ASA Globalog

I want to begin my contribution to this blog on anthropology and counter-insurgency by reproducing a short review of Charlie Wilson’s War, a film closely based on George Crile’s book about the CIA and American government decisions which led to the US arming the Afghan resistance against Soviet imperialism and the Soviet occupation. The review was written by Jonathan Neale. Like me, Jonathan did anthropological fieldwork with nomads in Afghanistan in the 1970s. Jonathan and I have talked a great deal in our effort to understand the last thirty years of war in Afghanistan. His account is a clear illustration of how important it is to locate an understanding of resistance in a particular history. It also points to a deep political confusion on the left about imperial resistance, and hence also about ‘counter-insurgency’ – it is a confusion which I think lurks behind some of the discussions here.

Jonathan writes:

I went to see the movie Charlie Wilson’s War to review it for Socialist Worker. I really liked it – but many readers of this paper and Stop the War activists will hate the film. So I’m not going to recommend this very good film. Don’t go see it. You won’t like it. (Unless you’re Afghan, in which case you’ll probably think it’s funny and accurate – apart from the bits set in the refugee camp.)
Instead of a review, I’m going to write about some political confusions about Afghanistan. I’ve talked on Afghanistan recently at Stop the War meetings. I’ve been surprised by how many people in the audience say they find it quite hard to make the argument for withdrawing the troops from Afghanistan. That’s surprising, because the opinion polls steadily report that over 60 percent of the public are in favour of getting out of Afghanistan. By that, I’m sure they mean get the troops out and let the Afghans sort it out. And if the Taliban or the “warlords” win, so be it.
But I think the left activists find the argument hard because they are often not talking to that majority, but to other leftists and peace activists. And one big reason many of those people are unsure is because of what happened in the 1980s.
In 1978 the Afghan Communists took power in a coup led by army officers. The Communists were progressives, and moved quickly to support land reform and women’s rights. But they didn’t have majority support. Uprisings, led by mullahs and Islamist students, spread across the rural areas. In December 1979 the Russian army invaded Afghanistan to prop up the government. At that point the majority of city people also turned against the Communists. As an invading force without the support of the majority, the Russians had no alternative but to try to break the population. Afghanistan had a population of about 20 million. The Russian forces tortured tens of thousands, killed roughly one million, maimed another million, and drove six million into exile as refugees. This terror united most Afghan people behind the resistance.
Before the invasion the two main political groups in Afghanistan had been the Communists and some pretty hardcore Islamists. So it was no surprise the Islamists led the resistance, though on the ground it was a popular resistance, with each village fighting for its own land. But the Cold War framed the wider picture. The CIA and General Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship in Pakistan put together an alliance of Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, the US and Saudi Arabia to fund and arm the Afghan resistance. And 40 percent of US aid went to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Islamist resistance leader who is now one of the key leaders of the resistance to the US.
Right through the 1980s a debate raged in the US over whether to give the Afghan resistance surface-to-air missiles to shoot down helicopters. If they did, the Russians would lose. On the other hand, the Afghan leaders were a lot more hardcore than the US’s Islamist enemies in Iran next door. Charlie Wilson, a Texas congressman, campaigned for giving the Afghans the missiles. By 1986 he had won the argument, and by 1988 the Afghan resistance had shot down 300 helicopters and planes and defeated the Russians. Most of this history is laid out accurately in the film – from Charlie Wilson’s point of view. (The book, by George Crile, is much better.)
Many on the left now look back to Communist-run Afghanistan with nostalgia. This is partly because they hate US domination of the world, and at least, they say, Russia was a countervailing force. But this nostalgia ignores the Russian invasion and the torture and mass murder that followed.
There is now another popular uprising in Afghanistan, but it was not automatic. When the US invaded in 2001, Afghans were not willing to fight for either the invaders or the Taliban. They had had enough of 23 years of war. But three years on, the experience of occupation drove many to pick up the gun again. That new resistance now looks to the Taliban and Hekmatyar – not because of fanaticism, but because they have been the only serious political forces in Afghanistan completely opposed to the occupation from the beginning.
That has a lesson for today. If the left allies with the invader, the eventual resistance will hate the left. Feminism is now very weak in Afghanistan because in the 1980s Afghan feminist women supported the Russians and their violent occupation.
Many leftists in rich countries think of themselves as offering solidarity to “progressive” resistance movements in the poor countries. But for me the politics of the resistance is not the key. I lived with Afghans once, and ate their bread. My solidarity is not with their politics, it’s with them – the people who work, farm and herd their sheep. As a socialist, my solidarity was with their resistance to invasion in the 1980s, for all the same reasons it is with their resistance to occupation now. In the long term, the only way to create a progressive movement in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or anywhere else, is to oppose invasion, occupation and the helicopters.  (Jonathan Neale, Socialist Worker, 10/1/08, p.12)

For me, Jonathan’s review raises three key issues that deserve our attention if we are to be wise about the involvement of anthropologists in covert government sponsored counter-insurgency: the relation between politics and anthropology, the nature of imperialism, and effective resistance to imperial power.

