Celebrate the end of the academic year at our fourth International Book Blitz. At this popular event, open to all Weatherhead affiliates, a panel of Weatherhead Center Faculty Associates will each give a seven-minute “speed talk” about their recent book, launching us into compelling issues from around the world. A party for affiliates will follow the presentations.
Yamini Aiyar, Advisory Committee. President and Chief Executive, Centre for Policy Research; Visiting Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University.Lessons in State Capacity for Delhi’s Schools (Oxford Academic, 2024)
Theresa S. Betancourt, Salem Professor in Global Practice; Director, Research Program on Children and Adversity (RPCA), Boston College School of Social Work. Shadows into Light: A Generation of Former Child Soldiers Comes of Age (Harvard University Press, 2025)
Jennifer L. Hochschild, Faculty Associate. Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government, Department of Government; Professor, Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University; Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School. Race/Class Conflict and Urban Financial Threat (Russell Sage Foundation, 2025)
Tyler Jost, Assistant Professor of Political Science, International & Public Affairs, Department of Political Science; Watson Institute Assistant Professor of China Studies, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University. Bureaucracies at War: The Institutional Origins of Miscalculation (Cambridge University Press, 2024)
Serhii Plokhy, Faculty Associate. Mykhailo S. Hrushevs'kyi Professor of Ukrainian History, Department of History; Director, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. Chernobyl Roulette: War in the Nuclear Disaster Zone (W. W. Norton, 2024)
Malika Zeghal, Faculty Associate; Harvard Academy Senior Scholar. Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor in Contemporary Islamic Thought and Life, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University. The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Islam and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton University Press, 2024)
MELANI CAMMETT: Welcome, everyone. For those of you I don't know, my name is Melani Cammett. I am director of the Weatherhead Center and professor in the government department here at Harvard. And I'm really delighted to welcome you all to the fourth annual International Book Blitz here at the Weatherhead Center.
It's really a fabulous event. Really exciting to learn about the work of our colleagues and to bring everyone together. One of our favorite events. It highlights the dynamism of our amazing affiliates, past and present. As you will see, we have affiliates from many connections to the center, and we get to showcase the culmination of years' long research projects centered on topics from around the world and also the US, many of which were supported by the Weatherhead Center.
And we are talking years of research. One of my colleagues here on the panel just mentioned this is a decade of work coming together. So feeling challenged to put that in seven minutes, but seven minutes it will be. So if you have not seen the Book Blitz before, you'll notice that the format is different from standard book talks, as I've just alluded to.
Seated up front are six distinguished authors from across the social sciences. And their books were published in the last year. That's the requirement for eligibility to be part of this event. And they're going to briefly introduce themselves and their books before they begin.
This year, we're going to raffle off a copy of each book featured today. The raffle tickets are going to be passed around, and I will announce the winners after the presentation. So I think the raffle tickets are emerging shortly.
I'm going to quickly name the authors in order of appearance. First, we have Yamini Aiyar, who is from the Watson Institute at Brown University and an esteemed member of the Weatherhead Center's advisory committee as well.
Then we have Theresa Betancourt, who is a former faculty associate now at the School of Social Work at Boston College. We have Jennifer Hochschild, my colleague from the government department. Tyler Jost, who is a former graduate student associate at the Weatherhead Center and now is a professor in the political science department at Brown right here to my left. And then we have Serhii Plokhy from the history department here at Harvard. And last but not least, Malika Zeghal from the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, NELC.
So what I'm going to do is ask each author to present their book in only seven minutes. This is like speed dating for books. And we're going to be very strict about this. This, in itself, is a feat, as you can imagine, trying to get people who've been working for a decade on a project to speak about it for only seven minutes. It's challenging.
But we are going to enforce this with the sound of a bell from our resident time keeper and producer, Michelle Nicholasen, who put together this amazing event, along with Sarah Vance and the other fantastic members of our communications team here at the Weatherhead Center. We could not do anything without this team and without the events manager.
After the raffle, please stick around. We have our Cinco de Mayo celebration, end of the year festivities, and so forth. So without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to our first author, Yamini Aiyar.
YAMINI AIYAR: Do we come back?
MELANI CAMMETT: Yes, please.
[APPLAUSE]
YAMINI AIYAR: Thank you. Waste, fraud, and abuse. Sound familiar? Every society seems to be flirting with democracy. And the nature of their flirtation may be different, but at the heart of it seems to be a growing disenchantment with the administrative state.
In India, we have been long disenchanted with the administrative state because it simply seems to fail on all the everyday things most of you here take for granted. Our public schools are appalling. If it snows at-- luckily, it's hot in Delhi, but there are parts of India that are cold. If it snows, the municipal administration isn't going to show up the next day to clear out the roads.
