Much attention has been paid to the increasing role of the US military in US–African relations, from the expansion of US Africa Command (AFRICOM) bases and deployments across the continent to the concomitant displacement of the Department of State, the United States Agency for International Development and the United States Information Agency by military and intelligence agencies. Few have paused to reflect, however, on the importance of these developments to, and the involvement of, Africanists and African Studies centres. Former US African Studies Association (ASA) president David Wiley's recent essay marks a notable exception, deftly charting the history of US African Studies centres’ opposition to the militarisation of African Studies from the Cold War to the post-9/11 period (2012).
As Wiley recounts, Africanists' organised opposition to military and intelligence linkages followed similar action by scholars of Asia, Latin America and the Middle East; in each case US intervention abroad provided the critical impetus. The North American Congress on Latin America, publishing the bimonthly NACLA Report on the Americas, was formed in 1967; the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, publishing a Bulletin and now the journal Critical Asian Issues, was formed in 1968; and in 1971 the Middle East Research and Information Project was formed and began to publish Middle East Report.
While black scholars' and students' protests against Africanists' cooperation with US security agencies and apartheid shattered the annual meeting of the ASA at Montreal in 1969, organised opposition within the ASA did not emerge until 1978, with the creation of the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars (ACAS). The immediate catalyst was provided by covert intervention in Angola, and US support for white minority regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa and their wars of destabilisation against neighbouring African states.
The growing anti-apartheid movement pushed the leaders of African Studies programmes and the ASA to take a public position on their relation to the US government's actions – and in particular their dependence upon federal funding. In 1982 the directors of the 11 major Title VI centres at the time agreed not to pursue or accept funding from military or intelligence agencies.1 The Association of African Studies Programs (AASP), with roughly 60 member programmes, shortly followed suit. At their 1993 meeting AASP members reconfirmed their
conviction that scholars and programs conducting research in Africa, teaching about Africa, and conducting exchange programs with Africa should not accept research, fellowship, travel, programmatic, and other funding from military and intelligence agencies or their contractual representatives – for work in the U.S. or abroad. (cited in ACAS 2009)
ASA and AASP statements alike stressed the necessity of separating academic and military/intelligence research, securing the transparency and integrity of scholarly research, and maintaining relationships with and access to the work of scholars and students based in Africa. These goals were linked to good public policy as well. As the AASP continued in 1993:
We also believe that the broader interests of the people of the United States are served best by Africanist scholarship and programs oriented to goals, issues, and regional foci which are determined openly using academic and broader public priorities, not in secret or for the narrower priorities of military, foreign policy, and intelligence agencies. (cited in ACAS 2009)
Over the course of following decades, as Wiley observed, ‘with some exceptions, almost all the centres and programmes have observed the consensus’ (2012, 152). Individual scholars, however, were never bound by the commitments of centre directors. The cost for some centre directors and administrators has nevertheless not been negligible. Some have, as Wiley notes,
paid a serious price for keeping the agreement. One African centre director was fired by his university president for taking this stance, many were pressured by their university administrations to take the funding, and some faculty and administrators had their career mobility truncated for holding firm to this position. (Ibid.)
The ‘exceptions’ have steadily grown over the last 20 years, as the lure of military and intelligence funding has increased and the pressure from below against accepting military and intelligence funding has dissipated. This raises the prospect of the militarisation not just of US foreign policy towards Africa, but of the academic study of Africa as research and the training of new students begin to be determined by the values and priorities of military and intelligence agencies. In this sense, militarisation also entails, as Enloe has pointed out more generally, in the intrusion of martial values – patriarchy, hierarchy and a belief in the efficacy of violence – through the unspoken assumptions of funding agencies and their interests. Researchers may come to ‘see military solutions as particularly effective, to see the world as a dangerous place best approached with militaristic attitudes’ (2007, 4).
For Africanists the passage of the David L. Boren National Security Education Act (NSEP) in 1991 signalled the coming of a new era of the broader impact and acceptance of military and intelligence funding. Part of NSEP, the Boren scholarships provide US$20,000 scholarships for undergraduates to study abroad. A parallel programme, the Boren fellowships, awards graduate students US$30,000. Both programmes require award recipients ‘to work in qualifying national security positions for at least one year’ (Boren Awards for International Study 2014).
Acceptance of NSEP funding by individual students and faculty foreshadowed the decisions of a few African Studies programmes to do so as well, most notably at Howard University's Modern Language Department and the National African Language Research Program at UW-Madison. In the last few years this trend has accelerated as the Title VI African Studies centres at Indiana, Pennsylvania and Florida have accepted NSEP funding.
However, NSEP is only part of a much larger force pulling Africanists and African Studies within the orbit of the US national security apparatus. NSEP's current US$20 million budget is now complemented by the US$75 million Department of Defense (DoD)/National Science Foundation Minerva Initiative, social science research conducted at military academies and research centres, work at the AFRICOM headquarters in Stuttgart, and numerous and untraceable classified projects – many of which employ Africanist faculty and graduate students.
