From elite consumption to popular opinion: framing of the US drone program in Pakistani newspapers

The United States has conducted armed drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004. While there has been some recent work on Pakistani public opinion about drones, there is very little research on how Pakistan’s media characterize the US drone program. This is an important gap in understanding the determinants of Pakistani popular perceptions of this program. Decades of research has shown that “news framing”, a process by which certain aspects of a complex concept are emphasized in political communications with others played down, influences individual cognition while forming political opinions. In this essay, we address this lacuna by assembling an unprecedented sample of editorials about the drone program from three English newspapers and one Urdu newspaper and analyzing the news frames within them. We next compare the trends in these news frames to public opinion data collected by Pew between the spring of 2009 and 2014. Initially, most Pakistanis were unaware of the drone program, media coverage of the program expanded as drone strikes increased in frequency. While Pakistanis became more cognizant of the US drone strikes, even by 2014 large minorities remained unaware. Pakistani public opinion strongly reflected the top media frames, particularly those that are negative. This is an important finding suggesting that newspaper editorials are a good barometer of Pakistani opinions despite the fact that only information elites rely upon newspapers for political information.     

Performance and properties of Q‐Statistic monitoring schemes

In this article, we study the Shewhart chart of Q statistics proposed for the detection of process mean shifts in start‐up processes and short runs. Exact expressions for the run‐length distribution of this chart are derived and evaluated using an efficient computational procedure. The procedure can be considerably faster than using direct simulation. We extend our work to analyze the practice of requiring multiple signals from the chart before responding, a practice sometimes followed with Shewhart charts. The results show that waiting to receive multiple signals severely reduces the probability of quickly detecting shifts in certain cases, and therefore may be considered a risky practice. Operational guidelines for practitioners implementing the chart are discussed. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2009     

Predators and Peace: Explaining the Failure of the Pakistani Conflict Settlement Process in 2013-4

ABSTRACT

Did US drone strikes cause the unravelling of the Pakistani conflict settlement process between the government and the TTP in 2013-14? In answering this question, we present strong, fieldwork-based evidence that the effects of leadership decapitation, civilian casualties, and loss of legitimacy and credibility as a negotiation partner by both the government and the TTP interacted in the context of specific social, political and cultural characteristics of a tribal society. We find that drone strikes ‘produced’ some of these factors, but not all, which allows us to conclude with four concrete policy recommendations for rethinking the use of drones.