Recorded on Tuesday, January 20, 2026

TRANSCRIPT

Catherine Malinin Dunn ’87 Welcome, everybody. Welcome to the first SwatTalk of 2026. If this is your first SwatTalk, particularly excited to have you here. My name is Catherine Malinin Dunn, I'm Swarthmore, class of 1987. SwatTalk is a speaker series. It's brought to you by the Swarthmore Alumni Council, of which I am proud to be a member. The council is the leadership body for the Swarthmore Alumni Association. Tonight's talk is titled “Politics and Political Science in a Changing World” and our speakers, we're proud to have with us Peter Katzenstein and David Laitin. The talk tonight will be moderated by Swarthmore professor of political science Ayse Kaya. She's also the department chair, and she's also the coordinator of Swarthmore's Global Studies program. She was twice selected by Swarthmore's graduating class to be the commencement speaker, both in 2014 as well as in 2021, and her current research project. She's working on a book on multilateral climate finance.

So let me explain how this will work for the first hour, excuse me, for the first half hour or so, Professor Kaya will be asking a few questions to our panelists and give them the opportunity to respond. And then for the second half hour or so, we'll turn to questions from the audience. So if you have questions, what you should do is type them into the Q&A feature on zoom. Please be sure to include both your name as well as your class here. And our speakers will address as many questions as time allows. In some instances Professor Kaya might combine questions if there are some that are similar. So now I would like to turn it over to Professor Kaya. Please take it away.

Ayse Kaya Thank you so much for that kind introduction. And before I introduce our distinguished speakers, I want to give a shout out to Jason Zengerle, class of 1996, who organized this event and graciously and quietly brought us all together. Jason is a staff writer for The New Yorker and has been a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, as well as writing for many other leading publications. Jason's new book, “Hated by All the Right People. Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind”, has just come out. Thank you, Jason, for all your hard work and making this evening happen.

It's a real honor and a great pleasure for me to be moderating this conversation between two giants in my field, Peter Katzenstein and David Laitin. By any reasonable definition, they’re household names in political science and have had a significant impact on the field. Peter and David have had interlocking careers; they were roommates in Mary Lyon, tennis partners, political science majors graduating in 1967 and best men and each other's weddings. Post-graduation, David joined the Peace Corps in part to avoid the draft, and Peter went to LSE to enhance skills in economics and philosophy. Both went to grad school in political science, Peter at Harvard and David at Berkeley. For their dissertations, Peter examined how Germany and Austria were on again and off again partners. David on why newly independent African states continue to rely on colonial languages for official purposes. Peter became a leading voice in international political economy and is the Walter S. Carpenter Junior Professor of International Studies at Cornell University. His current research interests focus on power and uncertainty in world politics, on time and space, and the politics of civilizations and regions. His latest book, “Entanglements and World Politics”, was just published last month. David is Watkins professor of political science at Stanford. Over his career, he has studied the role of culture and state building in Somalia, Nigeria, Catalonia, Estonia and France. His current research as co-director of Stanford's Immigration Policy Lab is on political conditions for the health and economic success of immigrants. Among their many awards, both Peter and David have been recipients of the Johan Skytte Prize, awarded in Uppsala, Sweden. The self-proclaimed Nobel Prize in Political Science. So we're grateful to have you here, and I'm honored to moderate.

Peter and David, I'd love to start this conversation by going back in time before hopefully we end with the present. Could you please reflect on how your years at Swarthmore shaped your intellectual trajectory and drawing on that experience, what kind of a college environment do you think is most essential today? If you don't mind, let's go in the opposite order of my introduction and start with you, David.