While the rise of NSEP, Minerva and AFRICOM set in relief the contours of a parallel world of militarised knowledge production, the comparatively low level of support from the US Department of Education has served to propel Africanists' acceptance of new military and intelligence funding. Following 9/11, annual funding for the roughly 125 national resource centres for all world areas rose slowly over the first decade of this century, moving from US$20 million in 2000 to US$34 million in 2010; funding for the 11 to 12 African Studies centres moved in parallel from US$2.1 million to US$3.5 million over the same period. In 2011 however Title VI funding for the national resource centres, including the 12 African Studies centres at the time, was cut by a drastic 47% – and has not risen since. That same year, the number of Boren scholars studying sub-Saharan Africa doubled while the number of fellows nearly tripled, as Table 1 shows.
| 2010 recipients | 2011 recipients | 2012 recipients | 2013 recipients | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scholars | 7 | 16 | 29 | 41 |
| Fellows | 10 | 28 | 28 | 31 |
For those working within the field the trend was clear. To quote Wiley again, ‘In this time of austerity, especially at public universities, there is a growing sense that civilian agency funding is collapsing and military and intelligence funding increasingly is the “only game in town”’ (2012, 159).
This conclusion raises a whole host of questions about the future of Area Studies research and language training in the US – questions that have been quite absent in the coverage of the expansion of AFRICOM and related military interventions across the continent:
What are the scale, location and significance of military and intelligence funding?
How have individual Africanists engaged with the new wave of military and intelligence projects?
Is the trimming of civilian funding and the expansion of military and intelligence funding fundamentally altering research and training priorities?
Do these post-Cold War or post-9/11 transitions mark a reconfiguration of the US state's influence and interest in Africa and African Studies?
Is African Studies in the US as we have known it in the post-World War II period being marginalised as US relations are increasingly organised by military and intelligence agencies?
These critical questions are being avoided. Here, we can only begin to outline some answers, and, in the process, sharpen questions for ongoing research, self-reflection and debate.
We tackle below three specific and limited areas: (1) an admittedly incomplete survey of new military and intelligence agency funded research, and Africanists' engagement or lack of it in these initiatives, (2) a preliminary evaluation of the redirection of research and language training priorities and (3) an assessment of whether these developments mark a new era for the study of Africa in the US, rupturing in the process the long-term interests and relations of the US to continental Africa.
US Africanists and the ‘black’ world of militarised knowledge: NSEP to Minerva and beyond
The full extent of military funding of the work of African Studies is clouded by government secrecy and compounded by the rapid growth of new research programmes and institutions connected to the national security apparatus and quite separate from the academic world. The size of this covert world is remarkable. Four million Americans hold government security clearances, in contrast to the 1.8 million who work in the non-classified parts of the federal government (Greenberg 2012, 5; Paglen 2009, 4). The work produced under these auspices, by some estimates, outnumbers publicly produced knowledge by fivefold every year (Galison 2004, 230).
The increasingly hidden or ‘black’ world of militarised knowledge production resists research on it. The primary transparency mechanism – the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) – is undermined by misaligned priorities: the federal government spent US$215 to keep its records classified for every $1 it spent on declassification (Open the Government 2012). Open records requests simply cannot keep up with the pace of classification: 76.7 million documents were classified in 2010, up from 23.4 million in 2008 and 8.6 million in 2001 (Greenberg 2012, 5). The Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff FOIA Office, for example, has a 5000-request backlog in its ‘complex processing queue’ and a 1500-backlog of ‘less complex requests’ (including three concerning the Africa Center of Strategic Studies submitted in June of 2012 as part of this research project and not processed and released until January 2014). Moreover, the responses we received to our FOIA requests were quite incomplete. Only a fraction of the requested records were released. The budget for AFRICOM operations (discussed below) was withheld as were related statements of ethical and review procedures. Requests for copies of ASA officers' correspondence with intelligence agencies in the 1950s also remain too highly classified, we have been told for example, to be released even today.
This institutional secrecy is animated by a wider culture organised on the principles of intelligence work: secrecy, compartmentalisation and plausible deniability. The Boren Awards for International Study demonstrate how the principles of intelligence work can transform scholarship into a technical support adjunct for the national security state. While Boren fellows and scholars are announced yearly, past award winners are no longer disclosed because of, in the words of the programme administrator, ‘the sensitive jobs they may currently hold in the government’ (A. Rutenberg, personal communication, 16 November 2012).
Here, we confront a unique methodological problem: the national security state is deliberately designed to thwart outside inquiry and keep information confined within the chain of command and related classification systems. While some of the programmes discussed here, such as the Minerva Initiative, simply fund the work of academics, others, such as the Boren Awards and the programmes of AFRICOM's Social Science Research and Africa Center for Strategic Studies, bring academics into the world of official secrecy. Plumbing the depths of the national security state is a difficult endeavour that has led to the formation of a whole constellation of open government organisations ranging from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) such as George Washington University's National Security Archive and the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, to more activist and unruly operations such as WikiLeaks and Cryptome. The full extent of the intelligence analysis and social science research being done on Africa by the US national security state is virtually impossible to determine. A complete account of these clandestine programmes and activities would require successful litigation to force the DoD to release more records, a major leak specific to these programmes or dramatic changes in the classification system.
