( SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL)

Volume50lNumber41December1996 . 810 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10019

Counterfactual Thought tary fame as far as he surpas ed him in gentlene ,in

elf-command and in other noble qualities" (quoted in
Experiments in World Gould 1969). Social scienti ts have also long been
aware of the pivotal role that counterfactuals play in
Politics cholar hip.
Logical, methodological, and psychological Neverthele ,some contemporary historian till
perspectives temly warn us to avoid "what-might-have-been"
questions. They tell us that history is tough enough as
by Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin * it is-a it actuaLLy i -without worrying about how
thing might have worked out differently in this or that
cenario. Why make a difficult problem impo ible?
There i nothing new about counterfactual inference.
The ferocity of the skeptics is a bit unnerving.
Hi torian have been doing it for at least 2,000 year .
They are right that counterfactual inference i daunt-
Counterfactual fueled the grief of Tacitus when he
ingly difficult. But they are wrong that we can avoid
pondered what would have happened if Gerrnanicus
counterfactual rea oning at acceptable cost. And they
had lived to become Emperor: "Had he been the ole
are wrong that all counterfactuals are equally "ab urd"
arbiter of events, had he held the powers and title of
becau e they are equally hypothetical (Fi her 1970,
King, he would have out tripped Alexander in mili-
19). We can avoid counterfactuals only if we e chew
all cau al inference and limit our elve to trictIy non-
, • Thi. e say i adapted from the introductory ch:lpter to Counter/actual cau al narrative of what actually happened (no mug-
T1wUlllu Exptrimtnts in World Polilic.f: Logical. Mellradological. and gling in cau al claim under the gui e of verb uch a
PsycholllJlical Ptrspulh·ts. P. Tetlock and A. Belkin. cd! .• Princeton "influenced," tIre ponded," "triggered," "precipitated,"
University Pre., • 1996. Philip E. Tetlock i. Harold E. Burtt Profe. or of
P.·ychology and Politic:ai SCIence at OhIO State University. Aaron Belkin i
a Ph.D. candid31e in politic:al science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Contributors to the volume include A. Belkin; George w. Breslauer. • CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE •
University of California. Berkeley; Bruce Bueno De Mesquita. Hoover
In. titution. Stanford University; Lars·Erik Cederman. Somerville College, Counterfoctu:ai Thought Experiment! Vietnam Work hop 98
Oxford University: Robyn M. Dawe , Carnegie Mellon University: Ronald in World Politics, Philip E. 1996 SSRC·Mellon Minority
J. Deiben, University of Toronto; James D. Fearon, University of Chicago; Ttllod: and Aaron Belkin 77 Summer Conference 98
Mich:lel Fi~h rkeller, Ohio State University; Richard K. Herrmann, Ohio Researching Sexuality: A New W3l hington Symposium on
State University; Robert Jervi. , Columbia University; Yuen Foong Khong, Fellow hip Program. DIOne Japanese Politic. 99
Nuffield College. Oxford University; Edgar Kiser, University of di Mauro 86 Conference on African
W3l hington; Rich:lrd Ned Lebow, Ohio State University; Margaret Levi, Presidential Item : Intemational Investment 99
University of Washington; James M 01. on. University of We tern Di. sertation Field Research. New JSPS Fellow hip
Ontario; e:ai J. Roese, Northwc"tern University; Bruce Ru sell, Yale Ktnntlh Prewill 91 Program 100
University; Janice Gro .. Stein, University of Toronto; P. Tetlock: Mark Requiem for P&P. Da~'id L Sills 94 SSRC Archive Now Open 100
Turner, University of Maryland; Steven Weber. University of California, Current Activitie at the Council 98 Recent Council Publications 101
Berkeley: Barry R. Weing3lt, Stanford University.

