Margaret Peters 01:44

Hello everyone, and welcome to today's book talk. Today we've got Erin Lin, who's an associate professor of political science from The Ohio State University. Professor Lin's work is super interesting, as you'll find out more today, if you have not already looked at the book. She's really interested in how war affects economic development, agriculture, genocide, the legacy of war, but really focusing on a topic that I think we haven't really focused on much in international relations literature, of what happens after the war, and what happens with everything that's still on the ground and still unexploded. Her book "When the Bombs Stopped", addresses what happens when these undetonated bombs from the Vietnam War still affect rural communities. She was also, just two months ago, awarded the prestigious Fulbright Hays Faculty Research Abroad Award, and she's going to go to Cambodia for four months to look at how Cambodians and civilians, during the Vietnam War, to really understand what their experiences were after war. We're very excited to have her here, and as a reminder, if you have questions, put them in the Q and A. Professor Lin, take it away.

Erin Lin 03:12

All right. Great. Thanks, Maggie. All right. Well, thank you all for coming. It's really an honor to be able to present my research in front of a new set of faces. Today, I'm going to talk and really give you a brush clearing sense of what's in my book. The book talks about the long term impact of bombing and across these three main empirical chapters, I grapple with the economic implications, the social consequences, as well as the political ones. Now today, I won't be going into a tremendous amount of depth into any one of them, but I anticipate an eagerly await questions on any of the chapters we'll be talking about as well as the theories involved. Okay, so this is the title of the book, "When the Bombs Stopped the Legacy of War in Rural Cambodia," and in it, the book really has as much detail about bombing as it does about Cambodian life. On the bomb side, I talk about how bombing technology has advanced in the past half century. It's become more lethal, even though, not always, more precise. I also write about the policy makers and the political scientists who saw the advantages of these bombing technologies. And there's some history of science in there as well, because I talk about the R and D failures of our bombs, as well as the technologies that we have developed to clear and remove leftover undetonated bombs. On the other side of it, it's also very much a book about rural Cambodia. I describe what it's like to grow rice, to live in these kamai farmhouses that are on stilts above the rice paddies, and what the gossip is around town. So the rumors going around, the hidden transcripts that reveal these problems between the commercial landowners [Speaking Khmer], the subsistence farmers [Speaking Khmer]. Now, the theory that I'm presenting in the book, like in a nutshell, it's about how under development arises. It's not from the normal explanations, not from lack of resources or bad geography or bad economic policy or of a lack of technological capacity, but it's from a war that ended a half century ago, from weapons that were intended to send this message of strength, a message that ideally would end the war earlier. But it's these weapons that ultimately fail to detonate at high rates, and these are the weapons that explain these localized patterns of poverty and food insecurity. I will say that the goal isn't to explain patterns of US bombing, but instead, I'll show you how bombing led to different patterns of development across Cambodia, and I'll also show later that it cannot be easily reversed. So that's the broad idea. This picture on the title slide harkens back to the original title of the book "Dangerous Ground". It was changed partially because the reviewer says that that sounds just like a bad Liam Neeson movie. But what you see in the picture is that there is a blue 42 cluster bomb. It's actually the round object to the right of the wooden post, and then below that, you see a sign that in kamai, it says, "Be careful there's an explosive that has not yet exploded". All right, so I'll give you a quick overview of the book, first in terms of the setting. The title is not wrong, this is a book about Cambodia that's a small country in Southeast Asia that's never been a big deal in political science, but I think that's exactly why it's important. It's a country that's very much been impacted by the US, by our foreign policy during the Vietnam War. Just brief history primer, we had these us aerial attacks during the Vietnam war over Cambodia, known as the US Secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos, and this was part of our efforts to break up the communist supply lines that ran from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia to South Vietnam. Now it's the impact of these bombings that I argue that we've really forgotten about, and in some ways, I think Americans have never comprehensively examined our role really in this like systematic exploration of the statistical military record paired with this deeper understanding of what life has become for people on the ground. The puzzle of the book originated from a lot of this field work that I did during graduate schoo. The puzzle is that in Cambodian agriculture, you see these uneven patterns of development and productivity. Oddly, some of the most fertile parts of land of Cambodia, that are farmed, are also the least productive, even though they have a lot of other things going for them. They're near roads, they're very accessible, and they have smart, hard working farmers who own and work the land, yet they're still farming at a minimal level of productivity. So the question is, why? Now my approach really relies on examining the impacts of bombing from a bottom up perspective, so in that way, it's a very anthropological book. Two out of the three main chapters are built on ethnographic observation, and that's actually a lot of what's potentially new here and worth arguing about. To me, this is part of an effort to rethink historical legacies and the legacies of war literature, so that we can kind of get outside our usual methodological framework. It's a very econometric