Social Science Research Council

Craig Calhoun, SSRC President

After 1989, internationalism flourished. To many its center was global civil society. For others, free trade was the core. For still others it was open exchange of ideas, or migration and attendant cultural pluralism. But to many, internationalism seemed an unalloyed good and an obvious future.

To be sure, the 1990s saw the rise of an “antiglobalization” movement—itself intensely international—that challenged the imposition of an American model in globalization. And the 1990s saw an extraordinary amount of nationalism, some of it implicated in violent conflicts from the former Yugoslavia to Central Asia and Central Africa. India and Pakistan accelerated a nuclear arms race. But most Western media and many scholars treated all of this as a “transitional” problem and confidently expected the triumph of a cosmopolitan globalization.

After September 11, 2001, internationalism encountered a deeper crisis. Al Qaeda dramatically linked American military power and global finance capitalism in simultaneous attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. And the US and other world powers responded with new assertions of their own national interests, tightened border controls, “homeland security” programs, and military interventions.

If 9/11 symbolized US vulnerability, the invasion of Iraq symbolizes US military might. But one-sided US dominance in the world was one of the motivations for the attacks, so this may be a vicious circle. In any event, the announced end of the Iraq war has not brought peace or a sense of security—either in Iraq or in the world at large. Not only is there still fighting, a host of international relationships are strained or ruptured.

Science is among the victims. The pursuit of knowledge depends not merely on peace, but on open minds and open borders. Yet both terrorist actions and government responses demand emotional commitments in place of intellectual analyses. Whether acting out of desperation or positions of power, those who deploy death and destruction threaten the fragile culture of open inquiry on which science depends as they threaten all public life. Mobs and profiteers looted libraries, museums and universities in Iraq, but elsewhere other kinds of repression weakened the intellectual basis for public discourse. Many prefer uninformed unanimity to the open recognition of differences on which intellectual advances depend. Scientists cannot be among these.

The work of social scientists is challenged especially sharply because it touches directly on contentious matters of political power, economic performance, cultural identity, and social welfare. Social science recurrently intersects with public controversies, and too often governments respond by trying to repress the work of scientists who raise uncomfortable questions or present data that disturb the dominant.

Science is a vital arena of international cooperation. Universalistic in its commitment to truth, yet driven forward by contending perspectives, differences in understanding, and the need for new data, science draws thinkers and researchers from different countries, institutions, and disciplines together in dialogue and cooperation. Scientists from different countries produce new data, debate the significance of their findings, put apparent truths to the test in empirical research, and develop new vocabularies as they forge views of how the world works.

US dominance—along with the more general privilege of intellectuals in “developed” countries—is also a challenge for the organization of science. It places researchers in hugely unequal positions and makes it harder to achieve trust and communication. Such inequality creates blind spots in the vision of those privileged to work in the world’s rich and powerful countries as well as problems for those based elsewhere.

Fears of war, terrorism, disease and economic instability drive new pressures for insularity. It has become dramatically harder for scientists—especially those from Islamic countries—to travel to international conferences. It is hard for them to get visas and they suffer delays and indignities at airports. Foreign students are subject to new scrutiny and regulation. Nationalist organizations hound scientists whose teaching or research does not fit their ideologies. Even in the US, with its long tradition of academic freedom, nationalist campaigns try to limit not only dissidents, but the teaching of international studies.

The same pressures that block international cooperation block domestic science as well. Governments that feel threatened refuse criticism; nationalists demand conformity; new ideas are suspect. In many countries social scientists find the space for free inquiry squeezed ever smaller. On the one hand, there is pressure from the US and other powerful forces to support globalization without criticizing its inequalities and destructions. On the other hand, there are pressures from their own governments and popular opinion to express nationalist solidarities without concern for their excesses.

Internationally and domestically, science depends on institutions in which the pursuit of knowledge is a basic value, and in which colleagues can argue in confidence that logic and evidence have priority over the exercise of political power. Science depends, therefore, not only on observation, experiment, and theory but also on trust, communication, and shared endeavor. The Social Science Research Council works to make creativity and innovation possible precisely by creating spaces for international and interdisciplinary collaboration and debate.

The knowledge social science offers is all the more needed as the world changes. Both the gains and the inequalities of economic globalization demand scientific analysis. New kinds of wars demand new sorts of knowledge if they are to be contained and their effects mitigated. Related problems like the effect of armed conflict on children, its role in spreading infectious diseases, and the migrations it forces all need improved understanding to guide practical action. AIDS doesn’t stay within national borders. The new electronic media are global, even if unequal. Science must be international.

The SSRC brings social science to bear on public issues. We make them the objects of scientific study so practical action can be more effective. And we seek to make that study truly international not only to be fair, but because that produces the best science and the best links between scientific knowledge and practical action. Because we are committed to science, and to the public good, we are committed to the open communication, intellectual diversity, and opportunities to build relationships of trust both require.