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Earlier this week, Adam Elkus tweeted a Diplomat article, by Chun Peng, about the political passivity of the Chinese citizenry. Chun explains the Chinese state’s abiding resilience through a confluence of cultural and organizational-political factors. Historical patterns of gratitude towards authoritarian institutions–“protection rackets,” via Charles Tilly–inform contemporary relationships between Chinese communities, writ large, and various state organizations (the Chinese Communist Party, especially). In the crudest terms, we can describe this as the Neidermeyer theory of state-building: the state giveth, and the state taketh away, but at least it’s something to be part of.

Chun’s fallacy is empirically lacking for all the reasons Jay Ulfelder describes: the cultural broad-brush, the homogenization of “Chinese culture,” the conceit that, in fact, Chinese citizens are regularly disobedient, if irregularly successful. The tipping point of Beijing’s resilience is difficult to anticipate, but the environmental and social consequences of China’s authoritarian excesses probably disrupt Chun’s historical continuum of obedience. A critique of Chun’s causality, however, is unsatisfying. The Chinese state is simultaneously resilient and embattled, and the origins of this dialectic–both in the Chinese context, and in general–merit explanation.

When Elkus described Chun’s point-of-reference as “familial politics as sources of cohesion,” he was onto something. In China, as elsewhere, familial politics are an observable form of micro-relationships, through which individuals interact with with communities, societies, institutions, and the state. These interactions, however, exceed Chun’s cultures of obedience, and shape the varied dimensions of political decision-making: who gets which resources, who participates in public, private, and mixed (club, common) goods. Francis Fukuyama, in his Origins of Political Order, aptly describes “family” as a precursor to evolved forms of political order. Fukuyama’s “family,” however, is a diverse classification. Genealogical lineage may be the most common form of familial politics, but it’s not ubiquitous:

Chinese lineages often have memberships in the thousands; entire villages share the same surname, which suggests the fictive and inclusive nature of Chinese kinship. And while the Sicilian Mafia speaks of itself as a “family,” the blood oath only symbolizes consanguinity.

The familial vocabulary is a consistent indicator of who gets what, and who’s included in which community. Consider, for example, the Hollies’ kitschy pastoral ballad, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” released in 1969: “So on we go / his welfare is of my concern.” Allan Clarke’s lyric companion is a metaphorical sibling, and benefits from his labor as a result.

I just read Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, a cornerstone of microhistorical scholarship, which subtly addresses related themes in the proto-history of state-building. Montaillou captures a small village in France’s Languedoc region on the cusp of the Inquisition, which Ladurie vests with a explanatory significance. In the words of Carlo Ginzburg, Ladurie’s Italian contemporary, the microhistorical craft leverages studies of small, “modest” historical institutions–the individual, the village, the parish–“to trace, as in a microcosm, the characteristics of an entire social stratum in a specific historical period.” From a methodological standpoint, microhistories mirror the social-scientific case study. If done well, they construct historical patterns from the idiosyncratic; if done poorly, they overstate the general at the specific’s expense. The political dimension of Ladurie’s Montaillou–in particular, its insight into the security dimensions of the Languedoc community–may cast the micro-politics of contemporary state-building in a relevant light.

Ladurie divides Montaillou into two sections, which reveal the narrative development of Montaillou’s politics. The first, on the “ecology of Montaillou,” outlines the ecosystem of local authority, comprising the structure of intra-family relations, the maintenance of authority and control, the impact of Inquisition interventions on local Cathar (heretical) organizations, and the hierarchy of (predominantly agricultural) resources. The second section, on Montaillou’s “archaeology,” describes the subsequent characteristics of the village’s political economy, with a particular focus on the ideational impact of competing Church doctrine on local theologies and superstitions. Ladurie’s analytic concerns resemble the topical inverse of Chun’s: how is it that, amid the cohesive civil society of Catharism, the Inquisition’s authoritarian institutions gained a foothold?

