It burns!

1 hour writing, 3 hours reading/researching

Ooh, that's no fun. I spent a couple of hours this morning going through several hundred listings from the Library of Congress catalog, culling relevant sources about the municipal and departmental police in Colombia, and then emailed them to myself; but it turns out their email system erases any line with an accent in it. Which is like every line containing a title, when you're consulting Spanish-language sources. D'oh! At least I have the call numbers that I can use to reconstruct the listings, but still, it's a hassle. Good news is there's a LOT of stuff there, including a good bit at the state level. A trip to DC may be in order...

First, I need to go figure out what data I need, what's highest priority, and then figure out if LOC, NYPL, or Berkeley are my best bets. I'm considering a research trip to Colombia in September, but I want to get as much as I can stateside before committing to that. There's a surprising range of Spanish-language sources, and historical ones too, in the three libraries I'm consulting. Certainly makes life easier.

Continued writing the police chapter. A professor who's written on irregular armed forces, of whose work I think highly, has offered to take a look at it, so I'll be getting that to him next week in advance of the August 1 LASA deadline.

Thanks to Rafael Mazer for being a great, engaged monitor this week, in the midst of what I take to be his last week at Hispanics in Philanthropy. Muito obrigado, Rafa! Up next is Geordan Drummond, in Philadelphia. More on him - and on Williamstown and Restaurant Week - next Monday. Have a great weekend!

Preoccupied

1.5 hours writing, 2.5 hours reading/researching, 0.5 hours emailing

Continued working this morning on the chapter about police systems. I have about 20 pages of raw material, which I'll keep shaping and expanding in anticipation of having a draft for LASA by August 1st. In terms of reading, I did some math and read more in the 2003 collection on irregular armed forces. That revealed a vein of writing in Europe about political policing that I'll want to tap into.

I was preoccupied today, as Cathy was just arriving at Grand Central last night when the water main exploded. It was very scary; people running and screaming, nobody knew what was going on. The column of steam was so high at first that "it looked like a skyscraper was on fire," she says. She'll have to drop the clothes she was wearing and the bag she was carrying off at a Con Edison pickup point in Midtown on Monday so they can dispose of them properly. No real danger, just a good precaution. Hoo-boy.

A good time to get out of the city! We're going up to Williamstown, MA, for the theater festival this weekend. It's the town where we went to college, which during the summers hosts a well-regarded theater festival. There's a great museum of contemporary art nearby, MassMoCA, so it's a fun weekend; this'll be the third year we're doing it. Looking forward to getting away!

Regimes and constitutions

1 hour writing, 3.5 hours reading/researching, 0.5 hours emailing

Genius: Upload a photo of yourself and get "Simpsonized." Mine (see right) is eerily accurate.

Took a good suggestion from Cathy and started the day writing, rather than writing at the end of the day. It was a good way to start. Yesterday I made a big leap forward on the police chapter, and today was about filling in some of the details and rearranging the ideas into a better flow. The whole issue of irregular armed forces is a really rich vein, so I'm going through a collection of articles on just that topic from a few years ago. It's interesting that the articles take police as one of several non-army forces that the authors say need more attention. My take is slighty different, putting the army and police together under the category of "security forces," sanctioned by the state, and considering militas, bandits, guerrillas, mercenaries, etc., as originating in society. Anyway, should be some good ideas in there.

I was re-reading an article about graded vs. dichotomous conceptions of democracy, and came across one of the authors' current projects, a vast initiative to develop a comparative database of constitutions worldwide. Impressive. We could use one of those for police forces. There are a couple of global police encyclopedias, but it's the historical information that's lacking.

An issue I continue to struggle with is exactly how to define the specific regime dynamics that interest me. Is it regime stability, democratic stability, stability of constitutional governance? The terms matter, because they imply measuring different things. The point I'm trying to get at is that democracy vs. authoritarianism, the usual dichotomy, is not really what's going on at the period I'm looking at (first half of the 20th century), because suffrage is pretty limited for much of the time. I'm looking for a term that is more general than democracy, that can include both democracies with universal suffrage and regimes that enshrine, in a constitution, elections as the sole means of accessing power. Maybe "republic?" "Constitutional governance?" Worked on that today, without reaching any conclusions. To be continued....