While I strongly agree with the comments of David, John, and others about the relation between anthropology as a professional disciplinary practice and real politics in the world, my agreement stems from my personal politics, not from anthropology per se. Indeed, I am uncomfortable when broader discussions of global politics are framed and funnelled through the lens of anthropology. Anthropological thought and practice cannot, in themselves, provide the scope for such debate. Nor are there uncontested disciplinary imperatives which prefigure the relationship between anthropology, anthropologists and politics. So, for example, it is important to remember that the ‘handmaiden of imperialism’ arguments need to be balanced by the fiercely and explicitly anti-imperialist stands taken by both Malinowski and Boas. Indeed, it is likely that today a majority of anthropologists are left-leaning, but this is not inevitable.

Anthropologists come in all political stripes. And yet, because most anthropology professionals are well-meaning and dedicated, they have a tendency to project their personal politics onto the discipline and treat their anthropology as a moral compass in a frightening world. Some even make a leap of faith from their anthropology to political belief. This may be a way of dealing with cognitive dissonance at a personal level or even calculatingly self-serving, but it skates round deeper moral questions about war and peace, inequality and resistance. It also means that anthropologists, as anthropologists, don’t necessarily have cogent or compelling explanations of the global economic and political system that are more accurate, or more moral, than other, competing explanations.

So while I completely support the admirable pledge of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, I am unsettled when discussions of global politics are looped back, and anchored into our knowledge and experience of anthropology. The anthropological lens can, I think, truncate and blur our vision and limit the clarity of our politics.

I am a socialist and an anthropologist. I am glad there are many anthropologists who are exercised about any and all anthropological input into covert government sponsored counter-insurgency. But to understand the wider issues, we anthropologists on the left will always need to locate our concerns more broadly. And as people of the left, we need to decide very clearly whose side we’re on. And that is not always easy.

I think we need to go well beyond the ‘liberal imperial’ rhetoric and include an analysis of imperialism which forefronts the process of centralization fundamental to capitalism, and the increasing militarization of competition between rival centres of capital accumulation. This puts the oil politics of the American empire is at the centre of the analysis: as a project to monopolize control of the world economic system – including natural resources, human labour, and markets. And such an imperial project inevitably creates and sustains resistance.

Resistance to American, and rival, imperialisms takes many forms – from anthropologists who sign the pledge against counter-insurgency, to the activists fighting Coke and the Narmada Dam in India, the thousands of Chinese who are fighting forced homelessness in the run up to the Olympics, Chechen fighters and the Taliban and Iraqis who have resisted occupation so strongly that the US is losing in both these wars.

Counter-insurgency is about resistance. It is counter to insurgency. We cannot understand the one without understanding the other.

Along with ordinary people, and activists around the world, our concern as left-leaning anthropologists should be to understand which kinds of resistance work, and which don’t, according the changing balance of power in any struggle. And only then, does it become possible to consider how we can intervene with efficacy– as leftists, and perhaps even as professional anthropologists, if our credentials can be used to make a difference. But conflating our liberal anthropology with socialist politics can lead to a deep confusion which we must do our best to avoid if we want to help the world a better place to live.

Nancy Lindisfarne

An American soldier, interviewed in the early days of the war on route to Baghdad, is asked what she most looked forward to. A Big Mac, large fries and a jumbo Diet Coke, she replied. A few days later, after Baghdad had been captured, I read in the British press an interview with another marine. What struck him most about Iraq? There were no malls, not one, on the road to Baghdad. As the resistance to American occupation gathered coherence and momentum, another was surprised that there were no throngs welcoming them, grateful to be rescued from tyranny; instead, they were dodging sniper bullets while patrolling the sullen, burning city.

Three questions emerge from these random responses:
What allows conquering people to have no knowledge about vanquished, subjugated populations?
What allows conquerors to believe that subjugated populations are like them?
What allows conquerors to entertain the fantasy that they will be welcomed as liberators?

When anthropology first emerged, its relations with imperial projects were intimate. Travel narratives and official documents, which one can say were proto-anthropological, were accounts of vanquished territories and subjugated populations. They became, over time, the training manuals for officials of the East India Company, and then of the civil services. Indeed, the trader and the administrator was partly also a gatherer of information, and the compiler of knowledge about the territory and population at the expanding frontiers of empire. Imperial power both made anthropological knowledge possible, and was partly constituted by that knowledge.

Even when that knowledge was sympathetic to its subjects, it insisted on difference between the researcher and the researched. True, many went native, identifying totally with the populations they studied. But even this – a rejection of their ‘own’ cultures and becoming one with those of ‘others’ – only re-enforced the very basis of imperial anthropology: the difference between the two.

There was a dynamic tension at the very heart of imperial anthropology: the very act of ethnography changed the ‘pure’ conditions of the other. Primitive-ness was both the marker of the essential difference of the other, and the very condition that imperial projects brought to an inevitable end. There was little question that the imperial project was for the benefit of the subjugated, who were themselves too primitive to recognise this.

