Questioning our agency inside agencies: rethinking the possibility of scholars’ critical contributions to security agencies

During the months and years following the 11 September 2001 terror attacks in the US, it became axiomatic for American policy makers to speak of a need to more directly connect military and intelligence agencies with academic experts at American universities. Anthropology and other social science disciplines drew renewed attention as politicians, pundits and policy makers claimed regional and disciplinary expertise was lacking in the governmental agencies involved in America’s terror wars. This paper questions the possibility that the US governmental agencies claiming they seek anthropologists and other scholars to bring new ideas to security and defence agencies want the sort of independent ideas that a body of critical anthropologists would bring to this work. I argue that the primary outcome of these efforts will be, not the transformation of governmental agencies; but the transformation of American universities into more-streamlined appendages of expansive national security apparatus. The lack of serious consideration of these possibilities by policy makers or members of intelligence or security agencies the importance of asking such basic questions as clearly as we can. I argue that the broad range of post-9/11 existing and proposed programmes linking American anthropologists and other social scientists’ work with military and intelligence projects will narrow the range of views within intelligence and analyst circles, will damage university systems, and will produce a homogenisation of analysis that will weaken intelligence capabilities.