Abstract
The study of mass contentious politics in Southeast Asia has accumulated significant knowledge over the last 40 years. This politics is instructive because it presents distinctive problems for analysis whose solutions will be useful to future analysts there and elsewhere. Two areas of knowledge where this literature has made special contributions are peasant resistance and the politics of insurgency and counterinsurgency. In addition, the peculiarities of the scholarship on this topic offer an opportunity to engage two different debates. First, because of the diverse methods employed to tackle this topic, the literature is useful for evaluating claims often made by partisans to methodological debates that only one’s own method can accumulate knowledge while others cannot. Second, given the high geopolitical stake Southeast Asia once held for the United States in its fight against world communism, the scholarship on contentious mass politics in this region provides an appropriate test case for the common argument that postwar American scholarship has been dominated by American “imperial designs.” This article examines the different genres of analysis in the literature and shows how these genres hold different normative and ontological assumptions, conceptualize problems differently, and accumulate knowledge in different modes. A key finding of the essay is that knowledge accumulation by different genres has experienced cycles of growth and exhaustion. The evolution of these genres indicates the often neglected fact that knowledge accumulation consumes exhaustible knowledge resources that need to be replenished. The changing fortunes of the genres with different normative orientations also suggest a loose link between scholarship on this topic and broad ideological shifts in the United States, although “imperial interests” did not always prevail as often claimed.
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Notes
Among 53 civil wars from 1960 to 1992, 23 took place in Asia as opposed to 19 in Africa and 11 in the Middle East (dataset compiled by Henderson and Singer 2000).
According to Gurr (1970, 6), out of 2,828 articles that appeared in the American Political Science Review from its establishment in 1906 through 1968, only 29 had titles that concerned political disorder or violence and more than half (15) appeared after 1961.
McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2001, 5) defines contentious politics as “episodic, public, collective interaction among makers of claims and their objects when (a) at least one government is a claimant, an object of claims, or a party to the claims and (b) the claims would, if realized, affect the interests of at least one of the claimants.” Here I define contentious mass politics as uninstitutionalized politics that involves nonelites and a contest for power or authority in a polity but that is not necessarily public or collective. Ethnic and religious conflicts are excluded from this definition to make the comparative task manageable.
An example is Paige (1975).
An example is Kerkvliet (1990).
An example is Race (1972).
The genres certainly had had long pedigrees in political science before the 1960s, but they only took on distinct shapes since then. Among the pioneering works were Johnson (1962) for PO, Moore (1966) for CH, Wolf (1969) for PS, and Feierabend et al. ([1966] 1972) for QM. Seven Southeast Asian countries were included in Feierabend et al.’s dataset of 84 cases. Wolf had a chapter on the Vietnamese “peasant war.”
Syntheses and reviews of the voluminous social movement literature can be found in McAdam, McCarthy and Zald (1996), Tarrow (1998), and Edelman (2001). Extensive reviews of CH research program on revolutions are available in several articles and two recently edited volumes, i.e., Goldstone (1980, 2001, 2003) and Foran (1997). Reviews of QM studies on conflict include Feierabend et al. (1972), Lichbach (1989), and Henderson and Singer (2000).
A “genre” in this conception is similar to a “research tradition,” which can encompass inconsistent theories at any given time (Johnson, 2003, 90).
For example, see the Symposium on “Peasant Strategies in Asian Societies: Moral and Rational Economic Approaches,” Journal of Asian Studies 42/4 (August).
Examples were theories by James March, Herbert Simon, Chester Barnard, and Peter Blau.
Juan Linz (1978) was influential to works in this genre.
For a description of this database, see Small and Singer (1982).
Ragin (1997, 32) explains the difference between “explanation” and “explaining variation.”
The usage here follows Hall (2003, 374). Ontology refers to “premises about the deep causal structures of the world.”
See Qualitative Methods 1/2 (Fall 2003) (Newsletter of the APSA Organized Section on Qualitative Methods) for a recent debate on the interpretivist tradition in political science.
This criticism is made by Skocpol (1982, 360).
Skocpol (1982, 363) makes this assumption.
Ethnographic methods and interpretivism have been undervalued in the discipline but support for them appears to be increasing. See Bayard de Volo and Schatz (2004, 67), the debate on interpretivism in Qualitative Methods 1/2 (Fall 2003), and the Symposium on Discourse and Content Analysis in Qualitative Methods 2/1 (Spring 2004).
For this point on descriptive concepts in the interpretivist tradition, see Bevir (2003, 20).
See Skocpol (1982).
In fact, social movement researchers in general overwhelmingly choose to study only movements with which they sympathize (Edelman, 2001, 302).
The cases include South Africa, China, Nepal, Thailand, Burma, and the Philippines.