77
 and the like). Putting to the side whether any coher-
ent and compelling narrative can be "noncausal,"
this prohibition would prevent u from drawing the
orts of "lessons from history" that scholars and pol-
icy makers regularly draw on such topics as the be t
ways to encourage economic growth, to pre erve
peace, and to cultivate democracy. Without counter-
factual reasoning, how could we know whether state
intervention accelerated growth in country x,
whether deterrence prevented an attack on country
y, or whether the courage of a young king aved
country z from sliding back into dictator hip?
Counterfactual reasoning is a prerequisite for any
form of learning from history (cf. Tetlock 1991).
To explore the many roles that counterfactuals
play in the study of world politics, the SSRC's
Committee on International Peace and Security
sponsored a research planning project on Counter-
factual Thought Experiments in World Politics. I
Project participants, including philosophers, political
cientists, sociologists, and psychologists, met at the
Univer ity of California at Berkeley in January
1995, to present and discuss papers (see footnote
on preceding page).
What are counterfactuals, and why do they matter
for the study of world politics?
A useful place to begin is by clarifying what we
mean by counterfactual rea oning. A reasonably pre-
cise philosophical definition is that counterfactuals
are subjunctive conditionals in which the antecedent
is known or suppo ed for purpo e of argument to
be false (Skyrms 1980). As such, an enormous array
of politically consequential arguments qualify as
counterfactual. Consider the following rather repre-
entative sample of counterfactuals that have
loomed large in recent scholarly and policy debates:
If Stalin had been ou ted as general party secretary of
the communist party of the Soviet Union, the Soviet
Union would have moved loward a kinder, gentler
fonn of communism 55 years before it actually did.
IfYeltsin had followed Sachsian fiscal and monetary
advice in early 1992, Russian inflation in 1993 would
have been a small fraction of what it was.
If the United State had not dropped atomic bomb
on two Japanese cities in August 1945, the Japanese
would still have surrendered roughly when they did.
I The committee and its activities are supported by the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
78\lTEMS
If all states in the 20th century had been democracies,
there would have been fewer wars.
If 80 nians had been bottlenosed dolphins, the West
never would have allowed the slaughter of innocents
in the Yugoslav civil war to have gone on 0 long.
The participants in this project approached coun-
terfactual inference from both normative/epistemo-
logical and descriptiVe/cognitive cience perspec-
tives. The normative issues focus on how students of
world politics should use and judge counterfactual
arguments. The descriptive issues focus on how we
generate, use, and judge counterfactual arguments.
One key cognitive-science question concerns when
people are prone to think about possible worlds. Of
the infinity of past events that people could "men-
tally undo" and in ert as antecedents into counter-
factual arguments, why do they devote so much
attention to certain causal candidates and so little to
others (Kahneman and Miller 1986; Olson, Roese,
and Deibert2)? A natural next question concerns
when people are likely to be persuaded by counter-
factual claims concerning the consequences of alter-
ing particular antecedents. Given that people have
no way of directly determining what would have
happened in these hypothetical world , why do they
defer to some counterfactual arguments but disdain
other (Turner)? Finally, is there evidence of cogni-
tive and motivational biases in how people judge
claims about po sible world ,tendencie to rai e
tandards of evidence and proof for di onant coun-
terfactuals but to lower standards for claims conso-
nant with one's beliefs and goals?
Normative issues in evaluating counterfactual
claims
Our participants generally agreed that counterfac-
tual reasoning is unavoidable in any field in which
researchers want to draw cause-effect conclusions
but cannot perform controlled experiments in which
they randomly assign "subjects" to treatment condi-
tions that differ only in the pre ence or absence of
the hypothesized cause. Try though we do to control
tatisticaJly for confounding variables in large-N
multivariate studies or to find matching cases in
comparative designs or to search for the signature of
2 Names cited without dates refer to contributors in the publi lied
volume.
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 4
 hypothesized causes in process-tracing tudie, the
potential cau es are simply too numerous and too
interrelated in world politics to permit complete
e cape from counterfactual inference. Researchers
mu t ultimately justify claims that a given cause
produced a given effect by invoking counterfactual
arguments about what would have happened in
orne hypothetical world in which the postulated
cause took on some value different from the one it
assumed in the actual world (Fogel 1964; Fearon 1991).
The consensus among our participants, however,
began to unravel beyond this point. They empha-
sized distinctive, albeit largely complementary,
function of counterfactual reasoning. The argu-
ments they pre ented persuaded us to adopt a stance
of epistemic plurali m that acknowledges the variety
of ways in which counterfactual arguments can
prove enlightening and the need for different stan-
dards in judging counterfactuals that erve different
cholarly goals. We organize the e di tinct styles of
counterfactual argumentation into five ideal type .
(1) Idiographic
Several participants u ed counterfactuals to
explore "po ibility-hood"-whether hi tory had to
unfold as it did. For instance, Breslauer explored the
everal junctures in the hi tory of the Soviet Union
that have parked the mo t inten e counterfactual
debate within the expert community. Khong
attempted to assess whether any conceivable Briti h
prime minister would have adopted a policy of
appeasement toward Nazi Germany, at least up to
March 1939. Herrmann and Fi cherkeller examined
everal counterfactual controver ie in which the
positions taken by policymakers on "what would
have happened?" haped American policy toward
Iran during the cold war. Lebow and Stein con-
structed an exhaustive inventory of the counterfac-
tual beliefs that apparently guided American and
Soviet policy during the Cuban mis ile crisis-the
crisis during which, it is often as erted, the world
"came closer" than ever before or since to nuclear war.
These diverse applications all u e counterfactuals
to focus on "conceivable" cau es that could have
ea ily redirected the path-dependent logic of events
(cf. Hawthorn 1991; Fearon). In each ca e, the
inve tigator want to know what wa hi torically
po ible or impo sible within a circum cribed
DECEMBER 1996
period of time and set of relations among political
entities. To make this determination, they draw upon
combinations of: (a) in-depth case- pecific knowl-
edge of the key players, their beliefs and motives,
and the political-economic constraints under which
they worked; and (b) general knowledge (nomo-
thetic propositions) concerning cause-effect rela-
tions in human behavior and political-economic sys-
tems. Moreover, our case-study authors seem to
agree that counterfactual speculation should be con-
strained by some form of "minimal-rewrite-of-his-
tory" rule that instructs us to avoid counterfactuals
that require "undoing" many events.
The e idiographic counterfactuals are not idle
exercises in ocial-science fiction; they are a useful
corrective to imple deterministic forms of theory.
They compel us either to abandon determinism by
acknowledging the role of chance or to abandon
simplicity by acknowledging that factor outside the
purview of our deterministic models-viruses, kill-
ful or inept leadership, group dynamics, a well-
timed or ill-timed persuasive argument-can deci-
sively alter the course of events.
(2) Nomothetic theory-testing
Whereas idiographic inve tigators are intere ted
in conceivable causes that they can readily imagine
taking on different values within a pecific historical
context, nomothetic investigators usually how little
or no concern for the plausibility of switching the
hypothesized counterfactual antecedent on or off in
any given context. From this perspective, counter-
factuals are the inevitable logical by-products of
applying the hypothetico-deductive method to an
hi torical (nonexperimental) di cipline uch as
world politic . Whenever we combine a well-
defined Hempelian covering law (say, relating
money supply to inflation) with well-defined
antecedent conditions (the Russian economy in
January 1992), we can deduce specific counterfac-
tual conclusions (e.g., if the Russian central bank
had adopted this or that monetary policy, then,
ceteris paribus, inflation would have taken on this
or that value). Note that these counterfactuals are in
no way con trained by the hi torical plausibility of
the Rus ian central bank adopting one or another
policy. The counterfactual "predictions" follow from
the context-free logic of macroeconomic theory, not
1TEMsn9
from the context-bounded logic of what was p y-
chologically or politically po ible at that juncture
in Rus ian history. These nomothetic counterfactual
invoke miracle causes (Fearon). Even if our theory
requires us to posit an extremely implausible hypo-
thetical world, we do what our theory tells us to do.
The goal is not hi torical understanding; rather, it i
to pur ue the logical implication of a theoretical
framework.
(3) Idiographic-nomothetic synthesis
The ten ion between idiographic di ciplines (hi -
tory and area studies) and nomothetic di cipline
(general ocial science) is well known and need not
be belabored. A not uncommon way of proceeding
i to acknowledge that the idiographic and nomo-
thetic repre ent complementary "way of knowing"
that may in the fullness of time be conceptually
integrated, but do not hold your breath. It i worth
noting, however, that uch conceptual integration i
the nonn in natural hi tory, where there i much Ie
controversy than in the ocial cience over what
counts as a well-e tabli hed tati tical or theoretical
generalization.
Our favorite example of idiographic-nomothetic
ymbio i i the manner in which biological and
phy ical scienti ts have gone about deriving and
te ting rival hypothe e concerning the extinction of
dino aur . Perhap the mo t influential hypothe i i
the doom day-a teroid conjecture which, in counter-
factual fonn, runs a follow: "If a ix- to twelve-
mile-wide a teroid had truck the Earth at a velocity
of approximately 44,000 mile per hour 65 million
year ago, then a ho t of prediction would follow
(including the ize of the crater, the effect on the
atmo phere and climate, the di tribution of variou
trace elements in particular geological trata, antipo-
dal volcanism .... )." Thi line of work capture the
be t in both the idiographic and nomothetic tradi-
tion . Inve tigator focu on a well-defined "con-
ceivable" cau e (meteors and asteroid hit our planet
frequently over long tretche of time) but rely
heavily upon deductive theory, empirical ob erva-
tion , and computer imulation to as e the ound-
ne of the connecting principle that pennit u to
deduce empirical con equence uch as climate
change of ufficient magnitude to wipe out the
dino aur . Investigator al 0 try to tea e apart
So\lTEMS
te table prediction from rival hypothe e uch a
"endogenous volcanism alone is ufficient to
account not only for this specific mass extinction
but for nine of the ten other ma s extinctions in the
fo il record over two billion years." As a result of
this vigorous re earch program, many scientists
argue that a once highly peculative counterfactual
conjecture i now better viewed as a quite-probable
fact of natural history-yet another illu tration of
how blurry the boundary between factual and coun-
terfactual can be (Herrmann and Fi cherkeller).
There are no idiographic-nomothetic synthe e of
comparable cope and weep in world politics. But
there are some elegant demonstrations of how one
can weave together idiographic and nomothetic
objective -in particular, by the game theori t in
thi project. Bueno de Me quita and Weingast both
u e game-theoretic model to enhance our under-
tanding of particular historical epi odes (Philip
Augu tus ver u the Pope; medieval merchant
versus town ; federal bureaucrat ver us Congre ),
to identify intriguing cro -ca e regularitie , and to
make prediction about how behavior will change a
a lawful function of alteration in the probabilitie
or payoffs attached to cour e of action. In 0 doing,
the game theori t remind u that ocial cienti ts
are not the only creature roaming thi planet capa-
ble of thinking counterfactually. Policy maker do it
all the time, con tructing mental representation of
how other would re pond to one or another move
and making deci ion on the basis of tho e mental
model.
Game theorist integrate the idiographic and
nomothetic by applying" trong theory"-expected
utility maximization and criteria for identifying
equilibrium trategie -to complex hi torical itua-
tion that can then be understood by modeling the
option available to each ide and the expected pay-
off as ociated with all logically po ible combina-
tion of move . In judging what el e could pIau ibly
have happened, game theori ts u e nomothetic law
to an wer the idiographic que tion: How much hi -
tory do I have to rewrite to "undo" a particular
policy? If the counterfactual imply hift u from
one equilibrium path to another (as is po ible in
game with multiple equilibria) the counterfactual
doe no violence to the rational-actor axiom of the
underlying theory and may be quite acceptable. But
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 4
 if the counterfactual requires us to imagine a world
in which, for many reasons ( toehastic, p ychologi-
cal, and motivational), players stray from an equilib-
rium to a nonequilibrium path so that one or both
are worse off than they otherwi e could be, the
counterfactual is uspect. These ground rules for
judging the permissibility of po ible worlds are
commendably precise, albeit rather proeru tean.
There is no guarantee that hi tory i efficient in the
ense of quickly identifying equilibrium solution ;
hi tory may be better viewed as a "pathdependent
meander" (March and Olsen 1995) in which acci-
dents, fortuitous opportunitie , and miscalculation
often lead us into culs-de- ac from which it is diffi-
cult, even impo sible, to extricate ourselve .
(4) Pure thought experiments: logical proofs and
computer simulations
Our participants often use counterfactual to rein-
force a causal argument (be it an idiographic one
concerning the impact of a particular belief, person,
or policy, or a nomothetic one concerning causal
proees e that theoretically transcend context). But
they also sometimes u e counterfactuals to reveal
previously hidden contradictions or ambiguities in
the logical structure of the cau al arguments that
others have advanced.
Using counterfactuals to probe the logical com-
pleteness and internal coherence of claims is com-
monplace in mathematics, the phy ical ciences, and
economics.
We know of no thought experiments in world pol-
itic that are a deci ive in shaking theoretical con-
victions a tho e of Galileo and Einstein in physical
cience or of Ricardo, Coase, and Arrow in eco-
nomic theory. But we do see ome intere ting paral-
lel with the computer simulations of complex adap-
tive y tems that Cederman and Fearon di cus in
their re pective papers. One interpretation of these
imulations is that they highlight logical lacunae in
currently influential approaches to world politic .
The qualification "one interpretation" is critical; one
is not obliged to accept this interpretation for the
imple rea on that the simulation-based counterfac-
tuals lack the "if and only if" delivering power of
rigorous mathematical proofs in well-defined
axiomatic sy tems. For example, one could argue
that if balancing were inevitable in anarchic interna-
D EMBER 1996
L-______________________________________________________ _
tional ystems, then global hegemons would not
emerge in simulated worlds which, according to
Cederman, capture the key functional attributes of
anarchy within a neorealist framework. But becau e
hegemons do emerge, and emerge especially fre-
quently when defense-dominance prevail (an addi-
tional unwelcome surprise for some theorists), this
neorealist prediction may (not must) be wrong.
Cederman's simulations of artificial hi torie ugge t
that we may have just been lucky that an Alexander
or Hitler or Napoleon has not yet conquered the
world! Or, hifting to Fearon' paper, one could
argue that if long-term forecasting were po sible in
complex interdependent sy tems, then we could pre-
dict the long-term consequences of minor variations
in initial ettings for cellular automata. But because
we cannot make accurate long-term predictions even
in these imple, well-understood system , perhaps
long-term predictability al 0 breaks down in the
much more complex and poorly understood domain
of world politics. These simulation-driven counter-
factuals are not deductively decisive but they are
intellectually seductive. They nudge us gently
toward the conclusion that something is awry with
key assumptions that serve as starting points for
influential analyses of ecurity issues.
(5) Mental simulations of counterfactual worlds
Not all counterfactual simulation of po sible
world need run through the logical tructures of
computer programs; ome run through the p ycho-
logical structure of the human mind. The c1as ic
thought experiments of physici ts and economi t
iIIu trate the point in the ab tract, but it is pos ible
to make the ame point with example more directly
relevant to world politics. Asking people to imagine
and work through the detailed implication of hypo-
thetical worlds is a powerful educational and rhetor-
ical tool. Like their formal epistemological kin (log-
ical proofs and computer simulations), mental
imulations can highlight critical contradictions and
ambiguities in one's own intellectual position and
that of others (Thrner). As Kahneman (1995) point
out, mental simulations derive their persuasive force
and power to surprise by revealing previously unno-
ticed tensions between explicit, conscious beliefs
and implicit, unconscious ones. In this sense, people
discover aspects of themselves in mental simulations
I-reMsI8l
that would otherwi e have gone undi covered.
Six criteria for judging counterfactual arguments
There should now be no doubt that cholars use
counterfactual arguments for a variety of distinct,
albeit interrelated, purposes. It should also come as
no surpri e that there is no single answer to the
