Wowers. I haven’t been keeping up with the PNM-based blogging that Dan and the folks at Coming Anarchy have been working on. Really excellent work. It fills me with intellectual envy, so I’m going to focus on complimenting and discussing these fine efforts instead of wallowing in jealousy that I’m not doing this.

First of all, Barnett’s Core-Gap (or Core-New Core-Gap) model has been aching for this sort of treatment. Whether reading through Foreign Policy’s Failed State Index or Transparency International’s Corruption Index, the global distribution of McDonald’s or GDP distribution, I keep thinking to myself “how does this correlate with PNM? In fact, hanging on my wall right now is a scrap of paper with the following scrawled in red pen:

Use Google Earth to create overlays for:
-’arc of instability’
-’Islam’s bloody borders’
-failed state index
-freedom index
-economic wealth index
-US military interventions
-UN peacekeepers?
-NATO deployments?
-Friedeman’s McDonald’s and Dell ‘theories’

And I know it isn’t just me. I have repeatedly found myself discussing with others about how the four flows of globalization explain the underlying security dyamics better than the other alternatives that get thrown out… but I haven’ t had the data to back up my tough talk with evidence.

So. Enough gushing. On to the substance.

Chirol takes the military measures to the next level by looking at German, Canadian, and British deployments around the globe. I was particularly surprised to see how widely Canadian troups have been deployed. This is great data and it would be wonderful to pull it together into a single visualization.

Then there is Dan’s piece de la resistance. Regarding the problem of measuring “Brutality,” I agree with TM Lutas’s concerns about the Brutality Index Dan used. A possible improvement would be annual war deaths as a proportion of total population. I am thinking here of an updated version of data Lawrence Keeley presented in War Before Civilization (Fig 6.1 on page 89, for those of you keeping score at home). Keeley’s point was to illustrate the proportionally increased rates of death due to warfare within “Primitive” societies, but I wonder whether we would find a similar pattern when comparing Core and Gap nations in the 21st Century. At the very least, this would address the problem of penalizing nations that participated in peacekeeping deployments for being “brutal.”

And on an utterly tangential note, I recall a Boston Globe article several years back that discussed some research a political scientist or anthropologist did that correlated likelihood that a country would engage in warfare (or civil war or generally increase its instances of violence) with the proportion of young (~15-25 or so) men to available land (I forget how they measured that). The implication being, of course, that young men who faced little opportunity for economic success and self-realization (reflected analgously by the lack of land to buy and establish a life for himself) were more likely to turn to violence to try to address this problem. To check the correlation of this type of measure with the Core-Gap model would be particularly interesting since Barnett so often discusses the demographic aspects of the voyage from Gap to Core (i.e. the voyage from young to old).

All of this bears much more thought. Again, an excellent job by Coming Anarchy and Tdaxp.