Political Scientists on Vacation

Political scientists take vacations! We have nothing to hide! Our vacations are not a weapon of mass destruction! No tricks! There is no hidden menace in these activities. Never!

Our initial assessment is that if the scholars stay all the time in the office, that such persons will die, we swear by God! False administrators and state legislators who complain of the lazy professors, God will roast their stomachs in all tribunals. They will be degraded and rot from inside. They will be beaten with shoes. They do not even have control over themselves! Do not believe them!

We triple-guarantee you, our vacations are harmless. We get our information from authentic sources, many authentic sources. The situation is excellent.

Our Excellent Vacations

In this photograph I am enjoying my vacation in the Republic of Somaliland, capital, Hargeisa. Maybe I'll collect some data for my new book too. Lee Seymour, a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Department of Political Science came too. I come to this place to see why people would stop fighting several times in the 1990s, while others who had pretty much the same resources and lots of other similar circumstances, let's say those guys in the south, could not pull off this feat. I like to call this “autonomous gun control”. We don’t really know enough about why guys with guns obey guys without guns—sometimes. I look at the same sorts of developments in the Caucasus and Nigeria’s Niger Delta. This gives me a lot of variety, or as we say, lots of variation on the dependent and independent variables, as I get to evaluate lots of different community experiences during wartime. The objective here is to explain why some communities utterly collapse in wartime and their local gunmen victimize their own neighbors, while just down the road they pretty much behave like police or a mini-army to protect their neighbors. Once upon a time, thus were born governments and states.

Lee studies the foreign policies of as-yet unrecognized states. Somaliland is a great example of an unrecognized state. Lee and I also worked together in the Caucasus. This was possible because we went with my colleague Georgi Derluguian, noted author and sociology star. Here is Lee in Nagorno-Karabakh. That unrecognized state has an army, as you can see.

Ok, there is one more stop—the Niger Delta and its vigilantes and, well, other sorts of interesting armed structures. Isn’t it interesting with what they arm themselves?