During his visit to the Philippines in December 1962, Guerrero discussed with de la Costa a project on nineteenth century Philippines and along with it was the objective of recovering the Burgos trial records. In London before he left for Madrid, he saw the Spanish ambassador, the Marquess de Santa Cruz, who suggested to him to get in touch with key Spanish officials. In the first quarter of 1963, he inquired about the Burgos trial records and communicated to the Army Ministry but they were evasive.

Once the records were available to the public, the rewriting of Philippine history, at least from 1872 onwards, would be logical. The trial of Burgos was still shrouded in mystery for almost a century because no Filipino or even Spanish historians had accessed the trial records. Gaining access to these procesos would be boon to their project. Towards this end, he reread Montero y Vidal's Historia General de Filipinas, which took him to the movement of Apolinario de la Cruz and recognized its Katipunan resemblance, particularly its restriction to Tagalogs, making him conclude that Filipino nationalism was based on racial resentments. Rereading the same, he realized almost on the eve of the Philippine Revolution, that the Spanish conquest never succeeded in the mountainous north and in the southern islands. On Montero y Vidal's account, he said it “reads just as badly as Zaide et al. sometimes; all those decrees — but his footnotes are often amusing and some of his accounts of historical events most readable.” After Montero y Vidal, he wanted to read Sinibaldo de Mas’ Informe sobre el estado de las Islas Filipinas en 1842, a copy of which he was looking for, but he had instead Martinez de Zuñiga's Estadismo de las Filipinas. For the Spanish background of nineteenth century Philippines, he enjoyed La Política y Los Políticos en el Reinado de Carlos III, leading him to two other books.

In all these readings, he began to question the beginning of the nineteenth century in the Philippines:

The study of the societies of Asia and the Pacific through Western methods of the humanities and social sciences has always been driven by the dynamics of wealth and power. The European study of Asian and Pacific societies and cultures was central to the colonial enterprise; originally as a fascination with other wealthy and powerful societies, then as part of a Western ideological hegemony determined to demonstrate that the societies of Asia and the Pacific were in decline, in contrast to the Europeans’ own ascendancy (Anderson 1991, 163–64). The study of proud pasts and contemporary societies soon became part of dozens of independence movements across Asia and the Pacific, a vital ingredient of the intellectual emancipation of colonized peoples (Chatterjee 1993). With independence came a Cold War, a desperate zero-sum struggle between capitalism and communism that mandated the need in the rival camps to understand the particular character of the newly independent governments and the societies they ruled in Asia and the Pacific. “Area Studies”, the deep research of Asian and Pacific societies, grounded in extensive fieldwork and advanced proficiency in vernacular languages, was born. Across the Western world, Asia and the Pacific were divided into regions and studied in their own departments. In establishing a national university in 1946, the Australian government mandated that one of four areas of global excellence the new university had to achieve was in Pacific studies (which at the time was intended to include Asian studies) — precisely because of the new and unknown world of international relations that was to be ushered in by the independence of states to Australia's north and east.

The rapid economic ascent of Northeast and then Southeast Asian economies led to renewed attention to Asian societies. Debates arose over the causes of the Asian economic miracle: was it a question of culture, or institutions, or the peculiar legacy of war and colonialism (World Bank 1993; Johnson 1982; Amsden 2001)? These debates drew regional thinkers into the battle lines, as some advocated the catalytic role of distinctive Asian “values” in the stability and success of a lengthening chain of Asian economic success stories (Barr 2005). Others countered that there was in fact nothing distinctive about Asia's economic success; the stunning growth rates were a consequence of “perspiration” (meaning large infusions of investment and low-cost labour) rather than “inspiration” (meaning superior cultural values or institutional design) (Krugman 1994).

Ours is a hyper-vigilant age. Our journey through life is cushioned and buffeted by a constant stream of warnings, prohibitions and exhortations intended to make us safer. Every accident, attack, fatal disease, or tragedy is followed by a flurry of post-mortems about what went wrong and recommendations about what should be done to make sure such an event cannot happen again or at least will be much more unlikely. We refuse to be comforted by the statistics that tell us we are, on average, leading longer, healthier lives, that crime and accident rates are falling, or that extremist attacks remain very rare, and fewer and fewer of our fellow citizens can remember the last time our countries were involved in a prolonged fight to the death between powerful countries. Meanwhile, our governments believe their survival depends on reassuring us that they are doing everything they can to ensure our individual, community, and national security. And a whole ecology of research institutions — university centres, think tanks, consultants, intelligence agencies — thrive on the endless demand by governments and their citizens for reassuring research into the latest causes of their anxieties.