According to Ladurie, several organizational forms defined Montaillou’s social relations and, perhaps most importantly, divisions. Nuclear families were common, but not universal, and were generally subordinated to the domus, a physical and social grouping of Montaillou residents. The village’s (male) shepherds, an economic staple, maintained a separate form of social organization, which as a result of the ecosystem’s gender imbalance disrupted nuclear-familial institutions. The Inquisition’s influence placed often-existential stress on Montaillou’s Cathar domus, which could not withstand the inquisitors’ incessant efforts to infiltrate and upend heretical ecosystems. The Inquisition’s efforts were authoritarian in nature, and frequently violent in practice. The Clergue domus, the wealthiest clan in Montaillou, reflected the Inquisition’s debilitating impact: Bernard, the tax collector, and his brother Pierre, a corrupt priest, submitted to the Inquisition’s violence (torture, mostly) and espionage. “The apparatus of power was not a ‘police’ apparatus in the modern sense of the term,” writes Ladurie, “but for anyone who did not keep absolutely to the straight and narrow path it was a Kafka-esque world of spies and betrayals.” The clans’ patriarchs–for the Clergue’s, Bernard and Pierre–were responsible for protection, and the survival of their social institutions in space and throughout time rested on the elites’ ability to provide it. As in any ecosystem, scale effects mattered: as the Clergues, the elite-of-elite, became less resilient against the Inquisition’s anti-heretical efforts, so too did the domus network:

The manorial judge and his colleagues only had to arrive for a few years (after 1300, for example) at a valid compromise on the question of tithes or on the tolerance of heresy in order to win the support of the great majority of the village. Needless to say, there was never any question of a revolutionary solution to these conflicts. The clan which aspired to domination did not seek to bring down the manorial authorities but only to annex them.

As Ladurie describes, Montaillou’s cultural environment was an outgrowth of this uncertain ecosystem, rather than a driver. The regional development of millenarianism–post-apocalyptic theology–amid the Inquistion illustrates this causality. As a historical phenomenon, popular enthusiasm for milenarian ideas often occurs during periods of great social upheaval, as during the Black Plague. According to Ladurie, Inquisition officials were variously sympathetic towards millenarian moralism, which contradicted the dualistic theology of the Cathar opposition–he tells one story of a man, Arnaud de Savignan, who was “rebuked by the Inquisition for believing that the world was eternal.” Under cultural-driven theories of the history of ideas, the confluence of social upheaval and Inquisition tolerance should have generated popular support for millenarianism; to the contrary, however, millenarianism found scant support throughout Languedoc. The moral texture of the region’s institutions, which under Chun’s fallacy would stem from uncertain cultural norms, proved historically subordinate to Montaillou’s political ecosystem.

Rather than conclude with an assertive statement of Ladurie’s microhistorical findings, I’d rather end with a question: if the politics of protection inform the resilience of order-maintaining institutions, as they did in Montaillou, how can we evaluate the drivers of institutional continuity and survival in contemporary systems, like Chun’s China?

My family’s second home is in western Massachusetts, in Huntington, which holds bluegrass concerts on the public lawn during the summer months. My brothers and I spent our childhood at the Huntington country store, trying our hardest to convince our parents to raise the one-dollar cap on root-beer barrel purchases; at the Bridge Store, devouring blue-raspberry slurpies before our Sunday-morning garbage run; grabbing canoe rides to Polka Dot Rock, which boasted a patriotic redesign sometime during the last decade.

I’ve been catching up on my woodwork, and decided to take a break from my oak relief, an anniversary present for my girlfriend, Lucy. There’s a bookstore down the road, which Lucy and I visited several years ago. It’s a forty-minute walk, so I brought a book along, and a raincoat, as the weather was a bit melancholy. It took me fifteen minutes to find the store when I arrived, because it’s hidden behind an overgrown brush on the side of the road. When I walked in, the bookstore was dark, with a light, fungal stench, which unites used-bookstores the world over. Books lay on the floor, and those on the shelves had tilted on their sides; ephemera (Victorian-era postcards, mostly) sat in boxes, attracting dust. Dirty dishes gathered in the sink, and the refrigerator’s cord dangled, unplugged, on the kitchen counter.

I wandered over to the house next door, set aside a collection of half-potted azaleas, and knocked. A short woman, probably my mother’s age, answered the door.

Is the bookstore open, I asked.

She sighed, and opened the screendoor. The bookstore, well, is closed, she started. My mother–Barbara, the bookstore’s founder–had a few strokes, and my nephew’s been living there off-and-on for a couple of years.

We’re not sure what to do with this stuff, she continued. There’s so much of it, and it seems a shame to throw it away.

