Voices Erin Lin === [00:00:00] Erin Lin: It's a messy process. I think everyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. In this case, the way this project evolved was honestly through a lot of failure. Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host, David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as Art, Astronomy, and Physics. Chemistry and Biochemistry, Physics, Emergent Materials and Mathematics and Languages, among many others, the college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. David Staley: I am pleased to be joined today in the ASC Marketing and Communications Studio by Erin Lin, Associate Professor of Political Science at The Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. She uses a multidisciplinary approach to study key questions in [00:01:00] comparative politics and international security, including legacies of war, economic development, agriculture, and genocide. Welcome to Voices, Dr. Lin. Erin Lin: Thank you. I'm happy to be here. David Staley: Well, and I'm particularly interested to learn more about your recent book, _When the Bombs Stopped: __The__ Legacy of War in Rural Cambodia_. Tell us what your findings were in this book. Erin Lin: Yeah, so this is a book that's about the legacy effects of the U. S. secret bombing of Cambodia, that's during the Vietnam War, and what I did is that for my dissertation and for the extra research I did once I arrived at OSU, I conducted a lot of immersive field work in Cambodia in these remote villages in the northeastern province of Ratanakiri, which borders Vietnam. And the idea behind that type of field work is that I really wanted to understand what bombing looked like from the perspective of the bombed. A lot of times in our research in political science and in international relations, international security, we really focus more on bombing strategy, what happens, what's the most efficient ways for fighters to win [00:02:00] wars and really how that impacts things like the global changes in the balance of power. And I really wanted to take the inverse perspective and understand, well, given that there are these strategies in place, what does it look like for the people who are actually experiencing those types of targeted aerial attacks? David Staley: What did it look like for them? What did the bombings look like from the perspective of the bombed? Erin Lin: Well, one thing that I discovered is that there's still a long legacy of unexploded ordnance that impacts the lives of Cambodian farmers today. The people who are almost differentially impacted are the people who live in the most fertile lands of Cambodia. This is because the way we design many of our bombs, still to this day, they're supposed to detonate upon impact, so places that are hard, rocky surfaces, you're going to see more likely detonated bombs. This means that kind of the lush, fertile rice paddies of Cambodia, where those surface areas are softer and inundated with water, have lush plant growth year [00:03:00] long, that's actually where you find the most unexploded ordnance. So, it's in the most fertile areas of Cambodia where you actually see the most unexploded ordnance, and those are the most underdeveloped places, ironically. David Staley: And, Presumably, these explode from time to time, or are there other sorts of issues like that? Erin Lin: They explode unexpectedly. Anything from just like shifts, because there's two seasons in Cambodia, a rainy season and a dry season. The way that the soil is structured, the rainfalls will basically shift a lot of the soils, bringing sediment up from the bottom and also moving sediment from one place to another. So, as a result, you do have bombs being unearthed, shifting around, and that just change in pressure alone can often set off bombs, also just changes in surface pressure, so like when animals traverse areas that are relatively overgrown, then they can also set off unexploded ordnance, as can people driving tractors or using handheld equipment. There's a lot of reasons, both known and unknown, about why unexploded ordnance can continue to detonate today. David Staley: And [00:04:00] they are detonating today. What sort of rate, I mean, in a given year, how often might this happen? Erin Lin: That's a statistic that's hard to exactly capture in terms of the number of bombs that are detonating, but we do know the number of lives that are impacted through injuries, and so it's estimated that in Cambodia you have about an injury or death a month, due to unexploded ordnance across the whole country. David Staley: What other sort of effects, the bombings, aside from unexploded ordnance? Erin Lin: So, this is actually one of the key focal points of my book, where I examine some of the economic impacts in one of the main chapters, and I find that areas that are affected by unexploded ordinance, experience a 40 percent decline in household income, and a 50 percent decline in agricultural productivity and rice productivity. That means that they are effectively producing less rice because of this, what I call a sphere of fear that hangs over the entire community, because the idea [00:05:00] is that when someone discovers an unexploded bomb, it actually has this outsized impact that's larger than the blast radius itself because then they and other people like their neighbors and other community members will hear about just where unexploded ordnance continue to persist in the village, and that will impact their everyday agricultural behaviors. So, you see people actively trying to use hand tools rather than machines to grow their rice because they want to literally leave a light footprint on the soil, and then you also see them farming minimal amounts of their land rather than trying to farm