Children and War: How "Soft" Research Can Answer the Hard Questions in Political Science

A s a graduate student, two months shy of defending my dissertation proposal, I yanked a first, respectable rough draft off my advisers’ desks and replaced it with something completely new: a pitch to head to Uganda and start a study of child soldiering. My advisers were unimpressed. “This sounds more like a policy report than a dissertation,” said one, “I’m not sure you should go.” No one disagreed the issue was important. But is tackling a humanitarian issue the sensible start for a budding social scientist? It’s a question young earnest scholars ask themselves every year: Can I get my Ph.D. and still save the world? As it happened, there was more to my pitch. Buried inside the proposal, hidden to me at the time, was the germ of actual social science, something more than a policy report. Ultimately, the study would change the way I think about fundamental questions in international relations and comparative politics: the organization of rebellion, the diffusion of international norms, and the legacy of political violence on economic and political development. Big questions, I discovered, get answered in unusual places. For the academic who tackles policy questions or humanitarian issues, the real world impact can be its own reward. If that means sacrificing “serious” scholarship, some say, then so be it. I think that trade-off, however, is false and misleading. It leads to narrow and disjointed scholarship. Policy and science both suffer when the links to theory and big questions are ignored. The three books under review here all tackle a topic— children in war—with glaring moral consequence. Each book manages to avoid most of the myths and cliches that surround their lurid subjects. And each book delivers original and overlooked lessons for the problems facing waraffected children. But perhaps most important, each book contains lessons for our larger understanding of warfare and the politics of advocacy and aid. These larger lessons, however, can struggle to emerge, for issues of great moral consequence can also obscure. Child soldiers and children born of wartime rape are as vivid, wrenching, and sensational as any subject in our profession. Speaking from my own experience, one struggles constantly with the scholarly disposition. On the one hand, keeping such a stance is hard. Field research brings emotional anguish and helplessness, and dealing with inert bureaucracies and injustice brings fury and despair. More importantly, it becomes difficult to separate advocacy from critical thought; sensational images and banal policyspeak too easily substitute for facts. On the other hand, it is also a struggle to escape the scholar’s disposition. You catch yourself speaking of genocide or child abduction as variables and forgetting they are atrocities. More seriously, you become stuck in arcane details and arguments, and in fighting myths and sensation you can find yourself more callous and petty than objective and insightful. Neither circumstance does the victims, policy, or science the service each deserves. Christopher Blattman is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University (christopher.blattman@yale.edu). He is grateful to Charli Carpenter, Scott Gates, Benjamin Morse, and Simon Reich for comments on drafts of this essay. Earlier discussions with Jeannie Annan, Jo Becker, Radikha Coomaraswamy, and Timothy La Rose were immensely helpful as well. | |