FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.
They are looking at novel technological interventions to improve rural livelihoods, like the development implications of solar power-generated crop growing in Northern Benin.
FSI academics also assess which political processes yield better access to public services, particularly in developing countries. With a focus on health care, researchers have studied the political incentives to embrace UNICEF’s child survival efforts and how a well-run anti-alcohol policy in Russia affected mortality rates.
FSI’s work on international development also includes training the next generation of leaders through pre- and post-doctoral fellowships as well as the Draper Hills Summer Fellows Program.
For 25 years now, a weak-state fixation has transfixed U.S. foreign policy, Amy Zegart writes in this Foreign Policy piece. But Washington's paranoia over weak and failing states is distracting it from the real national security threats looming on the horizon.
The thirteenth session of the Korea-U.S. West Coast Strategic Forum, held in Seoul on December 11, 2014, convened senior South Korean and American policymakers, scholars and regional experts to discuss North Korea policy and recent developments in the Korean peninsula. Hosted by the Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University, the Forum is also supported by the Korea National Diplomatic Academy.
The future of humanitarian assistance and security policy in chaotic places such as Syria and Iraq could rest on a single question: Does aid in conflict zones promote peace or war? It seems intuitive to assume that hunger and exposure push people to violence and that aid should, therefore, lead to peace. This idea has been the bedrock of scores of “hearts and minds” campaigns dating back to the Cold War, which have invested billions of dollars on the principle that assistance can buy compliance and, eventually, peace.
Yet recent evidence indicates that sending aid into conflict-affected regions can actually worsen violence in some cases. Over the past decade, our research collective, the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project (ESOC), has conducted a suite of studies in conflict zones to test this relationship. Among other countries, we studied the Philippines, a state riven by a variety of long-term conflicts in areas with limited governmental control. Our findings provide several lessons on how infusions of aid work in poorly governed spaces.
Understanding the nature of violent conflict in the world's most dangerous flashpoints may help find ways to peace and stability, according to a Stanford expert.
Once a soldier, now a scholar, Joe Felter knows better than most the intrinsic meaning of war and conflict – he served on the front lines in the U.S. Special Forces in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the Philippines.
Today, the senior research scholar at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperationand research fellow at the Hoover Institution is on a different kind of mission: building knowledge on the subject of politically motivated conflict.
For example, how are the most casualties suffered and under what conditions? Are there patterns to why rebels are surrendering? And how do armed battles affect development and education in local communities?
Answers to these and other questions are found in the Empirical Studies of Conflict project database, which is led by Felter and Jacob Shapiro, his former Stanford political science classmate, now a professor at Princeton University. The effort focuses on insurgency, civil war and other sources of politically motivated violence worldwide. Launched last year, it currently covers the Philippines, Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Mexico, the Israeli-occupied territories, Pakistan and Vietnam. The site includes geospatial and tabular data as well as thousands of documents, archives and interviews.
Since 2009, Felter has collaborated with colleagues at Princeton, the University of California, San Diego, and other institutions in developing the database. Today, they are advising policymakers and military leaders on how best to curb conflict, reduce civilian casualties and promote prosperity. Felter and his colleagues have outlined some of their work in this Foreign Affairs article published in January 2015.
Felter's research on Filipino insurgencies, for instance, has produced significant results. The senior officials there have invited him to brief their military on battlefield trends and counterinsurgency strategy, as Felter and his colleagues have interviewed thousands of combatants as part of the project.
What do they learn about the insurgent mindset? One Islamic militant chief 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. Others included a Roman Catholic nun who was running guns and money to help the poor and a young college freshman recruited with the promise of $40 a month to support her family.
Pathways to peace
In the case of the Philippines, Felter had access to more than 100,000 individual reports of conflict episodes dating back to 1975 and more than 13,000 interview transcripts from rebels who were captured or had surrendered over the last 30 years. That information was coded in detail and compiled as part of the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project database. The Philippines is home to some of the most protracted Muslim separatist and communist insurgencies in the world, and that is precisely why the government is interested in learning how to thwart it.
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Crystal Lee, a Stanford senior and history major, has been Joe Felter’s research assistant since her freshman year.