question of what counts as a good counterfactual
argument. The obvious rejoinder is, "Good for
what?" A counterfactual that is idiographically inci-
sive (advances our understanding of a particular
case) might be nomothetic ally banal (devoid of
interesting theoretical implications) and vice ver a.
A counterfactual grounded in an elegant computer
imulation might blow a gaping logical hole in an
influential theoretical argument but tell us precious
little about the actual world it uppo edly imulate.
A counterfactual that stimulate us to think of new
hypotheses might run afoul of the received wisdom
on what counts as a trivial or influential cause.
Given the diverse goals that people have in mind
when they advance counterfactual arguments-from
hypothesis generation to hypothe i te ting, from
historical under tanding to theory extension-our
participant convinced us that the que t for a one-
ize-fits-all epistemology i quixotic. Different
investigator will inevitably empha ize somewhat
different criteria in judging the legitimacy, piau ibil-
ity, and in ightfulne s of specific counterfactuals. It
would be a big mistake, however, to confu e epi -
temic plurali m (which we accept up to a point)
with an anything-goes ubjectivism (which we reject
and which would treat all counterfactual claim as
equally valid in their own way).
To avoid this fate, we advanced six normative cri-
teria for jUdging counterfactual arguments that
appear to command substantial cro s-di ciplinary
upport. To be ure, we do not expect univer al con-
ent; we do eek, however, to initiate a u tained
conversation within the research community on
what should count as a compelling counterfactual
argument-a conversation that will allow us to
explore the strengths and weaknes e of pecific
standards in the ab tract, in i olation from the domi-
nant debate of the moment (when the temptation to
play favorites i often irre i tible).
Our six criteria. which are more fully elaborated
in the volume, are as follow :
82\ITEMS
I. Clarity: Specify and circumscribe the independent
and dependent variables (the hypothe ized
antecedent and consequent).
2. Logical consistency or cotenability: Specify con-
necting principles that link the antecedent with the
consequent and that are cotenable with each other
and with the antecedent.
3. Historical consistency (minimal· rewrite rule):
Specify antecedents that require altering as few
"well-e tabli hed" hi torical facts as po ible.
4. Theoretical consistency: Articulate connecting
principles that are consi tent with "well-estab-
lished" theoretical generalizations relevant to the
hypothesized antecedent-consequent link.
S. Statistical consistency: Articulate connecting prin-
ciples that are consistent with "well-e tablished"
tatistical generalization relevant to the antecedent-
con equent link.
6. Projectability: Tease out testable implication of
the connecting principles and determine whether
those hypotheses are con i tent with additional
real-world observation .
Each standard we propose is open to orne inter-
pretation. Certain standards will provoke resistance
from tho e who denounce it as impossible
(Breslauer) or undesirable (Weber) or irrelevant
(Lebow and Stein). And orne tandards will clash
with each other. For example, con i tency with well-
established historical fact sometime conflict with
con istency with well-e tablished statistical or theo-
retical generalization . There are at pre ent no gen-
erally accepted principle for adjudicating uch di -
putes and we do not claim to offer a well-defined
"method of counterfactual argument" that re earchers
can deploy in an off-the-shelf fashion to olve any
and all problems.
Psychological perspectives on counterfactual
reasoning
There i a thriving re earch literature in both cog-
nitive psychology (01 on, Roese, and Diebert) and
linguistic (Turner) on how people actually generate
and judge counterfactual claim . The e normative
and psychological arguments hould not, of course,
be viewed as two self-contained, hermetically sealed
domain of di cour e. The p ychological literature
highlights a host of determinants of spontaneou
counterfactual rea oning that raise erious que tion
about the reliability and validity of counterfactual
thought experiment in world politie . Indeed, when
VOLUME SO. NUMBER 4
 the topic is thought experiment , it i hard to ay at
what point epi temology and methodology end and
p ychology begins.
From a broadly psychological per pective, it is
difficult to imagine avoiding erious bia in thought
experiment. Bias can creep into every tage of this
inherently ubjective proces , from the initial elec-
tion of antecedents (for "mental manipulation") to
the evaluation of connecting principle to the will-
ingne s to entertain counterargument and alterna-
tive cenarios. Bias appears inevitable, in part
becau e of the cognitive limitation and motiva-
tional inclinations of the thinker in who e mind the
thought experiment "run ," and in part becau e of
the extraordinary complexity and ambiguity of the
ta k. The population of pa t event from which one
can draw counterfactual antecedent i effectively
infinite, from the flapping of butterfly wing to the
" tructural polarity" of the international y tem. And
the task of a e sing what would have happened in
these hypothetical worlds (to which no one has
acce ) is obviou Iy highly ubjective.
Indeed, this project generated much evidence that
departure from normality or the tatus quo do
indeed attract especially vigorou counterfactual
peculation. The e departure can take diverse
form , including leader hip tran it ion (Bre lauer;
Herrmann and Fi cherkeller), revolution ,a a ina-
tions, and unusually inten e policy debate in which
the argument might easily have gone either way
(Khong; Lebow and Stein). Routine events fade into
the perceptual background and are rarely elected
for mental manipulation in thought experiments.
The simplifying strategies that people u e to
impo e cognitive order carry a price tag. The e
trategie can tilt the playing field (arguably
unfairly) in favor of certain counterfactuals over
other . Con ider the much di cu ed trilogy of judg-
mental heuri tic : anchoring, availability, and repre-
entativene s (Tversky and Kahneman 1974). The
anchoring heuristic could lead people to be too
quick to dismi scenario about hypothetical worlds
that deviate dramatically from the perceptual anchor
of the actual world with which they are already 0
familiar (making it difficult to appreciate the arbi-
trarine of the statu quo); the availability heuristic
could lead people to be too quick to embrace vivid,
ea i1y imaginable scenario that link all the compo-
nent event into a compelling tory (even though the
DECEMBER 1996
compound probability of all the narrative' compo-
nent taken together i vani hingly mal\); the repre-
entativene s heuristic could lead people to be too
low to concede pIau ibility to counterfactuals that
po it dramatic nonlinearitie in cau e-effect rela-
tion (making it difficult to appreciate that small
cause can sometimes produce big effects and vice
versa).
Perhaps the mo t lethal threat to the validity of
counterfactual thought experiments comes, however,
from theory-driven thinking. People often succumb
to the temptation of applying trong te ts to di so-
nant arguments and weak test to consonant one -a
temptation that may be e pecially pronounced when
the arguments invoke po ible world that no one
can ever enter and that can never be decisively di -
confirmed. The perceived pIau ibility of a counter-
factual hinges on how hard one looks for hortcom-
ing . Few counterfactual arguments will not have
points of vulnerability when we ubject their
antecedent and connecting principle to clo e
crutiny. A a re ult, we are much more likely to
recognize the collap e of cotenability in our oppo-
nents' arguments than in our own-a recurring
theme in everal papers.
The cognitive per pective al 0 leads u to be su -
piciou of people' capacity to tran cend (avoid con-
tamination by) outcome knowledge. As theory-
driven thinkers, people automatically try to as imilate
"what happened" to ome prior knowledge tructure
or chema that pecifie cau e-effect relationship
for event of that type (Fi chhoff 1975; Hawkins
and Ha tie 1990). The re ult i a deep, and arguably
unjustifiable, asymmetry between backward and for-
ward rea oning in time. On average, political
experts ee fewer pos ible past than they do po i-
ble futures (Tetlock 1994).
Motivational bia al 0 affects the haping and
reception of counterfactual arguments. People are
not, of course, ju t information-proce ing device ;
they are animated by wi he , hope , and fears that
hape their perception of what might or could or
hould have been. These emotional need can take
many, ometimes conflicting form (Tetlock and
Levi 1982), including:
(I) Need/or predictability and controllability. On
the one hand, people might allow their de ire to
believe that the world i fundamentally predictable
to rule out butterfly-effect counterfactual , which
ITEMs/83
imply that, no matter how hard we try, it is in princi-
ple impo ible to anticipate the future becau e 0
much hinge on small cau e that are beyond our
measurement gra p. On the other hand, people might
allow their de ire to believe that the world is control-
lable to rule out "inevitability" counterfactual , which
imply that, no matter what people do, our fates are
ultimately under the sway of powerful geopolitical,
macroeconomic, and technological force beyond
individual mastery.
(2) Need to avoid blame and to claim credit. On
the one hand, people might allow their de ire to avoid
blame for bad outcome to override their de ire for
predictability and control. In such case , people will
argue that they hould not be blamed for having
failed to fore ee the unforeseeable or having failed to
control the uncontrollable. On the other hand, people
might allow the de ire to claim credit for good out-
comes to enhance the pIau ibility of counterfactual
that take the form "had it not been for my uperior
predictive ability and courageou willingness to act
on the ba i of that in ight, thi good outcome would
never have occurred."
(3) Need/or consolation and inspiration. People
might u e "downward" counterfactual to comfort and
con ole themselve ("Thing may not be great, but
think how bad thing could have been if x or y had
occurred") or "upward" counterfactuals to in pire
greater effort ("Do not be complacent about the pre-
ent, think how good thing could have been and, by
implication, could yet become").
(4) Need/or cognitive consistency. The well-docu-
mented aver ion to imbalanced or dis onant cou-
pling of events hould motivate people to rule out
counterfactual that link bad cause (like Stalin) to
good outcome (like accelerated economic growth) or
that link good causes (like foreign aid) to bad out-
comes (like increased dependency and corruption of
recipient regime ). Pre sures for cognitive con i -
tency should also motivate people to defend "core
beliefs." For example, people who believe that "evil
is avoidable" hould be trongly motivated to gener-
ate counterfactuals that undo moral cata trophe . But
people of different political persuasion may define
moral catastrophe differently. For many con erva-
tive , the root of evil in Soviet hi tory goe traight
back to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 (which
should be a focal point of "if only" peculation); for
84\ITEMS
many ocial democrats, a noble socialist experiment
was corrupted by Stalini t tyranny (which hould be a
focal point of "if only" speculation). The e predic-
tions fare reasonably well against the evidence
(Bre lauer).
The li t is a lengthy and unpar imoniou one. Here
we imply want to add that there are alway two
levels at which motive may influence counterfactual
reasoning: private thought (affecting what we truly
believe) and public po turing (affecting what we ay
we believe and want to induce other to believe).
Mo t p ychologi t think that the motive Ii ted here
do indeed hape privately held plausibility judgment
of counterfactual , but few would deny that public
impre ion management i also at work (Tetlock and
Man tead I 985)-a judgment WIth which most of our
participant eem to concur. This project generated
ugge tive evidence that the clo er we get to pre crip-
tive policy debate , the greater the temptation to u e
counterfactual arguments as rhetorical tools to ju tify
either what one plan to do or ha already done
(Bre lauer; Lebow and Stein; Herrmann and
Fi cherkeller).
Conclu ion
There i omething about the topic of counterfac-
tual thought experiments in world politics that make
people feel a bit uneasy, even defen ive. To be blunt,
it feel like epi temological lumming. A social ci-
entist , we are all too familiar with the pre tige hier-
archy for method of drawing cau al inference. At the
top of the cientific pecking order is experimentation
in which we can manipulate hypothe ized causes and
then either hold everything el e con tant or random-
ize extraneou influence acro treatment condition.
Experimental control of this sort i obviou Iy out of
the que tion for mo t que tions in world politics. We
cannot rerun the tape of hi tory: splicing a Gorbachev
in or out, delaying or accelerating key technological
development, or tinkering with thi or that aspect of
macroeconomic policy.
Social cienti t often re ort to tati tical control
when experimentation i ethically or practically prob-
lematic. But tati tical arguments themselves often
re t on counterfactual a umptions (Fearon 1991) and
are, in any case, extraordinarily difficult to make for
many i ue that loom large in security debate . For
example, what kind of regre sion or time erie
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 4
 analyse will allow u to e timate the cau al contribu-
tion of nuclear weapons to the "long peace" between
the United States and Soviet Union between 1945
and 1991? There are simply too many confounding
variables-a problem we can alleviate but not elimi-
nate through judicious election of comparison case
and meticulous proces -tracing of deci ion-making
protocol.
So where does that leave u ? Probably till feeling
uneasy: we eem to be tuck with quite literally a
third-rate method, counterfactual thought experimen-
tation. The control group exi t-if indeed "exist" i
the right word-in the imaginations of political ana-
Iy t who are left with the daunting ta k of recon-
tmcting how history would have unfolded if cau al
variable of the pa t had taken on different value
from the ones they actually did. The whole exercise
tarts to look hopele ly ubjective, circular, and non-
falsifiable. What i to top u from imply inventing
counterfactual outcome that ju tify our political
bia e and predilections? There appear to be large
classes of question in the tudy of global conflict
and cooperation for which experimental control i out
of the que tion and tati tical control is of limited
u efulnes (assuming we can find a reasonable set of
comparison ca e and can reliably operationalize the
theoretical con truct ). These que tions are too
important to ignore, but apparently too difficult to
an wer in a fashion that command trans ideological
con en u .
Too often, the re pon e to the dilemma is to
embrace extreme solution (Strassfeld 1992): either
to reject categorically all counterfactual argument as
fanciful suppo ition , mere conjecture, and frivolous
figments (counterfactual dread) or to a ume confi-
dently that we know exactly what would have hap-
pened if we had gone down another path, sometimes
going 0 far as to project everal tep deep into
hypothetical cau al sequence (counterfactual
bravado). The former re pon e lead to futile effort
to exorcize counterfactual from hi torical inquiry
(Fi her 1970); the latter re pon e leads at be t to
error (we ignore the compounding of probabilities at
our peril) and at wor t to the full- cale politicization
of counterfactual argument (a advocate claim carte
blanche to write hypothetical historie that advance
their favorite causes). Thi project tried to articulate a
DECEMBER 1996
principled compromise between the e extreme . On
the one hand, we acknowledged that thought experi-
ments inevitably play key roles in the causal argu-
ments of any hi torical di cipline. On the other hand,
we acknowledged that thought experiments are often
uffused with error and bias. But, that aid, we did
not conclude that thing are hopele -that it is
impo sible to draw cau al Ie ons from history.
Rather, we concluded that di ciplined u e of counter-
factual -grounded in explicit tandards of evidence
and proof-can be enlightening in peeific historical,
theoretical, and policy ettings. And that, we u peet,
i the most important lesson of this project. •
References
Fearon. J.D. 1991. "CounterfactuaJ and Hypothe i Te ting in Political
Science." World Politics 43(2): 169-95.
Fischhoff. B. 1975. "Hind ight I NO( Equal to Fore ight: the Effect of
Oulcome Knowledge on Judgment under Uncertainly." Journal of
Exptri~ntal Psychology: Human Ptretpt;on and Puformanu 1(3):
288-99.
Fi her. D.H. 1970. Historians' Fal/aclts: Toward a Logic of Historical
Thought. New York: Harper &: Row.
Fogel. R. 1964. Railroads and "~rican Economic Growth: Essays in
Economttric History. Baltimore: John Hopkin University Pres .
GOUld. J.D. 1969. "Hypothetical Hi lOry." Economic History Rtvitw
22(2): 195-207.
Hawkins, S.A.• and R. H tie. 1990. "Hindsight": Biased Judgments of
Pasl Events after the Outcomes Are Known." Psychological Bullttin
107(3): 311-27.
Hawthorn. G. 1991. Plausiblt Worlds: Possibililty and Undustanding in
HIS/ory and tht Social Scitncts. New York: Cambridge University
Pre s.
Kahnemann, D. 1995. "Varieties of Counterfaclual Thinking." In NJ.
Roese and J.M. Olson. cds., What Might Havt Bun: Tht Social
Psychology ofCountttfactual ThinJcing, 375-96. Mahwah, New Jersey:
ErIbaum.
KahnelT\3nn, D.. and D.T. Miller. 19&6. "Norm Theory: Comparing
Reality 10 Its Alternatives." Psychological Rtvitw 93(2): 136-53.
March. J.G .• and J.P Olsen. 1995. Dtmocratic Govunanu. New York:
Free Press.
Skynns. B. 1980. Causal Ntctssity. New Haven: Yale Universily Pres .
SIras feld. R.N. 1993. "If ... : Counterfactuals in the Law." Gtorgt
Washington Law Rtvltw 60(2): 339-416.
Tedock. P.E. 1991. "Learning in U.S. and Soviet Foreign Policy: In
Search of an Elusive Concept." In G.W. Bre lauer and P.E. Tetlock.
cds., Ltaming in U.S. and Sovitt Fortign Policy. 20-61. Boulder:
'W Iview.
Tellock, P.E. 1994. "Good Judgment in World Politic: Who Gets Whal
RighI. When and Why?" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the
American P ychological Society. W hington, D.C.
Tetlock. P.E.• and A. Levi. 1982. "Attribulion Bi : On the
Inconclusive of the Cognition-MO(ivation Debale." Journal of
Expuimtntal Psychology 18: 68-88.
Tetlock. P.E.• and A.S.R. Manstead. 1985. "Impression Managemenl