the entirety of the fields that they own because they'd rather stay safe than produce at a commercial capacity. David Staley: Is anything being done about this unexploded ordinance? I mean, aside from, you know, having farm equipment run into it or something, is there anything sort of formally being done to clear these areas? Erin Lin: That's a good question, and there is a very active international humanitarian demining community. The issue with professional demining is that it's very capital intensive, and [00:06:00] it's very expensive, and you have to move at a relatively slow rate in order to remove unexploded ordnance that can be hidden anywhere, ten, twenty meters into the soil. So this means that it requires an array of tools that use different types of radar detection, metal detection, looking into the soil. You also have to train deminers, in anywhere from a three to six month long course to both use these tools as well as, how to dig up unexploded ordnance properly when you find it, because remember, this isn't just, like a sandbox where you have, like, landmines hidden throughout; these are former battlefields, and so you effectively have fields with a lot of rocks in them, you have a lot of scrap metal, both due to, I think, a history of agricultural usage, but also due to the fact that there's a lot of detonated ordinance and leftover munitions that could essentially set off false positives for any type of equipment that you use. So, this means that every type of metal that is registered or [00:07:00] object that looks similar in shape to a an array of unexploded ordnance, have to be treated as if they were a potential explosive bomb, and this means that you have to both dig them out slowly and carefully, but this also creates a fair amount of deminer fatigue when you kind of have to treat all of these potential instances of pings on your radar as things that potentially could kill you. David Staley: So, what's the geographic extent of the problem that you're examining here? Erin Lin: That's a good question, you can answer it a couple of ways. So, I think the first question that people usually have when they hear about my book is that they wonder, well, you know, how long of a task is at hand in terms of like how much land is actually necessary to be able to clear and like how much money would be feasibly need to invest in order to remove the unexploded ordinance. And that's a tricky question to answer in the way that there are a lot of uncertainties in estimating exactly how much [00:08:00] unexploded ordnance is left. What we do have are the payload drops of exactly where pilots had estimated bombs or the payloads that they dropped, latitude, longitude coordinates. But, then we don't exactly have an understanding of where those bombs still exist, and that's because bombs can move in the soil, that's because it's actually really hard to determine, when you find a bomb, exactly which payload it came from, and that's because Cambodia suffered other wars besides the U. S. bombing. So, for example, there's a large land mine problem in Cambodia as well, and so you have battlefield sites that are essentially overlapping, and as a result, the way that we understand where the high density areas are, it's a mixture of both using the geospatial data as well as just calling reports of people telling us, well, you know, we found what we think is a landmine or a bunch of cluster bombs here the other day, and those don't always overlap with I think where we would expect the payload [00:09:00] data to tell us. And so, like, the complicated way to answer your question is that, there continue to be areas that kind of surprise us. We're finding new ordinance from different times of periods of war all of the time. And it just, it seems honestly just more like a continual living problem than one that's going to be finitely solved in the next twenty or thirty years. And the other thing to think about too is that unexploded ordinance is a problem that exists in any country that has experienced war, so this is a problem that exists much outside of Cambodia, and even the wars that we see today in terms of Ukraine, Gaza, but also, longstanding conflicts like Azerbaijan, like Lebanon, where we see very similar mechanisms at play where entire agricultural fields that used to be very important for agricultural productivity in these areas, be essentially taken away because it's too dangerous to use these fields anymore. And so, like, the way I end my book is just suggesting that all of these [00:10:00] areas need much more attention and research being paid to it, because the good news is that in some ways we're producing a really amazing social scientists in our PhD programs, both in OSU, but also just around the U. S. and across the world. It's a cry for help, for more attention to be paid to some of these other cases by some really talented graduate students. David Staley: Well, I think you started to address this, but I'll ask it anyway. Is your book documenting a problem, or are you offering solutions, here's what can be done to address this? Erin Lin: It complicates both, to be honest. I think, especially working on a topic that touches closely to a lot of policy themes, I think the immediate temptation is to think like, I almost had to think like an economist, which would be a slam to economists, which I don't mean at all because I use a lot of econometric methods. But, I think the initial, the knee jerk reaction is to think of like a market oriented solution, right? So if I'm making this argument that unexploded ordinance kind of services barrier to market access from [00:11:00] farmers to increase productivity, then the obvious solution would be remove the barriers to access, remove the unexploded ordnance, and