"For me, it's kind of validating all the thousands and thousands of hours that went into all our coding," said Felter, adding that the information will help the Philippines government find ways to ease the costs and human suffering in the conflicts it faces.
It has been a transformational journey for Felter, who retired in 2012 from the U.S. Army as a colonel following a career as a Special Forces and foreign area officer with missions and deployments across Asia, Panama, Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010-11, he commanded the International Security and Assistance Force Counter Insurgency Advisory and Assistance Team in Afghanistan.
"I spent a long time in the military deployed to environments where you could appreciate that what you were doing was having an impact," Felter said.
In higher education now, his vantage point is different from what it was on the front lines. Today, both perspective and policy are two of his main goals.
"Since I transitioned to academia, I haven't lost my commitment to trying to help practitioners in the field to better understand conflict – by using data," Felter said.
Stanford senior Crystal Lee, a history major, has been working with Felter as a research assistant since her freshman year, helping him code and compile the datasets.
"It's been really interesting for me to think about the implications that this type of data analysis has on governments and broader policy work," said Lee, who also has analyzed and reconstructed hundreds of interviews with former rebels for Felter's upcoming book.
She said that a romantic notion exists in Silicon Valley that if one uses a huge database, one can wave a magic wand and believe that so-called "big data" will solve everything. "But it's a really messy field and we've had to use best practices to make sense of the increasingly complicated picture of counterinsurgency and terrorism," she said.
Study at the local level
Felter pointed out that to truly comprehend the nature of counterinsurgency in places like the Philippines, Iraq or Afghanistan, one must realize that its roots are in local communities.
"You need to study it at the local level to really understand it," Felter said. "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."
The coders are now doubling back over the dataset from 1975 to 2012 to make sure it's accurate and cleaned of any potentially sensitive details before it goes public. The data are the basis for two of Felter's ongoing book projects and dozens of working papers and journal articles.
Roots of research
A Stanford alum, Felter was in the Philippines in 2004 conducting field research as part of his doctoral dissertation when he was first able to gain access to what would become a trove of detailed incident-level data on insurgency and counterinsurgency.
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Stanford scholar Joe Felter with members of the First Scout Ranger Regiment, Philippine Army. His research in the Philippines helps inform the Empirical Studies of Conflict database.
After bringing back the data and meeting with his faculty advisers – 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 is going to be the holy grail of micro-level conflict data," Felter said. "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."
The network is expanding. A dozen young scholars who were supported by funding for the Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC) project as postdoctoral fellows have now been placed in tenure-track positions at universities.
"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," said Jake Shapiro, an associate professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and the project's co-director.
On Iraq, for example, the website provides data on conflict outcomes, politics and demographics, in addition to maps, links to other useful information sources and other types of research on Iraq, he said.
Shapiro says researchers working for the Canadian Armed Forces, the World Bank and the U.S. military have already turned to the database for help. Insurgencies cost human lives and dollars, enough so that the United States and the international community are now focused on rebuilding social and political orders in those troubled countries.
As Felter put it, "We are devoted to learning from all those experiences and to making it easier for others to do so as well, so that we can all live more peacefully and safely in the future."
Research highlights
The Empirical Studies of Conflict project includes the following scholarly advances:
• Research on insurgent compensation paid during the U.S. Iraq conflict shows that pay was not based on risk factors. • Findings show rebel violence will decrease when projects are secure and valued by community members and when implementation is conditional on the behavior of non-combatants. • A journal article describes the preference for "certainty" in the relationship between violence and economic risk in wartime Afghanistan.
Media Contact
Beth Duff-Brown, Center for International Security and Cooperation: (650) 725-6488,bethduff@stanford.edu
CISAC Senior Research Scholar Joe Felter with members of the First Scout Ranger Regiment, Philippine Army. His research in the Philippines helps inform the Empirical Studies of Conflict Project database.
The recently manifested massive failure of America's intervention in Iraq has led outside observers to speculate that the ongoing rapid drawdown of international military forces in Afghanistan will lead to similar chaos in that country, Karl Eikenberry writes in this Foreign Policy commentary about the new Asia Foundation survey of the Afghan People.