versu Intrapsychic Explanations in Social P ychology: A Useful
DichO(omy?" Psychological Rtvitw 92(1): 59-77.
Tversky, A. and D. Kahneman. 1974. "Judgment Under Uncertainly:
Heuri tics and Bi ." Scitnct 185 (Sept. 27): 1124-31.
hEMs/85
Researching Sexuality
A new fellowship program
by Diane di Mauro *
Human exuality i inherently related to many of the
ocial and public health concern and challenge in
the United States today, including family planning
and contraceptive use, adole cent pregnancy, child
abu e, and HIVI AIDS-health cri e that are increa -
ingly understood within the context of poverty, family
trauma, ethnic di crimination, lack of educational
opportunitie , and inadequate health ervices. How-
ever, there i little recognition of how the e health
cri e are related to human exuality or how sexual
attitude , belief, and value act a antecedent and
contributing factors to the e problem . A more fully
developed under tanding of how early exual experi-
ence and ocialization patterns influence adult be-
havior -both po itively, a in one' ability to form
lasting, affectionate relation hip , and negatively, a
with coercive exual behavior -i e sential to plan-
ning and implementing activitie undertaken in the
name of public health and public policy.
For example, in chool and community-based pro-
gram and public education campaign , there exi t a
tremendou need for exuality information about
HIVI AIDS, adole cent pregnancy, exual coercion,
and family ju tice. A comprehen ive and effective
approach to addre ing the e public health concern
depend on knowing what constitute exual health,
what motivates exual behavior, how exual norm
are developed and u tained, and how the e evolve
over time. The e debate can be better informed if
data were broadly collected on a range of exuality
topic including the diver ity and di tribution of
exual values and behavior within different popula-
tion , ocietie, and culture ; the impact of exuality
on per onal and family relation hip ; and the pecific
and varied meanings of exuality for individuals. Yet
comprehen ive data on contemporary exual behav-
ior , attitude , and practice are not available, nor i it
under tood how they are haped by different ocietal,
cultural, and familial contexts.
• Diane di Mauro, a psychologi t. i the program director for the
Sexuality Research Fellow hip Program. funded by the Ford Foundation.
6\1TEMS
Insufficient and erratic funding coupled with a
narrowly de igned re earch agenda that has focu ed
primarily on a "ri k-factor approach" have contributed
to a paucity of re earch on exuality which, in tum,
ha u tained many of the ocial cri e evident in
the United State today. Steady funding i needed to
attract new tudent to thi field, to upport the work
of enior researchers, and expand the research agenda
to explore a greater range of topic and new approache
to current ocial and health i ue. In particular, there
i a need for ba ic, fundamental re earch that ad-
vance our conceptuaVtheoretical framework a well
a our under tanding of exuality-related behavior ,
attitude ,and tructure in population of varied cul-
tural and ocial backgrounds.
In respon e to thi need, a new fellow hip program
was initiated at the SSRC in September 1995: the
Sexuality Re earch Fellow hip Program (SRFP). The
only one of it kind in the country, the program pro-
vide di ertation and po tdoctoral upport for ocial
and behavioral re earch conducted in the United
States on sexuality topics and i ues in order to
trengthen the diverse di cipline conducting exual-
ity re earch. It eek to cultivate new generation of
cholars who will addre s the complexity and contex-
tual nature of human exuality, explore connection
acro di cipline , method, and i ue, and make
contribution that link the tudy of human exuality
to the intellectual trajectory of their own di cipline .
In achieving the e aim , it will help build con tituen-
cie among exuality re earcher that can publicly
promote the u efulne of uch re earch, encourage
collaboration, and improve re earch di emination in
order to inform important ocial and public health
i ues. In providing upport at both the di sertation
and po tdoctoral level, the SRFP eeks to ignifi-
cantly expand the knowledge base and to make a crit-
ical inve tment in the capacity to anticipate, confront,
and overcome public health challenge in the future.
The program focu e on four primary need in the
exuality re earch field:
(1) Expanding the range of re earch
Currently, the driving force behind re earch on
exuality is a preventive health agenda that empha-
izes sexuality as a ocial problem and behavioral
ri k. Here exuality i inve tigated as a ub-topic in
intervention re earch on adole cent teenage preg-
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 4
 nancy prevention, HIV/AIDS, or exual coercion.
While such re earch is needed, the ramifications of
a limited, preventive approach are significant. Fir t,
the re earch questions are focused primarily on iden-
tifying high-risk sexual behaviors and/or motivating
behavioral change; and econd, exuality i conceptu-
alized within a negative and problematic context.
A a result, exuality re earch who e ole objective
i to obviate social problem or di ease is typically
re tricted to answering "how many" rather than
"why"-and data produced by re earch attempting
to determine what percentage of a population engage
in which behavior provides few an wer concerning
the origin of the behavior and the context in which it
occurs.
A cursory look at the topics on sexuality under
investigation in the social cience literature illu trate
how a preventive approach ha narrowed the re earch
agenda to di ea e and ri k prevention: studie of
childhood exuality focu on exual abu e; re earch
on adolescent exuality i concerned with teenage
pregnancy prevention and the ri k of HIV tran mis-
ion; research on adult exuality focu e on contra-
ceptive use, HIV tran mi sion and prevention, and
exual coercion. Such a narrowly defined re earch
agenda cannot adequately examine pecific ocial and
cultural factors that drive human behaviors and atti-
tudes. While it is of critical importance to identify at-
risk popUlations, there is a dearth of information
about populations not con idered to be at ri k, with a
re ulting lack of ba eline data about exuality acro
the life span. For example, there is little information
on women' exuality after the reproductive year of
15 to 44.
In order to expand the re earch agenda, the SRFP
cast the wide t of nets in attracting applicant con-
ducting research on diverse topics. Open to all
re earchers in the social and behavioral sciences and
in the humanities, application are invited from a
wide range of disciplines including, but not limited
to, anthropology, demography, economic ,education,
ethics, hi tory, the humanities, cultural and women's
tudies, political cience, psychology, and ociology.
Applicants are encouraged to submit re earch propo -
als that eek to investigate a wide range of exuality
topics as conceptualized by their re pective di ci-
pline and conducted within the United State,
including but not limited to: new developmental para-
DECEMBER 1996
digms focu ing on exual health and ocialization
within the context of ociety and culture; comparative
and cross-cultural analy es of sexuality within the
United State; the diver ity and di tribution of exual
values, beliefs, and behaviors within different popula-
tions and their meanings for individual ; the link
between exuality and gender; exuality and di abil-
ity; exual orientation; exual coercion; the impact of
economic change or of other institutional influences,
uch as religion or the media, on exuality; and the
formation of ocial policy ba ed on cultural norm
regarding exuality.
(2) Mentoring and training
The lack of comprehensive training is a major
obstacle to a more cohesive and developed field of
multidi ciplinary research in sexuality. Training for
future generation of sexuality re earchers is there-
fore needed to integrate knowledge about human ex-
uality with kills in diverse research methodologie .
An important component of the Sexuality Re earch
Fellow hip Program is an application requirement
de igned to under core the need for comprehensive
methodological training. Only joint applications can
be ubmitted-from the dissertation applicant and
her/his re earch advisor, or in the ca e of po tdoctoral
applicant , from the applicant and her/his re earch
as ociate. This advi or/associate typically is an estab-
lished researcher with experti e in the re earch topic,
either in the applicant' own discipline or a related
field. The advi or/as ociate functions as a mentor
and is re pon ible for providing the fellow with con-
istent guidance and clo e upervision of the re earch
project a it evolves. Hopefully, in the future, in titu-
tional mechani m will supplement this experience
by facilitating the haring of training material within
and acros colleges and universities, and new tech-
nologie, uch as multi-media and computer interac-
tive seminars, will be explored within the context of
training.
A primary intention of the mentoring component
of the SRFP i for experienced researcher from dif-
ferent disciplines to provide ongoing training of
young cholars in various methodological approaches
to sexuality re earch topic ,and pecifically to under-
core the importance of both qualitative and quantita-
tive method . Briefly, the qualitative approach has
been used to obtain data about the nature and context
ITEMs/87
of sexual relationship and exuality over the Iife-
pan among ubgroups of the general population.
Qualitative re earch methods are well-suited to ex-
plore sexuality topics, ince they can identify and
record nuances of individual interpretation and cul-
tural meaning. In its examination of the experiential
and the subjective, qualitative research has the poten-
tial to generate important conclusions about the
meaning and significance of the acts to the actors.
Quantitative research can provide useful descrip-
tions of the epidemiological parameters of a given
behavior and of the di tribution of exual behaviors in
a given population. It can al 0 document changes in
behavior over time, help to evaluate the effectivene
of prevention programs, and make u e of a wide
range of statistical techniques for hypothesis-te ting
of the many interactive factors relating to human
exual behavior. Thus, the quantitative approach has
typically obtained infonnation about a range of sexual
behaviors and their frequencies that can be submitted
for stati tical analysis. The 1996 competition of the
SRFP awarded projects that utilized a variety of
methods: quantitative, qualitative, and combined
approache , as well as organizational, cognitive-experi-
mental, archival, and econdary analy i of existing
datasets.
(3) Promoting parity for basic and applied research
The 1993 report is ued by the National Commi sion
on AIDS acknowledges that ocial cience has failed
to properly differentiate basic behavioral and ocial
cience re earch from applied re earch and to recog-
nize basic re earch's potential value in generating
new insight for po ible interventions. In the area of
sexuality re earch, this failure ha tran lated into a
financial and logistical priority to upport interven-
tion re earch at the ex pen e of ba ic re earch, rein-
forcing a view of exuality a primarily problematic.
More ba ic re earch in exuality is needed to fill in
extensive gaps in knowledge, e pecially the ocial,
physiological, and p ychological aspect of human
sexuality in general, and exual behaviors in particu-
lar. The findings can then be deciphered and incorpo-
rated into effective intervention re earch and program
implementation. Moreover, basic research can repre-
ent a preliminary tage of re earch without the
expectation that it will yield immediate or foreseeable
application . The ocial and behavioral cience can
88\ITEMS
no longer promote intervention re earch that offers
only individual re olutions to ocial crise or generic
programs supposedly applicable to all population .
In tead, infonnation about the actual circum tances in
which, for example, contraception i u ed, in which
di eases are transmitted, and in which abuse occurs,
is greatly needed, together with a deeper under tand-
ing of the political, economic, and cultural frame-
works that infonn the meaning and con equences of
these individual interactions.
In addressing thi di parity, the SRFP encourages
proposal that represent:
• Basic research integrating an expanded defi-
it ion of sexuality and augmenting the knowl-
edge base of human sexuality.
• Relevant intervention research that i attuned
to community need and incorporates appro-
priate evaluative proce se. This kind of
re earch would an wer uch question as
"What are the important variables of behav-
ior predictors and what do they represent to
the member of a given community?"
• A more accepting and positive depiction of
exuality to off et the current negative
research emphasis which contributes to inef-
fective interventions.
The SRFP will provide a supportive environment
for more theoretical re earch that will advance the
theories of human motivation and explore the link
between ocial tructure and personal agency. New
theoretical models re ulting from uch re earch
would greatly contribute to future cycles of both
ba ic and intervention research, as well to the suc-
ce sful implementation of preventive trategies.
(4) Dissemination
A frequent grievance expre ed by both practition-
er and re earcher is that di emination of re earch
finding to tho e who need thern-policymaker , ad-
vocates, and community repre entative -i highly
inadequate. In tum, the concern of the e group are
eldom integrated into the re earch agenda, making
it difficult to obtain the infonnation needed to effec-
tively plan public policy and implement relevant
program.
The requirement that all applicants provide a com-
VOLUME 50. NUMBER 4
 prehensive outreach /dissemination plan is an impor-
tant mechanism designed to promote more useful
research dissemination and to more consistently
engage others, both within and outside of the research
community. The applicant is expected to describe at
length his/her plans for the dis emination of both pre-
liminary and final research findings in the form of
publications and presentations at the home institution
or professional gatherings. In this way, the fellow
can pre ent the work in progress and form productive
alliances with other fellows and senior researchers.
With regard to outreach, the applicant is also ex-
pected to describe planned activitie in which schol-
ars and other professionals will be more actively
"engaged" on exuality and research i ue. Some
ideas can include organizing an informal seminar
erie , more formal presentations highlighting the
re earch or the work of an invited outside guest
speaker, or other events designed to involve the com-
munity in discussions of sexuality-related i sues.
This dissemination/outreach component has consider-
able potential for promoting the links between exual-
ity re earch and ocial and public health policy and
will more consistently expo e the fellow to the idea
that exuality plays an important role in public policy.
(5) Future implications
The first SRFP competition in 1996 drew approxi-
mately 70 application for dis ertation and po tdoc-
toral support from a range of discipline areas, includ-
ing ociology, anthropology, psychology, political
cience, cultural tudies, hi tory, human sexuality,
women's tudie, social network, demography, his-
tory of religion, film, Engli h, ociomedical cience,
American studie , and health studie . The topics
awarded included childhood exual abuse, trans exu-
ality, sexual ocialization, pornography, exual iden-
tity/orientation, immigration and the political econ-
omy of identity, pro titution, HIV/AIDS, and ado-
Ie cent sexuality.
If the objectives of the SRFP are achieved, it will
have ucces fully encouraged greater methodological
diversity and innovation, more relevant re earch di -
emination, and the con truction of new and u eful
theoretical model of exual knowledge. With their
work legitimated through consi tent and sufficient
upport, sexuality re earchers repre enting a ignifi-
cant constituency will be able to erve as advocates
DECEMBER 1996
for the importance of sexuality as a substantive area
of inquiry, raise awareness within and outside the
research community on the centrality of sexuality
research, and provide greater public visibility for
important sexuality issues. Furthermore, they will be
promoting a new view of exuality, one that no longer
considers it to be inherently problematic. This new
view will approach exuality as a important arena of
human development that is culturally, socially, and
historically mediated. Human sexuality will no longer
be viewed a a series of individual, episodic behav-
iors linked to pecific acts and the physical body, but
will be tudied as a range of sexual activities and nor-
mative core value , who e meaning and significance
change over time as they are communicated, internal-
ized, and acted upon by the individual. The future
research agenda will begin to address the e kinds of
questions:
• How is exuality defined and what doe it
signify or repre ent over the life span for
individuals in different cultures and chang-
ing ocial role (i.e., as children learning
about the body; a women making contra-
ceptive decisions; as men communicating
with a partner; and as parents and caretakers
communicating messages about exuality to
the next generation)?
• What is the effect of aging on sexuality in dif-
ferent cultures? How is sexuality experi-
enced as people age? How is exual health
maintained on a long-term ba is?
• What are the ramifications of phy ical and
mental di ability on the development of
exual behavior and values and on exual
phy iology?
• Within any given culture, what i the impact
of familial and ocietal exual norm on the
acquisition of specific exual behaviors?
How do the e norms, when enacted as prac-
tice , make individual vulnerable to abu e
or ri ky exual practice as they mature?
• Within any given culture, what i the role of
different ocial in titution -including reli-
gious in titutions, chools, and the media-in
e tablishing and maintaining exual norm ,
value , attitude , and behaviors?
ITEMsl89
 • What are the impact and effects of drug ,
alcohol, and pharmaceutical on exual
behaviors?
• What individual behaviors, abilities, attrib-
utes, motivations, and practices contribute to
exual health? What constitutes a sexually
healthy ociety?
Sexuality research will provide important contribu-
tions to the effective planning and implementing of
public health promotion and public policy, and will
have a significant impact in providing crucial answers
to ocial challenges. It will no longer be considered
the ource of problem and ri ks, but as an arena of
well-being and human potential. •

