Date:
Location:
"Wars and Freedoms"
Speaker:
Saumitra Jha, Associate Professor of Political Economy, Stanford Graduate School of Business; Senior Fellow, Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Affairs.
Contact:
Max Calleo
mcalleo@wcfia.harvard.edu
Attendance Information:
Please register to attend this event.
Abstract:
A long-standing debate about most of human history lies between those that argue that the fate of nations is shaped by deep structural forces- economic, political etc.- and those who credit individuals as being agents of change. In this book project, we make progress on these questions by making the case that there is a common, though often hidden, structure to who has agency. We argue that individuals, particularly those from non-elite backgrounds, gain agency when they acquire local monopolies over a particular set of skills or credentials that allow them to coordinate others within novel hierarchical networks. And throughout human history, a common environment in which both of these traits emerge is in times of war and external threat, when elites have little option but to allow non-elite groups to acquire organizational skills and heroic credentials and to develop such networks.
We argue that such wars not only create opportunities for individuals to gain credentials as heroes– those who have demonstrated their willingness to engage in extreme sacrifice for others – but also often leads an otherwise unlikely set of non-elite individuals to learn how to fight and organize. Thus the wars do not often end when the history textbooks say that they do: veterans with heroic credentials and organizational skills are often specially placed, should they so choose, to fight for new causes when they return home. Further, we can predict when these new struggles are likely to lead to strengthened democracy and the spread of freedoms for all, and when they instead can lead to civil conflict, ethnic cleansing, revolution and repression instead.
Yet, these challenges born of war have also often provided the opportunity for another set of people with agency– political and economic problem-solvers– to apply novel financial and organizational ideas to mitigating such conflicts and building new nations. Thus understanding the hidden structure to agency can help us understand both how political freedoms and democracy emerged, how our democracies may die, and what we can still do about it.
To provide evidence for this structure we draw upon natural experiments across places and moments of history, including the Partition of South Asia (see Does Combat Experience Foster Organizational Skill below), the American and French Revolutions (see Revolutionary Contagion), World War I and II (see Heroes and Villains), the English Civil War and the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, Meiji Japan, the Mau Mau rebellion, among others. We conclude by evaluating the links to extremist movements and democratic backsliding around our contemporary world.
Bio:
Jha is an associate professor of political economy at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and, by courtesy, of economics and of political science at Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences; and convenes the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab. He is also a senior fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law within the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Affairs, a faculty fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
Jha’s research has been published in leading journals in economics and political science, including the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Political Science Review and the Journal of Development Economics, and he serves on a number of editorial boards. His research on ethnic tolerance has been recognized with the Michael Wallerstein Award for best published article in political economy from the American Political Science Association in 2014 and his coauthored research on heroes with the Oliver Williamson Award for best paper by the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics in 2020. Jha was honored to receive the Stanford MSx Teacher of the Year Award, voted by the students in 2020.
Jha holds a BA from Williams College, a master’s degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. Prior to joining Stanford GSB, he was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University. He has been a center fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. Jha has consulted on economic and political risk issues for the United Nations/WTO, the World Bank, government agencies, and for private firms.
