Shia speculate on, but that’s not really our bag. The US invasion of Iraq really changed the ways the Sunnis thought about the end times. With the Arab Spring and all the political turmoil that followed in its wake, its given an apocalyptical framework far more currency than it ever had a way to explain political upheaval in the region.

The Believer - Brookings Long-Form Article on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi written by Will McCants

37:53 - (Responding to question ‘is history made by men or faceless forces’) I think if your work-a-day world and you professional experience is going up through graduate school, getting a position in university - you tend to prefer explanations of the world that look at things in terms of big structural forces that are beyond the capability of one human to control. When you go into a big bureaucracy like the US government and you have a series of good bosses or bad bosses and their competency as bosses really has an influence on how policies are made - not just substances, but how it moves around the building, whose attention it gets - you come away with a much greater appreciation for how much individual humans matter in a big, faceless organization like the DoD or State Department. And when I was working on the Baghdadi profile, I had in mind a lot of my own experience in government bureaucracy. How cutthroat it can be, how complicated it is, so I had a much greater appreciation for the role of individuals and I think if you were to look at the landscape of the civil war in Syria and Iraq, you can see a lot of different personalities as leaders of many different groups, but what’s fascinating is they are all responding to the same circumstances - ie the civil war - but in very different ways. They’re making different choices - some of that has to do with their organizational culture and some of it has to do with the temperament of the individual. Even in the current Islamic State, if you compare Baghdadi to his predecessor, or the real shadow ruler of the first Islamic State, Abu Ayub al-Masri, the current Baghdadi is a much more capable bureaucrat than those men were, and they paid the price of their incompetency and he has been rewarded for his competency. So individuals definitely matter.

43:25 - I utterly agree that our understanding of the history of these organizations that are nominally adhering to the same ideology or similar ideologies - we don’t have a good handle on at all. Partly that is a language barrier - as you know, it’s not easy to learn these languages that are required to get deep into it, and also because of how dangerous some of these groups are. It’s not easy to do a lot of original research on them. Also, valuable primary sources are killed off as well. So it’s not an easy area to work in. So I would agree that histories of individuals and groups, we are certainly in the starting stages.

44:45 - (On ‘have policy lessons been learned since 2001/2003’) I would say among the policy-making elite, yes. There is much more a pessimism about what the Americans can do in the Middle East despite their overwhelming military power, and there’s greater humility. It’s tough to say with the political class, and you don’t know which of that to take seriously. Right now I’m trying to catalog the Republican candidates positions on ISIS, and they’re all over the field. Some are isolationist, some sound aggressive, but when you scratch the surface, you realize they’re talking about putting a few more special forces on the ground. I think everybody is constrained by the mood of the American public, which is very much anti-interventionist, and even when there are spikes in their support for intervention, nobody believes it will be long lasting, so it will not sustain a decades long occupation. So I do think there has been a reassessment of the efficacy of American power, almost too far in the opposite extreme. There’s almost a sense of hopelessness, that the Americans cannot do anything to help, which will make it to where - if that endures - America will become increasingly isolationist, and you have other powers who do not feel so isolationist who are getting involved and perhaps making things even worse.

47:44 - (on learning languages to understand groups) I’m not particularly snooty on this topic. I don’t think you need to be a major scholar of the language to understand an enormous amount about these groups. For people making decisions about their time, I think they’d have to really evaluate what type of job they hope to have in the future. That said, it has been a great use to me, both as a researcher, but also in the role of policy-making. Being able to go check a source, or look at a translation - is this word as aggressive as it looks in English? - has been really useful. I don’t think you ever do yourself harm by learning another language but as you both know, it is a huge commitment of time.

50:48 - I benefitted a huge amount (in Arabic language development) from going to Middlebury (see Alex’s post about his experience there above).

52:11 - (On working efficiently) When I start a project, I do try to think through my process and think about ‘What can I improve here.’ For the ISIS book, there wasn’t a lot of systemization to the process. I thought about it in the beginning, but I really needed to get that book done. It helped that I already knew the sources, and I had a general sense of what I wanted to say. So with that one, it was really a process of diving in. Making sure I had essay-length sections as standalone sections, and then synthesize it in a thousand words. You’ll see in the book, some of the sections are blog posts, I forced myself to write the blog posts as a way to put the material down and then refine it a little bit later. So in this one, I did not have a systematic process for collecting. For the Quran book I’ve been working on forever, there is a lot of process. I use Scrivener and there are folders and subfolders, and that’s because I was less familiar with the material. So there’s a ton of background reading I had to do and that requires are a lot more organization. So I would say it depends on the task.