The 1996 JSPS Postdoctoral Fellowship Program for Recent Ph.D.'s

Sponsored by: The Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
The JSPS Po tdoctoral Fellowship Program for Recent Ph.D.' seek to provide promi ing and highly qualified researchers in the
social science and humanitie with the opportunity to conduct research with leading universitie and other research in titution in
Japan. The Social Science Research Council serve a the nominating authority for U.S.-based applicants in the social sciences and
humanitie . Researchers in the field of medicine hould contact the Fogarty International Center at The National In titute of Health
for further infonnation. Re earcher in the phy ical cience hould contact the National Science Foundation.
Although the competition has no topical boundarie , propo al that advance research in the following area will be particularly
welcome:
Science and Technology tudies: Including but not limited to topic in: philo ophy of science, hi tory of science, science education,
comparative research and development trategie, public/private cooperation in research, science and technology policie .

Economics, Busin , and Trade tudies: Including but not limited to topic in: micro-economic , macro-economics. comparative
economics, international economic, banking and finance, organizational behavior, indu trial relation, human re urce management.
international trade law and policy.

Environmental tudie: Including but not limited to topic in: u tainable development, biodiver ity. global climate change, compar-
ative environmental policies, tudie of the human dimen ion of environmental change.

Period or FeUow hip: 12 to 24 month .

Terms or Award: Round-trip airfare; in urance coverage for accident and iIIne s; monthly tipend ofY270,OOO; settling in allowance
ofY200,OOO; monthly housing allowance ofY I 00,000; monthly family allowance ofY50,OOO; eligibility for up to an additional
Y 1,500.000 annually for research expense .

Eligibility: U.S. citizen or permanent re ident . A doctoral degree received ix years or les prior to the effective date of the fellow-
hip. Proof of an affiliation with an eligible ho t re earch in titution in Japan.

Application Deadline: November 15. 1996. For complete Ii t of eligible ho t research in titutions contact:

J PS Postdoctoral FeUow hip ror Recent Pb.D.'s

Social Science Research Council
810 Seventh Avenue
New York, NY 10019
Telephone: 212-377-2700
Fax: 212-377-2727

9O\lTEMS VOLUME 50, NUMBER 4

 Presidential Items
International Dissertation Field Research: A New Fellowship Program
Recent "Pre idential Item " have de cribed the reor-
ganization of the joint ACLS· and SSRC interna-
tional program. The March 1996 i ue of Items pro-
vided a broad argument for re tructuring in the
context of a changed world, while the June/September
1996 i ue defined the principle of area-based knowl-
edge and pre ented the architecture for the jointly
admini tered international re earch and training pro-
gram of the Council .
The e note de cribe the companion fellow hip
program, the International Oi sertation Field Re-
earch Fellow hip (IDRF). The IDRF represents a
ignificant departure from previou ACLS-SSRC di -
ertation field re earch competition that were area-
focu ed and admini tered under the joint area com-
mittee tructure. The IORF program con olidates the
bulk of the e competition into a ingle program. We
note, however, that the Council continue to manage
a variety of predoctoral, doctoral, and po tdoctoral
fellow hip and training program, orne of which are
targeted to pecific areas of the world. For further
information about the e program , please contact the
SSRC and ACLS, or con ult the SSRC web page
(http://www. rc.org).
Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and
in keeping with the larger aim of the international
program reorganization, the IORF promote re earch
that i en itive to hi torical and cultural specificities
while al 0 being engaged in tudie that link local
phenomena with global and tran national proce e.
Field re earch i the key principle. Field re earch at
the di ertation level i a nece ary part of graduate
training if a reasonable number of top-ranked human-
i t and ocial cienti t are to tart their career with
ub tantial knowledge about orne part of the world
outside the United State. The IDRF offer upport
to approximately 50 di ertation candidates enrolled
in U.S. doctoral program, who ere earch require
an extended period of fieldwork abroad.
Field re earch or, more broadly, area-ba ed knowl-
edge, i a nece ary but not ufficient condition for
the kind of cholar hip that i to be advanced through
• American Council of Learned Soci II
D EMBER 1996
the IDRF program. The fellow hip i de igned to
en ure that awardee develop the capacity for cumula-
tion, aggregation, and com pari on. The ability to iden-
tify and extend the comparative implications of partic-
ular re earch agenda i of pecial ignificance. For
the purpo e of thi program, the comparative dimen-
ion i defined broadly a that which can speak to, or i
relevant to, more than one locality and/or time period.
In orne projects it will mean a recognition of the value
of te ting one's theorie and ca e again t another con-
text. In other in tance it will lead to field research in
more than one locality-provided that the re earcher i
qualified to do thi . It can al 0 mean field re earch on
a ingle ite that incorporate a econd case through
the u e of econdary literature, or explicit compari on
acro in titution , time period , and/or proce e. One
of the major aim of the fellows' work hop -an inte-
gral component of the program-will be to facilitate
comparative analy i and to help fellow engage in
i ue beyond their doctoral re earch.
For many year SSRC and ACLS fellow hip pro-
gram drew a harp di tinction between their "dome -
tic" and "international" program . The new program
blurs that di tinction; it hold that the United State i
no Ie caught up in wider global and tran national
proce e than any other country or region. Propo al
that treat the U.S. in a comparative context are eligible,
provided they require field re earch out ide the United
State . At the arne time, propo al that deal with
place that once fell out ide the joint area committee
tructure (Au tralia, New Zealand, the Pacific I land ,
and 0 on) are eligible a well. Indeed, one of the
major aim of the program i to help cholar reca t
our conceptual and geographical mapping of the
world. and to develop new kind of regional and cro -
regional compari on that challenge, tran cend, or
elide the areal configuration that guided po twar
cholar hip.
Many fellowship competition -including orne
pon ored by the ACLS and the SSRC-are themati-
cally bounded. In uch competition the purpo e i to
enlarge the number of cholar who work on i ue of,
for example, immigration, human exuality, or environ-
mental economics. There i obviou Iy an important
ITEMs/91
role for such competitions. But applications to the
IDRF program are not restricted by theme. The
program seeks in tead to enhance the capacity of
promising junior scholars to engage in theoretically-
sophisticated field-based research regardless of the
substantive topic. One of the trengths of an open
competition is that it is likely to provide support to
some applicants who are addressing issues of conse-
quence that have not yet attracted sufficient funder
interest (i.e., that may be "ahead of their times").
Just as the program is not bounded with reference
to theme, it is similarly not restricted in terms of his-
torical time frame. While it i expected that mo t of
the fellowships will be awarded to cholars working
on the modern and contemporary world (defined here
as the mid-17th century onwards), propo als that
address premodern eras will be welcome, e pecially
propo als that articulate meaningful linkages between
earlier epochs and issues facing the modern and con-
temporary world. By the arne token, successful
applicants will demonstrate an understanding that
contemporary issues-however urgently topical-are
rooted in the hi tories and cultures of specific places.
The e considerations sugge t the kind of applicant
expected to be succe sful in the competition. If the
program reaches its ambitiou goals, we would
expect that each fellow would benefit by reading the
dis ertations of every other fellow. We view the fel-
lows as a cohort in this important en e. While they
will have cho en different topics and will be conduct-
ing field re earch in a diver ity of places, there i a
family re emblance in the approach adopted. By
reading each other's work fellow can learn how col-
league working in different areas or from different
disciplines manage to link local phenomena to
broader trends and to incorporate a comparative and
historical per pective.
The criteria guiding the IDRF program are part of
the more inclu ive principle that have defined the
new SSRC and ACLS international program, an effort
that takes its orientation from the sweeping changes
generated by proce e of global integration and frag-
mentation, and from equally fundamental changes in
92\1TEMS
the ways in which knowledge about such processes
is produced and disseminated. The e changes require
that we reconfigure the forms of knowledge that
emerge from the study of specific places and histori-
cal periods. In particular, we need to define and legiti-
mate a fresh rationale for field-based scholarship, one
that is consistent with changed world conditions.
Higher education-not only in the United States,
but in many other parts of the world-is moving
away from the traditional rationale for area studies,
i.e., an emphasis on understanding the foreign
"other" and on en uring geographic coverage of vari-
ous regions and areas of the world. The re ulting
hift in emphases has led to sharp debates on many
campuse . Univer ity administrators are expected to
"choo e" between protecting the area tudy tradition,
both in terms of its characteristic intellectual ap-
proaches and its organizational form , and the
counter-position that it is time to move away from
area studies, on the a sumption that international
research should know no boundaries. Thi latter
globalist perspective is often buttressed by a ertions
that international cholarship should be organized
around thematic topics, uch as u tainable develop-
ment or peace and ecurity.
The Councils have argued that this i a false
choice, believing-as the IDRF program intends to
demon trate-that area knowledge makes en e of
global phenomena. ju t as global trend hape and
structure what occurs in pecific place . Through its
support for intensive field re earch, the IDRF pro-
vides a foundation for the ongoing development of
area-based knowledge. At the arne time, through its
election criteria and fellows' work hop , the pro-
gram encourages the be t graduate tudent to think
beyond pecific area and di ciplinary concern and to
draw out the comparative and interdi ciplinary impli-
cations of their re earch. The re pon e received to
date, particularly from pro pective applicants and
their advisor, ugge t that a very large and diver e
array of scholars is eager to participate in a program
of this kind. (A formal announcement of the IDRF
program appears on the oppo ite page.) •
-Kenneth Prewitt
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 4
 SSRClACLS International Dissertation Field Research Fellowships (IDRF)
The Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societie announce a major new initiative funded by the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in upport of field research at the di ertation level. The IDRF provide upport for ocial cienti t
and humani ts to conduct di sertation field re earch in all areas and region of the world. The program will award up to 50 fellow-
hip in 1997. The fellow hip will enable doctoral candidates to use their knowledge of di tinctive area. culture. languages.
economies. politi • and hi torical experience. in combination with their di. ciplinary training. to addre i ue that tran. cend their
discipline or area pecialization.
Fellow will al 0 participate in multidisciplinary workshop upon completion of field research. Work hop will be tailored to fellow'
research agendas and addre theme that resonate acro s culture and region. They are intended to facilitate network and cro -di-
ciplinary exchang • and to help fellow engage in i ues beyond their doctoral research.
Program Scope: The IDRF help promi ing scholars to launch their career with ub tantive knowledge about societie • culture •
economie • and/or politie out ide the United State. It promotes cholarship that treat place and setting in relation to global and
tran national phenomena as well a particular hi torie and culture . The program operates on the premi e that societie and culture •
from i olated village to entire world region. are caught up in proce se that link them to event • whic~hough geographically dis-
tant-are culturally. economically. trategically. or ecologically quite near. To learn m re about value or ocial condition in a partic-
ular area. then. mean to learn more about how that area i ituated in event and proce se going on out ide it. borders. but not
thereby out ide its culture or economy or ecology. At the arne time. the obverse hold. An integrated understanding of tran national
and global phenomena (pa t and pre ent) cannot be acquired with ut referen e to the numerou pecific pIa e which give hape and
~ub tance to those larger proce e. The program particularly eeks to promote holarship that i relevant to more than one locality
and/or time period. Thi may mean applying one's theories and case again t other contexts; field research in more than one location;
field re earch on a single ite that incorporates a econd case through use of econdary literature; or explicit compari on acro in titu-
tions. time periods. and proces e .
Criteria for election: Applicant will be se sed in term of the probability that their propo. ed re earch can inform debate that go
beyond the pecific topic and place cho en for tudy. Application hould exhibit a grounding in the m thod and theorie of a particu-
lar discipline or ubdi cipline. but mu tal 0 be of demon trable cro -disciplinary intere t. Applicati n hould pecify why an
extended period of field-ba ed research i critical to the ucces ful completion of the propo ed doctoral di .. ertation. The research
de ign of propo al hould be reali tic in scope. clearly formulated. and re pon ive to theoretical and methodological concern .
Applicants hould provid evidence of having attained an appropriate level of training and kill to undertake the propo. ed field
research. including evidence of a degree of language fluency adequate to complete the project.
Eligibility and Terms: The program i open to full-time graduate tudent in the ocial ien e and humanitie -regardle of citi-
zen hip--enrolled in doctoral program in the United State. The program invite propo al for field research on all areas or region
of the world. as well a for research that i comparative. cro -regional. and/or cro -cultural. Propo al that identify the United State
as a ca e for comparative inquiry are welcome; however. propo al that require no field re earch outside the United States are not eli-
gible. There are no re triction with regard to theme or hi torical time-frame. Applicant mu t have completed all Ph.D. requirement
except the fieldwork component by the time the fellow hip begin. Standard fellow hip will provide upport for nine month in the
field. plu travel expen • but they will rarely exceed $15.000. In orne case • the candidate may propose Ie than nine month of
fieldwork. but no award will be given for Ie than ix month .
Deadline for Receipt of Application: December 2, 1996
An application form hould be reque ted well before the ubmi ion deadline. Application sent by fax or received after the deadline
will not be accepted. All material mu t be typed or computer-printed according to the in truction on the application. A digital copy
of the application form will be available on the SSRC web ite and may be downloaded. but application mu t be ubmitted by mail
together with the propo al. reference • and tran cript .
Announcement of Award : May 1997
For Further Information and Application Material
International Di sertation Field Re earch Fellow hip Program (IDRF)
Social Science Re rch Council
IO Seventh Avenue
ewYork. NY 10019

(212) 377-2700 ttleplwne (212) 377-2727 fax idrf rc.org e-mail http://www. rc.org web