We blame the frontlines of the administrative state. It's the bureaucrats that we see every day, who are incompetent, who are corrupt, who are apathetic. And the best way to get the state to work, we say, in the US, you want algorithms. We have perfected the panopticon.
We use technology in all kinds of ways to monitor, to create real-time data, to see what these guys are doing everyday, so much so that we can monitor sitting in Delhi, whether the school teacher has showed up in a school in a village far, far, far, far away because there is a biometric stuck there in a command and control center where the senior bureaucrat is checking to see if the teacher has shown up.
We forget, of course, that showing up is only half the job. Once you get there, you actually need to teach. And that's really the challenge that we needed to confront. 50% of children in schools in India can-- in standard five can barely read a standard two text.
The challenge of education for a large population that is at the tipping point of a demographic dividend is huge and critical, and we need desperately to strengthen our public school systems. But because we don't like the administrative state, because it's people with characters that we think are basically corrupt, incompetent, and apathetic, we look for solutions in the wrong place.
I spent many years documenting the story of how one state government in my city, the city of Delhi, attempted to improve the quality of schools by briefly listening but mostly confronting, because they didn't listen hard enough, to the voices of those at the front line, whom we say are the causes of all the waste, fraud, and abuse, that is the reasons for our disenchantment to try and improve the quality of schools.
When listening to them, I recognized that because we're so busy perfect-- in perfecting the panopticon, we have removed from them the whole sense of purpose. Teachers talked about themselves very much as administrators. We came to teach, but we are nothing but administrative clerks.
The system, because it's a bureaucratic hierarchy, Weberian to perfection. So it only operates when an order comes through a circular all the way down to the front lines. We traced in three years, 8,000 circulars. We also learned from the British. We really got it right.
We have a lot of paper. Nothing is real if it's not on paper, in the file, ordered through the Bavarian hierarchy. But in the process, nothing gets done if it's not written in the order. And an order-driven structure, which is deeply embedded in hierarchy, creates organizational norms that are basically structured around enabling the hierarchy to operate through this paper, rather than asking itself what its core purpose of being here is.
As long as we move papers, we have done our job, say a lot of the frontline officers. We think of ourselves as no more than post officers. I call this the post office paradox. Post officers not because we are efficient and we get money, or we get a postcard all the way from the state capital to the middle of nowhere. But post officers because we're just moving papers around, unclear of what our purpose is. And the hierarchy will usually ask if I have moved the paper, rather than tell me what the purpose of this paper was.
So when we tracked, for instance, the time use of many of our frontline workers, we discovered, by and large, most of the day will begin based on what the order says. That comes on WhatsApp nowadays, tells you what you're supposed to do. So you busy yourself in the day, responding to what you're supposed to do on that particular day.
In one of the occasions when we were tracing our frontline education administrators, it was a time when they were supposed to work with parent-teacher associations, making plans for the schools, but they received an order to ensure that all schools had introduced yoga practice in the morning assembly. And so they spent the entire day making phone calls to ensure that the yoga practice was happening to please the hierarchy, rather than actually do what they were supposed to do, which might have actually contributed to improving the quality of schools.
So the frontline says, we are nothing but post officers, and our job is largely about complete rest and comfortable conditions. Inside the classroom then, the teacher is doing complete rest and comfortable conditions. In India, we do development through acronyms, so that position is called the CRCC, Cluster Resource Center Coordinator, meant to mentor teachers in schools, but he describes himself rather eloquently as complete rest and comfortable conditions. I respond when the order comes, and for the rest, a CRCC is completely resting.
This translates inside the classroom in a manner that doesn't focus on what children are learning, but in a manner that focuses on how best to respond to the hierarchical norms within which I'm embedded. This isn't a corrupt, apathetic, incompetent bureaucrat or incompetent public school worker official.
This is really somebody who is responding to the organizational culture within their-- within which they are embedded, which is pushing them then to only think of the classroom as something that can be easily monitored. Because if you can biometric it, then it's actually working.
So they are asked about the number of students that passed the exam. They are asked about whether they've completed the syllabus. They are not asked why it is that 50% of children in this classroom are nowhere near the curriculum level expectations and what they can do to improve the quality of learning in their classrooms.
So when we ask these frontline officers what exactly it is that they can do to improve the quality of schooling in their schools, they turn around and say, government can do a lot, but they forget that they are government because for them, even though they may be exuding the power of being a government officer-- it means a lot to be part of the state in India. You can't sack 10,000 federal workers in India and not have a protest. The government will be on fire. That's the difference between our two countries, even though we have many similarities.