After many trials, tribulations, tabulations, and Chavez-esque levels of coffee consumption, I’ve finished my undergraduate thesis. I’ll make a couple of tweaks to the typological analysis tonight, in order to prepare for my 15 April due date, but I feel comfortable sharing the nearly-completed product. I’ve spent plenty of time blogging about the thesis, as well as distracting myself from it, in this space, so I figured I’d share:

Why do some responses to mass atrocities succeed in mitigating violence against civilians, while others fail? The nascent academic and policy literature on mass atrocity response emphasizes the varied functions of particular policy tools, emphasizing the dividends for mass atrocity response of economic sanctions, preventive diplomacy, or third-party military intervention. In this paper, I argue a greater role for power relationships, as opposed to tools of statecraft, in determining response outcomes. I posit a middle-range theory of relational power—an actor’s ability to influence organizational preferences, processes, and decision-making through social, interactive means—in mass atrocity response, through which I identify a taxonomy of social relationships between respondent actors and mass atrocity perpetrators. Using this theoretical framework, I conduct a typological analysis of mass atrocity response events between 1991 and 2011, and apply the social taxonomy to two case studies, in Sri Lanka and Darfur, Sudan. The case study analysis offers some support for the hypothesis that a perpetrator’s patron—an external actor, with overlapping social preferences—is the primary determinant of mass atrocity response outcomes.

If this seems like your run-of-the-mill, “undergrad-discovers-Wendt” analysis, I view it a bit differently: the “logic of consequences,” which undergirds realist interpretations of power in the international system, is important, but its importance emerges from the social implications of consequentialism, as well as their practical effects. tl;dr: tools of statecraft are important, but their social context bears further explication.

Far from a finished product, my thesis represents the contemporary consolidation of my thoughts about mass atrocity response, which I fully expect to evolve, in keeping with the field’s evolution. I enjoyed the process of qualitative research design, but it certainly has its limitations, as I discuss in the paper–with forty-eight mass atrocity events, limited capacities for statistical inference, and limited expertise in anything but a handful of case studies, my relational-power theory carries marginal weight. Over the next few years, I’d like to expand my research, and to develop the theory. How? Here are some ideas:

• Add a bit of quantitative grist: My history of “successful” Stata regression analyses amounts to a bivariate assessment of ethnic fractionalization and conflict, and it wasn’t statistically significant. Needless to say, my quantitative skills aren’t what they should be. My typological table, in progress until twenty-four hours from now, should underscore a few avenues for quantitative measurement, which would disaggregate my measurement of relational power in mass atrocity environments. Take, for example, the friendly exercise of compulsory power, which might occur in the context of trade incentives for mass atrocity mitigation. Without statistical inference, it’s difficult to identify the correlative relationship between a friendly actor’s trade patterns, a proxy for compulsory power, and response outcomes. As far as I’m aware, the quantitative models needn’t be complex, but a basic, applied understanding might be useful.
  
• Visualize the qualitative data: As I’ve noted in a previous post, the blogosphere’s preference for visually appealing, easily digestible data poses a (surmountable) challenge to qualitative researchers. Some platforms, like the World Peace Foundation’s Reinventing Peace blog, provide excellent case-study analysis, but three-thousand-word, no-visual posts about mass atrocity response have limited reach. In addition to the quantitative skills, a bit of coding might be useful, “at least” enough to design a rudimentary, quasi-interactive map of global mass atrocity events, and the vectors of local, national, international, and non-governmental response. I would scale up my two case studies, Sri Lanka’s civil war and Darfur’s conflict, to forty-eight, in keeping with my typological analysis. In the meantime, a Google Maps visualization, sans chronological analysis, might do the trick.
• Disaggregate the mass atrocity events: As I note in my paper’s conclusion, my rudimentary, middle-range theory of relational power in mass atrocity response opens several additional dilemmas: within relational power, broadly speaking, do different forms of power yield different response outcomes, as a result of different kinds of social interaction? Probably. Does the exercise of military force, which I describe as an idiosyncratic tool of foreign-policy statecraft, differ in its impact from other applications of relational power? Again, probably. But the most interesting question to me, which I didn’t delve into in much detail, is the sub-event implications of relational power. As I observe, most discussions of mass atrocity response refer to meta-events, or aggregations of political conflict between various parties: consider, for example, the “Rwandan genocide,” which we remember as the genocide per se, rather than the escalation of local grievances, local organization, and local violence. In some contexts, this tendency is understandable, but in others, as Severine Autesserre observes, it’s less applicable: the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya’s post-election violence, and Pakistan’s micro-insurgencies, in particular, come to mind. In keeping with my emphasis on mass atrocity events as evolutionary, adaptive phenomena, I’d like to get a better sense of how we analyze the atrocities’ component parts through a similar framework.