This secrecy underlines the dilemmas of mandatory service to a federal agency with national security responsibilities, highlighted most prominently by earlier programmes such as the Michigan State University Group (MSUG) during the Vietnam War. Where MSUG brought academics to Vietnam to provide technical assistance – and cover for covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operations – the Boren Awards redirect aspiring scholars on a career path of service with agencies carrying out national security work. Field work in Africa under Boren auspices – often carried on without local scholars' and institutions' awareness of its intelligence agency funding – is immediately channelled into the service of security institutions. In addition to involving academics and their institutions in the work of intelligence and endangering US students who go abroad, the Boren Awards thus mark out a new process: bringing new scholars into the institutions and classified work of military and intelligence agencies.
Boundary institutions: between intelligence and scholarship
As universities became centres of radical revolt in the 1960s and 1970s, the presence of military and intelligence agencies on campus became politicised. In response to the Kent State shootings in 1970, to cite one dramatic example, students destroyed 30 Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) buildings on campuses across the US.2 Even the normally conservative Ivy League universities banned ROTC from their campuses (Fendrich 2003). By time of the Title VI centres' rejection of military and intelligence funding in 1982, the national security state was unwelcome at many universities. This victory by radical students and scholars shifted the conditions of struggle and, paradoxically, set the stage for radical students' and scholars' defeat by alternative means: the military and intelligence community simply moved out of the university and into its own parallel world. Today, there are a series of university-like ‘boundary institutions’ to rival and replace the Title VI African Studies centres.
Writing on think tanks, Medvetz (2012) defines ‘boundary institutions’ as ‘mediating the relationships among more established fields’ (114). ‘Field’ means more than formal institutions: it indicates a broader set of relationships and actors competing to assert control over ‘cultural authority in the artistic field, scientific authority in the scientific field, sacerdotal authority in the religious field, and so forth’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 17). The field of militarised knowledge sustained by boundary institutions is a social space defined by the struggles of actors to monopolise a specific kind of ‘scientific’ authority: the power to designate social problems as ‘national security’ issues, define the social context of these problems (i.e. intelligence assessments) and recommend specific policy responses or operations to military and intelligence agencies.
The boundary institutions that constitute the classified world of militarised knowledge sit between the more established fields of social science and ‘national security’. Occupying the interstitial space between academia and military, the military academies and other institutions of military higher learning (Norwich University, Virginia Military Institute etc.) are the most established boundary institutions. Here African Studies is already institutionalised. African Area Studies can be found in the four service academies, in the 18 other military higher education institutions and in other DoD programmes (Foreign Military Studies Office, Centre for Contemporary Conflict, the Defense Language Institute etc.) (Wiley 2012 152).
Over time, boundary organisations, as Medvetz put it (2012, 124), succeed ‘in transcending the “spaces between fields” and acquire field-like properties of their own’. In this sense, there are two generations of boundary institutions that form the ‘black’ field of militarised knowledge. The first generation, military academies, clearly intersect with the world of higher education. Indeed, they are educational centres where the next generation of military officers are recruited and trained. The second generation of boundary institutions have transcended the space between the military/intelligence community and scientific field/higher education, and have become a field in their own right: a ‘black’ field of militarised knowledge with monopoly over a specific form of ‘scientific’ authority through their power to name ‘national security’ threats and influence the state's response to them.
This second generation of boundary institutions includes relatively obscure and semi-secretive institutions that are largely unknown outside of the US military and intelligence community. One of the more significant of these is the DoD's in-house African Studies centre: the Africa Center for Strategic Studies (ACSS). Unlike a university centre, however, ACSS straddles the boundary between the academe, the policy community and the African political field. Created in 1998, ACSS now is the hub for a 4400-person community, which includes ‘African heads of states … as well as senior military leaders, ambassadors, diplomats academics professionals … and many others’ (Africa Center for Strategic Studies, n.d.). In effect, ACSS combines the research efforts of a Title VI centre with the foreign assistance mission of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, its parent agency. It blends the research and pedagogical mission of an African Studies centre with the foreign policy goals of the United States. Unlike a Title VI African Studies centre, ACSS is endowed with millions in state support. In 2009, ACSS had a US$17.3 million operational budget; by 2012, the year after Title VI centres were cut by 46%, ACSS was still funded to the tune of US$14.5 million (Africa Center for Strategic Studies 2009, 2011).
