Left Flank

One of the reasons this site was down was, because I was celebrating my mother-in-law's birthday at a Korean-style sashimi place down the hill from our house. BTW, it's my favorite meal (and, obviously my mother-in-law likes it, too!) A few photos were lost to the...ahem! drunkenness of photographer, including the last hour at a nearby pub with family and friends. A big messy table full of side dishes, soju and beer, and raucous conversation-that's a Korean-style birthday!

Actually, this was an active day trip. with frequent stops and tight schedules. All that was missing was the sun for most of the day and an airplane to bypass the evening traffic returning to Busan.

Starting from Boseong to breathe in the tea-scented air and climb the terraced hill, we bought green tea. Oddly enough, my wife and I were only one of two customers for tea. Mostly, mothers bought tea-flavored candy, treats, and ice cream for the kids. The green tea is excellent, BTW. Then it was on to an organic farm to pick strawberries. After lunch at Nakan Folk Village we toured what my wife called «Korea's Williamsburg». Laypeople can sleep for a night within this actual village where the venue workers actually live. Note: the brown stuff is bondaegi (boiled silkworm larvae). They're quite good, but very rich-flavored.

Lastly, we went to Sonam Temple, one of the oldest-standing Buddhist temples to survive the Japanese invasion of the 17th Century.

I told my wife, instead of planning trips around battlefields (obviously not my appealing to my wife) we should tour tea plantations. And, if there's a battlefield nearby, so much the better!

My wife and I will head to Boseong in South Cheolla province for a day-long tour of the tea plantations and a folk village. I'm sure to return with lots of green-hued pictures of well...tea.

Enjoy your Saturday!

Busan can surprise!

I've been out of sorts lately because my Palm PDA unexpectedly became senseless last Thursday. It's not as if I need to schedule every minute of my day. I need something to read on buses and subways, and I need an mp3 player for classes, since my university department doesn't even provide cassette players. Then, the touchscreen became a stone. All the little taps turning pages in the last 15 months finally took their toll.

Good news, though! An enterprising group of geeks in Busan fixed it for the rough equivalent of $60. Considering that the warranty has run, a new one costs $199, and Singapore is the nearest service center, I was lucky! Well, perhaps the parts were cheap.

But, now I can read again!

Earlier I was selecting sample data for that paper on civil wars and resources I wrote about earlier. Here's a trivia question: what was the bloodiest civil war in the world during the 19th Century?

A hint...

Niece's First Birthday Party

Last Wednesday, my niece had her first birthday, and family, friends, and my brother-in-law's colleagues—who paid for the feast at a Busan buffet restaurant—got together for the ceremony.

For Koreans, the first birthday is very important because historically few children survived into childhood and adulthood. Families, friends, and colleagues have a celebration. The highlight of the party is when the child chooses between symbolic objects: pencil (education); money (prosperity), and thread (long life). The favored choice is for education.

BTW, she chose the pencil!

(The following is a proposal for a research paper)

Introduction: I will examine how natural resources affect political instability. Since civil war is the most dramatic expression of instability short of partition or secession, I will define instability as «civil war», using the Correlates of War Project, Intra-State War Data, 1816-1997 (v3.0) database. I intentionally chose such a long historical period, to reduce the the influence of cyclical factors, such as the late 19th-Century nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe or the Cold War. This period also roughly corresponds with the rise of capitalist production on a global scale, which accelerated the extraction and consumption of natural resources. Two other factors recognized in the literature are geography and third parties. Overall, I am concerned about the possibility that civil wars can generate interstate wars.

Literature Review: My interest in the American Civil War (1851-1865) prompted my first acquaintance with the dependent variable and another reason to broaden its historical scope. In The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War, David J. Eicher mentions the role of cotton in the development of the animosity between Union and Confederacy and the role that third-party diplomatic recognition, both by border states and European states, like Great Britain and France, played in Confederate strategy.1

Michael T. Klare's Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (2001) inspired the choice of the independent variable. Klare's central thesis (p. 213) provides a warning for this examination, because his central thesis, that «resource wars will become, in the years ahead, the most distinctive feature of the global security environment» replaces fact with prognostication. Of a list of reasons for this prediction, Klare includes political instability as a factor in his «new geography of conflict.» Klare boldly declares that a new map colored with the geographical sources of resource deposits, including oil and coal, water, gems, timber, and minerals will replace boundaries in the new cartography. More helpfully, Klare provides an appendix (p. 221), «Territorial Disputes in Areas Containing Oil and/or Natural Gas».