Yet the actor inside the state thinks of herself as a remarkably powerless, powerful bureaucrat. This is the heart of the challenge of public service provision in India. I learnt this from listening to the voices of the frontline. And in writing this book, I'm appealing to those of us who want to, in fact, strengthen democracy to ask ourselves whether we should dismiss the administrative state as merely being one of waste, abuse, and fraud, or rather, embrace the administrative state as a potential partner in strengthening the societies as we imagine them to pursue the cause of democracy rather than the cause of authoritarianism. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
THERESA BETANCOURT: Hello, everyone. I am Theresa Betancourt. I am here to talk about my book, Shadows into Light, which came out in January. I wrote this book because I am motivated by the fact that in our lifetimes, we are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II.
It's now estimated that one in six children around the world lives in an active conflict zone. If you come to post-conflict settings like Rwanda, post-genocide Rwanda, post-conflict Sierra Leone, that the book is about, that number swells even further. We're talking about 473 million children growing up in conflict zones.
So as a researcher in public health and child development and mental health and trauma, after a while, I realized that publishing research articles, one at a time disjointed, was no longer able to tell the story that I shared in this book.
And the story that I shared in this book is the story of a 23-year journey with colleagues in Sierra Leone after the end of an 11-year civil war, which raged from 1991 to 2002, where we had the massive abduction of children into armed forces and armed groups.
You've probably heard the term child soldiers. Sometimes that is a misnomer because it's giving the image of a boy with a gun. That's not the truth. When we look at every conflict around the world where children are involved, it's girls as well as boys. They're involved as cooks, porters, sexual slaves. They're sent to the front lines.
But the question was, we don't really know what happens to them after these experiences. We have a lot of cross-sectional research of the mental health impact of armed conflict on children, but we don't have enough developmental, longitudinal research. That was the gap that we were trying to fill.
So in 2002, we started a mixed methods study with my colleagues in Sierra Leone. We had data collection, qualitative, in-depth interviews. We also had surveys, conducted in 2002, 2004, 2008, 2016, slowed by Ebola, and then underway now in 2025 as these young people, 529 of them, a third female, they've become young adults. They've started their own families. They're having their own children. It's become an intergenerational study of war.
And one of the most important messages of the book is that this is not a lost generation. A lot of times people would say, well, kids who've been through that level of extreme trauma-- if you look at our sample, our children in the sample were taken on average at age 10, socialized by armed groups for four years on average.
You would think, well, how can you come out of that? The truth is, the tendency in our data, 66% of the young people, when they came home, they were met with support from their families and acceptance from their communities. Another 24% of our 529 young people struggled at first but eventually were able to right themselves and have, in many ways, look like their peers and their communities around Sierra Leone today.
There is a subset, 10%, that have much higher rates of involvement with police, suicidal attempts and ideation who struggle to this day. And I tell the story of the social ecology around the child and how important that is. Yes, it's individual perseverance, intelligence, ambition, effort, mental health, and functioning. But it's also who's around you and your family. Who are your supports? What's the nature of family functioning?
How about community? Can you get back into school? Can you pursue a livelihood? And what's going on in terms of governance, leadership on these issues of health systems strengthening of opening opportunities for war-affected youth?
And I wrap my story around two individuals. They appear time and time again through the different chapters of the journey of this 23-year study. One is the boy, Sar. I'll tell you a little bit about Sar. When he was first abducted, he was with his grandmother as a toddler. He was taken from her arms by an armed group to be the house boy to help a formerly abducted young woman around the house, who was being forced to have the children of a rebel commander as a helper.
Sar was exposed to countless traumas, sent to the front line, forced to take drugs to annure him to the violence. He was so small when he was abducted that no one knew what he would look like as a teenager. So when family tracing happened-- and this was common with the non-governmental organizations-- they couldn't identify Sar because they didn't know what he would look like as a teenager.
But he had a mother and a grandmother who loved him dearly, wanted him home. But he also had an uncle who rejected him, saw him as stigmatizing, shameful for the family. And this uncle did not protect Sar. So as Sar began to be in the community, he had a lot of community challenges.
Now one thing that had helped Sar at the interim care centers where the young people would come after the war before they would trace their families was he had ridden bicycles to sooth himself. It helped him calm his emotions.
When he went home, his family didn't have a bicycle. So he would go to the community, and they had bike lenders. You were supposed to pay them. He couldn't pay. He'd take the bike. He couldn't pay. So these people would beat him. His mother had to break up fights, saying they were correcting his behavior. She couldn't understand why someone would do this. And the powerful family leader, his uncle, did not defend him.
