Nafeez
Ahmed
Thursday 12
June 2014
theguardian.com
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/12/pentagon-mass-civil-breakdown
A US
Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model
the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the
world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million
dollar programme is designed to
develop immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant insights" for
senior officials and decision makers in "the defense policy
community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant
commands."
Launched in 2008 – the year of
the global banking crisis – the DoD
'Minerva Research Initiative' partners with universities "to improve
DoD's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political
forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US."
Among the
projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study
managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims to develop
an empirical model "of the dynamics of social movement mobilisation and
contagions." The project will determine "the critical mass (tipping
point)" of social contagians by studying their "digital traces"
in the cases of "the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma
elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park
protests in Turkey."
Twitter
posts and conversations will be examined "to identify individuals mobilised
in a social contagion and when they become mobilised."
Another
project awarded this year to the University of Washington "seeks to
uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale
political and economic change originate," along with their
"characteristics and consequences." The project, managed by the US
Army Research Office, focuses on "large-scale movements involving more
than 1,000 participants in enduring activity," and will cover 58 countries
in total.
Last year,
the DoD's Minerva Initiative funded a project to determine 'Who
Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?' which, however, conflates peaceful
activists with "supporters of political violence" who are different
from terrorists only in that they do not embark on "armed militancy"
themselves. The project explicitly sets out to study non-violent activists:
"In
every context we find many individuals who share the demographic, family,
cultural, and/or socioeconomic background of those who decided to engage in
terrorism, and yet refrained themselves from taking up armed militancy, even
though they were sympathetic to the end goals of armed groups. The field of
terrorism studies has not, until recently, attempted to look at this control
group. This project is not about terrorists, but about supporters of political violence."
The
project's 14 case studies each "involve extensive interviews with ten or
more activists and militants in parties and NGOs who, though sympathetic to
radical causes, have chosen a path of non-violence."
I contacted
the project's principal investigator, Prof Maria Rasmussen of the US Naval
Postgraduate School, asking why non-violent activists working for NGOs should
be equated to supporters of political violence – and which "parties and
NGOs" were being investigated – but received no response.
Similarly,
Minerva programme staff refused to answer a series of similar questions I put
to them, including asking how "radical causes" promoted by peaceful
NGOs constituted a potential national security threat of interest to the DoD.
Among my
questions, I asked:
"Does
the US Department of Defense see protest movements and social activism in
different parts of the world as a threat to US national security? If so, why?
Does the US Department of Defense consider political movements aiming for large
scale political and economic change as a national security matter? If so, why?
Activism, protest, 'political movements' and of course NGOs are a vital element
of a healthy civil society and democracy - why is it that the DoD is funding
research to investigate such issues?"
Minerva's
programme director Dr Erin Fitzgerald said "I appreciate your concerns and
am glad that you reached out to give us the opportunity to clarify" before
promising a more detailed response. Instead, I received the following bland
statement from the DoD's press office:
"The
Department of Defense takes seriously its role in the security of the United
States, its citizens, and US allies and partners. While every security
challenge does not cause conflict, and every conflict does not involve the US
military, Minerva helps fund basic social science research that helps increase
the Department of Defense's understanding of what causes instability and
insecurity around the world. By better understanding these conflicts and their
causes beforehand, the Department of Defense can better prepare for the dynamic
future security environment."
In 2013,
Minerva funded a University of Maryland project in collaboration with the US
Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to gauge the risk
of civil unrest due to climate change. The
three-year $1.9 million project is developing models to anticipate what
could happen to societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.
From the
outset, the Minerva programme was slated to provide over $75 million over five
years for social and behavioural science research. This year alone it has been
allocated a total budget of $17.8 million by US Congress.
An internal
Minerva staff email communication referenced in a
2012 Masters dissertation reveals that the programme is geared toward
producing quick results that are directly applicable to field operations. The
dissertation was part of a Minerva-funded
project on "counter-radical Muslim discourse" at Arizona State
University.
