In this article, Associate Fellow and author Benoit Pelopidas argues that memorialization of the Cuban missle crisis may lead to the misconception that we have learned all the lessons worth gleaning from the crisis. Ironically we run the risk of recreating the perilous mood of the day: "the overconfidence that the leadership at the time had about both their knowledge and the sufficiency of that knowledge to allow successful management of a nuclear crisis.."
CISAC Senior Fellow Scott Sagan and Affiliated Faculty Member Allen Weiner of the Stanford Law School teach "Rules of War," a Thinking Matters course that investigates the legal rules that govern the resort to, and conduct of war, and study whether these rules affect the conduct of states and individuals. The class will confront various ethical, legal, and strategic problems as they make decisions about military intervention and policies regarding the threat and use of force in an international crisis. The class culminates in one of CISAC's signature simulations in which students are assigned roles within the presidential cabinet.
FSI's Francis Fukuyama and former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, a William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC, write in the Financial Times that President Barack Obama's stance on ISIS is "overpromising" and that the United States should follow lessons from British history and pursue a more sustainable strategy known as "offshore balancing."
FSI's Francis Fukuyama and former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, a William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC, write in the Financial Times that President Barack Obama's stance on ISIS is "overpromising" and that the United States should follow lessons from British history and pursue a more sustainable strategy known as "offshore balancing."
Abstract: To what extent are the American public’s views on the use of force consistent with just war doctrine’s principles of proportionality and distinction? Drawing on an original survey experiment conducted on a representative sample of American citizens, we find that Americans broadly accept the ethical principle of proportionality. They are less willing to inflict collateral civilian deaths when the military importance of destroying the target is lower and more willing to accept them when doing so would avert the deaths of larger numbers of American soldiers. Nevertheless, we find that the public’s commitment to proportionality is heavily biased in favor of American interests in ways that suggest only limited support for traditional understandings of just war theory. We find little evidence that the public supports the principle of distinction (non-combatant immunity). Indeed, under certain conditions, more than two-thirds of the American public was willing to approve of intentional attacks on foreign civilians. In addition, contrary to prevailing interpretations of just war doctrine, Americans were significantly more likely to accept the collateral deaths of foreign civilians when those civilians were described as politically sympathetic with the adversary than when they were described as political opponents. The paper that will be presented, "Just a War Theory? Understanding American Public Opinion on Proportionality and Distinction in War" is co-authored by Scott Sagan (Stanford University) and Ben Valentino (Dartmouth University).
About the Speaker: Scott D. Sagan is the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, the Mimi and Peter Haas University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University. He also serves as co-chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Global Nuclear Future Initiative. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University. From 1984 to 1985, he served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. Sagan has also served as a consultant to the office of the Secretary of Defense and at the Sandia National Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989); The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993); and, with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Planning the Unthinkable (Cornell University Press, 2000) with Peter R. Lavoy and James L. Wirtz; the editor of Inside Nuclear South Asia (Stanford University Press, 2009); and co-editor of a two-volume special issue of Daedalus, On the Global Nuclear Future (Fall 2009 and Winter 2010), with Steven E. Miller. Sagan’s recent publications include “A Call for Global Nuclear Disarmament” in Nature (July 2012); “Atomic Aversion: Experimental Evidence on Taboos, Traditions, and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons” with Daryl G. Press and Benjamin A. Valentino in the American Political Science Review (February 2013); and, with Matthew Bunn, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences occasional paper, “A Worst Practices Guide to Insider Threats: Lessons from Past Mistakes” (2014).
Sagan was the recipient of the International Studies Association's International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award in 2013. He has also won four teaching awards: Stanford’s 1998-99 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; Stanford's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching; the International Studies Association’s 2008 Innovative Teaching Award; and the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Nonproliferation Education Award in 2009.
CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, E202
Stanford, CA 94305-6165
(650) 725-2715
(650) 723-0089
0
ssagan@stanford.edu
The Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science
The Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Senior Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
rsd25_073_1160a_1.jpg
PhD
Scott D. Sagan is Co-Director and Senior Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, the Caroline S.G. Munro Professor of Political Science, and the Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He also serves as Co-Chair of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Committee on International Security Studies. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sagan was a lecturer in the Department of Government at Harvard University and served as special assistant to the director of the Organization of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon.