So you can imagine where Sar's story goes from here. When we last interviewed him, he had been working on a farm. He'd dropped out of school because he'd pulled a knife on one of these occasions. And he was living in isolation on a farm just for room and board. Moses Zombo, who wrote the foreword to the book, was my main interviewer of the males in the study. And I could see his face when he entered the room. He had just found out that Sar had died at 24.
Now there's another tendency in this book, which is one of resilience and perseverance, personal growth and overcoming. And that is the story of Isatu. Isatu was abducted from school when she was sitting for her exams, her grade completion exam. She was only 12.
And the Revolutionary United Front rebels took her. Her sister was also abducted. When they got back to the RUF encampment, she saw her sister. And these two girls ran interference for one another throughout the years. They protected each other from sexual violence, and when they came back out of their years with the rebels, they were able to be placed into foster care. And normally foster care situations, people don't have a lot of resources. And they wouldn't invest them in a foster kid. But this kid had such drive.
She just wanted to get back into school and continue her studies, and people saw that. So the foster parents, despite not having the money, they leave the power generator on late at night so she could study. She eventually was getting top test scores, wanted to go to pre-medicine programs, but she couldn't afford it.
So people passed the hat, and UNICEF even chipped in, the staff at the UNICEF office, to send her to pre-medical classes. She eventually got a scholarship and studied in Latin America. She's now become one of the few doctors in Sierra Leone. So I hope that you'll join us on this journey. I think it's a journey of overcoming, hope, and perseverance. And thank you so much for your time today.
[APPLAUSE]
JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD: I'm Jennifer Hochschild. I'm in the government department, African and African-American studies, and the Harvard Kennedy School. My project took a little over a decade, which means about half of the time that you spent.
So I'll just talk really fast. So this started with a research project with Vesla Weaver, who is a former student here, now teaches at Johns Hopkins. And we were interested in-- both of us coming out of a kind of racial ethnic politics framework, how does the intersection between race and class actually work on the ground?
Everybody uses the framework. It's kind of critical race theory, which we're not supposed to say anymore, but we all kind of know broadly what-- but we wanted to know what actually happens. Who says what to whom with what consequences in actual policy arenas, in actual cities?
So we got some funding from Russell Sage Foundation. We did a big survey of 12 American metropolitan areas across racial ethnic groups. And we kind of decorated it with four case studies of actual policies in cities, which we thought would add some kind of local color and some good quotations.
But the project was supposed to be the survey. Turns out the survey just wasn't very interesting. And so it shows up marginally in the book. But all the RSF funding basically wasn't wasted. I wouldn't say that. But the case studies turned out to be what was really central.
So the short version of the story is that we did, in fact-- mostly the we is now me. Vesla has gone off in a different direction. So she's not entirely responsible for this project. We found what we were sort of expecting to find in two of our four policies in four cities.
So one was stop, question, frisk policing in New York City. And the metaphor for that is a target. And it's not very hard to figure out what it was. 90-something percent of the young men who were stopped-- well, first of all, they were young. Secondly, they were men. Thirdly, they were overwhelmingly African-American. Actually, Latinos were roughly proportional to population. Mostly African-American young men who lived in disproportionately non-white, mostly African-American, poor communities within the city.
Stop and frisk is actually a totally common police tactic and is constitutionally permitted. It's not a big deal. It's not a big problem, except in New York. It went from several hundred a year around the turn of the 21st century to 700,000 a year stops by 2010, 2011, which means that many young Black men were being stopped three or four times a year. And the number of frisks and the number of crimes being controlled was absolutely minimal. So this is a kind of classic case of race-class targeting.
Second case also worked the way we anticipated that it would. And it-- which is to say a race-class dynamic but looked differently. This is the beltline and the surrounding housing and urban development in the city of Atlanta.
The beltline is a 22-mile rail to trail. I do this because it circles the city. A rail-to-tail project. And this is kind of a classic case of a race-class grid so that there were well-off, politically powerful African-Americans running the system. Well-off, especially economically powerful whites, poor Blacks, and poor roughly everybody else, some white, some Latino, some Asian.
So kind of classic two by two table. And if you trace who benefited most from the beltline itself and from development around it, both housing and broader corporate or commercial establishments, it's essentially a class story somewhat decorated by race is probably the best way of describing it, which is to say the well-off whites and the well-off Blacks did well.
Poor Blacks and poor non-blacks didn't necessarily do badly. It depends on how you look at it and whether you think gentrification is a negative or just not as beneficial for some as others. But it's a pretty clear race-class story.
OK, our other two cases didn't work. They simply are not by-- to my astonishment, stories about the intersection of race and class. And this is partly why it took a decade because I refused to look at-- refused to accept what the data was telling us for several years.
