Defence officials prepare to fight the poor, activists and minorities (and commies)

Yesterday I wrote about the Pentagon’s dubious role in funding social science research that could be applied to active military operations in the context of the increasing propensity for global systemic crises to challenge US interests. Several key research projects highlighted the extent to which US security agencies, assisted by civilian academic institutions, view entire populations – particularly those involved in political activism – as potential terror suspects who, therefore, deserve to be carefully monitored and studied.

It is not just the US where the effort to subordinate social science to the demands of state military ideology continues apace. In Britain, a key area where this is occurring is in the Research Councils UK (RCUK) Global Uncertainties programme, recently rebranded as the ‘Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research.’

The programme is led by the Economics and Social Research Council (ESRC), and supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). But it is not an independent exercise.

Rather it is explicitly designed to “help governments, businesses and societies to better predict, detect, prevent and mitigate threats to society” in the context of” environmental change and diminishing natural recourses, food security, demographic change, poverty, inequality and poor governance, new and old conflicts, natural disasters and pandemics, expansion of digital technologies, economic downturn and other important global developments.”

The RCUK partnership is thus deeply politicised. It “works closely” with a wide range of UK government departments, including the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, Department of Communities and Local Government, Foreign Office, Ministry of Defence (MoD), Home Office, and the US Homeland Security Department.

Its strategic advisory board is chaired by Sir Richard Mottram, a longtime Whitehall civil servant for defence whose last post was as Permanent Secretary for Intelligence, Security and Resilience in the Cabinet Office – Prime Minister Tony Blair’s top national security adviser – who also recently praised the coalition government’s Strategic Defence and Security Review as containing “much of value.”

He is also currently chair of the board of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), an MoD executive agency which performs science and technology work for defence purposes. Among Dstl’s activities are high-level operational analysis to support the Ministry of Defence along with providing support to counter-terrorism and frontline operations – to name just a few.

The government’s defence review which happened to meet with Sir Mottram’s approval, titled ‘Securing Britain in an Age of Uncertainty’, highlights the future risks of heightening “competition for resources, growing populations and climate change.” Priorities include “securing trade and energy supply routes”; working “overseas, using diplomatic, military, intelligence and economic activity to mitigate disruption to the transit of energy supplies”; as well as tackling risks “associated with other resources, such as key mineral components important for particular industries (e.g. rare earth metals which are crucial for some low carbon technologies), water and food.”

Domestically, the review calls for “enhanced central government and Armed Forces planning, coordination and capabilities” under the extraordinary totalitarian powers of the Civil Contingencies Act, to respond to domestic emergencies in the form of natural hazards, environmental disasters or other forms of strategic shocks.

Other members of the RCUK Global Uncertainty programme’s strategic advisory board represent a veritable ‘who’s who’ of the British defence policy establishment. They include Prof Michael Clarke, head of the Royal United Services Institute but also a 2009 appointee to the Prime Minister’s National Security Forum, a 2010 appointee to the Chief of Defence Staff’s Strategic Advisory Group, and a defence advisor to the UK Trade and Industry; former head of defence and security at the Government Office for Science and now deputy chief scientific advisor at the Department of Transport; Rob MacFarlane, assistant director for resilience in the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, National Security Secretariat, Cabinet Office; Prof Martyn Thomas, a member of the MoD’s Defence Scientific Advisory Council (DSAC), and a non-executive director of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA); Dr Seamus Tucker, a former career Foreign Office official who worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan supporting counter-terrorism efforts, and currently deputy director for science and technology in the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) of the Home Office where his remit includes engaging with the UK security industry.

These individuals are responsible for the Global Uncertainty programme’s “strategic direction” and “core themes”, co-ordination of its activities with the work of “research funders and potential users” – primarily “government” and “businesses” – and effective “exploitation of the research,” including “how best to ensure inputs from ‘connected’ RCUK and stakeholder investments.”

Some of the research generated through this programme is undoubtedly useful, and occasionally innocuous – but ultimately its fundamental direction is constrained by the naval-gazing limitations of the establishment ideology pertaining to UK security agencies and officials.

It is no surprise then that UK social scientists are feeling the pressure. Over the years, dozens of my senior academic colleagues at various international relations departments of top universities up and down the country have told me they are increasingly concerned and demoralised by the escalating encroachment of defence-related funding on the research environment. International relations departments are being transformed, they say, into conveyor belts for establishment-friendly ‘security studies’, with research designed for practical policy and operational utility being favoured the most for funding. Meanwhile, the scope for the sort of independent critical and sceptical inquiry that should be the hallmark of sound scholarship is being undermined.

These concerns are borne out by the facts. In 2007 the Guardian reported on an in-depth report exposing how 26 British universities had received contracts for research from the defence industry to the tune of nearly a billion pounds. “Corporate interests tend to favour secrecy, a monopoly of intellectual property rights, and the silencing of dissidence,” concluded the joint study by Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT) and Fellowship for Reconciliation (FoR). This sort of funding has continued, and includes extensive UK government military funding – and the numbers are probably much higher as several institutions refuse to provide information.

The ideological impetus behind this sort of research can be gleaned from a UK Ministy of Defence (MoD) report on global strategic trends published in 2010, updated in 2013, which contributed to the UK government’s Defence Green Paper. This is the first part of the process leading to the 2010 Strategic Defence Review, which met with the approval of Global Uncertainty chair Sir Mottram.

