Cyrus Samii

Sometimes we just “feel” like doing something. By my reading of recent neuroscience, these situations may arise because somewhere in our brain there are processes that have determined that this “something” is optimal and the signals from these processes have overwhelmed signals from others that may have come to a contrary conclusion.

Our thoughts and actions are the result of numerous parallel processes. They are sometimes combined in an apparently sensible way giving us the illusion of an integrated self (link). But sometimes they do not come together in a sensible way and so we cannot immediately intuit a reason. We just feel like it.

The manner in which external stimuli and those parallel processes can mix is vast. So our urges to do things may take into account a vast number of dimensions of which we are barely familiar. So long as we let ourselves occasionally take actions because we “feel like it,” these processes reveal a preference ordering that we cannot access intentionally. In doing so we discover features of our inaccessible inner preference ordering. One implication is that we can misjudge ourselves just as much as we can misjudge others (link).

War is what you get when there are no limits to what you will consider doing or what your opponent will consider doing to impose one’s will on the other. When there are no limits to what you will consider doing, the only things that constrain what you actually do are those that are determined by cold military rationality.

I have studied civil wars for some time now, and I’ve been pretty lazy in using the word “conflict” to describe these phenomena. But clearly we should distinguish between conflict and violence, with violence being a necessary aspect of the process whereby a conflict results in a war.

Watching the uprisings in the Middle East over the past month has brought these distinctions into sharp relief. In Egypt, things got violent for a time. But very quickly the sides moved to resolve things without escalation. What’s the source of the contrast between what happened here and the cases that I have been spending my time studying?

Mandela famously wrote in his autobiography that the nature of the struggle is defined by the oppressor. Looking at Egypt, I feel that this can only be partly true. Certainly the protesters faced uncertainty in how far the incumbent regime would be willing to go to counter the uprising. They nonetheless chose not to escalate, but rather to defend themselves and attack only at the level at which they were being attacked. Perhaps this was dictated by the limited means that were at their disposal. But even if this constraint were not binding (e.g., if the protesters had access to guns), I can see that a choice by the protesters to limit their use of violence would be crucial in determining how things would play out. Thus, when faced by initial escalation by “the oppressor” those involved in the uprising do indeed have a choice.

So what we need in our theorizing about the origins of war are theories about how masses of people get to the point where they no longer accept any limits on what they are willing to do to have their way.

The art of a diplomat is to manipulate an opponent’s beliefs so that the opponent will not take action against the person that the diplomat represents.

The diplomat typically operates in a world where third party enforcement of formal rules does not apply. Thus, the diplomat can only constrain the action of the opponent by manipulating certain beliefs. These include the opponent’s beliefs about what diplomat’s side can be coerced into doing. If something is out of your control, you cannot be coerced into controlling it, for example.

The diplomat typically has to deal with the same opponents time and time again. Thus a good diplomat anticipates a whole future of interactions and a trajectory of beliefs. Sometimes, somewhere on the path, it becomes clear that the opponent’s beliefs are headed in a poor direction and you need to be creative to steer things somewhere else. It’s not so simple.

The art of the diplomat comes in handy almost every day. A person that you once offended moves into your town. You don’t avoid that person but rather find a way to make them believe that there was nothing to that offense and that there is nothing that they can get from you as reparation. This way you have no worries when you see that person in town.

In yesterday’s post (link) I discussed how protesters face a tough problem in selecting leaders to represent them in negotiating the terms of the transition. It seems unlikely that the incumbent regime is going to vanish, and some bargaining between elements of the incumbent regime and representatives of the protest movement seems inevitable. Thus, leader selection is a problem that the protesters will probably have to solve and perhaps one they will have to solve very quickly. At the moment, it seems that the incumbents are trying to force their own solution to the problem by selectively inviting certain opposition figures in for discussion.

On this, a line from NY Times columnist Ross Douthat’s article today (link) struck me. Douthat writes on the Obama administration’s approach to Egypt, proposing that “Obama might have done more to champion human rights and democracy in Egypt before the current crisis broke out, by leavening his Kissinger impression with a touch of Reaganite idealism. But there isn’t much more the administration can do now, because there isn’t any evidence that the Egyptian protesters are ready to actually take power. [emphasis added]” Certainly this is an image of the protest movement that the Egyptian incumbent regime favors. It reveals more about how the leadership problem is hurting the protesters.