Case number three is charter schools in the city of Los Angeles, Los Angeles school district. Anybody who knows anything about schooling, public education, Los Angeles, school desegregation, urban politics will be astonished to hear that race and class simply don't drive that policy dispute. I was certainly astonished.
It's a bitter, nasty war, has been, between the school district and particularly the teachers' union and the charter schools, the independent charter schools. Everything we thought we knew would lead us to expect there to be a strong racial class dynamic going on within that war. It's just not there.
The population of students in the charter schools is virtually identical to that in the public schools. The teachers are virtually identical. The kind of left-wing social justice education as a way of avoiding the school-to-prison pipeline is identical. If you looked at any given comment or any given set of data, you simply would not be able to tell whether it's charter school or LAUSD.
What's going on in that? And yet they hate each other. The teachers' union is trying to kill the charter schools. The charter schools would be happy to kill the teachers' union. They just don't have enough power to do so.
What's going on? It's population loss. The LAUSD-- the metaphor here is an open border, which is to say in 2002-ish, they had 730,000 students. By now, they have about 400,000 students. And people are simply leaving the district or family birthrates are declining.
As people-- as the population declines. State budgets decline. Jobs are threatened. School closures are threatened. Pensions are exploding and are threatened. So there's a perception, particularly in the teachers' union, but not uniquely so, of a zero sum game.
And where do you get more students and therefore more state funding? From the charter schools that are literally sitting next door. So it has this quality of a kind of zero sum financial threat. People, every so often, would talk about the D-word.
Anybody know what the D-word is? Detroit, right? Bankruptcy. Nobody would-- almost nobody would literally say it out loud. But that's the shadow that's sitting behind the school district and the perception that either we're going to survive or they're going to survive and not both of us.
Final case-- so it doesn't much have anything to do with race and class, to my surprise. Final case is public sector pension funding in the city of Chicago, which I thought was going to be the most boring case and turned out to be actually the most interesting one.
Chicago owes somewhere between $30 and $60 billion, depending on who you-- how you count, towards public sector pension funds. There is no dispute. Unlike in Los Angeles, where everybody would like to kill each other if they possibly could, everybody agrees in Chicago that they should pay the pensions. They must pay the pensions. State Supreme Court says they have to pay the pensions. Of course, we're going to pay the pensions. There just isn't any money.
So it's not a race-class issue. It turns out that this book is actually a more methodological intervention than an empirical one, which is to say under what conditions and for what reasons should we think that the kind of canonical class analysis or critical race theory analysis is the appropriate way to understand urban politics? Conversely, to what degree should we return to good old Robert Dahl pluralism, which turns out to have mattered more in two of my four cases.
[APPLAUSE]
TYLER JOST: Good evening. My name is Tyler Jost. I'm an assistant professor at Brown University. I'm here to talk about my book, Bureaucracies at War. And what motivated this project is this fact that international conflicts often turn out much differently than decision makers anticipate that they will.
So take, for example, in the early months of 1979, Chinese national leaders approved a short but powerful invasion of Vietnam. It's not well-covered in the textbooks, and there's a reason for that. The logic of this invasion was simple. China would teach its southern neighbor a lesson through a short-lived military action akin to China's war with India in 1962. China would then withdraw back over the border, having demonstrated its military strength and prowess to its southern brother.
But the war ended up having the exact opposite effect. Poor performance on the battlefield demonstrated China's military weakness, not its strength. And as Vietnamese leaders would, behind closed doors, we now know, say after the war has finished, it was not China who taught Vietnam a lesson, but Vietnam who taught China a lesson.
Now, this somewhat stylized distillation of the Sino-Vietanemese conflict illustrates an important and arguably tragic point about the nature of war itself. Decision makers often, often, often charge headfirst into conflicts that ultimately fail to deliver the benefits that they anticipate going in. And this mismatch between expectation and outcome leads decision makers to in retrospect, wonder whether they might have made different choices had they only had different information available to them at the time.
In the context of the American escalation in Vietnam, for example, numerous senior US officials would later reflect just how inaccurate their view at the time was. Lyndon Johnson's secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, in his memoirs, famously claimed that US decision makers were, quote, "wrong, terribly wrong."
Similarly, in an unpublished manuscript that's available just down the road at the JFK Archives by Lyndon Johnson's national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, put this point a little bit more concretely and even more precisely. Bundy reflected that the spread of communism in Asia, the very foundation of the logic that the United States was escalating in the region could, quote, "have been contained just about as well as it had at much lower cost."