one, where you take spatial data of a historical event, you merge it with contemporary outcomes that are quite localized, and you typically take a plausible guess as the mechanisms which characterizes a lot of HPE, historical Political Economy Research since Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson. That's not really a criticism, their work has launched ships, including my own, like HAPS and world politics articles. But I think there's a different way that we can start thinking about HPE, and we can think about ways to turn to the field, to ground truth alot of these findings. Beyond just finding these plausible pieces of evidence of the mechanism, but also adding nuance to our characterizations of individuals, we can find these surprising consequences that we might not have found behind a laptop, and narrate our findings to a larger audience, more effectively and powerfully. So that's my little soapbox where I'm going to call for increased attention to, invest in language, visiting areas often, and developing these long term relationships, really committing to area studies. All right, then the argument. The argument here, in some ways, is simple. It's that bombs fail to go off when they hit soft ground. The unexploded ordinance left behind leaves behind the sphere of fear that limits productivity, amplifies ethnic tensions, and ironically, leaves farmers protected from the country's economic elite who have been grabbing land for commercial plantations. I will say you really have to read the book to appreciate the heterogeneity of the individuals impacted and the variety of ways that the consequences of war will kind of spill out from it. But I hope by the end of the presentation, you'll want to buy the book, get it from the library, or at the very least, cite it. All right,well, I'll do a quick kind of overview of each chapter. Chapter one starts with the theory, where exactly it fits, what's new, what's different, have I read something like this before? Because there is a legacies of war literature that focuses on the developmental effects of bombing. This is mostly in development economics - you have at Columbia two economists, Don Davis and Weinstein, and they examine Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bombing, and they show how both cities experience this population boom that reinvigorated the depleted workforce and brought back those economies to life. Economists from the Netherlands applied a similar approach to analyze the impact of bombing on post war Germany, and they reached similar conclusions. Bombing only left behind this temporary impact on urban growth, and then these urban economies quickly rebounded. Of course, when you think about these two particular cases. These could be very specific to the story of post World War Two economic recovery, right? So you have industrialized nations, the bombs were largely targeted on urban areas, and you also have military historians like Tammy Biddle argue that these bombs were relatively imprecise and they weren't actually that good at destroying factories. So there's this question of, what can that particular time tell us about, say, Southeast Asian development after the Vietnam War and its bombings? Now, it turns out that for the past 10 years, the scholarly narrative around post-war Southeast Asia has actually followed this same trajectory, the same story. It's been led by economists from Berkeley, Ted Miguel and Gerard Roland, and they find that bombings have no long run impact on Vietnam's district level, population density, poverty, rate, consumption, literacy, and access to public goods. They do use like causal inference and more granular data, but the argument is still the same. It's due to capital's ability to regenerate and redistribute after war. This is kind of neoclassical growth theory in economics. Now, this theory gets you somewhat close, but it doesn't get quite as far as the claim that I'm making to get you to explain some of these patterns in Cambodia, because in Cambodia, you see some aspects of the story, you see this booming population, like now, it's three times larger than it was in 1960, you have more and more agricultural capital entering the country. So since 2004 the number of rice mills have doubled, the water pumps have doubled, the number of tractors have tripled, rice threshers have tripled, and the number of power tillers have increased eightfold. And thanks to development programming from like USAID, the World Bank, and the Cambodian Ministry of Agriculture, this capital is being distributed throughout the provinces. But my argument here is that we need to pay closer attention to local geography, in particular where a bomb's trigger fuse usually will fail to go off upon impact. Those are the areas that leave behind these large quantities of unexploded ordinance, and it turns out that these impact feases fail to go off when they hit soft ground cover. So in Southeast Asia, that means the lush, verdant rice paddies that grow rice all year long. My respondents reveal this reversal of fortune that takes place on Cambodia's most fertile land. So for an array of people from like the village chiefs the Highland tribes or the urban migrants from Phnom Penh to soldiers who had fled the Khmer Rouge, among all of these different types of people, you see a sphere of fear hang over their communities, ultimately leading economic growth just all out. So the like tagline for this section is that unexploded ordinance essentially removes the fertility advantage of high fertility land. Now this seems intuitive, but the hard part is actually like tracking down the respondents to get them to, like, open up about themselves and talk about their lives, and it's hard to describe people. So this is where we move from political science to political ethnography, and this is what happens in chapter two. So you meet key respondents like Mata Ray Lang, and you learn what life is like from the perspective of the bond. From these interviews, you know, I'll pull out a couple of things that we learned. So first, farmers will actually adapt their farming behavior when they're living around unexploded ordinance, and this results in very cautious farming, so people will farm more with hand tools rather than machines. For example, you'll use like a machete to hand