David Laitin ’67 Thank you. I have to say, it's totally cool to be doing this with you and Peter. Thanks for officiating, and I'm excited to be here. Since the awarding of that, the Skytte prize was a motivation for inviting us to this SwatTalk my focus will be on being a political science major rather than a member of the tennis team or staff writer for the Phoenix, or future spouse of Delia, class of 1966. What then was the experience of studying political science at Swarthmore in the 1960s? First, I want to say what it was not. When I graduated with a political science degree I had zero exposure to the quark scientific concepts of our discipline. What constitutes an equilibrium, no less a Nash equilibrium? What is an extensive form game and how to infer predictions from backward induction? What is a credible commitment? What is a regression model? What is a coefficient? How to compute the standard error? What is a byte? I didn't even know what these terms meant. I was clueless about the discipline for which I was a major. It was similar with the faculty. No member of the political science faculty would want to read the empirical articles in the American Political Science Review. Political science at Swarthmore in the 1960s was one of the humanities and provided me with a stemless education. Let me give an anecdote; In 2005, 39 years after I graduated, I came across Ray Hopkins, who I knew from common research in East Africa at the conference. He had come to Swarthmore the year after I graduated, and I think was the first political science professor who published work that had a regression model. I complained to Ray that I had been invited to give talks as a score of colleges, but never Swarthmore, not even as an honors examiner. I offered to give a talk without taking an honorary and more expenses. I had only one demand - my demand only to be invited to sit in in an honors seminar where I incredibly promised I would keep silent. I read the seminar papers on the train to Philadelphia, both of them seeking to explain why aid from the IMF and the World Bank led African countries into financial ruin. The subsequent seminar discussion that afternoon developed a set of reasons why this would happen. I couldn't help myself and butted in with this thought experiment. Suppose, I said we had a four box matrix, one axis with above and below the median growth rates for all African countries. The other axis above and below the median of aid from World Bank and the IMF. Then we could ask the question would there be only two field boxes: low growth and high aid and high growth and low aid? The students looked at me as if I were from Mars. I said they could find out that question and answer in about 15 minutes of research. After the seminar, Ray thanked me, telling me that Swarthmore students love big ideas, but not small tests. That was a good portrait of political science at Swarthmore in my era and lasting at least several decades. What about the small tests that I conducted in my career? That's what I focused on. I went to the library to search for any of the books I published, and I did find a couple, but neither was ever taken out. Another thing it was not, that is Swarthmore education, though it was humanities in tumultuous times, I can't recall a moment in political science classes where we argued about the Vietnam War, about Freedom Summer, about Berkeley and the Free Speech Movement, it was all big think but think. But big think in stemless and yet it served us well in terms of a successful career in the discipline. Indeed, J. Roland Pennock taught political theory to four future winners, Peter and I, Robert Putnam and Margaret Leavy, who came from Bryn Mawr and enrolled in the seminar with Peter and me. He is clearly the highest per capita teacher of Skytte winners. Well, how did Swarthmore do it? Most importantly, I was surrounded by brilliant students. Most importantly, Peter. He read nearly every one of my seminar papers at midnight before class and would tell me, teach me what my paper was about. I revised it along those lines from 1 to 3 a.m. in the morning and had a freshman deliver it to the ditto machine. On my hall taking part in these late night discussions, where future well known professors and inspirations, Alexander Nahumus, Steve Hamilton, Jeffrey Hart and the third political science and our ML Quint Maitland Sharp. Well, I have to admit, props played a complementary role. They expected us to read and write carefully and capture the essence of everything we read. I had to be prepared to justify every sentence and paragraph that I wrote. That skill, that turns out, is rarely developed in US education, and it has taken me and I think a lot of us, a long way. Still, I think today Swarthmore is at its best, combining the big think humanities and the small think STEM and perhaps more STEM than I received a half century ago. Peter, the floor is yours.

Peter Katzenstein ’67 Okay, well, I remember a paper which David titled “Almond and Nut”  Gabriel Almond was the most famous political scientist then, I think in Stanford and theorizing about developing countries and structural functionalism. And he was nutty in that way, but it was a big, important book. So you were pretty good at titles, I remember that. So I was at Swarthmore for only three years, not four, because I came from a German high school, which had 13 years and I convinced the Swarthmore registrar that I didn't need to do any science because I had chemistry and physics, you know, and ancient Greek and all of that. I would have flunked out if I had to take anything in the sciences, I'm sure of that. And I certainly wasn't an intellectual, I was a jock. I played soccer, but that was not really my sport, I was a field hockey player in Germany and I made a pact with myself and said, well, if they give me credit for the science courses and if I get into the honors program and I have to be the only for three years, I'll go back after my first year. And for reasons I have not ever fathomed, I had the intellectual maturity to choose Swarthmore for three years over field hockey in Germany.