On writing - on shorter pieces, it’s really just wherever you can fit it in. When I was working on the book, I would try to get four days a week where I could get solid writing. I could sit down at the computer - and they always tell you this is the worst thing you can do - I would answer all my emails and turn off all my notifications and go into it.

57:23 - (On ‘managing the flood’) I use Evernote. A lot of my sources are ephemeral, and thankfully I had saved them there. This is also the case for Arabic language sources on news sites. Evernote was a huge help in keeping a digital footprint for where I had traveled.

 

Sources and Methods #17: Leah Farrall

 
 

Our thanks to Tinderbox for sponsoring this week's episode. Listen to our interview with Tinderbox's creator, Mark Bernstein here, and check out Tinderbox here.

Leah Farrall 101:

Leah's website

Leah on Twitter

Leah's new book: The Arabs at War in Afghanistan

Show Notes:

10:59 – I actually took a lot of my inspiration from screenwriting books and documentary books than any other work. Narrative arcs and how we could do that type of thing, because some of these conversations could fill books in themselves.

12:00 – Our particular goal was to make a book for kids in a library to read in future generations.

13:35 – There are four things I will fess up to being quite shocked by:

1)   Spoils of war from the First Iraq War ending up in Jalalabad

2)   The details of Bin Laden’s support for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

3)   Abu Musab al-Suri and the issue of recruit poaching

4)   The involvement of Al-Qaeda in Yemen, going back as far as it did

This all has relevance to today – we always want to look at change without looking at continuity.

15:10 – Ideology comes last, not first

17:30 – The entire way in which we study this material, we’ve got it the wrong way around and I think we really need to have a good hard think about it. To me, that’s what part of this book shows. That we got so much of this history wrong. And we got it wrong because we always try to jump to a solution without letting the history speak for itself first.

20:57 – Mustafa and I being able to do this book was a unique confluence of circumstances and also as well as personalities. Both of us had influence within our fields, but also operated on the edge of them.

29:52 – Everyone has an agenda for everything they do, and this is important to remember.

42:01 – Implications of fighting for funding: the pressure to reduce everything to bite size chunks. And with that, we’re missing the ability to chart emerging landscapes and how they’re changing. And it’s very rare that you get that type of funding coming through. The traditional funding structures have not caught up to the changing research environment. So we’ll need to look at new ways of collaborating and new ways of researching. The nice side is that the online space means that people like us can contact each other and work together in a way that we couldn’t before, and that’s breaking down some of the barriers that academia is putting up in other areas.

46:45 – Teaching should be research led. So it’s balancing the research you need to do when you’re teaching with the research you want to do. And I haven’t found my balance yet.

49:29 – I taught, before 9/11, and taught a counter-terrorism course, and one of the things I made every single one of these students in this tutorial class do was give me their own definitions of terrorism, and present to the class the reasons why. And they couldn’t just pick an existing definition and if they did they had to really heavily justify it and explain why they felt nothing should be added or removed. So after the first few it got really tiring, as you would imagine. But when you pushed through, the discussion started, and I found it fascinating that – well, it’s 2015, and my students still get back to me and they still remember those definitions. That formed the basis of thinking exercises that I did throughout the entire course.

51:09 – I think (research) is all about the teaching or research objectives. I remember I had colleagues in the Australian Federal Police and I felt sorry for them (though I was no different) because no one really taught us critical thinking. I hit the work place, and I didn’t know how to think critically and I didn’t know how to analyze. I think we’ve got a real responsibility to make sure that’s what we’re teaching our students. You want to give students transferable skills.

53:58 – Gregory Johnsen’s (previous guest on the show!) excellent AUMF piece

54:30 – In the quest for knowledge, how we see something and how we understand it is essentially the main starting point and the main problem as well.

56:30 – I’m a very visual person and I’m a very messy person…often just grabbing a notepad and scribbling down notes. I love Analyst’s Notebook, purely because you can make a mess.

I also have a box full of post-it notes, and use butcher's block and put those post-its on top of it.

