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The Washington Post has a good piece today about the Pentagon’s new Minerva initiative. Minerva is an effort to bridge the gap between social science and national security — in this case, doling out grant money to anthropologists willing to work with the military. Unfortunately, that’s a dicey proposition, as the Post recounts:
But the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, which includes professors from American and George Mason universities, said dependence on Pentagon funding could make universities an "instrument rather than a critic of war-making."
In a May 28 letter to federal officials, the American Anthropological Association said that it was of "paramount importance . . . to study the roots of terrorism and other forms of violence" but that its members are "deeply concerned that funding such research through the Pentagon may pose a potential conflict of interest."
Minerva builds off one of the Pentagon’s most innovative programs, well, ever: the Human Terrain System, created by anthropologist Montgomery McFate, which takes anthropologists to Iraq and Afghanistan to create a picture of tribal customs, mores and structures in order to better facilitate counterinsurgency campaigns and inform strategy. (In the interests of full disclosure, I’m currently working out an embed with HTS officials in Afghanistan.) As my friend Lindsay Beyerstein and others have reported, HTS is rather controversial in academia, owing to the concerns that the AAA laid out in its May 28 letter that the Post cites. Yet it’s hard to misunderstand, at the least, the intentions of HTS: to inform national strategy so it kills and offends as few Afghans and Iraqis as possible, to be blunt. Certainly there’ll be problems in its execution, since nothing is perfect, but the problems with the program don’t seem to be more than theoretical, at least as laid out by the anthropologists’ organization.
Crossposted to The Streak.
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um, Spencer, you’ve repeated a paragraph that starts, “Minerva builds off one….”
I was disturbed to read this story in the Post last night. Engaging with warmakers in order to kill and main fewer inhabitants of the invaded country seems to me not merely studying but also improving the warmaking.
Especially if the warmakers are funding the study.
To me, the test is: would these anthropologists seek to undertake this study without Pentagon sponsorship or funding? And will their results be published for peer review, or will the studies belong to the Pentagon funders?
All science wrestles with sponsorship issues; this seems to me to cross a bright line into enabling more effective and efficient warmaking.
I wrote you an email a while back about problems with the HTS, which I guess you didn’t think too much of… you say that the HTS is one of the most innovative developments in counterinsurgency, but its nothing new. Several anthropological classics were funded by the British Colonial Office – E E Evans Pritchard was, for example, sent to study the political organization of the Nuer – a tribe in Sudan – to help the British effectively control them. During the Vietnam war the Army and CIA used anthropological research into highland tribes in Vietnam to help carry out the war, Project Camelot used anthropologists to help the CIA in South America.
You say that the objections to the HTS are ‘theoretical’ as a way to dismiss it. There are theoretical objections, but those lead to practical and ethical problems as well.
Anthropologists’ primary ethical obligation is not to the Department of Defense or the US occupation of Iraq. It is, rather, to the people that they study. That the US army does not see itself as having a fundamental ethnical obligation to see that no harm comes to the people of Iraq is pretty clear. So, why should anthropologists make their ethical concerns subsidiary to US foreign policy? Why should they work to gain the trust of people as a part of an overall project that will bring them harm?
Would you publish an article if you thought that there was a chance that doing so would get a source killed? Would you place information that you gathered through your research in the hands of people who would use it to make decisions that you could reasonably expect to lead to people dying? Within the context of US counterinsurgency in Iraq that is not an abstract question.
The Counterinsurgency Manual has a very good description of how to use anthropological understandings of culture and identity to manipulate and control people. That’s great to the extent that you believe that the US army manipulating and controlling people in Iraq to be a legitimate end. Anthropologists are ethically bound to take the viewpoint of the people on the other side of the equation.
The theoretical problems with HTS will have practical consequences. If you wanted to do research into the NYC Squatter Punk scene as yourself, you would get a very different set of information than someone who was openly from the NYPD.
McFate wrote an article suggesting that the US Army us an understanding of Iraqi social networks to find connections between insurgents. http://usacac.army.mil/CAC/mil…..mcfate.pdf
If you know where two different bomb makers lay in an extended kinship network, you can see where there are connections between them – and use that social map to find other potential insurgents. Within this context an understanding of Iraqi social networks isn’t just abstract cultural data, it’s a map that will be used to single people out for detention, torture and death. So, problems with data gathering become very concrete very fast.
Even if those sorts of projects are separate from the HTS program, you are suggesting that anthropologists should surrender their ethical obligations to the better judgment of the US Army in pursuit of a project who’s overall morality is – to put it mildly- questionable.