So what was it about Swarthmore? Well, it was ideas, and it was this seminar experience. That is the first year there were courses, but the courses were small. I remember an English course where I had to write a paper a week, and by the end of the semester I was ten papers behind, and they said, okay, you get an incomplete, but you got to finish it by the first day of the second semester. Which I did, writing these papers in Houston, Texas, where we visited my sister. I visited friends and on a little Olympic typewriter and academics has ever since been very easy for me. But it was the Swarthmore honors seminar which interested me. And I found these discussions and the papers were very broad, enormously enriching, and interesting. And, I forgotten that I read David's paper.=, I'm sure this was made up by David, because I'm sure I was in bed already by 11. But, a seminar by Ken Waltz, who was then the great teacher of international relations at Swarthmore and became one of the great theorists of international relations internationally in the next 20 years. You know, we read the footnotes to his first book, “Man, State and War”. And, it was exhilarating for me, it was intimidating for a lot of other people. But I was so clueless about any of this that I didn't have any fear. So for me, it was a discussion and as for David, it was a discussion led by people who let students talk. So it was not sitting in lectures, it was talking and learning from fellow students and having read important works. So that is really what I remember about Swarthmore. And, it was big ideas for me. I never missed any of the small print. I wasn't interested in small print.

Ayse Kaya Fascinating. I have so many follow up questions, but I need to be disciplined. So bringing us more to the present, I want to ask you about your current and ongoing projects. And, Peter, starting with you, you've been thinking about the implications of changing American role and global politics. And, David, I know you've been focusing on immigration as we discussed. Can you both tell us a little bit about these ongoing important projects? How do you see this work contributing not only to the discipline of political science, but also to policy debates and what students often call the real world out there? Peter, let's start with you this time, if that's okay.

Peter Katzenstein ’67 All right. So the decline of American power, you know, there was a theme which has been around for close to 30 years. And, the financial crisis of 2008 sort for me said, okay, the game is over. And I published a book three years before the financial crisis called “The World of Regions”, in which I set the contours of the world will be regional, but it will be different from the 1930s. These will not be block regions as the new order in Europe was, the Japan led region in East Asia, they will be open regions, that is what they will be. Free trade, investment, migration, all sorts of things. And that was basically the legacy of the American induced and American brought about world system after 1945. So that is really the image of the world I had in 2005. And it was an image of the world which I had still in 2024. This has changed, in the last year. And what's happening in Davos tomorrow is just a continuation of what's happened in the last ten months. We are returning to the regionalism of the late 19th century, led by a group of political leaders in this country and Donald Trump isn't one of them, because he is purely into transactionalism and the politics of the day and the situation in which you make deals. But other people around him in which it is really a civilizational imperialism, and the world will be carved up as it was described in Orwell's 1948 into three block systems. And these blocks will be run by big countries, and these big countries eventually will fight. So we are, I think right now poised, if this plays out according to the plans in Washington of a world in which there will be a Western Hemisphere in which Donald Trump has already said China will run East Asia, and in which Russia will have to find accommodation in Europe. The question is how far west it will expand its influence. And the question is whether the Trump administration will, in fact, say we can do this world without alliances. That is the question. Because the alliance system, which the United States built up in the last 70 years, has been of enormous importance and strength. At the end of 1945. And this is where what stop, America accounted for about half of everything in the world. Military power, economic power, cultural influence. By 1970 it accounted for roughly a quarter of everything in the world, roughly the same proportion as today. But the other quarter was the resources which its allies had. And, that is the strategic decision the United States is facing. And Donald Trump is in a world in which breaking trust and taking people off is costless, because he only looked at the bargain of the day, but over a longer time period, I think it's costly and we are at a breaking point and I don't know how it's going to play out, but it is an important moment in world history.

David Laitin ’67 Peter, you don't see this as a political revolution led by President Trump?

Peter Katzenstein ’67 In international relations and domestic politics it's a much more open because I think there's still considerable resistance in this country to go along with the authoritarianism which he craves. But in the world, I think, this notion of a world of regions and probably regions which are not as open as they used to be, is likely to stick.

Ayse Kaya David, would you like to talk about your ongoing projects, the immigration? Love your immigration work?

David Laitin ’67 I'd love to. In the 2000s, I thought that the integration of Muslims and Christian heritage societies was a consequential political concern that merited investigation. What was the world going to be like with mass migration of Muslims into Christian heritage societies? France had for a generation mass migration from North African Muslims and I asked myself the following question, back to small print; how would this migratory wave succeed in France if everything about them were the same but they were Christian? In other words, can you actually measure the marginal effects of being Muslim on integration success in Western Europe? I had a cool, we call it identification strategy, that is, I wanted to look at two tribes from Senegal, the Jolas and the Seres and they had half of them Christians and half of them Muslims. But everything about them was the same; peasants, they were from Senegal, they came to France because of the drought, and France was admitting them in because they thought they needed mass workers for the new industrial age. They all came together, Muslims and Christians. And I asked myself, a generation and a half later, would you be able to see a difference between the success of the Muslims and the success of the Christians? It turns out that I compared that success, and there indeed was a big difference with Muslims having incomes a generation after migration, about 15% lower than the Christians. Why was this so? I developed a notion of a discriminatory equilibrium, where France expected low performance and Muslims expected low opportunity, which was self-sustaining. But I wondered how this equilibrium could be undermined through public policy. Is there a way to undermine this discriminatory equilibrium? Alas, I didn't have the skills or the perspective to answer this question, and that drove me in the new direction of my research.