Over time, of course, anthropology began to exceed its imperial beginnings to become perhaps the most self-aware discipline in the academy. Its engagement with geopolitical projects underwent radical transformation. On the one hand, it emerged as a site of critique of imperialism, and also of claims of European universality. It shed its evolutionary assumptions for co-evalness. On the other, the ambit of its interests well exceeded its traditional concerns to encompass everything. This has had a dual effect. It has allowed the more shrill voices on the rightwing fringes of politics to accuse it of complicity with ‘those who hate us’. At the same time, its retreat from complicity with imperial power and its use of continental theory has meant that even though it now makes more practices of more people legible, it no longer is a constitutive element of imperial projects in the way it was before. And such projects have themselves changed: new forms of knowledge are more key to it than anthropology.

Anthropology, consequently, has had little to do with the current imperial iteration. Deep knowledge has been replaced by ‘adequate’ knowledge. Rational choice theory dominated the American social sciences, and through it had travelled to the Israeli academy and the Israeli defence forces, who had used it to develop strategies of counter-insurgency in occupied Palestine with ‘success’. Stylized models of game theory, based on the assumption of a universal rationality of maximizing power and wealth, obviated the need to know subjugated populations in their complexity. Of course, the previous Gulf war and the embargo and the secretive nature of the Saddam regime had also made deep knowledge difficult to construct. Likewise, geo-positioning satellites and allegedly ‘smart’ bombs made intimate knowledge of terrain unnecessary. Through the entire occupation of Iraq, the lack of ‘human intelligence’ and even of Arabic speakers has been worried about by coalition forces.

Liberal imperialism is based on the assumptions of universalism. People everywhere are assumed to desire liberal democracy and free markets: a straight line can be drawn from Fukuyama to Rumsfeld, and indeed both were also signatories to the Project for the New American Century. But some of the old assumptions crept in: some places, like Pakistan, were not ready for democracy, so it was ok to have an enlightened dictator. Other places – Zimbabwe and Burma for example – had strong movements for democracy but lay outside the zone of interest of liberal interventionists. This created a tension at the centre of the liberal imperialist project: the universalism of the values on whose behalf it was waged always were a little less than universal, some places and some people were exempt from it. Oil and the security of some homelands at the expense of others compromised the universality of liberal democracy, and free markets do not need democracy to bring them about: Pinochet comes to mind. Security, energy, and free markets always are more important than democracy, though liberal imperialism fictitiously claims that they are all equally universal.

Finally, what of the liberal imperialist fantasy that the wars of conquest are wars of liberation? Liberal feminists of NOW and human rights crusaders such as Michael Ignatieff all argued that being occupied by coalition forces was progressive, and that, far from liberation being liberation from military occupation, such occupation was the precondition for liberation from political and social tyranny. Condoleezza Rice and George Bush argued that the war on Iraq was a continuation of the American civil rights movements and of a piece with movements in Eastern Europe against communist rule. On more than one occasion, Bush equated Osama with Lenin.

So the ignorance of the populations and territories being attacked and occupied ran from the top to the bottom of the American war machine. The analogies used to justify occupation failed the tests both of logic and of credulity. In fact, much as knowledge was a constituent element of the previous iterations of empire, ignorance is a constituent element of this current imperial project. Indeed, the internal critique offered by the British fell back on old imperialism, effectively stating that since Britain ‘knew Iraq better’, it should be heard more seriously about what to do. The fact that the Iraqis defeated British forces time and again in the 1920s, of course, was not brought up.

This puts anthropology in a state of profound crisis. On the one hand, it is an ethical position to disavow any truck with projects of imperialism. On the other it has ceded the field to merely adequate knowledge and ignorance, which have had a deep bearing on how this war is being fought, and the assumptions of soldiers, generals and ‘the American people’ alike. Now that anthropology has become post-imperial, has empire itself not become post-anthropological? If so, what are the implications?

Subir Sinha
SOAS, University of London

I post some more thoughts on the wider issue of ’security’.  The following quote comes from Dibyesh Anand 2005  ’The violence of security: Hindu nationalism and the politics of representing ‘the Muslim’ as a danger’,  The Round Table 94, 379: 203-215.

I have enjoyed blogging here and have benefited from reading the concerns and dialogue developing here on the broad range of issues pertaining to current uses of anthropology by military and intelligence agencies. In completing my role as an ASA blogger I am posting a new international version of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists pledge of non-participation in counterinsurgency work.

This past summer a core group of likeminded anthropologists working in the United States, Canada and the UK and wrote a simple statement declaring our non-participation in counterinsurgency efforts linked to the United States war in Iraq and so called “war on terror.” Hugh Gusterson recommended that as a model we consult a pledge circulated by physicists in the 1980s who pledged to not work on projects contributing to the Strategic Defense Initiative (more commonly known as “Star Wars” here in the states). The end result of these efforts was the formation of the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, and the circulation of an online and printed pledge against working on counterinsurgency projects. The pledge has generated a great deal of support here in the U.S. and we are now hoping to bring in more international support.

In the last several months we have heard from anthropologists from nations around the world asking if we could also circulate a pledge of non-participation in counterinsurgency that was aimed at a more international audience. In response to these requests the Network of Concerned Anthropologists steering committee has produced the below international version of the pledge. This pledge essentially addresses the same concerns of our first pledge, but removes the specific focus on U.S. military and intelligence operations and universalizes the concerns of applying anthropology for reasons of counterinsurgency.

