Whistling Past the Graveyard
In the latest MERIP, there is a ridiculous and baseless critique of academic and policy-facing terrorism studies:
In the vacuum left by all of the attempts to distinguish jihadis from other Muslims, the work of explaining and interpreting jihadism is largely abandoned to the cottage industry of “terrorism experts.” Aside from its sordid links with racist fearmongering, this field’s intimate relationship with the national security state has left it without the autonomy needed to develop into a serious intellectual project. [6] Over the past decade, a more sophisticated, professionalized generation of specialists in jihadism has emerged. This newer cohort is more likely to have at least some relevant linguistic experience and may even dabble in critiques of Islamophobia to bolster its own credibility. Nevertheless, the overwhelming demand to provide “actionable” insights renders jihad studies unable or unwilling to engage any of the grand recurring questions of social and political theory. Jihadologists may dismiss this as ivory tower irrelevance; others might call it intellectual autonomy.
To be frank, this is vacuous nonsense. Terrorism studies existed long before jihadism became a focal point, as seen in old-school work by the likes of Martha Crenshaw. It is also bizarre to suggest that work by Scott Atran, Aaron Zelin, Cole Bunzel, William McCants, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, or Thomas Hegghammer (to name a view) does not engage with timeless questions of social and political theory. There is also something very unfortunate about the perception that people who have devoted their lives to acquiring hard language skills and engaging in “thick context” study of a little-known social milieu are somehow posers that did so out of a desire to get in with the cool kids. And it is approaching libel to suggest that the likes of the people I have mentioned have even the most indirect of connections to “racist fearmongering.”
The author, however, in making terrorism studies part of the overall problem he is denouncing, is simply one more person that cannot take seriously the idea that there might be some benefit to the study of terrorism. This has occurred in academia, as MLR Smith has observed with his look at the strange ‘critical’ approach to terrorism. Friend Daniel Trombly also looked at this tendency when it came to assessment of the policy side of terrorism studies. My Master’s thesis advisor and South Asia terrorism expert Christine Fair has been on the receiving end of many a smear campaign because she took government money for her research. And there is little about this exclusive to terrorism studies either. Strategic studies of the kind that Bernard Brodie and Thomas Schelling used to practice has been more or less erased from the modern American university. Military history is an endangered species within academia writ large. Both were driven out by a similar critique; that they did not have academic value outside of the pet projects of governmental patrons and those patrons had broadly sinister aims.
Unfortunately for the author and others like him, the need for social science and humanities specialists in understanding the origins, functions, and characteristics of organized political violence (as opposed to lazy Marxist critiques that war and terrorism is either false consciousness or the fault of the West) will not go away even if they successfully delegitimize the academic and quasi-academic study of it. Like it or not, democratic governance over the use of force and matters of internal security depend on the existence of academic and applied expertise in the stratagems of figures like Bismarck and Bin Laden. Otherwise, the matter is left purely to politicians, the military and security services, and anyone willing to cater to the needs of both parties. The United States did not cease to deal with insurgents and guerrillas after research institutions like the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) were driven from campuses, it just dealt with them with far less information and expert knowledge and suffered accordingly.
To be sure, this is not a statement that “policy relevance” is everything or that academics should cater to those interested in policy by default. Those familiar with my various denuciations of this idea know that I find it as fundamentally counterproductive as the author’s demonization of those who work with policy. It is also fair to wonder if (a) policymakers actually will listen to experts and specialists and (b) whether or not experts and specialists can back up the claim that their analysis and scholarship can provide useful policy advice. But history also suggests that expert knowledge has been nonetheless critical to solving complex policy problems, from the role played by the quite Marxist Frankfurt School in the US World War II war effort to the way in which policy expertise on the Great Depression helped avert a far greater financial catastrophe during the 2007–8 financial crisis. This is not to argue that providing input to policy is morally unimpeachable either. Certainly there is much risk involved in association with power.