The key theme of the report by the MoD’s Development, Concept and Doctrines Centre (DCDC) is that the world “is likely to face the reality of a changing climate, rapid population growth, resource scarcity, resurgence in ideology, and shifts in global power from West to East” out to 2040. Dependence on complex global systems, chiefly “global supply chains for resources” is likely to “increase the risk of systemic failures.”

Although globalisation is “likely to be an engine for accelerating economic growth” the report said, it could also be “a source of risk, as local markets become increasingly exposed to destabilising fluctuations in the wider global economy. Economically, globalisation is likely to generate winners and losers, especially in the labour market.”

Globalisation will likely benefit “the globalised core, which comprises the most interdependent and economically successful regions of the world.” However, the report alludes to the danger of civil unrest in the core: “Instability within the globalised core is likely to adversely affect the national interests of major powers.” Furthermore it is the job of the globalised core’s security agencies to protect its dominant access to resources and technologies of production:

“Resources, trade, capital and intellectual property are likely to flow through this core, and rely on complex networks of physical and virtual infrastructure” including “air and sea lanes and their associated ports, rail and road infrastructure, communications links, gas, oil, electricity pipelines and cables, food distribution centres, banking and finance hubs, universities and science parks, manufacturing and energy production facilities.” Therefore: “Ensuring the security of this globally distributed infrastructure is likely to be of multilateral interest.”

Given that a tightly-knit network of just 147 of the world’s most powerful companies own and control the bulk of the world’s productive assets, this is virtually a defence manifesto for the 1% (or, perhaps more accurately, the 0.1%).

Despite the world producing sufficient energy, food and freshwater resources, the MoD report continues, “distribution and access to resources will be uneven” – concentrated in the richer core at the expense of the poorer periphery – “and local and regional shortages will occur, increasing the likelihood of societal instability and of disagreement between states, and providing the triggers that may ignite conflict.”

Most disturbing is the report’s implicit securitisation of foreign Muslim-majority populations in the periphery, and diaspora communities in the “core.” Rising populations “especially in the Middle East, Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa” may “fuel instability” by generating “youth bulges” that could “provide a reservoir of disaffected young people. In particular, young males with limited economic prospects may be susceptible to radicalisation.”

The report emphasises the vulnerability of cities, stating that “large urban areas” especially those with poor governance could become “centres of criminality and disaffection,” and as such, “focal points for extremist ideologies.” This could culminate in “urban, rather than rural, insurgency”, and at worst the failure of local governments. Here, the MoD refers directly to the rationale for the sort of social science research currently being funded in earnest by its American counterpart:

“A greater understanding of the dynamics of urban societies will be required if instability within these regions is to be identified and managed. New ideologies will emerge, driven by religion, ethnic differences, nationalism, inequality or a combination of these factors. Ideological conflicts are likely to occur and extremist groups may use violence to achieve political objectives.”

Note here that the sweeping reference to “extremist groups” indicates that violence is not integral to the assumption of their extremist character; what, then, makes them “extremist”? The MoD report is conveniently vague on this point, but it seems the context suggests any group working for major political and economic change that challenges the dominance of the “globalised core” – very similar themes to research funded by the DoD:

“There may be a resurgence of anti-capitalist ideologies, such as Marxism. Diaspora communities are likely to increase in size and influence and many will bring economic benefits to their host states. However, those that fail to integrate are likely to remain reservoirs for resentment. Some of these groups are likely to become involved in ideologically driven conflicts, and may act as proxies for other states. Similarly, host states may be drawn into regions and conflicts that reflect the interests of their diaspora communities.”

So ideologies which oppose global capitalism are “extreme” or “radical”, and assumed to be inherently vulnerable to political violence. Meanwhile, “diaspora communities” in the west – a polite euphemism for black and ethnic minority groups – will be particularly vulnerable to becoming “reservoirs for resentment” as capitalist globalisation continues to deepen inequalities between “winners” and “losers”, and thus to operating as fifth column “proxies” for foreign interests.

Though the language here is carefully articulated, its racist, imperialist pretensions are difficult to overlook: in coming decades, Muslims, immigrants, foreigners and activists are all potential terrorists, and must therefore be watched. The analysis is subliminally premised on the axiomatic drive to protect the multilateral supremacy of the globalised core at the expense of the periphery, rather than recognising the causal role of that very structure in accelerating security risks.

The underlying assumption is that the present system is the most advanced ever possible for humanity, and thus must be protected in its current structure at all cost.

The upshot is that Anglo-American security agencies, with the best of intentions, believe that civilian populations across both the core and periphery will become vortexes for ‘extremism’ as the normal operation of global capitalism concentrates the benefits of growth in a powerful minority dominating the planet’s productive resources, and thus ramps up resentment against the system – with the core locus of such dangerous resentment orienting around activists, civil society groups, and minority communities.

As the instability of global capitalism accelerates, the ‘war on terror’ is increasingly transforming into a war on dissent – a war on everyone who either opposes global capitalism in its current form, or is marginalised by it. In a world where 85 people are collectively worth $1 trillion – equal to the entire wealth of the bottom half of the world’s population – it’s fair to say that makes most of us.

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an international security journalist and academic. He is the author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It, and the forthcoming science fiction thriller, ZERO POINT. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jun/13/uk-defence-fight-poor-activists-minorities-marxists-commies