For more information, you can find more background information on our website, which includes links to background articles and media coverage concerning recent uses of anthropology by military and intelligence organizations, as well as Frequently Asked Questions.

Below is the international version of our pledge of non-participation counterinsurgency. I encourage all of you who share these views to show your solidarity by circulating, signing and submitting the below pledge:

Network of Concerned Anthropologists Pledge of Non-participation in

Counterinsurgency (International Version)

We, the undersigned, believe that anthropologists should not engage in research and other activities that contribute to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq or in related theaters in the “war on terror.” Furthermore, we believe that anthropologists should refrain from directly assisting military in combat, be it through torture, interrogation, or tactical advice.

Military and intelligence agencies and military contractors have identified “cultural knowledge,” “ethnographic intelligence,” and “human terrain mapping” as essential to military intervention in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East. Consequently, these agencies have mounted a drive to recruit professional anthropologists as employees and consultants. While often presented by its proponents as work that builds a more secure world, protects soldiers on the battlefield, or promotes cross-cultural understanding, at base it contributes instead to brutal wars of occupation which entail massive casualties. By so doing, such work breaches relations of openness and trust with the people anthropologists work with around the world and, directly or indirectly, enables the occupation of one country by another. In addition, much of this work is covert. Anthropological support for such an enterprise is at odds with the humane ideals of our discipline as well as professional standards.

We are not all necessarily opposed to other forms of anthropological consulting for the state, or for the military, especially when such cooperation contributes to generally accepted humanitarian objectives. A variety of views exists among us, and the ethical issues are complex. Some feel that anthropologists can effectively brief diplomats or work with peacekeeping forces without compromising professional values. However, work that is covert, work that breaches relations of openness and trust with studied populations, and work that enables the occupation of one country by another violates professional standards.

Consequently, we pledge not to undertake research or other activities in support of counter-insurgency work in Iraq or in related theatres in the “war on terror,” and we appeal to colleagues everywhere to make the same commitment.

SIGNATURE NAME TITLE INSTITUTION

—————————————————————

The Network of Concerned Anthropologists invites all who are interested in signing this pledge to do so by either collecting signatures (listing names, signature, titles, and institutional affiliations) and mailing them to: Network of Concerned Anthropologists,c/o Dept. of Anthropology, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MS 3G5, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA.

Or by electronically sending this information to: concerned.anthropologists@gmail.com

Regards, David Price

“I am worried about this word, this notion – security. I see this word,
hear this word, feel this word everywhere. Security check. Security watch.
Security clearance. Why has all this focus on security made me feel so much
more insecure? What does anyone mean when they speak of security? Why are
we suddenly a nation and a people who strive for security above all else?”

“Is it possible to live surrendering to the reality of insecurity,
embracing it, allowing it to open us and transform us and be our teacher?
What would we need in order to stop panicking, clinging, consuming, and
start opening, giving — becoing more ourselves the less secure we realize
we actually are? How has the so-called war on terrorism given rise to this
mad national obsession for homeland security, which has actually made us
much more insecure at home and in the world?”

Posted by Filippo Osella

Following the debacle of the first avatar of the ‘radicalization programme’ the ESRC, in a cross-Council initiative, is re-framing its approach in terms of ‘global uncertainties’. This move does not simply try to deflect criticisms by subsuming ‘war on terror’-oriented research within a broader framework, but effectively reduces issues such as poverty, political dissent and even environmental degradation to simple matters of security. Many Universities – including mine – are enthusiastically preparing themselves to participate in these programmes. I attached below extracts of a mail I sent to my colleagues in order to generate debate on (and opposition to) this.

“The theme of ‘International Security’ has been proposed as one of new themes for the expansion of teaching and the theme ‘Security’ as one of the new interdisciplinary research themes for the university as a whole….I believe that there should be a broad discussion – before further moves are made – to see whether the academic body of the University feels comfortable with such a possible turn of events. A discussion is even more urgent in light of the proliferation of security-oriented research programmes funded under various guises by bodies such as the ESRC to bolster the so-called ‘war on terror’.

To kick start a discussion, I will argue that the introduction of an ‘International Security’ theme in our University might be ill advised on the grounds that: ·

The proposal for a teaching and research programme on International Security has a degree of affinity with current research agenda of UK funding bodies such as the ESRC. The political nature of the latter – which has been the object of substantial critique, leading, for example, to the withdrawal of the first ESRC/FCO radicalization programme – is revealed by the way it frames research priorities. Research taking place within the second avatar of the ESRC ‘Radicalisation Programme’ – interesting and open ended as it might be – still focuses only on Muslims/Islam, assuming that existing forms of radicalism are simply endogenous to Islam as a religion and implying that all Muslims are potential terrorists. Radicalisation is thus seen as a Muslim social problem, precluding analysis of radical state policies (including radical ‘Western’ state policies). At the same time, radicalisation is wrongly equated with violence, and radicalism is generally thought of as bad (where would we be today if there’d been no radical suffragette movement???). Although questions might be asked on how Muslims perceive Western foreign policies, the latter are taken for granted and, apart from rare exceptions, removed from critical scrutiny. What one notices of these programmes is that they generally entail a refusal to acknowledge the role of Western governments’ aggressive foreign policy in producing the very thing these governments most fear. This is part of a wider reluctance to address an issue which is animating debates among Muslims across the world: the role of western ‘neo-colonialism’ or ‘neo-imperialism’ (in the terms commonly used by Muslims worldwide) in what appears to be a deliberate – and overtly Islamophobic – attempt to undermine Muslim religion, society and culture. From the perspective of African, Latin American or Asian populations, it is countries such as the USA, UK, Russia or France which represent a more direct and tangible threat to security. ·

