Formal and informal

I'm posting this on Friday, as it was $15 for Internet access at the hotel in Montreal.

2 hours meetings, 1 hour book-shopping, 1 hour reading, 6 hours travel, page count = 112

Hmm. A bit of a mixed second day in Montreal. It started off well, as my first two meetings were great. Both were with professors who know a lot about security forces and local-level dynamics, but in countries other than Colombia, so they had interesting comparative information to share, as well as insightful comments on my work. One of them echoed yesterday's comment about developing an original dataset. Definitely something I want to look into, and that ought to be feasible given the sources I'm already consulting. The other had really good suggestions about how to position work on the police in the context of two adjacent literatures, on decentralization and civil-military relations. His own work looks at both of those issues, and I'll want to be in touch with him as the semester progresses. In fact, he teaches in the department of Villager Marco Mojica, so it really is a small world....

Things went a bit downhill from there, as my other two meetings didn't happen. The first, I'm not sure what happened, I was where I was supposed to be and waited 20 minutes. The second, I gather the person was delayed coming from the airport. Alas. I'll look into setting phone appointments with both, as I very much would like to speak with them both.

I did manage to get in some shopping for dissertation-related books while at the conference. As it's an academic trade show, all the university presses set up booths in the exhibit hall and offer discounts on their usual prices, which are steep given the limited press runs. (Trivia: the 7th Harry Potter book made more in its first day than the top-grossing movie of all time made in its first weekend. The pen is mightier than the camera?) I went a little crazy, but it has been three years since I've been paying attention, and there's a lot of interesting stuff going on - especially in the decentralization literature, which I need to catch up on. So I may have made a few purchases...

...one of which I started reading on the way home, and gave me lots of food for thought. Charles Tilly, one of the pioneering authors on state formation, wrote a short, intriguing book about "trust networks" and how they interact with systems of rule (governments). This is a fascinating sociological angle on the types of dynamics I study between irregular armed forces and security forces, and makes me think a little differently about what counts as order and what doesn't. Banditry may in some cases be a form of local trust networks protecting themselves from encroachment by the state. While my work focuses on what the state is up to in these situations, it's important to understand the resources through which rebels operate in cases where insurrection is prevalent. Hmm, I think it's time to revisit the idea of doing a formal model; there's a lot going on at the local level, and some of that type of thinking could help me organize all the different pieces.