“A lot of the original research and counterinsurgency… looked at the use of development assistance in a given village or area on sort of insurgent violence in the village and completely ignored the fact that in a sort of insurgency, what's happening in one village is observable to the insurgent as well as to sort of residents in other areas… And what I ended up finding was that on average, you actually only serve to displace and possibly exacerbate the violence. So in sort of this original published research, you said, yes, development aid is good and it reduces violence, when in reality, the opposite was true.”
ChinaTalk · Geopolitics & World Affairs · October 2026
Context
Koven, a former academic, makes the case for publishing failed and null results, using his own dissertation as the example. He argues the US spent heavily on development aid in counterinsurgency without those lessons, at a cost in money and service members' lives.
Transcript
…research enterprise is one of trial and error, right? For everything I published, I tried 10 or 15 things that didn't work. And when I say didn't work, they didn't work in the sense that I didn't provide, didn't sort of have this aha moment. It didn't mean I didn't learn something in the process.
Let's do an example. Let's give us a coin case study here.
Ooh, okay. So a lot of the original, and this gets to my dissertation project, but a lot of the original research and counterinsurgency that looked at the use of development aid and governance reform looked at the use of development assistance in a given village or area on sort of insurgent violence in the village and completely ignored the fact that in a sort of insurgency, what's happening in one village is observable to the insurgent as well as to sort of residents in other areas. So I tried to sort of fix this by implementing sort of a spatially weighted regression approach to studying this so that we could measure the effect of a development aid intervention not only on the village receiving it, but on violence in surrounding areas. And what I ended up finding was that on average, you actually only serve to displace and possibly exacerbate the violence. So in sort of…
So let's now do like a Department of Energy Genesis case study.
Yeah. So my critique there is focused largely on sort of traditional academic research, sort of typically something that's done as a solo sport. One professor or grad student by him or herself working on their own project in a silo. The way in which DOE and the national labs do sort of…
Yeah. And so I don't know, how's AFS going to solve the problem here?
More from ChinaTalk