Noam Chomsky’s writing on the responsibility of intellectuals is the only piece of his political writing that I find congenial, as it is fair to point out that those engaged in the intellectual work behind the Vietnam War ought not to regard themselves as disinterested scholars. Nor should the correctness of their analysis be above criticism. And if one wants to adopt Chomsky’s policy of reflexive opposition to every and any use of force by the West, they are of course welcome to do so (though hopefully without Chomsky’s copious apologia for the Khmer Rouge and other brutalizing regimes). I also do not expect the likes of Chomsky to approve of the idea that it is useful or worthwhile to advise the state in the use of organized violence and the development of intelligence and security policies. That is his choice, though I also may observe that what I and Chomsky both have in common is that we have both worked to advantage the mil-industrial complex in some way. I have, for example, privately provided input of various sorts on security and strategy questions that I view as within my ability to speak to. Chomsky, as cognitive science historian Margaret Boden details, took money for linguistics and cognitive science research from similar people looking to develop better technology for spying on the Eastern bloc.
Still, one can at least respect some of the motivations that led Chomsky to pen his diatribe more so than the ones that motivated the MERIP piece. The key problem with the view of those like the author of the MERIP piece lies in the following inconvenient issues:
It does not fairly represent work in areas of academia that face policy or areas of policy sciences outside of academia. Economics as a discipline involves itself heavily with policy (to the point of economists being named to top policy positions). And many policy organizations maintain staffs of PhD economists to churn out analysis on key economic problems. Yet there is also a Nobel Prize devoted to economic sciences that has seen awkward speeches by such giants of the mind as Herbert Simon and Daniel Kahneman. Similarly, casting terrorism studies as intellectually lightweight because of a connection to policy is ridiculous and can only be done by ignoring all of the relevant scholarship and analysis in the field. As long as people care about organized political violence (of which terrorism is a subset), there will need to be study of it that brings together multiple perspectives that would not otherwise be seen in conventional andhyper-specialized academic institutions.
It washes its hands of any sort of responsibility for how policy is made. Policymakers may consider themselves practical men and women but upon closer look one sees that ideas do play a significant role in their worldview and operations. Successful self-promotion by behavioral economists, for example, has resulted in the creation of a White House behavioral science office. This will surely have consequences — good or bad — -for millions. It is fine to reject the idea of collaboration with policy, but one ought to think twice before demonizing it and conflating policy-facing research with bad policies or discourse. People like McCants or Hegghammer are frankly the last people to blame for problematic US policies abroad. They provide information and knowledge and some prescriptions. What is done with this information and knowledge is not up to McCants or Hegghammer. And it is people like McCants or Hegghammer who will still be necessary to implement any kind of response to terrorism, whether hawkish or dovish in character.
It is whistling past the graveyard. If there is any hope of saving US counterterrorism and security policy from lurching completely into a situation reminsicent of World War II’s Japanese internment, part of the solution will have to come from those qualified to understand terrorism and counterterrorism working in their own way to shape the policy landscape to avert such a catastrophic outcome. It will not come from reflexively anti-government researchers that have mostly eschewed any real engagement with the security state, speak mostly to themselves, and lack real expertise or knowledge of the security problems that policymakers are concerned with. As Charles Dunlap observes, the abject failure of drone opponents to do anything beyond produce inaccurate agitprop ought to be a lesson to those concerned with the future of security and counterterrorism:
There are many reasons that drone critics have not gained the traction in the U.S. that they seemed to have enjoyed overseas. In part, this may be the result of a larger problem that many lawyers, academics and others suffer: an insufficient understanding of the technologies of war as well as the methodologies and strategies for their use. …..
In short, well-versed leaders within the Administration, the armed forces, the intelligence community, and Congress are likely aware of the factual errors of many of the critics’ complaints, and that has made them less susceptible to anti-drone arguments that might have otherwise operated to limit the President’s political ability to use the systems.
Of course, they are welcome to whistle past the graveyard, but not to complain afterwards about the resulting isolation that inevitably follows. It is legitimate to complain about the terrible quality of the median ‘terrorism analyst’ that appears on a cable TV discussion panel, but the response ought to be to get the likes of McCants, Hegghamer, and others on the panel instead of demonizing their work.