The extension of the International Security Agenda to include issues of poverty, environmental degradation, political mobilization, migration, development etc – as in the forthcoming Cross-Council programme on security – trivializes and politicizes complex processes by reducing them to a narrow problem of security. In other words, discussing these issues in relation to security either (if a state-centric or Western interests definition of security is used) implies that they are important primarily in as much as they impact on state or Western interests; or (if a human security definition is used) adds little of analytical or explanatory value. Calling ‘malnutrition’ ‘food insecurity’ doesn’t in itself help us understand this problem any better (see eg Beall, Goodfellow & Putzel 2006 for a critique of the incipient ‘securitization’ of development). ·

Ongoing research on conflict, violence, human rights, religious movements/religiosity, inequality, governance, critical theory – to mention but a few of the areas where Sussex academics are leading the field – cannot be reduced to issues of ’security’. Utilitarian or instrumental forms of research might have their own place, but academics offering more nuanced (and critical) perspectives on the practices and predicaments of everyday life should be encouraged to develop separate agendas and to maintain & forward their research interests with the support of the University…. · If the University wants to strengthen its international reputation, it needs to set – rather then follow – research agendas and to differentiate itself from existing players. ….. A programme focusing on issues concerning rights, justice, reconciliation and conflict resolution might provide an alternative agenda which challenges the premises of mainstream IS studies and which can make Sussex a leading player in the field. ·

In the rush to generate much needed income for somewhat empty University coffers, we appear to have moved – rather cynically and uncritically – to privilege policy oriented research (as on International Security) over independent/’blue sky’ enquiry. ESRC international benchmarking of disciplines such as Anthropology or International Relations – conducted recently by international panels of academics – has commented negatively on such a turn, stressing the importance of fostering open-ended, non-applied research to maintaining cutting edge international standards. It is open ended research which brings innovation and shifts research to new grounds. ·

Finally, setting ‘International Security’ as a privileged area for research and teaching in the University would align Sussex to a specific understanding of political and social relations, thus foreclosing possibility of research in Muslim societies. Anyone who has conducted field research in Islamic contexts would know that Muslims see themselves as subject – for very good reasons – of an indiscriminate and virulent ‘Western’ Islamophobia. Open to the accusation of working on behalf of governments or security agencies [our ‘informants’ do surf the web], future researchers would find their safety in the field greatly undermined. At the same time, host governments would think twice before granting research visas to academics who might be thought of as spying on behalf of their countries’ security agencies [the govt. of India, for example, is reviewing its policies concerning the issue of research visas to social scientists]. The international reputation of the ESRC has been greatly tarnished by the infamous ‘radicalisation programme’: surely we don’t want to be tarred by the same brush”.

I sent this mail today: I’ll keep you posted on the responses I receive!

Cheers

Filippo Osella

Today I begin a stint as a guest blogger; rather than put up an opinion piece, I want to go through some of the incidents that I’ve been involved in. I hope to be able to give anyone reading this who is wondering, ‘What is all the fuss about?’ an idea of the range of stuff that’s happening and the scale of the head-banging-against-brick-wall feeling that inspired the blog.

Today let me tell you about my adventures in Exeter in July 2006…

Working as Filippo and I do with Keralites who work and do business in the Gulf, I was pleased to get to an academic conference at Exeter Gulf Studies Centre, which would bring together those of us working on both sides of the Arabian sea.

So, flashback….

First night of the conf:  I was there with Neha Vohra, Attiya Ahmad and Karen Leonard and a few others; we were all sitting in the bar and I was in a tight little clique of Indianists, talking shop – you know what we Indianists are like for gossip and cliques

I was a bit surprised when three unknown young people (clearly) from the USA came and quite frankly forced themselves into our shop-talk circle, obliging us to open up the chairs and make space.

They split their own threesome and slipped in individually in between us, and began to engage us all; one guy talked for a bit to three of us about the ‘Freakanomics’ book, raving on about it etc and making himself seem like a naive but very likeable grad student.

The woman who’d come in with him really hit on me, asking me about my perfume (it was an Arab one bought in the Gulf) and then asking about my trips to Gulf so on.

It all suddenly seemed a bit too smooth and very weird, so I asked them, ‘So, what are you guys working on?’  At that point, two of them told us that they worked for Washington in defence…. and the third one told us he would rather not say what he did…..

Bloody hell!!!