harvest rice rather than a harvester. They also tend to work more slowly to keep an eye out for unexploded ordinance, and they work minimal amounts of land, typically the land that is like right next to their house. I argue that these short term adjustments actually accumulate in the long term and lead to underproduction and poverty in the long term. And so it's this idea that like these effects are kind of building up over a long period of time, they're not emerging suddenly, and history matters. And also like makes you kind of question this idea that peace is a thing that happens at the end of war, which is something that you might think if you study like war length or war termination. In reality, a lot of these people might be living in technically a post conflict area, but there still is this real fear for your life from these ancient military weapons, and that fear exists on a daily basis. So I also quantitatively test this theory. I use a historical data set of US Air Force sorties flown over Cambodia from 1965 to 1973. This is their geocoded payload drops in terms and there's also data on the tonnage of each payload drops as well the types of bombs that come out. I use Ministry of Agricultural Soil Charts and also Ministry of Interior's Contemporary Household Survey that measures things like household assets and income, in addition to the Cambodian Agricultural Census - so that gives you information of the geo reference plot of each land, the productive crop productivity, the land usage, all but also alternative forms of land usage. So the types of animals that are being reared, in terms of numbers of poultry, cows, pigs, the amount of fish being harvested in fish ponds, and also the amount of family out migration. I also took pains to collect pre treatment measures of population density, so the proportion of village boundaries that contain agricultural fields are also another measure that I code, as well as transit areas, so pre bombing roads and river ways. And this design really relies on a comparison. So first the comparison between bombed high fertility plots and non bombed high fertility plots. So what you see is the marginal effect of bombing on the high fertility plots on the right hand side of each plot, and then also on the comparison between bombed low fertility plots versus non bombed low fertility plots. So this could give you both a measure of what the effect of like bombing is across low and high fertility soils. But also remember, the difference between low fertility soils and high fertility soils is that on low fertility soils, you typically have the bombs all explode upon impact, so there's going to be no residual unexploded ordinance left, compared to the high fertility plots, where those once they've been bombed, they're still high risk for unexploded ordinance. And that's why I find that it's on those specific plots that you actually find a two thirds drop in rice production and a 40% reduction in income compared to the unbound high fertility controls. And the point that I want to make here is that, to me, these qualitative and quantitative methods really work in tandem, where the statistical models really indicates how the experience is highlighted at the beginning of the chapter from the ethnographic observation interviews, they really index these broader inequities in Cambodian society. The chapter following that considers the social implications of living with unexploded ordinance. I visit one multi-ethnic commune called havoc, and I find that my respondents descriptions of themselves really move beyond the classic tropes of war victims, so you don't have trauma just like freezing one's imagination and forcing these repetitive risk averse behaviors. Instead, you see trauma influencing this cultural script where there's this new set of like moral rights and wrongs through this lens of leftover bombs, in other words, like they're creating these new codes of conduct, like the best ways to live among unexploded ordinance, but it's based on these different cultural conceptions of violence and one's ability to control it. So in this particular commune, there is an indigenous minority, the [Speaking Khmer], and then the ethnic majority group, the Khmer. And you see the Khmer neighbors use gossip and rumors of the temp one behaving irresponsibly, of like tossing bombs to one another, of like name calling. [Speaking Khmer] and is, like, uneducated and not smart, and this, reinforces stereotypes, but it's also serves as this device to, warn the Khmer children about the hidden dangers of unexploded ordinance. So now you've just heard about, the two main empirical chapters about how these leftover bombs are bad, and they also enhance like ethnic stereotypes. I think it's a matter of temperate like those of us with more of a progressive bent might think we then have, like, an obligation to remove these faulty bombs. The first thing I'll say about the process of removing unexploded ordinance is that you know, the technologies have improved in how we kind of identify and detect bombs from false positives, like scrap metal, but the removal process, of physically getting the bomb out is still the same. So you have, like one deminer with some type of magnetic metal detector, or a dog trained to sniff out explosives and they sweep a suspected area when there's a particularly spot, like a spot that's noted, then a second deminer will, get on the ground and generally, dig the area to find the buried object in order to expose and identify it. If it is identified as a bomb, then the team will either try to diffuse it, but more likely, they'll just plant a charge on top of it so it can be blown up from a distance. When you compare demining now, as it was done about 30 or 40 years ago, the main difference is our detectors. The detectors are more accurate now. Now we use these dual sensor detectors called large loops. They emit these electromagnetic induction with ground penetrating radar. So what's good is that these are relatively small, low powered radar units that can emit back these signals that reflect these 3d images of either the plastic or the metal items that are hidden in the soil. And that's actually what you see in this picture, where you have a deminer, a one person team pushing one of these large leaps across the ground.

