Social Science Research Council

INTRODUCTION
By Itty Abraham

As we approach the first anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, we are in a much better position to assess the extent to which these attacks have in fact changed the nature of international relations and threats to human security, as was claimed by many in the heat of the immediate reaction to those tragic events. This collection of articles -- some written by fellows and committee members of the GSC program, others commissioned by an editorial committee of fellows -- allow us a variety of perspectives speaking to questions of continuity and change. A tentative conclusion after reading these articles might be that while some things have changed, others have not. More provocatively, it is not always the things that we might have expected which have changed the most.

Possibly the most important elements of change in the aftermath of 9-11 has been the attack on civil liberties and personal freedoms within the United States. The passage of the Orwellian-named Patriot Act with only one dissension in the House of Representatives was the most striking example of the power of the modern state to privilege its definition of security over all others. The patent violation of due process and legal protections in the arrests of thousands of Muslim, Middle Eastern and South Asian residents of this country point to the lack of judiciable evidence in the hands of the government and mark a historic breakdown of a liberal legal culture that was the envy of the world. Racialism cannot be separated from this problem, as is suggested by the vastly divergent treatment of enemy combatants John Walker Lindh and Yaser Esam Hamdi, or by the degree of attention paid to the anthrax attacks – most likely the contribution of a home grown terrorist – in contrast to the identification and arrests of innocent Muslims. As Lisa Hajjar points out in her discussion of the dangers of racial profiling, a parallel may be seen with the incarceration of Japanese but not Germans during World War 2.

If there has been a whole-scale realignment of the relationship of the individual to the state as a result of draconian internal security laws, the ‘war’ on the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan also produced effects in places both familiar and not. Sebastian Braun, a Swiss anthropologist, discusses the ambivalent reactions to the war on the Lakota reservation. Lakotas, he notes, ‘like all American Indian nations, [have] a high percentage of their people in the U.S. armed forces.’ Mustapha Kamel Al-Sayyid, GSC committee member, suggests that Washington Establishment has not understood the asymmetric power of international subalterns, even as they provide new justifications for intervention in the affairs of other countries.

The asymmetric power of different combatants is nowhere more visible than the Middle East. Sharon’s Israel has taken strength from the tacit and explicit support of the Bush Administration – and from American companies, as Neve Gordon points out -- to apply military, territorial and economic actions against Palestinians in order to roll back the political and humanitarian advances of the last decade. The predictable reaction has been violence, but, as Lori Allen, a GSC fellow, notes, Palestinian suicide bombers or martyrs are driven by more than revenge. Her article details the complex signification of the meaning of these deadly actions, in a rare example of analysis that comes from a resident in that war zone.

The intertwining of violence, war, sexuality and gender is further explored in a series of articles. While Frances Pilch’s article explores how international law is beginning to make the experience of women and sexualized violence, especially rape, central to the jurisprudence of war and mass violence, Lynn Graybill points out how pervasive this problem is by focusing on examples of sexual crimes committed by UN peacekeepers, who are meant to be restoring order. Melissa Brown takes the discussion home in her analysis of the shifting mores of masculinity as read through the new recruitment strategies of the British Army.

Violence against women is not only a condition of war, as can be seen in the appeal of MUDHA, a movement of Haitian-Dominican women. The women of this community experience four fold discrimination in the DR: for being women, poor, black and Haitian. Samuel Martinez, GSC postdoctoral fellow, first writes an introduction to a statement by this movement seeking protection for this community, and then goes on to raise a question of deep relevance to all academics. What is the responsibility of the scholar to his or her human subject(s), and, depending on the answer, is it compatible with our conventions of social science? This question is of great interest to us in the GSC program, as we plan a workshop on the question of ‘activist research’ during the next academic year.

These articles epitomize, in their variety and scope, so many of the concerns of this program. We hope they will provoke, excite and discomfit you. Isn’t that what critical ideas do?