Human Terrain Team member blog by Ben Wintersteen

Macquarie honours student Nikki Kuper introduces the blog of a Human Terrain Team member Ben Wintersteen.

Minerva awards announced – no anthropologists funded

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has just announced the winners of the first round of research funded under the Minerva Initiative.  This was a joint process whereby the National Science Foundation (NSF) and DoD determined funding for research on “Social and Behavioral Dimensions of National Security, Conflict and Cooperation” — i.e. social science research [...]

Weaponized irony

There’s a fabulous little piece in the July issue of Harper’s from Graham Burnett and Jeff Dolven, a couple of professors at Princeton who put together a $650K, 3-year grant proposal for Lockheed Martin to identify irony and weaponize it.  An excerpt:
“Ideally suited to mobilization on the shifting terrain of asymmetrical conflict, inherently covert, insidiously [...]

NYT reviews David Kilcullen book

This weekend’s issue of the Books of the (New York) Times has a review of The Accidental Guerrilla by David Kilcullen, the Australian anthropologist and mastermind of the Human Terrain programme. The review, which is very positive, describes Kilcullen as “one of the few brave souls who had the ear of people in the Bush White [...]

Some HTS updates

A couple of news items about the Human Terrain System have crossed my desk in the past week and I’m finally getting around to writing about them.  First, there’s an extended article in the Boston Globe about Paula Loyd, the HTS anthropologist who was killed in Afghanistan by a man who set her on fire [...]

Kelly Fosher’s “Under Construction: Making Homeland Security at the Local Level”

Merriden Varrall, our PhD student who is doing her research on Chinese foreign policy, forwarded a review of Under Construction: Making Homeland Security at the Local Level, a dissertation-turned-book by Kelly Fosher published by the University of Chicago Press. Writing in The Times Higher, Jeremy Keenan rubbishes the book as “the epitome of all that [...]

Anthropologie sans frontières: Interview with Dr Alice Corbet

This post has been removed at the request of the author.

Nature calls for end to HTS

A Nature editorial calls for a swift end to HTS. Their objection: not the principle of putting anthropology and the social sciences in the service of the U.S. military in Iraq, but the fact that there have been several deaths, injuries, and a scandal in the form of hiring as an Iraqi translator a [...]

Attack on social scientist in the Human Terrain System in Afghanistan

Some sad news: Paula Lloyd, a social scientist on a Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan, was reportedly doused in gasoline and set on fire by a Taliban supporter.  According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lloyd was interviewing a man about gasoline prices when the man, who was carrying a container of gasoline,  doused her [...]

More on the Military’s ‘Culture Rush’: Brian Selmeski interview

There’s a culture rush going on in the U.S. military. While the Human Terrain System gets most of the media attention for being the face of the military’s sudden interest in culture, there are a whole host of other military efforts revolving around the concept of culture. For example, as we have mentioned on Culture [...]