The educator covid diaries

I was at the EDEN conference this week in Dublin (excellent conference by the way, congrats to EDEN and the DCU team). Although I’ve done a couple of conferences, this was the first time seeing a lot of people I used to bump into regularly prior to the pandemic. It made me reflect that much of what happened during that time (2020-2022) is already fading from memory. This prompted me to look back over some journals I kept at the time, and I was right, I had forgotten most of the unusual work and roles we took on then, plus the stress of worrying about family, and the continual stream of lockdown variants.

Michael Ward at Swansea Uni started an interesting Corona Diaries project during this period, which capture much of this sense of anxiety, puzzlement, anger and uncertainty. My daughter even did some work inputting the entries. Looking through those and my own entries made me think we should share some of our experiences from the higher education perspective, before our human capacity to recover and move on means all those moments are lost in time, like tears in rain, or at least face masks in the bin.

So here are some edited highlights of my covid diaries, I’d love to hear yours:

18th May 20 I have 8.30 scrums most mornings now for the microcredential course. I wrote for this until 5.30

had a day that covered all my academic roles today – course author, senior manager, researcher, journal editor, administrator, speaker, fund raiser. Finished after 6

I finished at 6.30 and went outside for a neighbour’s socially distanced 70th birthday. Everyone in the street came out and they poured champagne in glasses we left at the end of the drive.

Long working day again but then I’m on leave. I feel the problem of having too many roles at the moment – they’ve all increased by 20% because of the pandemic so I’m failing on multiple fronts. Went to bed by 9.30 and slept for 9 hours.

I did a webinar this evening for EDEN with Catherine Cronin on use of oer in the online pivot, then had a quick meeting with people from COL on doing another webinar. It is the year of webinars.

27th Sept [daughter] has had her first week at uni, she has settled in well with her flatmates. In Glasgow and Manchester Covid has spread wildly through student halls and it’s surely only a matter of time before it hits them.

18th Oct We are likely to be entering a short ‘circuit-breaker’ lockdown on Friday, for 17 days in Wales. Numbers have been rising and the hospitals are near to overload.

26th Oct [daughter’s] flatmate has been diagnosed with Covid, and [daughter] thinks she has it too. She rang me at 1.30 last night and today was in tears. It’s difficult enough learning to live with 6 strangers, but having to negotiate how they’ll all deal with pandemic and self-isolation adds another layer of stress and tension to it.

21st Nov I did an interview for the BBC and Natwest this week, both for web articles on the shift to online learning.

It’s been a busy week, we needed to get a microcredential course in presentation by tomorrow, which meant writing a week’s worth of work and doing some odd tasks.

6th Dec The Welsh government announced last Monday that from Friday pubs would close at 6 and not be allowed to serve alcohol. Most have sensibly decided that pubs not serving alcohol are rather pointless and have shut. I went to the pub last Tuesday, and that was it, no pubs for christmas or new years. There is a rumour that we will be going into full lockdown again on 28th December.

It was announced today that we’re going into full lockdown again on the 28th, and I rang my father today to say we’re not coming up before Christmas.

20th Dec Wales went into lockdown last night, unexpectedly and without warning – we had been told it was coming on the 28th. Shops are to close, no meeting up, no travel. It means I might not even get to see [daughter] over the xmas holidays. It plunged me into depression last night – not just the lack of contact but the necessity to keep finding ways to be positive, to dig again and manufacture methods of staying active, being supportive and restructuring the day.

13th Jan We’re deep in lockdown now, with around 1500 deaths a day, and 50,000 infections

I’ve had a few insomniac nights, getting 3-4 hours sleep each night, but it shouldn’t be a surprise really when ALL of this is going on.

17th Jan We’re still in lockdown now, I forget what it was like not to be in lockdown now. We’ve been in some variety of it since September and that was after a four month one.

I did a keynote for the H818 conference today. I’ve got another keynote on Monday for Belfast Met, and completed a review of e-learning rubrics for UNESCO this week.

Mar 14th (after getting a puppy) Yesterday I felt claustrophobic, trapped in one room mostly, still in lockdown, it felt like we’d been taken hostage by two canine terrorists

4th Apr I went to see [daughter] last week, as we’re now allowed to travel within Wales. We met up in Brecon and she walked Posey. I had my first vaccination jab on Friday. It was in a large leisure centre in Pentwyn. I found the experience strangely moving in its quiet efficiency.

I expect lots of you have more intense or interesting journals from the time, but I found it fascinating just how much of this I had forgotten.

How to Disrupt Feedback Loops of War in Beijing and Washington

The professional bureaucracies of both the US and Chinese national security states encourage mistrust, jingoistic attitudes, pessimistic assumptions, and hawkish policies. This is a growing source of war risk, and the only near-term fix is a security dilemma sensibility.

Let me explain.

The Security Dilemma Sensibility

Some time ago, Kenneth Booth and Nicholas Wheeler wrote of a “security dilemma sensibility” that policymakers could (and should) cultivate in order to better manage the interactive processes that can lead to crisis and war, even between two actors who have only defensive intentions.

They described a security dilemma sensibility as:

an actor’s intention and capacity to perceive the motives behind, and to show responsiveness towards, the potential complexity of the military intentions of others…the ability to understand the role that fear might play in their attitudes and behaviour, including, crucially, the role that one’s own actions may play in provoking that fear.