Went to Nobu for lunch for Restaurant Week, where shmancy restaurants have relatively affordable prix-fixe menus. I had sashimi salad (two pieces of tuna! albeit scrumptious) and their famous black cod with miso, which came with a vinegary pickled green onion that contrasted with the unctuousness of the cod perfectly. Dessert was basically a parfait, but with fresh berries and a sake-spiked mousse...an interesting addition. I sat at the sushi bar, and tried to discern the hierarchy/division of labor among the sushi chefs, but it remained opaque. The monolingual sushi chefs gave a funny look when acknowledging my order, as announced by the waiter, of sashimi salad...well, excuuuuse me. :)

Pinkertons now and then

1 hour writing, 4.5 hours reading/researching, 0.5 hours emailing/administrivia

Interesting article in the Times today about the U.S. Army's negotiations with Iraqi militias to support pacification efforts in Iraq, and the connection of these to the new Iraqi army. The issue of how militias, and other irregular armed forces, connect to the state security forces, while not absolutely central to my dissertation, are nonetheless an important part of the story. Today I'm wondering whether the connections aren't deeper than I'm thinking. Perhaps the connection between security forces and regime stability happens via irregular forces; that is, Type of Security Force --> Type of Irregular Armed Forces --> Type of Armed Challenge to Regime. Worth pursuing further.

The ironic thing about the Times article, which is about the connection between public and private security forces, is that the U.S. colonel featured is named Pinkerton, which is the name of a private police force that emerged in the U.S. at the end of the 19th century. The Pinkertons were involved in hunting down Jesse James, breaking strikes, and survive to this day, though under the aegis of a Swedish global private-security firm. The Pinkerton logo featured an eye above the slogan, "We Never Sleep," and that image is where the term "private eye" comes from. Now you know.

Finished going through the Bailey/Dammert collection on police reform in the Americas. Lots of good ideas and sources, but I remain convinced the story of the emergence and evolution of these forces has yet to be told, particularly at the state and regional level.

In terms of writing, I focused on the chapter on police systems. I'm presenting that chapter as a paper at the Latin American Studies Association conference right after Labor Day, and the paper is due on August 1st, so I'll be working toward that deadline. Also made an appointment to meet with one of my advisors in a month when I'm out in the Bay Area for Matt and Laura's wedding. Deadlines are good!

It's Restaurant Week in NYC, with a bunch of fancy places offering reasonable lunch prix-fixes. I made a couple of reservations, much to Cathy's chagrin/envy, as she's too far uptown to meet me. Well, I'm scouting for the future; yeah, that's the ticket....

P.S. Happy birthday, Mom! And happy belated birthday, Allison!

Them good ol' boys...

0.5 hours writing, 5.5 hours reading/researching, 0.5 hours emailing/administrivia

This week's blog monitor is Rafael Mazer in San Francisco. Rafael is a former colleague of mine at Hispanics in Philanthropy, and an unapologetic blog-o-phile, loving all types of internet ramblings, from intelligent political discourse to celebrity gossip and arguments over old rap records. He has an academic background in Latin American politics, and has lived abroad in Chile, Argentina and Guatemala. He's headed to graduate school at Duke in the fall. Welcome, Rafael!

I've been thinking about The Dukes of Hazzard and Veronica Mars today, as I picked up a book at the Strand over the weekend about rural and small-town police in the U.S. Thought it would be a useful point of comparison with the Colombian rural police who are central actors in the story I'm telling in my dissertation. One of the most interesting points to emerge from it was the contrast between a sheriff and a local police chief. I can't believe I hadn't thought of this before, given that one of my favorite TV shows, Veronica Mars, features a main character who runs for the elected office of sheriff. An elected police officer. Given my interest in politicized police, my head just about exploded when I finally made the connection. However, it's not something that's directly relevant for Latin America (far as I can tell), because I believe the sheriff is a distinctly Anglo-American institution. As in so many areas, the difference between common-law (British) and Napoleonic legal systems inherited from colonial times makes a big difference in how U.S. vs. Latin American law enforcement evolved. So you don't have sheriffs in Latin America. It may be an interesting thought experiment to wonder what difference it would have made if there were sheriffs.... In a similar pop-culture vein, reading about small-town sheriffs, the image of Boss Hogg from The Dukes of Hazzard kept popping into my head, the all-white-clad political boss who controlled the local sheriff. And that's because on his new CD, which I got last week, the stand-up Patton Oswalt (who's the voice of the lead character in Ratatouille) has a great riff about Bush and Cheney being like the Duke brothers, somehow managing to get themselves out of impossible situations. It's all connected....

