Lessons from a 50-year-old professional drifter

This text covers my experience writing a PhD in a mid-career phase of my life. The experience is of course specific to me, but it might help other people contemplating this move. I sometimes sought such reflections online, when I felt lost, and rarely found anything useful.

I have not yet defended my dissertation (that will happen on 26 January 2023) so it may be a bit premature to share this experience, but whatever the result of my defence, the trajectory leading to it will remain the same.

1. Deciding to embark on a PhD

In 2016, when I was already 48, I decided to write a PhD in International Relations, my main field of work. I had the following reasons:

1. To increase my options to lecture at universities, an activity I had come to enjoy but that can rarely be practiced without a doctoral degree
2. As a freelance consultant and occasional writer of analytical texts it is advantageous to have a PhD degree: one qualifies for better jobs and reaches a wider audience
3. I was genuinely puzzled by the failure of international efforts (that I had participated in) to restore political order in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia and could not find a sufficient explanation for it in my readings
4. I felt that I was becoming intellectually a bit lazy: too complacent with my own ideas about how the world functions. I wanted to submit these ideas to the test and sharpen my thought processes.

The third reason oriented my choice of subject: why do international efforts to build states in other countries fail so spectacularly, and why does the international community keep trying? The fourth reason convinced me I should embark on a thesis. The first two, more practical reasons, were professional justifications I could give to others and myself.

The choice of where I should register as a doctoral candidate came quite naturally: Sciences Po in Paris is where I did my second master’s degree, and where I have been lecturing since 2010. I did look at options in the UK (SOAS, LSE), the USA and the Netherlands, but they all required a year of ‘sitting in classrooms’ which I could not afford myself (and had no desire to do). At Sciences Po PhD students must also follow a few courses the first year, but I understood I could postpone them, and that they were not all that essential. You don’t need to be in Paris to do your PhD.

I didn’t seek funding. Being registered at Sciences Po only costs a bit less than 400 € a year (while PhD registrations in the UK and the USA are much more expensive), and I was earning enough money to avoid looking for doctoral research funding.

2. Getting my PhD research plan accepted

The next step was to find a PhD director and have my proposal accepted. The latter is difficult in Paris, because only a limited number of PhD students are accepted and, given the low yearly registration fee for this prestigious university, the quality of the proposal is the major screening factor.

The faculty pages of university websites give a clear indication of which professors and researchers are most suited for a particular subject, but I soon found out that many of them are not qualified to direct doctoral theses; and those that are qualified often already have enough PhD students, especially if they are popular or well-regarded academically.

I formulated an initial research proposal called ‘Cultures of Intervention’ where I would focus on three countries: Afghanistan, Somalia and Libya, and examine international interventions in these countries through a cultural lens. This six-page proposal sketched the subject, why I thought it was relevant, a rough theoretical framework, how I would go about my research (methodology), some fundamental authors on both the theoretical and the policy analysis sides, and a rough timeframe for my research. In the following months, this research proposal went through three new versions. The changes were mostly inspired by a few meetings I had with academics whom I approached to see if they could be my research director.

I soon noticed that my twenty years of professional experience, mostly in the field, were not considered an asset. The director of the doctoral school, a man of roughly my age who, I hoped, would agree to be my PhD supervisor, didn’t even look at my proposal, that I had sent him days before: he told me straight away that it was not a good idea. I was too coloured by my professional experiences and could not achieve sufficient academic detachment. If I wanted a doctoral degree, I should try an ’executive PhD’ of the kind US universities offer. When I told him I liked teaching and lecturing he told me I was too old, anyhow, to ever become a university professor; the competition was fierce and young people were preferred. When I left his office, I was close to giving up. With him against me, my chances of being accepted seemed very dim.

Professor Luis Martinez, a specialist on North Africa, had oriented me helpfully but initially thought my subject was beyond him. However, he finally agreed to become my PhD supervisor if my proposal were accepted. Like the director of the doctoral school, he advised me against a comparative approach: would I be able to do fieldwork in Somalia, Afghanistan and Libya? How would I resolve the enormous differences between these countries? So I decided to limit myself to Somalia, where I had just gotten a job as research director for an NGO. The most prominent French expert on Somalia, Roland Marchal, who was not qualified as a PhD supervisor, agreed to cooperate with him on the content; that helped to convince Luis Martinez.

