from guinea to yale and back again

i got a little vicarious thrill in coming across a quote from my anthro advisor, currently on leave and doing field work, at the end of this article about the military coup in guinea.

the first time i met mike was when i came to the first day of his class (his first class at yale, i think) "anthropologies of insurgency". my skepticism about his choice of facial hair (a little soul-patch paired a predilection for black turtlenecks) was short lived. by the end of the semester, i decided that any guy who mentions offhandedly anecdotes like "this one time i was talking to some insurgents in the niger delta. they had this new remote car-bombing technology they were really excited about. i think they got it from jihadis, but they wouldn't tell me for sure" can wear his beard any damn way he pleases.

yes, mike is a scary scary man (especially when he's critiquing your senior thesis), but he's also exactly the kind of anthropologist i want to be when i grow up. it's not just his subject matter (political violence, conflict, reconstruction), but his approach. while maintaining a proper anthropological dedication to deep understandings of local particularities, he doesn't fear the comparative or political economic. most importantly, he wants to make anthropology accessible to policy (he was west africa project director at international crisis group, one of my all-time favorite NGOs, before returning to academia at yale).

at the end of this post on guinea, he poses some questions that i think, disastrously, for many years went without serious consideration in COIN and other policy planning (eg applicability of an iraq-style surge in afghanistan): "How can we take into account the particularities of a country and also the predictability of experiences from other countries in roughly comparable situations? How can we take seriously local actors’ just concerns with short-term considerations while underlining the medium-to-long term risks being built into the situation by present compromises?". i'm not saying that these questions aren't posed, but rather that the importance of anthropology (or, rather, the vital local knowledge that the discipline is in the unique position to provide) in answering them was for a long time ignored by policymakers. in return, the discipline obliged policy-makers by basically uninviting them to its birthday party. and so both groups skipped along for most of the 20th century, happily writing off the other as detached from reality on the ground (in their own ways).

since the american military finally caught wise to what they were missing in the wars in afghanistan and iraq, we've seen a new debate born among in social science (and especially anthro) around the human terrain system (HTS)program, which embeds social scientists with the military in the field. quite rightly, the american anthropological association, has decided that researchers collaborating with the military can not maintain a responsible, "first, do no harm" relationship with their informants, and may simultaneously do irreparable harm to the discipline (you can read the AAA resolution here and the full report here).

now, i think the resolution is absolutely right. HTS, as it currently functions, is fundamentally contradictory to responsible anthropology. besides being, arguably, deeply unethical, the results that you get are just not reliable the way non-embedded anthropology is; HTT anthropologists can't build the bonds of trust or develop the subtle back-of-the-house understanding of local dynamics that are precisely what (should) make anthro invaluable to responsible policy making. a not-unreasonable analogy is to the fundamental unreliability of intelligence gathered by torture. on the other hand, i think this debate forces open a conversation about what role anthropology should play in informing policy. the statement in the AAA resolution says, "anthropology can and in fact is obliged to help improve U.S. government policies through the widest possible circulation of anthropological understanding in the public sphere, so as to contribute to a transparent and informed development and implementation of U.S. policy by robustly democratic processes of fact-finding, debate, dialogue, and deliberation." however, i don't think the discipline can rest on this statement alone. the HTS debacle(s) must force a deeper examination about how anthropologists can remain true to professional ethics while REALLY engaging policy makers with the knowledge that they need.

...anyway. i never meant for this post to devolve into what it did...long story short, it's time that policy makers got re-invited to our birthday party. work like mike's and international crisis group's are good examples of vitally important bridge building among disciplines and between academia and policy making.