So this leads to the central question of this book, which is why and when do states miscalculate on the road to war? As political scientists and historians, social scientists writ large were naturally and immediately drawn to this tempting answer that while hindsight might be 20/20, a decision maker's vision at the time is often quite blurry. And as a result, we might be tempted to conclude that, given the pervasive nature of uncertainty in international politics, what historians sometimes refer to as the fog of war, decision makers are ultimately going to get it wrong.
This book reaches a different conclusion, however, looking deeply at how foreign policy decision making worked in four different case countries-- India, Pakistan, China, and the United States. It argues that some while some level of unanticipated failure is certainly unavoidable in international politics, over time and on average, states do do better and worse, depending on how they design institutions for foreign policy decision making.
Some of these institutions perform better than others and in particular, at delivering more complete and accurate information to political leaders who ultimately hold within their power the final choice about whether or not to use force against other countries. And that information, both its accuracy and completeness, shapes and terms the patterns of behavior that we see states exhibit in their successes and failures.
So my argument in this book centers around a particular set of formal and informal institutions that regulate the relationship between political leaders on the one hand-- think presidents, prime ministers, even dictators. And bureaucratic advisors on the other hand-- think defense ministers, foreign ministers, defense analysts.
And this book is certainly not the first to discuss the relationship between the role of bureaucracy in foreign policy decision making. There's a long tradition going back to this very department in Graham Allison's work in the 1970s that explored this topic in significant detail.
But if there's a single conventional wisdom that emerged from that body of scholarship just as well as the folk wisdom if you talk to someone on the street, it is that bringing bureaucracy closer to decision making tends to muck things up. It's doomed to fail. It degrades process. It delivers biased information to political leaders tasked with making unenviable choices. Or, as the colloquial saying goes, a camel is a horse designed by a committee.
My argument is that we have this quite wrong. Bureaucratic participation in decision making actually is quite helpful in avoiding miscalculation by politicians, particularly when institutions channeling their participation are properly designed.
There's really two reasons for this. The first is that bureaucracy provides political leaders with access to more information than any single human being could ever collect on their own. And second and critically, putting bureaucrats with competing perspectives in dialogue with one another forces debate and deliberation that, on average and over time, improves the quality of information upon which political leaders can base their decisions.
This leads to the title of the book, Bureaucracies at War, which comes from this intuition that pitting bureaucracies at war with each other at home helps to prevent miscalculations on the road to war abroad. And to be clear, this isn't the only reason that decision makers miscalculate. Nor is it the only reason that states enter costly conflicts with one another.
But I show that this logic of institutional miscalculation, in other words, adopting the wrong process by which you evaluate the costs and benefits of any foreign policy action is far more common than we've previously acknowledged, both within the academy and on the street.
The danger to foreign policy, arguably, is not keeping bureaucratic advisors too close, rather, it is the danger lies in pushing bureaucrats out of the proverbial room where policymaking happens. Of course, this naturally raises a question about why political leaders would ever do the things that I say or the book finds are deleterious to decision making outcomes.
And the second half of the book offers an answer that's rooted in domestic politics and survival. It argues that political leaders face a trade-off in the institutions that they design, namely, the very same institutions that I described to you, delivering high-quality advice to leaders also allow bureaucrats to gain access to sensitive information, to build expertise, and to garner authority with which they can use, if they choose, to punish political leaders politically.
Put differently, institutions that are effective from the perspective of decision making can also be a political liability for presidents, prime ministers, and dictators who are trying to stay in office. Leaders resolve this trade-off, I argue, in large part based upon their domestic political environment.
When leaders see the bureaucratic state as a threat to their power, institutions become inefficient from the standpoint of decision making, become efficient from the perspective of politics. So thanks so much for your time and attention today.
[APPLAUSE]
SERHII PLOKHY: OK. Hi, everyone. My name is Serhii Plokhy. I am in the history department, which is that way, and also the Ukrainian Research Institute, which is that way. So I walk here quite often back and forth.
The book that I am going to talk about, the title is Chernobyl Roulette: War in the Nuclear Disaster Zone. And it is a book on the current Russo-Ukranian war on the aspect that, in my opinion, doesn't get as much attention as it should, the nuclear weapons in general, and nuclear is an important part of thinking about this war.
Under the administration of President Biden, the main concern in terms of supplying Ukraine with weapons on time and the sort of weapons that Ukraine needed was Russian use of nuclear weapons. And there is a lot written about that, a lot of concern about that.
What gets really missed in that story is that the war in Ukraine-- in Ukraine went nuclear already on the very first day of the all-out Russian invasion, which was the 24th of February, 2022. On that day, the Russian Army, or more specifically, units of Army, but also the internal forces, took over the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the decommissioned nuclear power plant.
Within roughly one week, on March the 6th, the Russian Army attacked Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. It is still under the Russian control today. Six reactors that are there and were at that time working.
