Follow-up to typologies of political dispute
March 30th, 2012 § 2 Comments
I got some great responses to my last post about typologies of political dispute, which I’ll list and respond to in turn. On the whole, I’m not sure this typology idea is leading anywhere useful, but there’s definitely a lot to learn from the comments I’ve received.
- Jay Ufelder points out that the post makes it sound like these disputes are static, whilst they’re actually dynamic and interactive (with which I completely agree!). He suggested reading Patrick Regan & Daniel Norton’s 2005 paper “Greed, Grievance, and Mobilization in Civil Wars” [PDF].*
- Daniel Solomon asks about what differentiates “violent protest” from rebellion, as he considers these similar categories, whilst Zach Warner does see them to be different. In his opinion, rebellion aims at changing the social basis of political power, whilst violent protests represents dissatisfaction with the outcome of current political structures.
- Dan and Zach also point out that the empty boxes in the dispute matrix could be attributable to mixed strategies of repression, as dispute may provoke both military campaigns and violent repression of civilian voices.
- Rebecca Weissburg suggested checking out Nic Cheeseman‘s work, and Dan suggested Alex de Waal’s recent essay on ending mass atrocities. Dan has used both Cheeseman & de Waal’s work in his own article on participatory violence and local peacebuilding in Kenya.
I’m totally with Jay on the interactive nature of political dispute, and I don’t think I made that point clearly enough in the last post. I was thinking of the 3-by-3 matrix more as a set of outcomes on a decision tree than as a way to simply categorize different types of conflict. Mostly I was wondering if this would be a useful way of thinking about A) why similar initial political conditions and grievances produce different types of disputes, as you move along a decision tree, and B) how disputes shift between categories as both civilian & government actors change their strategies. Of course, as Dan and Zach correctly point out, the shortcoming of the decision tree model is that it doesn’t do well at capturing instances when many types of disputes are operating simultaneously – say, peaceful protests in a capital coupled with armed rebellion in an outlying district.
Dan is quite right to point out that I didn’t define the distinction between violent protest and armed rebellion clearly. The distinction I generally had in mind was of peaceful/violent civilian protest - that is to say, (semi-)organized civilian movements – as compared to the decision to form rebel militias and launch an armed rebellion. Of course, actors with different grievances/motivations/capabilities within a given country could well engaged in different strategies simultaneously – and I’m starting to wonder how often the same actors actually transition from one type of protest to another. Do protesting civilians often go off to create or join militias? And conceptualizing “protest” as a civilian activity seems to imply that militaries can only ever engage in rebellion or coups when they’re politically dissatisfied, which isn’t true. This is why I don’t think this framework holds up, in the end – there’s too much of a conceptual muddle about these different categories of dispute, and I don’t feel like I have enough information to clean it up. But I’m glad the conversation happened!
*I’m including the PDF instead of a link to the journal article to facilitate access for readers who aren’t affiliated with universities and thus don’t have subscriptions to many journals. I think this will be standard policy around here from now on. Gated articles might be good for journals’ financial health, and that’s not a negligible consideration, but it’s definitely bad for intellectual debate.
Typologies of political dispute
March 20th, 2012 § 4 Comments
Here’s an idea I’ve been brainstorming recently, and which I’m tossing in a rather raw form out into the world: has anyone written the definitive typology of different types of political disputes? Not that I plan to write it; I’d just like to know if it’s out there!
Consider the ways in which citizens may express opposition to government policy. This could run the spectrum from peaceful protest to violent rebellion on the civilian disputant side, and from active accommodation to a violent military campaign on the state side. Naturally, such disputes are relational and contingent – the actions taken by either party provoke a reaction of some type by the other party, which itself will condition future actions by the first party.
I was thinking of this because most of the work I’ve seen on African politics in the 1990s seems to focus rather narrowly on either pro-democratic protest or civil war, without considering them as examples of political dispute on different ends of the same spectrum. Some of this literature is discussed in my recent post on Robert Bates’ latest book. As I noted in that post, the same combination of factors (economic stagnation + political unrest) led to fairly peaceful democratic change in some countries and civil war in others.
I’m not asking here about why some countries consolidated democracy and others reverted to authoritarianism or fell into conflict; the income hypothesis seems to predict democratic consolidation pretty well. And I’m not asking about why some countries had civil wars at all and others didn’t; there’s a lot of work out there on the structural determinants of civil war, notably Collier & Hoeffler. But I do think it’s interesting that, facing similar sets of political disputes around the same time (the 1980s and early 1990s), some countries followed contingent paths that led to relatively peaceful political change, whilst others drifted towards the use of violence.