At this time, the field of labor economics was developing an experimental approach to estimate the effects of policy on outcomes. They were working on what's the effect of reducing class size on educational performance? What is the effect of instituting a minimum wage and employment levels? What is the effect of nudging kids to prefer apples over candy and the lunch line in schools? They get the marginal effects of these policies, on outcomes that we care about. Maybe I thought we could use these techniques to examine policies towards immigrants, to see the return of those policies and their integration into host societies. In this spirit with Jens Heinmueller, I co-founded the Immigration Policy Lab, and we have looked at many policies to see if they had discernible positive returns in integrating immigrants and refugees into their home societies. We looked at DACA. We looked at driver's licenses given to the undocumented. We looked at the Program of Emergency Medicaid. We looked at welcoming contracts for permanent residency, very popular in Western Europe. We looked at granting citizenship more freely to people who wanted it. Many of these policies, alas, were statistical duds. No results. And a good example of this is a ten year project, which is just coming out in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences next week, where we ran a lottery for the $740 and 400 forms for citizenship. And the winners of the lottery were compared to the losers of the lottery after 4 or 5 years asking if winning the lottery and they were both alike in all respects, they all signed up for the lottery and wanted to become citizens. They all would have done it if they had the $740. We gave one group of 740 citizenship, the other group not. And what we found after four years, there was zero difference in their income, zero difference in their educational investments, zero difference in their credit ratings. The only difference we found was those who got citizenship were less fearful that they would be deported. But in terms of the economic returns to citizenship, zilch. Then we looked at DACA and looked at mothers who got DACA, who made the deadline by three months, and those who lost DACA privileges because they missed the deadline by three months. And here we found big results. Those kids, US citizens of these DACA recipients, those who are citizens and mothers who are DACA recipients were two and a half times less likely to suffer from stress related disorder. It turned out to be one of the most successful programs, in, in immigration history.

So this is exciting work that is looking at a range of policies, trying to figure out what works and then pushing those policies. For example, our excellent work on driver's licenses for the undocumented was tested in California, shown to be very positive, and New York quickly picked it up, relying on the data we collected. So we're trying to make small effects on the success of immigrants in host societies by studying the policies that are designed to do better for them.

Ayse Kaya This is really wonderful. Thank you. So we have to open it up to the audience soon. And Peter started answering my next question already. But I wanted to go from the past to the present to the future. And hindsight is always clearer than foresight. And each generation tends to feel that the moment it's living through is uniquely turbulent. That said, the moment does feel a little bit turbulent in this country and the world right now. So what are the most important dynamics or forces you think scholars, students or citizens should be paying close attention to? Maybe, I’ll direct that first to you David and then Peter you've just written a book on the importance of uncertainty. What does it tell us about the clarity of hindsight and the power of prediction? Thank you. And, David, we'll start with you this time.

David Laitin ’67 Yeah, but we should really be listening to Peter, his latest book on predictions and the major forces are exciting answers to your question. But my reading of Peter’s book is that we should be completely uncertain about what's going to happen and keep our mouths shut because our predictions are likely to be wrong. Here's what I tell my graduate students and I'll be quick here, that there are many, many forces that are moving these tumultuous times, many different ones, and to choose which one to be focusing on is the wrong way to go. I tell my graduate students, choose the force that you think is consequential and for which you have some intuitions on which way it's going, which may be different from popular wisdom. Use your own experience to push you to the forces where you think you can make a contribution. We've given our graduate students what I call the high technical tools or nuclear bombs. And I tell our students, don't use nuclear bombs to kill flees. Go after what you think is the most important. And after they've chosen that and grab a piece of the problem, they should grab a piece of the problem where they think they have a unique perspective and intuition. So I think there are multiple forces, but our students at Swarthmore or elsewhere should not be afraid to choose the ones they think they can make a contribution to understanding, to make the world a little bit less dangerous than it is. Peter.