What else should I be looking at? Keep me posted, and I’ll try to do the same.

It’s been almost one year since Invisible Children released its #Kony2012 video, which sparked both viral enthusiasm and visceral controversy. At the time, I published a critical perspective, which to my satisfaction was distributed widely and, for the most part, favorably. I spent much of the ensuing month assessing, reassessing, and revising my analysis, attempting to understand why #Kony2012 was both important and problematic, and what the campaign’s impact implied about the contemporary value of domestic mobilization around international human rights issues. Others asked similar questions; if their answers varied widely, I found the discussion fruitful.

I’ve learned a lot since #Kony2012’s release about defining success and failure in human rights advocacy, both experientially, through my work with STAND, and academically. Those who are familiar with my STAND work, which focuses on mobilizing domestic constituencies around atrocity prevention in U.S. foreign policy, know that I have a particular concept of the organization’s value, which despite similar origins differs widely from Invisible Children’s. In short, I see STAND’s contribution to the United States’ broader atrocity prevention community as a “leadership development” role, due to its small footprint, its student-led function, and its consciously limited access to DC’s policymaking community. This priority places a stronger emphasis on long-term capacity-building, and the creation of domestic “communities of practice” around atrocity prevention. In defining this role, I consciously omit factors that, as my colleagues have identified, are critical to domestic political mobilization: why people act, how individual activists see their role in a broader community, and what activists want to see from their actions. Where this concept has generated discursive enthusiasm among STAND’s leadership contingent, it’s received understandably limited traction within the organization’s grassroots constituency, likely for the reasons described above.

Over the course of the past year, I’ve also thought a lot about power: what it means to hold power, which types of power influence politics, and how these power structures impact organizational processes, preferences, and decision-making. As my previous post acknowledged, most of my power-related thinking has occurred in the context of my senior thesis, which examines “relational” power’s impact on mass atrocity response outcomes. Domestic human rights mobilization is tangential to this larger focus, due to the myriad of power forms that impact policy- and non-policy structures. At the same time, my post-#Kony2012 concern for advocacy impacts was indisputably formative in my analytic understanding of power–see, for example, my two-part series on whether (and how) “advocacy works.” Given my recent emphasis on relational power, as well as #Kony2012’s upcoming anniversary, I thought it might be worthwhile to riff empirical on #Kony2012, a positive case study in human rights advocacy’s power.

As I suggested in my initial post, #Kony2012’s case study applications emerged as a cross-section of the organizing and transnational advocacy literatures. #Kony2012 intentionally framed its advocacy as a “people power” movement, encouraging students, especially, to conduct targeted actions around specific, domestically-oriented asks: guerrilla flyering would “make Kony famous” among U.S. political constituencies, while Congressional actions–call-in days, lobbying efforts, a mass petition–would “build political will” for U.S. policy against the Lord’s Resistance Army. Invisible Children’s campaign actions, scheduled over the course of several months, varied intentionally in participation rates: not everyone who shared the Facebook video participated in the 20 April “day of action,” and not everyone who participated in the “day of action” joined MOVE DC, a part-lobby day, part-summit, part-dance party that convened in Washington, DC. This participatory variation, which organizers often refer to as a “ladder of engagement”, is an intentional organizing strategy: scaled campaigns acknowledge variations in social incentives, motives, and capacities for action, and often structure events and opportunities accordingly. The campaign’s purpose, as Marshall Ganz instructs, is the activation of different levels of social influence, which construct “people power” in particular ways. If singular actions produce individual results, the purpose of an aggregated campaign is the creation of intentional, escalating social change.

In addition to its “people power” role, #Kony2012 also functioned as a transnational advocacy movement: Invisible Children operates on-the-ground reconstruction, early warning, and development programs in northern Uganda, and its networks are often global, due in part to its prominent reliance on evangelical Christian communities as its organizing base. In the case of #Kony2012, transnational media networks–both “traditional” and “social”–also proved influential, as non-American constituencies, especially throughout the African diaspora, interacted with the campaign’s content, impacts, and digital platform. If hashtags are any indicator of norm diffusion–and they might be, if in an ephemeral sort of way–#Kony2012 took the cake: #StopKony, #Kony2012, and, adversarially, #StopIC were trending for days. Invisible Children proved uniquely effective at setting national, international, and transnational agendas, as well: the UN Security Council, the U.S. Congress, and “gatekeeper” human rights organizations (Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International) each brought #Kony2012 into public policy deliberations.