Unknown Speaker 22:05

So bomb removal almost seems like this intuitive, clear and obvious solution, because you have this one intervention and it can solve potentially, these multiple problems, like saving lives, making work safer, lifting these farmers out of poverty. And there's a very attractive, honestly, tech based parsimony to that. It's also attractive and parsimonious, because it's the like, the idea that the same intervention and multi like, you can use that in multiple contexts in the same ways. So, like, you have D minors around the world training with the same manuals using similar techniques and equipment. Now the argument I make in this chapter is that these seemingly simple, technocratic solutions are rarely simple in practice or in reality, and policies that seem reasonable in theory can actually fail and practice, especially if it ignores politics. This begs the question , What are the politics of Cambodia? And it is authoritarian. There's no real opposition party. It's ruled by a kleptocratic elite right now, run by Hun Manet, and there's a very weak judiciary that's influenced by political elites. So I find that mine removal programs, bomb removal programs, actually recalibrate the environmental milieus in rural Cambodia, because on the one hand, you have demining improving like personal safety and briefly improving economic prospects. On the other hand, the same endowments that make land economically attractive also make it geopolitically vulnerable. So what I find from the ethnography is that there's a bunch of people living these post mined, post cleared farms that are functioning in limbo, where they're competing against these cronies of the state who want to appropriate their land for commercial development. In Ratanakiri Province, where I do the majority of my field work, I see that demining efforts paired with the economic growth of the area, has pushed up the value of land, so it makes land speculation one of the most lucrative businesses in the area. My respondents show that local authorities will actually abet political elites in transferring land ownership out of the hands of villagers, and then they reclaim the land under the pretext of using it for to provide public goods, in This case, commercial development, providing more jobs for people. Then it turns out that higher level political officials at the province level will use these legal loopholes in the Cambodia 2001 land law to designate that the seized land is their own private property. And so there's this irony in it, because as much as The International Humanitarian Demining Community, as much as we might try to fix our mistakes in removing bombs that were left behind, we can actually leave the people that we are trying to help, worse off. That takes us to the conclusion, and I can't get to all of it right now, just because I'm a little over time, but I will go to one thing, which is like, what exactly is the lesson here? Because I think these findings raise these really important questions for students of like, civic engagement in American politics. I think we really need to ruminate about what this means in terms of the obligations of the American citizen, because in many ways, like the costs of our personal human security, like the actions that we take in pursuit of our national security, has these unforeseen consequences, and in this case, has taken away the liberties of Cambodian farmers. My answer is that the American political community should connect more to the experience of victims of American military violence, because I think only by like informing ourselves and caring about others and being curious about the world outside of ourselves, can we really start to feel the true weight of our military actions. And I think this can start with us, like in political science. I remember in graduate school, like much of what I was learning, the IR literature about bombing, it focused more on these traditional outcome variables like global balance of power, military outcomes, likelihood of winning war, and how this impacts things like deterrence, coercion and bargaining, bargaining. Now my argument and the conclusion is that these are actually really top down perspectives and our usual interpretations of bombings effects and security studies that really is more from the perspective of the global power. You know, Tom Shelley and arms and influence, one of his arguments in the introduction is that, like you know, we have this responsibility to make war shorter with these improved weapons and technologies. I don't think that's a very satisfactory explanation, though, for the impacts of war, and I'm very inspired by this like rising subset of other IR scholars who study the human costs of war, like Netta Crawford, Nisha Faisal, that work to quantify and document the casualty rates on both sides. And I hope that this book adds a little bit of a different element to that how, knowing area studies, doing your field work, you can more vividly describe bombing from the perspective of the victims. And that will be helpful overall, not just to us in academia, but hopefully the larger US constituency as well. I have, normally, other things to talk about too in the conclusion in terms of applications, of the effects of unexploded ordinance, and the way that we use cluster munitions, still to this day in war, since the Vietnam War. But I will keep that for the Q and A, since I know I'm a bit over time. So thank you so much for your attention.

Margaret Peters 28:03

Thank you, Erin, so much for providing such an interesting talk. Okay, so since you left it open for Q and A, let me ask you. You know, when we think about clusters munitions or landmines or other types of unexploded ordinances when we see increasing use. So I'm thinking about not just like our American involvement in war, but you know, thinking about the current conflicts that have been happening or recently happened. So thinking about Ukraine and Russia, thinking about Yemen, thinking about places like Gaza. You know, what do you think the like long term impact will be in some of these places? And I think it's so interesting how you point out, sort of counterintuitively, like the best land means the like least likely to explode. So as you're thinking about this moving forward, you know, what would you like if you were going to talk to Zelensky or if you were going to talk to Ukrainians, like, how would you tell them to start thinking about this and start planning for after the war? That's really hard. I'm sorry.

Erin Lin 29:17

It's really hard, but it's a very important question, because there's a couple of things that the issue of Ukraine and also just contemporary applications and issues around unexploded ordinance bring up. And I think the first is that you do see just a limited budget dedicated to humanitarian demining, essentially getting shifted shift from like one post war scenario to another. I work a little bit in the humanitarian demining space, and I think it was amazing to see the amount of national programming that was at first dedicated to cases like in Southeast Asia and in Western, Eastern Africa, those budget like those programs were closing down entirely because so much attention was being geared towards Ukraine and their unexploded ordinance issues that the the amount of US, the the amount of US money that we've dedicated to it, as well as the amount of international attention that's dedicated to current events, issues. Basically, I think, change the the the country specific programming. What's ironic about the Ukraine case is that, according to humanitarian law, like demiers cannot work in active conflict zones, and so you see a lot of money going into a country where you actually can't do that much demining yet, and a lot of these issues aren't paused. So I think from the humanitarian space, there is this question of, like, we do want to help Ukraine, but right now, all of that money is essentially frozen, and it would have been a better use just going back to the original countries that they're taking from. So in some ways, like the advice would be, we understand that the issue is going to be very important, but right now, the immediate concern would actually be thinking about how the funds would be used better elsewhere. I think there is this question. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's weird to think about what, what peace means nowadays compared to what it meant before, I think, and I think the book really ends in this kind of very like realistic note where, like, war is never going to end, and there's always going to be this demand for people to want to contain other armies and other militaries, and to either keep land for themselves or keep other people out. So as long as that like desire is there, then the desire for these aerial weapons will also be there. So as much as we have a lot of international effort dedicated to trying to get more and more countries to sign international bans, to ban landmines and cluster munitions, you'll note that the countries that don't sign it are the ones who actively have the arsenals and have active interests in current wars to keep those types of weapons. And so it's then become this question of, you know, how do we tie our own hands in using these types of weapons, and how do domestic audiences potentially try to force their own militaries to only use these weapons when absolutely necessary? So that's kind of the current solution that I have suggested right now, where I think, in these areas, where there are democracies, to use as much pressure as we can to try to prevent these weapons from being used. Otherwise it's going like the weapons are always going to be available, and there always be a various number of non state and state actors who will want to use them.

