In a widely discussed speech in April 2008, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates called for a new spirit of cooperation between the military and academe. He envisioned “consortia of universities that will promote research in specific areas,” including studies of the Chinese military and radical Islamic movements.
The proposal was met enthusiastically by some university leaders, but social-science organizations have been skeptical. If the Pentagon starts to pour money into social-science research, some fear, whole subfields might see their priorities distorted as researchers shift their interests to work on projects that suit the military’s curiosities.
Mr. Gates’s vision—which is broadly known as the “Minerva Initiative"—came a step closer to reality on Friday, when the National Science Foundation announced 17 national-security-related social-science projects that will receive grants under a special agreement between the science foundation and the Department of Defense. The research proposals were solicited and reviewed by the science foundation, but the money—a total of $8-million—will come from the Pentagon. (In a parallel program that does not involve the science foundation, the Pentagon announced large awards for seven other social-science projects last December.)
The awardees announced Friday include 13 political scientists, five economists, three sociologists, two psychologists, two computer scientists, one linguist, and one communication scholar. (The numbers total more than 17 because several of the projects have more than one principal investigator.)
The group includes a few prominent senior scholars, including Robert L. Powell, a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley who is known for his game-theoretic models of international conflict, and Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation who has been studying terrorist organizations since the 1970s. But most of the awardees are near the beginning of their careers.
Broad Research Topics
If some skeptics were worried that the Pentagon would invest only in projects that are narrowly tied to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, there is not much evidence of such bias in the new awards. One project will look at conflicts over water resources and the successes and limits of “river treaties” over the last 60 years. Another will explore how political leaders manipulate the public’s perceptions of external threats. Yet another will examine how the process of ending a war has changed over the last two centuries.
“This is a serious group of researchers pursuing problems that genuinely have connections to national security,” says Craig Calhoun, president of the Social Science Research Council. (Several months ago, the council sponsored a lengthy online debate about the Minerva project.)
But Mr. Calhoun and others say that while the quality and topical diversity of the awards may be fine, there is also a certain methodological narrowness. Most of the awards went to projects involving techniques that do not necessarily require deep knowledge of a particular nation or region. Instead, the projects are attempts to build quasi-universal models of governments’ and citizens’ behavior, using game-theoretic modeling, computer simulations, social-network analysis, or large-scale databases of historical events.
“You have to look at the list for the kinds of work it doesn’t represent as well as for the work it does,” Mr. Calhoun says. “We should be concerned about other kinds of knowledge—knowledge based on anthropology and fieldwork, knowledge from historically and culturally oriented area studies, and so forth.” (One of the science foundation’s 17 projects will involve substantial fieldwork. Cynthia Buckley, an associate professor of Slavic and Eurasian studies at the University of Texas at Austin, was awarded nearly $1-million to direct a study of workers who migrate to Russia from Central Asia and Vietnam.)
Ronald R. Krebs, an associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, shares Mr. Calhoun’s concern, though he notes that it is impossible to know whether anthropologists and area specialists simply chose not to apply for Minerva grants. Officials at the NSF did not immediately reply to questions about the number and nature of applications they received.
“This is not necessarily an effect of Minerva,” Mr. Krebs says. “This is a longstanding complaint about the science foundation among some social scientists. There is not much federal support for case studies, for area studies. What the government is looking for is broad rules of thumb or ‘covering laws’ of international and comparative politics that can then be deployed in new cases. So when the government confronts a new civil war, a new regime transition, a new genocide, it wants to have a set of guidelines from scholarship as to how it should behave in those circumstances.”
Mr. Krebs emphasizes that he does not scorn the search for broad empirical lessons about international relations. But he does fear that the federal government is failing to support—or even to notice—scholarship that is based on deep knowledge about a single nation or conflict.
“They’re seeking to eliminate the particularities of situations in the quest for general laws about how the world works,” he says. “When we say something is a civil war, how similar is it, actually, to other civil wars? And are the aspects that make it unique perhaps the aspects that make all the difference?”
Missing ‘Jolt’
Hugh Gusterson, a professor of cultural studies at George Mason University who has been one of the most prominent skeptics of the military’s recent fondness for social science, says that his initial response to the list is that “the American taxpayers are not quite getting their money’s worth here.”
“You would have hoped that there would be far more people who knew about the Middle East,” Mr. Gusterson says. “You would have hoped for much more diversity of method here. The people one could think of who might really be able to give Pentagon thinking a jolt and explain how things look from the point of view of disaffected people in the Middle East—I just don’t see them here. I don’t see this assemblage of scholarship as likely to make the Pentagon think in a really fresh way. That’s not to say it’s bad scholarship. But this is the usual suspects.”
While Mr. Gusterson despairs, Mr. Calhoun, of the research council, is modestly hopeful that the Minerva program will evolve into a productive collaboration between the military and academe.
“So far there’s been much more argument about whether this is a good idea than about developing norms for the relationship,” Mr. Calhoun says. “We have a fair amount of repair work to do to build trust.”
Mr. Calhoun says the Pentagon should not underestimate the amount of legitimate reluctance that exists among social scientists. The U.S. military has been so dominant internationally for so long, he says, that many scholars reasonably worry that they will be tainted as government agents if they accept money from the military.
Still, Mr. Calhoun would like to see the process continue. “I’ve had conversations with people at the Defense Department who indicate that they would like to fund this research on a continuous and long-term basis,” he says “I give credit to Secretary Gates for getting this going, because he recognized a gap in what the government was supporting.”
