Civic Epistemologies: Constituting Knowledge and Order in Political Communities

How do we know things? The question of epistemology – which drives both the sociology and philosophy of science – is also a crucial question for political sociology. Knowledge is essential to even the most basic and foundational of political processes and institutions. In 2000, for example, the transition of power in the US presidential election hung for 36 days on uncertainty over a seemingly simple question of fact: who won the most votes in Florida? A few years later, disputed factual claims about Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction unraveled, calling into question key justifications of the US decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and significantly weakening perceived US legitimacy. Yet, surprisingly, sociologists and political scientists know relatively little about how knowledge gets made in political communities, nor how the making of knowledge is tied to other key aspects of political life, such as identity, authority, legitimacy, and accountability.     

试论美国反恐与中东局势

美国巧遇恐怖袭击与中东地区关联深厚，而反恐行动更是为本已动荡的巴以局势增添了新的变数。反恐利益主导下的美国中东政策的不稳定性客观上加剧了中东局势的动荡。随着反恐行动的后续发展，伊拉克成为新打击对象，中东的两大热点--巴以争端和伊拉克问题在反恐框架中相互交织，中东局势未来走向与美国反恐息息相关。在可预见的将来，美国中东政策将在确保中东根本利益不受影响的前提下，根据反恐需要做相应调整，而巴以冲突将维持可控制的低烈度状态。     

The Secret Downing Street Memo,the One Percent Doctrine,and the Politics of Truth: A Performance Text

Presented to the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction in Montreal, Canada, on August 7, 2006, this performance text is a critique of the Bush administration and its reliance on science, or evidence‐based models of inquiry (SBR). SBR raises issues concerning the politics of truth and evidence. These issues intersect with the ways in which a given political regime fixes facts to fit ideology. Three versions of SBR are discussed. A model of science as disruptive cultural practice is outlined. I locate the interactionist project in the discourses surrounding the global war on terror and the war in Iraq. I conclude by calling for a merger of critical pedagogy with a prophetic, feminist postpragmatism.     

美对伊战争目的与伊重建

美英于3月20日对伊发动了战争，5月1日，布什总统宣布在伊的“大规模战斗”已经结束。至此，美结束了其“改造”伊拉克的第一阶段行动；第二阶段的工作是重建和掌控伊拉克，从中获取丰厚的经济利益；第三阶段是在伊建立美式民主制度，作为样板供中东各国效仿。但战后，伊社会状况混乱，民不聊生，伊重建将面临诸多困难。     

中东棋盘上的伊拉克战略地位浅析

地缘政治是一种战略地理学，属国际关系理论中现实主义学派的一个理论支派。布什上台后，美国对外政策表现出明显的现实主义和实用主义色彩。美国避开联合国、北约甚至欧洲盟友对伊动武有经济、政治、丈化、价值观等许多深层原因，但用地缘政治理论更能清楚地了解布什中东政策的本质。通过考察伊拉克的战略地位及其在中东棋盘中的作用，有助于研究美伊战争后中东格局的演变方向。     

"There Must Be a Reason": Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification

One of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election was the strength and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Scholars have suggested that this belief was the result of a campaign of false information and innuendo from the Bush administration. We call this the information environment explanation. Using a technique of "challenge interviews" on a sample of voters who reported believing in a link between Saddam and 9/11, we propose instead a social psychological explanation for the belief in this link. We identify a number of social psychological mechanisms voters use to maintain false beliefs in the face of disconfirming information, and we show that for a subset of voters the main reason to believe in the link was that it made sense of the administration's decision to go to war against Iraq. We call this inferred justification : for these voters, the fact of the war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties between Iraq and 9/11.     