Sagan is the author of Moving Targets: Nuclear Strategy and National Security (Princeton University Press, 1989); The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons (Princeton University Press, 1993); and, with co-author Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons: An Enduring Debate (W.W. Norton, 2012). He is the co-editor of Insider Threats (Cornell University Press, 2017) with Matthew Bunn; and co-editor of The Fragile Balance of Terror (Cornell University Press, 2022) with Vipin Narang. Sagan was also the guest editor of a two-volume special issue of Daedalus: Ethics, Technology, and War (Fall 2016) and The Changing Rules of War (Winter 2017).
Recent publications include “Creeds and Contestation: How US Nuclear and Legal Doctrine Influence Each Other,” with Janina Dill, in a special issue of Security Studies (December 2025); “Kettles of Hawks: Public Opinion on the Nuclear Taboo and Noncombatant Immunity in the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Israel”, with Janina Dill and Benjamin A. Valentino in Security Studies (February 2022); “The Rule of Law and the Role of Strategy in U.S. Nuclear Doctrine” with Allen S. Weiner in International Security (Spring 2021); “Does the Noncombatant Immunity Norm Have Stopping Power?” with Benjamin A. Valentino in International Security (Fall 2020); and “Just War and Unjust Soldiers: American Public Opinion on the Moral Equality of Combatants” and “On Reciprocity, Revenge, and Replication: A Rejoinder to Walzer, McMahan, and Keohane” with Benjamin A. Valentino in Ethics & International Affairs (Winter 2019).
In 2022, Sagan was awarded Thérèse Delpech Memorial Award from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at their International Nuclear Policy Conference. In 2017, he received the International Studies Association’s Susan Strange Award which recognizes the scholar whose “singular intellect, assertiveness, and insight most challenge conventional wisdom and intellectual and organizational complacency" in the international studies community. Sagan was also the recipient of the National Academy of Sciences William and Katherine Estes Award in 2015, for his work addressing the risks of nuclear weapons and the causes of nuclear proliferation. The award, which is granted triennially, recognizes “research in any field of cognitive or behavioral science that advances understanding of issues relating to the risk of nuclear war.” In 2013, Sagan received the International Studies Association's International Security Studies Section Distinguished Scholar Award. He has also won four teaching awards: Stanford’s 1998-99 Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching; Stanford's 1996 Hoagland Prize for Undergraduate Teaching; the International Studies Association’s 2008 Innovative Teaching Award; and the Monterey Institute for International Studies’ Nonproliferation Education Award in 2009.
Co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation
CISAC Stanford University Encina Hall, E210 Stanford CA 94305-6165
(650) 724-5687
614-961-9670
0
dtraven@stanford.edu
MacArthur Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow
david_traven.jpg
PhD
David Traven joined CISAC as a MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow in July 2014. He received his PhD. in Political Science at Ohio State University in 2013. From January 2013 to June 2014 he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Kenyon College. His research examines the evolution of the law and ethics of war in international relations, and he is particularly interested in understanding how moral cognition and emotion shape the creation of norms that protect the victims of armed conflict, especially civilians. Dr. Traven is currently working on a book manuscript that examines how moral intuitions influence the creation and the effectiveness of the norms of war across cultures.
Among the technologies that transformed the 20th-century, none has cast a longer and darker shadow than the atomic bomb. Even since Sidney Drell and John Lewis founded the Center for International Security and Arms Control in 1983, scholars at CISAC have grappled with how these tools of war have altered global diplomacy and defense.
Current and former CISAC fellows recently took part in a conversation about the state of nuclear studies, which has bridged academia, the public sphere and the halls of power. In a joint forum for H-Diplo and the International Security Studies Forum, which curate book reviews and disciplinary debates for international historians and international security scholars, respectively, as well as the Monkey Cage, where The Washington Post publishes rigorous analysis on political topics, a cohort of historians and political scientists debated the claims and methods that are animating the study of nuclear subjects today.