DECEMBER 1996 ITEMs/93

A Requiem for P&P
Notes on the Council's late Committee on
Problems and Policy
by David L Sills·
A headline in a recent i sue of Items, "Di olution of
Committee on Problem and Policy (P&P),"I mu t
have startled many readers. P&P had been the core
of the Council's tructure eemingly forever. The
headline reminded me of a remark made in an early
terrori m movie (was it Red October?): When a
ecurity officer announced to a colleague that the
Superbowl might have to be canceled becau e of a
terrori t threat, hi re ponse was, "You can't cancel
the Superbowl! That's like canceling Chri tmas!"
It eems to me that the word "di olution" ound
a little too final, a little too executional, if you will.
Perhap orne words uch as "P&P will be combined
with (or ab orbed by) the board" might have been
more appropriate. (In a draft of one of his annual-
report -of the-president during hi earlier tenure a
head of the SSRC, Kenneth Prewitt referred to "the
Committee on Problem and Policy, affectionately
known as P&P." I reminded him at the time that there
were a few hundred di appointed propo al writers in
the land who e affectionate feeling might be tem-
pered, and he reluctantly changed the warm word
"affectionately" into the neutral word "familiarly."
With such cautious and tiny editorial intervention ,
the Engli h language is slowly 10 ing its capacity to
invoke awe, wonder, and envy throughout the world.)
Well, the olid truth i that Chri tmas has been can-
celed at the Council. P&P has been di charged, and
here i the only obituary of it that may ever appear.
In what some till refer to as "the good old day "
before World War II, the Council had a mall taff
and wa very much a voluntary as ociation of unpaid
cholar .2 Given the technology of the day, frequent
• David L. Sill , a sociologi t, was on the Council wff from 1973 to
1988; he i now Executive A sociate Emerilu . He was a frequenl contrib-
ulor 10 It~ms and also served as its editor.
I June- September 1996, page 40.
2 The Council didn 'l have a laried pre idenl during i firsl 25 years.
In 194 , the title of the sociologist Donald Young- who had been a
member of the taff since 1932- w changed from Executive Director to
President.
94\ITEMS
con ultation among phy ically- eparated profes or
was impo ible, 0 in 1925 a Committee on Problem
and Policy was created to oversee the intellectual
program of the Council between infrequent board
meetings}
P&P met frequently in its early years, as often as
once a month; when I joined the taff in 1973, it was
till meeting quarterly. For many years, from the
1920 to the early 1930 , it al 0 met at a 100day, out-
of-town meeting back-to-back with the annual board
meeting and the annual "Summer Conference ."
The fir t six of the e ummer meetings were held in
Hanover, New Hamp hire. Sub equently, the confer-
ence were held in uch plendid re ort communities
as Nantucket I land; Franconia, New Hampshire; and
Lake George, New York. The entire New York taff of
the Council al 0 attended, 0 in effect the Council
itself moved out of town for this period. Eventually,
Sky Top in the Poconos turned out to be judged the
ideal pot, and the annual meetings were held there
for three decade .4
The rea on for the timing and the pattern of
Council meetings in the prewar years are not hard to
recon truct. The Council' New York office were not
air-conditioned; profe ors in tho e days had far
fewer opportunitie to leave their campu e than they
have today; the virtual nonexi tence of air travel
meant that ocial cientists in California could not
casually come to one-day meetings in New York; and
the small ize of the Council's taff required that
more actual work be done by the unpaid profe or.
In addition, the Council was the only nationwide
organization dedicated to research in the ocial ci-
ence and a ignificant fraction of all re earch-minded
profe ors attended the e annual meetings-either as
Council members or as gue t .
The need for a change in the Council's governing
tructure in the mid-I 970 ,however, temmed not
from the new technologie of air travel, air condition-
ing, telephone conference call , faxe , and the Internet,
J Elbridge Sibley, Social Sc'~nu R~s~arch Council: T~ First Fifty
Y~ar.s (New Yort: Social Science Research Council, 1974), page 9. Thi
hi tory i an excellent review of "the good old day " and a valuable ref-
erence source for names, dates, even ,publications, and accompJishmen .
4 (David L Sill ), "50th Anniversary of the 1930 Hanover Conference:
The Letters of Robert Redfield to His Wife Keep the Pasl Alive." It~ms,
June 19 0, page 35.
VOt.UME 50, NUMBER 4
but from financial necessity. In the 1920 and 1930 ,
core upport of the Council's admini tration was pro-
vided by variou Rockefeller philanthropies. A young
p ychologi t named Beardsley Ruml, who directed
the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Fund, can
fairly be aid to have u ed the Council as omething
like the re earch ann of hi foundation-an arrange-
ment quite satisfactory to both organizations and only
recently challenged by "new hi tori an ," who use thi
relationship to upport their claim that the Council
wa the tool of nefariou capitali m.S
A the years pas ed, core upport from foundations
diminished, and overhead from grant was increas-
ingly needed to support the board and other admini -
trative functions. Since its early year , the Council's
board always had three member from each of the
even major social cience a ociations, plu nine at-
large members. In 1975, Pre ident Eleanor B. Sheldon
propo ed that the size of the board be reduced by
having only one member from each a ociation, thus
ubstantially reducing airfare, hotel, and other travel
ex pen es. The propo al wa approved after a brief but
occasionally heated debate: I remember the Yale
political cientist Charle E. Lindblom making an
impas ioned plea that a large board and a large
annual meeting (attended by many di tingui hed
guests) should be maintained as a public demon tra-
tion of the importance of the Council specifically
and of the ocial sciences in general. But Eleanor
Sheldon's per uasivene and firmne won the day,
and over a three-year period the size of the board was
reduced from 30 to 17 member .
From 1975 until 1996, all member of the board
were a signed either to the Executive Committee or
to P&P, and P&P oon met only at the time of the
biannual board meetings, thu 10 ing much of its di -
tinctive function of being an independent-of-the-board
over eer of the Council's ub tantive program. It will
urpri e no student of organizational dynamic to
learn that it took 21 year for the duplication and con-
fu ion re utting from this new tructure to be elimi-
S See, for example, Donald Fisher, Fundam~ntal D~v~/opm~nt olth~
Social Sci~nc~.r: Rocuf~lItr Philanthropy and tht Socwl Scitnct
Rutarch Council (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Pre ,1993). For a
cntique of the Fi her book, see David L. Feathennan, "SSRC, Then and
Now: A Commentary on a Recent Historical Analy is," Ittms, March
1994, page 13-22.
DECEMBER 1996
nated by eliminating P&P.
One important tructural feature of P&P mu t be
noted: its membership has always included cholars
who are not director of the Council. The implicit
function of the e outside-the-organization members
has been to represent the intellectual intere t of the
ocial cience community as a whole, rather than
imply the intere t of the board or of the seven pro-
fe ional a ociation. Now that P&P has been di -
charged, the board will erve as the Council' forum
for accepting or rejecting propo ed projects, and it
eems to me that special attention mu t be given to
electing board members-at-Iarge who can authorita-
tively repre ent the ocial cience community in thi
way.
What did P&P accompli h in its 70 years of exis-
tence? Obviou ly a great deal. The in cription that Sir
Chri topher Wren's on wrote for his father's tomb in
St. Paul's Cathedral a serts (in Latin), "If you would
ee the man's monument, look around." Much the
arne can be aid of P&P and the Council' intellec-
tual achievement .
P&P wa alway able to attract orne of the fine t
social cienti t of the time. The ro ter of its chair-
men over this 70-year period read like a "who's
who" of the ocial ciences. It include the econo-
mi tAlbert Ree and Jo eph J. Spengler; the
political cienti t V. O. Key, Jr. and Sidney Verba;
the p ychologi t Gardner Lindzey and Robert S.
Woodworth; the ociologi ts E. W. Burges and
William G. Ogburn; and the statistician Burton H.
Singer and S. S. Wilks. A ro ter of its member i
equally impre ive: the anthropologi t Clifford
Geertz, the economist Frank H. Knight, the historian
C. Vann Woodward, the political cienti t Gabriel
Almond, the p ychologi t Otto Klineberg, the ociol-
ogi t Neil J. Smel er, and the statistician Frederick
Mo teller have all erved on P&P.
P&P created and approved the policies and pro-
grams that are the Council's distinctive achieve-
ment-they are too numerou and too well-known to
Items reader to be Ii ted here. Its collective judgment
kept a great many foolish or unwi e projects from
getting tarted, and it di charged numerous commit-
tee that had outlived their u efulnes .
Of course P&P made mistakes over the years; no
committee can always accurately foreca t the future
performance of other . Weak project have ometimes
ITEMsJ95
been approved, and promising projects have ome-
times been rejected. One mi take of thi kind, in my
opinion, was to turn down a 1955 Ford Foundation
request that the Council pon or a new encyclopedia
of the ocial ciences that it re earch had concluded
was needed. Ultimately, Jeremiah Kaplan, the innova-
tive pre ident of the Macmillan Company, decided to
publi h the encyclopedia without any foundation
Upport.6
Through its actions, P&P encouraged and legiti-
mated a number of important subfield in the ocial
cience : p ycholingui tics, culture and per onality
re earch, area tudie, longitudinal tudie, and ocial
indicator analysi are all example. It al 0 created
one of the mo t frequently u ed adjective in the
ocial cience: "interdi ciplinary." The hi tory of
this adjective i fa cinating and complex.7 Since it
erve a a metaphor for P&P' intellectual accom-
pli hment , it i appropriate to recount it here.
The tory begin with the planning of a Festschrift
for Robert Burchfield, the editor of the Oxford English
Dictionary. One of the glories of thi remarkable
multivolume dictionary i that it eek to report the
fir t appearance in print of every new word. Roberta
Frank of the Centre for Medieval Studie , Univer ity
of Toronto, decided to examine the hi tory of "inter-
di ciplinary" for her paper. Since he had come to
believe that the Council wa omehow involved in
this hi tory, she enlisted my help.
A far as we could di cover, the word was first
used orally by the Columbia Univer ity p ychologi t
Robert S. Woodworth on the evening of August 30,
1926, at one of the Council's Hanover meetings.
(Woodworth was then a member of P&P; in 1931-32,
he served as the unpaid pre ident of the Council.)
6 The In/tma/ional £ncyclo~dia of/he Soc/OI Scitncts, publi hed in
17 volumes by Macmillan in 1968, turned out to be both a commercial
and an intellectual uccess; 40,000 sets were sold worldwide in the tim
few years. In the early 1960s, many of us thought that, because of the new
technologies of electronic data orage and retrieval, it would be the I
of the printed social science encyclopedi ,but in 1996 there are igns
that a completely new printed multivolume encyclopedia of the social sci-
ences may be produced before long. It will of course be available both on
the helf d on line.
7 See David L Sill , "A Note on the Origin of 'Interdisciplinary:"
I/tms, March 1986, pages 17- 18, and Roberta Frank, " 'Interdisciplinary' :
The First Half Century," page 91-101 in E. G. Stanley and T. F. HoOO,
editors, Words: For Robu/ Burchfitld's Sixty·fifth Bir/hday (D.S. Brewer,
19 8).
96\1TEMS
The word wa undoubtedly u ed orally by P&P
and the Council taff in the years following Robert
Woodworth' u age in 1926, but there is no evidence
of the word appearing in print until 1933. Although
the minutes and files of the American Council of
Learned Societie and the National Academy of
Science both reveal many example of the idea
behind "interdi ciplinary," diligent re earch has not
found a single example of the word itself being used.
It wa n't until 1933, when the Council advertised its
offer of fellow hips in the American Journal of
Sociology, u ing the word "interdisciplinary" as an
attraction, that the word fir t appeared in print. (The
new Oxford English Dictionary, however, till reports
a 1937 appearance in a imilar Council adverti ement
a the fir t u e.)
Although the word "interdisciplinary" may have
been fir t used orally in 1926 and first printed in
1933, the underlying idea was expre ed by many
cholars in the years immediately following World
War I and everal organization were created to fur-
ther interdisciplinarity. The American Council of
Learned Societie was founded in 1919, as was the
New School for Social Re earch. In 1923, a plan-
ning meeting wa held that led to the 15-volume
Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (publi hed
between 1930 and 1935), and in that arne year rep-
re entatives of four major social cience a ociations
founded the Social Science Research Council. If you
read the founding documents of these organization
from today's per pective, you are amazed that their
author could avoid u ing the word "interdi cipli-
nary": all of the ideas expres ed by the word appear
over and over. One of the fir t task that the new
Council et for it elf, for example, was "the bringing
together of men [sic] from different cience, the
breaking down of excessive compartmentalization."
World War II eem to have given the word the
impetus it needed, and oon there was no topping it;
it became a common word throughout the ocial ci-
ence and beyond. Profe or Frank, intere tingly,
came to detest the word who e origin he had so dili-
gently ought to find, and her paper is a model of
cholarly scorn. Thanks to "interdi ciplinary," he
wrote, "reviewers are no longer in the hateful po ition
of having to pecify whether a book is cultured, eru-
dite, thorough, original, or conversely, superficial,
facile, general, derivative: the one all-purpose adjec-
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 4
 tive keeps reader alert and authors friendly."8
I have reported the history of the word "interdisci-
plinary" not only becau e I find it intere ting but al 0
becau e I believe that the origin of the word erve a
a vivid reminder of the creativity of the cholar who
erved over the year on P&P. A dozen or 0 scholar
from seven di cipline ,di cu sing new projects for
many hours each year, for 70 year, develop an
important culture of creativity. Connections between
ideas and propo itions are identified, new word are
pontaneously invented to de cribe the e connections,
and early drafts of the textbooks that will be pub-
Ii hed in the next decade are in effect written. This
proce is not elf-con ciou ; cholars meet to di cu s
and judge projects, not to create idea , but creation
occurs anyway, with unpredictable re ults. At the la t
meeting of P&P, on June 3, 1996, the chairman,
William Cronon of the Univer ity of Wi consin,
noted that while erving on board i rarely exciting,
P&P had alway been the ite of lively, almost anar-
chic, intellectual exchange among scholar from a
wide range of field . And at the board meeting the
next day, the board instructed Pre ident Prewitt to
en ure that future board meetings invite the free-
wheeling intellectual give and take long as ociated
with P&P meeting .
The word invented at P&P meetings can even be
turned again t the culture that created them. Perhap
the ultimate triumph of "interdi ciplinary" as a word
characterizing the ocial cience was its u e as a
French noun during the tudent prote ts in Paris in
May 1968. The student 'banners cornfully pro-
claimed, "Pluridisciplinarite et interdisciplinariti:
deux termes barbares, meme s'ils sont d'actualite."
[Multidi ciplinarity and interdi ciplinarity: two bar-
baric term, even though they're in style.]9
Any committee who e private buzz word can ur-
vive, and emerge as a rallying cry during the Paris
tudent ' revolt in May 1968, can't really be all bad.
P&P, requiescat in pace! •

Frank,op. cit.. page 100. 9 Le Figaro, 8 September 1970. Quoted in Frank, op. cit., page 96.