As a first take at an organizing structure for this thought, here’s a graph representing the spectrum of citizen & government positions during a political dispute. (Click to enlarge it.) It clearly still needs some work. Does anyone find this useful? Am I just replicating someone else’s work without knowing it? (It looks like Regina Bateson at Yale has a working paper addressing a similar topic, and there’s definitely Rebel Rulers, but I haven’t seen much else about the relational, contingent nature of political conflict.) Would love to hear your thoughts, oh readers!
Conflict minerals and Kony2012
March 14th, 2012 § 6 Comments
Everyone who cares about African development has surely heard both sides of the Kony2012 debate by now, and frankly the sight of another #stopkony hashtag is enough to make me close my browser tab at this point. Thus, this is not a post about Kony2012! It is, however, a post about an analogous phenomenon: the way in which the Enough Project used an oversimplified and inaccurate narrative about the conflict in eastern Congo to “raise awareness” in the West, and translated that awareness into harmful policy on the ground. Laura Seay recently wrote an excellent report [PDF] on this topic for the Center for Global Development. It’s a timely reminder that this type of poorly informed Western activism can have very real consequences for ordinary Africans.
The central problem with Enough’s narrative about conflict minerals is this: whilst rebel groups in the eastern DRC were profiting from mineral sales prior to the September 2010 ban on exports, minerals certainly weren’t causing the ongoing conflict, and they weren’t the rebels’ only source of funding. Cutting off one source of funds has done nothing to resolve many rebels’ underlying grievances about land use and citizenship, or to fill in the great vacuum of state authority in the Kivus which is so conducive to armed violence. Furthermore, most rebel groups have access to funds from other activities, including logging, agriculture, and informal taxation of local populations. (If anything, they’ve probably increased their levels of extortion from Congolese citizens since the mineral export ban in an effort to compensate for revenue shortfalls.) Whilst mineral exports were one of the factors perpetuating the conflict, the belief that they were its linchpin is clearly inaccurate. Effectively banning mineral purchases from the DRC has thrown hundreds of thousands of miners out of work, with few prospects for alternative employment, for the sake of a policy that has done little to reduce levels of violence in the region.
Interestingly, mineral exports may have actually facilitated the event that did significantly reduce the frequency of violence in the Kivus: the January 2009 arrest of Laurent Nkunda, leader of the CNDP militia and a key political actor driving the conflict in eastern DRC. Laura notes that President Kabila’s seemingly inexplicable decision to ban mineral exports (an activity from which many top Congolese politicians profit) ahead of the passage of the Dodd-Frank Act was likely driven by two factors: a desire to convince eastern voters that he was paying attention to the region’s problems, and an interest in consolidating FARDC control over mines to ensure Rwanda’s continued access to minerals. This latter consideration appears to be a key element maintaining the continued cooperation between the DRC and Rwanda. This same detente, of course, led to Nkunda’s arrest.
Laura also makes several other points about the political economy of Congolese mineral exports which I hadn’t heard before.
- The much-cited figure about how the DRC has 80% of the world’s coltan supplies is likely inaccurate; the real statistic is probably less than 10%. However, mining revenues (from all minerals) still play an outsize role in the country’s economic life. They “[account] for 80% of the exports, 72% of the national budget and 28% of GDP according to the latest available statistics.”
- “If minerals cause or drive conflict in a failed state, then we would expect to see most, if not all, of the Congolese mineral trade to be militarized and/or the object of competition between armed groups. This is far from true, however. The mines of Kasai and central Katanga are completely free of violence, as are many mines in the heart of the conflict regions in North and South Kivu and Ituri.”
It’s a report that’s well worth reading, for a contextualized take on the conflict minerals narrative as well as a pointed reminder of the dangers of misguided Western activism.