While ACSS has an open education and pedagogical mission, other boundary institutions of militarised knowledge production are more fully enclosed within the ‘black’ field of militarised knowledge production and, as such, are not as visible. Here, AFRICOM's Joint Command for Intelligence and Knowledge Development – J2 K in military shorthand – is explicitly designed to put social scientists to work for the US military. As of November 2012, AFRICOM J2 K included a staff of 38, including 10 with PhDs and an analyst from the National Geospatial Agency. This is much larger than any African Studies centre and, unlike an African Studies programme, AFRICOM J2 K is directly integrated into the larger military command which dictates its research priorities.
The primary research arm of the AFRICOM J2 K is the Social Science Research Center (SSRC), which ‘focus[es] on the long-term with an eye toward forecasting potential flashpoints and preventing them from developing into conflicts’ (Vandiver 2009). The SSRC's main programme is the Socio-Cultural Research Advisory Teams (SCRATs), which ‘conduct a socio-cultural assessment[s] to better focus U.S. efforts and develop beneficial objectives. They may then accompany U.S. forces during the exercise in a cultural advisory capacity and conduct a post-exercise assessment of the impact on the local population’ (Varhola undated). As of November 2012 AFRICOM had set up four SCRATs, each with an area of geographic focus: 1. Horn of Africa, East; 2. Horn of Africa, North; 3. West and Central; 4. South. At the time, only the Horn of Africa, North team was deployed. Operating from Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, the Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) commands this SCRAT team and sets its research priorities (Eidson 2010).
The SCRATs are modelled after the controversial Human Terrain System (HTS) from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which embedded anthropologists in military units and tasked them to use their anthropological training for the purposes of intelligence gathering. The HTS programme has generated much debate among anthropologists (Forte 2010; González 2009; Price 2011) and culminated with a formal statement of ‘disapproval’ from the executive board of the American Anthropological Association (AAA). Specifically, the AAA (2007) found that the HTS programme put anthropologists in a position where voluntary informed consent was compromised:
As military contractors working in settings of war, HTS anthropologists work in situations where it will not always be possible for them to distinguish themselves from military personnel and identify themselves as anthropologists. This places a significant constraint on their ability to fulfill their ethical responsibility as anthropologists to disclose who they are and what they are doing.
While the SCRATs are not deployed in active war zones as the Human Terrain Teams were in Iraq and Afghanistan, they present many of the same ethical problems. A 2010 report released to us as part of an FOIA request reveals the dilemmas present when the boundaries between academic scholarship and military research blur. Entitled ‘Civil Military Operations in Kenya's Rift Valley: Socio-Cultural Impacts at the Local Level’ and co-authored by a member of SCRAT deployed under CJTF-HOA and a researcher with Social Science Research Command at AFRICOM headquarters in Stuttgart, the report is an assessment of an US Army Reserve Civil Affairs Team project to rebuild schools damaged in the post-election violence that overtook Kenya in late 2007 and early 2008. After conducting 71 interviews with 135 participants in 10 locations, the researchers found that ‘host communities do not distinguish between various US military groups.’ While the Army Reservists had left the area in the July 2010, a US Navy SeaBee detachment had arrived to do same work the next month. ‘In the minds of local populace’, the report concludes, ‘the US Military has not left the Rift Valley because locals do not differentiate between groups inside the organization’ (Authors’ Names Redacted 2010, 9–10).
The report ends with the recommendation that ‘[w]hen crafting message for local communities, US military parties must consider the total presence of Department of Defense personnel’ (Ibid., 3). However, this analysis is not extended to the SCRAT. The report raises the question: does ‘the community’ understand that the non-uniformed SCRAT team is part of US military? Is it clear to interviewees that the research is not publicly available and is written for the purposes of a military command? The report's informed consent procedures do not offer much insight on these issues. The researchers note that they ‘obtained permission of Provisional Administration and community leaders to carry out field interviews before engaging with community members’ but give no indication that they went through any informed consent procedure with their individual interviewees (Ibid., 3). The DoD also did not release individual SCRAT members’ statements of ethics as we requested under the FOIA.
These observations underline the reasons of the ASA's, AASP's and AAA's past and present calls for separating social science research from intelligence gathering. Social science is produced for public audiences and subject to peer review by a community of professionals held together by shared codes of conduct and an open set of research questions and methods. Social science research speaks as well to many audiences: other academics, policymakers, media elites, the general public. Research driven by military and intelligence priorities, by contrast, often has a much narrower focus and audience. When directed at immediate and tactical problems of military and intelligence work, research can all too easily become directly entangled in the service of the coercive power of the state. Military and intelligence research is also often produced and distributed behind a wall of secrecy, the extent of which we simply cannot determine.
In short, collecting data for the use of military and intelligence agencies along these lines poses quite clear ethical issues. These include, as the AAA Executive Board statement (2007) details, constraining or eliminating informed consent and institutional review, imposing limits on the ability of scholars to disclose what they are doing and for whom, breaching long-standing obligations to do no harm to peoples under study, and potentially providing information that isolates and potentially targets individuals, groups and regions for military operations.