everything should kind of go back to baseline, or what, you know, we would expect otherwise. What I find in my research, and this actually is one of the themes of my fourth chapter of the book, it's how we really need to pay attention to the historical and political contexts in which we try to apply some of these technocratic solutions. So, what I find is that in areas, or farmers that have had the good fortune to have their fields professionally attended to by professional deminers, what I find is that like there's kind of this initial honeymoon phase of a couple of seasons where they're able to produce rice at a much larger commercial capacity than they had previously. But then, what happens is that they find that they're at risk to land grabbing in the Cambodian marketplace. So, you know, [00:12:00] Cambodia is an authoritarian country. There's a kleptocratic elite that has enough political connections to essentially take land under what's called the economic land concessions, one of the land laws that was started in 2001. And so this means that they can make this argument that any place that they find could be, you know, well suited for large scale commercial development that would improve the Cambodian economy as a whole, they can ask provincial and commune and district level leaders for essentially permission to lease that land. And that's what's been happening for a lot of the farmers that I spoke to in Ratanakiri, where they've had these experience of their ancestral household land being taken from them once it was cleared, by these economic elites and their businesses. And so it's this idea that, you're kind of throwing Cambodian farmers out of the frying pan into the fire. It's a very tricky situation because not necessarily the fault of the humanitarian demining organizations, because, again, their outcomes [00:13:00] oriented operation where it's true they did make land safer for Cambodians and for large communities. And so, then the question is, like, is this the continued responsibility of, say, the U. S. government that put the failed bombs there in the first place? And I think my whole argument in that chapter is that, at the very least, someone needs to be researching and documenting some of these secondary effects, because if the researchers won't do it, it's not really clear who else will attend to some of these second order questions. David Staley: You've been talking at various stages about the kinds of methods that you're using, and you, initially, you talked about fieldwork. Describe some of the fieldwork that you engaged in. Erin Lin: Yeah, I do fieldwork that's very, like, off the tarmac and on the ground, so. David Staley: Is there any other kind? Erin Lin: I don't want to slander. Um, so I've researched Cambodia for the past 15 years. I got started as a college junior, doing a summer residency research program [00:14:00] in Cambodia, and that kind of just started my interest in the country. And to be honest, my interest in Cambodia, like, predated my entree into political science. I just knew I wanted to study Cambodia first, and then I eventually found out that, like, a lot of the questions that I was interested in were political science questions and a lot of the methodologies I wanted to learn were housed under political science. And I think in some ways, like I wanted to write a book beyond just an academic book, like a book that really introduced Cambodia to a general audience. I find that as a comparativist in political science, like the majority of my audience has never been to Cambodia, and of course, like if they haven't been to Cambodia, they definitely haven't been to Cambodian minefield, or experienced what farming rice is like and what going to a rice paddy is like and actually working in a rice paddy. I think a lot of, I think a lot of foreigners like can see a rice paddy because they've been on a bus, and they've had a tourist experience of Southeast Asia, but I think there are fewer who know what it's like to like work, like wade in the [00:15:00] waters. David Staley: Have you worked in a rice paddy? Erin Lin: Yeah. So in college, actually, my hobby when I was doing my PhD, in college, I was an environmental studies major, so I always liked kind of studying, outdoors behaviors, and then in graduate school, I worked in an organic vegetable farm in my off time, and that actually helped my field work a lot when I was doing my dissertation research because in some ways, I actually had skills, like I could plant things, I could weed things, I, like, knew how to not damage seedlings. I think a lot of beginner farmers or gardeners, like, don't know how fragile plants are to begin with and how to transplant things properly, and that was actually the perfect way for me to develop a lot of my relationships that I had with my respondents because, they saw I was free labor, but they also saw that I was, like, curious in their livelihood, and that was a much easier way to start interviews, than to just kind of, like, go in cold, wanting to do a more formal interview in someone's house. And it was just a good way [00:16:00] to, I think, learn a lot about the land. I'm, like, a huge fan of John McPhee's narrative nonfiction and I think his approach both to like how he wrote about plants and how he wrote about ecologies and human interactions with the environment, was like something I always had in the back of my head as I was doing my fieldwork and I was developing relationships with people. Yeah, so I probably do this weird version of fieldwork that's inspired more by John McPhee than the modal political scientist. But it honestly just boils down to, I think, my interest in farming and in people. David Staley: But you also mentioned your use of geospatial data, for