Program Director, Economics

The Social Science Re earch Council invite applications and nomination for a Program Director for initiative in the field of
economic. Applicant mu t have a Ph.D. in economic and a trong interest in i ue concerning the training of economi ts.
The SSRC i e pecially intere ted in candidate who have a broad training and who are familiar with recent development in both
macro- and rnicroeconomic theory and empirical methods. Applicant hould have a ub tantive intere t in one or more of the fol-
lowing areas: poverty, income, tratification; economic tran ition; u tainable development; technology, information, innovation;
gender and/or race; labor market . Applicants hould al 0 have an intere t in the theoretical development of the di cipline and it
relationship to other di cipline in the social science. Individual with experience in re earch, teaching, and/or policy analy i are
encouraged to apply.
Dutie include: administering a new program area; e tabli hing and maintaining relation hip with individual scholar, ademic
in titution , foundation, and other organizations working in the area of economic; preparing and negotiating grant propo al ;
upervi ing upport taff; administering fellow hip and grant competition. The Council provide an intellectually timulating,
multi-di ciplinary environment.
Council alarie are com men urate with experience and qualifications. Provi ion are made to enable profe ional staff to continue
their profes ional development while at the SSRC. There i no deadline, a the search will remain open until an appointment is
made.
Candidate hould ubmit a letter of application, curriculum vita , ample of written or publi hed work, and the name of at lea t
three profe ional references. Nomination and application material hould be addres ed to:
Omce or Human Resources
Economics Starr Search
oclal Science Research Council
810 Seventh Avenue
New York, NY 10019
The Social Science Research Council i an Equal Opportunity Employer

D EMBER 1996 lTEMsI97

 Current Activities at the Council
Vietnam Workshop from universities, research insti- in stemming the flow of institu-
tute , and government departments. tionally-based research profes-
A workshop on "Applying
A similar short course held in sionals in Vietnam to the finan-
Social Science Concepts and
Hanoi in the spring of 1995 served cially more lucrative private
Methods to the Study of the
as a model. Foeu ing on the study ector.
Effects of Economic Change on
of social change, lectures and dis-
Vietnamese Society," jointly
cussion sessions guided students
sponsored by the SSRC and 1996 SSRC-Mellon Minority
through the research process, Summer Conference
Vietnam's Institute of Social
from the selection of a re earch
Science , was held in Hochiminh
problem through the production On June 27-30 the SSRC-
City on July 29-August 10,
of a research report. A field trip Mellon Minority Fellowship
1996. Its primary goal was to
to a rapidly urbanizing province Program held its annual fellows'
provide international, interdisci-
on the out kirts of Hochiminh conference at Stanford University.
plinary example of social sci-
City provided hands-on training Entitled "Making Our Way in a
ence research and training for
and local context for the econd Changing Academy," the confer-
Vietnamese scholars and students,
week of the workshop. Following ence brought together over 120
in order to build research, analysis
preparatons initiated in the first minority fellows currently en-
and interpretive capacity within
week, students and faculty under- rolled in Ph.D. programs in the
the research and policy planning
took archival, urvey, and inter- humanities, social sciences, and
communities in Vietnam. Since
view-ba ed re earch to study physical sciences. The confer-
1989, Vietnam has been engaged
ocial change in Binh Tri Dong ence was de igned to provide a
in the process of Doi Moi, or
village of Binh Chanh province. forum where fellows can pre ent
renovation, and as part of that
Returning from their field trip, their work, share their experi-
process, the once denigrated
tudent pent the last few days ences in the academy, and initi-
stature of the social science has
of the workshop analyzing, inter- ate and expand profes ional net-
been greatly enhanced in policy
preting, and writing up their re- works with others who hare
circles. By trengthening local
earch re ult . On the final day, similar conceptual, methodologi-
social science research and plan-
participant pre ented propo als cal, or policy concern .
ning infrastructure, researchers
for further re earch based on their The conference featured ple-
may be more effectively engaged
preliminary finding. nary presentations by Claude
in the modemization of the country.
The e workshops have not Steele, Stanford University;
Faculty for the workshop
only tran ferred a body of knowl- David Montejano, Univer ity of
included international scholars in
edge but they have helped to Texas, Austin; Kalvin Howel,
sociology, demography, anthro-
develop an attitude which values Duke University; and June Jordan,
pology, history, and political ci-
questioning, contending perspec- University of California, Berkeley.
ence.* Most participants were
tives, and flexibility in approach, Thematic sessions focu ed on a
mid-level profe ional researchers
as well as careful attention to sys- number of issues, including
tematic data collection and analy- "Social Science at the Cro road,"
sis. The impact of that knowl- "Identity Politics and Beyond,"
• Faculty members included: Charles edge is expected to carry over and "Crossing Di ciplinary
Hirschman. University of Washington; Hy
Van Luong. University of Toronto; Gary into the participants' home insti- Lines." In addition, fellows had
Gereffi. Duke University; David Marr. tutions. More importantly, the an opportunity to participate in a
Au trulian National University; William workshops serve as catalY ts for number of professional develop-
Turley. Southern Illinois University; and
Mary McDonnell. Social Science Research the formation of local networks ment workshops on such topics
Council. of researcher , which may assi t as getting through the first year,