These are not simply potential problems as illustrated by AFRICOM's SSRC work, which extends beyond the SCRATs. The SSRC also produces regular intelligence assessments to help the command staff of AFRICOM assess the military theatre. A Theater Intelligence Report on clan dynamics in the Lower Shabelle region of Somalia, for example, was produced by the SSRC research in ‘respon[se] to recent inquiry concerning clan dynamics in al-Shabaab’, the armed Islamist group active in Somalia (Author's Name Redacted 2012). Even though the report in question was not produced as immediate tactical intelligence to aid military operations, it was strategic intelligence written to inform long-term strategic planning of military commanders. As with the work of the SCRATs, research blurs with intelligence gathering, the notion of informed consent fades away and knowledge transforms into intelligence. This situation legitimises the wariness of Africans, including African scholars and research institutes, towards US scholars and their research: how, it may be increasingly asked, do we know US students and scholars are not spies, conducting research at the behest of US intelligence agencies and military operations? Opposition to US government policies is indeed, in today's climate, all too easily transmuted into a rejection of US-based scholars, research and programmes.
Research redirection: whose questions? Whose priorities?
Directly linking the funding of the study of Africa to national security interests defined by the state raises a critical question about the future integrity of African Studies: Whose interests do researchers and the broader field represent?
While the Title IV centres were always federally funded, their research priorities were primarily determined by professional debates and struggles within the scholarly African Studies community in the US. Today, declining funding undercuts the financial and institutional basis of the autonomy that Africanists have long possessed within the confines of the academy. This change is coupled with a move to shift definition of research priorities from the hands of scholars and universities to the priorities of the DoD.
The Minerva Initiative, part of the DoD's wider US$75 million investment in social science, provides a prime example. Started in 2010, the first group in the programme includes two scholars of Africa: a recently minted PhD in geography from the University of Kansas whose first academic appointment is at West Point where he researched the ‘Social, Spatial and Cultural Topologies of African Villages’ during the 2012–13 academic year (Strasser 2012), and a political scientist from Georgia Tech who studied Chinese policy toward Africa as a Minerva Chair at the Air Force Academy during the 2012–13 academic year. Consider Table 2, which shows Minerva grants on Africa, and set it against the annual National Resource Center funding for all 12 Title VI African Studies centres of around US$2 million after the 2011 budget cuts.
| Lead researcher | University appointment | Topic | Award year/numbers of years | Total award (US$) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| James Lindsay | U. of Texas Austin (Maurice R. Greenberg Chair at Council on Foreign Relations) | Climate Change, State Stability, and Political Risk in Africa | 2009/5 | 7.6 million |
| Leonardo Villalon | U. of Florida (Political Science & African Studies) | Political Reform, Socio-Religious Change, and Stability in the African Sahel | 2012/3 | 1.25 million |
| Jeffrey Hancock | Cornell (Communications) | Modeling Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes | 2009/1 | 1.85 million |
| Mark Woodward | Arizona State University (School of Historical, Religious and Philosophical Studies) | Finding Allies for the War of Words: Mapping the Diffusion and Influence of Counter-Radical Muslim Discourse | 2010/3 | 4.9 million |
| Lincoln Pratson | Duke (Earth & Ocean Sciences) | A Global Value Chain Analysis of Food Security and Food Staples for Major Energy-Exporting Nations in the Middle East and North Africa | 2012/3 | 999,596 |
| Heidi Ellis | Harvard/Children's Hospital Boston (Psychiatry) | Identifying And Countering Early Risk Factors for Violent Extremism Among Somali Refugee Communities Resettled in North America | 2012/3 | 886,000 |
| Arie Kruglanski | U. Maryland (Psychology) | Motivational, Ideological and Social Processes in Political Violence | 2012/5 | 4.5 million |
| Barbara Geddes & Joseph Wright | UCLA (Political Science) & Penn State (Political Science) | How Politics Inside Dictatorship Affect Regime Stability | 2012/3 | 241,000 |
| Martha Crenshaw | Stanford (Political Science) | Mapping Terrorist Organizations | 2009/3 | 500,000 |
Sources: press releases, university newspapers, departmental newsletters and the CVs of the primary investigators.
As can be seen, research is heavily concentrated on quite specific topics and geographical areas. Identifying religious and political extremism, from mapping ‘terrorist’ organisations to identifying extremists among African youth and even African refugees in the United States, is a primary concern. A secondary focus clearly exists as well with ensuring political stability and political order – rather than supporting social movements or social justice – in states and regions that export energy and natural resources. Narrow security and policy concerns dominate, all too easily leading to the technocratic reduction of independent intellectual inquiry into solutions to the US state's policy problems.
These considerations serve to reorient research towards a small group of states that are deemed to either threaten the US or alternatively support the US with military bases, energy supplies and natural resources. This is a far narrower group than that historically covered by Africanist programmes at universities, and more often than not involves supporting alliances with highly repressive regimes engaged in inter-state warfare as recent cases in East, Central, West and Northern Africa indicate all too well.