instance. Tell us how you use that in this research. Erin Lin: Yeah, so, I love ethnographic methods, but of course there's a limitation to them just in terms of scale, right? It's hard to necessarily prove that a few conversations will scale into large dynamics that impact the majority of people, say, in a country. I used a lot of data. I used [00:17:00] declassified U. S. Air Force data of the payload drops, the pilot records that I had mentioned before, and then I geocoded the Cambodian census, particularly the agricultural census, and so that gave me the agricultural yields of every single plot in Cambodia, as well as other types of household level agricultural behaviors in terms of like the amount of rice surplus, the amount of rice sold to market, and also things like household income and consumption. And then, the Ministry of Agriculture also has a really well defined soil fertility map, based on their own geo codings of geospatial data, satellite data, of different colors and verdancies of soil types in Cambodia. So, I was able to use the soil fertility data, the census data, and the payload drop data to get a sense of like where the bombs are being dropped, where there should be unexploded ordnance due to the differential soil fertilities, and then how this then linked [00:18:00] to present day agricultural productivity. From all of those statistics I was able to find these large scale trends of, like, where there's high fertility soil and where bombs had been dropped, where we expect the most unexploded ordnance, then that's where you actually have the lowest agricultural productivity rates of the whole country. David Staley: What other methods did you employ writing this book? Erin Lin: In the book, I used really a combination of ethnographic methods and econometric methods. Beyond the book, I've been able to work with soil scientists to collect soil samples from my respondents to understand what the levels of heavy metal exposures were from the areas where unexploded ordinance remained in their soil, and the goal is to start an environmental impact study of how unexploded ordnance can potentially either leach toxins into the soil, but also how the detonation process in itself can create more kind of heavy [00:19:00] metal particulate exposure in the soils that then can get absorbed through the food chain. So, that was one project to come out of the field work, and I also worked with a team of computer scientists to take the payload drop data as well as the soil fertility data, and come up with a more precise estimate using machine learning algorithms and bomb craters to understand like where unexploded ordnance should be left in particular fields. David Staley: So, I'm going to ask you a chicken or egg question. So, you have the data and, you know, there's data driven methods and then you have ethnographic field work. Did the field work inform the data analysis or did the data analysis inform the field work, or what did that process look like? Erin Lin: It's a messy process. I think everyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. In this case, the way this project evolved was honestly through a lot of failure. When I was a graduate student, I did not come in knowing that I wanted to study [00:20:00] unexploded ordnance. I came in knowing that I had an interest in, you know, development in Cambodia, and in an array of methods. So I actually, the first time I went to Cambodia as a PhD student, I went in for a different project. I wanted to study like folk tales and how that may or may not lead to more pro social behavior in particular villages, and then like the villages that I went to, it was just really hard to find anyone who knew of these folktales, like I had discovered this Ministry of Culture archive from the 1940s and 1950s of different folktales, like localized folktales, and when I went to those particular villages, like, the village elders, as well as any of the generations after them, were just like, I have no clue what you're talking about. Like, there might have been a librarian back in the day, but like, they don't live here anymore, or, you know, obviously the Khmer Rouge genocide had happened and a fair number of people who worked in education were lost in that. So I just was kind of stuck, [00:21:00] and as a result, I just farmed while I was trying to figure out what to do for the rest of my fieldwork. And so, it was really through farming where I got to kind of know people better and people beyond, like, kind of the educators who would be interested in folktales. And that's when I started hearing stories of people's different experiences, and as someone had mentioned that, like, they had family in a different part of Cambodia where they're these issues of unexploded bombs. So, like, the topic was in my head, but I don't think I fully understood what I could do with it until I came back from my fieldwork. And I was, you know, just flailing, just trying to figure out what to do, like what someone does after their first research idea doesn't pan out. I had this backup of like while I was in Cambodia and in Phnom Penh, I tried to collect as much data from different organizations as possible, so I had contacts in the Ministry of Interior and they have like a digital statistics [00:22:00] archive, and so, I worked with them to kind of get all of the census data and then I geocoded it and then I was like, well, you know, like, let me see, like, if there's any legacies of bombings. And then I was like, but, you know, I should also include some fertility variables, because I think in the back of my mind, some of those stories about like, bombs and unexploded bombs were kind of still sticking in my head. And then I was able to find this really interesting statistical correlation