Recent publications by early career political scientists and the occurrence of what CISAC Senior Fellow Scott Sagan terms “two nuclear renaissances,” prompted the discussions. Since 1991, historians who work on subjects such as nuclear power, crises, proliferation, compellence, and deterrence have vastly expanded the documentary record (nearly always declassified) upon which our collective knowledge rests by mining archives throughout the world. Their efforts have been curated and made available by organizations such as the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Concurrently, political scientists have taken advantage of the prodigious computational power and advanced statistical tools that have revolutionized scientific inquiry to generate important new research and insights using large-N quantitative analysis as well as survey methodology.
Two recent articles in International Organizations, a prominent journal of political science and international relations, one authored by former CISAC fellow Matthew Kroenig and another coauthored by former CISAC fellow Todd S. Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann, endeavor to draw inferences about what leads one state or another to emerge victorious from an international crisis when one or both sides possess nuclear weapons. Intriguingly, though they ask slightly different questions, they come to divergent conclusions. Kroenig contends that crisis outcomes are co-determined by nuclear superiority and “the balance of resolve” (i.e. which side has higher political stakes). Sechser and Fuhrmann, on the other hand, find that nuclear weapons generally fail to furnish a “credible threat,” making them weak tools with which to compel adversaries.
Francis J. Gavin, the Frank Stanton Chair in Nuclear Security Policy Studies at MIT, takes issue with the methodological approach of both articles in a response piece, entitled “What We Talk about When We Talk About Nuclear Weapons,” which grew into a joint H-Diplo/ISSF forum featuring an introduction by Sagan, responses by the two articles’ various authors (individually and collectively), an exposition by former CISAC honors student and current Duke University professor Hal Brands on the importance of archives for studying nuclear politics; an “apology” for quantitative methods in the political sciences by UCSD Professor Erik Gartzke; and a explication of how “large-N methods” can be used and abused when studying nuclear subjects by one of last year’s Stanton Faculty Fellows at CISAC and Gavin’s colleague at MIT, Vipin Narang.
The forum inspired another round of responses on H-Diplo, including a number by former and current fellows at CISAC. Gavin reprises some of his arguments in a response to the forum while also underscoring the professional and institutional stakes at issue. UCLA historian Marc Trachtenberg, Columbia political scientist Robert Jervis, and U.S. Naval War College strategic thinker Tom Nichols also weigh in on when nuclear weapons matter and how scholars can go about figuring out why and how they do.
As the current MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC and forthcoming Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at RAND Corporation, I call attention to the power of ideas and how social scientists embed themselves in the subjects they study. Jayita Sarkar, a Stanton Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center explores how empirical work on case studies of technological assistance and proliferation such as that of France and India call into doubt some findings by political scientists who employ statistical methods. Lastly, former CISAC postdoctoral fellow Benoît Pelopidas, now a professor at the University of Bristol, probes the ethical responsibility of intellectuals and whether scholars ought to serve the policymaking community, or the broader public, when they conceptualize and perform their work.
Pelopidas’ essay points to a core concern about the policy implications of nuclear-security scholarship, which a third group of distinguished panelists delved into for a symposium in TheWashington Post. The forum, posted on the Monkey Cage, features thoughts from Yale Assistant Professor of Political Science Alexandre Debs, Duke Professor of Political Science and former Special Advisor for Strategic Planning and Institutional Reform on the National Security Council Staff Peter Feaver, Georgetown Associate Professor of Political Science and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Colin Kahl, and Matthew Connelly, who will join CISAC this year as the inaugural Hazy Senior Fellow in International Security and Professor of History at Stanford University.
Gavin concludes his introduction to the Monkey Cage symposium by reflecting on how the current generation of scholars has taken up the baton from those who participated in the “golden age” of nuclear-security scholarship after World War II:
If brilliant minds like Bernard Brodie, Thomas Schelling, and Albert Wohlstetter could not settle these issues during their time at RAND, we certainly don’t expect to here. At best, we can inspire much needed debate and broaden this crucial conversation. What we do hope to emulate, however, is the earlier generation’s rigorous, interdisciplinary questioning and exchange, while always keeping an eye on how our ideas can help decision-makers better understand and make responsible decisions about these fearsome weapons.
The Center for International Security and Cooperation is gratified that so many of its affiliates—current and former—are contributing to this revival of scholarly interest in how the nuclear revolution has shaped global affairs. We look forward to our nuclear scholars—past, present, and future—continuing to enrich these vital interdisciplinary debates.
