Mark LeVine: Mid-East Battle of the Sociologists
[Mark LeVine is a professor of history at UC Irvine and senior visiting researcher at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University in Sweden. His most recent books are Heavy Metal Islam (Random House) and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books).]
I received an email from BAE Systems the other day. According to the company's website, BAE is the largest military contractor on earth, with 100,000 employees globally "engaged in the development, delivery and support of advanced defence, security and aerospace systems in the air, on land and at sea."
The subject line of the email read "International Employment for Social Scientists". I couldn't imagine what BAE would want with me, given that my published views on the military industrial complex don't exactly resonate with the company's business model....
I had assumed that the Human Terrain System was retired along with president Bush and the neocons who spent much of the 2000s trying to militarise academia in the service of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the email informed me otherwise. Instead, like so much of Bush administration policy towards the Middle East, the HTS program is clearly continuing under his successor.
Originally conceived in the mid-2000s as the Iraqi insurgency gained strength and the US was making little headway in Afghanistan, the "Human Terrain Systems" program brought anthropologists and other scholars or so-called experts into the military "kill chain" to advise field commanders on how better to interact with the local populations in the territories under occupation.
Sociologists and particularly anthropologists are considered crucial to the HTS program because, the argument goes, they have the skills to collect data - what the CIA would likely call "intel" - on "key regional personalities, social structures, links between clans and families, economic issues, public communications, agricultural production, and the like."...
As funding for graduate studies and teaching positions dries up across the country, HTS boosters have imagined retaining young academics as "an Individual Ready Reserve" of scholar-warriors who could be deployed as needed to situations where the US military is engaged.
Ironically, the methodologies the program utilises includes concepts like "cultural scripts", with which few young scholars would have more than a passing familiarity.
Such antiquated notions fell out of favour among anthropologists a generation or more ago because of the simplistic and misleading representations of local cultures they offer....
Read entire article at Al Jazeera
I received an email from BAE Systems the other day. According to the company's website, BAE is the largest military contractor on earth, with 100,000 employees globally "engaged in the development, delivery and support of advanced defence, security and aerospace systems in the air, on land and at sea."
The subject line of the email read "International Employment for Social Scientists". I couldn't imagine what BAE would want with me, given that my published views on the military industrial complex don't exactly resonate with the company's business model....
I had assumed that the Human Terrain System was retired along with president Bush and the neocons who spent much of the 2000s trying to militarise academia in the service of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
But the email informed me otherwise. Instead, like so much of Bush administration policy towards the Middle East, the HTS program is clearly continuing under his successor.
Originally conceived in the mid-2000s as the Iraqi insurgency gained strength and the US was making little headway in Afghanistan, the "Human Terrain Systems" program brought anthropologists and other scholars or so-called experts into the military "kill chain" to advise field commanders on how better to interact with the local populations in the territories under occupation.
Sociologists and particularly anthropologists are considered crucial to the HTS program because, the argument goes, they have the skills to collect data - what the CIA would likely call "intel" - on "key regional personalities, social structures, links between clans and families, economic issues, public communications, agricultural production, and the like."...
As funding for graduate studies and teaching positions dries up across the country, HTS boosters have imagined retaining young academics as "an Individual Ready Reserve" of scholar-warriors who could be deployed as needed to situations where the US military is engaged.
Ironically, the methodologies the program utilises includes concepts like "cultural scripts", with which few young scholars would have more than a passing familiarity.
Such antiquated notions fell out of favour among anthropologists a generation or more ago because of the simplistic and misleading representations of local cultures they offer....