Political Scientists on Vacation

We have nothing to hide! Our vacations are not a weapon of mass destruction! No tricks! There is no hidden menace in these activities. Never!

We triple-guarantee you, our vacations are harmless. We get our information from authentic sources, many authentic sources. The situation is excellent.

Excellent Vacations

Above, I am visiting the Republic of Somaliland, capital, Hargeisa to collect data for a new book. Lee Seymour, a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Department of Political Science came too. My aim is to see why people would stop fighting several times in the 1990s, while others who had pretty much the same resources and lots of other similar circumstances could not pull off this feat. This is a sort of “autonomous gun control”. We don’t know enough about why guys with guns obey guys without guns—sometimes. I look at the same sorts of developments in the Caucasus and Nigeria’s Niger Delta. This gives me a lot of variety, or variation on the dependent and independent variables, as I get to evaluate lots of different community experiences during wartime. The objective here is to explain why some communities collapse in wartime and their local gunmen victimize their own neighbors, while just down the road they pretty much behave like police or a mini-army to protect their neighbors. Once upon a time, thus were born governments and states.

Lee studies the foreign policies of as-yet unrecognized states. Somaliland is a great example of an unrecognized state. Lee and I also worked together in the Caucasus. This was made possible by my colleague Georgi Derluguian, noted author and sociology guru. Here is Lee in Nagorno-Karabakh. That unrecognized state has an army, as you can see.

There is one more stop—the Niger Delta and its vigilantes and other armed structures. Look at how they interpret their right to bear arms and what arms they have!