98\1TEMS VOLUME 50. N UMBER 4

preparing for qualifying exami-
nations, mentoring, and balanc-
ing social and academic life.
The conference also spon ored
two panels, one on "Language
Matters," co-chaired by John
Baugh and Guadalupe Valdes,
both from Stanford; and another
entitled "Meet the Editors,"
which featured Norris Pope and
Muriel Bell from Stanford Uni-
versity Press, and Allan Harvey
from Cambridge Univer ity Pres .
Washington Symposium on
Japanese Politics
In collaboration with the A ia
Program of the Woodrow Wil on
Center in Washington, D.C., the
Abe Fellowship Program held a
public symposium entitled "Japan:
Upheaval or Paraly is?" on May
2, 1996 at the Center. Paneli ts
included Nobuhiro Hiwatari,
University of Tokyo (Abe '94);
TJ. Pempel, Univer ity ofWa h-
ington (former chair of the Joint
Committee on Japane e Studie );
and Susan Pharr, Harvard Uni-
versity (Abe '95).
Ms. Pharr led off with a pre-
entation on Japane e political
ethic and public trust. Drawing
on data collected from focus
group studie , she characterized
Japane e politics and ociety as
being in ferment, with notable
changes in the high level of
public di affection with political
leadership, a new lack of confi-
dence in the conduct of the bu-
reaucracy, and increa ed respect
for the power of the broadca t
media-all of which could lead
to profound changes in Japan'
leader hip and in titution .
Mr. Pempel' ob ervation
focu ed on the catalyzing event
DECEMBER 1996
and i ue that have mo t chal-
lenged Japan in recent years.
The e include, among other ,
increased pressure from other
nation on Japan to reform and
liberalize its economy, greater
polarization between rich and
poor, drastic hift in fi cal and
administrative policy, corruption
scandals, and war in the Persian
Gulf. Despite the turbulence,
however, Mr. Pempel was uncon-
vinced that major changes in
public policy or party politics
would take place.
An emphasis on continuity in
the organization of politic in
Japan was the focus of Mr.
Hiwatari's remark, which exam-
ined the interactions between
organized labor, the opposition
parties, and the current ruling
coalition. While acknowledging
that labor and the opposition par-
ties have reorganized and that
voter disaffection is increasing,
Mr. Hiwatari predicted the poten-
tial re urgence of the Liberal
Democratic Party.
More than 80 people attended
the ympo ium which wa also
covered by a cable television net-
work.
Conference on African
Investment
On September 5-6, 1996, the
former Joint Committee on African
Studies (JCAS) held a conference
on "Ri k and Restraint: Reducing
the Perceived Ri ks of African
Inve tment" at the Harvard
In titute for International Devel-
opment (HIID). The meeting
brought together an international
group of academic and practi-
tioners: economi ts, political ci-
enti ts, legal cholars and repre-
entatives from the Central Bank
of Uganda, capital management
and investment firm , the Inter-
national Monetary Fund (JMF),
the World Bank, OECD, and
the Overseas Private Inve tment
Corporation (OPIC). *
Conference convener Paul
Collier (of Oxford University
and Harvard's Kennedy School
of Government) outlined the
conference's goal, namely, to
examine how economic and
political ri k is conceptualized
by potential investor and how it
is measured by firm and risk
rating agencie ; and to analyze
why perceptions of risk, in par-
ticular concerning Africa, often
diverge from realities. One con-
sensus was that it is difficult for
countries to shed their reputa-
tions as inve tment risks, despite
economic and political progres .
• Presenters and di cu ants included: Paul
Collier, Harvard University and Oxford's
Centre for the Study of African Economies
(CSAE); Robert Bates, Harvard University;
Nadeem U. Haque, IMF; Frederick Z.
J person, Intemational Finance Corporation
(IFC); Joe Demby, Regent Kingpin Capital
Management; Claude Erb, First Chicago
Inve tment Management Ltd.; Catherine
Pattillo, CSAE, Oxford; Robert Graffam. IFC;
Eric Jackson, Harvard University; Lemma
Senbet, University of Maryland; Jan Willem
Gunning, Free University, Am terdam; David
Bevan, CSAE, Oxford; Malcolm McPherson,
HIID; Loui Kasakende, Central Bank of
Uganda; Stephen O' Connell, Swarthmore
College; Leslie D. Biddle, OPIC; Gerald We t,
Multinational Inve tment Guarantee Agency;
Mark Warner, University of Baltimore;
Richard Mash, CSAE, Oxford; Ravi Kanbur.
World Bank; David Ailola, University of
W tern Cape; Pearl Robin on, Tufts
University, former JCAS chair; David
St avage, OECD Development Centre;
Jennifer Widner, University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor; Smita Singh and Karen Ferree,
Harvard graduate tudents and both fellows
in SSRC's International Predissertation
Fellow hip Program.
ITEMs199
 Another hotly debated i ue was
the utility of country ri k rating
when both finns and ri k in ur-
ance providers are likely to look
at the nature of particular inve t-
ment projects and the specific
condition within a country rele-
vant to that project.
Participant al 0 examined the
kind of pro-active policie that
could reduce the perception and
reality of ri k, in order to attract
foreign capital. Mr. Collier u ed
the tenn "agencie of re traint"
to characterize the mechani m
for reducing ri k. The e included
external mechani m impo ed by
donors. For example, ri k in ur-
ance finn them elve may act as
a deterrent through their rating
and premium ,as well a through
their relation with bilateral and
multilateral donors. In addition,
everal internal or dome tic
agencie of re traint were di -
cus ed: the role of central bank ,
the adoption of ca h-budgeting
procedure , and the legal y tem.
Finally, regional arrangement
that can reduce ri k were exam-
ined. The e included the Franc
Zone in We t Africa and the vari-
ety of preferential trade agree-
ment acro the continent.
The conference concluded
with a di cu ion led by Robert
Bate of Harvard' Department
of Government. Opinion ranged
widely about the potential to
reduce the perception and reality
of ri k in Africa in the hort or
10000TEM
medium tenn. But many of the
participant cited recent exam-
pIe, uch as Uganda. where
agencie of re traint have re-
duced the reality, if not the per-
ception of ri k. An edited volume
including ome of the conference
papers i planned for publication,
and a follow-up conference i
being organized at Oxford'
Centre for the Study of African
Economie in 1997.
New JSPS Fellowship
Program
The SSRC has been appointed
as the admini trator of a new fel-
low hip program for recent Ph.D.' .
The fellow hip, pon ored by the
Japan Society for the Promotion
of Science, eek to provide
promi ing and highly qualified
re earchers in the ocial cience
and humanitie with the opportu-
nity to conduct re earch with
leading in titution in Japan.
Although the competiton ha no
topical boundarie , propo al in
cience and technology tudie;
economic , bu ine ,and trade
tudie ; and environmental stud-
ie are particularly welcome. The
duration of the fellow hip i 12 to
24 month. and i open to U.S.
citizen or pennanent re ident
who have received the Ph.D. ix
years or Ie prior to the year the
fellow hip takes effect. Up to 10
award will be given annually.
The annual deadline for the fel-
low hip i November 15, 1996
( ee box on page 90).
SSRC Archives Now Open
The SSRC i plea ed to
announce that it archive.
which have long been inacce -
ible to scholars, are now
open for re earch at the Rock-
efeller Archive Center (RAC)
in Pocantico Hill, New York.
The e material , which date
back to 1924. contain record
of the governing bodie of the
SSRC, taff-written memo-
randa and corre pondence,
committee and working group
document. fellow hip and
grants material ,and other tile .
The deci ion by Rockefeller
to erve as the repo itory for
the SSRC' material continue
a partnership between the two
in titution that began in 1923.
Many of the individual and
in titution covered in the
SSRC record al 0 have impor-
tant documentation in the RAC'
holding.
Scholar wi hing to con ult
the SSRC record hould con-
tact the RAC for an appoint-
ment. Addre : Rockefeller
Archive Center, 15 Dayton
Ave., North Tarrytown. NY
10591-1598. Phone: (914)
631-4505; Fax: (914) 631-
6017.
VOLUME 50. NUMBER 4
 Recent Council Publications
African Material Culture,
edited by Mary Jo Arnoldi,
Christraud M. Geary, and Kris
L. Hardin. Spon ored by the Joint
Committee on Mrican Studies
(1960-96) and the Smith onian
Institution. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1996. xii + 369
pages.
This book unites 14 interdis-
ciplinary essays that open new
perspectives for understanding
African societie and cultures
through the contextualized study
of objects. Research by an inter-
national group of cholar , in-
cluding anthropologi ts, archeol-
ogists, art hi torians, hi torians,
and linguist ,treat everything
from the production of material
objects to the meaning of ticks,
masquerades, hou ehold tool ,
clothing, and the television et in
the contemporary repertoire of
African material culture.
Mary Jo Arnoldi is curator for
African Ethnology in the Depart-
ment of Anthropology at the
National Museum of Natural
History, Smith onian In titution.
Christraud M. Geary i curator of
the Eliot Eli ofon Photographic
Archives at the National Mu eum
of African Art at the Smith onian.
Kris L. Hardin i a re earch
as ociate with the Smith onian
Institution.
Also noted:
The Shaping of Biodiversity.
Special i ue of A/rica, vol. 66,
no. I, 1996. Gue t editor, Jane I.
Guyer and Paul Richards. Ba ed
on papers pre ented at a se ion
pon ored by the Joint Committee
D EMBER 1996
on African Studies (1960-96) at
the African Studies As ociation
meeting in December 1993 in
Bo ton. 158 page .
Borneo in Transition: People,
Forests, Conservation, and
Development, edited by
Christine Padoch and Nancy Lee
Pelo o. Spon ored by the Joint
Committee on Southea t Asia
(1976-96). New York: Oxford
Univer ity Pre s, 1996. xx + 291
pages.
The last three decade have
been exceptionally important for
the people and forests of Borneo.
Logging and public road have
reached many of the mo t remote
village , plantations have replaced
diverse native fore ts, hundreds
of thou ands of immigrant have
moved to the island, and va t
trides have been made by the
Indone ian and Malaysian gov-
ernment in extending both the
infrastru.cture and the ideologie
of national integration.
Many of e ay in thi volume
examine tran itions in re ource
management in pecific commu-
nitie , but do not ignore the
regional, national, and interna-
tional contexts of local p~enom­
ena. Other contribution place
more empha is on regional pat-
terns and national policie that
have ignificance for the way
re ources are managed in local
communitie . Studie carried out
at variou level of analy i high-
light the diversity and complex-
ity of the changing linkages
between people and fore t .
Christine Padoch is a curator
in the In titute of Economic Botany
of the New York Botanical Garden.
Nancy Lee Peluso is associate
profes or of re ource policy in
the Yale School of Forestry and
Environmental Studies.
Counterfactual Thought
Experiments in World Politics:
Logical, Methodological, and
Psychological Perspectives,
edited by Philip E. Tetlock and
Aaron Belkin. Sponsored by the
Committee on International Peace
and Security. Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University
Pre ,1996. x + 344 pages.
Political scienti t often a k
themselves what might have
been if hi tory had unfolded
differently: if Stalin had been
ou ted a General Party Secre-
tary or if the United State had
not dropped the bomb on Japan.
Although cholars ometimes
coff at applying hypothetical
reasoning to world politics, the
contributors to this volume find
such counterfactual conjectures
not only u eful, but nece ary for
drawing causal inference from
hi tori cal date. Given the impor-
tance of counterfactual , it is per-
haps surprising that standards are
lacking for evaluating them. To
fill this gap, the volume' two edi-
tors propose a et of criteria for
di tinguishing pIau ible from
implausible counterfactual con-
jecture acro s a wide range of
application .
The contributors make u e of
the e and other criteria to evalu-
ate counterfactuals that emerge in
diver e methodological contexts,
ITEMs/101
including comparative case stud-
ie , game theory, and tati tical
analy i . Taken together, the e
e ays contribute to the e tablish-
ment of a more nuanced and rig-
orous framework for as e ing
counterfactual arguments about
world politics in particular and
about the ocial cience more
broadly.
Philip E. TetJock i Harold E.
Burtt Profe sor of P ychology
and Political Science at Ohio
State University. Aaron Belkin
i a Ph.D. candidate in political
cience at the Univer ity of
California, Berkeley.
The Politics of Election in
Southeast Asia, edited by R.H.
Taylor. Spon ored by the Joint
Committee on Southeast A ia
(1976-96) and the Woodrow
Wil on International Center
for Scholar . Cambridge:
Woodrow Wilson Center Pre
and Cambridge Univer ity
Pre ,1996. xii + 256 page .
Though mo t government
in Southeast A ia are widely
de cribed a authoritarian, elec-
tions have been a feature of
politic in the region for many
decade . Thi volume, bringing
together 10 eparate case tudie,
examine the countrie that
have conducted multiparty elec-
tion ince the 1940 : Indone ia,
Malay ia, the Philippin ,Thailand,
Cambodia, Bunna/Myanrnar, and
Singapore. It identifie the com-
mon and distingui hing feature
of electoral politic in the region.
The contributor , unlike mo t
earlier tudents of politic in
Southea t A ia, conclude that it
i not omething peculiar to the
political culture of the region that
102\lTEMS
hape its political behavior. It i ,
rather, the arne force and struc-
tures that hape politics in North
Ameriea and Europe.
R.H. Taylor is profes or of
politics and pro-director of the
School of Oriental and African
Studie of the University of
London.
State Sovereignty as Social
Construct, edited by Thomas 1.
Biersteker and Cynthia Weber.
Sponsored by the Committee on
International Peace and Security
through the SSRC Comparative
and Tran national Program.
Cambridge: Cambridge Univer ity
Pre ,1996. xii + 298 page .
State overeignty i an inher-
ently social con truct. The modem
tate y tern is not ba ed on orne
timele principle of overeignty,
but on the production of a norma-
tive conception which link author-
ity, territory, population ( ociety,
nation), and recognition in a
unique way, and in a particular
place (the tate). Attempting to
realize thi ideal entail a great
deal of effort on the part of tate -
person ,diplomats, and intellectual .
The ideal of tate overeignty is
a product of the action of power-
ful agent and re i tance to those
action by tho e located at the
margin of power. Thi volume
de cribe , theorize , and iIIu -
trate practice that have ocially
con tructed, reproduced, recon-
tructed, and decontructed variou
overeign ideal and resi tance to
them. The contributor analyze
how all the component of tate
overeignty-not only recogni-
tion, but al 0 territory, population,
and authority-are ocially con-
tructed and combined in pecific
hi torieal contexts.
Thomas J. Biersteker is Henry
R. Luce Profe sor of Tran nation-
al Organization and director of
the Watson Institute for Inter-
national Affairs at Brown Univer-
ity. Cynthia Weber is as ociate
profe or of political science at
Purdue University.
The Culture of National
Security: Norms and Identity in
World Politics, edited by Peter J.
Katzen tein. Sponsored by the
Committee on International Peace
and Security. New York: Columbia
University Pre ,1996. xv + 562
page.
The political tran formation
of the 1980 and 1990 have dra-
matically affected model of
national and international ecu-
rity. Particularly since the end of
the cold war, cholars have been
uncertain about how to interpret
the effects of major hift in the
balance of power. Are we living
today in a unipolar, bipolar, or
multipolar world? Are we moving
toward an international order that
make the recurrence of major
war in Europe or Asia highly
unlikely or virtually inevitable? I
ideological conflict between
tate dimini hing or increasing?
Fu ing ociology and ecurity
tudie ,contributor to thi
volume explore alternatives to the
long-dominant analytical per pec-
tive of neoreali m and neoliber-
ali m. Que tioning the utility of
imagining global security rela-
tion simply in term of the con-
ventional dimen ion of power
and intere t, they reflect on
whether a more effective model
would include analy is of cultural
complexe as well.
VOLUME 50. NUMBER 4
 Spanning two centuries from
the Greek war for independence
in the 1820 to Israeli-Pale tinian
negotiations today, reflecting
on uch i sues as nuclear and
chemical weapons bans and
humanitarian intervention, The
Culture of National Security
lays the groundwork for new
models of national security
and global affairs.
Peter J. Katzenstein is
the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr.
Profe or of International
Studie at Cornell Univer ity.

ACLSISSRC International Postdoctoral Fellowships Competition

The 199£r97 competition will provide approximately 15 po tdoctoral fellow hip of $20,000 each to upport scholars doing human-
i tic research and humanities-related social cience research on the societie and culture of A ia, Latin America, and ub-Saharan
Africa. The fundamental criteria for selection of award will be the intellectual value of the proposed research and the likelihood that
significant and innovative scholarship on foreign societie , making important theoretical or . ub tantive contribution to particular
di cipline , to multidisciplinary scholarship, or to comparative research, will re ult. This competition is upported by a grant from
the National Endowment for the Humanitie .

These fellow hip are intended as alary replacement, although travel funds may al 0 be reque ted, to help scholars devote ix to 12
continuous months to full-time research and writing. Tenure of the grant may begin no earlier than July I, 1997 and no later than
February I, 1998.

U.S. citizen, permanent re ident , and others who have resided in the U.S. for at lea t three consecutive year at the time of applica-
tion are eligible to apply. All applicant mu t have the Ph.D. or it equivalent by the application deadline.

Intere ted scholars hould apply to the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Completed application forms must be post·
marked not later than December 1, 1996.
To reque t an application form, pie send the following inrormation:
I. Highe t academic degree held and date received
2. Academic or other po ition
3. Geographical area( ) of research
4. A brief, de criptive title of the proposed research
5. Country of citizen hip or permanent re idence
6. Propo ed date for beginning tenure of the award and duration reque ted
7. Specific award program for which application i reque ted
8. Full name and mailing addre
You may send that information by anyone of the following means:

I. Write: Office of Fellow hip and Grant, ACLS, 228 Ea t 45th Street, New York. New York 10017-3398
2. Fax: (212) 949-8058
3. E-mail: grants@ac1 .org

Note: Application forms will be sent only by U.S. Po tal Service first-cla mail, or air mail to addresse abroad. Application forms
will not be ent or accepted by fax or other electronic means.

DECEMBER 1996 ITEMs/I 03

 SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH COUNCIL
SIO SEVENTH AVENUE. NEW YORK. NY 10019
(212) 377-2700 FAX (212) 377-2727 WEB hUp://www. rc.org

The Council was incorporated in the Slate of //Iinois. December 27. 1924. for the purpose of advancing research in the social sciences. Nongovernmental and
interdisciplinary in nature. the Council appoints committees of scholars which seek to achieve the Council's purpose through the generation of new ideas and the
training of scholars. The activities of the Council are supported primarily by grants from primte foundations and government agencies.

Directors. 1~97 : PAUL B. BALTES. Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education (Berlin); ROBERT H. BATES. Harvard University; IRIS B. BERGER.
State University of New York. Albany; NANCY BIROSAU., Inter-American Development Bank; ALBERT FISHLOW. Council on Foreign Relations; SUSAN FISKE,
University of Massachusetts. Amherst; SUSAN HANSON. Clark Univer3ity; BARBARA HEYNS. New York University; SHIRLEY LINDENBAUM. The Graduate Center. City
University of New York; KENNETH PREwrrr. Social Science Research Council; JOEl. SHERZE.R. University of Texas. Au tin; BURTON H. SINGER. Princeton
University; NEIL SMELSER. Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; KENNETH W. WACHTER. University of Cali fomi a. Berkeley; MICHELLE J. WHITE,
University of Michigan. Ann Arbor.
Officers and Staff: KENNETH PREWm. President; KRISTINE DAHLBERG. Chief Financial Officer; GLORIA KIRCHHEIMER. Editor; KAREN BRADUNAS. Manager of
Human Resources and General Administration; ITTY ABRAHAM. SUSAN BRO SON. JOSH DEWIND. DIANE 01 MAURO. ARUN P. EulANCE, ERIC HERSHBERG. SllOVEN
HEYOEMANN. FRANK KEsSEL, ROBERT LATHAM. MARY BYRNE McDoNNELl., Eu.EN PEREcMAN. SHERI H. RA IS. RAMON TORRECIUlA. KEHTON W. WORCESlU.

The Social Science Research Council supports the program of the Commi sion on Preservation and Acces and is represented on the National Advisory
Council on Preservation. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Infontlation
Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.4S-1984. The infinity symbol placed in a circle indicates compliance with thi
tandard.

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l04\IreMS ISSN 0049-0903 VOLUME 50, NUMBER 4