DOI: 10.5064/f6m2h9vq
title: Data for: Making the real: Rhetorical adduction and the Bangladesh Liberation War

description: &lt;b&gt;This is an &lt;a href="https://qdr.syr.edu/ati"&gt;Annotation for Transparent Inquiry (ATI)&lt;/a&gt; data project. &lt;/b&gt; &lt;h3&gt;The annotated article can be viewed on the &lt;a href="https://hyp.is/go?url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/D7396F6DFDE0914CD3C1C8D7A7141BF9/S0020818317000054a.pdf/making_the_real_rhetorical_adduction_and_the_bangladesh_liberation_war.pdf&group=zvEVDE2R" &gt;publisher's website&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;/h3&gt;

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&lt;p&gt;The overarching empirical research question of the paper is “why did states recognize Bangladesh as a state?” and, more specifically, “why did (most of) the international community first condemn and then accept Bangladesh as a state?”. The goal of the empirical section of the paper was to do theory-building process-tracing of the decisions to recognize Bangladesh, that is, to build a theoretical explanation from the empirical evidence of a particular case, and then inferring that an analytically general mechanism exists.&lt;/p&gt;
description: &lt;h3&gt;Data generation&lt;/h3&gt;

After immersing myself in the secondary literature and the archival material that I had collected for the prior doctoral project, I had an idea for a skeleton causal mechanism, i.e. that the withdrawal of Indian troops from Bangladesh had somehow changed the status of recognition, i.e. legitimated recognition. In order to assess this idea, I then consulted some theory from international relations, psychology, sociology, and cognitive science, on how decisions are made and how arguments work, in order to hypothesize a causal mechanism. This causal mechanism, elucidated in the paper, was rhetorical adduction; basically that states try to win arguments (thus changing the behavior of relatively uncommitted audiences relative to some policy) by linking some empirical state of affairs with their argument and then bringing that empirical state of affairs about. In this Bangladesh case, this meant that some actors argued that although India’s invasion and occupation of East Pakistan made recognition of Bangladesh problematic, the withdrawal of Indian troops from Bangladesh would dismiss or undercut the critique. At this point, I formulated some observable implications of this idea, such as that if this is what had actually been going on, the states making the argument (e.g. Bangladesh and India) would have to actually have made the argument, and states would have explicitly conditioned their recognition policy decision on the withdrawal of Indian troops. 
In order to find out whether there was any evidence for these observable implications, I consulted three main types of evidence; 1) public statements by state representatives in the press and at the UN (using the UN verbatim meeting records), 2) UK political and diplomatic archives and 3) US political and diplomatic archives. As it happens, the UK was heavily involved in discussions surrounding recognition and the US was not (US President Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger were more concerned with other issues, like supporting West Pakistan and also organizing the historic visit to the People’s Republic of China), so that almost all of the relevant evidence came from UK archives. A clear limitation of this sampling frame is that it relies on 3rd party evaluations of internal deliberations of most of the states involved. This is less of a problem than it might otherwise be because there seems little reason to explicitly condition recognition on troop withdrawal in private and secret/confidential bilateral communication with the UK if it is irrelevant to internal deliberations. If there had been some clear self-interest in misrepresenting, in this type of communication, then it would affect the plausibility of the causal claims. 
I collected most of the documents used in the paper from the National Archives at Kew in the UK during two visits, one in January 2011 and another in July 2013. The first visit was to collect data for my doctoral dissertation, which was a prior, separate project from this paper. While I was finishing the Bangladesh case for my dissertation, I began to have another idea about the material. That is, I started to think that a slightly different type of conceptual/theoretical argument was relevant to a different empirical aspect of the Bangladesh case. However, as I had not had that in mind when initially collecting archival documents, I arranged a second visit to search for more information more directly relevant to this second puzzle. 
The documents primarily come from a series of folders from the Foreign and Commonwealth Offices’ archives and the Premiers’ Archives that I found via two methods. First, I used the citations in Musson 2008 to identify potentially important or relevant material and then made a list of all the folders that that material was contained in. Second, I performed keyword searches for recognition and Bangladesh in the National Archives database search engine. 
While I was in the archives, I made copies of almost every single document in the folders that I had previously identified. I excluded documents that were obvious duplicates or that had no readable text. 
&lt;h3&gt;Data analysis&lt;/h3&gt;
Data Analysis for this paper involved reading through all of the documents, constructing a detailed timeline of who said what when and who did what when, and then identifying a list of different countries that plausibly were actively engaged in the argumentation. Some countries appeared, from the documents I consulted, to be indifferent to the major lines of argumentation in the international community, either because they were so committed to a policy that argumentation had no effect, or because they only expressed parochial concerns. As detailed in the paper, I also created typologies of why states said they were conditioning recognition on withdrawal and also what counted for them as a sufficient proxy for withdrawal. 
In addition to a division between states that were engaged in the argumentation and those that were not, there was also a spectrum of plausibility for a key counterfactual; if the Indians had not withdrawn troops, would this state have withheld or delayed recognition of Bangladesh? In the documents available, there is a variety of different actors within foreign ministries / departments of external affairs expressing views that range from considered, voted-upon formal policy to what someone said while at a party last night. When summarizing the data, in particular for Table 2, these subtleties had to be elided. This data supplement allows for more detailed evaluation of the plausibility of each of these claims. The main way that I interpreted the documents for this particular causal claim was that if a state representative indicated (according to the report of conversation and according to my understanding of the ordinary English language meaning of the words, including unstated implications) that the Indian troop presence was a barrier or a problem or a concern relevant to recognition, then this generally constituted a “smoking-gun” piece of evidence (Collier 2011). In some cases, the specific way that this concern was phrased or some other context downgraded the evidence to merely “straw-in-the-wind” level. 
An additional point, separate from each individual document, the overall shape of the situation also factored into my judgment as to the relevance of the rhetorical adduction mechanism. While a claim about whether an individual state was actually conditioning their recognition decision on troop withdrawal might have been made based on a single report from a British diplomat, the fact that dozens of countries raised troop withdrawal as a central or even the only barrier to recognition suggests the applicability of the mechanism to the case. 


&lt;h3&gt;Logic of annotation&lt;/h3&gt;

In annotating this article, I focused heavily on providing access to source text that was not directly quoted in the main body of the article. I also aimed to provide access to documents that were not easily accessible elsewhere. So, for example, the Foreign Relations of the United States series is available in fulltext online (for example, here: https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v11), and is keyword searchable, so providing an annotation in the Data Supplement seemed relatively superfluous. Similarly, UN Security Council records are publicly available online (for example, here: http://repository.un.org/handle/11176/74491?show=full). 
In addition, with some quotations from archival documents, the context did not seem especially relevant and so a source excerpt would consist entirely, or almost entirely of the material directly quoted in the paper. In these cases, I did not annotate the citation. 
The analytic notes in this Data Supplement mainly give more detail as to the identity of the actors involved and also provide, where needed, an interpretation from the words used in the document to the concepts used in the paper. 
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&lt;h3&gt;Data Overview References&lt;/h3&gt;

Collier, David. 2011. Understanding process tracing. PS: Political Science & Politics, 44(4): 823-830.
description: UK National Archives Image Library
description: Update Notes for Version 3.0
Version 3.0 is a QDR-administered technical update. Files have been reprocessed to improve digital accessibility; the content of materials remains unaltered.