vote for meeeee

hey y'all,

i'm hoping you can take a second to watch a video and become a "fan" of my application for STA's 2011 world traveler internship.

interns tackle a 3-month itinerary drawn up by STA travel that includes 16 countries (a full around the world trip). they file blog entries, video and photos to document their trip.

if you feel comfortable re-posting, tweeting, emailing it out, or whatever other social media the kids are dancing to today, well, that would be just swell.

thanks bunches,
m

feb 7th quicklinks

i'm not really so much for "coherent thinking" today. it's just not that kind of monday for me. so here's a collection of random links that i've enjoyed in the past couple days.

alien tort statute jurisprudence continues to evolve. particularly liked this: 

"Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs, part of the September panel that ruled for Shell, wrote that the original ruling "has no great practical effect except for the considerable benefit of avoiding abuse of the courts to extort settlements [from corporations]."

 oh, y'know, except for that whole accountability for the gross violation of human rights thing. have no doubt that this will go poorly if it ends up in the supreme court...well, "poorly" assuming you value human life and social and environmental justice, and you sort of resent the way that increasingly powerful international corporations crap all over the same for the sake of grotesque profit and even more so the way the roberts court actively helps them do it.

~

emily writes about the health and environmental impacts of quarrying in rural himachal pradesh. she notes that given the opportunity, people still express a preference for the polluting, unhealthy quarry work over traditional agriculture and husbandry, even if they could make the same amount of money. there's a possible additional factor that she didn't bring up in her speculation on the reasons for these preferences. in nepal, anyway, there seems to be a stigma associated with traditional agricultural and husbandry livelihoods among the younger generations. even when other factors might make agriculture a more viable option, it is viewed as undesirable and "backward" to continue the backbreaking labor of your parents' and grand-parents' generations. i wonder if this has an impact on what emily's seeing in india. regardless it's another example of the tension between progress and social and environmental welfare in developing countries, and the question of how much those members of the international community who benefited from the former without concern for the latter have the right to regulate it.

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this is an old one from sociological images that i missed. it basically calls out avatar for being liberal guilt porn that should in no way be taken as a critical post-colonial narrative. i still haven't seen it, but i'm glad i can go into my next movie night with some pre-loaded righteous indignation.

~

oh my GOD do i miss good beer....

....almost as much as i miss electricity for 14 hours a day.

~

i didn't think it was possible for my crush on ted leo to get any bigger...but there ya go.

~

feb 14th: get in on flashmob kathmandu.

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stars on NPR's tiny desk concerts: come for the unplugged version of "fixed" at 3:25; stay for the jokes about tote bags at the end.

spotting local power in aid interventions: preliminary thoughts

talesfromthehood is a perennial favorite on my google reader. it tends to be a smart, funny, and no nonsense commentary on aid and development (and the author is a co-blogger on the incomparable stuff expat aid workers like). i especially enjoyed the recent critique of three cups of tea's popularity.

i found today's post, "power", engaging as well, although i question the connection between the points made in the intro and the example chosen to illustrate them (although, to be fair, the intro and concluding bits seemed to be a kind of analytical dressing for the sake of drawing a lesson from the very very funny anecdote). TFTH says,

"Understanding who has power in a community is vital to doing good aid. And yet we very frequently get it wrong. We miss the cues. Local power often hides in plain sight in the eyes of outsiders."

right. i've been chewing on another post about positionality in development research and my experience in humla, so much more on this later, but for now: yes, blindness to the myriad and overlapping local structures of power is a really fast way to screw up a development intervention. but TFTH's example doesn't really turn out to be about that. his anecdote about an interaction with a "camp leader" in haiti is about an inability to spot locally powerful individuals, something that is only one small part of the manifestation of local power structures...and something that, in my experience, is actually not all that hard figure out. i'm working with much more limited, and possibly very different (community development, as opposed to humanitarian aid) experience, but i would say that local leaders are pretty easy to spot. they're the ones who will dominate group discussions, and the ones who will feel most comfortable approaching local NGO staff and engaging with them seriously and sometimes even contentiously; they speak with authority and are treated with visible respect. i mean, no assumptions about local power and local leaders should be taken without a grain of salt (and significant amounts of open-minded observation). however, it seems to me that identifying local leaders is only the first, and the least challenging, step of mapping the narratives that are made visible and invisible by local power structures, and, most importantly, making visible the invisible ones and incorporating them into planning and implementation.

bombing the everloving sh*t out of civilians may not be a great COIN stategy: now with 100% more statistical evidence

it absolutely made my morning to find an ungated copy* of kocher, pepinsky, and kalyvas' new article "aerial bombing and counterinsurgency in the vietnam war," which just appeared in the american journal of political science. they use just awesomely fine-grained data available from the hamlet evaluation system (HES), used by the US during vietnam, to assess the way indiscriminate violence in the form of aerial bombing affected insurgent control of the hamlets bombed (rather than occurrence of subsequent insurgent violence, which is more imprecise, but more commonly used out of necessity). they conclude that "A variety of estimation methods, including instrumental variables and genetic matching, show that bombing civilians systematically shifted control in favor of the Viet Cong insurgents."

on a personal note, i was lucky to have a lot of really great professors in college, but matt kocher was one of the best. he helped define what kind of teacher i hope to be, if i ever end up teaching...and i swear that has nothing to do with the slight crush on him that i may or may not have harbored.

anyway! if COIN and/or BALLER statistical analysis is your thing, definitely check it out. do people know if there's an equivalent data set for other conflicts? obviously, i'm thinking about the most immediately pertinent example of af-pak.


