Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
15 transcript-backed records
01 / evaluation
“The thinnest one I read 25 years ago. So maybe I suspect a lot of people are like me in that they have bought the volumes and aspired to read but have not fully read, so probably underrated.”
02 / evaluation
“When I think about any splinter group, whether it’s some Northern Irish band of terrorists or a faction in Palestine or the Israeli government or wherever it may be, I think fundamentally it’s these groups who can act in their own self-interest because they have at least a temporary interest that can then push a situation into violence that was otherwise quite likely to be peaceful.”
03 / evaluation
“I think the problem, though, is actually the fact that we create a set of institutional or ideological rigidities that keep us from compromising.”
04 / evaluation
“The fundamental driver of that capacity are these competing state systems, and war is an occasional by-product of that. But when you run a regression — maybe they did; I don’t know this paper — of current state capacity and war, there’s just this omitted variable, which is the competitiveness of state systems.”
05 / evaluation
“I would say most Canadians — because I don’t think it’s nearly as polarized a place, although I haven’t lived there in something like 20, almost 25 years — recognize that there’s a strong conservative and anti-establishment sentiment in the country, slightly fewer than in the United States but not dramatically different.”
06 / evaluation
“I think we need more — I don’t know how to think about it systematically because I don’t think we’ve had 20 people with their shoulder behind the boulder, pushing and trying to understand that.”
07 / evaluation
“The way I think about this is that there’s usually a narrow set of people who decide whether or not to go to war, and those people are either accountable or not accountable to lots of people.”
08 / evaluation
“I’m not sure how they will ever solve the problem of violence because solving the problem of violence requires recognizing that these armed groups and criminal cartels have an immense amount of power, and that they have to find a way to live with them.”
09 / evaluation
“Going back to this question you had earlier about why was there so much instability in the years after the war, I think a set of misdrawn borders and trying to find a political equilibrium where all of these groups have to live together is one source of that political shock and instability.”
10 / evaluation
“I don’t like to be that crude because I’m actually a little bit of a skeptic of this knee-jerk to policing: “We need more police, and we need more investment in security resources.”
11 / evaluation
“There’s an answer to what I think my production function looks like, but the answer for most people — when I was in my maybe third year, and you do something, as you know, in academia called your third-year review, where your senior colleagues debate what you’re doing right or wrong, and then give you basically no feedback.”
12 / evaluation
“I tend to think we’re maybe a bit glib about saying that people are resilient because there’s a lot of pain or problems that don’t necessarily show up in our data but turn out to be really important.”
13 / evaluation
“People use it to think about something that we think of as bargaining and the commitment problem, which is that massive power shifts can lead to war, partly because it becomes difficult for the temporarily powerful person to be paid off not to exercise their advantage and, through a first strike, eliminate.”
14 / evaluation
“I think of Africa, which is the site of many of these wars, as undergoing a period of political instability followed by consolidation after a rapid and unexpected decolonization — at the same time that you’re having experimentation with economic systems and political organizations that turned out to be failures, which interacted with that to make it so much worse.”
15 / evaluation
“Any description of African society, African culture, conflict, or politics that relies on this, I have to believe it’s there because so many people have written books. But it doesn’t seem to be a first- or even second-order determinant of what’s going on when I think about the conflicts I know, the politicians I know, and the decisions that get made.”