With regards to intellectual merit, a large segment of the American International Relations sub-field approaches international security through its engagement with World War I. This case serves as the foundation for an extraordinary number of key debates, involving multiple research programs and levels of analysis. This project will demonstrate new approaches to qualitative and multi-method research, which promises more rigorous and replicable scholarship.
Most of the key debates which use World War I predate Political Science's recent attention to Data Access and Research Tranparency (DA-RT). Two basic principles underlie the new movement: First, analytical transparency is a prerequisite for research to be considered scientifically credible and legitimate. Second, data becomes more useful when it is made available to others, either in the context of validating prior claims or to undertake new research.
Hitherto DA-RT was regarded as the exclusive bailiwick of quantitative approaches. These principles have recently been extended to qualitative and multi-method research, through two related developments. First, the availability of better specificed accounts of both process tracking and counterfactual analysis allow scholars to be explicit about the analytical techniques they used. Second, new infrastructure has been created for the institutionalized sharing of qualititative data. In addition, new standards are being developed for active citations, hyperlinks to digitized primary data which are probative for the credibility of hypothesised causal pathways.
This workshop will bring together experts from three relevant epistemic communities: scholars of World War I, qualitative methodologists with expertise in process tracing and counterfactual analysis, and qualitative data archivists working on new active citation practices. They will collectively develop a plan to access and link the original source documentation.
With regards to broader impacts, the World War I project will be a highly visible demonstration of the efficacy of the Qualitative Data Repository. The project will vividly present the payoff from a synthesis of better specified analytical techniques, institutionalized data sharing, and new standards for research transparency. The substance of the project is likely to be of interest to all scholars of international security, as well as a broder scholarly community and the genderal public as the war's centenerary approaches.
Workshop was designed to bring together scholars working on one or more of three recent methodological and infrastructural developments: (a) APSA’s ongoing efforts to achieve Data Access and Research Transparency, providing a broad background set of principles on which the discussion was grounded; (b) Syracuse University’s Qualitative Data Repository, serving as a venue for openness in qualitative research to be practiced; and (c) active citation providing a specific mechanism for instantiating openness in the context of qualitative, case-oriented, historiographical research. The intention was for the group to consider how to apply combinations of techniques arising from these developments to qualitative political science, in the context of studies which used the First World War as a case. Qualitative research on the First World War appeared to be an ideal test bed for research openness in qualitative, case-based historiographical political science. First, there was already a considerable body of well-regarded published material in the genre, some of the best of which was represented at this workshop. Second, while the case continues to generate new scholarship, many of the debates had ‘cooled off.’ This allowed us to focus on the machinery of the arguments, not their conclusions. Third, as the paradigm case in security studies, the broad outlines of the more prominent debates are familiar to a wide range of scholars, and the volumes under discussion were core texts for the subfield. Finally, as the United States continued to disengage from Afghanistan and Iraq, we expected to see a shift in focus of both policymakers and academics to other types of security concerns. We anticipated that scholarly focus would shift back to expansion by rising states and resulting power transitions, with the result that these debates would be reanimated, and with them more attention to the First World War. While the primary value of the meeting was continued development of the tools and techniques we hoped to deploy in the Qualitative Data Repository, a further benefit of the workshop and subsequent activities was the development of pilot projects for the repository. These comprised activated versions of selections from some of the volumes under discussion. A prime example is an activated version of Jack Snyder’s "Russia: The Politics and Psychology of Overcommitment," Chapter 7 in his The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Cornell University Press, 1984). Another is Timothy Crawford’s "Pivotal Deterrence and the Chain Gang: Sir Edward Grey’s Ambiguous Policy and the July Crisis, 1914", Chapter 4 in his Pivotal Deterrence: Third-Party Statecraft and the Pursuit of Peace (Cornell University Press, 2003).