The
internal email from Prof Steve Corman, a principal investigator for the
project, describes a meeting hosted by the DoD's Human Social Cultural and
Behavioural Modeling (HSCB) programme in which senior Pentagon officials said
their priority was "to develop capabilities that are deliverable
quickly" in the form of "models and tools that can be integrated with
operations."
Although
Office of Naval Research supervisor Dr Harold Hawkins had assured the
university researchers at the outset that the project was merely "a basic
research effort, so we shouldn't be concerned about doing applied stuff",
the meeting in fact showed that DoD is looking to "feed results" into
"applications," Corman said in the email. He advised his researchers
to "think about shaping results, reports, etc., so they [DoD] can clearly
see their application for tools that can be taken to the field."
Many
independent scholars are critical of what they see as the US government's
efforts to militarise social science in the service of war. In May 2008, the
American Anthropological Association (AAA) wrote
to the US government noting that the Pentagon lacks "the kind of
infrastructure for evaluating anthropological [and other social science]
research" in a way that involves "rigorous, balanced and objective
peer review", calling for such research to be managed instead by civilian
agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The
following month, the DoD signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the
NSF to cooperate on the management of Minerva. In response, the AAA cautioned
that although research proposals would now be evaluated by NSF's merit-review
panels. "Pentagon officials will have decision-making power in deciding
who sits on the panels":
"…
there remain concerns within the discipline that research will only be funded
when it supports the Pentagon's agenda. Other critics of the programme,
including the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, have raised concerns that
the programme would discourage research in other important areas and undermine
the role of the university as a place for independent discussion and critique
of the military."
According
to Prof David Price, a cultural anthropologist at St Martin's University in
Washington DC and author of Weaponizing
Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State,
"when you looked at the individual bits of many of these projects they
sort of looked like normal social science, textual analysis, historical
research, and so on, but when you added these bits up they all shared themes of
legibility with all the distortions of over-simplification. Minerva is farming
out the piece-work of empire in ways that can allow individuals to disassociate
their individual contributions from the larger project."
Prof Price
has previously
exposed how the Pentagon's Human Terrain Systems (HTS) programme - designed
to embed social scientists in military field operations - routinely conducted
training scenarios set in regions "within the United States."
Citing a
summary critique of the programme sent to HTS directors by a former employee,
Price reported that the HTS training scenarios "adapted COIN
[counterinsurgency] for Afghanistan/Iraq" to domestic situations "in
the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective as
threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law
and order."
One
war-game, said Price, involved environmental activists protesting pollution
from a coal-fired plant near Missouri, some of whom were members of the
well-known environmental NGO Sierra Club. Participants were tasked to
"identify those who were 'problem-solvers' and those who were
'problem-causers,' and the rest of the population whom would be the target of
the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of
viewpoints and values which was the 'desired end-state' of the military's
strategy."
Such
war-games are consistent with a raft of Pentagon planning documents which
suggest that National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance is partially
motivated to prepare
for the destabilising impact of coming environmental, energy and economic
shocks.
James
Petras, Bartle Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University in New York,
concurs with Price's concerns. Minerva-funded social scientists tied to
Pentagon counterinsurgency operations are involved in the "study of
emotions in stoking or quelling ideologically driven movements," he said,
including how "to counteract grassroots movements."
Minerva is
a prime example of the deeply narrow-minded and self-defeating nature of
military ideology. Worse still, the unwillingness of DoD officials to answer
the most basic questions is symptomatic of a simple fact – in their unswerving
mission to defend an
increasingly unpopular global system serving the interests of a tiny minority,
security agencies have no qualms about painting the rest of us as potential
terrorists.
Dr.
Nafeez Ahmed is an international security journalist and academic. He is
the author of A User's Guide to the
Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It, and the forthcoming science
fiction thriller, ZERO POINT. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter @nafeezahmed.
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