Peter Katzenstein ’67 Well, let me start. I think the past is never fixed, Aysa. It's always reinterpreted. We rewrite the past all the time to suit our own insights, like the ones which David just outlined. So the past is always alive. So if  the past is always alive and uncertain, of course, the future is uncertain, right? So David was describing and it is in the title of the evening’s hour -

Political Science - David is very committed to the scientific enterprise and I was insisting on politics. My understanding of science is somewhat different from David's. David is a Newtonian. I wrote a book on power, and I remember giving lots of lectures and everybody sort of, I got the same question 20 times, 20 different audiences. And this question was Professor Katzenstein, what you're saying is very interesting, but let me, which meant - you're crazy, but let me translate it into my own language. And that language was unfailingly Newtonian. David is talking Newtonian language. It's a powerful language, but it's not the language of 20th century science. 20th century science is not a mechanistic model, it's a post Newtonian. Post Newtonian doesn't say that Newtonian, that the classical model is wrong. It says it's a partial view. It's very practical and it's wrong. And the same thing you can do also with humanism. Today's news is that the cow can scratch itself with a broomstick. Big surprise for the newscast that says, how come that that cow does something which humans were supposed to, only we were supposed to use tools? Well, if you're a humanist, you're basically ignorant about the power of humans. That is beyond human insights of modern chemistry, of modern biology, of astrophysics, a lot of science in the 20th century. So if you change the baseline, the worldview which informs your view of the world, world politics, the political world, you will come to different kinds of theories. And that means that you are able to not just focus on risk, but that you are integrating into your understanding of the political world and world politics - uncertainty. Not everything is uncertain. There are conditions which differentiate what I call the small world, the world of conventional political science from the larger world, the world of uncertainty. But normally risk and uncertainty are mutually implicated. And, so it's very difficult. You know, all professors always say on the one hand and on the other, okay? There are always two hands. Why? Because before the event, they don't know. After the event it's all very clear, right? So regression models, which David to some extent relies on, they always post dictions. They're always based on things which have already happened. And the assumption is that the underlying conditions don't change. Sometimes that's a reasonable assumption. Quite often it isn't. So the one issue which is most difficult dealing with uncertainty is the issue of language. Language creates worlds. It makes possibilities which we rely on imagination. I read a brief article about Greenland this afternoon. The maker of Borgen, which was a Danish TV series, the third season was set in Greenland, and he tried to convince the producers that the scenario would be that China, Russia and the United States were in competition for resources, and they're going to invade Greenland. Okay, he said, I couldn't sell that in 2022, that was too outlandish. Nobody was buying that idea, you couldn't imagine it. But he came up with the imagination. Okay, well, a political scientist who predicts in 2022 wouldn't have come up with that prediction, but he might have come up with the importance of a traffic stop in Greenland in 2023, because the conditions of those small world predictions might be stable, right? So the insight is not that risk based analysis and political science are wrong. They have fixed boundaries and the conventional wisdom basically doesn't acknowledge that we are afraid of uncertainty. We want to control the world. We are deeply suspicious of the world. At the same time, which we cannot control. And this is where science and religion actually meet. The fear of the uncertain.

Ayse Kaya Very inspiring. Very, you know, thought provoking. So I have to turn to the audience. We welcome the questions. And you already have questions. I want to start with a question from Robert Putnam, talking about the greats in our field and joined by another great in political science. And what, Robert Putnam is asking is the spirit in which I asked my first question, he says you two were very successful globally in political science, as you know, if we extend the window two years earlier, that number rises to three from a tiny college. Why? Faculty mentors selection and to Swarthmore randomness. Bob Cohen. I'll just tell you three questions, if you don't mind. Or we can start with one question and then go from there. So, we already have 12 questions.

We have a question on the importance of the rule of law past, present and future as a norm. So we have a mixture of questions, and some of them are, touching upon the current moment. And one on the Trump administration and fascism. So let's start with those three. Two of them are bringing us more into the politics realm. And the first one is reflecting on, from Bob Putnam, reflecting on your Swarthmore experience. And then I'll try to collate more as they're coming in. Thank you.

Peter Katzenstein ’67 David, can you take the first one?

David Laitin ’67 The Bob Putnam's.

Peter Katzenstein ’67 Yeah.

David Laitin ’67 Let me just say one thing from the last conversation. One of the great things about Swarthmore is that Peter and I have very, very different perspectives on politics and political science. Vastly different ones and yet we've been intimate friends for over a half century. And that's the kind of relationships that Swarthmore permits, that there's open mindedness and strong views with open mindedness. And I really appreciate our differences. My, if I can sum it up in a half a second, mine is political scientists, political science should be working to reduce uncertainty and Peter says political science should recognize uncertainty. And it's a different way of doing work and writing, but I think we both admire what each other has tried to do.

