Weaponizing Anthropology. David H. Price
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2006, these developments pressed the AAA to form a commission, of which I was a member, charged with investigating the issues raised by anthropologists’ engagements with military, intelligence and national security agencies; and this commission chose to delineate the ethical issues raised by these engagements (AAA 2007 & 2009). While this examination of professional ethics provided some guidance to the discipline, the Association’s inability to critique the political issues leaves the primary concerns of many anthropologists unaddressed.
One way that these political issues were addressed was with the formation of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists by a group of colleagues and myself in 2007 helped focus political and ethical opposition to counterinsurgency and the militarization of anthropology. Anthropologist Terry Turner drew upon widespread concerns over the increasing weaponization of anthropology to press the AAA to restore language in the Code of Ethics prohibiting secretive research. Some anthropologists have argued that it is “unfortunate” that revisions of the AAA’s Code of Ethics is occurring during a time marked by active warfare — the implication being that political or emotional factors stand to override objective rationality. Such arguments act as if political vacuums existed in nature, laboratories or anywhere. Anthropology’s consideration of ethics has always been pushed by warfare — and after 9/11, the mercenary nature of counterinsurgency necessarily drives anthropological discussions of ethics.
In 2008, the AAA membership voted to restore general prohibitions against secrecy by adding a section to the Association’s ethics code stating that: “anthropologists should not withhold research results from research participants when those results are shared with others” (AAA Code of Ethics VI, 2). Human Terrain Systems, other militarized forms of anthropology, as well as pressures and changes in applied and non-applied forms of anthropology led the AAA Executive Board in late 2008 to appoint an ad hoc committee charged with revising the Association’s Code of Ethics (at the time of this writing, I am a member of this committee). Obama’s wars and increasing militarization of society casts shadows over this undertaking — but just how these shadows will influence these revisions to the ethics code remains unclear. While the issues addressed by anthropological ethics codes must address routine anthropological activities, war remains the force that pushes the importance of these issues to the fore.
While professional associations like the AAA have historically taken political stances on some issues (most generally dealing with matters of social equality, including statements on race and marriage), and adopted policies linking the discipline to supporting the Second World War, there remains a great resistance to confronting the ways that disciplinary ethics are linked to the political context in which anthropology is practiced. Although the rank and file membership of the AAA have adopted resolutions condemning particular unpopular wars or military actions (the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, etc.), the Association remains skittish in adopting stances on the uses of anthropology in non-defensive wars of aggression, or wars of imperialism. Instead, professional associations like the AAA are pressured to keep the institutional focus on delineating ethical, not political, practices.
On the surface, these distinctions between ethical and political concerns make a certain amount of sense if you follow the logic that professional ethics have legitimate concerns with establishing “best practices.” But this reasoning stops short of addressing fundamental issues ranging from the inconsistency of associations supporting some political causes (e.g., racial equality, the Second World War) and not others, and it fails to address just how problematic notions of “best practices” are if they don’t include basic political stances like opposing imperialism, neo-colonialism, and supporting the rights of nations to self determination. While professional associations like the AAA, often embrace doctrines of universal human rights (the AAA does), such positions can insolate organizations from adopting positions on specific issues.
These distinctions between ethics and politics limit the critiques that develop within professional associations. Such distinctions mean the difference in organizations, like the AAA, opposing the Human Terrain program’s use of anthropologists for ethical reasons (because it does not obtain voluntary informed consent, endangers studied populations etc.), or opposing it for political reasons (because it assists the American military in an unjust project of empire, occupation, and exploitation). As long as professional associations limit these discussions to the realm of ethics, and avoid addressing these political issues embedded in conducting anthropological research in a nation engaging in global military expansion, the critiques of these associations must be limited to critiques of manners and techniques, not of the underlying political program employing anthropology for conquest.
Professional associations focusing on ethics while setting aside politics, ignore the larger political issues of how anthropological engagements with military, intelligence, national security sectors relate to US foreign policy, neo-colonial military campaigns, the Global War on Terror and a growing military reliance on anthropologically informed counterinsurgency. But addressed or not, these political issues remain at the forefront of many anthropologists’ concerns over these issues, even while their professional associations generally limit their focus on ethics.
Professional associations like the AAA hope to position themselves as politically neutral, but there is no political neutrality. There is only silence or engagement on these issues — and silence most usually means acquiescence to national policies, which is itself a dangerous political position. The AAA avoids addressing the political meaning of using anthropology in military contexts that include the occupation and conquest of the peoples anthropologists work with and study. It is as if some anthropologists believe that addressing these issues would undermine the scientific (or humanistic) nature of our work — yet the measures of anthropologists’ work are generally measured by criteria such as reliability, validity, rigor of method etc., criteria that need not be undermined by directly addressing the political project that seeks anthropologists, our data and methods.
Given the Obama Administration’s increased reliance on counterinsurgency’s soft power in Afghanistan, the political and ethical issues raised by anthropologists manipulating other cultures in ways aligned with US foreign policy will grow in importance. Anthropologists need to resist limiting their critiques to issues of ethics and bring the political issues of domination to the fore of their critiques.
Chapter Two: The CIA’s University Spies - PRISP, ICSP, NSEP, and the Big Payback
What is overlooked in the growing, enthusiastic collaboration between the military-industrial complex and academe within the context of developing a powerful post-9/11 national security state is that the increasing militarization of higher education is itself a problem that may be even more insidious, damaging, and dangerous to the fate of democracy than that posed by terrorists who “hate our freedoms.
— Henry Giroux
Post 9/11 changes on American university campuses transformed university classrooms into covert training grounds for the CIA and other agencies in ways that increasingly threaten fundamental principles of academic openness as well as the integrity of a wide array of academic disciplines. Several programs developed in the past half decade found new ways to secretly place students with undisclosed ties to the CIA, FBI, NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and Homeland Security in American university classrooms.
There have long been tensions between the needs of academia and the needs of the National Security State; and even before the events of 9/11 expanded the powers of American intelligence agencies, universities were quietly being modified to serve the needs of intelligence agencies in new and covert ways. The most visible of these reforms was the establishment of the National Security Education Program (NSEP) which siphoned-off students from traditional foreign language funding programs such as Fulbright or Title VI. While traditional funding sources provide students with small stipends of a few thousand dollars to study foreign languages in American universities, the NSEP gives graduate students a wealth of funds (at times exceeding $40,000 a year) to study “in demand” languages, but with troubling pay-back stipulations mandating that recipients later work for unspecified U.S. national security agencies. Upon its debut in the early 1990s, the NSEP was harshly criticized for reaching through an assumed barrier separating the desires of academia and state (Rubin 1996). Numerous academic organizations, including, the Middle East Studies Association