Also finished going through Kirk Bowman's great book on militarization and development in Latin America. One key notion from there is that the military never acts alone in staging a coup, it's always allied with other actors. Given that a key distinction I make is between two types of armed challenge - a coup, led by actors within the state, i.e., the army, and an insurrection, led by actors in society (and therefore not the state) - I'll need to give this some thought. The idea of who leads the challenge is probably enough to make the distinction valid, but I'll have to work on whether it makes a difference whether the army is trying to get power for itself or whether it's just knocking aside one civilian government in favor of another, with no intent to rule itself.

0.5 hours writing, 3.5 hours reading/researching

The math textbook I ordered arrived, so I did some of that; I like this one much better than the other one I'd been using. I think they'll complement each other well. I find it useful to train my brain to think in a different way than I'm accustomed, and to focus carefully on the assumptions I make and what they imply. Also, I'm working with a lot of data right now, so it's helpful to have an orientation toward what may or may not be possible with it.

Read more of Kirk Bowman's excellent book on militarization and its negative effect on development in Latin America. It's really a model of multi-method (statistics and case studies) research, and he's very thoughtful every step of the way while generating new insights and overturning false "truisms" in the literature.

Based on some of the data in his book on the level of military participation (how many soldiers per thousand people in the population, a standard measure of militarization, MPR), I compared this to my database of years of military government to see if there's any correlation. Interestingly, while countries like Mexico, Colombia, and Costa Rica have both relatively few years of military government and relatively low MPRs, El Salvador, one of the countries most frequently governed by the military, had a lower than average MPR, and the two highest-MPR countries, Chile and Uruguay, are in the middle of the pack as far as number of years of military government. Since both countries have reputations for democratic stability prior to their coups in the 1970s, there may be something interesting going on, as all three of Mexico, Colombia, and Costa Rica also have reputations for stability in their own way (even if it's authoritarian stability in Mexico's case). Something interesting to follow up on next week.

Many thanks to this week's monitor, Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, and happy birthday once again! Next up is Rafael Mazer in San Francisco. More about him on Monday.

Have a great weekend!

0.5 hours writing, 3.5 hours reading/researching, 0.5 hours emailing

Worked on two of the three regions I'm looking at in the subnational comparison: finished analyzing 1938 census data for Tolima, and went through cites for Santander history to cull the most interesting pieces. On the latter front, the NYPL has an annual state statistical abstract for most of the 1940s, which is just the time period I need. They seemed to have kept pretty decent records; it'll be interesting to see how these compare with what's available for Tolima and Atlantico/Bolivar/Magdalena (whichever of those three I end up picking).

Continued reading in the two books I worked on earlier this week, on militarization in Latin America, and on police reform in the Americas. The whole idea of decentralized and community-based police keeps coming up in the latter, and I'm hoping that as part of this work, I can find a way to comment on those contemporary issues from the historical perspective I'm adapting in looking at early and mid-20th century trends. I'm just leery about putting police control in the hands of politicians.... My argument is that 100 years ago, the choice was between Scylla and Charybdis: militarize the security forces and be susceptible to coup, or politicize them and be susceptible to insurrection - soldiers or politicians in charge. The third option, not really available at the time, is to have citizens in control of the security forces. At some point, I'll need to be able to connect my story to that unexplored/unavailable third option of citizen control of the security forces. That's clearly the hope behind decentralizing police reforms, but my spidey sense continues to tingle about those. We'll see....

Had lunch with a former co-worker who's moving to New York for graduate school next month. She's also been blogging lately, and as you can see here, I'd much rather have her material to work with! It was great to catch up and see someone in a different context after having known them through work.