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In late October and again this past week, the American Anthropological Association's (AAA) executive board issued recommendations on whether, or in what contexts, anthropologists should collaborate with or be employed by the U.S. military.
The AAA's initial resolution spoke firmly against the military's Human Terrain System (HTS) project:
The U.S. military’s HTS project places anthropologists, as contractors with the U.S. military, in settings of war, for the purpose of collecting cultural and social data for use by the U.S. military. The ethical concerns raised by these activities include the following:
1. As military contractors working in settings of war, HTS anthropologists work in situations where it will not always be possible for them to distinguish themselves from military personnel and identify themselves as anthropologists. This places a significant constraint on their ability to fulfill their ethical responsibility as anthropologists to disclose who they are and what they are doing.
2. HTS anthropologists are charged with responsibility for negotiating relations among a number of groups, including both local populations and the U.S. military units that employ them and in which they are embedded. Consequently, HTS anthropologists may have responsibilities to their U.S. military units in war zones that conflict with their obligations to the persons they study or consult, specifically the obligation, stipulated in the AAA Code of Ethics, to do no harm to those they study (section III, A, 1).
3. HTS anthropologists work in a war zone under conditions that make it difficult for those they communicate with to give “informed consent” without coercion, or for this consent to be taken at face value or freely refused. As a result, “voluntary informed consent” (as stipulated by the AAA Code of Ethics, section III, A, 4) is compromised.
4. As members of HTS teams, anthropologists provide information and counsel to U.S. military field commanders. This poses a risk that information provided by HTS anthropologists could be used to make decisions about identifying and selecting specific populations as targets of U.S. military operations either in the short or long term. Any such use of fieldwork-derived information would violate the stipulations in the AAA Code of Ethics that those studied not be harmed (section III A, 1).
In addition to these four points about the activities of anthropologists working in the HTS project itself, the Executive Board has this additional concern:
5. Because HTS identifies anthropology and anthropologists with U.S. military operations, this identification—given the existing range of globally dispersed understandings of U.S. militarism—may create serious difficulties for, including grave risks to the personal safety of, many non-HTS anthropologists and the people they study.
Conclusion
In light of these points, the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association concludes (i) that the HTS program creates conditions which are likely to place anthropologists in positions in which their work will be in violation of the AAA Code of Ethics and (ii) that its use of anthropologists poses a danger to both other anthropologists and persons other anthropologists study.
The AAA used a blog to solicit feedback on the resolution, and received more than 100 comments in response. Go check them out--they're interesting reading.
Then, on November 28, the AAA published a report based on greater research into the issue. That report takes a less oppositional stance to a broader range of collaborations between anthropologists and the military, but still cautions academics against the many ethical perils inherent in such projects:
We have found no single model of “engagement,” so issuing a blanket condemnation or affirmation of anthropologists working in national security makes little sense. Moreover, this very formulation – engagement vs. non-engagement – is itself problematic because it suggests that there is only one choice to be made in a monolithic military, intelligence, and security environment. With this in mind, we lay out procedural recommendations for the AAA, as well as suggest that the AAA provide ethical and pragmatic advice to individual anthropologists contemplating research or employment in an area that falls under the broad MIS banner. We recognize both the opportunities and perils that accompany engagement. On the one hand, the global situation calls for engagement. Since the Cold War, localized conflicts pitting culturally divided groups have increased the need for cultural knowledge and awareness of dynamic global forces. Anthropologists can
