How Chris Blattman Attempted to Destroy an Innocent Mother-Son Bond

(Editor's note: sarcastic title. Mostly.)

When I was a child, my mother would regularly read me The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown. Amazon describes the book as follows: "A little bunny keeps running away from his mother in an imaginative and imaginary game of verbal hide-and-seek; children will be profoundly comforted by this lovingly steadfast mother who finds her child every time." (Maybe this is where my sometimes-outrageous imagination hails from?) As the little bunny imagines new and exciting ways to escape the boring life at home, the mother bunny stays a step ahead of him, telling her child, "...for you are my little bunny."

My mother has reminded me of this story throughout my life. When I went to Spain in high school, she left me a birthday card that included the reminder "For you are my little bunny." Similarly, care packages arrived in Madagascar enscribed with the same line. But aside from this specific mother-son bond, I have not given the book much thought in years - very few of my friends even remember it (unlike Margaret Wise Brown's more popular Goodnight Moon).

So, imagine my surprise when The Runaway Bunny came up during a lecture in my Political Economy of Development class. Professor Blattman used the story in a state-building lecture (details here). Here is his connection between the children's book and the lecture material:

States for most of history have been unrelenting, coercive, and all-consuming. If you think of states as merely benign or civilizing, you will fail to understand the shape of society. You can try to run away, but you will come home. Here’s a carrot for your trouble.

I guess I should not be too surprised; earlier in the semester, Professor Blattman used Babar to demonstrate European colonial rule in Africa. On a completely unrelated note, he has small children...

Was The Runaway Bunny statist propaganda, meant to discourage the anrachist element in young children? It is an interesting point (though I doubt that anarchist-purging worked for me...). Others have argued it is an allegory about God/Christianity. That might be, but to me it will always just be the story of an adventure-seeking child who knows he can, contrary to Thomas Wolfe, go home again.

I guess that just goes to show, I am my mom's little bunny. I think it is time for a carrot!