Invisible Children quickly raised these impacts to the fore, highlighting in a new video the campaign’s “people power” and policy outcomes. That #Kony2012 was influential is largely indisputable, but simply highlighting its positive consequences omits key factors in empirical analysis. How was #Kony2012 influential? Through which actors, and through which means? And, if we can use #Kony2012 as a qualitative case study, what is it about these institutions, communities, and structures that makes them especially susceptible to human rights organizations’ multi-pronged power?

As I highlighted in my previous post, Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall’s analysis of power in international relations offers a compelling framework for understanding political influence. Barnett and Duvall discuss power as a relational, social phenomenon, which I adopt to mean “an actor’s ability to influence organizational processes, preferences, and decision-making through interactive means.” As a social phenomenon, power is multi-directional, which means it can have an impact on its target, the target’s respondent actor, or the respondent actor’s component members. Barnett and Duvall identify four forms of relational power, each of which interact with one another to shape change in their proximate and distant environments: compulsory power, which functions through an institution’s political “technologies”; institutional power, which functions by changing, creating, and defining an organization’s standard operating procedures, processes, and rules; structural power, which defines social hierarchies (who rules/is ruled, who leads/follows, who is included/excluded, and so on) through existing norms; and productive power, which constructs new norms and identities for social communities and organizations. If these four power types impact diverse social interactions, their implementation relies on the type of actor, the actor’s context, and the community of actors participating in social exchange. That is, human rights advocates’ application of Barnett and Duvall’s taxonomy looks very different, and functions through different mechanisms, than mass atrocity response efforts’, writ large.

In Invisible Children’s context, we can differentiate between target and respondent actors. Three subtypes, in particular, comprise Invisible Children’s respondent constituencies: “in-group” activists, who participate in the organization’s campaign; “out-group” activists, who oppose the organization’s campaign; and “elite” movement leaders (Ben Keesey, John Prendergast, Kenneth Roth, Michael Poffenberger, among others), who function as “gatekeepers” of policymaker access, expertise, and, for the purposes of our domestically-focused case study, legislative outreach. Obviously, we can further disaggregate these actor subtypes, as attempts to classify individuals carry inherent observational problems. For example, there’s a quantitative and qualitative difference between an “in-group” activist who posts a video on Facebook, and one who participates in a Congressional action. Under the logic of community organizing, however, grassroots actions are “effective” at an aggregated level–after all, the term is “people power,” rather than “person power.” Accordingly, while discrete categories may exist within “in-group” activist constituencies, as well as “out-group” activists and movement elites, these empirical categories are not entirely off-the-mark.

As for target actors, #Kony2012’s was singular: the U.S. government. In theory, we can subdivide this further: the campaign included both legislative and executive branch-oriented components, and actively devoted resources towards both target actors. All other target actors, however, were indirect, at least on a publicly observable level: Invisible Children devoted financial resources towards “catching” Kony, in keeping with its programmatic priorities, but those efforts were tangential, rather than central, to the advocacy campaign’s messaging, resources, and design. The UN, too, was a secondary, rather than primary actor: Invisible Children sought to influence UN Security Council priorities through U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice, rather than through, say, the Togolese consulate. Accordingly, we can restrict our target analysis to the U.S. government’s executive branch–in particular, the National Security Council/Staff–and the legislative branch.

Over the next week, I will assess the influence of Barnett and Duvall’s power taxonomy on Invisible Children’s advocacy outcomes. While acknowledging the influence of pre-#Kony2012 outcomes on #Kony2012’s relational power, I will restrict my timeframe to post-video events, in keeping with Invisible Children’s public analysis of the campaign’s success. By success, I refer to a publicly apparent shift in the target actor’s processes, preferences, or decision-making. This is not to suggest a coercive model of power, as Robert Dahl implies, but merely to view change as the logical outcome of a “successful” human rights advocacy campaign. I will conclude my analysis with a fifth post, which highlights “lessons-learned” for domestic mobilization around international human rights issues.

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* For various reasons, I confine my empirical analysis to matters domestic, and will refrain from comment on U.S. foreign policy actions towards the LRA. Additionally, as scholars, activists, and practitioners have critiqued the campaign’s factual, ethical, and discursive elements, this analysis also omits those subjects.

