Ph.D. Research Profile - Allison Beth Hodgkins
While her two sons, aged 4 and 1, play on the living room floor, Allison Hodgkins is busy redefining war. “Conflicts are getting smaller,” she says. “The analytical tools we’re using today are not getting at the nature of the problem.”
By the definitions of the Correlates of War project, a widely used dataset for conflict analysis, “war” occurs when hostilities result in a minimum of 1000 deaths per year. But, as Allison points out, “by those criteria, the Israel-Palestine conflict only began in 2001. The IRA campaign in the UK doesn’t even register.” Why does this matter? “Because it means that the people writing hard-core theory about where conflict comes from, and how it can be resolved, are looking at a very limited set of cases. International relations, as a discipline, is still essentially state-centric, in a world where most of the on-going conflicts involve at least one party that is not a state.”
Allison’s PhD dissertation looks at the problem of “Guns for Promises” – the asymmetry that characterizes security guarantees between states and armed opposition groups in a peace implementation period. She argues that it is common for a peace agreement to meet the security concerns of a state: “for example, a terrorist attack by the opposition group would be a clear violation of the deal”; but that peace agreements rarely protect a non-state group from having its security threatened by the state, for example through curfews, restrictions on movement or arbitrary arrests.
This asymmetry, she says, can make it almost impossible to implement negotiated peace deals. “If an agreement contains terms that require one party to make itself vulnerable in order to reassure the other, then the peace process will not endure”. She argues that a state-centric worldview has led international actors to promote inappropriate prescriptions for peace in armed self-determination conflicts. “We approach conflict resolution as though the belligerents were warring states. We assume that the security concerns [of armed opposition groups] are the same as the concerns of states, and in many cases that is simply not true.”
For Allison, these insights come partly from the years she spent in Jerusalem, as academic director of an intensive program for American university students focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict and peace process. “I was on the ground throughout the entire period of implementation of the Oslo process,” she says now. “I watched it unfold. And one of the reasons it failed was that people simply didn’t register that the Palestinian side had security concerns. Everyone understood that terrorist attacks would undermine the peace process, but there was no recognition that some of the measures taken by the state security forces – like walling off Bethlehem and preventing people from traveling, even to hospitals – were just as destructive of an atmosphere of security and mutual trust.”
Although her background is in Middle Eastern studies – she has a Masters from the University of Texas and speaks Arabic and Hebrew – Allison believes the issues that undermined the Oslo process are significant in many other conflicts. She compares the Oslo process to the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, which was criticized at the time for not demanding disarmament of the IRA as a precondition to all other concessions. In fact, by Allison’s argument, the very “weakness” of the security demands in the agreement may have been its strength.
The core of Allison’s work this year will be building a data set to explore her hypothesis. She is researching cases as diverse as Macedonia, Senegal, Bangladesh and Indonesia, trying to understand the correlation between security arrangements and successful peace implementation in myriad “small” wars of self-determination. “It’s quite a radical approach”, she says. “I didn’t want to write just another comparative case study.” I wanted to contribute an idea that had application across a broad number of cases.
Why did she choose Fletcher? “I felt like Fletcher was a place that would understand what I was trying to do. Because the school’s philosophy is so interdisciplinary, I am less confined by the dogma of any one discipline. I have the flexibility to push the boundaries.”
She has pursued her project while also juggling the responsibilities of motherhood, raising her young family in Maine near where she grew up. Multi-tasking doesn’t begin to describe it. “I’m not a model mother, or a model housewife, or a model PhD student”, she says. But somehow it all gets done. She and her husband, who is Palestinian, hope to return to the Middle East in the coming years.