No plan survives

James C. Scott: Seeing Like a State- How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

Scott’s book deals with the failure of large-scale state-initiated schemes of social engineering. Based on various experiences in the 19th and 20th century, such schemes seem possible when four conditions are given:

• Socities that are administratively ordered; they have to be “legible” for the state to be able to intervene.
• Decision-makers believing in the possibility of designing the social and natural order (“high modernist ideology”).
• An authoritarian state willing to use its coercive power to bring high modernist schemes to life.
• A civil society unable to resist the state imposing high modernist schemes.

Scott shows how European state-building has been based on the harmonization and standardization of units of measurement and land tenure rights (including the introduction of the necessary documents and statistics). While harmonization and standardization constituted a great simplification of local realities, they made society "legible" for state administrators. Originally artificial inventions such as land titles also became important elements in peoples’ daily lives.

The first high-modernist scheme Scott examines is 20th century urban planning, particularly the work of Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia. These schemes focused on creating “modern” cities with single purpose districts (separating shopping, workplace, residences) and were organized for motorized traffic. Scott argues that modernist urban planning failed to create cities where people actually want to live. The lack of informal, unplanned public spaces (sidewalks, cafés) prevents the emergence of the networks of relations that are central to an attractive and functional urban life.

The second high modernist scheme examined is Lenin’s concept of the revolutionary mass party, which is contrasted with Rosa Luxembourg and Aleksandra Kollontay’s views. Lenin takes a top down view of revolution, with party cadres having to guide “unconscious masses”. Luxembourg and Kollontay, on the other hand, take a much more bottom-up approach. In their vision, revolutionary parties should take advantage of the lessons learned and creative energies of the working class.

Two more chapters are devoted to land reforms in the Soviet Union and Tanzania. Soviet collectivization put an emphasis on mechanization, mono-cultures, centralized procurement and planning. Inefficient from a pure production perspective, collectivization still greatly enhanced the Soviet Union political stability. Specifically, it made rural society “legible” for the state, destroyed potentially dissident peasant communes, and made peasants dependent on the state.

Finally, Scott delivers a fierce critique of “high-modernist agriculture”. Modernist agriculture is marked by monocultures rather than polycultures, permanent fields rather than shifting cultivation, the indiscriminate employment of fertilizer, and an emphasis on short-term outputs. Scott argues that high-modernist agriculture is based on a version of agricultural science that aims to isolate central variables in experiments rather than taking into account the complex localized interactions of soil, temperature, climate etc..

In two concluding chapters, Scott makes the argument for “metis”, the ancient Greek term for practical knowledge. “Metis” is acquired through experience in a constantly changing and complex environment. „Metis“ is based on local and customary knowledge and mainly concerned with the application of rules of thumb in local environments rather than the deduction of universal principles. Scott also provides four pieces of advice for planners: take small steps; favor reversibility; plan on surprises; and plan on human inventiveness.

Overall a nice read, making a sensible argument. The amount of historical material covered is nothing less than impressive. Planning for public policy of any kind of should take  Scott’s insights on the pitfalls’s of large-scale social engineering into account. Some thinking on military planning continues for instance to be coined by an overly mechanistic understanding of how military actions can achieve desired effects in complex war settings. A similar reproach can be made against overly simplistic understandings of nation-building in the aftermath of military interventions.

Still, Scott’s argument didn’t fully convince me. First, Scotts fails to develop counterfactuals that would demonstrate the pernicious effects of some of the high-modernist schemes he presents. How much better would the developing world be off on average without the introduction of high-modernist agriculture? Has modern urban planning made city inhabitants’ life worse on average? Would a communist revolution inspired by the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg really have taken a more human face? In a related vain, the whole book sometimes seems overly long. Scott introduces a tremendous amount of details on the failed modernization schemes he presents, but not all of it seems necessary to the case he is trying to build. Finally, some of the implications are also not too new given that the book was written in the 1990s. Scott’s book could have profited from engaging with say Herbert Simon’s work on bounded rationality, Charles Lindblom’s work on incrementalism, and FriedrichHayek’s works (without ever having read the latter).

Random movie/ TV reference:

Planning for War

You can't always get what you want...

John Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men

Another classic of American 20th century' literature on this month's reading list. 

It is a short story, so, well, the story is quickly told. Lennie and George move from farm to farm in California in search of work. Lennie is physically imposing, innocent, and good-natured , but mentally retarded. He likes to pet soft things, but usually inadvertently kills the animals he has. George, the smarter one of the two, takes care of Lennie. Together, they hope to realize their hope of having their own farm. The two had to leave their previous farm after Lennie's love for touching soft object (in this case a girl's skirt) led to him being accused of rape.

At the new farm they meet Candy, an old farm worker whose savings may bring the two closer than ever to realizing their dream of a farm. At the same time, the situation slowly escalates. Their boss's son Curley, a short, easily irritable man, soon gets into a confrontation with George and Lennie. Curley's promiscuous wife (referred to as Curley's wife throughout the novel) flirts with the farm workers. Lennie ends up crashing Curley's hand in a fight. Sometime later, Lennie accidentally kills Curley's wife, after she had asked him to stroke his hair, and runs away. The story ends with George setting out with Curley and the other farm workers to find Lennie... (won't spoil the rest).