Defending America against its devotees Presidential Address,First World Congress of the International American Studies Association,Leiden, The Netherlands, 22–4 May 2003

Abstract

This presidential address at the International American Studies Association's first world congress was composed while the invasion of Iraq was under way. Like the Vietnam War that was launched through an historic act of mendacity called the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the current pre-emptive war may be based on claims and ideological agendas equally suspect in their veracity that may well prove a watershed for American culture and paradigm-altering for American Studies. This first IASA presidential address traces the historical precedents of the National Defense Strategy of the United States of America of September 2002, since called the Bush Doctrine, and reads it as a Monroe Doctrine writ globally and as a new US Martial Plan that displaces the Marshall Plan on which the current American Studies field was founded. The portentous changes implicit in this displacement bode a transformation in the foundation of American Studies similar to the changes precipitated by the Vietnam War, with the difference that the global scope of American Studies as an international field today will resist the re-absorption of these changes into a national and nationalist project of US Americanism.     

WAR PROGRAMMING: The Propaganda Project and the Iraq War

The invasion of Iraq was justified to the American people by a sophisticated propaganda campaign that reflected a think tank's vision for a new foreign policy. One objective of this article is to set forth a theoretical argument for analyzing modern propaganda campaigns as a feature of mass-mediated discourse crafted by think tanks and highly organized claims makers. We propose that the current structure of policy and critique is now institutionalized and formatted as War Programming, which connects criticism within a narrative sequence, including critiques and reflections about journalistic failings. The scope of the action is so immense that it precludes and preempts its critique. The second objective is to show how the rationale for the invasion was developed as a "public conspiracy" over a decade by the members of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). The third aim of this article is to describe and clarify why the PNAC plans for Iraq and an imperialist foreign policy received very little news media coverage. Qualitative content analysis of news materials suggests that the news sources and media shared a logic and perspective about "timely and entertaining news." The PNAC plan was not publicized by the major news media because it fell outside the focus of the Bush administration's propaganda campaign to demonize Iraq and its leader Saddam Hussein, who was held to be responsible for attacks on the United States. The implications of such a well-organized propaganda campaign for future news coverage of war are discussed.     

Social-psychology and the invasion of Iraq

Abstract

The invasion of Iraq by American and British forces is analyzed from the standpoint of social psychology. The following social phenomena and events are discussed: (a) the role of groupthink in the intelligence failure; (b) asymmetrical consequences of reward and punishment and the role of causal attribution in responsibility assignment as explanations for the alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by Iraq;(c) dissonance avoidance and the refusal by those responsible for the invasion to accept that there were no WMD in Iraq; (d) balance theory, retributive justice and the attempt to link Saddam to bin Laden after the acceptance of the inexistence of WMD; (e) de-individuation, power of the situation, and obedience to authority and the Abu-Ghraib tortures; (f) the escalation of violence and the psychology of malignant social processes. The paper ends with a distinction between science and applications of science, and gives some recommendations to achieve peace in the world based on social psychological knowledge.     

Undergraduate Social Work Faculty in the USA React to the War with Iraq

The role of social workers in political activism has been characterized with ambivalence, and few studies have addressed political activism within the social work academic setting. The purpose of the current study was to explore how social work educators responded to the war with Iraq from an educational perspective as well as a personal perspective. Undergraduate social work faculty (N = 65) from accredited social work programs in each state throughout the USA completed a brief quantitative survey via email about the war with Iraq including the following topics: educational responses; personal responses; personal views; academic freedom; and demographic data. Findings revealed that 70% of respondents felt that social work faculty had a responsibility to educate students about the war with Iraq, however, only 36% of respondents felt that social work faculty had a responsibility to advocate for or against the war with Iraq. The majority of the faculty surveyed incorporated the war with Iraq in their class activities (88%) and participated in war activities outside of class on their own campus (80%). A significant minority of faculty felt restricted by their institution from expressing their views of the war with Iraq during class time (14%) and on their own campus (17%).     