These priorities are coming to define not just academic research but a far narrower path for training the future scholars of Africa in the US. This can easily be seen in relation to critical language training. Determining language in relation to national security criteria results in a few select languages being studied, focused largely on energy sites and threat determination. In the 2000–04 period, for example, the Title VI centres offered training in 56 African languages (out of the 750–1500 African languages) compared with eight at the Defense Language Institute (and seven at the Foreign Service Institute) (Wiley 2004, 10). The Defence Language Institute's list (Afrikaans, Amharic, Arabic, Lingala, Portuguese, Somali, Swahili and Tigrinya) hardly represents the normal past criteria for selecting language training in relation to the number of speakers of a language, the language's political, cultural and social importance, and its relevance for the US in terms of historical ties, national security and recent immigrant communities.
These languages and the states and peoples they encompass shift moreover as the definition of national security threats and sources of energy and natural resources shift. This makes for a quixotic mix and pattern. As some organisations and individuals become US allies, they fall off lists of terrorist areas that deserve enhanced attention and language training, while others are advanced onto priority language funding lists as new threats are defined – most notably Arabic and the languages of the Horn. This is a long-standing pattern, as the case of South Africa illustrates. As the anti-apartheid struggle heated up in the 1980s, for example, Zulu became a target language following the US state's support for conservative and anti-African National Congress (ANC), Zulu-speaking politicians – with conflict inside South Africa being depicted as being tribally based. And indeed the ANC and Nelson Mandela only came off the official US list of terrorists in 2008.
Data on Boren scholarships and recipients of Minerva grants and fellowships extend these findings. As Table 2 on Minerva grants and Tables 3 and 4 on the areas supported by Boren funds in 2011–12 suggest (data on previous years have been purposefully removed from federal websites), scholarships have been narrowly awarded by region.
| Languages | 2012 fellows | 2012 scholars | 2013 fellows | 2013 scholars |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Acholi | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Akan | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Amharic | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Arabic | 9 | 15 | 6 | 17 |
| Diola | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Hausa | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Kinyarwanda | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Lou | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Luganda | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Portuguese | 2 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Pulaar | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Swahili | 9 | 12 | 15 | 12 |
| Twi | 0 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Wolof | 4 | 2 | 1 | 4 |
| Yoruba | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| Zulu | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Countries | 2012 fellows | 2012 scholars | 2013 fellows | 2013 scholars |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Egypt | 4 | 14 | 0 | 0 |
| Ethiopia | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Ghana | 2 | 3 | 1 | 1 |
| Guinea | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Kenya | 3 | 0 | 3 | 0 |
| Morocco | 3 | 1 | 3 | 18 |
| Mozambique | 2 | 3 | 3 | 3 |
| Nigeria | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Rwanda | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Senegal | 6 | 2 | 1 | 4 |
| South Africa | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Tanzania | 7 | 12 | 10 | 12 |
| Tunisia | 3 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Uganda | 4 | 1 | 2 | 0 |
What languages are learned, what disciplines are supported and what areas are deemed worthy of study take on a distinctive configuration when military and intelligence priorities dominate. The location of the research has also been reconfigured, moving increasingly to scholars and programmes linked to US foreign policy and security networks and training, particularly on the East Coast – and outside the major African Studies centres.
The militarised realignment of a field: the declining autonomy of African Studies?
These trends do not augur well for African Studies in the US. Whereas funding for African Studies created an interdisciplinary space of scholarship on Africa written primarily for other scholars, military funding for specific research projects produces knowledge with the state as the primary audience. As even the cursory and security-restricted survey above of new funding sources and institutions reveals, research funded and directed by military and intelligence agencies has vastly expanded in the last 20 and especially the last five years. Funding for the study of Africa by US security agencies is now, by some estimates, at least 50 times greater than all public university funding for the study of Africa (Wiley 2012, 158).
The issue is not, however, simply the expansion of military and intelligence work and funding. As the rise of boundary institutions and the examples from Minerva contracts suggest, the increasing integration of civilian, military and intelligence funding and work blurs the separation of academic research and intelligence gathering – and thus raises serious ethical issues. The secrecy surrounding the sources and distribution of military and intelligence funding and research only serves to further obscure the visibility and evaluation of these trends.
This realignment of the field of African Studies most immediately and directly affects Africanist students and scholars, the vast majority of whom opposed covert US intelligence operations and direct military interventions in the past, and express dismay at the current expansion of US military operations across the continent. The vast expansion of research in the service of narrow military and intelligence priorities now creates a situation where, as Wiley put it, ‘Africanist scholars can no longer say to their African hosts that the U.S. Africanist community stands together in not taking military or intelligence funding that could affect their choice of research topics, how their results will be used, and how they and their students will be viewed in Africa’ (2012, 159).