It is no coincidence that our hyper-vigilant age is also an age of hyper-research and hyper-information. Our society has more capacity to investigate itself and its preoccupations, and to share the results of those investigations, than ever before. Each advance in our safety and well-being yields to new anxieties and new subjects for research and risk reduction. Research into security is a major industry, an academic-policy complex that has taken its place alongside the military-industrial complex. The symbiotic relationship between security policy and security research has been much noted and discussed, though it would seem with little impact on either the research or the policymaking (Herman and O'Sullivan 1989). It is worth looking at this relationship anew, and from a different angle, to consider how security policy shapes security research and vice versa, and to make a couple of comparisons: how the research-policy nexus in the security realm compares to the research-policy nexus in the prosperity realm, and how these mutual relationships between research and policy differ from country to country. On the basis of these two brief comparative excursions, I conclude by suggesting a new, programmatic and potentially more productive relationship between research and policy in the security realm.

One of the most well-used quotes from Sun Tzu states that “if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.” Thucydides — who like Sun Tzu is a member of the “classical cannon” of strategic studies from the fifth century BCE — argued, in a not too dissimilar vein, that scrutinizing the political and cultural differences of the ancient Greek city states was critical in understanding their motivations and behaviour during the Peloponnesian War. For both writers, appreciating the strategic culture of the protagonists is essential to understanding war, and crucial in the formulation of strategy.

Shifting forward a mere 2,300 years to the 1960s in Southeast Asia, the concept of understanding thy enemy and knowing thyself had not changed. A lack of understanding of the region, and especially its culture and political make-up, was to prove fatal to the efforts of the United States to prop up successive South Vietnamese governments in the face of a communist led insurgency. Robert McNamara, U.S. Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, noted that in accounting for the U.S. defeat in South Vietnam, one of the key reasons was that “we [the United States] viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience … we totally misjudged the political forces within the country … our misjudgements of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders” (McNamara 1995, p. 322). A decade later, Lawrence Sondhaus applied McNamara's analysis of the failings of U.S. policy in South Vietnam to the miscalculations and misjudgements evident in the U.S. invasion of Iraq: an observation that looks increasingly prophetic (Sondhaus 2006, p. 130).

What these insights from the ancient world and modern times reinforce is the continual failure of neorealist and traditional rationalistmaterialist approaches to explain strategic behaviour. As Rashed Uz Zaman has noted, the need for understanding ourselves, our potential adversaries, our allies, and the world we live in has not changed over time (Uz Zaman 2009, p. 84).

As in Emily Brontë's dreams, war has flowed through Asia in the past century like wine through water. Be they interstate conflicts, intercommunal violence, social revolutions, or struggles for sovereignty, wars have transformed political structures, changed territorial boundaries, and reshaped the regional order. In particular, World War II, which strides the twentieth century like some malignant colossus, had a profound impact on the region. Estimates of its human cost vary, but it probably caused at least twenty-three million deaths in the Asia-Pacific (Wikipedia 2015a).2 Politically, it shattered the hold of the European powers on their colonial subjects, triggered the wave of post-war decolonization, and established the bipolar balance which dominated international and regional relations for almost fifty years.

In a less tangible but equally important sense, World War II and other violent conflicts transformed the cultural imaginations of the peoples and societies of the region. Not only did the defeat of the European powers in 1941–42 make a world beyond imperialism imaginable, but in recent decades, the memories of past wars have come to play a central role in the domestic politics and interstate relations of the region. Asia is not alone in this. The memory “boom” which has swept the globe since the 1970s or 1980s has seen a turn to the past in many countries. In both established and emerging states, war memory has become “a key element in the symbolic repertoire available to the nation-state for binding its citizens into a collective national identity” (Ashplant, Dawson, and Roper 2000, p. 7). Across the globe also, the politics of war memory have been used by various substate agents to justify their claims to greater recognition or compensation for past grievances and injustices.

NEW KNOWLEDGE

Creating new knowledge — the task at the heart of research practice — is almost never straightforward. Whether you are in a Hmong village in northern Thailand, a government office in Canberra, a dusty archive in Beijing, or a banquet hall in Singapore, there is no single, or simple, way that research in Asia-Pacific affairs should be done. For some researchers, their career is spent down in the dirt, where muddy boots may be symbolic of long commitments. Others spend their time among sharply-dressed officials and business people — the other end of the continuum. Lack of unanimity about preferred research tactics and techniques inspires us to consider the many different ways that researchers can successfully blend disciplinary, thematic, and geographical orientations to support their analysis about how the world works and why. In fact, it is this wide variety of research practice that helps to sharpen our understanding of politics at the local, national, regional, and global levels. Good research begins with a puzzle about how things happen. In this chapter, we reflect on the different practices of solving these research puzzles, and consider the conceptual, ethical, and practical challenges researchers face in their quest to understand some of the biggest questions in social, political, and economic life.