Margaret Peters 32:59

Yeah. Yeah. Now this is really helpful, and I could just draw, like, a key point to like, how important I think your book is for highlighting these long, long run effects. I mean, I know in the book, you talked about how Princess Diana, you know, 30 years, 30 years ago now, you know, started to make deep binding like a big issue. But then again, it like loss. You know, it loses out to other causes at plenty of times. And like you say, it's pretty expensive to do. So I think it's just really important to, like, keep talking about these sorts of things and talking about the harm they do, not just because, you know, I think people will think about, like, oh, you know, like the kid, it's very easy to, like, have a campaign with, like, a kid whose hand has gotten bombed off, and, like, trying to get money that way, but to think about these other harms that, you know, affect a lot more people than Just the, you know, the the actual ordinance falling at a given time. So I just think the book is, like, really fascinating and very helpful. In that sense, one question I had is so thinking beyond just these sorts of bombs, you bring up some other issues, and thinking more broadly about environmental degradation after war and how that affects things. Do you think that this argument also applies to things like the use of napalm and other sorts of long run harms that might really affect people?

Erin Lin 34:39

Yes, like all the other types of weapons that we're investing that also have long term effects, I do, yes. I think there are so many enough projects that were related to this, partially because I think as our military technology advances, we've only found different ways to. Make our weapon weapons more lethal, right? And I think there's really exciting research being done by geographers, as well as some economists and Area Studies as like anthropologists in Southeast Asia about the effects of napalm and its use in the Vietnam War. And we're only now trying to think about like ways that we can apply our knowledge of spatial statistics and causal inference to think about how we can measure these long run effects on human health outcomes, but then also on the like the long term development outcomes. So like this kind of goes back to your comment before right, which is that I think so far, a lot of the humanitarian demining space has been focused on these like immediate, direct, violent impacts of the unexploded ordinance. And that's a narrative that donors, I don't know if they tire of, but they just it becomes rote after a while. And so I do write in the book about how we have a lot less research about the secondary effects of our military policy, and there aren't a lot of people who are incentivized to study it like when you think about the military, it's a very outcomes oriented institution. It's like a business in that way, where you have, like, very few, you know, DVS that you're trying to maximize. And then you don't really think there's no one in charge of thinking about what the consequences are for what the human costs are for other people. And so I make the argument in the book that, honestly, the only subset of people where all of the stars kind of align, in terms of like, having the skill set, the time to kind of study these issues, and the space to fail like the space to like, you know, run a bunch of collect the data, run, run a bunch of regressions, and not necessarily find stars in your coefficients, but still a worthwhile finding. Like, that's academics. That's not going to necessarily be people, like, within the military or even within the government. So it's really this call for, you know, graduate students and undergraduates and future academics to think about, like, all the different research questions and kind of that can spin off from various types of US military engagement.

Margaret Peters 37:10

Yeah, yeah. And I think it's not just the US military too. It's, you know, other militaries as well. But I think it's just so interesting to think about. I when military planners, they're just planning to win the war. And even as much as we've changed our laws of war to hopefully get people thinking about civilian casualties and trying to avoid immediate civilian casualties, we don't think so much. Or they would say, military planners do not think so much about like what happens after the war and what happens to the economy and the and the development. So it's really nice to have you point this out that this could be a major problem. One question I had as I was reading, especially about the the role of elites in Cambodia taking land that I was just really curious about. And maybe you talk about this book, and I just missed it when I was reading the book was, how do the minors like, are they really? Are they fully, like, just honest brokers, like, in terms of, like, I find a bomb and I go do it, or do they like, prior choice? So if I'm like, the village head, or I'm the the like, or I'm a local rich person, can I get them to come to my land sooner? And do we also have problems? Or, you know, like you say, about this predation of the land? Do you see local elites? Or did you hear anything about local leads trying to be like, could you go clear that thought over there for me? Or is it really just sort of like an after the fact kind of thing going on.