This being my final semester, I’m currently in the throes of my undergraduate thesis. While I’ve previously described my project, it’s changed enough to merit a revised summary. By my count, one of the central failings of the mass atrocity response literature is its failure to integrate power as a characteristic of qualitative analysis. Tools-based analyses are nearly ubiquitous among both academic and policy studies of mass atrocity response, while power gets the short shrift. Consider, for example, the interpretive framework of Samantha Power’s A Problem from Hell, which is widely perceived as the literature’s formative text: Power dismisses the U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy’s willful negligence towards postwar atrocities as in keeping with Albert Hirschman’s “futility” thesis, despite the inconclusiveness of Power’s mass atrocity response counterfactual. Tools-based analyses often portray response mechanisms as inherently fungible (see, e.g. Rory Stewart and Gerard Knaus’ Can Intervention Work?), while underemphasizing the context in which mass atrocity response occurs.

For my thesis, I’m re-centering the varied functions of power in select case studies of mass atrocity response. As Michael Barnett and Raymond Duvall’s taxonomy of power demonstrates, power operates in different ways, through different actors, and with different consequences. I’ve adopted a “relational” approach to power, which synthesizes Barnett and Duvall’s power taxonomy with Joseph Nye’s three “faces”. I’ve defined relational power as “an actor’s ability to influence organizational preferences, processes, and decision-making through interactive means.” tl;dr: power is a social phenomenon, and operates through relationships between local, national, international, and non-governmental actors.

Using Jay Ulfelder’s 110-n dataset of state-sponsored mass killing between 1945 and 2011, and Kate Cronin-Furman’s 80-n dataset of mass atrocities between 1970 and 2010, I’ve extracted a case population of mass atrocity response events between 1991 and 2011 (at time of writing, forthcoming). Due to time constraints, I’m only writing two case studies: currently, Sudan’s Darfur conflict, and Sri Lanka’s counterinsurgency against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), although these selections are subject to change. With that said, I’m enjoying my interpretive framework, and it appears to bear out as a descriptive mechanism, at least in my initial observations. And, more relevantly, I’m enjoying the process of qualitative case research. To leave Ulfelder and Cronin-Furman’s respective datasets to the perils of logistic regression analysis, therefore, seems unfortunate.

This enjoyment, however, is extracurricular–at this point, it’s difficult to fathom the case studies’ application beyond a blogging platform. To riff on Adam Elkus’ Abu Muqawama piece on policy relevance, it’s not unreasonable to argue that blogging platforms have a diffuse impact, at least in shaping how students, practitioners, and scholars of foreign policy, comparative politics, and international relations understand the world. There’s a “logic of presentation” here, I think, which Stephen Walt implies in his widely-discussed post on “why academics write poorly?”: scholars may “discover” a particular political phenomenon, but the blog’s primary value is its wide distribution capability–it costs five minutes of iPhone data to read this blog post, whereas your run-of-the-mill International Security article might cost fifteen dollars. And, as Jay Ulfelder hinted, academic journals have not adapted well to the creative possibilities of the “information age”.

The past decade has witnessed a broad proliferation of quantitatively-oriented blogs, as well as those by regional experts. The Duck of Minerva, the Disorder of Things, the Monkey Cage, and Political Violence at a Glance each diffuse political-science research in blogosphere discourse, often in idiosyncratic ways. With chance exceptions, however, there appear to be few blogs in the political-science space that embrace qualitative research as a defining methodology, and which apply case-based empirical analysis to cross-regional, transhistorical trends. This is not to construct a Waltian/Mearsheimerian fallacy about the poverty of theory, of course–plenty of bloggers theorize well, and frequently–but to make an empirical observation about the blogosphere’s discrete components.

It’s easy enough to speculate about why this is the case: qualitative methods are, to my understanding, less than “in vogue”; large-n visualizations are sexier than, say, 3,000-word essays; and, as Andrew Moravscik has recently implied (hat-tip: @stratbuzz), qualitative citations are a challenging beast. Harder, of course, is the process of identifying solutions. As I suggested above, I’m interested in expanding my thesis’ emphasis on relational power’s qualitative applications for mass atrocity response, although professional restrictions will continue to limit the scope and frequency of my analysis. Regardless, I’m interested in exploring platforms for engaging, effective qualitative research. In that vein, dear reader, a few questions:

• What would an accessible qualitative blog look like, aesthetically speaking?
• Assuming space limitations (<1500 words, as a standard practice), how would a qualitative blog apply theory to its component case studies? Policy applications?
• What kind of case studies would a qualitative blog include? Theoretical variations on the same event? Event variations on the same theory?

Let me know if you think of any more, and I look forward to your comments.