I was furious, some others in our group of anthros became v cold, and those 3 guys left early.  Those of us left behind discussed what had happened and I ended the evening in tears (I also felt the need to get rather drunk!) both because my pre-circulated very draft paper (and those of other academics, of course) had gotten into the hands of these people, which I really really did not want.  I had presented a very rough draft of me and Filippo’s piece about Indian Muslim business men who trade in Dubai and are involved in Islamic reformism back home (see this pdf for final published version).  At that point, had Filippo & I known that people like this were going to get hold of the pre-circulated papers, we surely would have been more careful in vetting what we had put in it and made damn sure to change the names / details  etc more carefully.

But I was also reduced to getting drunk and going tearful because I found that I was the only bloody person at that conference who seriously objected to their presence. My academic colleagues, whom I had imagined would be as horrified as I was to discover that Washington was there, tried to reason with me that: -

these people are close to condoleeza rice and are trying to help her make better decisions,

or

washington does what it likes anyway and any information they get from us makes no difference to policy, so we should not worry.

or

this is an unprecedented moment, and we have to understand the global situation…

… and some pointed out to me that in I.R. circles it’s ‘quite normal’ for the front row to be taken up by men in suits.

but this is NOT I.R., it is anthropology, dammit…. do I have to accept it as normal?

Do we have to tolerate this?

A week before Exeter, I had attended a conference on south Asian studies in Leiden and also found some of these security types there, listening in on the panels on south Asian Muslims – and even presenting papers themselves!

The up-close-and-personal socialising after the conference did not happen to me there, but the Exeter experience in the bar was for sure not a one-off.  Bad enough to have to check oneself and what one says in conferences…but to have to be on your guard in the bar afterwards in case you say something of interest about the Gulf-connected Muslim Indians you work among is surely one step too James Bond for an anthropologist?

When I got back form the conference, I emailed a load of people to express my shock and ask if I was really so bizarre and over-emotional in my reaction to all this; that’s when I got in touch with those who are now running this blog and found that, thank goodness, I am not.  An Indian academic colleague who had been at the conference and witnessed my semi-drunk tearful protests that night emailed me back to say,

Hi Caroline,

Thanks for keeping me in the loop…must admit that I now realize that there
is very little difference between u being sober and drunk (except the tears,
perhaps)!!!! Thought u were overreacting that night, but realize u were
speaking ur mind all along…salute ur commitment…fight on

My colleague (anonymity requested)  said he had not realised that western academics might actually not take the realpolitik or ‘stand by your government’ or ‘Muslims really are different, and not to be trusted’ or ‘ whatever it takes to save my own skin’ or ‘more better foreign policy now!’ or ‘protest won’t do my career any good’ or whatever-it-is line.

He has known that academics in India have protested about all this (see Yoginder Sikand’s excellent piece on ‘how not to engage with the Muslim world’), but he had not, he told me, expected any of us Americans or Brits to have our politics straight.

What a lousy public image we British anthropologists have built for ourselves through our apathy and silence and polite heads-in-the-sand or ‘let’s not make a fuss!’ attitudes!  Shame on us.  We teach our undergrads about our shameful past with regard to colonialism.  Are we going to find the next generation of anthropologists teaching about us and our pathetic accommodations to state power and our polite refusals to speak out?

So it’s important that those of us who do find ourselves disturbed and angered by the status-quo do huddle together for strength and raise the issues…over…and over…. and over…in the face of indifference, sophistry and wilful naivety.

My good friend Professor Karen Leonard from California, (someone with a background of 1960s/70s radicalism, anti-Vietnam etc.), was one of those who surprised me with her reaction, and provoked me to get drunk, cry and despair that Exeter evening. She emailed me later and agreed to let our emails go public.

James, Caroline, Neha,

I am sorry, Caroline, to differ with you on this issue. If an open
conference like this one attracted US government employees I don’t see
a problem….it is only too obvious that US government employees and
the American public too need to learn about the Gulf, the Middle East, the
world…and why deny them the opportunity? Incidentally, Christine Fair,
whose presence you criticized at the Leiden conference we both attended
prior to the Exeter one, is a genuine scholar doing excellent field work
in Pakistan (Chicago PhD under Barney Cohn) and she was attacking the US
policies in the region, both in her paper and in a public speech at the
conference. Having her speak and contribute to conferences, and
letting younger people like Shannon and Tony below attend them,
can be viewed quite positively. I am genuinely puzzled by your anger.
We have colleagues within universities with whom we differ and they too
may interact with governments. How should one deny others access to
expertise that is sorely needed, to the knowledge we are in the business
of producing?

Sorry, Karen Leonard

Well, sorry, Karen; I can’t agree with you and your attitude on this one came to me as a surprise and filled me with gloom.  It’s because people like you, whom I respect, are giving this line, that the situation is so dire.

I still maintain that this is a worrying trend and that effectively, academic freedom and decent research is jeopardised if all our conferences are gatecrashed.

Conferences are places where we try out ideas and present first
drafts of our work; we may later decide to alter some things before going to
publication in order to protect the people we work with.

By letting security personnel or academics form the military into conferences then effectively our work is going into the public realm before we are ready for it to do so.