倒萨战争——确立美国新秩序的战争

冷战后,美国利用高新技术,扬长避短,连赢了几场战争,对外动武的信心十足。阿富汗战争和伊战的胜利助长了美的气焰,美成了当前世界主要的战争策源地。冷战后,遭受过美打击和欲打对象几乎都是发展中国家,反恐已成为美的金字招牌,镇压、剪除发展中国家中不服它的“刺头”的道义理由。伊不会是美欲打名单上的最后一个,反恐战争有可能指向“南方”国家。伊战是场全球化、信息化时代的“新的十字军东征”,是美在世界确立其新秩序的战争。     

Carl Schmitt’s politics in the age of drone strikes: examining the Schmittian texture of Obama’s enemy

When George Bush declared to his global audience that they were either ‘with us or against us’, he appeared to directly invoke the Schmittian antithesis of friend vs. enemy. Against the historical backdrop of Bush’s war on terror, and the scholarly attention his foreign policy received in relation to Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political, this paper examines whether the Obama administration’s targeted killing regime has marked a departure from Schmitt’s paradigms of war and enmity. Focusing specifically upon the rapid increase in use of drone strikes during Barack Obama’s presidency, this paper argues that the production of the enemy’s abstractness and drive for its annihilation together push at the limits of the Schmittian political logic. However, rather than denoting the point at which political relations are unexplainable through a Schmittian lens, this paper proposes that this produced enemy and its treatment in drone ‘warfare’ obfuscates the lines between a complex of Schmittian paradigms.     

美伊战争对我国安全的影响

美伊战争是美国对中东国家进行民主改造和“先发制人战略”的试验场，也是美国实现其全球霸权的重要举措。它不仅改变了中东地区的战略格局，也改变了世界的政治格局、能源格局，对我国的政治、经济、军事和地缘安全产生了深刻而长远的影响。     

LAST OF THE DINOSAURS? BIG WEAPONS,BIG SCIENCE,AND THE AMERICAN STATE FROM HIROSHIMA TO THE END OF THE COLD WAR

This article examines the origins and recent crises in linkages between big science, big weapons, and the U.S. state during and after the cold war. We examine the sources of legitimacy of military dominance of U.S. research and development (R&D) in the first decades of the cold war and argue that the exigencies of a nuclear arms race between two superpowers gave the military an unprecedented peacetime claim on science and technology resources. We argue that economic crises, political challenges by peace movements, and technological exhaustion of the nuclear arms race in the 1980s weakened military claims to science and technology leadership, but that the 1991 Persian Gulf war deflected what might have been a major shift in U.S. R&D priorities. We conclude by examining U.S. post-cold war R&D policy and find that military priorities remain preeminent.     

Strategic Role Taking and Political Struggle: Bearing Witness to the Iraq War

U.S. and Canadian peace activists traveled to Iraq as a social movement tactic, in the buildup to the war and during the war itself, in an attempt to sustain or increase peace activism at home. Based on interviews with fourteen peace activists, this study analyzes how the presence of antiwar activists in Iraq serves two social movement goals. First, their presence in Iraq bestowed activists increased access to media, bolstering their ability to reframe the war within mainstream media accounts. Second, by traveling to Iraq, activists furnished themselves with stories of the hardships and suffering of war to share with audiences at home. By retelling these narratives, activists provide opportunities and obligations for audience members to imaginatively take the role of Iraqi civilians, in the hope that audience members will practice moral reasoning and be consequently moved to act against the war. To provide these role‐taking opportunities, peace activists must also engage in a political struggle over “otherhood” by countering official attempts to dehumanize Iraqis.     

Public Opinion on Foreign Policy: The Multilateral Public that Perceives Itself as Unilateral

Americans have a strong preference for multilateral foreignpolicies over unilateral foreign policies. But do Americansknow their own preferences? Data from a national survey showwide misperceptions of public opinion on foreign policy. WhileAmericans strongly prefer multilateral policies, they overestimatepublic support for unilateral policies. For example, while only23 percent of respondents agreed that the more important lessonof September 11 is that the United States should work aloneto fight terrorism rather than work with other countries, respondentsestimated that almost 50 percent of Americans endorsed thisview. Moreover, misperceptions of public opinion were relatedto subsequent judgments of specific policies. For example, respondentswho incorrectly perceived the unilateral view as the majorityview were 1.84 times more likely to support a presidential decisionto invade Iraq without the approval of the United Nations (UN)Security Council than respondents who correctly perceived theunilateral view as the minority view. Misperceptions of publicopinion were also associated with the belief that the currentforeign policy reflects the opinions of the American people.This belief in the legitimacy of the foreign policy was as stronga predictor of support for specific unilateral policies as respondents’attitudes.     