CISAC nuclear fellow Jonathan Hunt listens to the 2012 Drell Lecture on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Jonathan Hunt was a Nuclear Fellow at CISAC from 2012-2014.
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CISAC nuclear fellow Jonathan Hunt listens to the 2012 Drell Lecture on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Abstract: This book project is the first historical study of the postwar Soviet civil defense program, and an innovative comparative account of American and Soviet civil defense. It offers a comparative institutional history of the superpowers’ civil defense drawing on previously unexamined Soviet and American archival sources. It offers findings that challenge common assumptions about the logic driving the two nations’ potentially apocalyptic nuclear flirtation, such as that that a mutual recognition that nuclear war would be suicidal prevented the leaders of the two superpowers from embracing civil defense. In actuality, Moscow and Washington developed their civil defense policies in accordance with domestic political concerns, sometimes in direct contradiction to their declared strategic doctrines or military planning. The strange history of Cold War civil defense shows that the superpowers made their nuclear weapons policies as the result of power struggles between different institutions pursuing their own narrow self-interests, with results that imperiled the survival of civilization itself.
About the Speaker: Edward Geist received his Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina in May 2013. Previously a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the RAND Corporation in Washington DC, he is a native of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. His research interests include emergency management in nuclear disasters, Soviet politics and culture, and the history of nuclear power and weapons. His dissertation, a comparative study of Soviet and U.S. civil defense during the Cold War, draws upon previously unexamined archival sources to examine the similarities and differences in how the two superpowers faced the dilemmas of the nuclear age. Edward is also interested in the potential uses of simulation and modelling for historians and is developing a piece using these techniques to explore the potential historical implications of the the U.S. and Soviet Union's use of qualitatively different technical assumptions to model strategic nuclear exchanges. A previous recipient of fellowships from Fulbright-Hays and American Councils to conduct research in Moscow and Kyiv, he has published articles in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Russian Review, and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.
Encina Hall (2nd Floor)
Edward Geist
MacArthur Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow
PhD
CISAC
Erin Baggott Carter (赵雅芬) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Southern California and a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. She is also a non-resident scholar at the UCSD 21st Century China Center. She has previously held fellowships at Stanford's Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and the Center for International Security and Cooperation. She received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University.
Dr. Carter's research focuses on Chinese politics and propaganda. Her first book, Propaganda in Autocracies (Cambridge University Press), explores how political institutions determine propaganda strategies with an original dataset of eight million articles in six languages drawn from state-run newspapers in nearly 70 countries. She is currently working on a book on how domestic politics influence US-China relations. Her other work has appeared in the British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Security Studies, and International Interactions. Her work has been featured by a number of media platforms, including the New York Times and the Little Red Podcast.
Her research has been supported by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University.
Dr. Carter regularly tweets about Chinese politics and propaganda at @baggottcarter. She can be reached via email at baggott [at] usc.edu or ebaggott [at] stanford.edu.
MANILA, Philippines – When Victor Corpus was an idealistic young military officer, he turned on his country to join the communist New People’s Army. He headed for the mountains and would face years of armed struggle, imprisonment and then a sentence to death.
What made the highly trained Philippine Army first lieutenant lead a bold raid to capture the weapons from his own armory at the Philippine Military Academy – one that would go on to make him a living legend and lead to a movie about his life?
“It was my realization that our society at that time was structured like a pyramid, where the wealth of the nation is controlled by about 100 families on top, where less than 1 percent of the population controls everything,” recalls Corpus, who is now 70.
When the Army ordered the 26-year-old officer and his soldiers to train the private militia of a wealthy warlord in the northern Philippines, a trigger was pulled.
“If you are a member of the Armed Forces and you realize that you are just being used as an instrument of the elite, to preserve and protect their interests, it makes you want to rise up and fight for what you believe are the true interests of the people,” he said.
“That is what made me go to the rebel side.”
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It’s still a factor that makes young Filipino men and women pick up arms today: The gap between rich and poor, the government corruption, the dynasties that still rule the impoverished countryside.
By understanding this former rebel’s story – and thousands of others his team of researchers have collected over the last decade – CISAC Senior Research Scholar Joe Felter believes he can help scholars dive deeper into the causes of insurgency. He hopes to aid policy makers and military planners in determining how to best curb these conflicts and help reduce casualties and economic devastation.