Concern about this ontological ambiguity is expressed in Gamson and Meyer’s (1996, 275) criticism of the concept of political opportunity structure as “a sponge that soaks up virtually every aspect of the social movement environment-political institutions and culture, crises of various sorts, political alliances, and policy shifts.” McAdam et al. (2001, 23) and Amenta (2003, 115–6) also view this ambiguity as a problem for the social movement literature. Tilly (2001) and McAdam et al. (2001) recently propose that this “problem” be solved by focusing on recurrent “causal mechanisms” and “processes” in a wide range of political contention.
Why? I can offer three possible reasons. First, no Southeast Asian revolutions meet the strict requirements for “great social revolutions.” Second, most revolutionary conflicts in the region involved protracted civil wars. Many of these conflicts did not end until the late 1980s, when interest in Southeast Asia had waned. Third, the CH genre requires reliable secondary sources, which were missing for many Southeast Asian cases, especially the Indochinese case, until the 1980s or 1990s.
As Julia Adams et al. (2005, 28) reflect, “It seems obvious – now – that we cannot understand people’s making revolutions without looking at what they thought they were doing. Yet recall that at that time, ‘culture’...was often understood as homogenous and nationally unified.”
Steinmetz (2004, 378) argues that this methodological positivism reflects the common tendency of sociology until recently to mimic the natural sciences.
The terms “dataset observations” and “causal process observations” are proposed by Brady and Collier (2004).
Laitin (2005, 128–130) also maintains that providing “[causal] mechanisms linking dependent and independent variables in statistical analyses” is one of the three roles played by “narrative,” which in turn is viewed as “coequal to the statistical and formal elements” of his “tripartite method.” Yet although he insists that none of the three elements are adequate for making causal claims if standing alone, the roles of narrative in his view are to support formal modeling (proving plausibility tests) and statistical analysis (linking variables and analyzing residuals), rather than the other way around. Andrew Abbott (2001, 140) captures well how narratives are used in a superficial manner by positivists like Laitin, “...there are no complex narratives; narratives are always one-step decisions. There are no real contingencies or forkings in the road. There are simply the high road of variables and the rest – which is error.”
For a claim to the contrary, see Wickham-Crowley (1997).
Walton is referring to theoretical frameworks established by James Scott, Eric Wolf, Charles Tilly, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Barrington Moore.
Ragin (1997, 30–32) discusses how cases are “constituted” and not taken as given in CH research.
Lichbach and Gurr (1981) have shown that a democratic regime is associated with an increased likelihood of protests but a decreased likelihood of rebellions (see Henderson & Singer, 2000, 276 for similar examples). If the concept of revolution is not uniformly defined, two different researchers may reach contradictory results yet both may be right because they are not examining the same phenomena (even though they believe they are doing so).
What is presented here is only the gist of the argument and the method of inference. Of course, their models are more complex than they can be summarized here.
Yet as Sambanis (2005, 325) concludes based on a number of case studies that test the Collier-Hoeffler model, motives of rebels are more complex than the simple dichotomy of grievance and greed suggests.
The rational actor model is not new in the study of conflict. One of the earliest works is Leites and Wolf (1970), which seeks to apply the market analogy to political conflict in a formal mathematical model. Note that Popkin (1979) treats peasants as rational actors, whereas Leites and Wolf (1970) and Collier and Hoeffler (1998, 2000, 2001) focus on rebellious groups and their leaders as rational actors.
Collier and Hoeffler (2001) argue that it can because higher education means more employment opportunities, less need to join rebellion, and higher cost of recruitment. However, in many developing countries, which suffer from perennial high rates of unemployment due to high population growth rates and stagnant economies, higher education is not sufficient to bring employment, often brings more discontent and lowers the cost of recruitment.
The definition of knowledge here is still within the boundaries of what many anthropologists call a “traditional” definition (Hastrup, 2004). While it may be true that certain knowledge “depends intimately on the modes of knowing and of interpreting” as Kirsten Hastrup argues, I do not submit to the view that all knowledge does so.
To control the environment of village life, the movement first developed a coercive infrastructure with covered agents and demonstrated actions (e.g., assassinations) before making repeated face-to-face contacts with potential recruits.
An example is Henderson and Singer (2000).
This is because rational choice hypotheses drawn from rational choice behavioral assumptions are often irrelevant to quantitative analysis. Dryzek (2005, 510) also observes that rational choice theory and quantitative approaches are not easily reconciled.
Adams et al. (2005, 34) also writes, “As contemporary revolutionary openings seemed to close and revolutionary outcomes came to be viewed more sourly, [many scholars of revolutions turned to] consider a nonrevolutionary version of progress toward a more egalitarian future, the Progressive Era and New Deal origins of the U.S. welfare state.”
For a discussion and sources on the politics of postwar scholarship in the US, particularly with respect to Southeast Asia, see Berger (2003).
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Vu, T. Contentious mass politics in Southeast Asia: Knowledge accumulation and cycles of growth and exhaustion. Theor Soc 35, 393–419 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-006-9011-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-006-9011-z