Eikenberry notes that Ahmed Rashid, a commentator on Afghanistan security issues and author of the superb book Taliban, wrote in a recentNew York Times op-ed that the U.S. troop withdrawal plan formulated in 2009 "is proving catastrophically wrong now." Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham warned two months ago: "If the President repeats his mistakes from Iraq and withdraws all U.S. troops from Afghanistan, based on a certain date on a calendar, we fear a similar failure will unfold ... as we have seen Iraq."
Eikenberry, the William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC and former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan, writes that the Asia Foundation's just-released 2014 Survey of the Afghan People indicates that while the Afghans do worry about the future of their country, they by no means share the deep pessimism of the foreign prophets of doom who assert that it is only a matter of time until the disaster on the Euphrates is repeated on the Kabul River. Comparing the attitudes of the Afghan and Iraqi people on key political, security, and economic issues helps explain why this is so.
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Afghans celebrate their first international soccer match in a decade, 36 years after rival Pakistan played them in Kabul. Afghanistan thrashed its nuclear neighbor 3-0 on Aug. 20, 2013.
Asia-Pacific leaders recently met in Beijing at the annual APEC summit, and after two days of discussion, concluded with some significant pledges and remarkable moments. President Xi Jinping of China and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan held a landmark meeting, and the United States and China discussed two agreements that are both symbolic, and lay groundwork for regional progress, say Stanford scholars.
High-level intergovernmental meetings are often more theatre than substance, but this year the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, the oldest trans-Pacific regional organization, delivered important messages and may spur actions by member governments.
“Any summit is a ‘hurry up, get this done’ motivator,” says Thomas Fingar, the Oksenberg-Rohlen Distinguished Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. “The head of state goes to the meeting – and generally speaking – he doesn’t want to arrive and say ‘my guys were asleep for the last year.’”
Fingar says the APEC summit prodded countries to work on “deliverables,” particularly the goals and projects on the agenda from previous meetings. He recently returned from Beijing, and shared his perspectives with students in the Asia-Pacific Scholars Program.
Writing for the East Asia Forum, Donald Emmerson, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, said many of the commitments declared at the APEC summit, and at the subsequent meetings of the G20 in Australia and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Myanmar, will have implications for global governance, particularly as China holds a more influential role in the region.
APEC countries account for over 40 percent of the world’s population and nearly half of global trade – and true to form, the grand vision of the summit is to advance regional economic integration.
Yet, “the ancillary things – things that went on in the margins – are in many ways more important,” Fingar says, referring to areas outside of the summit’s obvious focus, and what’s discussed on the sidelines of the public talks.
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Key outcomes from the 2014 gathering include:
The leaders of Japan and China met for the first time since coming into office, afterward acknowledging that the two countries have “disagreements” in their official statements. Of the Xi-Abe meeting, Fingar says, “it helps clear the way for lower level bureaucrats to go to work on real issues."
The United States and China announced a proposal to extend visas for students and businesspeople on both sides. While the immediate effects would be helpful, the change is symbolically superior. “You don’t give 5-10 year visas to adversaries,” he says, it shows that “‘we’re in [the relationship] for the long-term.’”
China proposed the development of a new “Silk Road,” pledging $40 billion in resources toward infrastructure projects shared with South and Central Asian neighbors. “It’s tying the region together and creating economy-of-scale possibilities for other countries,” he says. “A real win-win situation.”
The United States and China, the world’s two largest energy consumers, announced bilateral plans to cut carbon emissions over the next two decades. “It’s significant because those two countries must be the ones to lead the world in this area. Unless we are seen to be in basic agreement, others will hold back.”
China codified the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a global financial institution intended as an alternative to institutions like the World Bank. “China has been frustrated with its role in existing international institutions,” Fingar says, explaining a likely motivation behind the AIIB’s creation.
Emmerson said the outcomes of the APEC summit from the U.S.-China standpoint were better than expected, speaking to McClatchy News. The visa and climate deals, as well as their commitment to lowering global tariffs on IT products, will lessen chances of conflict between the two countries.