Erin Lin 38:43

Yes, okay, this is great to answer your question. I am going to be giving a short primer on how demining teams operate. Because it's not just a, I think, a simple notion of like different types of like freelance teams or even, like international teams that are just working in different areas. Each one has a different specialty. So one thing that I didn't talk about in the talk is actually, like, the first step of demining, which is the most dangerous step, which is, I think this goes back to like, let's, let's imagine what a minefield looks like, I think most people imagine some variant of, like a sandbox or just like a plot of dirt with like bombs thrown about it. What it actually is is just like a piece of land that's usually overgrown. So it's like, it's like, very, very weedy barren. And so the hardest thing is to actually figure out the ways to pull out, like all of like the big trees and pieces of brush that have to come out in order for use to use the metal detector properly. And so one of the other technological advancements in demining is that, like we now. Have remote control, like bulldozers and like cranes essentially, that'll pull out trees, or, like, basically raise land and like, they're, like, armed encased with different types of, like, protective steel. So that way, like, if they detonate a piece of ordinance, like, the machine will still work. So, so first, there's like a demining team that, like, focuses just on clearing land of brush. Second, there are then two different types of de mining operations. So there's usually what's called, like a battlefield area clearance team. And that is like the team where, like, they get assigned a piece of land, and then they go and clear it. So this is gets, gets to your question of, like, well, how are these pieces of land chosen? The second type of team is basically an on call team that's called an explosive ordinance disposal team. So they'll get, like, they have a hotline in which people will call in and be like, Oh, I found a cluster bomb. I think, like, will you come take a look at it and then detonate it? If you positively idea. And so that's, that's a response team that functions more like 911, in the emergency sense, but not necessarily in the timeliness sense, because then there's like, a queue, and where you get off the list on that queue depends, usually on, like the plot of where the eot team is already checked out to go that day, and like the number of ordinance that you think, like you've you've found so, so the BAC team, the battlefield Area clearance team, that is something that's determined by the organization that's running demining in the country, in Cambodia. It's interesting, because the national demining institution, they actually are most focused on the lowest likelihood plan, the lowest risk land of unexploded ordinance. And partially this is just due to their access to capital, and so it's easier for them to kind of run the dog teams, and also the land mine sniffing rat teams to find the unexploded bombs. So they can kind of cover more ground, but they also have like, less direct access to, like the very expensive equipment, compared to like the International Humanitarian demining teams, and there's about three of them that operate in Cambodia. And because they're international, they have pretty strict guidelines and how land is how land is prioritized, and it's pretty formulaic, to be honest. So it's all about the number of community stakeholders that that are within that either live next to or live within that plot of land as a result, like the land that gets cleared first tends to be land that's like near public goods areas, so schools, roads, markets, And then the explosive ordnance disposal team, mostly than just targets areas that there's a lot of call in reports. So I think there could potentially be ways that, you know someone, could lean on the scale, a little bit call in more often, have more of a close relationship with the person who runs the EOD team, but the majority of the unexploded ordinance being cleared is through the BAC teams, and that's kind of determined by more of a formula than a personal relationship.

Margaret Peters 43:31

Cool, yeah, no, I was just sort of curious about how that works. All right, we've got a bunch of questions. So the first we're going to start out with is possibly one from a student, grad student or undergrad. It was thinking about, how was the process of researching data for your section on economic results? Was it difficult to find information? How did you determine what sources were reliable? And just in general, we're doing your ethnographic research. How do you so this is like more of a methods question, especially for students who might be interested in doing this sorts of research. How do you decide who to talk to? How do you decide you know when you're talking to people like, who are, how representative people are, how honest people are. And so thinking about like, how do you how did you think about that as you went through, like, I'm sure, as you talk to elites who were stealing land, they probably weren't. Like, oh, I'm stealing the land. I mean, although I've been in plenty of situations where I'm talking to elites about things that, like, maybe we think they shouldn't be saying that. They totally just say, oh, you know, could go either way. But thinking a little bit about like, how did you, you know, how did you go about this? And so if you were talking to grad students and explaining, like, how they might also do this, what are your some of the pitfalls? What did you. And those sorts of questions of how you got on this?

Erin Lin 45:03

Ugh, these are very good questions, and they so much relate to, I think, my personal experiences as a graduate student and honestly as an assistant professor, I So to answer the question of, like, how did I collect the data? I mean, part of this is just like figuring out what my identity was as, like a political scientist. I came from a graduate school program that was like heavily into econometric training and causal inference at the time. So I, like I, I was, I was part of Costa Mi's, like first class of graduate students that he trained,

Margaret Peters 45:43

oh, my goodness. And like, look what you've done now.