Washington and whoever else is welcome to read the published versions of my and Filippo’s work, like any other members of the interested public.  But they can download it and read it in their offices.  They can please keep away from academic conferences, where I want the freedom to try out my ideas, decide which details I might want to keep confidential for ethics’ sake, and feel free to engage in discussions which are not monitored or where the information I may pass on is not feeding into any policy agenda.  And I want to be able to go and drink and talk shop in the bar in the evening without wondering who is listening.

In July we will be having the ECMSAS (euro conf on Mod Asian Studies) at Manchester, and Filippo and I will be running a panel on everyday Muslim lives.  We were deluged with proposals for panel presentations on issues relating not at all to ‘everyday Muslim lives’ but to the ‘security implications’ of various sectarian disputes, educational establishments etc.

Are our academic conferences going to become extensions of government
policy think-sessions?

Basta!

Later on this week I will write about my session with a very wilfully disingenuous ESRC person.

Filippo will also be posting about the view from Uni of Sussex.

Till then, thanks for the links, the solidarity, the raising of these issues with colleagues and students.

Caroline Osella

I agree with David Price’s position on the involvement of anthropologists in the military projects. However, I take part in the current debate to raise different (albeit related) questions. Aware that war is not synonymous with ‘normal’ times, I think the ethical issue is not limited to the warfront alone. Drawing on my fieldwork conducted in India in the shadow of War on Terror, I focus, as Kriti Kapila’s and Anjan Ghosh’s posts do somewhat, on the ‘non warfront zones’. I aim to underscore the complexity of ethics in the contemporary global scenario. My proposition is that to maintain holistic ethicality is quite difficult, if not impossible. This is so because while anthropologists are largely identified with the state/power, the people they work with are often suspicious of the state and vice versa. In current climate, the society anthropologists visit is the ‘society of suspicion’ (cf. Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’). To speak of ethics is, therefore, to interrogate the structure of the society of suspicion. Arguably, suspicion has existed in every society. But the suspicion I speak of here is radically different; aligned as it is to new configuration of power.

When the UK Foreign Office, in 2006, sought to induct anthropologists in its worldwide (India included) research ‘Combating Terrorism by Countering Radicalization’ many protested arguing, inter alia, that their involvement will mar anthropology’s reputation and physically may harm fieldworkers. Clearly, such concerns are selfish. In my view, anthropologists’ participation in imperial war and the related initiatives is unethical even if it didn’t risk their lives and defamed their discipline. It is simply because by our participation we not only legitimize the wars, including the bellum justum (have not most wars and violence been justified under the flag of ‘just war’?) but, more importantly, this can tantamount to a breach of trust and ethical ties with the people we work with. Thus far the issue looks pretty simple. However, it is far more complex. It is this complexity about which I wish to say a word or two.

As a PhD candidate in anthropology at Amsterdam University, I had planned my fieldwork on India’s Jamaat-e-Islami (hereafter Jamaat) well before the tragedy of 9/11. When I landed in Aligarh (India) in October 2001, what greeted me was abject suspicion and severe hostility from my subjects. Only two weeks before my arrival, the BJP Government had banned SIMI, a radical offshoot of Jamaat, on the charges of ‘sedition’. Consequently, SIMI leaders were arrested. The Indian state had also launched a campaign against Islamic seminaries (madrasas), the alleged hotbed of terrorism. My plan to study a Jamaat school thus also met with suspicion. As I wrote in Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs ‘They [SIMI and Jamaat) thought that I was part of the Western conspiracy to harm Islam and thus an agent of the West deputed to collect information about them’ (2005: 281). The web of suspicion, if it can be called such, was much wider. Hostlers of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) told me that many of their colleagues worked as informants to the Local Intelligence Officer (LIO). Once at a tea stall, a stranger began talking to me. He inquired about my academic career and background. Later some hostlers told me that he was an LIO (It is worth noting that, in 2000, the police had arrested two hostlers suspected as militants). At a paan shop in the old town of Aligarh, a person introduced himself to me. He proudly told me that he knew ‘all about me’. My friends told me that he too was an LIO.

The web of suspicion did not end with Jamaat-SIMI’s suspicion of me, AMU hostlers’ suspicion of each other as informants to LIO, and LIO knowing ‘all about me’. A few of my friends who happen to be Hindu held that my research somehow shielded ‘Islamic fundamentalists/terrorists’. After the serial blasts in Mumbai in 2006, allegedly engineered by SIMI, a journalist from an English weekly contacted me (I was then in India). Knowing about my research, he asked me if I could give him the contacts of SIMI activists. Finding me unmusical about his request, he solicited my comments on SIMI. I stated that unless it was established that SIMI engineered the blasts, it is premature to comment. I clarified to him that my research dealt with SIMI’s radicalization in the 1990s, which could not be understood without Hindu nationalists’ violent hate campaigns against Muslims. The journalist told me, not too implicitly, that my stance was sympathetic to SIMI. Clearly, he suspected my research. I have encountered such suspicion from a few colleagues in the West during conferences while making a presentation on SIMI’s radicalization. The society of suspicion comes to its full play with a new feature of conferences in the post-9/11 world. Filippo and Caroline Ossella’s ‘Introduction: Islamic reformism in South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, notes perceptively how Intelligence officials appear in every conference whose theme bears ‘Islam’ or ‘Muslims’.