I first came across their book while finishing my PhD, which I did on the side while working in Obama’s Pentagon. Like (hopefully) everyone who studies international relations, I’d learned about the security dilemma as an undergrad. It made sense that non-aggressive countries could inadvertently make themselves less secure by taking measures that would be misperceived by others as threatening, leading to counter-measures also perceived as threatening. 

But a security dilemma sensibility really resonated with me as a practical extension of the original concept. And so I found myself trying to bring this sensibility to bear over and again—on the “Korea desk” in the midst of two North Korean attacks on South Korea; among a small group of policy nerds trying to make the “pivot to Asia” real; as a one-time defense strategist contemplating “emerging technologies”; and as a public critic warning about the ways the Trump-Kim nuclear crisis of 2017 could (and nearly did) go sideways. 

My role in these things was inarguably negligible; with the exception of the North Korean nuclear crisis, none of the policy paths taken reflect my counsel. Nevertheless, the security dilemma sensibility strongly colored how I made sense of these wide-ranging problem sets. 

The Feedback Loop Problem

I was reminded of all this while reading a piece in Foreign Affairs by Tong Zhao, whose research on China-related strategic questions is among the most insightful in the business. In the essay, Zhao argues:

The dynamics among China’s political leadership, its policy elite, and the broader public have generated an internal feedback loop that is not entirely within Xi’s comprehension or control. This could result in China’s being fully mobilized for war even without Xi deciding to attack Taiwan.

Recognizing the presence of policy feedback loops is important—they describe how we can imagine security dilemmas escalating into conflict spirals. And it’s not surprising that feedback loops would be present in a rivalry that is intensifying right in front of us.

The valence of a relationship constrains available policy choices and how those choices are perceived, making rivalries self-reinforcing and stubbornly path dependent.

In China, as in the United States, the opinion-makers are virtually all hawks. Everyone is outbidding everyone else. Above all, nobody wants to be seen as “weak” or naïve about the enemy. And all the while, the national security states of both sides are doing everything that politicians allow to optimize themselves for war.

Fueling this is ethnonationalism—in Washington as in Beijing. Reactionary politicians feed implicitly racialized nationalist policies to publics whom they refuse to feed political democracy or economic security. As Yuen Yuen Ang saw in 2022:

The only people who are winning [Sino-US competition] are the ardent radicals, the extremists, and the autocrats on both sides.  It’s so easy to be nationalists…You just need to scream and say extreme things and get people roused.

Neither Chinese nor US officials exercise sufficient control of the violent forces they’re manipulating for political, strategic, and personal gain.

Proximate and Underlying Causes of War

We can’t afford to overlook the root sources of Sino-US confrontation, which include a nightmarish melange of exceptionalist nationalism on both sides, shifting patterns of capital accumulation under the previous economic order, and an unwillingness by either side to take a relational view of the other.

But being clear-eyed about the root causes of security problems doesn’t buy you out of taking seriously potential proximate causes of war, like feedback loops.

Now, I worry about whether China and the United States actually have defensive intentions. Xi Jinping’s jingoism has infected China’s governing regime, and the People’s Liberation Army is definitely taking seriously Xi’s priority to “be ready by 2027 to invade Taiwan.” And while it’s impolitic to point it out in Washington, there is good reason to think that the United States could be a revisionist actor too.

But even though it can be difficult to know whether to code states as having defensive or aggressive intentions, it is not hard to find policy elites within states who are unquestionably aggressive or unquestionably defensive.

The trouble is that even individuals harboring non-aggressive, security-seeking motivations are trapped in systems whose pressures and incentives are much bigger than them.

This is true at the nuclear level. We can reasonably say neither country has the desire to launch a first strike, yet the nature of today’s technologies and Sino-US nuclear postures have locked the two countries in a structural security dilemma. As recent research shows:

The shift in the conventional balance of force in the region and the U.S. development of lower-yield nuclear weapons has led to greater fears in China of U.S. limited nuclear use in a conflict. Chinese strategists increasingly believe that U.S. nonnuclear strategic capabilities threaten China’s nuclear forces.

This is also why feedback loops are an important phenomenon to grasp. The point of Zhao’s warning is that we ought to be trying to “understand how certain efforts to deter Beijing can inadvertently exacerbate the security challenge.” It’s a matter of urgency that US policy thinks through how to disrupt—rather than blissfully ignore—feedback loop dynamics within the Chinese system.

How? By cultivating a security dilemma sensibility.

Our policies need to do more than give us psychological comfort and optimize for a war that nobody can win. They need to self-consciously prioritize preventing war.

So for every new basing access agreement we announce, for every new tariff or economic restriction we unveil, for every new military exercise or arms sale we conduct, we must ask: How does this make us more secure? How does this feed into China’s distorted view of our intentions?

Similarly, when China makes moves we don’t like, we must ask: To what extent are they responding to what we are doing?

I know that many a policy wonk worships at the altar of Thomas Schelling and therefore tends to view life as an endless series of rational games where you as an individual are just constantly trying to get the best of everyone.

But that’s exhausting and unsustainable, and probably self-defeating. It impedes adopting a security dilemma sensibility. And ironically, even Schelling stressed the importance of reassurance and the idea that adversaries needed to believe not just your threats but that they can get on peaceably if they don’t challenge your resolve.

This is cross-posted at Security in Context’s blog, as well as Van’s newsletter.