The practical challenges of research tend not to receive much everyday attention beyond methodology classes, which often narrowly emphasize mechanics rather than cultures.

This is partly the result of professional hesitation about revealing some of the many difficulties involved in effective and sustained research practice. Researchers often enjoy a life of flexibility in terms of research topic and approach, with a variety of intellectual entanglements that can be the envy of those in many other twenty-first century jobs. Researchers also face the perpetual struggle for positions, funding, and priority in academic political economies that can prove inhospitable, even for the best prepared. Entire subcultures of academic reflection are devoted to the gripes and grievances of those who imagine that a gilded age has recently vanished: much of this material is nowadays found online, a global common room.

INTRODUCTION

War is a complex and deeply social process that reaches lives far beyond soldiers on the battlefield. The first department of international relations was founded in Aberystwyth in 1919 following the horrors of the First World War, and as a discipline, it has always been captivated by the central problem of preventing the devastation of war on human populations, even if scholars disagree on how this can be achieved. Although war is an enduring feature of global politics, the character of war itself has changed significantly over the past century (Strachan and Scheipers 2011). We are fortunate not to have experienced another major world war despite the creation of 142 new nation states since 1945, yet war itself has become much more fragmented and internalized within this period. The rapid changes in the mode and characteristics of today's conflicts challenge the way that scholars consider their methodological approaches to studying the impact of armed conflict on societies.

This chapter focuses on methodological considerations for researching populations impacted by armed conflict in the Asia-Pacific, a region that experienced major conflicts in the Cold War period, has the potential for major interstate conflicts, and continues to be confronted by a range of diverse internal conflicts that threaten the security of domestic populations. The starting point for thinking about methodological approaches here is to consider the nature of the field that is being researched — what are the historical, social, and political characteristics of the conflict settings? How are conflict-affected populations situated within this overarching field? What are the implications of the way that the field is conceptualized for advocating for the agency, protection, and human rights of the affected populations?

This chapter is therefore concerned with two sets of developments in international politics and academic practice that are important for considering approaches to research on the humanitarian impact of armed conflict. The first set of developments is in global politics where we find, on the one hand, the strengthening of international norms and rules to regulate armed conflict that are increasingly geared towards the protection of individuals in war. On the other hand, the fragmentation and internalization of armed violence within the state creates ambiguity in the international legal and regulatory space, and challenges international efforts to protect populations affected by conflict.

INTRODUCTION

Statistical research methods are already very big in many of the social sciences. For decades, it has been well-nigh impossible to get an academic appointment in economics without a thorough grounding in quantitative research. The same is increasingly becoming true in political science (at least in the United States), psychology and to a lesser degree sociology. Even in the humanities, the quants are making inroads — economic history, for instance, increasingly resembles economics more than it does other subfields of history, and some have even sought to apply quantitative analytic tools to the analysis of literature. Nor is this phenomenon confined to the ivory tower. With the exponential growth of marketing opportunities represented by new data-rich companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Amazon, “data scientist” is, according to the Harvard Business Review, the “sexiest job of the 21st century” (Davenport and Patil 2012). Similarly, the mathematical requirements of financial engineering are becoming so intense that Wall Street, the City of London, and other finance houses are raiding not only economics but also mathematics and physics PhD programmes in order to find analysts with the requisite skills (Lewis 2015).

Statistical and other quantitative methods are powerful tools in the hands of researchers, policymakers, and the public, when used correctly. The first part of this chapter will outline why researchers use quantitative methods in the social sciences. Human brains, even expert human brains, can be horribly wrong in extrapolating general trends from small numbers of events. Where there are multiple cases at hand of a phenomenon in which we are interested, statistics therefore allows us to see the general trend better than anything else. But quantitative methods can be misused. When they are misused, this can be dangerous because a conclusion couched in terms of numbers and endowed with the prestige of science often commands more confidence than it warrants. Costly errors can result, as the 2008 Global Financial Crisis shows us. Good quantitative researchers are aware of such pitfalls, however, and make strenuous efforts to avoid them. In the second part of this chapter, therefore, I will outline some cautions about the application of quantitative research to the social sciences.