To discuss the issue of ethics is thus to address the society of suspicion anthropologists inhabit. When the State’s penetration into society is so pervasive, it is perhaps more meaningful to link ethics with the ways in which power –domestic as well as global –plays itself out, for instance, in relation to Indian Muslim minority with which anthropologists like me work. Shouldn’t we also talk –after Geertz’s ‘theatre state’, Dirks’ ‘ethnographic state’, Messick’s ‘calligraphic state’ –about the ‘state of suspicion’ (in a double sense) that defines contemporary times and anthropologists interactions therewith?

Irfan Ahmad
ISIM-Leiden University

While endorsing David Price’s initial post and Kriti Kapila’s queries about the ethics of collaboration in times of peace, I would like to reflect on the implications of anthropological involvement in counterinsurgency operations for countries of the global South. The ways of anthropology in the US has a remarkable spread effect in the South and it is that which concerns me, writing from India.
Firstly it is necessary to recognize the difference in anthropology’s engagement with counterinsurgency from the 1970s. It was largely in an advisory capacity that anthropologists were involved in projects like Camelot or Agile. This time around in the ‘war on terror’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, anthropologists are being embedded with combat units as part of Human Terrain Systems (HTS) teams. In other words they are directly involved with combat operations.
The ethical imperative underwriting their action is as David Kilcullen seems to suggest the ‘greatest good of the greatest number’ (Anthropology Today, Vol.23, No.3, June 2007, p.20)
The problem is are the victims part of this number ?
Secondly, in countries of the South where the professional association of anthropologists may not be as strong as in the metropolitan countries, ethical concerns may not even be recognized or even bypassed for pragmatic reasons. This may be more evident in countries, like India, where the government is a leading employer of anthropologists and where collaboration with the government is routine in terms of policy and planning. These efforts can easily be channelised towards counterinsurgency efforts as was done in regard to armed Maoist insurgency in the 1970s. More recently, anthropologists outside the pale of government employment are contesting in Supreme Court the Chattisgarh state government’s counterinsurgency strategy of setting up vigilante groups (Salwa Judum) and ’strategic hamlets’ against Maoist guerrillas.
The use of cultural knowledge for counterinsurgency purposes has existed from early on but the embodied presence of anthropologists as combatants in a conflict zone is of recent origin. However, according to the recent post by Price the anthropological surge seems to be abating !
Is that a hopeful sign or merely pointers to the dark uses of anthropology ?

Anjan Ghosh

Anthropological knowledge as expertise has been solicited in a variety of forums, of which war-time intelligence and cultural engineering are the latest to grab public attention. Anthropologists are routinely called to court as expert witness to verify claims to the veracity, authenticity, and indeed ownership of various aspects of ‘culture’. Claimants range from refugees, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants to artists, community chiefs and state governments. Away from the contestory arena of litigation, anthropological attestation has by now come to be seen as routine and mandatory, though significant part of the evidentiary terrain of a range of governmental projects and practices in many parts of the world. A pre-eminent example is the verification of distinctiveness of groups in various enumerative exercises, such as the census. Paying attention to this kind of work of anthropology in itself makes weak (or strong – depending where one is coming from) the imperative to ‘go East and/or South’ in order to do any meaningful anthropology (as some hapless graduate students are sometimes advised). In almost none of these cases is expertise sought from foreign, western or northern locations. Anthropology has thus become very much part and parcel of home science.

David Price’s posts raised some very important ethical issues surrounding anthropological collaborations in wartime and as armour for imperial expansion, especially the US occupation in Iraq and the war led by its forces in Afghanistan. I want to continue the discussion on the ethics of collaboration not in wartime, but in its routine and routinised way. This is not to detract the importance of this topical discussion but more perhaps as a way of trying to generate some discussion on the idea of collaboration itself. When does professional expertise cease to be expertise and move into the shadowy area of collaboration? Whilst the mobilisation of anthropological knowledge and expertise in counterinsurgency needs to be decried and actively resisted, how should one make sense of other routine domestic collaborations with state projects that are clearly aimed at refining statecraft, and actually seen from one perspective undermine ‘anthropology’s critiques of power and subvert anthropology for the needs of the state and connect the present to our discipline’s colonial past’ (David Price, previous post). And moving beyond the state, how should we make critical sense of the fervour with which the stock of anthropology has grown amongst multinationals eyeing the comprehension of culturally diverse consumption habits and multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to say nothing of the World Intellectual Property Organisation? Do we or do we not need a code of conduct for collaborations on such counterinsurgency? When is expertise and when is collaboration? And when is counterinsurgency and cultural engineering?

Last winter I began fieldwork amongst state anthropologists in India (i.e. professional anthropologists recruited qua anthropologists to advise and assist the state on a wide range of issues, most of which have potential juridical use of implications), and sitting across the table from one of them in their office, I began to introduce my project to him. ‘Ah, this is most interesting. I have been an anthropologist for nearly twenty years now, and now I realise I too have become a tribe’. And to be sure, he did not sound flattered.

Kriti Kapila