The Intellectual Market is Rigged: Militarized Knowledge and the US Elite Think-Tank Network

Readers interested in global politics can be divided into two categories: those who are generally interested in the affairs of the world and want to keep themselves current with emerging geopolitical developments and then those who have more defined specific research foci, who need information to hone their research ideas. However while the former are passive recipients of knowledge and information, the latter are in an authoritative position to use information to produce, reproduce and circulate knowledge. Within this latter community, which includes, scholars, intellectuals, and researchers, the fascination for objective work building on cause and effect scenarios, and their assimilation of similar work, helps present an uncomplicated generalized world view which is easily decipherable. Of course, when the passive recipients come across such authoritative work, their penchants to contest these writings are largely sedated, given the intellectual authority of the knowledge producers, from where they are deriving their knowledge. Hence begins a circulation of knowledge in the community of readers which is largely focused on what kind of knowledge is produced and in the process, obfuscates the sources from where this knowledge is produced. To put this matter into perspective, let us look at think-tanks as knowledge producing agencies.

Essentially ideational repositories, think tanks are involved in knowledge production. As Wiarda argues: “Think tanks have come essentially to do the government’s thinking… Their scholars either come up with new ideas based on their own research or they rationalize and put into articulate public policy form the ideas and conclusions that other academics, politicians, and government officials had already arrived at but for various reasons were unable to put in writing or into a framework that policymakers can use”.1 The cross-pollination of ideas happens through various means including organizing events such as lunches, seminars, networking dinners, making television, media and public appearances, through personal contacts and issuing reports. However, one of the most important ways in which knowledge is produced and disseminated is through presenting and showcasing research through institutional publications targeting various audiences, including opinion magazines for policy-makers and the general public, and scholarly journals which are intended to be read by faculty members and university students. Rescuing information from the theoretical abstractions that pervade academic writing, scholars who contribute to the intellectual life of the think tanks produce knowledge based on new ideas or recycle existing academic ideas by making them more succinct, contemporary, policy-relevant and assimilative.

Experts in think tanks have inadvertently become the arbitrators between power and knowledge. On the one hand, in order to help the state articulate the objective causes of international problems, they identify the ‘real’ dangers or interests of states affected by those problems, and to suggest appropriate policy remedies, they have inadvertently become the “vehicle for the interpretation of international structures, the identification of the ‘imperatives’ facing the state, and the articulation of state interests in international politics”.2 On the other hand, their participation in the knowledge economy through ‘revolving doors’ allows them the opportunity to contribute toward knowledge production by becoming involved in disciplinary discussions through university teaching and journal publications. To inform policy on Pakistan, for instance, United States’ think-tank experts are often called upon to produce quick policy prescriptions and analysis of the state of democracy in Pakistan, its role in countering global terrorism, or whether foreign aid to Pakistan should be withheld. At the same time, the ingress of their opinion into academic discourse allows them to circulate their ‘truth’ to a wider audience.

The need to inform policy-makers on how to vote on, let’s say, military aid to Pakistan, is simultaneously followed by an academic discussion on why military aid to Pakistan should be given or withheld. Implicit within a discussion of such issues is a construction of Pakistan’s identity. What this means is that within the context of these discussions Pakistan’s identity as a state has been constructed, and reconstructed practices of representation are brought into play which enables the production and reproduction of Pakistan’s identity. Through these “discursive practices that put into circulation representations that are taken as truth”,3 practices, policies and courses of action are made possible. This further means that the ‘truth’ about what the Pakistani state is, constitutes and informs the context of theoretical and empirical discussions around what action and policy it warrants. Doty argues that the productive practice of constructing identities and relationships “is perhaps most obvious in situations where the production of truth and knowledge coincides with the military and economic power that facilitates control and domination”.4 In this instance then, the foreign policy think-tank experts who inform policy-making in the West cannot be absolved of the vital role they play in the production of ‘truth and knowledge’ about Pakistan’s representational identity by speaking to the economic and military power of the state on the one hand and, less conspicuously, by actively participating in discursive and representational practices through their membership of academe.