Book review: When Things Fell Apart
February 22nd, 2012 § 3 Comments
I went into Robert Bates’ recent book When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa with high expectations. His 1982 work Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political Basis of Agricultural Policies remains one of the best pieces of African political analysis I’ve ever read, displaying an admirable willingness to take African domestic politics seriously, and thereby producing a insightful overview at the process of agricultural policy-making. (I must confess here that I thought this sounded like a resoundingly dull topic until I read the book, at which point I realized that Bates had captured many of the fundamental dynamics of African politics in the post-colonial era.) At any rate, I fully expected the same insight from When Things Fell Apart – and was disappointed to put it down feeling like I had learned little of value. The book is a decent primer on African politics in the 1980s and 1990s for the reader who’s unfamiliar with the topic, but it doesn’t even define “state failure” clearly, let alone provide an adequate metric for determining why some African states failed and others didn’t. One could be excused for coming away with the conclusion that the entire continent imploded in the 1990s. Such an important topic deserves a more clearly-written book (as other reviewers seem to agree).
A bit of background: my primer on African politics in the 1980s and 1990s was Michael Bratton & Nicholas van der Walle’s 1997 book Democratic Experiments in Africa: Regime Transitions in Comparative Perspective (which I read for a course with the excellent Peter Lewis). Democratic Experiments isn’t what I’d call compulsively readable, but it does draw a clear picture of the generalized path that many African countries followed from authoritarianism to democratization. Generally speaking, the profound economic crisis of the 1980s unsettled many African autocrats’ grips on power, and by the end of the decade protests over economic stagnation and single-party rule were common. Many leaders reluctantly switched to multiparty democracy under such pressure, whilst others were able to repress domestic dissent but were still pushed towards democracy by international donors. Of course, some states avoided democratization entirely, as in Sudan with its civil war, Somalia with its total collapse, and Zaire with Mobutu’s preternatural skill at clinging to power.
So, in short: prolonged economic stagnation weakens leaders’ holds on power and provokes political unrest, which might lead to democracy (Ghana), civil war (Somalia), or both in succession (Rwanda & Burundi). I was really hoping that Bates’ book would start from this point and investigate the determinants of why some nations collapsed and others weathered this period intact. Instead, Bates takes the same stylized elements as Bratton & van der Walle (economic crisis + resultant instability in the political system), adds a structural assumption about politicians’ heightened discount rates in times of crisis, and comes up with a recipe for violent political infighting over access to resources and resultant state collapse. This is the flip side of the processes of democratization explored in Democratic Experiments, and it’s a plausible analysis for many of the states that did in fact fall into civil conflict.
However, Bates never actually defines “state failure,” nor identifies the set of African states or even the specific time periods to which this analysis applies. His working definition appears to mean “civil war during the 1990s,” based on statements like the opening sentence of his conclusion, which discusses Liberia and Somalia. It’s an odd oversight for a political scientist, given that the Liberian civil war is arguably a different type of “state failure” than the complete collapse of the central government in Somalia. (Rwanda and the DRC are also great examples: both were sites of great violence in the 1990s, but today Rwanda has one of the strongest governments in Africa, whilst the Congolese government doesn’t even control all of its own territory.) For that matter, evidence for the book’s arguments is culled from across the continent, including anecdotes from states such as Ghana and Zambia (which have never had civil wars) alongside the obvious choices of war-torn Burundi and DRC. Bates’ reasonable analysis of the risk factors for state collapse is greatly weakened by this inability to apply his hypotheses to specific African states.
Like this:
Violence and agency in the DRC
February 16th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
In yet another bit of backdated conference blogging, the Great Lakes Policy Forum held an excellent session on “Telling the Story of the Congo” last October. (Notes aren’t up at their site, but Wronging Rights lived-blogged the session.) The first day of the two-day event (which was all I was able to attend) focused on the partial and often inaccurate narrative about the conflict in eastern Congo which has gained currency among policymakers in the West. One of the first speakers opened with a striking exercise: he pulled a map of the DRC up on the overhead and pointed to a variety of cities throughout the country, asking the audience how many people had visited each. A healthy number had visited Kinshasa, and nearly as many had been to Goma or Bukavu, but very few had been to Lubumbashi or Kisangani, let alone Mbuji-Mayi or Mbandaka. This is a very real result of the way in which our collective imagined geography of the DRC has shrunk to the extreme west (Kinshasa) and extreme east of the country, rendering the rest of the country not as no-man’s land, but as non-existent land.
As the same speaker noted, the current Western framing of the DRC as a land torn by sexual violence and mineral-fueled conflict tends to pass over questions of domestic politics and governance, stripping the Congolese of political agency within their own country. By way of example, he noted that a recent case of rape in North Kivu drew criticism of MONUSCO for their failure to prevent it; however, few commentators asked who committed the rapes, or where the army or police were at the time. Sexual violence is clearly a symptom of the eastern DRC’s broader security problems, but the international community appears more interested in topical solutions aimed at reducing rape rates than in sustained engagement with the larger issue of security sector reform.