I also received the backing of Olivier Roy, a specialist on Afghanistan and well-known researcher and author, who had supervised my master’s thesis. I wrote the letter for him and he signed it. There were two decision dates per year for accepting new PhD students; I submitted my proposal and, to my surprise, it was accepted in September 2016. I was now a doctoral student.

In hindsight, the reason for its acceptance probably had more to do with my profile and subject matter than my proposal, but I don’t know for certain. Besides Marchal, there were few French experts on the Horn of Africa; and to have one or two elderly doctoral candidates with field experience, notwithstanding the reticence shown by the doctoral school director, brought some variety to what was otherwise a group of very young PhD students.

My opinion is that PhDs should only be started, barring exceptions, after the age of forty. Most PhDs are written by young people with a great aptitude for learning, but with little experience of life. They construe their subject matters theoretically, not responding to vital queries of professional life. Their fieldwork consists of limited experiences and formal encounters framed by their methodology. I have seen many of them become very unhappy during the writing: they are isolated in the ivory tower of academia, while their friends have jobs, are earning money and starting families. It is almost cruel to submit young people to the hardship of academic doctoral research.

3. Combining PhD research with a working and family life

I thought I could work on my PhD in the evenings, after a working day. But that was a miscalculation. For the first two years I worked in Somalia, and once every two weeks I would spend three or four days at home, in Addis Ababa, with my family. But the kind of NGO work I was doing required me to work often in the evenings, finishing reports and so; and when I was with my wife and young children I could not bring myself to work. And then there were many school holidays, trips through Ethiopia and vacations in Europe. I also needed to do some sport and have a minimum of social life. I did not even read much academic literature. Like most students, I hardly remembered anything from my years at university, and I found it very hard to get my bearings in international relations theory. By forfeiting my first year of research methodology (obviously, I could not travel back and forth to Paris and I got a dispensation, to follow the mandatory courses later) I did not even realize that I could login to the University library and download almost any academic article, and a few e-books, that I needed.

I didn’t suffer isolation, but my research did. I had no contact with any other PhD students, and my thesis supervisor was very hands-off. In those first two years I did learn a lot about Somalia, directly and through the few books I could find on Somalia in Nairobi bookstores (there were no good bookstores in Addis Ababa). In the second year, Sciences Po decided to establish a ‘comité de suivi de thèse’ for each doctoral student. I bluffed my way through one or two online meetings with the members of my committee, making it appear I was progressing much more than I was. Luckily, they let me be.

My employers thought dimly of my PhD research, and insisted I could not use any of the confidential information (mostly on NGOs and security issues in Somalia) that I was privy to, nor use my position or time at work to do my research. In my initial plan I wanted to conduct many interviews and even surveys among people working in the intervention industry; but by the time I quit my job, after two years, I only had three or four interviews written down, and I had given up on the idea of conducting surveys: too impractical in Somalia. Those first two years I read some interesting books and wrote a few dozen pages, but most of the work I had done on the PhD was rewriting the initial research plan, and sending these revamped versions to my supervisor, who, understandably, did not react very enthusiastically. He was very patient with me, that was nice.

In April 2018 I sat behind my desk in Addis Ababa and worked hard for a few months, producing a history of international intervention in Somalia. I worked when the children were at school and my wife in her office, and often continued at night. By then I had discovered the possibility to do online research through the university portal. I also benefitted tremendously from a pirate site called 1libgen, or b-ok, or zlibrary, where an amazing variety of academic books could be downloaded for free. But on these sites, you still need to know what to look for. What really gave my research a boost were hundreds of articles and a few books and PhD theses on Somalia that a German scholar on Somalia gave me on a USB stick, one fine afternoon in Hargeisa, Somaliland. Thanks, Markus.

The forty-seven pages I wrote then, and which I shared with my thesis supervisor, Roland Marchal and a Somali professor in Mogadishu (Baadiyow) were rewritten a few times afterwards, but much of it is still in my final thesis. This was the core of my dissertation. The feedback I received was that it was a good overview, but that it needed an academic discussion: where were the theories I used, or argued against, or modified? Sincerely, I still had almost no clue. The fields of international relations theory, or political anthropology, or historical sociology, which all had to do with the subject of state-building, still seemed an ocean in which I despaired to find my bearings.

