Solve the puzzles of international trade, war and order | MIT News

For Mariya GrinbergThe start of a research project often begins with an almost tangible feeling of irritation.

“I was reading something, a definition or an idea that doesn’t make sense, that seems logically inconsistent – and it stings,” says Grinberg, who joined the Department of Political Science as an assistant professor on July 1. “I try to solve what doesn’t work, like solving a puzzle. Her ultimate goal, she says, is “to find models around which I can build a theory.”

As a specialist in security studies, Grinberg’s broad interests “gravitate towards questions of time horizons.” This means, for example, how long-term planning by states affects their short-term decision making and how the expected duration of events affects how states respond to them. But in this vast and at times abstract space, Grinberg conducts research on issues in discrete areas at the heart of security studies: international order, decline of the state, and wartime commerce.

While it is “all about the theory,” Grinberg’s work taps into empirical evidence in the archives that amplifies his theoretical arguments and that sheds light on contemporary issues of the global power maneuver. It is research that challenges some conventional wisdom in its field, and has yielded provocative results on how states balance national security concerns with personal economic interests. Her thesis project on trade in wartime between enemies, which she is currently developing in book form, is an example.

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His project was sparked by conversations with other University of Chicago graduate students about the impact of economic interdependence on the likelihood of conflict between nations. “The basic idea was that if states trade a lot and war disrupts trade, those states don’t want to go to war,” she recalls. “Something about it wasn’t working for me, and I started pushing this idea,” she says.

Grinberg was born in Russia into a family of computer scientists. She shares the household’s aptitude for logical problem solving and has translated it into rigorous analysis of issues in her own field. So, faced with claims that economically linked states avoid conflict, she began a methodical questioning. “There was a lot of logic behind the general conception of trade as good and war disrupting trade as bad. But, she wondered, “Why shouldn’t trade take place during war?” “

Grinberg broke this down into a series of related queries: “You don’t want to sell an opponent a weapon, which would be bad, because it could shoot me immediately, but what about a vase?” Although the vase has no bullets, an opponent could sell it somewhere and possibly buy a gun, which would take longer to hurt. But what if the war ends before the enemy has a chance to buy the weapon? “

Through his arguments, Grinberg established instances where trade could legitimately be conducted during a conflict. It was time to turn to the evidence in historical documents to find out very precisely what type of trade occurred during wars and under what conditions.

Grinberg delved deeply into the British and French archives, where she found a wealth of relevant documents dating back to the Crimean War. She found notes from a British advisory committee during World War I that recommended that trade in products that could be used immediately in wartime, as well as those that could be used in wartime before the end of the war be banned. and those whose sales generated profits. that could be used during the war.

Of particular interest to Grinberg: the committee also recommended that if it took the enemy longer to convert gains from trade into military capabilities than the war would last, then it made sense to trade with the enemy . “You can trade them for something that they can turn into a profit over a year to buy a tank, if you think the war will be over in six months,” says Grinberg. “If a state predicts a longer war, then it can add items to the list of prohibited trade. “

These wartime trade policies appeared in every archive she explored. “States do rational things,” says Grinberg. “Trade is mutually beneficial, and it makes sense that both sides continue to trade, except under certain conditions.” At the start of World War I, for example, Germany and the Allied armies frequently repositioned their troops as they attempted to overrun each other. During this period, merchants from warring countries were allowed to buy and sell products such as pickaxes, shovels and shovels. But as the war continued, the armies retreated into positions, and “all of a sudden the ‘tools and tools of entrenchment’ as the British called them were banned from trade,” Grinberg explains. .

There were more bans for WWII, which participating nations believed would last longer. But Britain and Germany still traded with each other for products they couldn’t get anywhere else: for example, Britain needed precision-made hosiery needles by Germany, because the Specialized equipment to make the needles was not available in Britain for the foreseeable future.

Political implications

With the evidence from that research in hand, Grinberg began to think about the implications. “The economic interdependence argument rests on the idea that nations do not trade during war, and with more trade we should see less fighting.” But that’s not how it works at all, says Grinberg. “Given more interdependence and the likelihood of continuing trade in conflict, the push is not towards less war, but towards continuing trade during war.”

His thesis and an accompanying article, “Wartime Commercial Policy and Trade between Enemies” (published in International security), makes the argument that “trade cannot be used as a lever to prevent war, because we have too many incentives to trade during war”. This means, for example, that we should not assume that because the United States trades with another country, there is less possibility of war with that country. Given the strained relationship between China and the United States, two very established trading partners, this seems an important observation.

In addition to this ongoing project, Grinberg is developing a paper on state decline and strategies states can use to prevent such falls. The project is “centered on Britain, with American implications,” she said. Grinberg also revels in teaching at MIT, where she can meet colleagues and students face-to-face for the first time since Covid-19 conducted online education. The academic fit seemed perfect to him: “Few universities in the United States have devoted security study programs open to the economic dimensions of the field, and who appreciate both the theory and the methodology of case studies, ”she says. “I won the lottery here.”