Several speakers were similarly critical of the Western narrative around minerals and conflict. One pointed out that mining is in fact not the only revenue source for many armed groups, and that it’s unclear whether cutting off this particular source of funding would decrease or exacerbate violence. Another speaker, more accepting of the idea of a positive correlation between mining revenues and violence, said that the international community’s exclusive focus on eastern Congo overlooked continued conflicts over natural resources in the center of the country. In his words, places like Kikwete and Mbuji-Mayi are “more like war zones” today than Goma is. Ultimately, the canonical view of conflict minerals in the eastern DRC appears to have been created largely by Western activist groups such as the Enough Project, with very little input from the Congolese, and without sufficient attention to the contextualized and ultimately local ways in which violence plays out.
Book review: More Than Good Intentions
February 13th, 2012 § 1 Comment
Only eight months after I finished the book, I thought I’d finally review More Than Good Intentions, by Dean Karlan and Jacob Appel. Dean is my supervisor at Innovations for Poverty Action, as well as the organization’s founder, and what I particularly appreciated about the book was its clear explanation of how academic research in behavioral economics can lead to solutions for real problems of social policy in the developing world. Given the level of popular discontent with neoclassical economics, fairly or unfairly, after the financial crisis, works like this go a long way towards demonstrating that the economist’s conceptual toolbox can contribute to making the world a better place.
More Than Good Intentions opens with a short review of the Easterly-vs.-Sachs saga, and essentially sidesteps the debate about whether aid ever works with a call for more evaluation of extant aid programs. Their chosen tool is the randomized controlled trial. Of course, there are any number of development problems that are not amenable to randomized evaluation. Questions about the ethnicized distribution of government resources or the transnational funding networks of rebel groups really call out for other epistemological approaches. What RCTs can do well is evaluate program-based aid in contexts where funding shortages mean that some potential beneficiaries can’t be included, and this is precisely the approach taken by the research projects summarized in the book.
The rest of the book is thematically structured around financial activities (borrowing, saving, consumption) and non-financial activities (agriculture, healthcare, education). The financial sections of the book are the best non-technical introduction to the topic that I’ve seen. Dean’s interests tend towards microfinance and decision-making, and these chapters give a thorough overview of contemporary Western narratives around microfinance and the many reasons why the financial needs of the poor are more varied than simply “getting a loan.” For instance, whilst an RCT conducted in South Africa showed that randomly extending microfinance loans to people who otherwise wouldn’t have gotten one did raise those clients’ incomes, qualitative data from the Philippines also showed that the rigid structure of microfinance products drives many people back to the neighborhood moneylender. (The takeaway here isn’t that moneylenders are evil, but that microfinance banks might take a lesson in customizable loan repayments from them.) Another RCT in Peru used list randomization [PDF] to show that nearly a third of microfinance clients use their loans for household consumption instead of business needs – technically a violation of their loan agreements, but a more accurate reflection of their current financial needs.
The non-financial chapters are also consistently interesting, although they tend towards summarizing notable research and policy innovations rather than placing the results within a global context. They’re like the greatest hits of development research. For instance, the agriculture chapter doesn’t provide an overview of agricultural modernization attempts in Africa, but it does shed light on why Kenyan farmers don’t purchase fertilizer when they need it (it’s hard for them to save money after the harvest), and how Ghanaian pineapple farmers spread information about new agricultural technologies. Similarly, the education chapter doesn’t go into great depth about the history of universal primary education, but it does demonstrate that programs as simple as providing uniforms or cash grants to poor students can dramatically improve attendance. One of the most remarkable studies of recent years showed that treating Kenyan students for intestinal worms with a twenty-cent pill reduced absence rates by up to 25%. This result was so spectacular that the researchers started an NGO, Deworm the World, dedicated to reproducing this success.
All in all, More Than Good Intentions makes a strong case for the relevance of behavioral economics to development policy. It’s also an excellent popular introduction to some of the fundamental questions of foreign aid and development economics. I gave a copy to my parents to answer their perennial question of “so what exactly do you do in development work again?” So far it seems to be working.