MILITARY ORDER AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

The study of international relations today faces a formidable methodological problem: how to understand the role of power in relations between powerful states, and especially in the creation, maintenance, and decline of the international orders which frame those relations within groups or systems of states from time to time. The problem extends to explaining the role of power in general, but it is most acute in relation to power in its starkest form — military power. That is the focus of this chapter. It explores the role of military power in shaping orders in systems of states.

This is hardly a new question. Military power has been central to the conduct and study of international relations since states and state systems first emerged. But today it is poorly understood and its influence on current developments is generally underestimated, especially perhaps by analysts and decision makers in the West. This has big implications for our understanding of the choices that countries of the West now face, and of the risks they may confront at a time when, it is now generally accepted, we face a significant shift — or set of shifts — in international order. These choices and risks bear upon Australia as much as on any Western country, and perhaps more than on most. It therefore seems important, for very practical reasons, to make sure we refresh our understanding of the role of force in shaping international orders.

This chapter suggests a simple way to see this issue: an international order in a system of states is framed — its boundaries are defined — primarily or ultimately by what the great powers within the system are willing to go to war with one another over. Or, to be a little more precise, an order is framed by what the great powers can convince one another they are willing to go to war with one other over. One obvious example is the bipolar global order of the Cold War era, which was framed by the clear conviction on each side of the other's willingness to go to war to defend their established spheres of influence in the key European and Northeast Asian theatres.

INTRODUCTION

Is aerial bombardment an effective counter-insurgency tactic? Do immigrants depress local wages? Does the presence of natural resources harm democratic consolidation? Answering questions such as these requires the uncovering of general patterns of cause and effect. Social scientists have been attempting to put this search for causal inference on a sure philosophical and methodological footing at least since Émile Durkheim's pioneering research on suicide in the nineteenth century, but progress has been slow, coming in fits and starts. Even the diffusion of computing technology and the modelling revolution it brought about did not solve the problem. However, the last decade or so has seen one of the most exciting developments in the history of causal inference in the social sciences for generations.

The design-based revolution has transformed how social scientists go about their research and the kinds of causal inferences they can now draw from it. Field experiments and natural experiments are at the foundation of design-based inference. A growing body of scholarship outlining the principles, techniques, and promise of this kind of research already exists, but most of it has been aimed at an audience already well versed in comparative analysis and statistical methods (Gerber and Green 2012; Morgan and Winship 2015; Angrist and Pischke 2015; Imbens and Rubin 2015). The logic of design-based inference is actually very intuitive, despite its somewhat daunting technical language. In this chapter, I want to introduce the design-based approach to a non-specialist audience, primarily those who use qualitative rather than quantitative methods.

I first introduce the two main models of causal inference common to comparative politics, the sufficient-component-cause (SSC) model and the counterfactual model. Second, I outline the problem of confounding in traditional qualitative and quantitative methods in the social sciences. Third, I detail the experimental method in its basic form and present some examples of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in Asia. Fourth, I discuss extensions to the experimental model in the form of natural experiments and again illustrate the method with some examples from Asia. Finally, I discuss the limitations of the design-based revolution and what needs to be addressed going forward.

This is a good time to study Asia's international security setting. The biodiversity is astonishing. Scholars and analysts have become accustomed to what were once termed “new” security threats being core business. In the past, considerable energy and effort was spent trying simply to make the case that problems like transnational crime or the spread of infectious diseases warranted the distinctive analytic and policy lens of “security”. Today, the range of issues in the region that present clear, immediate, and significant challenges to the well-being, indeed existence, of states and peoples is huge. Equally, the old fashioned security challenges which many had thought we had left behind — rivalry between states over territory, resources, and influence — have become recharged. Flying in the face of the complacent platitudes of liberally-minded globalization enthusiasts, the growth, wealth, and interdependence of Asia's states and societies has fuelled tensions, not caused a binding of interests or fostering of a sense of common cause.

But it is not just the range of security issues — both conventional and non-traditional — it is the sense of change and the rate with which such changes are occurring which makes the field so engaging and challenging. There is a palpable sense that the current period is experiencing a high level of “plasticity” (Mahbubani 2008). The mix of moderate foreign policies and a stable military balance, that kept the traditional security concerns from centre stage for over forty years, is changing. Moreover, the global financial crisis of 2007–8 and its recessionary aftermath has accelerated the sense of transformation. The structures which gave confidence in the past are eroding, future trajectories are uncertain, and state goals and ambitions similarly unclear. Therefore, it is a good time to study Asia's security landscape.

One of the notable features of the Asian security literature, both scholarly and policy-focused, is the absence of a shared vocabulary about that with which we are trying to grapple. Perhaps more precisely, there is no clear intellectual consensus about the meaning of central concepts and ideas.