That took me another three years; the last (sixth) year of working on my dissertation I started to feel confident that I had a good overview of some of these theoretical fields, those that were required for my argument. In the meanwhile, I often felt lost when trying to address theory. It would take me another two years – until the summer of 2020 – to produce the first drafts of new chapters.

Many of the theoretical inroads I made into the political order in Somalia, and international state-building efforts, were false starts; others, such as Bourdieu’s sociology of the state, were promising but difficult to apply to Somalia. Periodically I would be unsettled by discovering a whole new field of academic literature on a subject I believed had been neglected, or hadn’t even heard of, requiring me to review my own arguments, realizing how shallow they would seem to any reader more acquainted with academic theories about my subject. But there was one field, concerning self-governance in Somalia, where I could find no theoretical approaches at all, while it had become clear to me that political order in Somalia was rooted in clan self-governance. How to deal with that?

I was also concerned about my lack of proper field research and interviews. Between the summer of 2018 and that of 2019 I made several trips to Nairobi, Mogadishu and Hargeisa for my research. It is  difficult to travel to Somalia, considered perhaps the most hostile place on earth for white foreigners. Friends secured a position for me as guest lecturer at a university in Mogadishu for two weeks; this was a perfect field research position. I collected a good amount of interviews, which would turn out to be a treasure trove for my subsequent analysis and writing, and made some useful new contacts with Somali specialists.

Time fled. My wife was ‘bringing home the bacon’ and the children, our house, and our ambitious holiday plans (overland trips through Africa and so) required my attention, as did moving our household from Addis to Brussels in the summer of 2019. Although I had decided not to take a new job until finishing my PhD, I would realize sometimes that I hadn’t been working on it for several weeks, submerged by the vicissitudes of daily family life.

I still had to do the mandatory ‘first’ year of PhD courses, and immediately after settling in Brussels I started these, in by now my fourth year (2019-2020). The content of these classes was quite useless; I found myself discussing my progress with 23-year old first year PhD students. During my short and sporadic trips to Paris I barely socialized with other PhD students or faculty. In hindsight, I think it would have helped to ‘hang around’ more in my research institute (CERI) but I didn’t really have the time for that. One thing is to overhear, in a conversation between two other researchers, some interesting point of methodology; quite another is delay one’s return or make arrangements to spend the night in the hope of gleaning more of such information. ‘Hanging around’ is, perhaps by definition, something that serves no purpose when planned.

The pandemic hit us in March 2020; with the children and my wife at home doing distance-working or -learning I could no longer really work comfortably at home. In the summer I locked myself up for four weeks in an apartment in The Hague, to write the chapter on Somaliland. This proved to be a useful strategy. By myself I could be quite disciplined, working from early morning to bedtime, with a one- or two-hour walking break in between. In late autumn, I went on another six-week writing retreat in a cottage in Burgundy, and in 2021 I repeated this experience in a hunting lodge in the Dordogne and a few times in my stepmother’s house in Utrecht. These moments of pure concentration were productive. Upon returning home, I wanted to prolong this fertile creative period, and continue researching and writing on a daily basis.

Meanwhile, my cash reserves were becoming depleted. I also felt the urge to return to Somalia to collect some additional interviews/points of view. I found some work with an English consulting firm: a six-week stint collecting data about contemporary Somali culture and writing a baseline study for a donor wishing to invest in this sector. I arranged to travel to places and meet people I had not yet seen; this donor project would allow me to also, on the side, continue my own research. It was a perfect opportunity, and it paid quite handsomely too. I collected another 21 interviews during these travels.

As a consultant, I could not allow myself to be completely absent from my field of work for years on end. I also secured some smaller jobs, one in Sudan, one a desk job working on Somalia. When the Afghan government fell to the Taliban in August 2021 I tried to get involved in the future of that country, working with Afghan exiles to set up new structures and engage the new authorities. That came to nothing and consumed quite a lot of my time, but these professional pursuits were not at odds with my academic research; both domains fed into each other, and it became clear to me that after finishing my PhD I would want to continue developing both fields simultaneously.