Yet think-tanks, especially those in the United States, use knowledge platforms to promote particularized agendas and those agendas are often connected to the concern of their donors. The Pentagon provides millions of dollars in funding to think-tanks every year to promote the Pentagon’s narrative. Other powerful weapon contractors also wield influence on United States’ national security priorities. A report released from the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative, or FITI, at the Center for International Policy, revealed that more than $1 billion in defence contractor and U.S. government funds flowed to the top 50 most influential U.S. think tanks from 2014-2019.5 Consequently “this creates a dangerous echo-chamber in the ideas industry that steers foreign policy debates to one solution: military might”.6 One example of how the weapons industry influences think-tanks is a recent case of the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation, a top 50 think-tank, publicly opposed a new Biden administration regulation that would have forced the weapons industry to report its greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time the Heritage Foundation is also a recipient of significant funding from the weapons industry which goes to show how the arms industry pays supposedly respectable institutions to do its policy bidding. Lazare argues that “this case provides a window into the murky world of think tanks, which are often viewed as academic and above-the-fray institutions but operate more as lobbying outfits”.7

Even though the weapons industry operating with the government and the pentagon, have a vast portfolio of investments, its greatest asset, however, is the vast troves of seemingly independent research that supports interventionist foreign policies and loose weapons export regimes. Foreign policy and military policy intellectuals, and the staff employed by think-tanks, form an intricately interwoven network which works alongside the global military-industrial complex, and has a dramatic impact on US foreign policy. Considering how the top think-tanks receive a considerable chunk of funding, the security justifications produced by the researchers at these think-tanks and the weapons industry’s drive for profit are mutually reinforcing. Most Washington, DC-based think tanks like the Center for Strategic and International Studies, International Institute for Strategic Studies, and the Brookings Institution, produce material that promotes an aggressive foreign policy, yet at the same time their donations come from the weapons industry. For instance “consider the Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS), one of the leading foreign policy think tanks in the United States: Among its 17 largest donors are six of the largest weapons makers (Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, SAAB AB and Huntington Ingalls, the largest military shipbuilder in the United States)”.8 Since think-tanks largely draw their research fellows and staff from the national security establishment, their ties with the weapons industry, which they have developed over the span of their professional careers, directly affect the research they produce, which consequently impacts the policies that are implemented. Hence “for an industry lobbying association, the cost of financing a think tank report is peanuts compared to the payoff” of getting biased narratives published nationally and internationally.9 The intended or unintended consequence of such biased publications is that since they are available in the public domain, the unsuspecting reader subscribes to the knowledge presented as ‘truths’. In this way these knowledges do not only influence policy-makers in the United States and the North, they also affect worldviews of those in the South, considering the impeccable credentials of the knowledge producers. Given this context, Pakistan emerges as pertinent case where such knowledges dominate the intellectual landscape.

I analyzed the top 100 journals in the field of International Relations from 2006 to 2016. The top 100 journals were selected from the 2017 journal ranking published by Scopus.7 Forty-two journals did not publish an article on Pakistan, hence the data set is restricted to 134 articles on Pakistan in 58 journals, including articles on South Asia within which Pakistan is studied. Of the total scholars who contributed to the literature on Pakistan, 52.5% scholars were based in the United States, 16.01% in the UK, and 10.9% in Europe. Taken all together 82.42% of scholarship originated from western centers of knowledge production. Within the data gathered on the knowledge produced in International Relation journals on Pakistan, 5 journals and magazines have contributed substantially to that knowledge. The Washington Quarterly (previously housed in the Center for Strategic and International Studies) published 18 articles, Survival (housed in International Institute for Strategic Studies) published 13 articles, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (a journal closely associated with the RAND Corporation) published 16 articles, International Security (housed in the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs) published 11 articles and Foreign Affairs (a journal of the Council of Foreign Relations) published 8 articles. Taken together these journals have contributed 47.7% of the scholarship produced on Pakistan between 2006 and 2016. Thus, close to half of the total scholarship on Pakistan from 2006-2016, was produced by think-tank housed/affiliated journals.