It's great. It's great to see Michael Meeropol's name there, who is a giant of our time, who asks if the Trump administration is attempting to bring fascism to America. I think that the rule of law is under threat, which is different from saying democracy is under threat. That we are living in a country now, where arbitrary actions by the executive, which we call the lack of executive constraints, means that the Democratic elected leaders can ignore the law for their own political or personal or financial purposes, and that is a disaster. I'm not sure whether it is fascism, as Michael is asking. But it is an undermining of human freedom, which is at least a cousin, close cousin to fascism.

Peter Katzenstein ’67 Yeah. So, I mean, let me just talk about the second and the third. I'm right now writing a book called “In Search of Germany”, taking off the manuscript that Henry Kissinger never finished in the 1960s. And I've done the introduction, and I'm writing the conclusion on, because I want to know where I'm going to land in that book. And, the conclusion’s title is or question is, is Washington now Berlin then? And my answer is that this is not fascism. I think we have now become an illegal society. Procedural law no longer works. I think the Trump administration does not adhere to procedural law. As for the rest, the Supreme Court is weighing in, but the shadow docket is preempting almost all other things. And the law works so slowly that, in fact, the Trump administration is creating facts on the ground which are not legal. So in my opinion, we are by now in a different regime from where we were on the issue of law. Like David, I think that's a more open question on the issue of democracy. Why not fascism? Fascism was a response to World War I, highly militarized societies. It wanted to create a new man, just like communism. And it was utopian. It was future oriented. The Trump administration and its MAGA movement is nostalgic. It wanted to recreate a past, a mythical past, for sure, but it has no future vision. It wants to create the kind of Spenglarian civilization or white civilization or racist ideology, which it thinks was a better past. And fascism was a movement oriented towards the future. So I, in that chapter have a section on why it's not fascism and then go into an analysis of populist ethno-nationalism and, backsliding, which is, the conventional understanding today, which I think is the correct one. But on the rule of law issue, I think, like David, that we've crossed the boundary, and it's not clear to me how we will recover from that.

Ayse Kaya We have an excellent slate of questions, both specific on your work as well as general about the world. So if it is okay, I'll start with one general and maybe we'll answer that and go to specifics about your work. So, Christina Coan Hamler asked a really interesting question. If you could have the answer to one unanswered question. So the answer to one unanswered question, historical or present day, what would that be?

David Laitin ’67 I think the unanswered question is, will the political revolution of the Trump administration, as we see in the political revolutions written about by Crane Britain, will undermine itself? As Trotsky was eliminated in the Soviet Union, as Robespierre was eliminated in France, as Deng was eliminated in China. That as the moderates of the of the political revolution are chased out by the radicals, eventually political revolutions eat themselves out. Will this process take place in this country, or will the political revolution undermining the rule of law sustain itself in the long term? That's the question for which research cannot provide an answer. But I would like answered.

Peter Katzenstein ’67 That's a great way of framing it, David. I will reframe the question saying what are the unpaused questions, which we would like to have two answers for. And there I come back to saying, well, that's the world of possibilities, which we never entertain. So quite often we find something in the history of technology and science and technology discovery. People come up with smart things which they found, and then later on they say, oh, we can apply it to X, Y, and Z. Most of the time the process of discovery is haphazard. And then we apply it to something. So the possibility of playing around which I would call experimentation is different from the process of experiment, which David is engaged in. Most of the time, I think we discover things through experimentation, not through experiments. Experiments operate in the domain of knowledge, which is pretty well established. Most of the time the important things are not well established. They come because they are new questions. So my unanswered question is actually about the question which we are not posing now, and I'm pretty sure five years from now that's going to be more important than the question which we are posing to which we have no answer.

Ayse Kaya All right, so a series of questions on how does a regional blog system or a multipolar world? I'm just pulling in from a number of different questions here. Not only how does it look like, but what about the potential outcomes? For instance, one question is touching upon the potential outcomes in terms of the future of Africa, because obviously a continent rich in natural resources. Another question is talking about multipolar world and how climate change and rising temperatures, you know, the ever elusive 1.5°C goals fairs in that world. And relatedly, and this is the third question I'm going to bringing into this, before we move on to maybe more political science discipline questions, what do you make of the Catholic Church speaking out on climate change, immigration? And, you know, some of these issues today? Maybe if that's okay. So, you know, we have this changing world, changing balances.