I also started teaching again at Sciences Po, but now as a doctoral student instead of as a professional. I earned much less than I had in the past, and instead of MA students in Paris I was now teaching BA students in Le Havre, one of their regional satellite campuses. This was also time consuming but as mentioned earlier, I like lecturing and feel I always gain much from my interactions with students. The ‘Introduction to Political Science’ course, for which I had two groups each year of first-year students, coincided with my increasing self-assurance that I had finally gained a broad and sufficient overview of political theory. The classes on Afghanistan I gave to second and third-year students allowed me to apply the insights I had gained on state-building, self-governance and the international order in Somalia to another country context I was deeply familiar with.

There was thus a growing convergence between my PhD research and writing, my lecturing and my consultant work, which seemed full of promise for the next phase of my life.

4. Writing and completing my thesis

I started out writing my PhD in Microsoft Word, but I soon ended up with a bewildering number of documents, some containing interview notes, others reading notes, and many others fragments of chapters to be. Then I heard about Scrivener, a software program with a once-only payment (no subscription) used to write complex texts, from a friend who writes TV and movie scripts. I took the time to complete the tutorial. This was a useful investment. Instead of a linear text, this software allows to develop a two-dimensional text with an arborescence. It is very light in terms of file size, so ideally suited for older, slower computers. What it does not do is layout (and images and so), so when the text is finished you compile it into an Open Document or MS Word format and finish it. This really helped me.

My dissertation text went through five major reorganizations, where I would modify the chapter order, requiring a rewrite of all the transitional, introductory and conclusion parts, as well as modifications in the chapters themselves. These resulted in five different Scrivener files. That is easier to oversee than a jungle of Word (or Open Office, which I prefer and advise to use instead of Microsoft) documents.

For Sciences Po, a PhD dissertation should normally be between 400 and 500 pages, or about 250,000 words not including annexes, bibliography and extras. I know that compared to most English and American universities, that is a lot. As mentioned, after two years I had only ‘completed’ less than fifty pages, and in the summer of 2020, after four years, I was not much further. I wrote my PhD in the last two years, most of it between October 2021 and October 2022.

My thesis supervisor, Luis Martinez, was hands-off and patient, always encouraging me to go deeper. He never pressured me; sometimes I had to pressure him to get feedback on chapters I had sent, and when he responded, his feedback was always very helpful but also distant, as if he had not really read my text, but rather just skimmed over it. He was right, of course, because when I had finished a chapter and sent it to him, I was convinced it was an accomplished work of academic art and expected feedback correspondingly. But a year later I would send a very modified version of that same chapter in my new layout, and so I was basically wasting his time. He told me, when I was close to completing the thesis, that he had only received feedback from his own PhD supervisor once, upon submitting the first draft of the entire work. I guess that my working life had made me used to colleagues responding to each other’s drafts in depth, creating a collective product; but my PhD dissertation had to be written by me alone.

As to Roland Marchal, he was also careful not to waste his time, providing extensive feedback on my drafts only when I could convince him they were really ‘final’. Then he would go through them pulling them apart, both theoretically and factually – the latter was most painful. But that was very useful feedback. Otherwise he would barely respond, with an email consisting of a few words. In the summer of 2019 he stopped responding to my (infrequent) emails entirely. I thought I might have exhausted his goodwill. It was only half a year later that I found out he had been imprisoned in Iran. It allowed me to say, interestingly, that ‘my research director is imprisoned in Iran’ but of course I also missed his critical feedback. After his release in March 2020, I hesitated to approach him, thinking he had many other issues on his mind, besides his unrewarded work to help me with my dissertation. His partner remained a political prisoner in Iran, and is so to this day.

So my two thesis directors were there for me at crucial moments, but for the rest I was truly on my own, and rarely received orientation for how I should proceed. I missed the warmth and compassion between colleagues I knew from professional environments. There is probably something very French about this approach, but the peculiarities of my position – old and far away from Paris – certainly contributed to this feeling of isolation.

I kept giving myself deadlines for when I should be done, and making detailed plans with timeframes indicating when all the missing chapters had to be ready. I failed to meet deadline after deadline, but kept making new plans. In the autumn of 2021 I made a final push to deliver my manuscript by the end of January 2022. In January, I had gotten to the rhythm of finalizing one chapter per week, sending them to my supervisors as I finished them. But the last chapter, about how state-building actually strengthens the international order instead of the political order in Somalia, was daunting and eluded me. I decided to await the verdict of my PhD supervisors on the completed parts; personally, I was very happy with how they had turned out. I felt, then, I was very close to completion.

