New Research Methods in Security Studies

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Security studies is undergoing a methodological renaissance. Recent work has focused on the improvement of longstanding techniques such as archival research (Darnton 2018), and the introduction of new research methods such as wargames as a tool for inference (Schneider 2017, Pauly 2018, Bartels 2019). Security studies comes with a specific set of challenges that make many general methods of political science inapplicable: experiments are often unethical or impossible to run, exogenous variation is difficult to find in the context of strategic interactions, and a (fortunately) limited set of cases of conflict make large-N work difficult. This panel concerns techniques to overcome these obstacles and enable better inference in security studies. Broadly, the panel asks what features of security studies differentiate it from other subfields for the purposes of inference, how to generate and analyze data specific to security studies, how to overcome small-N issues, how to conduct good inference in the context of repeated or strategic interactions, and how to isolate military and political factors to facilitate focused analysis

Two papers in the panel present advancements in how to use text data from national security archives, one of the main sources of data for security studies. Sizer introduces techniques for analyzing raw email data from inside foreign policy bureaucracies to understand decision-making during crises. Jost, Kertzer, Min, and Schub use supervised machine learning techniques to understand decision-making in a large corpus of US National Security Council archives. Bartels' paper introduces techniques for combining wargames with other sources of data in multi-method research projects. Finally, campaign analysis, a method for estimating the outcomes of military operations under specified conditions, has been widely used in security studies but has not yet been formalized as a method. Tecott and Halterman remedy this, providing a definition and guidance for using campaign analysis and introducing methodological innovations for quantitatively handling uncertainty and building models generalizable across scenarios.

Sub Unit

• Division 8: Political Methodology

Individual Presentations

• Campaign Analysis: Demystifying the Method - Rachel Tecott, U.S. Naval War College; Andrew Halterman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Multi-method Wargaming for International Relations Research - Elizabeth Bartels, RAND Corporation

• Causes for Concern: Explaining Priorities in the U.S. National Security Council - Tyler C. Jost, Brown University; Joshua D. Kertzer, Harvard University; Eric Min, UCLA; Robert Schub, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

• Emails as Archive Material for Microhistories of US National Security Decisions - Lydia Sizer, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University

Chair

• Marika Landau-Wells University of California, Berkeley

Discussants

• Erik Lin-Greenberg Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Asfandyar Ali Mir Stanford University