Peter Katzenstein ’67 I mean, the future of Africa, David is the Africanist. So I will just say Africa is, from all what I read, the growth continent of the next two generations demographically in terms of resources, China is in a terrible situation demographically. The United States, if it's migration policy changes continually will have a similar demographic crisis. Africa doesn't. Okay. So the future of Africa, in that sense, is open and hopeful. The multipolar world and the Catholic Church, there are problems which go beyond regions and countries and provinces and cities. And the the climate crisis is one of them. So it's interesting to watch, Donald Trump deny the existence of global warming and yet insists that, for national security reasons, he has to occupy Greenland. If there is no climate crisis, that's clearly not necessary., right? But we live with these contradictions all the time in science and politics and, of course, and political science. So, I think the environment is going to be a very big problem. You will not be able to buy insurance in Miami, Florida in 20 years from now, and if the threat or flares of ice melts, Cornell in New York will be underwater. There will be a 10-foot increase in water. And those are things which are likely to happen not in my lifetime, but in the lifetime of Swarthmore undergraduates who are graduating now. And the world of regions will not be able to cope with it. So there will be functional pressures for governments to cooperate, but not governments, which are now run by people who are 80 years old.

David Laitin ’67 I'm skeptical about the world regions. I see mass refugee and economic migration, due in part to the climate disaster that we are likely to face, and that the populations will become so mixed, that the notion that each region has its own personality will be somewhat undermined. But that's my, sort of trying to figure out what, how climate will affect the movement of peoples across borders and what that means for governance.

Ayse Kaya Thank you. So let me go to, there are two questions and I'm paraphrasing one of them, but basically asking about the probability or possibility of civil war in the United States. You know, one of them is directly mentioning civil war. Is it likely we're going to have a new civil war soon? And the other one, is questioning whether you see, is it possible, that we're going to see a peaceful transition in power or, you know, not. So if I may get your answers on that and maybe we'll move to the more disciplinary question.

David Laitin ’67 So one of my students, Barbara Walter, wrote, fabulous book, based upon the Political Instability Task Force research, of which I was a member, which says the conditions are riper than we would have thought for Civil War onset in the United States. It's a compelling argument. And maybe something here that supports Peter, that in the paper I wrote with James Fear on Civil War onset, published in 2003 and now has something like 14,000 citations. Our data show a zero probability of civil war in the United States. It also shows the zero probability of Civil War in Syria. So our ability to make good predictions with the best scientific models is questionable. I urge people to look at Barbara Walters' book if they haven't, because it shows the conditions, one of them being polarization or political polarization that seems to be one of the correlates of Civil war onsets.

Peter Katzenstein ’67 So the Civil War, there's also secession. It's not clear to me. I mean, there are books written about China 20 years ago that said China will break up into five different regions. Texas and California can clearly become major powers in the international system if they chose to do it. So I would say we ought to broaden our political spectrum of outcomes. But I think both of those in my gut instinct is that civil society here is sufficiently rich and resilient and we'll work it out. It'll take time, but I, I'm, you know, compared to other societies, I think we have a whole lot more cultural resources and resilience built into it. And there are a lot of ethnographies of middle America, you know, which, oh, there is common sense there too. So the political elites in Washington, maybe one thing, civil society on the ground through churches, voluntary organizations and other things is quite another. So it's not only civil war, I can see political accommodation, I can see decentralization, I can’t see secession. The United States doesn't have to be the United States. It could be the United States times four, times three, times two, right?

David Laitin ’67 I believe what you were saying for a long time, however, if you think about let's say the fruit seller in Tunisia suddenly setting off what became the Arab Spring and 2 or 3 civil wars, in different countries, associated with the Arab Spring. You could just think of some event like that in Minneapolis, sending people out on the streets, ICE and military brought there killing a few people and all of a sudden, a thousand people are dead. That constitutes a civil war.

Peter Katzenstein ’67 I’m not sure that constitutes the civil war, it would be Kent State in Minneapolis

David Laitin ’67 We would be lucky if it were that.

Peter Katzenstein ’67 Yeah.

David Laitin ’67 If it then moves on to Saint Paul and then moves on elsewhere as U.S. troops meet masses of protesting Americans and starting to shoot, the escalation possibilities are not zero. But I agree with you they're pretty low.