They took their time with their feedback. Finally, their verdict was that it wasn’t bad for a first version, but that what I had sent them was a book, or rather separate chapters of a book, not a thesis. Your argument is not clear, they told me; which theories and thinkers are you engaging, discussing, how does your thesis unfold in chapter after chapter? My dissertation needed a complete rewrite, and the addition of a new layer. I was devastated. In a meeting with Luis in Paris, he told me that it was normal, a PhD was never ready in one draft; the second draft would probably be ‘almost ready’ but still require a third go-over, to improve the details, footnotes, structure etc. I was in a rebellious mood and said: “what if I submit it anyhow, in its current shape? Will it pass?” He doubted it and said it would be a pity, after so many years, to fail.

I was on my way to Khartoum for a short job, and when I came back I found it hard to pick up my writing again. My central hypothesis was clear, and I developed a set of sub-hypotheses, and under that a layer of working hypotheses, trying to summarize my argument in a few pages before starting on the restructuring. I was thus fooling around until April 1, when Luis forwarded an email to me with the decision that PhD registrations in the seventh year were no longer permitted. I panicked. “Does that mean it must be ready by the end of the summer?” I asked Luis. He told me he had negotiated for a defence in January, but the PhD had to be submitted by the end of October at the very latest. No more time for a third version, so much was clear.

So from April to October 2022 I rewrote large parts of my thesis. In fact much of it really changed; I notably developed a new theory, which I called the Dual Power Theory, to account for how self-governance and state governance interacted to form the political field. The version I finalized in October was truly different from the first version, and in my eyes much better. But then I always feel happy about what I’ve written immediately afterwards: that is no guarantee that it is truly good. My supervisors had no time to give feedback.

In the last months, my supervisor and I composed the jury. I wanted to have big names, and Luis wanted to have ‘nice’ jury members who would not bring me down. There were detailed rules as to the jury composition (three academics external to Sciences Po, at least 3 qualified to direct theses, preferably a gender balance, preferably one or two members of foreign universities). We were both happy with the final jury composition. I’m pretty good at layout, and my father helped remove grammatical errors, as well as inconsistencies in my 1500 footnotes and forty-page bibliography, so that went smoothly. I remembered in the last days that I also needed to include a ten-page summary in French, and I kept needing to improve my introduction and conclusion, also written very late. Finally, on 28 October, I submitted the thesis and drove my family to the mountains for a holiday.

5. Final Thoughts

All in all, I really enjoyed writing this dissertation. I like both research (reading and fieldwork) and writing. I really grew, intellectually, during this process. From my initial four objectives, the first two remain to be proven, but the latter two have already been accomplished. I now believe I have the answer to why the international community keeps investing in failed state-building processes (and how it could be done differently).

I realized that I really want to continue in the field of academic research. Over the past years I have developed a theoretical grounding, developing my own theories of intervention, international order, the dual nature of power and the role of the State. I am very eager to continue developing them and putting them to the test. I now dream of leading my own research department at a university. But then I don’t aspire to become a professional academic, but would like to have one foot in academia, and the other in fieldwork and policy design.

Finally, I really think that a doctoral degree, at least in the humanities, but maybe generally, should be a mid-career objective, and should generally only be undertaken after twenty years of working life. What Sciences Po demands may be a bit extreme; probably most people in this age group would spend five years to finalize even a much more modest doctoral dissertation.

In contrast, I don’t think the production of young academics with doctoral degrees but little experience of life outside academia serves a general purpose. It allows the academic institution to perpetuate itself aloof from society. Allowing people with work experience that has been transformed by mid-life doctoral research to enter academia through a side-track provides much more interaction with the rest of society. This is a discussion which we must have, within academia.

Update: The defense was successful. You can download a copy of the PhD here (under a creative commons license) and a summary of the 3-hour defense here.

Image in the banner: Mehreen Murtaza: Ottoman Heliograph Crew at Huj during World War 1 1917, from the series ‘The Dubious Birth of Geography’, 2012