*thanks, dave!

did NOT see that one coming

honestly, i've been meaning to blog about nepal's revised PM-election process for about two weeks, but i assumed i'd have, like, three rounds of elections and run-offs to do it (and, cynically, that it would all end up going nowhere, anyway). much to my shock though, as of last night, nepal has a new prime minister. that the UML candidate, khanal, won isn't so suprising in and of itself; after the madhesi alliance threw in their own candidate instead of supporting the maoists' dahal, it became drastically less likely that the new government would be formed under maoist leadership. their 11th hour withdrawal and support of khanal makes sense, and it actually means the government might get moving, but...you know, that's just such a rare state of affairs in nepali politics.

of course the issue remains that there are only four months left for this government to draft the constitution. to "promulgate the statute in a timely manner", as they put it here, really really major issues have to be resolved. most immediate, and most contentious, is the integration of the PLA into the national security forces (i can't even find one or two links that summarize this back and forth; just google it). there's even a significant difference of opinion between groups as to whether the resolving the integration of combatants and other peace process issues is a prerequisite to writing the constitution or vice versa. you've also got other major hot button issues like federalism and land reform, which have been pushed aside in the attempt to form a government over the last seven months, but which will have to be addressed while writing the constitution.

anyway. it'll be an interesting four months.

new english-language online weekly from nepal

The Reporter
[h/t my roomie]

dear girl store: stop. just stop.

there is just so so much wrong with the girl store, but the three major points to be made are 1) the unsavory pitch, 2) the oversimplified "girl effect" logic, and 3) the lack of transparency.

the girl store ostensibly offers you the chance to support indian girls' access to education, by donating money through the purchase of school supplies for one of the girls pictured on the website. the logic is that education will prevent the sale of these girls into sexual slavery, forced labor or early marriage in a society rife with gender inequality, where sons are often prized over daughters, and where, among poor families, a daughter is an unwanted mouth to feed.

image from the girl store website

ok. so what's so wrong about this?

1) the fundamental cringe-worthiness of the pitch: there's a lot going on here for me, but imma try to articulate it as clearly as i can. i'm sure the theme of "commodification" is deliberate here; it's meant to emphasize the way these girls' lives are commodified and devalued by their societies and their families, particularly compared to sons. the problem for me is that, like a failed satire of racist attitudes, the girl store's presentation doesn't sufficiently undermine this concept through the appropriation of the theme. the girls pictured on the website appear, to me, dehumanized; they are precious little brown girl dolls that you, you white in shining armor, can make your very own. you can even dress her up (accessories not included)! the deliberately provocative commodification/child trafficking connection is also poorly served by the explicit appropriation of the language of child prostitution. like, i get where you were going with this one, girl store, but seriously: creepy. really really creepy.


2) the "girl effect" logic behind it: so, there's a lot of strong, reliable evidence that (some) aid is most effective when targeted at women and girls, but along with complexity and failure, "the girl effect" is set to be among the most overused and under-critically-analyzed buzz concepts in development in 2011 (self-promotion: i sort of wrote about this in regards to climate change a couple of months ago). the debate is well summarized elsewhere, so i'll just point out that the girl store seems to take a drastically oversimplified view of the causal connection between (specifically) lack of girls education and gender inequality as expressed by trafficking and early marriage*. it's just more, well, complex than that.


3) lack of transparency for donors: seriously we JUST WENT THROUGH THIS with the Great Kiva Debate. if you aren't familiar: basically, there was a huge blow up a few months ago over the way kiva, a micro-loan provider, told (or at least implied) to donors it did business, in comparison to how it actually did business. the story which kiva sold was that you, as a donor, are selecting an actual individual human to whom you are making a loan, kiva gives them the money, they do nice things, and you get to follow their progress and feel good about yourself. the reality, it was revealed, is much more complicated, and necessarily so. kiva partners with a microfinance organization in a developing country, the organization disburses loans to people and THEN the stories are posted. when you choose a loan to fund, partially or fully, you're actually sending your money to the organization that disbursed that loan, not the individual in question. bear in mind, this is the only ethical and effective way to go about doing this. you don't put people up all over the internet and then not give them money. you can't have a single US-based organization centrally disburse almost $200 million to individuals scattered throughout the third world. (well you could try, but it wouldn't work as well, if at all). the real debate was not over the necessity or propriety of the real model, but about the propriety of using implying that your money was doing something that it's not, because faces and personal stories are more compelling fund-raising tools than slightly more complex micro-finance mechanisms. it was about transparency.

the girl store does kiva one better (worse?). nowhere, but NOWHERE, on its website does it provide any information about the mechanics of how your donation is disbursed. it leaves you to assume that your $10 are actually buying little shruti's school uniform. now, this means that one of two unacceptable things is happening. we might have kiva redux, whereby the the girl store is providing reimbursement to its partners for support already given to girls whose photos are features on the website...and thus irresponsibly misleading its donors. alternatively, (and in my mind this is the worse, if less likely option) you have an organization that is promising actual individual children support for their education, posting their pictures on the internet (in a dehumanizing, colonial, and sexually objectified way, i will reiterate), and just stone cold hopin' that some money comes through. both options represent a drastic abdication of responsibility, the first, to donors, the second, to beneficiaries.


for any or all of these reasons, i say, "dear girl store: just stop."


*afterthought: this post doesn't even touch on the monolithic image of "indian" culture and society that the girl store creates.