“You were a real inspiration for me and made me want to learn more about insurgency and then study it and write about it,” Felter told Corpus over a recent breakfast in Manila. “I met Victor soon after I moved to the Philippines for a three-year assignment. It’s such an amazing story, and it captures so many of the challenges I’m researching."
The Southeast Asian nation is home to some of the most protracted insurgencies in the world. Muslim separatist groups on the southern island of Mindanao and Sulu Sea, known collectively as Bangsamoro, have resisted Christian rule since Spanish colonization of the archipelago began after Magellan arrived in the early 1500s. The Communist People’s Party and its armed wing in the New Peoples Army (NPA) continue to wage a classic Maoist revolutionary war across the country; and the extremist Abu Sayyaf Group – known to have links with al-Qaida and other international terrorist groups – is actively conducting terrorist attacks as well as kidnappings for ransom across the country’s restive south.
Felter, a career Army Special Forces officer, was a U.S. military attaché in Manila from 1999-2002. He traveled extensively throughout the Philippines and could see how widespread and debilitating the long-running insurgencies and internal conflicts were. After a spate of kidnappings by the Abu Sayyaf Group in 2000 and 2001 that involved American citizens and other foreign nationals, he helped persuade U.S. authorities to increase its support for America’s former colony and Pacific ally.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks reinforced the U.S. commitment to build the capacity of the Philippine military to prevent their country from becoming a haven for extremists who might use the country to stage and plot another attack against United States’ interests.
Felter helped the Philippine Army Special Operations Command (SOCOM) set up the country’s first counterterrorist unit. That elite Light Reaction Battalion has now been expanded to a regiment of 1,500 soldiers. Felter traveled to the Philippines in February to receive a medal in honor of his work in establishing this force.
His work with the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) as a military attaché, and dozens of trips back since, allowed him to get behind the scenes and make friends in the military and government. Those close relationships provided him unprecedented access to thousands of sensitive documents chronicling in micro-level detail the history of Philippine military and government efforts to combat insurgency and terrorism in the field.
“All counterinsurgency is local,” says Felter. “You need to study it at the local level to really understand it. And the Philippines is like a Petri dish for studying both insurgency and counterinsurgency because you have multiple, long-running insurgencies, each with distinct characteristics, and with an array of government and military responses to address these threats over time.”
Felter was in the Philippines in 2004 conducting field research as part of his Stanford Ph.D. dissertation when he was first able to gain access to what would become a trove of detailed incident-level data on insurgency and counterinsurgency in this conflict prone country. After bringing back the data and meeting with his faculty advisors – Stanford political science professors David Laitin and James Fearon – he realized the extensive incident-level data could be coded in a manner that would make it a tremendous resource for scholars studying civil wars, insurgencies and other forms of politically motivated violence.
“This comprehensive conflict dataset, when it becomes public later this year, is going to be the Holy Grail of micro-level conflict data,” Felter says. “It promises to be an unprecedented resource for scholars and policy analysts studying the foundations and dynamics of conflict. It has the potential to drive a significant number of publications, reports and analyses, and enable conflict researchers to develop insights and test theories that they would not have been able to do before.”
They also hope to help journalists do a better job of analyzing conflict.
Jim Gomez, the AP’s chief correspondent in the Philippines, says there is little access to detailed data about the conflicts he has been covering for two decades.
“There is a natural contradiction between military, police, intelligence and other security agencies which, by nature, operate in secrecy,” says Gomez, who has been on the front lines of many battles in his homeland. “The database is one step toward satisfying the need of journalists to be able to write stories with more accurate and in-depth detail and context. It allows for better comparative analysis and can give insights to emerging patterns like those found in the southern Philippines. Better access to information, to my mind, is always a boon to better security policies.”
CISAC Senior Research Scholar Joe Felter awaits a pledge of honor by the Philippines Armed Forces.
Coding Out the Data
Felter coordinated with senior leaders in the Armed Forces of the Philippines to gain approval to access and code the unclassified details from tens of thousands of individual conflict episodes reported by Philippine military units in the field dating back to 1975. Most of data were gleaned from the original hand-typed records maintained by the Philippine Army. Felter worked with contacts in the Philippine military to build a team of military and civilian coders to scan and input data from the only existing copies of these original incident reports.