Straus on remaking Rwanda
January 25th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Catching up on yet another batch of backdated conference blogging, I went to see Scott Straus discuss his edited volume Remaking Rwanda at CSIS last October. It’s a thought-provoking book, as is his previous work, The Order of Genocide, which contains a very insightful analysis of the microdynamics of the genocide. Remaking offers a largely critical look at Rwanda’s post-genocide domestic politics, with only brief acknowledgement of the RPF’s real successes in realms such as primary education and economic growth before proceeding to pillory the government for its repression of political dissent and attempts at social engineering.
Rather than revisiting the book’s conclusions directly, Straus used the conference to engage with the question of why the Western meta-narrative about Rwanda had shifted from a largely positive one in the early post-genocide period to the flurry of critiques that constitute it today. In part, he felt that the shift was warranted. Rwanda’s obvious intervention in the DRC contributed to an early change in public opinion, supported by the increasing number of defections from the RPF and the repressive manner in which the 2010 elections were handled. The 2009 death of Alison des Forges, who was an early critic of the RPF’s slide towards authoritarianism, then spurred the generation of a number of commemorative conferences and works on Rwanda at a time when scholars were abandoning the self-censorship that had previously characterized much writing on the country. Remaking Rwanda was one such work.
That said, Straus also acknowledged the complexity of Rwanda’s contemporary politics. Whilst “it’s not a secret” that the RPF has installed an authoritarian regime, he also noted the challenges of governing a post-conflict country, and suggested that we are in need of better methods to evaluate the effects of authoritarianism in different contexts. In part, he seemed to feel that this pointed to a need for more comparative work on Rwanda, and explicitly called for more comparisons with Burundi. Of course, as another commentator pointed out, there’s an even larger set of potential comparative partners out there, since practically every leader in East Africa today came to power out of conflict.
Having had a few months to think this through, it does seem to me that much research on Rwanda is limited by a lack of comparison. I do think there are good reasons to believe that genocide is a form of violence that’s analytically distinct from other types of civil conflict, but it also seems that some perspective is lost in treating Rwanda as completely unique. Regression to authoritarianism (or illiberal democracy, or some other non-democratic form of rule) was common in the 1990s even among African states that hadn’t suffered conflict. Straus’ more specific concern is that repression and “growing de facto ethnic inequality” will someday re-ignite all the familiar conflicts, which seems a likely outcome to me – one certainly sees the same pattern in both Rwanda and Burundi’s historical periods of ethnic conflict. That said, one might gain a better understanding of the specific conditions that contribute to the re-ignition of conflict, or to its avoidance, in comparative perspective. Uganda and Ethiopia might both be interesting places to start.
Prepping for fieldwork in the DRC
January 12th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
No, I’m not going back any time soon, unfortunately, but Peter van der Windt has a useful list here. Note especially the preparations for getting around without an affiliation to a local NGO – could come in handy for independent researchers!
Preparing for SAIS oral exams
January 9th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
The oral exam is a very small part of the overall SAIS experience – one hour out of two years of study – but I have to say that mine stands out in my mind as one of the most frustrating hours I spent there. The exam proceeded differently than I’d expected, based on my adviser’s recommendations for preparation, and I left feeling like I hadn’t had the opportunity to discuss the topics that truly interested me – and had been caught flat-footed by a variety of questions on topics more tangential to my studies. Here’s how it went.
How I was told to prepare:
- Write a one-page paper on a topic “that will integrate knowledge from the student’s regional or functional program and international economics.” (I wrote on the connections between structural adjustment, democratization, and civil war in Rwanda and Burundi.) The examiners will read the paper, and may discuss it in detail, or pass over it entirely if they’re not sufficiently familiar with the topic to pose questions on it.
- Read up on international affairs for approximately the week before the exam. Examiners will often discuss current events, and ask students to provide political or economic analysis.
- Review materials from all of your courses, but spend 70% of your time on the core economics courses.
- All of the above suggestions came from my adviser. A TA (and former SAIS student) also told me not to worry about understanding the detailed theoretical underpinnings of the core econ courses, but to focus on their policy applications.
- I had taken courses or worked for both of my examiners previously, and was aware of their research interests. As I studied, I tried to anticipate the questions that they might ask.
How it actually went:
- We didn’t discuss the contents of my one-pager or any current events. So much for the idea that “[the one-pager] along with a brief introduction by the student…will serve as the basis of discussion for the first 15 to 20 minutes.”
