International Relations

One of the important reasons that we value scientific knowledge is the possibility that it will allow us to intervene in the world to solve problems that we care about. Good climate science allows us to have high confidence in the causes of global climate change; and it also provides a sound basis for policy interventions to help to mitigate the pace of climate change. Good cellular biology permits a better understanding of autoimmune disease; and it also suggests avenues for prevention and treatment. There is thus an important component of pragmatism in our esteem for scientific knowledge. In the social sciences we would like to assume that something similar is possible. If we have good sociological understanding of the causes of teen pregnancy or gang violence, perhaps that understanding will also provide a basis for designing effective interventions that reduce the incidence of the social problems we study. In other words, perhaps we can count on social science to provide a valuable...

Agriculture remains the primary source of income for India's population, and the majority of India's farmers subsist on small farms, less than two hectares (five acres). It is all but self evident that these facts imply continuing poverty and low quality of life for rural Indians. And yet the basic facts and economics of the small farm sector are poorly understood.   The most recent product of the Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI) focuses on exactly this question ( link ).   Madhura Swaminathan and Sandipan Baksi's recent volume,  How Do Small Farmers Fare?: Evidence from Village Studies in India , attempts to provide a multidimensional appraisal of the complex realities of the small farm economy in India, including labor, crop productivity, incomes, costs, fertilizer use, credit, climate change, education, living standards, and an overall assessment of how small farmers fare. The book draws upon largescale statistical data collected by the Indian go...

What is involved in having a national or racial or sexual identity? What do we mean when we say that a person has a Canadian or a Haitian identity? How can we best think about the mental frameworks and models that serve as lenses through which people understand themselves and their places in history? Most basically, an identity is a set of beliefs and stories about one's home and one's people. These ideas often involve answers to questions like these: Who am I? What groups do I belong to? How did my group get to the current situation? Where did we come from? And perhaps, who are my enemies? So an identity often involves a narrative, a creation story, or perhaps a remembrance of a long chain of disasters and crimes. Identity and collective memory are intertwined; monuments, icons, and flags help to set the way points in the history of a people and the collective emotions that this group experiences. Identities are interwoven with narratives and folk histories. They have to do wi...

A crucial part of social cohesion is the prospect of social mobility across generations. A social order in which individuals are stuck in their social position as a result of the lack of social assets of their parents is one which lacks legitimacy for an important part of its population. (Here are a few earlier posts on social mobility in the United States; link , link .) This observation raises several crucial questions. How do we measure social mobility? What obstacles stand in the way of social mobility for some segments of a given population? And what mechanisms exist to increase the pace of social mobility for a given society? Raj Chetty and his colleagues have profoundly changed the terrain for social scientists interested in these questions through a striking new approach. Their work is presented on the Equality of Mobility website ( link ). The map above shows that there are very sizable regional differences in social mobility rates, from the deep south to the plains states and...

Critical realism proposes an approach to the social world that pays particular attention to objective and material features of the social realm -- property relations, impersonal institutional arrangements, supra-individual social structures. Between structure and agent, CR seems most often to lean towards structures rather than consciously feeling and thinking agents. And so one might doubt whether CR has anything useful to offer when it comes to studying the subjective side of social life. Take for example the idea of a social identity. A social identity seems inherently subjective. It is the bundle of ideas and frameworks through which one places himself or herself in the social world, the framework through which a person conceptualizes his/her relations with others, and an ensemble of the motivations and commitments that lead to important forms of social and political action. All of this sounds subjective in the technical sense -- a part of the subjective and personal experience of ...

We know what is meant by saying that a physical system is resilient : for a given range of shocks, the system has the ability to recover its structural integrity. This does not mean that a resilient system is impervious to shocks, but rather that it is capable of recovery from a given range of shocks at a given level of severity (through redundancy, decentralized systems, or repair mechanisms). (Here is a discussion of urban resilience and fragility in face of natural disaster by Kathleen Tierney in  The Social Roots of Risk: Producing Disasters, Promoting Resilience ;  link .) We also think we know something about individual resilience. It is a complex capacity of personality and character that permits the individual to regain equanimity after some of life's common hazards -- loss of a job, onset of a serious illness, death of a loved one. Here is how the American Psychological Association defines resilience ( link ): Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of ...