In 2009 – while a National Security Affairs Fellow at the Hoover Institution prior to his final deployment in Afghanistan – Felter invited his colleague, Navy veteran Jake Shapiro, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, to join him as ESOC’s co-director. Shapiro and Felter were graduate school classmates and worked together at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center where the vision for ESOC was first articulated. Felter and Shapiro formally established the Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC) project and began to build comprehensive databases on multiple political conflict cases around the world.
Eli Berman, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, joined the team soon after. Today he is research director for international security studies at University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and professor of economics at UC San Diego.
“I'm fascinated by how economic development is best achieved in places where property and people are insecure. Unfortunately, that's true of many Philippines communities,” Berman said. “Joe is the perfect partner for that research. He brings insights that come from years of thoughtful experience and local knowledge. The team he has assembled and the data they bring are a joy to work with.”
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ESOC members also include David Laitin, James Fearon and Jeremy Weinstein, all from Stanford’s political science department, as well as affiliates and a growing cadre of current and former post-doctoral fellows.
The Empirical Studies of Conflict Project website was launched last year. It highlights some of the key initial findings from ongoing data collection efforts in the Philippines as well as Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Mexico, Pakistan and Vietnam. The site includes geospatial and tabular data as well as thousands of documents, archives and interviews. Ultimately, nearly all of the releasable data Felter is compiling on the Philippines case will be made available via the ESOC website. The non-digitize materials such as hardcopy records and taped interviews will be housed in the Hoover Institution’s Library and Archives.
“This will be the gold standard for micro-level conflict data. The planets aligned for us in many cases,” Felter said. The team also has had unprecedented access to data sources in Iraq and to some degree from Afghanistan, Columbia, and Mexico.
“What’s unique about ESOC is that we’re trying hard to make it easier for others to study conflict by pulling together everything we can on the conflicts we’ve studied,” says Shapiro. “On Iraq, for example, the ESOC website provides data on conflict outcomes, politics, and demographics, in addition to maps, links to other useful information sources, and all the files ESOC members have used in their research on Iraq.”
Shapiro says researchers working for the Canadian Armed Forces, the World Bank and the U.S. military have already turned to ESOC as a resource for data on Iraq “because it’s so useful to have everything in one place.”
The West Point Connection
Many of these documents, some dating back to 1975, were withering in the heat and humidity of an old building at army headquarters before Felter and his Philippine military team arrived to scan and record them.
Felter’s chief Filipino partner in compiling and analyzing the data is another West Point grad, Lt. Col. Dennis Eclarin, an Army Scout Ranger commander who led many of the counterinsurgency missions that he would later come to analyze. Eclarin conducted 1,500 hours of videotaped interviews with rebels who gave up their arms and surrendered.
Eclarin recalls being a lieutenant fresh out of West Point and negotiating the surrender of 20 communist rebels.
“I got the chance to interview the rebel commander of this very elite group, against whom I had been fighting in 2000, and when I interviewed him he said: `You know what? If you had just given us one water buffalo each, we would not have been fighting you, we would have just gone out and tilled our land,’” Eclarin recalls.
He would go on to interview hundreds of rebels and their commanders, such as the Islamic militant chief who talked tactics with him, then revealed that his greatest tool was his men’s belief that Allah was waiting for them on the other side.
There was the Roman Catholic nun who was running guns and money for the communists and the young college freshman recruited with the promise of $40 a month to support her family. Eclarin heads up the team of coders supporting ESOC in the Philippines. Erwin Agustin, a Staff Sergeant in the Scout Rangers, does data entry – when he’s not out fighting rebels.
“The interviews and the coding has changed me – and it’s changed the perception of the Armed Forces, too,” Eclarin says. “We just appreciate data; we see it in a new light. We were just thinking short term, but the data allows us to look long-term and more strategically. Where are the hot zones we must avoid? What time of day are they likely to attack?”
Eclarin heads up the team of coders supporting ESOC in the Philippines. Erwin Agustin, a Staff Sergeant in the Scout Rangers, does data entry – when he’s not out fighting rebels.
