Far afield, close to home

1 hour writing, 3.5 hours reading & research, 0.5 hours emailing, 0.5 hours administrivia

As I continue to toy with the idea of including a formal model in my dissertation, I'm boning up on math so I can more easily read articles that use formal models, and get a better handle on what I would need to do one myself. I ordered a textbook on "Mathematics for Economists" per a colleague's recommendation, and started working my way through it. My aim is to understand enough by the end of the summer that I can comfortably read articles using formal models in political science journals, understanding how the models are put together and generate insights.

At my friend DK's suggestion, I checked out some news articles about the conflict going on right now in the Gaza strip. Within the Palestinian territory, the two main factions, Hamas and Fatah, are on the verge of civil war. At the heart of the struggle is, guess what, control of the security forces - my topic! Fatah is the faction that Arafat led before he died. They were in charge for a number of years, but last year, in the first election in ten years in Palestine, Hamas, which is fundamentalist, unexpectedly won a significant share of the legislature. So now Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), the governing body, is Fatah, but the Prime Minister is Hamas. Apparently, the Interior Minister (which is a ministry I focus on in my dissertation in looking at Colombia) is Hamas as well, and last year, he created a security force that's separate from the PA police. From what I can gather, it's basically a pro-Hamas militia that the Interior Minister decided to give the sanction of government. Abbas and his Fatah cohorts were of course not pleased, seeing it as not really different from a militia, and also a direct threat to the official PA security forces.

The issue here is about the distinction between regular and irregular armed forces, and who has control of which. One of the classic definitions of the state is that it exercises "monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force," with the key word being "legitimate." Regular armed forces operate under the rubric of state legitimacy - army, police, national guard, etc. Irregular armed forces are organized, but they operate outside the state's jurisdiction, and without its authorization: gangs, militias, the Minutemen, etc. (Private security companies, which have proliferated in Latin America, are a gray area, in that they may or may not be regulated and/or licensed by the state.)

So what happens when a member of the government - the Minister of the Interior, no less - authorizes the conversion of an irregular armed force into a regular armed force - and the legitimacy of his action is questioned by other members of the government, as happened last year in Palestine? The issue is even more complicated given that the schism within the government on this point is along factional lines. The key dynamic I'm interested in developing a formal model about is that of factions at the local level, and how they impact the decision of local politicians to use the local police for financial (personal benefit) or political (party benefit) corruption. So I'll be following this story as it continues to develop, and thinking more about how it reflects on and connects to the issues I'm writing about.

One thing this story also demonstrates is "layering" in terms of institutional development. Today, I finished reading an article by a colleague from my department, Taylor Boas, that was published earlier this year on "path dependence," which is the idea that once institutions are developed in a certain way, they tend to persist over time and condition future outcomes in a predictable way. The argument of my dissertation at this point features path dependence prominently, so I'm lucky that one of my colleagues is emerging as a leading scholar of this important methodological question. Taylor uses the model of the Internet and its "composite standard," in which individual components form part of a larger framework that can stay largely the same even as its components change over time, to propose a new way of thinking about path dependence. One of the dynamics that happens as institutions develop is "layering," in which new rules or features are added on to the existing ones: for example, the committee structure of the US Congress adds new procedural rules while preserving its existing ones. These are incremental changes, but they can end up altering the overall structure significantly over time. The Internet was originally designed as a way for defense researchers to communicate, and through layering has become something much larger, to the extent we can talk about "conversion" of the institution of the Internet from its original purpose.

So what we see in Palestine is layering that threatens to convert the security forces from what they ought to be - the guarantors of citizen security - into something entirely different - the agents of factional strife.

Well! That's certainly enough for one day. It's funny how disparate strands can come together sometimes.