- I reviewed the material from the core economics courses with an eye to their policy implications, as my TA had suggested. I definitely wasn’t prepared for a 15-minute discussion of the theoretical preconditions for something to be considered a market failure. (Examples of market failures in practice, such as the implications of failure of contract enforcement and property rights for land markets and agricultural output, weren’t considered sufficient.)
- My economics examiner was a trade economist, so I had reviewed the basic trade theories in depth, but I was still a bit surprised to have to discuss the assumptions underlying the Ricardian, specific factors, and Heckscher-Ohlin models.
- I felt much better prepared for the questions from my IDEV examiner. They ranged from the general (“What’s the connection between democracy and economic growth?”) to the specific (“You mentioned that you wrote a paper on conditional cash transfer programs. Do they reduce poverty?”), and touched on technical issues as well (“What’s the difference between an RCT, a quasi-experiment, and a natural experiment?”).
- Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the exam was the fact that we didn’t discuss my independent study at all. I really enjoyed writing it, and had been looking forward to running its propositions past my examiners.
In sum:
I felt like most of the advice that I was given about preparation was accurate. However, there were several things that would have reduced my stress level considerably during the exam had I known them.
- All of the heavily theoretical questions were drawn from the core economics courses, not from electives. Be conversant with econ theory as well as policy applications.
- Be prepared to defend your course of study. For example, I took a course on African militaries, whose salience to development seems obvious to me, and was asked why this was a relevant choice.
- Prepare a list of two or three main policy takeaways from each of your electives, as well as a few case studies that could be used to support these points.
- If you’re currently taking another course with a professor, they probably won’t ask you about the content of that course, since they’ll already be familiar with your level of knowledge on the subject.
Getting the most from SAIS academics
January 6th, 2012 § Leave a Comment
I graduated a semester early from SAIS almost by accident. There’s no indication in the school’s policies & procedures to indicate that this is possible, and technically speaking, if I had followed all of my department’s regulations to the letter, it probably wouldn’t have been possible. What I found during the course of my final semester, however, was many professors and administrators are willing to be flexible about requirements if one provides a good rationale for doing things differently. If you have a clear vision of what you’d like to study, this can definitely help you get the most from your SAIS experience.
Here are some of the useful tricks I learned:
- Early graduation is quite feasible! It’s simply a matter of fitting 16 non-language courses into three semesters. I did this by taking five courses each semester, and one course during the summer. Six courses per term is the upper limit, so it would even be possible to pull this off whilst still spending the summer outside of DC. (I did five academic courses and a language during my third semester, and whilst this was time-consuming, it’s no worse than taking four courses and working a 20-hour internship, as many SAIS students do.) Savings: $18,000 worth of tuition.
- You can get IDEV credit for courses that aren’t on the list of approved courses if you can show the departmental administrators that the course is relevant to development. Especially useful if you’re in the badly understaffed politics & governance track. I did this for both of my regional and one of the P&G requirements.
- If you’re strongly interested in a topic that isn’t covered by existing courses, or would like to come away with something approaching an MA thesis, an independent study is a great idea. The Red Book provides the relevant details. It’s best to approach professors the semester before you’d like to do your study, as independent studies must be supervised by a faculty member, and SAIS’ small faculty can make it difficult to find a professor willing to take you on. (That said, an adjunct can be your direct supervisor as long as a full-time faculty member has also signed on to supervise.) I ended up working fairly autonomously under Stephen Smith, who’s an amazing resource for all things related to conflict in Africa.
I have mixed feelings on the utility of testing out of the poli sci and economics core courses. I didn’t test out of them largely because I didn’t trust myself to read an entire trade/stats/monetary textbook before the exam, and I definitely learned the material in greater depth from taking the courses. On the other hand, I found most of the econ pedagogy rather antiquated – a useful foundation if you plan to continue doing theoretical work in economics, but otherwise of limited practical application. I enjoyed comparative national systems, but definitely wished I had tested out of theories of IR, which I found deadly dull. (CNS is more obviously applicable to my primary interest, politics in Africa, whereas theories of IR is oriented towards classic interstate conflicts, which occur less often in Africa.) So, in sum: testing out isn’t necessary for early graduation, but could be useful if you understand your academic preferences clearly going in and wish to substitute more interesting classes for something you know you won’t enjoy or need in your future career.
(On a different note, I initially googled the school’s logo before deciding to use my own photo above, and got a page full of, well, sais…)