So my book focuses on the occupation of Chernobyl with one chapter dealing also with the developments at Zaporizhzhia. This is between late February and late March of 2022, when a successful Ukrainian counter-offensive pushed Russian forces from Kyiv to the Belarusian border and Ukraine reclaimed Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.
So what also happened was that the Ukrainian prosecutors, general prosecutor's office, the officials went there collecting information on war crimes. But there were also journalists, including the journalists working for Reckoning Project, supported at that time by USAID, who were there as well, extensively interviewing people who were under occupation.
I was lucky enough to get access to the journalistic side. I was meeting also with the people in general prosecutor's office, but it was very useful, but I didn't get any materials from them. But I got materials from-- on the journalistic side.
And then my biggest challenge was to find sources on the Russian side, which were mostly-- the Russians celebrated their takeover of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. There were TV crews that were going there. The two commanding officers that commanded the operation received the Golden Stars of the Hero of Russia. So they were on TV, interviewed, and so on and so forth for allegedly saving the world from another Chernobyl.
Those were my sources. And I looked at that story, first of all, trying to reconstruct what happened there. This is a history of present, a history of today. So you have to put in chronological order things that happened and not the other way around.
Another thing I looked at that as a historian of Ukraine, late Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine, and then I looked at that as a historian of nuclear power and nuclear weapons. So in terms of the story itself, there was a very interesting dynamic, in a sense, that the Ukrainian crew that worked there all together, around 300 people, including the national guard that was protecting the station.
The engineers, in particular, they were able to turn the tables on the occupiers. They were actually kidnapped, but they turned the kidnappers into kidnapped by using the knowledge about the nuclear power plant that was decommissioned.
Knew the Russians-- nobody else has actually knowledge about that because Chernobyl is so unique. So they forced them to follow particular rules. They couldn't enter certain areas without a permit issued by the Ukrainian-- by the Ukrainian foremen and people in charge. So that was interesting in its own right.
Then before that, I wrote-- a few years ago, I wrote a book on Chernobyl 1986. And it was striking to see to what degree what we know about the Soviet Union in '86 is very much presented in Russia of 2022, 2023.
So it's top down. It's complete disregard for human life and also health of your own people. Chernobyl was, in '86, tens-- tens of thousands of young military recruits were sent into the most dangerous places, used as biorobots. Nothing changed there in terms of the Russian Army. So they were digging trenches near the Red Forest, the most contaminated area in the zone and so on and so forth.
It was interesting to see what happened on the Ukrainian side because Ukrainians ended up to be in complete isolation. The front line moved behind them. And they had to self-- to self-organize, which was quite different. So it wasn't a top-down system.
They had to answer to a number of questions. And one of them, OK, whether they should stay, whether they should leave, whether they should fight or not. And both in Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia, the Ukrainian personnel comes from the company towns, which were the towns that were built in the late Soviet Union, were multi-ethnic in their composition.
A lot of people came from Russia, including graduating from the institutions of higher learning there. And it was interesting to see how they were answering those questions and decided that in this fight between much stronger Russia and much weaker Ukraine, the mostly Russian-speaking communities, they decided they created, in their own cities, the self-defense units. They were fighting. They were fighting in Zaporizhzhia and so on and so forth. So that was interesting, in a sense, how the Soviet society really went into different directions when you look at what happened at Chernobyl.
Now the big and most frightening discovery, for me, it was that the international community in general was not prepared for the takeover of nuclear power plants. There are no protocols. There is no legal base in which the International Atomic Energy Agency is supposed to act.
It is not clear what is loyalty and what is betrayal for the soldiers and personnel of the nuclear power plants, whether you defend your nuclear power plant, like it was in Zaporizhzhia, and there is a fight, or the loyalty is really to the world as a whole, and you surrender because otherwise, there can be a nuclear accident.
And my overall conclusion was that we have-- as a humanity, have no business for building new nuclear power plant-- and we are allegedly on the verge of the nuclear-- of the nuclear renaissance-- until we learn how to protect the ones that exist there.
There are 440 reactors. There are no protocols. There is no legal base. There is no institutional capacity to deal with the repetition of what happened in Chernobyl, in Zaporizhzhia. And then last year, Ukrainian troops were approaching the Russian nuclear power plant around Kursk.
So it's not an argument in this book, or in general what I write, pro or against nuclear, but it's argument in favor of the nuclear safety. And we have a really, really serious crisis in Ukraine. And no one said that this is the last war. So thank you for your attention.
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MALIKA ZEGHAL: Well, good afternoon. My name is Malika Zeghal. I'm a professor in the Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations department at Harvard. So in my book, The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Islam and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa, published at Princeton University Press in 2024, I provide a new framework to study the role of Islam in governance and debates about it in Muslim majority countries.