However, the summit did leave some areas unsolved. One of the most important is the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade pact proposed by the United States that includes 11 others countries in the region, but does not yet include China.
Leaders “made positive noises” coming out of the TPP discussions, Fingar says, but nothing was passed. The gravity and complexity of trade-related issues, especially agriculture and intellectual property, is likely to blame for slow action.
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Leaders pose for a group photo at the 22nd APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting in Beijing, China.
Admiral James O. Ellis Jr. is the Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he oversees both the Global Policy and Strategy Initiative and the George P. Shultz Energy Policy Working Group. He retired from a 39-year career with the US Navy in 2004. He has also served in the private and nonprofit sectors in areas of energy and nuclear security.
A 1969 graduate of the US Naval Academy, Ellis was designated a naval aviator in 1971. His service as a navy fighter pilot included tours with two carrier-based fighter squadrons and assignment as commanding officer of an F/A-18 strike fighter squadron. In 1991, he assumed command of the USS Abraham Lincoln, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. After selection to rear admiral, in 1996, he served as a carrier battle group commander, leading contingency response operations in the Taiwan Strait.
His shore assignments included numerous senior military staff tours. Senior command positions included commander in chief, US Naval Forces, Europe, and commander in chief, Allied Forces, Southern Europe, during a time of historic NATO expansion. He led US and NATO forces in combat and humanitarian operations during the 1999 Kosovo crisis.
Ellis’s final assignment in the navy was as commander of the US Strategic Command during a time of challenge and change. In this role, he was responsible for the global command and control of US strategic and space forces, reporting directly to the secretary of defense.
After his naval career, he joined the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations (INPO) as president and chief executive officer. INPO, sponsored by the commercial nuclear industry, is an independent, nonprofit organization whose mission is to promote the highest levels of safety and reliability in the operation of commercial nuclear electric generating plants. He retired from INPO in 2012.
Ellis is also the former board chair of Level 3 Communications and served on the board of Lockheed Martin Corporation and Dominion Energy. In 2006, he became a member of the Military Advisory Panel to the Iraq Study Group. In 2009, he completed three years of service on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. A former board chair of the nonprofit Space Foundation, in 2018 he was appointed chairman of the Users’ Advisory Group to the Vice President’s National Space Council, where he served until 2022.
Ellis holds a master’s degree in aerospace engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He was inducted into the school’s Engineering Hall of Fame in 2005. He completed US Navy Nuclear Power Training and was qualified in the operation and maintenance of naval nuclear propulsion plants. He is a graduate of the Navy Test Pilot School and the Navy Fighter Weapons School (Top Gun). In 2013, Ellis was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for “contributions to global nuclear safety.”
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.
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CISAC Senior Research Scholar Joe Felter awaits a pledge of honor by the Philippines Armed Forces.
Governments and multilateral donor organizations are increasingly targeting development aid to conflict affected areas with the hope that this aid will help government efforts to reduce conflict and stabilize these areas.
The expectation is that implementing development projects such as roads, schools and hospitals will increase popular support for the government – effectively “winning hearts and minds” – and reduce support for insurgents making it more difficult for them to recruit rebels and carry out attacks.
Joe Felter, a Senior Research Scholar at CISAC, with Benjamin Crost at the University of Illinois and Patrick Johnston from the RAND Corporation, challenge this conventional wisdom in their article in the June edition of the American Economic Review: Aid Under Fire: Development Projects and Civil Conflict.
Felter and his coauthors provide evidence that a “winning hearts and minds” strategy can sometimes backfire. When insurgents believe the successful implementation of government-sponsored development projects will boost support for the government and undermine their position, they have incentives to attack or otherwise sabotage those projects, thus exacerbating conflict in the short term.
Ironically, increases in violence associated with government-sponsored development efforts can in some cases be interpreted as an indicator that these efforts are effectively targeting insurgent vulnerabilities.
FSI researchers consider international development from a variety of angles. They analyze ideas such as how public action and good governance are cornerstones of economic prosperity in Mexico and how investments in high school education will improve China’s economy.
CISAC Senior Research Scholar Joe Felter awaits a pledge of honor by the Philippines Armed Forces.