that just endured through a lot of different types of modeling distinctions, and that's when I think I knew I was onto something. So it's like a lot of things happen at once, and figuring it out is really, it's probably one of the, best experiences an academic can have. David Staley: In 2021, you were elected to the Board of Trustees at the Mines Advisory Group. Tell us what this organization is. Erin Lin: Yeah, so Mines Advisory Group is also known as MAG, and they are one of the key international humanitarian demining organizations. They do demine operations [00:23:00] across virtually all the continents, they have a wonderful program in Cambodia. So, I actually worked with MAG when I was an assistant professor in 2018. They helped me get in contact with their own teams of deminers in Ratanakiri, so I was able to both shadow those demining teams as well as meet many of their community stakeholders and ended up being respondents for my book. Like fast forward essentially three or four years later, and I was starting to publish research from some of those data collection efforts. One of my articles in political science got covered by _The__ Economist. _ David Staley: Yes, the magazine*.* Erin Lin: Yeah, the magazine. And it turns out that the board chairman, Dan Clune, former ambassador, U.S. Ambassador to Laos, is a subscriber and so he read that article and, within a week interviewed me for the board, which I sit on today. I'm serving my second term and it's been, I think, an amazing opportunity, it's honestly a dream for, I think, any social scientist to [00:24:00] actually be able to step more fully into the policy world to realize, like, they could play a role in informing any types of decision making or advocacy for issues that are very important to them. And so, it's been, I think, really wonderful to kind of see, like, the other kind of operations side, the types of challenges that international humanitarian demining is facing, both in terms of finding its monetary financing, but in terms of also figuring out what are the programs that they should dedicate their time and resources to since everything is limited, yet the problem almost seems infinite. David Staley: Tell us what's next for your research. Erin Lin: Well, there's two things. So, next fall, when I'm on sabbatical, I will be on a Fulbright-Hays, going back to Cambodia where I'll be studying the impacts of information operations campaigns. So, one of the things that I found both from my fieldwork and also exploring the declassified payload data is that I'm able to both see geospatially, but then also [00:25:00] talk to people on the ground of experiencing like pamphlet drops of aerial warnings from U.S. pilots, essentially telling civilians to try to limit their exposure to certain areas that are going to be bombed heavily. And what's interesting is that I find that there's a mix of reactions to these pamphlet drops. There are some communities that read the pamphlets and they follow the instructions to a T, and there's you know, everyone in that village kind of survives the bombing raids because they've moved to a safe haven. And then there's like other communities where the village leaders told them that this is false news, like, you know, why would you believe pamphlet drops coming from the people who are bombing us? They don't move and they experience high rates of casualties from the bombing raids. And then, there are some areas where the community just doesn't have like an overall leadership structure, so it's people interpreting these messages for themselves. I'm trying to understand exactly where this variation is coming from and what's determining these different responses. So, [00:26:00] that will be my Fulbright project, and then I have a separate project, funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and I'm actually moving areas to the South Pacific, to like the Marshall Islands, to Vanuatu, to Guam, where these are areas that are of immense strategic importance, especially as we see, like, increasing Chinese influence in the Pacific and U. S. essentially losing regional allies that were once very strong, from World War II on. Yet, I think as important as these areas are, they've honestly been understudied and undersurveyed in American political science, and so this is kind of just a first step to understand what are the foreign policy preferences, the national security preferences of a lot of these Pacific island nations and the civilians who are kind of caught in between the meeting of these two global superpowers. David Staley: How will you determine that? Will you do interviews and those sorts of things? Erin Lin: That's what I'm starting. So, I'm starting Marshallese language lessons, which is what they speak on the Marshall Islands; last summer, [00:27:00] I went to a Chamorro immersion language school, which is what they speak on Guam. And so, I'm starting to make a little bit of headway into, developing some of the more ethnographic methods of eventually going to many of these islands and essentially just living and learning from people. In the meantime, there's large diaspora communities, so, for example, there's about, I think, three thousand Marshallese living in Salina, Ohio right now, so I have, as one component of the project, a collection of oral histories from Marshallese elders, so we can start learning, some of the, I think, agricultural and cultural traditions that are increasingly being lost as more and more Marshallese actually move to the U.S. David Staley: Erin Lin, thank you. Erin Lin: Thank you for having me. Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at the Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at [00:28:00] go.osu.edu/voices. Produced by Doug Dangler, I'm Jen Farmer.