Great read. An impressive description of farm life in 1920's California. The novel got the feel of a classic drama, with the hopes of the protagonists being built up, while the foreseeable bad ending is kind of hanging over the story. Also, there are more than enough themes to identify with. Unrealized hopes, friendship, the loneliness of moving people etc. When compared to the previous American classic on my reading list, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, loneliness seems to be a theme running through both books. However, there is much less depiction of the characters' inner lives in Steinbeck's book. Moreover, having two farm workers in rural California as the main characters also nicely contrasts with private school educated Holden Caulfield. I have the impression that Caulfield's privileged upbringing and the material security afforded by well-off parents allow him to uphold an alienated attitude that characters like George and Lennie can't afford, given they have to survive, get along with people and make their living on a daily basis...

Next on the list of American (to-be) classics: Kerouac's "On the Road", Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath", Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mocking Bird", Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem", Tom Wolfe's "A Man in Full", and Yanigihara's "A Life in Full".


Random movie reference:
Apparently, two gremlins called George and Lennie feature in the second Gremlin's movie, but I couldn't find a proper clip. So let's go for the intellectual gremlin in the first part. The way how he deals with the less intellectual gremlin is also kind of remotely reminiscent of the novel...(no spoiler intended)

Favorite quotes:
"Ain't many guys travel around together ... I don't know why. Maybe ever'body in the whole damn world is scared of each other."

"Take a real smart guy and he ain't hardly ever a nice fella."

"I seen the guys that go around on the ranches alone. That ain't no good. They don't have no fun. After a long time, they get mean."

"Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody- to be near him."

The Social Network

Paul Staniland: Networks of Rebellion- Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse

Some of the more serious stuff I read this year... it's about war, after all.
Paul Staniland explains the success and failure of insurgent groups through the social networks on which they are based. Specifically, two explanatory variables describe a rebel group's structure:

• Horizontal ties, i.e. the social relations between the (geographically mobile) organizers of a rebellion. Horizontal ties are central for a rebel group to develop and implement a shared political vision and concerted actions that go beyond beyond localized grievances.
• Vertical ties, i.e. the relationships between organizers of rebellion and local communities. Vertical ties are important to align the localized actions of the rank and file- say peasants or workers- with the goals of the organizers of a rebellion. 

A central assumption in Staniland's book is that the social networks the organizers of rebellion had before a civil war determine the structure of insurgent organizations during the war. This assumption helps Staniland circumvent endogeneity concerns: pre-war social networks are usually not the result of a deliberate attempt to create an insurgent organization (1).
Based on these two variables, Staniland derives four types of rebel groups:

• Vanguard groups with strong horizontal and weak vertical ties. The classic example are communist groups, consisting of a committed revolutionary core of organizers, often intellectuals based in urban areas. Those revolutionary cadres often lack ties to the local communities they want to organize, be they peasants or workers.
• Parochial groups with weak horizontal and strong vertical ties. Parochial groups typically consist of a weak leader acting as a broker between different factions or are headed by loose coalitions of military commanders.
• Integrated groups with both strong horizontal and vertical ties. This is the most resilient form of rebel organization.
• Fragmented groups with weak horizontal and weak vertical ties, the weakest type of rebel organization. There are  coalitions of leaders are fluid with little to no centralized control, The processes for recruiting the rank and file are shambolic, attracting for instance criminal groups and other elements with purely local incentives.

Staniland derives 13 different mechanisms how insurgent groups may change, i.e. develop stronger horizontal ("central control") or vertical ties ("local ties") or be driven towards fragmentation:

• Vanguard groups are especially vulnerable to leadership decapitation, as evidenced for instance with the Sendero Luminosos guerrilla group in Peru. They may at the same time become integrated groups and develop strong vertical ties by imposing themselves at the local level or entering into alliances with local interests, strategies for instance pursued by ISIS in Syria. 
• Integrated rebel groups may be defeated by comprehensive counterinsurgency, which breaks both the horizontal ties between an insurgency's leaders and destroys the local networks in which an insurgency is embedded. A good example is offered by the British counterinsurgency strategy during the Malayan Emergency in the 1960s. 
• Parochial groups may be become integrated groups through "factional fusing", usually when external sponsors push their clients to act in a more unified manner. A nice example has been offered by Jordan and the U.S. attempting to improve the cooperation of various Free Syrian Army factions through through "operations rooms". 

Without going too much into detail here, suffice it to say that Staniland convincingly tests his theory through detailed historical case studies of insurgencies in Afghanistan, Jammu and Kashmir (India), and South East Asia.

The book suffers from some problems and might be expanded upon in multiple regards. Above all, there are issues with the measurement of Staniland's independent variables. Where do I set the boundaries between different parts of a rebel organization? How do I  recognize for instance an integrated rebel organization when I see one? In the case of Afghanistan, Staniland assesses Ahmed Shah Massud's rebel group, the Shura-ye Nazar, as at first a vanguard and then an integrated organization, while he codes its "parental" country-wide organization, Jamiat-e Islami, as parochial. Can a parochial rebel group consist of various organizations that are "integrated" at the sub-national level? How do we assess the organizational characteristics of federations of rebel groups?
Moreover, Staniland also neglects the different origins of civil wars in his analysis. Are rebel organizations systematically different when they arise out of an army splitting after a military coup rather than a popular uprising against an incumbent government? Do separatist rebel groups face different organizational challenges than groups attempting to capture central government power?

In spite of these criticisms, this is still an important book which will surely become a must read for anybody interested in "technologies of rebellion". It also offers a nice complement to Jeremy Weinstein's Africa-centered account of rebel group organization based on their access to lootable natural resources. The typology of rebel groups can easily inform policy, as for instance demonstrated in Staniland's work on the Syrian civil war.

Random movie association:
The People's Front of Judea...

(1) Roger Petersen's work on the role of the Catholic Church and student associations in mobilizing Lithaunian resistance against the Soviet occupation in the 1990s offers a nice illustration.