One Research Ladder

1:01:01 – I think there’s something to be said for it (getting up and going) but you have to be very sure of your own strengths and weaknesses, and what you will and won’t tolerate. It sounds silly, but if the value and integrity of your work is something you value above all else, be prepared to be blacklisted. I’ve pulled things from high-profile publications because they’ve insisted on using different words that would misrepresent something so badly that subject matter experts would say ‘what the hell.’ Now, that’s my personal commitment, but that’s come with a cost.  And to anybody coming into the academic field, be aware of that type of stuff. Be aware of what you will commit to and what you won’t. Because there will come a time where you will have to make a choice – do you surrender some of that integrity? Is having that profile important to you? Is being on TV important to you? If so, great, but know with that it comes with certain benefits and certain negatives.

Sources and Methods #15: Andrew Abbott

 
 

Andrew Abbott 101:

Personal website

Book: Digital Paper: A Manual for Research and Writing with Library and Internet Materials

Speech: The Aims of Education Address (for the class of 2006 at the University of Chicago)

Show Notes:

“You may have heard from some people that there’s a revolution in research and that it is easier than ever before. I don’t need to tell you that this is nonsense. You know from firsthand experience that research is confusing and daunting, as indeed it has always been. We are no closer to revolutionary improvement in library-based and “found data” knowledge than we were thirty years ago—more likely the reverse. The new tools in fact make it harder than ever for students to learn the disciplines of research, mainly through sheer overload.” - From Digital Paper

6:15 - My students [at the University of Chicago] today are completely overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that’s available to them on the internet, and they’re particularly overwhelmed because they don’t have any clues about how to make judgements of quality.

9:52 - Students come into the world thinking that the internet is the model of knowledge - whereas for my generation, students came into the world prepared by print. Of course we read plenty of junk print, don’t get me wrong. But we had a notion that when it’s a serious paper, we go to the library and start looking in indexes. Students today don’t have that - they have the internet. Students generally have very little idea of how to find things systematically and moreover they don’t know how to find high quality stuff.

12:50 - What is going to happen to libraries is that these buildings will be repurposed, the same way most churches are being repurposed these days. That’s because administrators have space problems, and they see the library as a waste of space. That’s what’s going to happen - not at the top of the research system, but throughout the system.

The stunning William Rainey Harper Memorial Library at the University of Chicago

17:56 - We’re definitely at a ‘use it or lose it moment’ for libraries. Teachers need to start teaching their students how to use libraries, or they’ll simply be taken away.

20:11 - Reading itself is clearly in rapid decline, both among my students and in fact my colleagues. You can see this by looking at page number citations. I proved this by looking at Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and showed that when the book first came out, about 17% of the references to it had page numbers - so not just Kuhn 1970, but Kuhn 1970, page 26. Now that number is down to 2%, and what’s clear is that the vast majority of people citing Kuhn have probably never read the book.

22:05 - We’re moving to a point where everyone in the world thinks everything can be abstracted... This notion that you can get to ‘the point’ and extract ‘the point’ has become central to people’s thinking about how knowledge works. Well, that isn’t the way knowledge works, and we’re actually in a bigger crisis about this, than about libraries. The bigger problem is that students coming up don’t actually know what knowledge is. They only know what the internet is. And the experiential message of the internet is that everything has an address somewhere, you just need to find it, you just need an address. Of course, that’s not what knowledge is. Knowing is not knowing a web address. It’s assembling things, it’s making new things in your own head. The internet only teaches you to find things.

23:57 - Take the example of Hobbes. I ask students to write a paper on Hobbes. They read the three or ten chapters of Hobbes, they underline the sentences they think were the important ones, and then they put those in a list or a file, and they say ‘Hobbes said so and so’ and they write a bit about that, and then they say ‘Hobbes also said this’ and write about that. It’s bizarre. They have no idea they need to comprehend Hobbes’s argument, and then respond to the argument, not to the bits from which it’s made. But if you ask them to summarize Hobbes’s arguments, they’ll present you with lists of bullet points, because they’ve been taught in classes that Hobbes can be presented as bullet points. So in many ways the teachers are to blame, but the whole concept of knowledge as it was understood by the mid-20th century is just under very serious attack right now. And it’s hard to see how that’s going to be changed much.

