So, a couple of folks have asked me to review the APSA. That's always hard to do, since so much of the experience is personal - the friends you see or don't see, the restaurants you choose, the attendance at your panel, and so on. What about more general impressions?
On the "controversy" over the relative weight of international and domestic politics going on over at the interesting new TNR academic blog, I'd have to agree with Dan Drezner. I was at the "clash of civilizations" plenary along with half the conference, and I left after Steve Walt's entertaining declaration of victory on behalf of Realism (even though Steve himself has obviously become a constructivist!) along with half the audience. I'd guess that most people went anticipating a lively argument between Sam Huntington and four big name critics (Walt, "Frank" Fukuyama, Ben Barber, and James Kurth). But when Sam couldn't make it due to illness, it lost that attraction even if the other panelists gave their typically entertaining presentations. Me, I have to admit that I felt like I had fallen into a wormhole and was back in 1996 instead of 2006, but it was still a decent way to spend the lunch hour.
The most personally rewarding panel I attended was the one Middle East panel I constructed for Division 12 which I was able to attend. Malik Mufti, Salwa Ismail, and Rabab al-Mahdi each presented very interesting, original, and thoughtful papers on questions with both theoretical and policy relevance; what more could we ask? I hear that some of the other panels went well too, which I find gratifying. Getting Middle East research out of the area studies ghetto and on to the main program - engaging with the core questions of the discipline without losing empirical richness - has long been important to me, and I'm very encouraged by the excellent work presented on these panels by the rising generation of grad students (like David Patel, Quinn Mecham, Lisa Blaydes, and others).
I found two panels very useful, even though I had to leave each of them early. One on the future of the jihadi movement was quite promising for several reasons (even if Juan Cole couldn't make it due to illness, and David Cook got trapped in Texas by the weather). Peter Bergen was very impressive, I have to say, never having seen him before. I didn't get to see Barbara Bodine's presentation, but was lucky enough to run into her in the lobby Saturday night and catch up a bit - I wish I could blog about some of our conversation about the Kurds and the future of Iraq, but I should probably get her explicit permission first since it was just a casual conversation. The most telling thing about this panel, though, was that it was organized by West Point's Combatting Terrorism Center. I find it quite telling for three reasons: first, that the CTC - which does excellent work - is so energetically reaching out to the academic community for expertise and insight; second, that the APSA welcomed them on to the program, in contrast to past reservations about such things; and third, that there were no mainstream political scientists on a panel at the American Political Science Association, underlining a point I've made in the past about the limited contributions we've made as a discipline... which hopefully will change soon.
The other panel which I found intriguing was the one by the task force on political violence called "Of what is Iraq a case?" This followed directly from the Foreign Affairs roundtable, debating whether we should be thinking in terms of national insurgencies or ethnic warfare or something else entirely. Stathis Kalyvas of Yale gave a nuanced and challenging reading of this question, suggesting that it was better to conceptualize the situation in terms of multiple dynamics - both insurgency and ethnic conflict - and try to model the interactions between them (does a stronger ethnic conflict weaken or strengthen the insurgency?). David Laitin and Margaret Levi also gave challenging presentations, showing how the conceptual maps we bring to the table shape our conclusions and policy recommendations. I had to leave before the discussion, but all in all this seemed like a really good example of what an APSA panel could be.
Of the "normal" panels I attended, the less said the better.
If I think of anything else, I'll fill it in later. I'm sorry if I failed to meet up with anyone who had hoped to see me, but there's always next year... see you in Chicago! But now it's back to real work, and perhaps even real blogging!
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