Academics, the Military and, yes, People Dying

Whooo-boy.  This is one that we’ve been talking about for the past two days here.  Yesterday on NPR they ran a story about the military using social scientists to help troops deal with the insurgency and forge a tighter bond with locals.

Audio Here

This is all originally from stuff that Noah Schachtman’s been following in Wired’s Danger Room blog.

Most recent post here along with links to earlier posts.

So there are several interesting things here and some very knotty problems.

To start with the AAA has taken a strong stand on this and equate helping the military with a violation of their ‘do no harm’ clause.  The ASA has a similar clause.  The AAA has already come out as saying they’re basically willing to shun anyone who participates in the Human Terrain project.  But there are some problems here.  First off the AAA is a professional organization that wields immense power over the field.  But they do not control the graduate schools.  They don’t control admissions, course offerings, or research agendas.  And there are plenty of other journals out there that would be willing to publish the work of people who collaborate with the military even assuming the AAA would take such a heavy-handed step as to blacklist certain people from publishing in journals or attending meetings.

Why is this important?  Because if, as the reports say, the military is paying as much as $400k to people willing to do this work then the types of applicants we’re likely to see to grad schools may start to change slightly.  Greed can be a powerful incentive to take even the most outrageous slings and arrows of your fellows.

So this may be something that is going to change the shape of social science disciplines.  It’s been happening for a few years with Social Networkers and now seems to be spreading to Ethnographers and will probably sweep up other methods as soon as they realized that they can be useful.

This could have some serious consequences for the disciplines.  As a friend pointed out at lunch today this could be the path to mainstream respectability that social sciences aside from Economics have ambivalently wanted for decades.  At the very least it could create a sort of brain drain right out of the gate that could result in higher salaries for the next few cohorts coming out of grad school as universities have to compete with the government and private sector (I don’t see this being terribly likely though.)

But the question really is; is this a good thing, bad thing, or mixed?

Regarding the issue of social scientists working for the military I’d have to, reluctantly, say mixed.  I agree wholeheartedly with the AAA that this type of program and behavior can put lives at risk and result in the direct killing of people.  This is unambiguously very bad but… what if it results in a net gain of life?  This is one of the arguments advanced by proponents, that the Human Terrain project actually saves lives by protecting American Soldiers and by allowing for more narrowly target strikes against potential insurgent targets.  My personal feeling on this is that it’s mostly a smokescreen in this instance, if the concern was really over saving lives we’d be out of there.  Plus the way a lot of proponents parse this you get the idea that American Lives >>>>> Local lives.  So that’s pretty fucked up right there.

The other thing to consider is how this might spill over to other arenas.  You can bet your ass that Blackwater and other private security companies are looking to hire in the wake of the  announcement of the success of the Human Terrain teams in Afghanistan.  Domestically the pattern has historically been to compel researchers of potentially suspect populations to testify in court (see the case of Rik Scarce for example) rather than hire them to spy on these groups.  But this too may be changing.  I’m not the only one I know who has been approached by government intelligence and security agencies about giving open access to my research.  So far most scholars I know have firmly told them ‘no’ and opted to risk getting tossed in jail on contempt charges.  But this could change if the model changes from compelling people to talk to offering them large sums of money to talk.  Right now few people I know are willing to take DHS’s money because of the strings that come attached.  But as government agencies such as DHS, the FBI, and the CIA get more and more funding for social science related projects we’ll probably see an increase in both faculty and grad students willing to take the money and ignore the ethical constraints of their professional organizations.

And finally how might this affect the professional organizations themselves?  Certainly they are fighting the good fight in resisting the co-oping of their research in such a way.  But is this a fight they can win?  And how far are they willing to go in support of their stance?  It’s all well and good to make calls for more public sociology and activist sociologists and anthropologists but most of our colleagues prefer the type of activism that requires the click of a button on a webpage to show support.  Don’t believe me?  When was the last time the majority of the faculty at a major R1 university marched in solidarity for a grad student union?  That’s pretty immediate and visible to most faculty yet they manage to stay out of such disputes.  Similarly I’m not sure that, in this case, most members of the AAA and ASA would be all that willing to go to the mat for their professional organizations.  I’d love to be proven wrong but I guess we’ll see.