The discourse on Pakistan in the ten most cited articles in think-tank based journals, five from the Washington Quarterly, which was published by the Center for International and Strategic Studies, US, and five from Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, which is published by the International Institute of Strategic Studies, demonstrate a peculiar pattern. Considering that these journals are based at think tanks, it would generally be assumed that their content would target their respective governments, but all ten most cited articles in both journals had American-based authorship and most of these authors have either been intricately networked with US think-tanks or are an active members of these think-tanks. For instance amongst those who have written most on Pakistan and those who have been cited most, Ashley J. Tellis holds the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs and is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Christine Fair is a university professor who was previously associated with the RAND Corporation; Craig Cohen is executive vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS); Derek Chollet is currently serving as the Counsellor of the United States Department of State and was the Executive Vice President for security and defense policy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States; Seth G. Jones is senior vice president, Harold Brown Chair, director of the International Security Program, and director of the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS); Stephen Tankel is a former Adjunct Senior Fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS); and Philip Cohen Stephen P. Cohen was appointed senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program in 1998, and during his 21 years at Brookings, published seven books and several papers analyzing security and foreign policy in South Asia. You get the idea.

No wonder then that titles of their papers reflecting the interests of the elite knowledge network focused on terrorism, radicalization, drones etc. As if there was nothing ‘International Relations’ about Pakistan beyond these polarizing contents. For instance widely read titles included: Pakistan’s Record on Terrorism: Conflicted Goals, Compromised Promises, When $10 Billion is not Enough: Rethinking US Strategy towards Pakistan, Pakistan’s Dangerous Game, The Unraveling of Pakistan, Pakistan’s War Within, Lashkar e Taiba and the Pakistani State. These are very few examples amongst numerous such article topics which seek to myopically canvas Pakistan’s International Relations. Being authoritative subjects in International Relations, the knowledge on Pakistan that they have produced contributes vitally to the discourse on Pakistan both within academia and policy-making circles.

It won’t be amiss to say that the international discourse on Pakistan, especially which originates or is associated to US and western think-tanks is militaristic in nature and subtly calls upon the military might of the West, particularly the United States, for action. I agree with Armitage’s understanding of the US knowledge network as hypermodern militarized knowledge factories when he argues that “hypermodern militarized knowledge factories more and more conceive of information, facts, and data as merely something to be obtained for military purposes. Knowledge is then purely something to be disposed of by the military-industrial-complex in the global war zone… And so, faculty, undergraduates, postgraduates, and anxious civilians increasingly find themselves ensnared in hypermodern militarized knowledge factories that are becoming nothing less than the boot camps or the preparatory institutions for our entry into everyday war”.10 I also agree with Giroux.

“While collaboration between the national security state and higher education developed during the Cold War, the post-9/11 resurgence of patriotic commitment and support on the part of faculty and administrators towards the increasing militarization of daily life runs the risk of situating academia within a larger project in which the militarized narratives, values and pedagogical practices of the warfare state become commonplace…the ensemble of institutions, relations, culture and symbols of militarization now loom large in the civic order’s ‘field of vision and strategic action’…faith in social amelioration and a sustainable future appears to be in short supply as neoliberal capitalism performs the multiple tasks of using education to train workers for service sector jobs, creating life-long consumers, constructing citizen-warriors and expanding the production of militarized knowledge, values and research.11

Our work as scholars and readers, especially those in the global South, should not just be the unscrupulous consumption of knowledge which emanates from these authoritative centers but to unveil and lay bare the sources from which these knowledge proliferate our daily lives.