“One time I was coding and was amazed to see the records of some of our comrades who had been ambushed and killed,” Agustin says. “Being a member of the Scout Rangers and seeing those who are missing – you hurt. But you must push through because you’re giving them a voice. They gave their lives for the Army, they sacrificed their lives for their families – and we are going to give them a voice.”
Erwin Olario, a civilian and the lead coder of Eclarin’s team, says the data is agnostic.
“We don’t take sides; we’re not out to prove anything. But, hey, if we could possibly contribute to bringing about peace one day – that would be something.”
The coders are now doubling back over the dataset from 1975 to 2012, to make sure it’s accurate and cleaned of classified details before it goes public. The data are the basis for two of Felter’s ongoing book projects and multiple journal articles, including a recent article in the American Economic Review entitled, “Aid Under Fire: Development Projects and Civil Conflict.”
Another of Felter’s longtime Filipina friends is Corazon “Dinky” Soliman, cabinet secretary for the Philippine government’s Department of Social Welfare and Development. They go back to 1997, when the two were classmates working on their master’s in public administration at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
The two caught up on classmate gossip during a recent meeting in her Manila office. She was on a rare break from her work in the south, where Typhoon Haiyan had claimed more than 6,200 lives in November.
Soliman tells Felter she used a study based on ESOC data to help demonstrate the efficacy of her department’s conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. This flagship development program attempts to reduce poverty by giving cash to families falling under poverty thresholds, conditional on enrolling kids in school and getting them regular medical checkups and vaccines.
Soliman and her staff used the study conducted by Felter – and Benjamin Crost at the University of Illinois and Patrick B. Johnston at the RAND Corporation – in which they took an existing World Bank experiment in the Philippines that separated villages into those that would receive the cash transfers and those that would not. The scholars incorporated measures of violence from the ESOC data to estimate the effect of the CCT program on conflict intensity. They found cash transfers caused a substantial decrease in conflict-related incidents and, using their data on local insurgent influence, they determined the program significantly reduced insurgent influence in the villages that received the cash transfers compared with those that did not.
“Your results were very, very important and it had such a strong impact with the legislators, and in particular the budget, because they saw the program is not just about education and health,” Corazon tells Felter. “They saw it even has impact on peace and security.”
“That’s just great,” Felter says. “That’s what motivates our team to engage in this type of work and really what you want to hear. It’s such a privilege for us to support you in this capacity.”
A Rebel’s Redemption
Felter led the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team (CAAT) in Afghanistan, reporting directly to Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David Petaeus, before becoming a senior research scholar at CISAC and retiring from the military in 2012.
While he misses his time on active duty and the sense of purpose that comes with serving in combat, he believes his ESOC research will make a difference and have an impact in stabilizing conflict areas and setting conditions for development and governance efforts to be effective.
“In the last decade, the United States and the international community have devoted tens of billions of dollars towards rebuilding social and political order in troubled countries,” Shapiro says. “Thousands of families today are mourning loved ones lost in those efforts. ESOC is devoted to learning from that experience, and to making it easier for others to do so as well, so that we can all do a better job helping such places in the future.”
Traveling back to the Philippines often to meet with Eclarin and his coders keeps him tied to the men and women who are on the ground. And close to old colleagues such as Corpus, who was pardoned by President Corazon Aquino and went on to become the nation’s head of intelligence.
“Here’s the irony: The intelligence service was one of the organizations that was running after me, and then I was eventually assigned to head this very organization. Only in the Philippines,” says Corpus, whose counterinsurgency plan drafted in 1989 was hugely successful.
The communist New People’s Army is estimated to have approximately 5,000 rebels today, down from its high of 26,000 in the mid-1980s. And the government signed a hard-sought peace deal with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in last spring, which grants the Muslim areas of the southern Mindanao region greater political autonomy.
Still, many don’t believe the accord will hold and separatists from Moro National Liberation Front and the Abu Sayyef Group continue to threaten stability in the south.
“As long as the root forces remain – the income gap between the rich and the poor – there will always be rebellion,” says Corpus.
Hero Image
CISAC Senior Research Scholar Joe Felter awaits a pledge of honor by the Philippines Armed Forces.
CISAC nuclear fellow Jonathan Hunt listens to the 2012 Drell Lecture on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
CISAC Senior Research Scholar Joe Felter awaits a pledge of honor by the Philippines Armed Forces.