Beyond these individual and immediate consequences stands a much larger concern: is the acceleration of military and intelligence-oriented research rupturing the disciplinary, field, regional or language priorities for research and training – in addition to the locations, as argued above – where this takes place? We lack benchmark data over time to make any accurate estimate of these trends in scholarship and research. There is little question, however, of the target areas for ‘national security’ research: areas of economic importance to the US, primarily oil, areas that the US government designates as sites of terrorist threats to the US and its allies, and rising competition for African resources from Asia. This is especially clear in the programmes, seminars, courses and research at military centres and academies. The list of seminars at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies is but one example; in 2011 it included Preventing Youth Radicalisation in East Africa, Managing Security Resources in Africa, Introduction to African Security Issues, Horn of Africa Security Seminar, Next Generation of African Security Sector Leaders Course, Preventing Terrorism in East Africa, US Africa Command Advanced Area Studies, and a Transnational Threats Symposium: Illicit Commons. As one detailed analysis of current and future US interests by a Senior Lecturer in the Department of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School put it, ‘Longer-term U.S. engagement with Africa is likely to be defined in terms of the perceived increase in U.S. interests in the region as a result of international terrorism, increased dependence on African oil, and the dramatic engagement of China with the continent in recent years' (Lawson 2007, 8).
This selection is based upon, we would argue, exceedingly narrow, fleeting and often capricious criteria. It also rejects any consideration of the historic relations of African peoples with the US and, in particular, long-standing shared commitments and struggles of Americans and Africans in pursuit of the common goals of assuring human rights, basic living standards, an end to militarised and gendered violence, and democratic practices. In short: shifting the study of Africa to the areas generated by national security as defined by military and intelligence missions portends a radical transition in defining the field of African Studies.
Disciplinary boundaries, methodological approaches, definitions of critical languages and geographical foci of African Studies have long been subject to debate and change. The original emphasis on anthropology and field training in the 1940s and 1950s was supplanted, for example, by the rise of history and then the social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s. Reassessments of the field in the 1990s noted diverging pressures emanating from quite different sources (Guyer 1996; Martin and West 1999; Zeleza 1997). In the late 1980s and early 1990s the increasing importance of Africa to Africa-America in the closing decade of apartheid led to pressures to widen and diversify the field to include African and African American scholarship, diasporas and cultural linkages. The subsequent demise of the anti-apartheid movement, increasing fiscal pressures and the rise of conservative political forces within both major US political parties led to the increasing evaluation of Africa and Area Studies generally by their relevance to US foreign and neoliberal economic policy objectives.
What was not foreseen at the time was the spectre before us: not only the steady demise of support for African Studies and the corporatisation of our universities, but the diversion of scholars, students and advanced research into military and intelligence channels and institutions – at the expense of the relative autonomy and integrity of an independent field of African Studies. The ‘militarisation’ of the study of Africa in this respect reaches beyond the steadily increasing weight of military and intelligence funding, the turning of research toward the strategic and tactical needs of military and intelligence agencies, and the veil of secrecy that covers much military and intelligence work. More is now at stake as we face the prospect of the study of Africa bypassing the vibrant, open and often highly contested discussions among students and scholars of Africa, and the reduction of much research to narrow problem-solving work driven by military and intelligence values and procedures.
These prospects are faced not just by African Studies scholars of course; almost all Area and Ethnic Studies programmes have been marginalised in relation to the ‘core’ disciplines of the US academy. Even the latter, however, have felt the fierce winds prioritising military research and conservative political agendas. The clarity of this position became evident in March 2013 when conservative Republicans secured Democrats' approval for a bill that eliminated all National Science Foundation funding for political science except for projects, to be certified by the National Science Foundation director, that promote ‘national security or the economic interests of the United States’ (Huckabee 2013). This bill has for the moment effectively killed all funding in this area.
Long-term patterns: reconfiguring/rupturing Africanist–African relations
Looking forward over the long term, what are we to make of these transitions in the study of Africa in the US and, more specifically, civilian African Studies as we have known it for over a half a century? There are several, often conflicting, possibilities. Are we watching a return to the days of the Cold War, with African peoples constructed and African states supported by their relation to the degree they constituted economic allies and shared common enemies as defined by the US government? Or are we watching a new, post-9/11 militarisation and securitisation of relationships with Africa, as is evidenced by the expansion of AFRICOM and US bases and troops on the continent – marking the dominance of US policy and research by a renewed military industrial complex (Cox 2012)? Is this part of the domination of the US as the last remaining superpower (Panitch and Leys 2003, 2004)? Or is it the marginalisation of Africa, and the reduction of US policy and African Studies to narrow market and military concerns? Simply stated, what do today's developments in the US study of Africa in the US suggest when set against past historical patterns?
If Africanists' engagement with military and intelligence agencies is accelerating, it is not a wholly new phenomenon. Indeed the origins of the Area Studies complex lie in military planning for the post-World War II, worldwide expansion of US power. It was not by chance that the ASA was founded in the year of Sputnik (1957), or that the following year brought the passage of the National Defense Education Act, which created the Title VI centres, the ASA's first annual meeting and the first president of the ASA writing to the CIA that the association ‘would be happy to aid you in any way it can’ (W.G. Martin 2011, 63). While covert CIA funding of organisations like the African American Institute and the Congress for Cultural Freedom came to light in the 1970s, very little subsequently emerged given later classification procedures on the relationship between scholars and military and intelligence agencies. However felicitous and extensive these hidden relationships were, it nevertheless remains the case that institutionally separate centres for the study of Africa and Africans were established in this formative period; by the early 1970s there were at least 34 major programmes and many more smaller initiatives (Lambert 1973, 15).