Erin Lin 45:47

So, it was, like, this really cool confluence, actually, because I think a lot of us started graduate school not knowing anything about statistics and causal inference, and then we like, meet this hot shop professor. We were like, wow, it makes a lot of sense. Like, why you do the things that you do? So I think a lot of us were coming in with, like, these big questions or a lot of area knowledge, and then we were also learning, like, what it was like to get the frontier methodologically of our field. So I went into Cambodia with the mind of an econometrician, where I was like, Okay, I need to collect, like, I need to just meet as many people as possible who have a bunch of cool data on their hard drives, and, like, figure out how to get it. I think that was also tricky, because my interest in Cambodia, like, predates my interest in political science. I started going to the country as an undergraduate, and then I had spent a year in between undergrad and grad school on a Fulbright working in slums in Phnom Penh. So I knew, like I wanted to study some aspect of the country, but I wasn't quite sure exactly how to do it, partially because, as I had mentioned the talk, like Cambodia is super authoritarian. You one of the reasons why you don't see a lot of political science research coming out of that country is because, like, you can't really ask people about their political preferences without getting in a lot of trouble. And, like, it's, it's what you were saying earlier, Maggie. Like, you don't even know if what they're going to tell you is it falsified preference, or their actual preference. And you essentially have to do, like, super deep, like ethnographic immersion to, I think, before you start getting certain preferences revealed. So that's actually one of the reasons why I wanted to study the US bombing. Because it was this event that was just kind of seen as, like, not political. Like, it was about, like a country that, I mean, has a presence. I mean about the, you know, US involvement. So there's like a presence. There's a US presence in Cambodia, but it's, you know, not, not a trigger point present, like you can mention that us and people I think you know, aren't going to be scared to talk to you. But like, I couldn't necessarily examine how like, exposure to unexploded ordinance impacts someone's like, personal political beliefs in terms of, like, what how you feel about the incumbent party versus an opposition actor, even though, like, the opposition might be more aligned with the US compared to the incumbent. That's more antagonistic. But I actually found that like doing the ethnographic observation and working with farmers, made it a lot easier to establish a relationship with people like I find that doing an interview with someone, especially if there's a language barrier. And I do speak my it's like, it's just really awkward. I mean, it's like awkward to get someone to sit down, like you're asking them these questions that to some extent seem a little abstract from their everyday experience. But I did kind of luck out, because in graduate school, I had this one weird hobby, which was, I, like, worked on an organic vegetable farm for like, my, like, second, third and fourth years of grad school. So I knew how to farm like, I knew how to, like, weed things. I knew how to plant things like, I knew how to harvest things without, like, breaking the plant. And so, like, I would go in and, you know, I was interested in this project, and like, parts of the environmental contamination around unexploded ordinance. So I'd also actually soil tested soils for farmers to see if they're like, high amounts of heavy metal contaminants near their near their the areas where they found a lot of bombs. And so, like, they were very interested in this test to understand, like, if they could actually eat the things that were produced from the soil nearby. And then, like, we just go out and farm together, you know? And like, that's when, like, I would learn about, like, all of these, like avoidance techniques and like the ways, like, you shuffle your feet to leave a lighter footprint, kind of, like on, like, Dune, actually, and, and like. How I was, like, getting a lot of, like, interesting information, but also just like, buy in from my respondents. So like to answer your question about, like, how do you know if someone's lying to you? I mean, it's the same thing about, like, how do you know if someone's lying to you in real life? And I would say, you triangulate it, you know, like, I would always try to, like, meet the people that others were talking about. So I could get like, some people's perspectives, and then, like, what that own person's perspective would be on the problem. And then I, like, that was nice to have all the statistical data too. So like, when, when village elders were telling me about their own personal experiences during the US bombing, like, I could then actually, like, map it on in terms of, like getting, like, quantity amounts from the payload drop data. So, so yeah, I mean, some of it is just like, going out to the field, repeating meetings with people and triangulating what they're saying, and then also triangulating it with other pools of data. Yeah,

Margaret Peters 51:01

Yeah, what I really liked about the chapter on, like, inner ethnic relations, wa- And this is something, again, for those of you who are interested in research and how to do it, is that you did talk to sort of like, all sorts of different people in the community, and got different perspectives from everybody in the community. And it just helped, like, both flush out the picture, but also get a sense of like, what were the like, what are the both the stereotypes, but then also, sort of like, the meta perceptions people have about each other, stereotypes about each other and like, how real are they? Versus like, are they not right? And and thinking about those sorts of things is just a really great way for thinking about, if you're interested, you know, in ethnic conflict, or ethnic, you know, relations. It just is a really nice chapter for understanding that from a really nice sort of viewpoint that you have there again again, yeah, for those of you who are UCLA, affiliated, I highly recommend the book, and the library owns an online copy, so you can just go the library, as I was saying in our last talk, like, sorry, Aaron, I'm costing you the 25 cents you would have gotten from the book, but you do alright. So the next set of questions, since we're sort of thing that running down in time, or, you know, how do you recommend, or like, are there groups you would recommend to support Cambodia in these areas? So somebody mentioned Heidi coons organization, roots of peace. And other person just asked, like, you know, are there specific organizations you can recommend, or government policies, you know, like, basically, how, how could we help? If somebody's interested in helping Cambodian communities, how would you say is the best way to help?

