Lining 'em up

2.5 hours researching, 2.5 hours writing, page count = 202

Welcome to this week's monitor, my dear old dad Hugo Cardona, in Milwaukee!

Each day lately I move a little bit closer to a very concrete goal: completing a draft of the revised Chapter 1 so I can send it to my main advisor. It's now 50 pages, most of which are new, all of which have been revised several times since January. Today I filled in the smaller gaps, relating to some pending cites on Colombia, Mexico, and Paraguay. Now I'm really focused on some pending information on Uruguay, and some broader comparative data on the balance between the army and police in other countries besides Colombia. This is a new piece that one of my advisors encouraged me to focus on in December, so I'm gathering that information.

It's interesting, Uruguay turns out to be less straightforward than I had anticipated, but that may end up strengthening my argument rather than weakening it. The key moment was when I lined up prevalence of coups and prevalence of insurrections after the end of the state formation period (1910), developed a measure for each, and then compared them. The rank order looks a lot like what I would expect it to be given my hypothesis of the importance of security-force configurations. So it'll be interesting to see what happens as I get more information on the army-police resource differential.