The thesis post

Here it is. After a hellish (okay, heckish) March scrambling to put everything together, I turned it in twenty minutes before the buzzer on March 30. I defended it the next week, and it got high honors.

What I’ve spent the last year on is this, roughly: we know that nations interact outside the bounds of international law sometimes — they make secret agreements and all that. We also have a lot of ideas about why they do this, but these theories haven’t been tested in the real world using a random sample. That’s what I tried to do, and it turns out that it’s pretty hard to test international relations theories in that way. Nevertheless, within my constraints, I found that a lot of the common wisdom doesn’t hold up.

Overall, it’s good to be done. The weeks since turning it in have flown by, and I think part of that is simply because I haven’t had anything to take the place of the eighteen-hour days I was putting into my thesis before that. At this point, I can hardly recognize it as my own — the context it was written in was one of basic primal freaking out, and in these sunny late-April days I can hardly even put myself back into that mindset. One symptom of this disconnect is the collection of phrases I find just skimming back through that I’d never use in my usual writing, for instance. But, a quick skim does bring back a lot of the reading that I did over the last fourteen or so months. And really, getting a good grasp of the literature in a field is more important than standing by the conclusions reached in your very first academic paper. At least, that’s my take on it.

I wish I could have known what I know now when I was first setting out to design this whole project. For one thing, some of the assumptions I made in operationalizing individual theories are barely justifiable, and if I just had a little more time and a little more data I feel like I might have found support for a lot more of them. That’s why, actually, I’m not comfortable saying that actors don’t take, for instance, the potential for political embarrassment into account when choosing, say, the form of their agreements (I think the ginger wording of my conclusion in the thesis itself expresses this hesitance). What would really have been interesting is another month or so to fiddle around with regression modeling and figure out what degree of weight each of my independent variables are given under varying circumstances. My gut feeling is that this is closer to the truth — decision-making really seems expressible (in a none-too-elegant way, sure, but expressible nonetheless) as a weighted model of factors leading to a rational choice of level and a rational negotiation on publicity. But I’m no savant mathematician and this was no open-ended dissertation — I had limited resources, expertise, and time. So it goes.

Thanks to everybody who helped me out in writing it, and thanks to everybody who put up with me when it was all I could talk about. I really am happy with my finished product!