Erin Lin 53:00

Oh, this is a very good question, because I do actually feel a lot of optimism about this issue, even though I think the talk that I gave was, like, very sad, and part of it is because, like, now having kind of have like, like having my feet grounded in the unexploded ordinance topic, as well as the humanitarian demining community, there's like, a lot of enthusiasm and effort towards, you know, not only removing unexploded ordinance, but thinking about like, what are the most responsible ways to do it? And thinking about like, well, what are the implications? So I think there are organizations that like actively ask these questions. And it was kind of nice to be both a graduate student and an assistant professor, like, of relatively low status, like doing field work in Cambodia, where I was kind of like able to, just like, come in as a researcher and see how, like, these different international de mining teams operated, and have different types of experiences with them. So there's one group that I do work with called the mines advisory group, and they ended up being my partners, both in terms in Cambodia, in terms of giving me access to a lot of their de mining teams, where I was able to observe them, write about them, and I also was very happy how they were able to essentially introduce me to a lot of their stakeholders and the like, essentially the village chiefs that I needed permission from in order to then meet and interview a lot of their constituents. And I think one reason why I liked working with that organization so much is that, like, they just wanted me to do good research. I think they recognize they're like, you know, there's not a lot of people who do research on this area, and, like, not a lot of people who do it quantitatively, and if they do do it quantitatively, they don't really know the area that well. So I think they liked how I was able to kind of blend the two together. But then I was also interested in, like, these larger. Scale issues of, you know how unexploded ordinance impacts poverty and food security, and so I think from that, I've had like, this nice now, like, five year long relationship with the organization where, you know, they now, like, are they want a lot of academic advice and guidance in terms of, like, thinking about best ways to design similar projects in different areas to figure out how some of these findings might scale. So I recommend, I think, that organization either to provide you more information or to see if you could support them in any way that they might need. Because I can say firsthand, I think that I do think that the work that they do in Cambodia is great and constantly evolving because they are asking themselves these self reflective questions of, what other supports can we give to the communities who both, like ask for the demining but then also ask for the support and some of the the the legal advisors that they would need to kind of help them keep their land?

Margaret Peters 55:57

What was the name of that again?

Erin Lin 55:59

Mines advisory group. The acronym is MAG.

Margaret Peters 56:09

Im just putting that in the chat for everybody. If you're interested in at go check it out. I'm sure they have a website you can go to All right, so one last question coming from the audience is okay. So the question is, you mentioned difficulty in detecting landmines or other unexploded ordinances? You know, are there protective preventative measures that could be implemented in these regions where mines are used, or where we have huge bombing campaigns that would make future clearance efforts more efficient?

Erin Lin 56:48

Yes, I mean, in some ways, the R&D labs the military are trying to figure out, how do you make a more responsible cluster bomb? So for example, like, can you just set off required timers in which, like, at a certain time, you know, 24 hours later, like, the bomb must detonate. I would say, like, those technologies exist, and we do produce certain generations of bombs that do have these kind of, like, timed functions. But at the same time, it's really tricky, because a lot of the unexploded ordinance, or the cluster bombs that we still produce to this day, don't have those precautions because they're just more expensive to put them in and again, like there is just a high enough demand that to make these bombs cheaply, that people are going to be more responsive to cost than they are to necessarily, like moral obligations to the civilians. I think the other thing that I mentioned more in the book, and I don't think I got to in this talk, is that, like, what's dangerous is that the US is on, like, the frontier of, I think, producing the most advanced military weapons in the world. The problem is that, like once, we produce a weapon that is both effective but also very like cheap to manufacture, that gets reverse engineered in every main military industry in all the other countries. So like the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, in this case, they're all producing, like versions of our basic entry level cluster munitions and land mines that are then used all around the world. So even if we're able, on the technological front, to kind of solve a cluster munition issue for future wars that the US might be engaged in, granted like the US actually has more domestic hand time instruments to prevent us from actively using cluster munitions in most military operations compared to many other countries, but you still will have this problem of the unexploded ordinance existing from all of the other makers of these cluster munitions.

Margaret Peters 58:53

Yeah, and that's so true. And then, you know, even if we do it, like you said, you know, other countries may or may not do it. We also might have old supplies that were like, Sure, we'll sell it cheaply to the so and so's even, you know, even if Congress was to say, like, we want you to use the blend so they make sure explode, we'll be like, Okay, well, we'll sell our stockpiles to whomever that like, you know, some sort of ally, the Egyptians or the Saudis or the somebody else. And it'll just still be there. And so that is what makes this all so tough. And even, you know, thinking about like we still have so much left to clean too, from from earlier generations of these wars. Well, I wanted to thank you so much. We're at time for such an interesting talk and such an interesting book, as I mentioned, we've put a link into the chat about how to purchase the book if you're interested, especially if you are a grad student or under or check out the local UCLA library, and we'll see. You soon, and we'll be back after the Thanksgiving break with another talk with Matt Furman. So thank you all so much for coming, and we will see you. I will, hopefully we'll see you all again soon. And it was great chatting. Erin, great.

Erin Lin 1:00:12

Thank you so much. All right. Bye, bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai