Ten years have passed since the explosion of violence in the heartlands of the West on September 11, 2001. The attacks of 9/11 posed fundamental questions about the principles, rules and means by which we live, conduct foreign policy, and manage relations with others. The disastrously conceived “War on Terror” presaged upon the use of military instruments of power has wrought enormous death and destruction across the broader Middle East. The intervening decade has seen the rise of a new pattern of warfare in Afghanistan, Iraq and, now, Libya. These wars have weakened the very structures of international law and multilateral institutions that underpin international society. Yet the stretching of the United Nations mandate authorizing the NATO-led intervention in Libya also demonstrates the continuing inability of international rules to limit or constrain the use of coercive power.

This article assesses the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya in terms of their legality, their consequences—local, regional and global—and their impact. It describes the growing impotence of Western powers in reshaping global politics by force. In addition to straining Western relationships with the Arab and Islamic world, they have given added impetus to the shift in the global order. A new balance of power is emerging that the West simply did not foresee a decade ago, as China and other emerging economies engage in commerce, economic assistance and the projection of soft power across the world. In just ten years, the flawed application of organized violence as a tool in the defense and projection of Western power has dissolved the grandiose project of the “American century.”

What follows is a three-stage analysis of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. Each case study begins with the political pretext and legal positions for going to war. We then examine the nature and trajectory of the military operations. Finally, we reflect on their results, both in terms of the massive loss of life and material destruction as well as their wider geopolitical consequences. Each of the conflicts was highly distinct, yet left a common legacy of failing states and fractured societies. We end with a section that considers the larger themes of where this leaves international society, the rule of law, and a multipolar world order—in a state of flux, transition and uncertainty.

9/11 and Its Aftermath

The terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC were acts of atrocity directed against the United States and the whole of humanity in their utter disregard for the sanctity of life and violation of all international norms.¹  They demonstrated the negative challenges posed by the contemporary nature and form of globalization as providing new channels for mobilization and political action.² The form of international terrorism unleashed by Al-Qaeda (beginning in 1998 and continuing after 9/11) was facilitated by the freer movement of people, money, and ideologies in a world more densely interconnected than ever before. Al-Qaeda was part of a wave of violent non-state actors conducting asymmetric operations across traditional state boundaries, and taking advantage of the global spread of ideas and technologies to maximize its visual impact in the twenty-four hour global news cycle.³

This rise of violent non-state armed groups introduced a destabilizing new dimension into world politics as they operated beyond the rules-based international system established to regulate relations between states. Intense globalizing processes also challenged existing security paradigms as they reconstituted notions of time and space and intersected localized patterns of violence with global processes and events.⁴ 9/11 was the transformative moment that should have set in motion a genuinely new approach to the security implications of globalization. Yet, as Cronin noted as early as 2004, the George W. Bush administration sought to explain the new threats to international security from transnational non-state actors in familiar state-centric strategic terms.⁵

The primacy of “national security” responses to 9/11 highlighted the emerging paradox between the growing complexity of collective “global” issues and the weak (and resolutely still state-centric) means for addressing them.⁶ In the United States, the George W. Bush presidential administration securitized the threat from international terrorism to justify its adoption of “extra-ordinary” measures resting on a particular interpretation of events, rather than established international law.⁷ Framing the War on Terror in this way rested on assumptions of US world leadership, primacy, and a deeply unilateral view of the world. Yet, Tony Blair’s premiership aside, this viewpoint was not widely shared in the international community, with significant consequences for the legitimacy and acceptability of the United States as a world leader.⁸

The underpinnings of the War on Terror were laid out in President Bush’s speech to a Joint Session of Congress on September 20, 2001. Bush declared, “We will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism . . . Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists . . . any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”⁹ This set out a framework for attacking a country (Afghanistan) accused of sheltering terrorists (Al-Qaeda) that was one of the twin pillars of the War on Terror. The other was the notion of pre-emptive war, as laid out in the September 2002 National Security Strategy. Together, they became the “Bush Doctrine,” as the bellicose president stated that “in the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action.”¹⁰

The Bush Doctrine was controversial from the outset. Critics focused on its disregard for international norms and its ambiguously vague and potentially overarching content. Eminent military historian (and founder of the International Institute for Strategic Studies) Sir Michael Howard argued bluntly that “the USA claimed a hunter’s license to use force anywhere in the world and the right to dispense with all the restraints of international law that they had done so much to create.”¹¹ Another leading military and strategic thinker, Hew Strachan, questioned whether freedom could ever be a strategy in itself, and warned that “the conflation of words like ‘war’ and ‘terror,’ and of ‘strategy’ and ‘policy’ . . . contributes to the incoherence of the response” that followed 9/11.¹² More polemically, the leading French analyst of political Islam, Olivier Roy, has suggested provocatively that, “with American public opinion whipped up to a frenzy,” the United States was “determined to punish the guilty . . . and people were prepared to pay the price, whatever the human and financial cost.”¹³ With the United States breaking with the constraints of international law, a dangerous signal was also sent to other powers. For it cannot be coherently argued that all states bar one must be bound to the rules and established practices of the postwar multilateral system.

Afghanistan

The Bush administration reacted to 9/11 with immediate military action. Military operations in Afghanistan commenced on October 7, 2001, four weeks after 9/11. To begin with, they enjoyed popular domestic support and broad international sympathy as the Taliban regime harbored Osama bin Laden while he planned and orchestrated the atrocities of 9/11. A lightning campaign by the US-led international coalition and the Northern Alliance routed Taliban forces and seized control of the major cities of Mazar-i-Sharif, Kabul and Kandahar in less than two months. Prominent Afghans came together in Bonn in December 2001 to agree on a pathway to political transition, and established the Afghan Interim Authority (AIA). In Tokyo in January 2002, an International Conference on Reconstruction Assistance to Afghanistan pledged over $4.5 billion for reconstruction, as the international community vowed not to “forget” the country, as had happened at the end of the Soviet occupation in 1989.¹⁴

Separately from Operation Enduring Freedom, on December 20, 2001, UN Security Council Resolution 1386 established the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). This had an initial six-month mandate to help the AIA develop its national security structures and forces. NATO assumed authority for the ISAF mission in August 2003, and expanded its geographical remit far beyond the initial focus on Kabul. NATO took overall responsibility for security in Afghanistan in October 2006, although significant numbers of US troops for counter-insurgency operations remained—and continue to remain—outside its chain of command.¹⁵

These early gains were significant. By early 2002, the threat from the Taliban had been significantly reduced, although acts of terrorism by Al-Qaeda affiliates continued in Bali, North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. But the situation in Afghanistan began to unravel as US attention shifted inexorably toward effecting regime change in Iraq. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech in January 2002 accused Iraq, Iran and North Korea of supporting terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction.¹⁶ In 2002, the administration focused increasingly on defining the concept of pre-emptive war, and, in 2003, on conducting the invasion and occupation of Iraq. It looked away at precisely the formative period when sustained engagement in peace-building and post-conflict recovery was needed to embed and expand the initial achievements in Afghanistan.

Beginning in 2002, the outlines of a guerrilla resistance against the US presence in Afghanistan emerged as the 10,000 US and ISAF troops and nascent Afghan National Army failed to secure the countryside beyond Kabul.¹⁷ This occurred, in part, as US troops were diverted to Iraq, just as fighters that had melted away in 2001 began to reorganize in smaller insurgent networks and groups, and as state and sub-state networks in Pakistan lent their support to spoilers and insurgents in Afghanistan. In addition, it occurred as a result of the inability of the Afghan government and security forces in Kabul (and their US and NATO partners) to do anything to prevent these developments; and, not least, in local and regional reactions to abuses of governance, rampant corruption and the escalating drugs-based shadow economy at the heart of the government of President Hamid Karzai. All these factors added up to a damaging erosion of local legitimacy and support for a government increasingly perceived as propped up by international military backing.¹⁸

Nowhere was this more understood than in the southeastern province of Helmand, to which a brigade of 3,300 British soldiers was deployed in March 2006. A small contingent of American Special Forces had been based in the provincial capital of Lashkar Gar since 2002. It had not attracted much attention and had sustained almost no casualties over the four years to 2006. By contrast, the British immediately ran into stiff local resistance as they acted as a magnet for Taliban troops.¹⁹ Lacking local awareness or knowledge (symbolized by then-Defense Secretary John Reid’s infamous statement in April 2006 that “we would be perfectly happy to leave again in three years’ time without firing one shot”²⁰) and broken up into operationally indefensible “platoon houses” across Helmand, British forces barely held off the waves of Taliban attacks on their positions. Their position was further complicated by the explosion of the narcotic economy as Helmand became the opium production and smuggling hub producing up to two-thirds of the poppies of Afghanistan.²¹

A nexus of insecurity developed from the activities of traffickers, drug warlords, Taliban commanders and organized corruption, eroding (in increasingly wider circles) the Afghan government’s legitimacy and ability to govern. Its scale also undermined local perceptions of British motives in Helmand, as further infusions of troops and civilian personnel stubbornly failed to reverse the rising levels of violence and criminality. By 2011, the number of British troops in Helmand had risen from 3300 to more than 9000 at a cost of nearly £5 billion in war-related expenditure. Writing about his experiences of serving in the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) in Helmand between 2007 and 2009, British Intelligence Officer Frank Ledwidge concluded that “the British had found themselves out of their depth and without the numbers to deal with the absolute necessity of bringing about the security that (arguably) their activities had so damaged.”²² The Ministry of Defense did, however, find time to arrest an officer accused of “leaking” civilian casualty figures and charge him with breaching the Official Secrets Act; doubtless these were deemed too embarrassing and sensitive to reveal to a suspicious public.²³ No such figures have been publicly released, but estimates range upwards from the tens of thousands for the ten years since 2001.

After a decade of war in Afghanistan, the situation today is bleaker than ever before. By mid-2011, ISAF had swollen to more than 130,000 troops and suffered nearly 2800 fatalities, with each year since 2003 being bloodier than the one before.²⁴ Indeed, the International Crisis Group (ICG) summarizes how “security has deteriorated across the country, with the highest civilian casualty rates since 2001, and the insurgency is spreading to areas previously considered relatively safe, including the provinces around the capital Kabul.” It notes that war-related civilian deaths in the first half of 2011 were 15% higher than in 2010, and that the Taliban has expanded beyond its traditional Pashtun base to establish shadow governments in central and eastern Afghanistan as well. With “a central government crippled by corruption and deeply dependent on a corrosive war economy” and Afghan security forces (even after ten years of funding and international assistance) “unable to enforce the law, counter the insurgency or even secure the regions where the transition has already begun,” the ICG concluded pessimistically that there was virtually no prospect of stabilizing the country before the end of the planned US and NATO withdrawal and handover of security duties to the Afghan government by December 2014.²⁵ The recent stoning to death of a woman and her daughter just 300 meters from the governor’s office in Ghazni city—scheduled for imminent transfer to Afghan security control—provided a grisly example of the extreme limitations of functioning authority after ten years of Western intervention.²⁶

Iraq

Military operations had commenced in Afghanistan in 2001 with broad international support. This provided the campaign with initial legitimacy that was enshrined through United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1378, 1383, 1386, 1401. They stood in direct contrast to the pre-emptive, legally dubious and globally controversial US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. Years of rising tensions between the Saddam Hussein regime and the international community over Iraqi disarmament culminated in Resolution 1441 on November 8, 2002. Adopted unanimously, it stated that Iraq was in material breach of its 1991 Gulf War ceasefire obligations relating to the possession of weapons of mass destruction. However, it fell short of permitting direct military action in the event of Iraqi non-compliance. Instead, UN weapons inspectors, led by Hans Blix, returned to Iraq and reported increased (though far from complete) Iraqi cooperation and disclosure of information. Yet Bush and Tony Blair rejected Blix’s findings and, despite failing to secure a second UN resolution authorizing the use of force, launched military operations on March 20.

The invasion of Iraq thus began without UN Security Council authorization and occurred against the backdrop of unprecedented global protests and mass opposition. Yet in a meaningful sense this did not matter, for the invasion was about the Bush administration demonstrating (to domestic constituents and international observers alike) its determination to deploy overwhelming and (mostly) unilateral military force in response to the new form of asymmetrical warfare that struck US soil on 9/11. The Independent’s Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn argued, “They were heady times in Washington in 2002, as the final decisions were being taken to invade Iraq. It was the high tide of imperial self-confidence.”²⁷ As previously mentioned, the 2002 National Security Strategy bundled together the issues of international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction with the notion of rogue states operating at the periphery of the international system. These ideas meshed with Bush’s rhetoric about the Axis of Evil and the neoconservative dream about the possibilities of “remaking” the Middle East, starting with regime change and radical transition to a free-market utopia in Iraq.²⁸ Moreover, the State Department, which, alone in the administration had looked into post-Saddam scenarios through its Future of Iraq project set up in 2002, found itself bypassed and marginalized by the Pentagon, which had done very little post-war planning itself.²⁹

Such post-conflict ideas as there were rested on little knowledge of—or interest in—the Iraqi political and social order, by the Bush administration and its ally in London. To the extent they reflected anything at all it was the overpowering “group think” of a closed circle of Beltway insiders and their contacts with exiled Iraqi politicians.³⁰ In November 2002, six leading UK-based academics familiar with Iraq were invited to Downing Street to brief Tony Blair and then-Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. One of those attending, Charles Tripp, recalled in 2007 how “Straw thought post-Saddam Iraq would be much like post-Soviet Russia and could thus be easily pigeonholed as that strange creature, a ‘transitional society,’” while “Blair seemed wholly uninterested in Iraq as a complex and puzzling political society, wanting confirmation merely that deposing Saddam Hussein would remove ‘evil’ from the country.”³¹

Official ignorance reinforced a lack of strategic vision and planning for post-war scenarios that afflicted British policymaking, just as in the United States. This failing covered both the military (which issued a divisional plan for post-conflict operations 15 days before Basra fell on April 6, 2003) and the Foreign Office (whose unit for post-war planning was set up just three weeks before the invasion of Iraq commenced).³² They were not helped by the late change in British war plans as their initial intention to invade northern Iraq fell through, following Turkey’s decision to deny its territory as a platform for the invasion. This caused a hurried switch in the objectives of Operation Telic to invade from Kuwait and take control of Iraq’s southern provinces instead.³³ Yet British officials remained uncertain as to their legal responsibilities in their areas of occupation even after they entered Iraq, and were totally unaware of how poor initial conditions in Basra had become over decades of neglect, persistent conflict since 1980, and international sanctions after 1991.³⁴

The successful invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein in less than three weeks quickly soured. Initial plans for a short occupation and rapid transition to Iraqi authority were reversed when the Coalition Provisional Authority under L. Paul Bremer disbanded the Iraqi Army and enacted a sweeping de-Ba’athification law. Acts of atrocity, such as the killing of seventeen civilian demonstrators by American soldiers in Fallujah in April 2003 and the arbitrary arrest and detention of thousands of Iraqis further disabused any notions of “liberation.” What little international legitimacy remained was stripped away following the United Nations’ withdrawal after the death of its Special Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello in August 2003.

All these factors provided fertile ground for the beginnings of an insurgency against what was turning into a brutal and prolonged occupation. In his book The War Within, veteran investigative journalist Bob Woodward cites General George Casey, the US commander in Iraq from 2004 to 2007, stating that President Bush reflected the “radical wing of the Republican Party that kept saying, ‘Kill the bastards! Kill the bastards! And you’ll succeed.’“³⁵ The disastrous reliance on overwhelming force resulted in operations that little distinguished between enemy combatants and innocent civilians. Iraqi casualties rose massively, but General Tommy Franks’ infamous comment that “we don’t do body counts” reinforced perceptions that “collateral damage” simply didn’t register or matter.³⁶ This perception was reinforced when a US judge dismissed all charges (citing inadmissible evidence) against Blackwater military contractors who had indiscriminately shot to death seventeen Iraqis in Baghdad in September 2007 while clearing a path for a convoy.³⁷

Against this backdrop of poor and confused leadership, post-occupation Iraq remained a zone of conflict and multiple insecurities as political and militia groups filled the vacuum created by the fragmentation of state structures and political authority.³⁸ In part, developments followed the logic of ethno-sectarian divisions enshrined in the post-Saddam political settlement laid down by the occupying powers in 2005. The coalition also adopted a deeply flawed counter-insurgency plan reliant for transitioning responsibility on an Iraqi government penetrated by sectarian interests and far from a politically neutral “honest broker” capable of governing in the interests of all Iraqis. As David Kilcullen has noted, this focus on transition before stabilization worsened the sectarian violence by increasing the state’s capacity to project power (and violence), as protection and predation became two sides of the same coin depending on ethnicity or sect.³⁹ In conditions of state fragmentation and the hollowing out of its administrative and (legitimate) coercive functions, the Iraqi government effectively ceased to function as a viable entity in control of the sum of its territory between 2005 and 2007.

The results for the Iraqi people have been catastrophic. Civilian deaths remain a matter of dispute owing to official uninterest in keeping figures. They range from an Iraq Body Count figure of 103,819 by December 2009 to a contentious survey published in The Lancet that suggested a much higher number of 654,965 excess deaths by June 2006 alone.⁴⁰ These measures of human insecurity were magnified by the displacement of more than four million Iraqis as a result of ethnic and sectarian cleansing. By the middle of 2007, the International Organization of Migration reported that approximately two million Iraqis had fled to neighboring countries, primarily Syria and Jordan, and a further 2.2 million were internally displaced within Iraq. This represented the largest displacement of peoples since the expulsion of Palestinians from the newly created state of Israel in 1948.⁴¹

Although levels of violence have dropped substantially since the sectarian slaughter peaked between 2005 and 2007, Iraq remains today one of the most dangerous countries in the world, with levels of daily violence that would be unacceptable in almost any other context. And what have been the consequences of the huge loss of life and material destruction that have arisen from the decision to go to war on false grounds? Iraqi state structures collapsed in 2003 and the country remains a failed state eight years later. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has shown no sign of relinquishing power voluntarily, and political decisions remain vulnerable to predatory instincts. Following the humiliating (to London) expulsion of British combat forces in 2009, US combat troops are set to leave—against their will—on December 31, yet the Iraqi security services lack the capability to replace them.

The geopolitical consequences have also been as profound as they were unanticipated to American and British eyes. Iran has been the big winner as it has carved out areas of strategic depth in neighboring Iraq. This should not have been unforeseeable; as early as February 2003, before the invasion, the Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia, Prince Saud al-Faisal, warned Bush that he would be “solving one problem and creating five more” if Saddam Hussein was removed by force. Two years later, in 2005, he was blunter still, as he complained that the United States was “handing the whole country over to Iran without reason.”⁴² Turkey, too, has made significant economic and commercial gains, and positioned itself to make a (not entirely uncontroversial) return as a major regional actor. In the Gulf, the West’s close strategic and commercial allies view the empowerment of a Shiite-led Iraq with deep suspicion, and have responded by ramping up sectarian tensions in defense of their own (Sunni-dominated) regional interests. By any calculation, and whatever one thinks of the legality or otherwise of the invasion, Iraq is decidedly MISSION NOT ACCOMPLISHED.

Libya

Any political benefits that might have accrued for the United States and the United Kingdom from their withdrawal from Iraq were offset by the intensifying military operations in Afghanistan. Belated recognition that the campaign was failing to meet any of its political or military objectives led to the plan to transition to Afghan control by 2014. Yet within months of this decision, NATO found itself embroiled in yet another civil conflict, in Libya in March 2011. The resulting seven-month conflict reopened old divisions in the international community about the applicability and deployment of the use of force. It also raised troubling questions about the legal interpretation of Security Council mandates, and about the motivations guiding Western policymakers and their local and regional allies in bringing about regime change in Libya.

Libyans in its second city Benghazi rose up against the 42-year regime of Colonel Gaddafi on February 15, 2011. Their uprising spread rapidly across Libya but met fierce and determined resistance by government security forces. International condemnation of the attempts to put down the rebellion mounted rapidly as Gaddafi reverted to the international pariah he had been prior to renouncing his weapons of mass destruction in 2003. In mid-March, reports that the regime was on the point of retaking Benghazi led to urgent calls by sections of the international community—led by France, the United Kingdom and Qatar—for intervention to forestall a feared retributive massacre of its civilian population. On March 17, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1973 demanding an immediate ceasefire and authorizing the international community to establish a no-fly zone to protect Libyan civilians from the regime.⁴³

Resolution 1973 passed with five abstentions in the Security Council. Five regional powers and emerging economies all abstained—Germany, Brazil, India and permanent representatives Russia and China. This reflected deep misgivings at the haste with which advocates of the resolution were making the case for intervention on the basis of unproven and unclear allegations. Nor were they alone, as the internationally respected International Crisis Group (ICG) noted in a report in June: “Much remains to come to light about the way in which the anti-Qaddafi rising began . . . much Western media coverage has from the outset presented a very one-sided view of the logic of events, portraying the resistance movement as entirely peaceful and repeatedly suggesting that the regime’s security forces were unaccountably massacring unarmed demonstrators.”⁴⁴

On numerous occasions the international media whipped itself into a frenzy about the supposed atrocities being committed by the regime. However, evidence for their having taken place is proving rather harder to substantiate in many cases. The ICG’s North Africa Project director Hugh Roberts spent months investigating a story for Al Jazeera on February 21 (quickly picked up by news outlets around the world) that the Gaddafi regime was using its air force against peaceful demonstrators in Tripoli and elsewhere. After finding no documentary evidence or eyewitness accounts to corroborate it, he concluded, “The story was untrue, just as the story that went round the world in August 1990 that Iraqi troops were slaughtering Kuwaiti babies by turning off their incubators was untrue and the claims in the sexed-up dossier on Saddam’s WMD were untrue.”⁴⁵ Similarly, Amnesty International failed to find evidence for claims of mass rape and other human rights violations allegedly conducted by the regime, contradicting both US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo.⁴⁶

The Libyan intervention is unsettling in other ways. The initial UN mandate for a No-Fly Zone with its limited justification for the use of force to protect the civilian population in Benghazi was far exceeded by NATO. Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, wrote recently that the limited mandate from the UN was disregarded almost from the outset, and that “NATO forces were obviously far less committed to their supposed protective role than to ensuring that the balance of forces within Libya would be tipped in the direction of the insurrectionary challenge.” He makes the important points that Russia and China would almost certainly not have merely abstained had the true intent of NATO objectives been disclosed at the time of the Security Council vote, and that it is “extremely disturbing that a restricted UN mandate to use force should be totally ignored and then no action taken by the Security Council” to censure NATO “for unilaterally expanding the scope and nature of its military role.”⁴⁷

Professor Li Weijian, Director of the Department of West Asian and African Studies at Shanghai Institute for International Studies, alluded to the problematic nature of the intervention in an interview with the leading Arab political magazine Al Majalla. An expert on China’s relationship with the Middle East, he criticized “the unparalleled degree of chaos and destruction which is mainly due to the fact that transition of power from the Qadhafi regime to the NTC was not natural. It was rather achieved by outside intervention and the use of force and thus today’s instability throughout Libya as well as the inhumane treatment of the Libyan dictator should not be surprising to observers.”⁴⁸ These comments tap into deeper Chinese apprehension about “Western norms” supposedly driving concepts such as humanitarian interventionism, and such as the “Responsibility to Protect” initiative. An article written on Chinese perspectives on global governance back in 2008 contains a phrase that eerily summarizes (and anticipates) China’s skepticism about the potential misuse of such actions: “Interventions must be authorized by the Security Council and must not be unilaterally hijacked by great powers, notably the US.”⁴⁹

The practical consequences may be far-reaching if concepts such as Responsibility to Protect become discredited or associated with militaristic Western-centric approaches. Events in Libya have, to a certain extent, crystallized and confirmed many of the concerns expressed by non-Western policymakers about these supposedly “universal” norms. The impunity with which certain NATO members stretched, manipulated and ignored the UN mandate in Libya certainly makes it more difficult to organize international consensus for humanitarian missions in the future. Qatar’s high-profile role in rallying Arab support must now be reassessed as its involvement in arming and funding a plethora of militia groups in the country becomes murkily apparent. Already these sub-state (and unregulated) networks are undermining the National Transitional Council, prompting its oil and finance minister to state, “It’s time we publicly declare that anyone who wants to come to our house has to knock on our front door first.”⁵⁰

Nor is Libya to date much safer than under the stifling dictatorial rule of Colonel Gaddafi. Western military intervention has once again turned a dysfunctional and repressive autocracy into a violent polity teetering on the brink of a failed state. The civil conflict built upon and magnified existing territorial and tribal tensions and created potent new flashpoints. These include flashpoints between groups that deserted the regime early on in the uprising and others that only did so once the outcome of the struggle became clearer, between opposition figures who fought in Libya and others in the diaspora who have since returned to Libya, and between territorially based groups of fighters, notably competing (and clashing) groups of fighters in Benghazi, Misrata and the Nafusa Mountains. In addition, revenge attacks on groups and individuals seen as having supported the Gaddafi regime have escalated and, in some previously loyalist areas such as Sirte, new militias have unleashed a “reign of terror” against them. A report drawn up by Ban Ki-Moon for the Security Council and leaked to The Independent reportedly claimed that more than 7000 new “enemies of the state” had been arbitrarily detained by rebel groups across Libya, with many being tortured in private jails outside the control of the new government.⁵¹

More than 300 militias currently operate in Libya, and the country is awash with weaponry, much of it taken from unregulated arms dumps. To this is added a fractious and unresolved political situation and lack of national consensus on crucial issues such as the formation of a national army or reintegration of former regime supporters.⁵² Tensions between the militias and the easy availability of guns means that disputes are far more likely to be resolved through force, creating further bad blood and grievance. A gun battle between two competing militias on a highway near Tripoli over the weekend of November 11–12 killed up to fifteen people and may be a harbinger of things to come.⁵³ The arrest of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi on November 19 also reveals the uncertainties of power in Libya: whether the group that holds him will hand him over to a newly forming Libyan government, and under what conditions, is far from clear. Parallels with the lethal and overlapping low-intensity urban conflicts in Iraq for access to and control over localized resources and the spoils of power are becoming more apparent by the week.

The Decade of Decline

In the space of a decade the project of the American Century has dissolved. The shock of 9/11 has been magnified by the subsequent Western military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. The Obama administration is less stridently ideological and less fixated upon the crude projection of raw power than its predecessor, and professes a greater regard for multilateralism and the rule of law. Nevertheless, the recent developments in Libya demonstrate the continuing attraction to Western policymakers of the use of force to manage international problems. Yet two of the three interventions of the past decade have been resounding failures that have not achieved their political, far less military, objectives—and Libya looks as if it is heading in the same direction. The past decade has shown how Western powers, led by the United States and the United Kingdom, are largely impotent forces in reshaping global politics. This stands in direct contrast to the multi-dimensional deployment of power and influence by emerging economies, which have presaged a global power shift wholly unanticipated in Western policy circles a decade ago.

The wars of decline have exposed the shortcomings in the United States’ predominance in a multipolar world with multiple layers of political authority and centers of economic gravity. Furthermore, the asymmetric warfare characteristic of the opposition to Western intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq has revealed their vulnerabilities to more “primitive” forms of combat. This modifies the grandiose projections made after the initial victory over the Taliban and before the invasion of Iraq by advocates of the “Revolution in Military Affairs,” and it reveals the limitations of technology alone to reshape military operations.⁵⁴ Pakistan’s furious reaction to NATO’s cross-border air strike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on November 26 also demonstrates how the mistaken use of force can undermine and harm regional relationships that have taken years to construct.⁵⁵ In both Iraq and Afghanistan the quick and easy attainment of conventional military success gave way to prolonged civil conflict and violent local resistance. Libya is showing signs of going down the same road, but still policymakers in Western capitals appear to believe that they can influence or even determine the political and economic choices of leaders they think they control.

Yet their conceit ignores the shift away from the West of the balance of global economic power. Recent academic research on the “world economic centre of gravity” has tracked its shift 4800 kilometers to the east since 1980 and set out empirical evidence about a rebalancing global order.⁵⁶ The rising economic power of China, India and the other emerging economies inevitably translates into greater political leverage as well. The success of non-Western oil companies in securing oil and gas contracts in Iraq’s license bidding rounds in 2009 and 2010 is one indicator of this. So are China’s $4 billion copper mining contract and the Indian mining companies lining up to make deals to tap Afghanistan’s reputed $ 1 trillion of mineral resources.⁵⁷ Yet another is the unseemly reaction of former US Ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan (and close Bush confidante) Zalmay Khalilzad when a client of his private investment firm, Gryphon Capital Partners, lost out to the China National Petroleum Corporation in a competitive tender for oilfields in northern Afghanistan. Khalilzad had lobbied intensively for the deal, and in response his son accused the Pentagon of betraying US interests by not advising the Afghan government to favor companies from coalition partners in Afghanistan.⁵⁸

The bigger picture is completed by the manifest failures of the Washington Consensus and the Washington security doctrine to prevent economic and financial meltdown and military quagmire. Western economies remain mired in deep-rooted difficulties while emerging economies lead the way out of the global recession of 2007-9. This is measured through evolving changes to global structures of production, trade and finance, the rise of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India and China—ed.), and flows of investment from oil-producing nations to help “bail out” beleaguered companies and institutions in the West. All these developments are rapidly turning the status quo on its head and will have far-reaching consequences for the balance of global power. It is, however, far from clear that Western leaders have grasped and assimilated this transformative shift, as the rush to intervene in Libya even after the debacles of Afghanistan and Iraq shows. Yet history warns us that empires in decline are dangerously prone to flailing out as they attempt to retain the status quo and reverse their decline.

The huge costs of these wars, in addition, creates immense new pressures on the domestic politics of the countries involved, The costofwar.com website claims that the total amount of money spent by the United States on its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan currently stands at $804 billion and $478 billion respectively, making a total $1.28 trillion.⁵⁹ An alternative figure has been provided by the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, who calculated that the war in Iraq alone had cost $3 trillion in the five years to 2008. He came to this figure, which far exceeded the Bush administration’s then-appropriation of $600 billion for operations in Iraq, by taking into account future obligations (accrual accounting) such as the provision of health care and disability pensions to returning veterans.⁶⁰ In Britain, the Helmand operations are costing an estimated £4 billion each year, and by 2010 the total cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeded £20 billion. Moreover, a House of Commons defense committee report accused the Ministry of Defense of trying to disguise the real figures, and added that the government had significantly underestimated the cost of the Libyan intervention when it requested parliamentary authorization in March.⁶¹

Ill-conceived foreign policy comes back to haunt the exchequer of many Western countries struggling now with excess debt and low growth. The opportunity costs of these wars in the context of the current turmoil in the global economy seems excessive by any standard. The sums involved could have created vital reserves to help shore up vulnerable economies. It is regrettable to recall that the weakening and disruption of Western economies formed part of Al Qaeda’s varied agenda.

After 9/11 the United States and its principal allies could have grounded their response in the rule of international law and multilateral institutions. They could have used the powerful international solidarity to go after the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity to, in the words of President Obama, “dismantle, disrupt and defeat Al Qaeda.” Yet they did not.⁶² In choosing to invade Iraq the Bush administration and Bush’s British ally rode roughshod over considerations of international peace and security, and disregarded the United Nations and the post-war international architecture. NATO continues to bomb Afghanistan even after the death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, which also hosts a resurgent Taliban that is once again destroying Afghanistan while destabilizing the fragile nuclear-armed Pakistani state. The intervention in Libya exceeded its UN mandate as NATO willfully misrepresented the nature and intent of its actions to tip the balance of power against Gaddafi. It is difficult to see Libya avoiding the sort of lengthy civil strife that has resulted from the external interventions and acts of imposed regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq. The terrible irony is that the attempts to resist terrorist violence in the decade after 9/11 have ended up weakening the very structures of law and constraints on the use of force that have formed the cornerstone of the international system and bedrock of global security since 1945.

David Held is currently Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science and co-director of the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics. In January 2012 he will become Master of University College and chair of politics and international relations at Durham University. Held is co-director of Polity Press and general editor of Global Policy. His most recent book is Cosmopolitanism: Ideas and Realities (Polity, 2010)

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen is a research fellow at LSE Global Governance and deputy director of the Kuwait Research Program. His latest book is Insecure Gulf: The End of Certainty and the Transition to the Post-Oil Era (Hurst & Co., 2011).

This article is also being published in the UK by openDemocracy.net

1. 1. David Held, Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 11.
2. 2. Andrew Hurrell, “One World? Many Worlds? The Place of Regions in the Study of International Society,” International Affairs 83, no. 1 (2007): 135.
3. 3. Klejda Mulaj, “Violent Non-State Actors: Exploring their State Relations, Legitimation, and Operationality,” in Violent Non-State Actors in World Politics, ed. Klejda Mulaj (London: Hurst & Company, 2010), 2.
4. 4. Damian Grenfell and Paul James, “Debating Insecurity in a Globalizing World: An Introduction,” in Rethinking Insecurity, War and Violence, ed. Damian Grenfell and Paul James (London: Routledge, 2009), 7.
5. 5. Audrey Kurth Cronin, “Behind the Curve: Globalisation and International Terrorism,” in New Global Dangers: Changing Dimensions of International Security, ed. Michael E. Brown, Owen R. Cote, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Steven E. Miller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 448.
6. 6. David Held, “Global Challenges: Accountability and Effectiveness,” openDemocracy, January 17, 2008,http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/global_challenges_accountability_and_effectiveness
7. 7. Morten Kelstrup, “Globalisation and Societal Insecurity: The Securitisation of Terrorism and Competing Strategies for Global Governance,” in Contemporary Security Analysis and Copenhagen Peace Research, ed. Stefano Guzzini and Dietrich Jung (London: Routledge, 2004), 112.
8. 8. Barry Buzan, “Will the ‘Global War on Terrorism’ Be the New Cold War?”International Affairs 82, no. 6 (2006): 1102.
9. 9. George W. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People” (US Capitol, September 20, 2001), http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/print/20010920-8.html.
10. 10. Andrew J. Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 147.
11. 11. Michael Howard, Captain Professor: A Life in War and Peace (London: Continuum Books, 2006), 219.
12. 12. Hew Strachan, “The Lost Meaning of Strategy,” Survival 47, no. 3 (2005): 52.
13. 13. Olivier Roy, The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East (London: Hurst & Company, 2007), 1.
14. 14. International Conference on Reconstruction Assistance to Afghanistan, “Co-chairs’ Summary of Conclusions” (Tokyo, January 21–22, 2002), http://www.mofa.go.jp/region/middle_e/afghanistan/min020
15. 15. Cyrus Hodes and Mark Sedra, The Search for Security in Post-Taliban Afghanistan, Adelphi Paper 391 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2007), 45.
16. 16. George W. Bush, “President Delivers State of the Union Address” (US Capitol, January 29, 2002), http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/01/print/20020129-11.html.
17. 17. See, for example, Paul Rogers, “Afghanistan: The Evolving War,” openDemocracy, September 3, 2002, http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict/article_161.jsp; “Afghanistan Still Burns,” openDemocracy, February 13, 2003, http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict/article_971.jsp; and “Afghanistan and Iraq: Regroupment or Insurgency?” openDemocracy, June 11, 2003, http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict/article_1282.jsp.
18. 18. Antonio Giustozzi, “Afghanistan: The Patrimonial Trap and the Dream of Institution-Building,” in Persistent State Weakness in the Global Age, ed. Denisa Kostovicova and Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 79.
19. 19. Hodes and Sedra, Search for Security, 45–46.
20. 20. UK Ministry of Defence, “Half-a-decade in Helmand,” Military Operations, June 3, 2011, http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/DefenceNews/MilitaryOperations/HalfadecadeInHelmand.htm.
21. 21. Program for Culture and Conflict Studies, “Heroin Production in Afghanistan: Helmand, Nangarhar and Badakhshan” (US Naval Postgraduate School, April 14, 2009), 3.
22. 22. Frank Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars: British Military Failure in Iraq and Afghanistan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 94–95.
23. 23. Aislinn Simpson, “British Army Officer Arrested Over Military Secrets Leak,” Telegraph, February 4, 2009, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/onthefrontline/4510438/British-Army-officer-arrested-over-military-secrets-leak.html.
24. 24. iCasualties, Coalition Casualties for Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, http://icasualties.org.
25. 25. International Crisis Group, “Security in Afghanistan,” August 23, 2011, http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/key-issues/security-in-afghanistan.aspx.
26. 26. BBC News, “Afghanistan Mother and Daughter Stoned and Shot Dead,” November 11, 2011, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-15688354.
27. 27. Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (London: Verso, 2006), 2.
28. 28. Toby Dodge, Iraq’s Future: The Aftermath of Regime Change, Adelphi Paper 372 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2005), 5–7.
29. 29. Greg Muttitt, Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq (London: Bodley Head, 2011), 53–54.
30. 30. Cockburn, Occupation: War and Resistance, 26–30.
31. 31. Charles Tripp, “Militias, Vigilantes, Death Squads: The Grammar of Violence in Iraq,” London Review of Books 29, no. 2 (January 25, 2007): 30.
32. 32. David H. Ucko, “Lessons from Basra: The Future of British Counter-Insurgency,” Survival 52, no. 4 (2010): 133.
33. 33. Ledwidge, Losing Small Wars, 18.
34. 34. Nemat Shafik (permanent secretary, Department for International Development, 2008–9), Iraq Inquiry testimony, London, January 13, 2010, http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/45193/20100113-shafik-final.pdf.
35. 35. Bob Woodward, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006–2008 (London: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 4.
36. 36. BBC News, “Counting the Civilian Cost in Iraq,” June 6, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3672298.stm.
37. 37. BBC News, “US Judge Dismisses Charges in Blackwater Iraq Killings,” December 31, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8436780.stm.
38. 38. Toby Dodge, “The Causes of US Failure in Iraq,” Survival 49, no. 1 (2007): 88.
39. 39. David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (London: Hurst & Company, 2009), 126.
40. 40. Iraq Body Count, http://www.iraqbodycount.org/; Gilbert Burnham, Riyadh Lafta, Shannon Doacy, and Les Roberts, “Mortality after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: A Cross-sectional Cluster Sample Survey,” Lancet, October 11, 2006.
41. 41. Patricia Weiss Fagan, “Iraqi Refugees: Seeking Stability in Syria and Jordan” (working paper, Institute for the Study of International Migration, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, and Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in Qatar, 2007), 2, http://isim.georgetown.edu/112522.html.
42. 42. Quoted in Nawaf Obaid, “Stepping into Iraq: Saudi Arabia Will Protect Sunnis If the U.S. Leaves,” Washington Post, November 29, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/28/AR2006112801277.html.
43. 43. Dan Bilefsky and Mark Landler, “As U.N. Backs Military Action in Libya, U.S. Role is Unclear,” New York Times, March 17, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/africa/18nations.html.
44. 44. International Crisis Group, Popular Protest in North Africa and the Middle East (V): Making Sense of Libya, Middle East North Africa Report No. 107 (Brussels: ICG, June 6, 2011) 3–4, http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/middle-east-north-africa/north-africa/libya/107-popular-protest-in-north-africa-and-the-middle-east-v-making-sense-of-libya.aspx.
45. 45. Hugh Roberts, “Who Said Gaddafi Had to Go?” London Review of Books 33, no. 22 (November 17, 2011): 17.
46. 46. Patrick Cockburn, “Amnesty Questions Claim that Gaddafi Ordered Rape as Weapon of War,” Independent, June 24, 2011, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/amnesty-questions-claim-that-gaddafi-ordered-rape-as-weapon-of-war-2302037.html.
47. 47. Richard Falk, “Libya after Gaddafi: A Dangerous Precedent,” Al Jazeera Opinion, October 22, 2011, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/10/20111022132758300219.html.
48. 48. Nima Khorrami Assl, “A Transformation,” The Majalla, October 31, 2011, http://www.majalla.com/eng/2011/10/article55227243.
49. 49. Lai-Ha Chan, Pak K. Lee, and Gerald Chan, “Rethinking Global Governance: A China Model in the Making?” Contemporary Politics 14, no. 1 (2008): 9.
50. 50. Charles Levinson, “Minister in Tripoli Blasts Qatari Aid to Militia Groups,” Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203499704576625441762600166.html; Sam Dagher, Charles Levinson, and Margaret Coker, “Tiny Kingdom’s Huge Role in Libya Draws Concern,” Wall Street Journal, October 17, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204002304576627000922764650.html.
51. 51. Kim Sengupta and Solomon Hughes, “Leaked UN Report Reveals Torture, Lynching and Abuse in Post-Gaddafi Libya,” Independent, November 24, 2011, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/leaked-un-report-reveals-torture-lynchings-and-abuse-in-postgaddafi-libya-6266636.html.
52. 52. Mary Beth Sheridan, “Reining in Militias Priority for Libya’s Prime Minister,” Sydney Morning Herald, November 2, 2011, http://www.smh.com.au/world/reining-in-militias-priority-for-libyas-prime-minister-20111101-1mtz7.html.
53. 53. C. J. Chivers and Clifford Krauss, “At Least Six Are Killed as Libyan Militias Clash on Coastal Highway Near Tripoli,” New York Times, November 13, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/world/africa/six-dead-as-libyan-militias-clash-near-tripoli.html.
54. 54. David Calleo, “Unipolar Illusions,” Survival 49, no. 3 (2007): 74.
55. 55. Saeed Shah, “Pakistan Orders US to Leave Airbase in Row over Deadly NATO Assault,” Guardian, November 27, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/27/pakistan-orders-us-leave-shamsi-airbase.
56. 56. Danny Quah, “The Global Economy’s Shifting Centre of Gravity,” Global Policy 2, no. 1 (2011): 9.
57. 57. Sachin Parashar, “Indian Firms May Land Iron Ore Mining Contract in Afghanistan,” Times of India, October 31, 2011, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/Indian-firms-may-land-iron-ore-mining-contract-in-Afghanistan/articleshow/10547450.cms.
58. 58. Alexander Benard, “War-Forfeiteering,” National Review Online, October 5, 2011, http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/279249/war-forfeiteering-alexander-benard.
59. 59. National Priorities Project, The Cost of War, http://costofwar.com/en/.
60. 60. Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, “The $3 Trillion War,” Vanity Fair, April 2008, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/stiglitz200804.
61. 61. Thomas Harding, “Britain Spent £18 Billion on War in Afghanistan, Figures Show,” Telegraph, July 28, 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/industry/defence/8668085/Britain-spent-18-billion-on-war-in-Afghanistan-figures-show.html.
62. 62. See David Held, Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), chap. 4.

This two-day meeting provided an opportunity for researchers in the natural, medical and social sciences to share their research progress and findings on a range of environment and health issues related to development. It was attended by more than 80 individuals from Beijing and provincial academic institutes (including government research centers), government authorities, NGOs and media with multi-disciplinary backgrounds.

In the context of the China’s 12^th 5 year plan drawn up earlier this year, the conference featured one panel on “Environment and Health in the Twelfth Five Year Plan,” and another three panels on “Food Safety,” “Data, Indicators, Risk Assessment,” and “Civil Society and Environment and Health.” Other speakers presented their case studies on cancer villages, heavy metal pollution, solid waste management, etc. Selected recipients of the SSRC Collaborative Grants Program were also invited to introduce their research and findings.

We suspect that this fervor is part of the background noise of a growing public awareness of the entanglements of the sciences in efforts to meet a dizzying array of contemporary human, moral, political, financial, medical, technological, and ecological challenges, as these are accompanied by growing recognition that scientific practice is also a kind of social practice. By this, we mean that people—including scientists—are less likely now than previously to define the parameters of scientific practice narrowly, in terms of the laboratory or a comparable controlled environment specifically dedicated to the activities of scientific research and production of results.

Recognition of science as ineluctably social often generates a gatekeeping backlash to defend the integrity of science as such. But recent arguments over ethics, as the chosen mode of public reasoning among social scientists about the morality, limits, and identity of their professional practice,² present an opportunity constructively to reconsider the relationship of scientific practice of all sorts to the social. This is the case because it is a social relationship that is typically at the heart of these arguments: the often troubled one between social scientists and the so-called human subjects of research.

Ethical debate among social scientists is part of a bigger picture, punctuated by spectacular ethics crises, such as Abu Ghraib, the financial meltdown, the BP oil spill, and Wikileaks, and including such diverse interlocutors as NIH (US National Institutes of Health), UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), and the Vatican. In the last two years alone, scientific associations in the United States representing psychology, geography, linguistics, anthropology, and economics have revised their professional ethics code or begun to draft one. This trend includes a wide range of other kinds of scientific and creative work with human beings as their subject, such as documentary film, whose filmmakers in recent years have been involved in their own spirited discussions about the ethical ambiguities and lack of ethical standards in their work.³ Though in different ways, each discussion has been grappling with the same sort of problem: how to recognize and where to locate the social in scientific practice in an era when human subjects increasingly expect greater participation in negotiating the directions, terms, outcomes, and significance of research projects.

If the language of scientific controversy, “ethics” also offers often discomfiting ambiguity. The recent Singapore Statement on Research Integrity was meant to “encourage the development of unified policies, guidelines and codes of conduct, with the long-range goal of fostering greater integrity in research worldwide.”⁴ It was crafted in response to the growth in collaborative scientific relationships across and among nations, even as different countries hold varying ideas about how to achieve and to maintain a practice of science with integrity.

Anthropology’s ongoing ethical discussion is a particularly instructive window onto the relationship of the sciences to the social since, as perhaps the most “social” of the social sciences, its signature historical method of ethnography requires protracted, and continuous, negotiation with counterparts in the field (that is, the “human subjects” of research) over an extended period of time—often measured in years. Not surprisingly, then, a primary disciplinary axis of attention to ethics has been a focus upon practitioner stance, as this represents different research arrangements that pursue particular social relationships with counterparts, and accompanying commitments.

At present anthropology is debating a plurality of different research stances, including as ethnographer, advocate, and activist, as well as engaged, public, and practicing anthropologist. If differences between these stances correspond to different ostensible purposes for the work of anthropology, in all cases, research is assumed to be embedded in—and produced through—social arrangements of one sort or another. We might say that anthropology is on the far edge of the spectrum of conversation about ethics across the sciences, regularly engaged with (if often contentiously), and inextricable from, the social contexts of its work. But this state of affairs contrasts with how ethics are more routinely discussed elsewhere in the sciences.

One case is the new Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, convened by President Obama in 2009 and understood to represent expertise “relevant across the fields of science, policy, ethics, and religion.” In response to evidence recently come to light about unethical research on sexually transmitted diseases conducted in Guatemala during the 1940s by the US Public Health Service, a major task for this new commission—announced in late 2010—will be a comprehensive review of current federal and international standards to “guard the health and well-being of participants in scientific studies.”⁵ If an ethical concern for human subjects has been particularly characteristic of debates in anthropology of late too, this has not been exactly in the same ways. The differences are in fact revealing.

The executive order creating the commission states a need to address the implications of rapid advances in biomedicine, understood as a matter of “science and technology.” It names well-known scientific controversies: stem cell research, genetic sequencing, and ownership of genetic materials as intellectual property.⁶ To this we can add ethical tussles over genetically modified organisms, cloning, personalized medicine, nanotechnology, geoengineering, and the science of climate change, among others. The commission’s first report, released in late 2010, takes up the ethics associated with the new science of synthetic biology, understood as an innovative “emerging technology” that will require “stewardship.”⁷ But we think this framing of the commission’s work erases most traces of the social, even as social responsibility is one key reason for convening the commission in the first place. Here science is presented as a sometimes problematic intervention into society, requiring oversight, but not in itself an essentially social activity. Anthropology’s arguments complicate this view.

The Role of Ethics in Anthropology

Anthropology’s occasionally rancorous, always vigorous, discussions of ethics often stumble over the different, unspoken assumptions we tend to have about how ethics relate to the practice of anthropology. We could, for example, contend that the AAA’s Code of Ethics possesses sanctioning power and conceive of it as a stand-alone gatekeeping set of regulations to discriminate “professional” from “unprofessional” conduct. As such, we might view the code as a set of abstract principles defining obligations or responsibilities. In turn these principles would be treated as unambiguously categorical in their translation from meaning to application and as commensurate with strong assertions of disciplinary “core values.”

Alternatively, we could interpret the code to be largely aspirational but keep it in close proximity to our practice, though now conceived as only one part of an ongoing process of ethical decisionmaking informing what we do. In this case, we would treat the code as a dynamic document less dedicated to establishing a disciplinary status quo about right and wrong and more used as a necessary provocation to regular ethical discussion. The purpose of the code in this instance would be as a guide for finding one’s way to an ethical answer rather than as a source for all the answers. That our code could be either prescriptive or aspirational is in contrast to, for example, the ethics code of the American Psychological Association, which of necessity must be both: in addition to conducting research, many psychologists are licensed for clinical practice—a scenario quite distinct from the varieties of “practice” of anthropology falling under clear laws and regulations.

The Dynamic “Field” of Anthropology

However anthropology chooses to engage with ethics, this engagement will have to come to terms with the regularly changing circumstances of professional disciplinary practice. “The field” has long stopped resembling a bounded, often distant, place from which we come and go.

But the key question of how ethics should relate to practice in a specific fashion is less discussed than is the felt need either to add or to subtract one or another particular ethical standard from the roster of possibilities. This includes consideration of what might be the best balance of specificity and generality when relating our Code of Ethics to our work, or what we might think of as the ethical mini-max challenge. But we think it is unrealistic to anticipate the specific details of future ethical challenges. At present, we would like to develop, instead, an appreciation of ethics that treats them as one part of an ongoing aspirational process, with an ethics code treated as a living document, and which we would expect to be routinely re-negotiated in proximity to the changing circumstances of professional practice rather than at a remote distance. These changing circumstances—often hard to foresee—will inevitably shape future ethical conversations.

Is This a “Core Values” Debate?

If the disciplinary history of anthropology is any indicator, our ethics talk is typically reactive, arising in response to controversial events (e.g., wars) or issues of public import in which anthropologists come to be implicated. Ethics debates are also often about the circumstances of anthropological training, credentialing, research, and disciplinary identity. Ethics are thus an example of self-policing. As anthropologist George Marcus has stated it, ethical debates aspire to a disciplinary “reflexive and self-critical function.”⁹ Perhaps; yet our semi-regular disciplinary controversies over ethics also suggest a lack of disciplinary consensus over our identity, research methods, modes and places of practice, and topical concerns. Ethics debates are, therefore, opportunities to explore to what extent anthropology’s regularly modified Code of Ethics could expect to spell out in principle clear applicable rules of conduct for the diversity of present and future anthropological work and, as such, serve as a statement of “who we are.” The short answer, we suggest, is: it cannot. And, we argue, this answer is both disciplinarily and ethically desirable.

Ethics are often presented as if a set of principles commensurate with the historical trajectory of the discipline. A prohibition against “secret and clandestine” research, the requirement of informed consent, the necessity of sharing results freely and publicly—all are promoted in conjunction with expectations about the “core values” of anthropology. As such, ethics have been used at once to define and to defend perceived disciplinary boundaries, with the goal of restoring disciplinary matter “out of place,” to jury-rig Mary Douglas’s well-known analysis of symbolic impurities.¹⁰

This state of affairs can devolve into a “litany of shame”—in the words of one ethicist and close observer of anthropology’s disciplinary paroxysms¹¹—with mudslinging and calls for censure. As such, ethics become an “othering” frame applied to one or another of what the Sandia anthropologist Laura McNamara calls the “many parallel universes of anthropological practice.”¹² Mobilized to such ends, it is possible that ethics could come to underwrite a disciplinary roots movement of sorts, enlisted in a push to restore a more “real” and “pure” anthropology by means of legalistic and prescriptive clarity. Ethics is the tool to counter what Gerald Berreman, disturbed by the discipline’s growing presence in the corporate world, earlier described as a “laissez-faire ethic of free-enterprise research in place of the tradition of humane scholarship,”¹³ or—as has more recently been described for anthropology’s engagement with the security sector—a growing “regulatory black hole.”¹⁴

However, ethics discussions moving out from definitions of core values as long-standing disciplinary norms perhaps purposefully tend to ignore a persistent fact about anthropology: its perpetual lack of such a consensus. In her distinguished lecture at an annual meeting of the AAA, Laura Nader characterized anthropology as an “outrageous science,” given its disrespect for boundaries.¹⁵ She meant this as a virtue. Anthropology in fact encompasses an incredible variety of work sites, projects, methods, tools, and interdisciplinary partnerships. Clyde Kluckhohn’s mid-twentieth century quip about anthropology as an “intellectual poaching license” comes to mind.¹⁶ So too does Clifford Geertz’s classic discussion of anthropology as genre-blurring. As such, Geertz suggested a stance of skepticism toward most received ideas of what we “ought or ought not to be doing.”¹⁷ And Paul Rabinow recently has suggested that the problem for an “anthropology of the contemporary” is sustaining inquiry into what’s going on while not deducing it beforehand.¹⁸

To embrace anthropology’s plural identity is not to reject ethics. But it does suggest where we might best locate ethics with respect to our work, liberating them from any forced exercise legislating uniformity in the circumstances—the particularities—of what we do. Our ethics discussions stall when unproblematically privileging any part as the sum of the whole: the study of culture does not identify anthropology; ethnography is not exhaustive of anthropology; nor is the comparative method. A single unitary code, if conceived as a prescriptive code of conduct, is hard put to avoid this problem. And ethics talk as a community-building and discipline-bounding exercise tends to want clear and unambiguous language as a categorical line in the sand about . . . [fill in the blank]. It can be tempting to try to anticipate and to fill in all the blanks. But this can also have the effect of discouraging the regularity of ethical discussion. However, we would encourage regular ethical dialogue, more attentive to the particulars of the social embeddedness of disciplinary practice, perhaps better conceived with Wittgenstein as discussion about relative family resemblances, and differences, among established and emergent forms of disciplinary practice.¹⁹

The Ethics of Secrecy and the Social

The 2009 revision of the AAA’s Code of Ethics did not consider the entire code so much as whether to reintroduce certain sections from the 1971 code barring secret and clandestine research and less than full disclosure in reporting results. The final revision, however, did not simply reintroduce such language, recognizing that the contemporary disciplinary landscape is significantly different from that of almost forty years ago. But given that a prohibition against secret activities repeatedly has been added to or removed from successive codes of ethics, our ongoing equivocation about our ethical relationship to the question of “secret and clandestine” makes it good to think with. The 2009 changes were met with a familiar ambivalence by AAA members, with some indicating the new language would and others saying it would not categorically rule out “classified research” as a kind of secret research.²⁰ And we take such a lack of clarity about whether “secret,” “clandestine,” or “classified” cover the same territory in the same ways as indicative of an as yet not well-thought-out suspicion that for each, in different scenes of work and research in practice, potentially different things are on the line.

If not engaged in outright secrecy, anthropology has nevertheless maintained an abiding relationship with deceptions and complicities of various sizes and shapes. One landmark discussion of this is Gary Fine’s “Ten Lies of Ethnography,” which explores the underside, or backstage, of field work. As Fine tells us, “Illusions are necessary for occupational survival,” in ways both trivial and not. Ethnographers cannot, he suggests, be “honest brokers” with nothing to hide and everything to share. We conventionally do not publicly share field notes. We develop our interpretations largely in private. And ethnographic writing is largely accepted on faith. Fine pursues the point that, as he puts it, “we ethnographers cannot help to lie, but in lying reveal truths.” He opts to encourage greater consideration of the sources of ethnographic efficacy in deception, as it is a routine part of the social management of our work.²¹

Anthropology’s present Code of Ethics aspires to transparency, full disclosure, and prior consent of counterparts regarding all the methods and goals of research. At the same time, the code allows limits to transparency, for example, when preserving the anonymity of victims to protect them from reprisal while documenting wartime atrocities. Ethnographers have recognized a role for a more outright deception while working with human subjects in order to, in the words of Nancy Scheper-Hughes, exploit the “transgressive uses of anthropology,”²² say, while exposing the trafficking of human organs. In short, the open circulation of knowledge encounters limits in our disciplinary public sphere. If the withholding of specific research goals from subjects or from different publics (e.g., in the interest of avoiding panic when researching bioterror threats) does occur, this is not the same as keeping one’s project altogether “secret.”

We suggest that anthropology’s established ethical commitments to openness and to transparency cannot be taken for granted as self-evident commitments. Rather, what they mean necessarily changes with the social contexts of our work. As Fine reminds us, the goal of complete transparency is naive if intended to describe the social relationships constitutive of ethnography. Yet, “secrecy” as deep cover for intentionally concealing or enabling harm to research subjects has to be beyond the pale. As we consider it, the ethics of ethnographic research negotiates the space in between. And we need to keep the door open for an ongoing discussion of resemblances and differences.

One characteristic of anthropology’s periodic discussions of ethics is that they exhibit significant consensus about general principles but a notable lack of consensus in how principles are put into practice. We would be well served, then, to make the details of our practice much more a part of our ethics discussion than has been the case to date. This includes appreciation for our changing research practice and for the changing legibility of our practice as research both inside and outside the academy, as well as for changing disciplinary practice, of which research is but a part, if at all.

We should also avoid a narrow or inward-looking focus on anthropology’s exceptionality (e.g., as ethnography, as the study of culture, or as representing a unique kind of relationship with human subjects) and remain open to disciplinary mobilities in the form of dual-identity professionals, interdisciplinary collaborations, and extra-academic ways of providing professional expertise (as with the analyst or consultant), as well as to the ethics of new technologies as these become part of our scene of research, and other such challenges. We might, too, consider tempering our regular calls for ethical categorical imperatives in favor of an active and sustained ethical dialogue that amounts to more regular traffic along a continuum of potential family resemblances where, rather than “othering,” we are in the habit of imagining what anthropology can be in places we do not expect it or might rarely think to find it, or where it has seldom visited or is yet to appear.

Final Thoughts: Science and the Social

Most often the social implications of scientific work are encountered in negative guise. This usually takes one of three forms: expressed concerns for the “politicization of science,” understood as an attack on scientific freedom, usually as it targets a particular scientist’s work; professional and media attention given to particular examples of science gone morally awry, a basis after all for the original Nuremberg Code for scientific ethics; or evaluations of the application of science for the “public well-being” or “public harm.” But anxieties over politicization, science gone awry, and evaluations of its application all treat scientists or experiments—as individual researchers, specific notorious cases, or as applied to society—as if removed from any context through which scientific research is routinely socially negotiated.

It is revealing to set debate about ethics in the social sciences—where the social implications of professional practice are most evident and fraught, in large part because signature forms of research practice like ethnography make little sense in the absence of associated social contexts of negotiation with counterparts—against a larger background of the recent public attention to ethics. We briefly examined the question of secret and clandestine research in anthropology’s ongoing ethics discussion to show how the discipline’s discourse of ethics is also an argument about how best to come to terms with the social embeddedness of its practice. We emphasized an approach that recognizes the everyday social negotiations of disciplinary practice, including of deception, rather than an exceptionalist approach (e.g., “core values”) that tends to set the discipline apart—including from the social sources of its efficacy.

Anthropology’s ethics debates suggest differences with the ethics frame informing the work of the Obama administration’s new Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. Anthropologists routinely encounter human subjects in very different social arrangements “in the field,” where research is much better described as a product of social relationships as opposed to the clinical laboratory. On the one hand, the commission conceives of its work largely within a “bioethics” framework, which tends to assume that people are subject to the experimental method as individual subjects under highly controlled conditions and where the importance of science is presumed to relate to a national investment in “innovation” and in “technology.” On the other hand, the American Anthropological Association recently briefly dropped the word “science” altogether from its long-range plan,²³ while many anthropologists view research and social activism as two sides of the same coin, with human subjects less subjects and more counterparts with whom we routinely negotiate the relative transparency and openness of the research process.

We believe that current discussions of ethics in anthropology are an early harbinger of an ongoing relocation of the sciences in public life and an increasing plurality of kinds of scientific practice, at present expressed by ethical debate across the social sciences, where scientific ethics have become one idiom for competing visions of social responsibility. We also think that ethical discussion across the sciences would do well to take more account of the limits of bioethics as an adequate way to conjoin the work of science with its social contexts of relevance. At once potentially too legalistic and with a too attenuated idea of the “public,” bioethics can divert attention from the social purposes of science. Even the most laboratory-based scientific practice represents a social process composed of the negotiation of funding, risk, governing procedures, shepherding of the project to completion, proprietary ownership of data, and presentation of results, among other things. As Duane Roth recently observed about the rise of participatory patient advocacy in the process of organizing clinical drug trials, these have evolved into “collaborative decisions made after open and vigorous debate.”²⁴

Robert Albro chaired the AAA’s Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities from 2008 to 2009. He is in residence at the International Communication Program of American University’s School of International Service.

1. 1. Barack Obama, “Inaugural Address” (Washington, DC, January 20, 2009), http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/20/us/politics/20text-obama.html.
2. 2. See, for example, Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
3. 3. See Patrica Aufderheide, Peter Jaszi, and Mridu Chandra, Honest Truths: Documentary Filmmakers on Ethical Challenges in Their Work (Washington, DC: Center for Social Media, 2009).
4. 4. 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity, “Singapore Statement on Research Integrity,” (Singapore, July 21–24, 2010), http://www.singaporestatement.org/statement.html.
5. 5. Barack Obama, “Presidential Memorandum—Review of Human Subjects Protection” (memorandum to Dr. Amy Gutmann, Chair, Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, November 24, 2010), White House, Office of the Press Secretary, November 24, 2010, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/11/24/presidential-memorandum-review-human-subjects-protection.
6. 6. Exec. Order No. 13521, 74 Fed. Reg. 228 (Nov. 24, 2009), http://bioethics.gov/cms/sites/default/files/Executive-Order-Establishing-the-Bioethics-Commission-11.24.09.pdf.
7. 7. Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, New Directions: The Ethics of Synthetic Biology and Emerging Technologies (Washington, DC: December 2010), http://bioethics.gov/cms/synthetic-biology-report.
8. 8. Hugh Gusterson and David Price, “Spies in Our Midst,” Anthropology News 46, no. 6 (2005): 39–40.
9. 9. George Marcus, “CEAUSSIC: Origin Story and Grand Finale,” American Anthropological Association (blog), December 7, 2009, http://blog.aaanet.org/2009/12/07/ceaussic-origin-story-and-grand-finale/.
10. 10. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1966), 35.
11. 11. George Lucas, Anthropologists in Arms: The Ethics of Military Anthropology (Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2009), 25.
12. 12. Laura McNamara, “CEAUSSIC: Ethics Casebook,” American Anthropological Association (blog), January 27, 2010, http://blog.aaanet.org/2010/01/27/ceaussic-ethics-casebook/.
13. 13. Gerald Berreman, “Ethics versus ‘Realism’ in Anthropology Redux,” Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology, ed. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2003), 79.
14. 14. Roberto González and Hugh Gusterson, “Taking the Next Step: Why We Should Continue Strengthening the AAA Ethics Code,” Anthropology News 50, no.6 (2009): 14–15.
15. 15. Laura Nader, “Anthropology! Distinguished Lecture—2000,” American Anthropologist 103, no. 3 (2001): 610.
16. 16. Quoted in Clifford Geertz, “Blurred Genres: The Reconfiguration of Social Thought,” Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 19–35.
17. 17. Clifford Geertz, “Blurred Genres,” 21.
18. 18. Paul Rabinow, Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
19. 19. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1953).
20. 20. Scott Jaschik, “Anthropologists Toughen Ethics Code,” Inside HigherEd, February 19, 2009, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/02/19/anthro.
21. 21. Gary Fine, “Ten Lies of Ethnography,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22, no. 3 (1993): 267–94.
22. 22. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, “The Ethics of Engaged Ethnography: Applying a Militant Anthropology in Organs-Trafficking Research,” Anthropology News 50, no. 6 (2009): 14.
23. 23. Dan Berrett, “Anthropology without Science,” Inside HigherEd, November 30, 2010, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/30/anthroscience.
24. 24. Duane Roth, “A Third Seat at the Table: An Insider’s Perspective on Patient Representatives,” Hastings Center Report 41, no.1 (2011): 31.

Budget Facts

Table 1: Click to enlarge, then click to zoom

Table 1 exhibits the information available at this time on the cuts that the Education Department has instituted pursuant to the final Continuing Resolution (CR) legislation for fiscal year (FY) 2011 as well as some of the international program competitions that have been cancelled entirely. While the budget for the Office of Postsecondary Education (OPE) was cut by less than 12%, funding for international studies and foreign language programs was cut by almost 40%. The line item that funds the nation’s leading area studies centers—or National Resource Centers (NRCs)—has been cut by almost 47%, from $34 million to $18 million (see table 2).

NRC and Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) awards are granted across multiple years. While the current grants cover the period from FY 2010 to FY 2013, decisions about continuation funding for grant years two, three, and four are made annually on a non-competing basis and are based on a number of factors, including the on-time submission of reports, evidence of progress toward grant objectives, and the congressional appropriation of funds for the program. Thus, all funded centers are just finishing the first year of their four-year award term but had prepared budgets through FY 2013 using estimated figures established at the time of the initial grant award notification.

Table 2: Click to enlarge, then click to zoom

The FLAS fellowships for this summer and for next year will be protected since the annual FLAS award letters were received by the NRCs before the budget discussions were finalized. A FLAS fellowship for a student in “language and area studies” typically covers a living stipend and partial tuition (with the university covering the remaining tuition).

However, research and study-abroad and dissertation-fieldwork awards have been particularly impacted by the budget cuts. The major shock is in the cancellation of the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) program, which grants approximately 150 awards each year. Faculty research abroad has also been completely cut as well as funding to the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC), which funds both student and senior-faculty research in the countries in which recipients are based as well as some comparative, cross-country research.

The consensus among our interviewees is that, with the 2011 budget cuts now a reality, the focus of lobbying should be to reinstate funding in 2012, with FY 2012 budget talks beginning this July.

National Resource Centers: Ifs and Buts

It has now been established that NRC cuts are to be applied equally across all grantees and that the NRCs will each experience a 47% cut in their budgets as of August 15, 2011. NRC directors recently received annual-award letters containing guidance for submitting revised FY 2011 budgets. Specifically, the NRCs have been instructed to maintain activities that strengthen capacity in area studies and less commonly taught language instruction, to continue to conduct outreach to minority-serving institutions and community colleges (an Invitational Priority in FY 2010 grant competition and a particular emphasis for the current administration), and to maintain evaluation activities.

If the centers spent cautiously during their first year of the current grant cycle (FY 2010–2011) and can rely on other sources of institutional support, then they may be able to struggle through the upcoming year. If the funding is reinstated in 2012, these NRCs may survive the crisis.

But, the big question is whether universities will honor the matching funding that they had originally promised in order to receive the Title VI funding. These matching funds frequently take the form of new faculty appointments, administrative staffing, program support, and the large portion of overhead costs that the Title VI program does not cover (since indirect costs for NRC awards are limited to 8%). There is doubt as to whether the universities will honor contracts already signed with new faculty hires where the position was partially (usually up to half) funded through Title VI funds.

For the public universities, there is no question that if funding is not reinstated in FY 2012, then many centers will be forced to close down. For the private elite universities, some of the bigger and long-established centers have endowments and are not threatened with closure; however, many of their courses, programming, and students will feel the effects of budget cuts.

University Responses

All the interviewees said that their universities had been extremely supportive, with presidents, provosts, and deans writing letters to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and working closely with their Federal Relations officers and state congressional representatives. Some deans have called for meetings of the various NRC programs to discuss coordinated responses. In addition to the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), the National Humanities Alliance has worked closely with universities to appeal these budget decisions.

However, all interviewees agreed that their respective universities—whether public universities, smaller private universities, or elite research universities—are not in a position to step in to make up the budgetary difference, as all of them have experienced permanent budget cuts upward of 10% across the board over the past two years. As mentioned earlier, not only can they not step in, but whether they will honor commitments already made in terms of matching funds or even contracts already signed remains uncertain. It is worth noting that, in the past, in quite a few cases when centers lost their Title VI funding for a cycle, universities would step in for a 3- or 4-year period until the funding was restored in the next grant cycle.

Ironically, despite overall budget problems, many of the interviewee’s campuses had experienced recent growth in international education, with new centers of international or global studies being established, each housing six or seven different area studies centers. Since 9/11, there has also been a growth in the number of students enrolled in graduate programs, especially in Middle East Studies (MES). On some campuses, there has been as much as a tripling in the number of graduate students in PhD programs in MES. Over the past decade, important gains in the number of students enrolled in Arabic language courses have also occurred. One faculty member in MES emphasized that, for the first time, they were receiving qualified incoming graduate students with two to three years of Arabic language study, including some that had taken Arabic in high school. This respondent also commented that there was increasing diversity in the student body pursuing international education, with more students of color going into these fields

Impacts

Respondents were asked about the immediate and longer-term impacts of the cuts on their individual centers, with a specific focus on graduate students, as well as the larger implications of these cuts at their universities.

Impact on Courses (and Faculty Hiring)

All respondents said that there would be a major impact on course offerings and, by extension, on departments. Area studies centers quite routinely organize joint courses with departments and fund course costs and faculty salaries out of Title VI funds. This is especially true for language classes and courses responding to new or renewed interest from students, whether in terms of countries or regions previously understudied or of themes of current and public interest.

Even for elite universities, Title VI funding provides flexible funds that can address specific needs and interests through classes with small numbers of students that would, as a result of their size, otherwise be seen as not viable or essential by university administrators. Courses on places like the Caucasus, Central Asia, or Afghanistan are examples, as are small classes or one-on-one tutoring in languages such as Ottoman, Kazakh, Bosnian, Hungarian, or Pashtu.

Quite large numbers of faculty, in both language and area studies, and administrators and staff are partially or fully covered by Title VI funding. Area studies centers depend on this kind of staffing, as do many of the institutes and centers for international or global studies that were set up in the past decade.

Impact on Student Research

The cancellation of the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program on the eve of the announcement of its awardees is deemed “devastating” for students. Many candidates for this program were planning to begin their research as early as September. The elimination of this source of funding affects students in fields that require research abroad more than others (including history, anthropology, archaeology, and comparative politics), but in general it is a blow to international research. There will be that much added pressure on the few other sources of funding, including the SSRC’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship (IDRF) program, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Institute of International Education’s (IIE) Fulbright program,¹ and smaller programs, such as Wenner-Gren. It is still unclear how NSF (National Science Foundation) programs will be affected, but for social scientists the budget cuts at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), especially the dissertation fellowships, are also significant.

At the SSRC, it has always been common to have a subset of fellows funded by both an SSRC program and Fulbright—thus enabling both programs to spread their resources farther. Approximately 20% of this year’s IDRF cohort is in this situation—with their second source of funding suddenly nonexistent—and awardees are already contacting IDRF to ensure that they will still get full funding from the SSRC.

The immediate impact, therefore, is on the cohort of students looking to go to the field in the upcoming academic year. However, training will also be affected by the cuts in courses and language study described earlier. Even specialized library collections and specific works needed by students for their dissertation research were funded through Title VI funds and will now be unavailable, as will specialized classes and tutoring. Furthermore, one interviewee suggested that if the same cuts persisted in the future, then FLAS awards would need to be used to cover dissertation research rather than coursework, which would mean that fewer students would be supported through graduate school.

Reactions

Interviewees all expressed their shock and unhappiness at the “midnight surprise”—especially in terms of the sizes of the cuts and the ways in which they disproportionally targeted international education and higher education. Following are some of their prime reactions.

Initial Uncertainty

The lack of information and specifics until just recently meant an inability to plan and led to “paralysis.” All NRCs immediately halted spending in order to hoard their funds. One campus was planning a series of events around the tenth anniversary of 9/11 but has stopped all work on this project. Given the summer break, they feel that the window of opportunity to carry on with their original plans has closed.

There is general unhappiness with the lack of communication from the Department of Education. On June 1, NRCs received an email from the Title VI program stating: “For FY 2011, the National Resource Centers has $18,048,762 from which to make continuation awards. Your IFLE program officer will provide the specific information about your NCC award in a later communication within the next few days.” The NRCs did not receive follow-up emails explaining how the $18 million will be distributed among the individual grantees until approximately one week later.

Sense of Betrayal

Several respondents expressed their dismay that these cuts were occurring under the current administration, which had seemed to embody enlightened international engagement. The general feeling among respondents was that while it was the Republican-controlled House of Representatives that mandated a 10% cut in the Education Department’s budget, it was the Obama administration that disproportionately targeted international education programs. There was also specific criticism leveled at the Department of Education, which for years has collected information from NRCs but then poured it all into a database that, for all intents and purposes, cannot be used to produce the information and figures that could support arguments to counter those who question the need for Title VI funding.

Interviewees also questioned what the private foundations were doing and whether or not they were trying to exert pressure on the Hill. Given the historical role of foundations in setting up area studies in the first place, several wondered whether they would step into a similar role fifty years later.²

Ironies

All interviewees noted the irony of these cuts, which come at a time when the United States is faced with particularly deep changes and challenges abroad—not least with the Arab revolutions, which have sent foreign-policy circles into a tailspin. It is also ironic that universities have generally taken up a discourse of globalization and internationalization—which has been especially dominant in recent commencement ceremonies—but find themselves undermined in their ability to provide international education.

Next Steps

The SSRC will continue work on the Producing Knowledge on World Regions project and is preparing to conduct a short online survey to collect information on the points raised here in a more systematic manner. The Council had in fact applied to the Education Department to move its existing research into a new phase of data analysis, but the International Research and Studies Program—to which the Council submitted its proposal—has been completely defunded. This small program (of around $6 million/year) was the only program at the Department of Education that actually funded critical evaluation and in-depth study of the state of area studies—and now this resource for reflexivity has been lost to the academic community.

Holly Danzeisen is projects manager for the SSRC’s Eurasia, Inter-Asia, and Producing Knowledge on World Regions programs.

1. 1. The Fulbright Program—administered by IIE and sponsored by the US Department of State—is a flagship international-exchange program designed to increase mutual understanding between people of the United States and other countries that provides support to US citizens in possession of a BA to study, teach, and conduct research abroad. Fulbright-Hays DDRA grants are explicitly for advanced graduate students who will have achieved doctoral candidacy at the time of award and who plan on conducting doctoral dissertation research abroad, with a particular focus on non-Western foreign languages and area studies.
2. 2. Foundations have begun to respond. Just recently the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced a $3.16 million grant to IIE to create the IIE Graduate Fellowships for International Study. Beginning July 1, these grants will provide support for PhD dissertation research overseas to doctoral students in the humanities whose funding has been lost due to the cancellation of the Fulbright-Hays DDRA program for FY 2011. However, it is worth noting that this is a special one-time-only grant that will provide support for approximately 80 of the 130 students nominated to receive funding in 2011/2012 through the DDRA program. Thus, this grants program responds to the immediate needs of current scholars but is not intended to supplant federal investment in the longer term.

Program Director Jennifer Holdaway awards certificates to Summer Institute participants

The Forum on Health, Environment and Development (FORHEAD), co-organized by the SSRC China Environment and Health Initiative, held its third Summer Institute in Guangzhou, South China at the end of June.

This week long workshop focused on capacity building for problem-oriented interdisciplinary research on environment, health and development. It was attended by more than 30 individuals with natural, medical and social science backgrounds from Beijing and provincial academic institutes (including government research centers) and from NGOs.

The Summer Institute is now linked to the application process for SSRC Collaborative Grants on Environment and Health in China. The institute therefore had two goals: 1) to introduce the key concepts and methods employed across the disciplines in the study of environment and health, including epidemiology, risk management, social psychology, and sociology, as well as research methods, frameworks for interdisciplinary analysis and relevant cases; and 2) to prepare collaborative grant applicants by inviting them to present their preliminary research plans and receive feedback from experts and other participants. The workshop also provided an opportunity for hands-on teamwork, as participants divided into groups and developed interdisciplinary research proposals relating to the problem of lead pollution. After five days of discussion and preparation, the five teams presented their proposals.

Teams discussed their research proposals in intensive meetings over a five-day period

The summer institute is held in a different province of South China each year in order to attract more local participants, build up local networks and incubate studies on local environment and health issues. The program also features a day at a local university with presentations and discussion on local environment and health issues. This year the partner was Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, and local representatives from universities, academic institutes, and NGOs shared their research on water and soil pollution in the province.

Selected Content:

Seyla Benhabib on the Arab Spring in the Public Sphere Formation Essay Series

Read in-depth coverage of the developments in the area at the Middle East Channel (SSRC Grantee) of ForeignPolicy.com

The Immanent Frame on Egypt

Selections from Publics, Politics and Participation: Locating the Public Sphere in the Middle East and North Africa (Seteney Shami, ed.)

Essays by Fellows:

“I Do Not Fear from this Uprising but I Fear for It” by Omar Cheta

“Breaking the Fear Barrier of Mubarak’s Regime” by Mohamed Elshahed

“More Than A Political Revolution” by Samantha Iyer

The Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa program offers fellowships to nurture the intellectual development and increase retention of early-career faculty in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. The program, launched in June 2011, responds to a shortage of well-trained faculty now reaching crisis proportions in African higher education.  The program assists fellows to develop research opportunities and skills, obtain doctoral degrees, and participate in robust research communities. Toward this end, the project features a thematic focus in order to renew basic research agendas addressing peace, security, and development topics as well as strengthen interdisciplinary social science research capacity on these issues. Funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York, this project complements foundation initiatives to develop and strengthen the next generation of African scholars.

At 2:46 p.m. on March 11, 2011, a magnitude 8.9 earthquake, known as the Higashi Nihon Daishinsai (Eastern Japan Great Earthquake Disaster), struck roughly fifty miles off the coast of Japan’s mainland. While the Tohoku quake itself caused few fatalities, it set off a tsunami measuring up to forty-five-feet high, which not only devastated coastal and inland villages but also swamped the backup systems of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-reactor complex. With the plant’s batteries and diesel generators offline, at least three of the six reactors in the complex experienced complete fuel meltdowns in the early hours of the crisis, meaning that the uranium fuel rods heated to exceedingly high temperatures beyond what their zirconium cladding (outer covering) could handle (beyond 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit) and collapsed at the bottom of their containment units, where they may have burned through the thick steel shielding of the reactor units. The buildings housing the reactor units exploded due to a buildup of the hydrogen gas created when hot zirconium cladding reacts with water, and nuclear engineers from TEPCO (the Tokyo Electric Power Company—operator of the plant) deliberately vented the units into the atmosphere to reduce the internal pressure. To keep the fuel rods at safe temperatures, seawater was pumped into the reactors, leaving hundreds of thousands of gallons of contaminated water inside the units that will eventually have to be disposed of, either pumped into the ocean or held temporarily in barrels for dispersal. The radiological consequences of these decisions are under study now by ecologists and biologists but will not fully be understood for some time. Only recently have radiation levels dropped to a point where engineers have been able to enter the area.

Located in the villages of Ohkuma and Futaba, the Fukushima plant was one of the fieldwork sites for my dissertation, and I have followed the ongoing crisis with dread. Roughly 16,000 people are confirmed dead, while another 9,000 remain unaccounted for, presumed swept out to sea by the tsunami. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese residents have evacuated the area due to both the radioactivity and the destruction of homes; many are now being housed in temporary shelters or with friends or family. The fear of radioactive contamination, in particular, has had far-reaching effects, with Japan suspending the export of vegetables, dairy products, fish, and other products from the region and China and Korea now scanning incoming Japanese goods and passengers for radioactivity. More broadly, the Tohoku disaster has pushed several nations, including Switzerland and Germany, to reconsider their commitment to nuclear power; Switzerland’s cabinet has voted to phase out atomic energy by 2034, and Germany will shut all their nuclear power plants by 2022. North American planners are thinking through the efficacy of existing disaster-response plans, the effectiveness of manual and automatic venting structures in their own, very similar, nuclear-reactor designs, and the common practice of onsite fuel storage.

In this essay, I want to briefly touch on three issues that the ongoing crisis has raised for social scientists: the ways in which crises work as “windows,” the complexity of disasters and their effects, and the importance of social capital and civil society in both disaster and recovery.

Crises as Dual “Windows”

Social scientists have long understood that decisionmaking in government circles is rarely a rational, predictable process that moves at a steady rate. Instead, researchers such as John Kingdon posit that problems, politics, and policies often flow separately until “windows of opportunity” bring them together in a situation in which change can occur. Policy entrepreneurs who work hard to propose new norms and solutions can create these windows, as can focusing events, such as large-scale disasters.¹ Thomas Birkland has underscored how, for a short period of time after a major disaster, entrepreneurs and policymakers have the chance to knit together problems and policies, although it may take several disasters—such as the repeated loss of airplanes and lives to terrorism—before policymakers enact change.² In this way, mega-catastrophes can serve as catalysts for transformation, just as the Fukushima nuclear crisis may push more nations to end their use of nuclear power or force alterations in the ways in which the field is regulated.

1. 1. John Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies. (New York: Longman Press, 2002).
2. 2. Thomas Birkland, “Learning and Policy Improvement After Disaster: The Case of Aviation Security,” American Behavioral Scientist 48, no. 3 (November 2004): 341–64.

The global research program involves a consortium of partners from around the world and aims to reframe and inform understanding and policy making about issues relating to the political marketplace, border spaces and citizenship, social exclusion and gender in countries/states considered “fragile” and/or affected by conflict.

SSRC Program Director Alex de Waal will co-chair the initiative together with Tim Allen, Professor of Development Anthropology at the London School of Economics. Tatiana Carayannis, SSRC Deputy Director of the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum, and SSRC Senior Adviser Jennifer Klot will also participate in the consortium.