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Government Funding Universities to Research Ways to Contain/Neutralize Activists

Every day, the world gets a little more dystopian sci-fi. Not only is the Department of Defense using social scientists to figure out ways to control dissent, they've spread the research around so that each piece of research on its own appears innocuous. That sounds like a familiar movie plot.

Last year, the DoD's Minerva Initiative funded a project to determine 'Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?' which, however, conflates peaceful activists with "supporters of political violence" who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on "armed militancy" themselves. The project explicitly sets out to study non-violent activists.
...
From the outset, the Minerva programme was slated to provide over $75 million over five years for social and behavioural science research. This year alone it has been allocated a total budget of $17.8 million by US Congress.

An internal Minerva staff email communication referenced in a 2012 Masters dissertation reveals that the programme is geared toward producing quick results that are directly applicable to field operations. The dissertation was part of a Minerva-funded project on "counter-radical Muslim discourse" at Arizona State University.

...

According to Prof David Price, a cultural anthropologist at St Martin's University in Washington DC and author of Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State, "when you looked at the individual bits of many of these projects they sort of looked like normal social science, textual analysis, historical research, and so on, but when you added these bits up they all shared themes of legibility with all the distortions of over-simplification. Minerva is farming out the piece-work of empire in ways that can allow individuals to disassociate their individual contributions from the larger project."

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By min | December 10, 2014, 3:40 PM | Liberal Outrage


Comments

No doubt you're tagged now.

Winter Soldier, or with a name like Minerva, perhaps the Kree Empire. What next, Ronan the Accuser?

Reference from SuperMegaMonkey

The latest in our bizarre and clumsy attempts to overthrow the Cuban government isn't quite as stupid as the fake Twitter program, but it was equally ineffective, put innocent people in danger, and: Instead of sparking a democratic revolution, it...    Read More: Can we stop please?