The Vital Importance of Critical Listening: An Extended Example

As a means of reinforcing the importance of critical listening, this study analyzes six speeches presented by President George W. Bush. These speeches provide an extended example of the use of a rhetorical technique, associational juxtaposition, in which President Bush gives the impression of a connection between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center by al-Qaeda when, in fact, no evidence or reasons existed to support such a connection. The paper concludes by discussing how Mr. Bush's use of associational juxtaposition underscores the need for effective critical listening.     

论阿里·哈迪清真寺的象征功能

阿里·哈迪清真寺的遭毁如同麦加禁寺罹难,开启了中东的潘多拉盒子,灾难与罪恶、丑闻与血腥、悲愤与绝望弥漫于巴格达的上空,伊拉克重建充满了更多的变数。阿里·哈迪清真寺遭毁所引发的一系列排他性暴力袭击,是逊尼派和什叶派之间矛盾激化的产物且销蚀了伊民众的国家认同意识,也将伊拉克问题升级为美国和伊朗之间政治交易的重要筹码,还使伊拉克成为美国反恐的主战场而将伊民众重建家国之梦碾为齑粉,更置美国于进退两难的尴尬境地,并使伊拉克重建前景令人堪忧。可见,阿里·哈迪清真寺的象征功能发挥了相当的现实效用。     

The lawyers’ war: states and human rights in a transnational field

While torture and assassination have not infrequently been used by states, the post 9/11 ‘war on terror’ waged by the US has been distinguished by the open acknowledgement of, and political and legal justifications put forward in support of, these practices. This is surprising insofar as the primary theories that have been mobilized by sociologists and political scientists to understand the relation between the spread of human rights norms and state action presume that states will increasingly adhere to such norms in their rhetoric, if not always in practice. Thus, while it is not inconceivable that the US would engage in torture and assassination, we would expect these acts would be conducted under a cloak of deniability. Yet rather than pure hypocrisy, the US war on terror has been characterized by the development of a legal infrastructure to support the use of ‘forbidden’ practices such as torture and assassination, along with varying degrees of open defence of such tactics. Drawing on first-order accounts presented in published memoirs, this paper argues that the Bush administration developed such openness as a purposeful strategy, in response to the rise of a legal, technological, and institutional transnational human rights infrastructure which had turned deniability into a less sustainable option. It concludes by suggesting that a more robust theory of state action, drawing on sociological field theory, can help better explain the ways that transnational norms and institutions affect states.     

The History of 0

When time has erased all details and ambiguities concerning the Iraq war the Abu Ghraib pictures will still be remembered, for two interrelated reasons. First, the pictures may be seen as part of a particularly cruel form of torture, in which the act of exposure multiply the feeling of shame. The significance of the pictures rests not in what they depict but in the fact that they were taken at all. The sexual nature of the torture, the use of the camera to multiply the feeling of shame, and the fact that the soldiers through their inclusions in the frame show no shame constitute their truly shocking nature. Second, the pictures provoked significant debate. They were used as forms of resistance against the “coalition of the willing”, with the Bush government afterwards trying to exercise damage control. The reason that the pictures had such impact was not the event itself — the fact that torture was applied. Most people know that such acts occur in wars. However, the various photographs, especially the hooded man in the “Jesus Christ pose” with wires attached to his limbs, had iconic potential. On a more fundamental level the perverse practices known from the prison worked as a secret and disavowed basis of American power, which was brought to light. Suddenly, American ideals appeared on the same plane as their constitutive exceptions. This left the administration with the choice of either denying the existence of this “downside” or in generalizing the exception (legalizing torture etc.). It was in fact by not choosing one of the strategies, but playing both cards simultaneously, that the Bush government lost so much prestige.