Michael L. Ross, in «How Do Natural Resources Influence Civil War? Evidence from Thirteen Cases» conducts a small-N comparative case study of 13 civil wars that occurred between 1990 and 2000 selected on a «most-likely» basis, to ascertain if natural resources are related to civil wars. Ross applies seven hypotheses, divided into three categories, onset, duration, and intensity, and in the process finds evidence for four further hypotheses. Ross concludes that there is a causal connection between natural resources and civil war, but that he can not rule out reverse causality or a spurious connection. For his sample, Ross also finds that oil, minerals and gems, and illicit drugs are related to civil wars. Furthermore, natural resources have multiple, indeed sometimes even beneficial effects upon civil wars. Ross argues that natural resources play a weightier role in civil wars involving separatist conflicts, but not non-separatist ones. Finally, Ross suggests as a guide for future research testing one hypothesis against the entire civil war dataset, not just a subset.2

In «What Do We Know about Natural Resources and Civil War? », Michael L. Ross conducts a qualitative review of 14 comparative case studies based on econometric data, namely the correlation of natural resource extraction to GDP. He notes four regularities in those conclusions. Firstly, oil affects the onset of civil war positively. Secondly, «lootable» commodities, like gems and illicit drugs, affect the duration of civil wars, but not the onset. Thirdly, there is no relationship between legal agricultural commodities and civil war. Fourthly, the relationship between natural resources and civil war is unclear. Ross ascribes four reasons for the inconsistencies he finds in his analysis of the 14 studies, including differences in databases, definitions of civil war separatist vs. non-separatist), procedures for determining the end of a civil war, and different procedures for handling missing data.3

James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, in «Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War» conduct a quantitative analysis of 161 states with a population over 500,000 experiencing civil wars between 1945 and 1999. They conclude that the occurrence of civil war was not related to the end of the Cold War. Also, ethnic or ethnicity does not cause civil wars. Finally, political grievances also do not relate to civil wars. The authors related civil wars to insurgent activity, and the propensity of governments to conduct inept or corrupt counter-insurgency operations. insurgencies. «Insurgency is a technology of military conflict characterized by small, lightly armed bands practicing guerrilla warfare from rural base areas.» Positive correlates of civil wars include newness, large populations, and mountainous terrain, but not natural resources.4

David E. Cunningham, in «Veto Players and Civil War Duration», argues that third-parties affect the duration of civil wars. Cunningham redefines civil war duration from units of «year» to «month» generating a dataset of 288 states involved in civil wars without a pause of a maximum of 24 months since 1945. Cunningham also argues that civil wars have three main types of participants: government, rebels, and third-parties, or veto players. Cunningham concludes that civil wars with more veto players last longer and are harder to resolve.5

Nicolas Sambanis, in «What Is Civil War? Conceptual and Empirical Complexities of an Operational Definition » tackles the issue of competing definitions of civil war with a qualitative analysis of the COW project and prominent definitions offered by most of the authors above.. Sambanis offers 11 conditions by which an armed conflict can be defined as a civil war, including internationally recognized states with at least 500,000 people and well-defined political statements from both the government and insurgents. Sambanis also recognizes the possibility of third-party participation. Onset occurs in the first year when 500 to 1000 deaths occur, or if 500 deaths occur within a 3-year period. Sambanis defines duration as «sustained violence», with at least 500 deaths in a 3-year period, but not decreasing below 100 deaths for either side. Finally, an end is declared by either a peace treaty lasting six months or an insurgent victory.6

Research design/methods: Following cues from the literature above, and my reading of the American Civil War, I have decided to pursue Ross' hypothesis, that «Resource wealth increases the likelihood of civil war by increasing the probability of foreign intervention to support a rebel movement.»7 I will also extend the scope of the examination to cover the 1816-1997 period covered by the Correlates of War Project, Intra-State War Data, restrict my examination to the question of onset, and adjust for Sampanis' definitional qualifications. One implication of this hypothesis is, to recognize Cunningham's insight, that civil wars have three types of parties. For the dependent variable, I will select a sample of ten civil wars, five from the 18th-century and five from the 20th-Century, with both the highest aggregate deaths and longest duration, but distributed as evenly as possible continent-wise. For the independent variable, I will select the ten natural resources I will examine fit into five categories: carbon-based products, including oil, natural gas, and coal; mined resources, including copper, and gemstones; legal agricultural commodities, namely timber, cotton, and sugar, and illicit drugs, such as opium and coca. Because I am drawing anecdotally upon one case, the American Civil War, a small-N quantitative comparative analysis is possible.

Discussion/Findings: I expect primary agricultural commodities will correlate more positively with civil war in the 19th-Century than in the last century. I also suspect that coal and civil war will be similar for both centuries.

Conclusion: Pro-Secessionist Southern planters banked on King Cotton to attract British and French support, West and Central African conflicts seemingly defied political boundaries, attracting broad regional participation. Finding which natural resources have ensured longer, bitterer civil wars would guide international and national policy-makers how to establish the international organizations Klare advocates to distribute natural resources wisely, if at all.