31: 09 - But the question is - do we actually have judgements of what is better knowledge? So I decided to research that a few years ago, and I look at complaints of the Research Assessment Exercise in Great Britain. And I looked into problems in the RAE. And they asked in their questions ‘what is excellent research?’ and I read all of those responses.

Link to abstract of Dr. Abbott’s paper on the results of this research here, summarized below.

33:07 - So, it turns out we know only three things about excellent research. The first is that you can’t measure it. The only people who believe it can be measured are the statisticians, not surprisingly. Second thing is that nobody can recognize it except for us, ie the discipline. The public doesn’t know, we know. The third thing is that it’s new. That’s it. Excellent research, then according to these academics, is something that can’t be measured, that we recognize, that’s new. That’s the grand total of what people told the RAE board about what excellence in research is. That’s pretty bad, we need to come up with some better definitions. I’ve been trying to come up with these, particularly in disciplines that are not cumulative - mainly the social sciences.

47:07 - The problem with student approaches to the world today is that they don’t think they need to know a lot. They don’t believe in memorization. You don’t need to memorize the entire Bible - but you do need to know the important names because then, if you’re reading it, the entire page will ‘turn blue’ like hyperlinks. You won’t necessarily know what’s on the other end of the hyperlink, but you’ll know it’s a hyperlink to something. So the point is - in order to browse, you have to have a fair amount of stuff in your head already. Students gradually discover this over projects, as they get more stuff in their head. Browsing is a casualty mainly because students don’t realize that one of the things you have to do early on in a project is a fair amount of background reading and a lot of memorization to just kind of get the stuff into your head, so that as you read, you’ll recognize important things. This is just a basic part of associative thinking.

49:08 - Early on in a project, you need to start memorizing. You need contextual knowledge for a project. And importantly, it provides a canon. And this is a way of solving an overload problem. Canon’s aren’t about excluding anybody, they are about solving a problem of ‘too-muchness.’ Actual disciplinary canons are not so much about coming people out of our discipline, but more that so we can all have something to talk about, that provides a common language.

55:01 - Second, simplification helps fight overload. Wikipedia seems new, but we’ve actually had books around like that for hundreds of years. Simplification helps the task of knowledge. You have to think of memorization in the context of the problem of overload, this huge problem that we all face all the time, and has been true essentially since the existence of the book.

57:01 - Writing is suffering, and part of the reason is the amount of writing people do. Important to remember that historically, the notion that everyone who reads works carefully - the notion that that person is always going to write something is not there. Many PhDs in the US through the mid-20th century published only one or two papers. I’m sure if you looked at the Oxford dons of the early 20th century you’d discover they didn’t write much - they spent all their time teaching and giving lectures in the schools.

Nowadays we have these beancounters running everything so everyone is writing everything, including graduate students who certainly have nothing or not much to say, so much of the emphasis on writing is purposeless, and exists mainly for personal advancement, which is a whole separate issue.

1:02:15 - If you go to any web development site, it will tell you that the level of language to use on a website is optimized at about sixth grade, or the age you would be at at 12 or 13. So internet sites tend to use really dumb language, and it’s dumb writing. And this is what students are contacting day and day again. And the rest of it is student blogs and posts, much of it flatulent. So students, even those with a great deal of training, have simply not contacted as much good prose. Generally, the best students I have have generally limited access to excellent prose. And you write what you read. So when I start teaching writing, I have students read a lot of different stuff, to expose them.

1:08:31 - Students of mine have enjoyed the exercise of developing a controlled vocabulary. And by doing that at the start of a project, you avoid the panic at the end of a project of wondering how you can keep your work well defined and logical, so at the end you don’t have to magically figure out how to put it all together.

1:15:20 - Deep down, I myself have never been much interested in applied knowledge. The modern social system is so productive in terms of its ability to generate useful, wonderful things that enable people to have good lives, that this society could afford to have huge proportions of its members dedicate large portions of their lives to research that has no practical implications whatsoever. We have an absolutely wonderful system and there’s no need for any of us to work as hard as we do. So we ought to be able to afford a huge amount of knowledge for its own sake. But obviously we don’t have that.

1:28:03 - What is the future of knowledge? It’s what we make it. It’s not out there to be discovered by some predictive algorithm. It’s out there for us to find it.