And I do so through a geographically and conceptually broad approach and through a longue durée analysis from the 19th to the 21st century in the Middle East and North Africa. The conventional approach to the role of Islam in governance is to focus on organized Islamist movements and their opposition to the authoritarian and supposedly secular states of the region.
My approach is broader, not confined to recent history or to Islamist movements. I study debates about the role of Islam in governance among a broad set of protagonists through constitutional history since its beginnings in the 1850s in Tunisia and in the 1920s in Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon.
I also quantify state religious expenditures in Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey since the late 19th century or early 20th century. And this allows me to illuminate one of the most important political divides in contemporary Middle Eastern societies, which opposes those whom I call the liberals and the conservatives on the issue of Islam in governance.
So let me highlight three main points here. My starting point is the following empirical regularity. In Middle Eastern Muslim majority countries, except for particularly religiously fractionalized Lebanon, and including Turkey, despite its constitutionalization of secularism, there has been a broad agreement across the political spectrum that the state, among other duties, should be the custodian of Islam, the preferred religion. This means that it should protect and support Islam as well as the Muslim community and Islamic institutions.
So this implies that there is no state neutrality toward religion and no separation between Islam and the state, although we sometimes find aspirations to separate religion and politics, which is different. These aspirations have often been misinterpreted to argue that Middle Eastern states are secular in the sense that they are neutral toward religion or that religion and state are separate, which is not the case at all.
What we typically have had, however, is a longstanding differentiation between political and religious authorities working in a partnership. By broad agreement on the issue of the role of Islam in governance, I mean that you rarely find political actors, who, in public spaces of deliberation, defend the idea of separation of Islam and the state or the idea of state neutrality. This means that both liberals and conservatives agree that the state should be the custodian of Islam as the preferred religion but disagree on how this principle should be carried out.
In the book, I explain the difference between conservatives and liberals. In a nutshell, conservatives want to expand the role of Islam in governance, and liberals seek to diminish it. Second, in the book, I historicize this political cleavage, and I find that the broad agreement about the necessity of the state custodianship of Islam as a preferred religion and disputes about its implementation are certainly not new. We find them in pre-modern and modern times and in a wide variety of contexts, such as pre-colonial, colonial, authoritarian, and democratic.
You will encounter them in the various chapters of the book, from early forms of constitutional governance in the 19th century through post-Arab Spring experiments in democracy. This goes against conventional approaches, which blame colonization, nationalism, and the nation state or socioeconomic dysfunctions for what is referred to as the supposedly recent politicization of Islam and for the so-called emergence of Islamism in the 20th century.
In fact, in the book, I reassess a well-entrenched received wisdom, the novelty of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers' ideology when their society was created in 1928. The gist of the Muslim Brothers Political Project, the expansion of the role of Islam in governance, in fact, long preceded them and was in continuity with the conservative tradition of political thought, notably expressed by conservative religious scholars.
And third, one of the most salient aspects of the state custodianship of Islam is the financial support that the state provides to Islamic worship, infrastructure, and personnel, Islamic education, and where they remain, Islamic courts, and Islamic forms of public assistance. And, of course, there are disputes about the extent of this support and tags of war between liberals and conservatives that lead to short-term fluctuations in the amount of these state-funded public religious provisions.
A striking feature is that in relation to GDP, the state financial support is not that large. In the countries I looked at, it has represented and continues to represent less than 1% of GDP, which is significantly smaller than what is spent on religion in the US today, about 2% of GDP.
Another significant difference is that in the countries I looked at, public religious provisions have mainly been and remain a state affair, whereas in the US civil society, it's the main contributor. Another striking feature is a two-pronged long-term trend. On the one hand, a decrease in state religious expenditures relative to other state expenditures. On the other hand, an increase in per capita exposure to public religious provisions, largely driven by the massive increase in per capita total state expenditures.
In the book, I explained this paradoxical long-term trend of relative secularization of the state and absolute expansion of per capita exposure to religion by parsing out mechanistic effects and choices made by policy makers.
So let me conclude by insisting on this notion of choice. Having a state preferred religion is a choice, which in the modern period, at least, has been made in full awareness of a wide array of alternative options for state religion relations.
It is, therefore, not ineluctable. Unlike what we often hear, it is not that the political in Muslim states is inherently or predominantly religious, that Islam is an inherently political religion, or that it is more political than other religions.
In fact, some Muslim majority polities do not have a state preferred religion, and almost half the rest of the world polities do, irrespective of their social, economic, and political rights condition. So thank you for listening, and I hope you will enjoy the book.
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