This institutional complex and the relationships between Africanist scholars and military and intelligence agencies came under scrutiny in the wake of African rebellions. The 1969 revolt by black nationalists at the 1969 ASA meeting and the subsequent formation of the African Heritage Studies Association represented one front; the rise of national liberation armies fighting US-supported Portuguese colonial and white settler regimes formed another. With this impetus, radical, largely white, Africanists responded by forming the Association of Concerned Africa Scholars in 1978 and pushed forward the 1982 agreement among directors of African Studies programmes to reject all military and intelligence funding.
While it is common to anchor the turn to the militarisation of US–African relations to the post-9/11 period, the evidence from the Bush and Clinton administrations suggests otherwise. By the early 1990s, and certainly by the end of apartheid and the emergence of a rigidly neoliberal South African government after 1994, the narrowing of US interests in Africa and declining support for African Studies was evident. While the engagements and pure exhilaration that greeted the end of apartheid momentarily invigorated interest in African Studies and African policy, this enthusiasm was short-lived. In popular and policy terms, Africa was increasingly depicted in the 1990s as a place of hopeless anarchy (Kaplan 1994), an arena for unrewarding international social work (Mandelbaum 1996), genocide and ‘black fascism’ (Chege 1997) or the origin of threatening, deadly, infectious diseases (Goldberg 1997).
Bush's and then Clinton's foreign policy and African specialists were equally blunt regarding the new African threat. As Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it in 1999, ‘Africa is a major battleground in the global fight against terror, crime, drugs, illicit arms-trafficking, and disease’ (B. Martin 1998; W. G. Martin 2004, 587). Clinton's Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, seconded to the post from the National Security Council (and under Obama the US Ambassador to the UN and now National Security Advisor), Susan Rice, put it equally sharply a year later: ‘We have consistently articulated two clear policy goals: integrating Africa into the global economy … and combating transnational security threats, including terrorism, crime, narcotics, weapons proliferation, environmental degradation and disease’ (Ibid., 587).
While 9/11 provided the opportunity for a global anti-terrorist discourse to present and legitimise these arguments, it did not inaugurate them. Concerns in the mid 1990s regarding the decline of Africa's economic and political importance also predate 9/11 and have, similarly, accelerated in recent years. The collapse of US–Africa foreign trade programmes and US trade with Africa (besides natural resources), the precipitous decline in US foreign direct investment in Africa and the visible lack in the last two administrations of any serious deputations to Africa (does anyone remember the trips by Clinton's Commerce Secretary Ron Brown?) mark the marginalisation of the continent in the eyes of the US business and political elites. The displacement of US and European trade, investment and loans by Asian commitments demonstrates only further the terminal, downward slide of the old North/South order.
These observations undercut any vision of a return to the Cold War competition over Africa, much less a revival of the legitimacy of the US as existed in the 1950s and 1960s due to the US's developmental and democratic promises to peoples struggling to escape colonial domination. The halcyon days of the expansion of US power and the creation and lush funding of Area Studies programmes are long gone. But if this is so, how do we understand the undeniable rapid expansion of US military interest in Africa and the military and intelligence funding for the study of Africa?
For some, US militarisation underpins the US state's singular status in the world after 1989: it remains the sole superpower. Yet as we can only note here, this argument is undercut by the serious decline in the last four decades of US productive and commercial power and the increasing challenges to the Bretton Woods institutions and their disastrous structural adjustment policies. For yet others, we are witnessing, in an era of enduring stagnation, the final triumph of the military industrial complex and its rule over foreign policy.
These arguments capture signal elements of the present. Yet they fail to acknowledge, for reasons we cannot detail here, the thin material and financial underpinnings of US military and security expansion. In a world bereft of material bases to sustain, much less expand, and legitimise US power, militarisation is an unstable alternative. Like the prison archipelago constructed to contain African Americans at home and now sinking under its own costs, the US military archipelago may well prove to be undermined in the coming period of austerity by its very financial and political hubris.
Set within this framework, the future of African Studies appears most uncertain. As corporate and state elites see most of Africa as of marginal interest, and movements in both continental Africa and Africa-America prove unable to push Africa onto the public agenda, there are few popular forces as yet to counter the declining funding of African Studies programmes as higher education is increasingly privatised and administrators increasingly turn to private and shrinking federal funding dollars. Under these circumstances, and left with few alternatives to legitimise global US corporate and political interests, the militarisation of Africa and African Studies is likely to remain a central and yet unstable dynamic for all of us in the coming, as in the past two, decades.