Ayse Kaya This is like a great Swarthmore seminar. It's just like a super high level because we have so many questions that are fantastic that I don't think we'll be able to answer. One question that we just got before we move to the discipline and perhaps end with that is nuclear war from Neil Holtzman. And, you know, he mentions that we haven't talked about the threat of nuclear war. Is that no longer important? Tony Hiltermann, sorry, the name was a different 1955. So. So what are your thoughts on that?

Peter Katzenstein ’67 Yeah, I'll let me talk on that. I mean, the book, which I just published has three case studies or four case studies in it to show what I call the risk uncertainty conundrum and the nuclear crisis of the October crisis in 1962 is my nuclear case. So the participants in that crisis, we they all agree, McNamara and everybody else, if you if you can tell one thing to the next generation is avoid entering into an escalatory crisis because at the end of the crisis, it was Khrushchev and Kennedy together, fighting together, this pressure to escalate. They were so scared of the uncertain outcome that they became allies. This generation of decision makers, Putin and Trump, I think no longer have that in their head. I mean, Putin uses nuclear threats pretty ineffectively, but he uses it very often. Trump hasn't used it and Trump is a coward. That's a saving grace, as far as I can see in national security. But if you were caught in a nuclear crisis, he would want to be a strongman. And that scares the hell out of me. So the nuclear clock is closer to the use of nuclear weapons now than it's ever been since 1945. So I do worry about this a great deal.

Ayse Kaya So, David, if you don't want to answer this, maybe we can end with both of you answering, of course, on the future of the discipline. So a range of questions we got is like, give us advisors, you know, students of politics, students of law. What should we do? How should we prepare? And then we got a couple of questions on causal inference, the use of quantitative methods, particularly regression, with one comment pointing out that regression, you could also use it for future prediction. You know, considering all of this. And I know that's a really difficult task, both advice to the future and the future of the discipline. Where do you, as one, question asked, where should today's students concentrate their energies if they want to have an impact as political scientists or on politics? Thank you so much.

David Laitin ’67 So let me just say that I think the great success of Swarthmore is in its ability to combine big think with small tests. That is the combination of the big normative issues that, for example, Emily Albring discusses in her question of J Roland Pennock influencing her, including through his Quaker heritage and contributing to her political science PhD focus on normative theory. It is the ability to combine the normative and the empirical in a way that doesn't look contradictory. That's, I think, a key to successful, professional development and intellectual development in the political science discipline. The other is to trust your intuitions, and not only to trust them, but then to run tests to see if the intuitions are correct. So, be guided by intuitions, but don't be fooled by them. Those are my two points. Intuitions and also combining the normative and the empirical. And that's what I think guided both Peter and guided me, in our careers. And I should say, we got a question from the political scientists, most prominent, I think, coming out of Swarthmore, that's Bob Putnam. And, he too was a Skytte winner, suggests that there was something special about the environment of Swarthmore that promoted this kind of professional intellectual development.

Peter Katzenstein ’67 Let me say one thing about prediction. There's exciting work by Phil Tetlock and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. They differ in their approaches and conclusions, but they agree that with careful analysis, you can look into the future, maybe 3 to 5 years out. Not beyond that. They both agree beyond that, this doesn't really work. That's not a small thing. So if you're interested in shaping the future, read Tetlock and read Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. Now J Roland Pennock or never taught pragmatism. So I would say lobby your theorist at Swarthmore to not just do normative theory, but include in it pragmatism. European social theory, things that American politics theory is facile, but I think the best deep thinking about how to affect the world comes out of the American pragmatist tradition. And that would be where I would put my emphasis in taking a political theory seminar. That's what I learned most from writing the book, which I just published. So there is Swarthmore work to be done, for instilling normative theory and pragmatism and a theory course mandatory for all Swarthmore graduates.

Ayse Kaya You know, mandatory courses are very hard at Swarthmore, but that’s a wonderful thought. So we have one minute left. Any final thoughts? Otherwise, you know, it falls on me to thank you. But anything David or Peter, that you wanted to share with us?

Peter Katzenstein ’67 Just thank you for having us. David and I talk a lot, but never talk in front of 95 people.

David Laitin ’67 It’s actually actually 301 people.

Ayse Kaya Actually we had over 320 people. So I was going to mention that we had over 320 people. It was inspiring, stimulating. Thank you both very much for your time and hope to do this again, if we can do it. Thanks a lot.

David Laitin ’67 Thank you.

Peter Katzenstein ’67 Thank you.

Ayse Kaya Thank you to the audience as well.