1. See Eicher (2001), Chapter One, «The War Begins at Sumter» and Chapter Two, «Organizing the Struggle». [↩]
2. Michael L. Ross, «How Do Natural Resources Influence Civil War? Evidence from Thirteen Cases», International Organization, Vol. 58, No. 1, (Winter, 2004), pp. 35-67. [↩]
3. Michael L. Ross, «What Do We Know about Natural Resources and Civil War?» Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 41, No. 3, (May, 2004), pp. 337-356 [↩]
4. James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, «Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War», The American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 1, (Feb., 2003), pp. 75-90 [↩]
5. David E. Cunningham, «Veto Players and Civil War Duration», American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 50, No. 4, (Oct., 2006), pp. 875-892. [↩]
6. Nicholas Sambanis, «What Is Civil War? Conceptual and Empirical Complexities of an Operational Definition», The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 48, No. 6, (Dec., 2004), pp. 814-858 [↩]
7. Ross, «How Do Natural Resources Influence Civil War? Evidence from Thirteen Cases», p. 57. [↩]

«What is even more cruel is that all the progress in the human species constantly takes it further away from its primitive state. The more we accumulate new knowledge, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all, and, in a sense, it is thanks to the study of man that we are now in a position where we are beyond the stage where he can know him.» (Gourevitch, 1986, p. 129) In 1754, in the Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men, Jean-Jacques Rousseau offered a version of humanity's natural state still lampooned over two hundred years later. Rousseau was not the first to offer such an account, his own feigned humility and his skepticism about naturalists' limited insights at the time notwithstanding. Humanity's natural condition is all the more a popular literary device for its plasticity. Adam is not the first human to spawn a race, and authors seemingly challenge deities to construct humanity anew in print. In Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (GGS), Jared Diamond offers his own take on humanity's «progress» from its natural state to modernity. I will argue that Diamond's biogeographical arguments refreshingly eschew a monocausal explanation for humanity's history. I will compare GGS, and relevant arguments from a preceding volume, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (TC), with both Immanuel Wallerstein's World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (WSA) and William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples (PP). GGS and PP, however, together prove the prescience of Rousseau's conundrum, by offering opposing accounts of humanity's natural state to those of GGS's critics.

In GGS, Jared Diamond asks, «Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?» (GGS, p. 16) Diamond answers succinctly a few pages later: «...because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.» (GGS, p. 25) In another rephrasing, Diamond asserts that «...human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between haves and have-nots; between peoples with farmer power and those without it, or between those who acquired it at different times.» (GGS, p. 93) In TC, Diamond calls the advent of agricultural production on the Eurasian continent around 8000 B.C. A ?mixed blessing» and «a halfway station between our noble traits (art and language) and our mitigated vices (drug abuse, genocide, and environmental destructiveness.» (TC, p. 180) «Farmer power» brought malnutrition, starvation, epidemic diseases, and class divisions, including bureaucrats and soldiers, to humanity. (TC, p. 187) Agriculture also sparked technological innovations, like implements and storage techniques, as well as military advancements, like horse-riding (GGS, p. 112) Agricultural production could deliver more food per acre than hunting-gathering, but not necessarily more food per person, as the result of a positive feedback cycle, or «autocatalytic» process between food production and population density. (GGS, p. 110) Hunting-gathering cultures either adopted agriculture or agricultural cultures conquered or assimilated them (TC, p. 190). Diamond also argues that hunting-gathering and agriculture were alternative strategies that probably existed in mixed forms, because societies sought the most efficient use of resources and animal and human power (GGS, p. 109). So, the answer to Diamond's question begins with agriculture.

Yet not all land, and not all continents, were equally bountiful to agricultural societies. Not only were not all indigenous plant and animal species domesticable, but not all domesticated species were not equally able to transcend land and water barriers before the advent of sailing technology. Diamond outlines how it is that so few wild plant and animal species are domesticable.1 More importantly, Diamond ascribes the rapid spread of domesticated plant and animal species through Eurasia to the continent's east-west axis. This geographical orientation ensures similar climate and seasonal patterns for plants to flourish without genetic modification, and for animals to adapt without different climates and parasites (GGS, p. 183-5). Diamond's biogeographical arguments are the second step in an answer to his question.

Diamond's treatment of language in TC and GGS is a bit tricky. In TC, Diamond argues why human spoken language is not remarkable as compared with animal proto-languages2 , but in GGS, Diamond discusses the advantages post-agricultural humans obtained from written language. Diamond considers spoken language as part of the «Great Leap Forward» predating the advent of agriculture and as another supposedly human capability with animal precedents (TC, p. 138). But, in GGS, written language joins «...weapons, microbes, and centralized political organization as a modern agent of conquest.» (GGS, p. 216) Written language, as opposed to the spoken language of hunting-gathering societies, «...served the needs of ...political institutions (such as record-keeping and royal propaganda) and the users were full-time bureaucrats nourished by stored food surpluses grown by food-producing peasants.» (GGS, p. 236) Finally, the same axial barriers stunting the spread of domesticated plants and animals also retarded the flow of written language (GGS, p. 238). So. language itself is not a very unique animal ability, but an alphabet is what a powerful human society needs.

The remaining two elements of Eurasian dominance are technology and political centralization, both of which are post-agricultural breaks with hunting-gathering society. Diamond argues technology arises cumulatively, and also for uses realized after its invention (GGS, p. 245). Diamond stresses four conditions for a new technology's adoption: relative economic advantage over existing technology; social value; compatibility with vested interests; and, timeliness-the «a-ha» factor (GGS, p. 247).

The link between agricultural production and political centralization and war is even clearer. «Inten