To support its counterterrorism efforts, the U.S. government should invest heavily in academic centers that study the history and culture of the Muslim world, a historian argues in a short essay in Foreign Affairs. David C. Engerman, an associate professor at Brandeis University, says the government should imitate the Soviet-studies centers that sprouted during the 1950s. (Mr. Engerman recently wrote a book about those centers.) The Defense Department’s Minerva project falls short, in Mr. Engerman’s view, because its projects focus too much on “the mechanics and tactics of terrorists” rather than on the political and cultural contexts of terrorist movements. For a related argument about area-studies programs, see William G. Moseley’s recent essay in The Chronicle Review.
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3 Responses to In Fight Against Terrorism, U.S. Should Mimic Cold War-Era Soviet-Studies Programs, Scholar Says
landrumkelly - December 10, 2009 at 6:15 pm
And the Israeli world? And the English-speaking world, etc.? I find it revolting to hear anyone suggest that terrorism is such a one-sided phenomenon.
jschantz - December 11, 2009 at 9:07 am
Are you saying that the US and Israel sponsors terrorism and that American scholars and military experts need to study ways to combat the only viable democracy and staunch allie we have in the middle east out of some misguided sense of fair play? What is revolting is your lack of priorities in helping frame a cohesive response to the primary challenge of our lifetime.Save your fringe politics for some other less educated audience.
raymond_j_ritchie - December 17, 2009 at 4:18 am
All well and good but unfortunately religiously motivated violence is different to the politically motivated violence of the Cold War era. Marxism was a pushover; Islamic fascism is much harder to deal with. For starters, Islam in the west is heavily funded by individual Saudis, Yemenis and other nice people and is a closed society whereas communist parties in the west were easy to infiltrate and were never heavily funded by the Russian or Chinese governments or billionaire marxists. Temperamentally Americans have great difficulty dealing with even the idea of religiously-motivated violence and religiously-motivated disloyalty. There are huge constitutional difficulties as well. Intelligence services in Western Europe, Israel, Asia or Australia do not have the same mental bloc nor do they have the same constitutional difficulties. Unfortunately, so far the track-record of Middle East or Islamic Studies Centres has not been promising. Islamic Studies Centres have simply provided a platform for Islamic dissimulation about how peaceful the religion is, it is all our fault and that the west has nothing to fear from Islam. That is all contrary to experience.