RT:
Pentagon spending millions to prepare for mass civil unrest
Published
time: June 13, 2014 20:22
The
Pentagon is pumping millions of dollars annually into programs that set out to
explore the factors responsible for creating civil unrest around the world, The
Guardian reported this week.
An article by journalist Nafeez Ahmed published by
the paper on Thursday this week acknowledges that the little-known United
States Department of Defense program — the Minerva Research Initiative — has
since 2008 partnered with universities “to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the
social, cultural, behavioral and political forces that shape regions of the
world of strategic importance to the US.”
According
to the program’s website, it has recently awarded millions of dollars to be
divvied up among 12 proposals from colleges that have launched projects
relevant to the Pentagon’s interest, including a Cornell University study
called “Tracking Critical-Mass Outbreaks in Social Contagions” as well as
others involving state stability, social disequilibrium and, in one instance,
“Understanding American Muslims Converts in the Contexts of Security and
Society.” The funding all comes entirely from the Dept. of Defense.
“Understanding
the Origin, Characteristics and Implications of Mass Political Movements,” a
study out of the University of Washington, was among those selected as well. In
Lowell, Massachusetts, researchers there will use $2 million from the Pentagon
to study terrorist behavior.
“This
research is intended to identify precisely how children get involved and how to
interrupt and stop the process,”UMass Lowell Professor Mia Bloom told the Lowell
Sun of
her Initiative-accepted project. “The research will contrast children in
terrorist groups with child soldiers and children in gangs to better understand
how they are alike and how they differ.”
Jonathan
Moyer of the Pardee Center for International Futures in the School of
International Studies at the University of Denver told a campus publication at that school
last month that a project he is involved with — one that will also now receive
Pentagon funding — will “hopefully help us understand instability in middle-income
countries, not just the low-income countries.”
“Trying to
pull out the Tunisias and the Libyas and the Ukraines,” he told the Pardee Center, “and why they might be unstable.”
“The total
funds awarded for this set of projects is expected to be around six million
dollars in the first year and $17 million over three years,” the Minerva Initiative acknowledged on
its website.
Writing for
The Guardian, Ahmed investigated these programs further and determined that
many are directly involved in mass protests and other acts of civil unrest
witnessed by the world in recent years. The Cornell project, for example, will
determine “the
critical mass (tipping point)” of social contagians by studying their “digital traces” in the cases of “the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011
Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi
park protests in Turkey,”
Ahmed wrote. To accomplish as much, researchers say they will examine social
media conversations such as Twitter posts “to identify individuals mobilized in a
social contagion and when they become mobilized.”
Another
project, Ahmed added, is managed by the US Army Research Office and focuses
in “large-scale
movements involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity” across 58 countries around the globe.
The
Pentagon’s overseeing of academic projects like these have raised eyebrows
before, and even earned the ire of the American Anthropological Society due to
its concerns with where the funding comes from.
“The
Department of Defense takes seriously its role in the security of the United
States, its citizens, and US allies and partners,” Dr Erin Fitzgerald, the Minerva
Initiative’s director, told The Guardian. “While every security challenge does not cause
conflict, and every conflict does not involve the US military, Minerva helps
fund basic social science research that helps increase the Department of
Defense’s understanding of what causes instability and insecurity around the
world. By better understanding these conflicts and their causes beforehand, the
Department of Defense can better prepare for the dynamic future security
environment.”
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