The routine employment of torture on the popular television
series 24 has given rise to the charge
that the program lends verisimilitude to the questionable premise
that torture is a legitimate and effective means of interrogation. A
growing body of evidence suggests the critics' charge is correct. Indeed,
the Dean of the US Military Academy at West Point grew sufficiently
concerned about the pernicious effects 24 was having on his cadets that he traveled to
California to meet with the show's creators to ask them to tone down
the use of torture on the program. The Intelligence Science Board has
echoed the critics' concerns, arguing that similar reality-distorting
attitudes towards torture can be seen in the public at large. But how
and why can a wholly fictional program like 24 actually influence political reality? Is this case
something of an exception, or more akin to the rule? Unfortunately,
evidence suggests that fiction and other socially constructed
portrayals of political reality-including propaganda, false flag operations
and conspiracy theories-have long exercised demonstrable effects on
political reality, often in unforeseen and unintentional ways.
Through the lens of the invasion panic that gripped Great
Britain in the late nineteenth century, Greenhill will explore how
and why national security-related "social facts"-i.e., things that
are deemed to be "true" simply because they are widely believed to be
true-can become broadly adopted and disseminated and, by extension,
thereby influence the development and conduct of national security policy. Greenhill
will further explore what this historical case can tell us about the theoretical
and policy implications such "social facts" may hold for the threats
we face today, including terrorism and the proliferation of weapons
of mass destruction.
Kelly M. Greenhill is Assistant Professor of Political
Science and International Relations at Tufts
University and Research Fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
She holds a Ph.D. and an S.M. from M.I.T., a C.S.S. from Harvard University,
and a B.A. from UC Berkeley. Greenhill previously held pre- or post-doctoral fellowships
at Harvard University's
Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and Belfer Center
for Science and International Affairs, and at CISAC.
Her work has appeared in a variety of venues, including the
journals International Security, Security Studies, and International Migration as
well as in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and in briefs prepared for
the U.S. Supreme Court. Greenhill has two books shortly forthcoming with
Cornell University Press: the first, Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced
Displacement, Coercion and Foreign Policy, focuses on the use of large-scale population
movements as instruments of state-level coercion; and the second, Sex, Drugs
and Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict (co-edited
with Peter Andreas), examines the politicization and manipulation of crime and conflict-related
statistics. She is currently at work on a new book, a cross-national study that
explores why, when, and under what conditions, fiction, so-called "social
facts" and other non-factual sources of information-such as rumors, conspiracy
theories and propaganda-materially influence the development and conduct of national
security policies.
Lynn Eden is Associate Director for Research at the Center for
International Security and Cooperation, Freeman Spogli Institute for
International Studies, Stanford University. Eden received her Ph.D. in
sociology from the University of Michigan, held several pre- and
post-doctoral fellowships, and taught in the history department at
Carnegie Mellon before coming to Stanford. In the area of international
security, Eden has focused on U.S. foreign and military policy, arms
control, the social construction of science and technology, and
organizational issues regarding nuclear policy and homeland security.
She co-edited, with Steven E. Miller, Nuclear Arguments: Understanding the Strategic Nuclear Arms and Arms Control Debates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989). She was an editor of The Oxford Companion to American Military History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), which takes a social and
cultural perspective on war and peace in U.S. history. That volume was
chosen as a Main Selection of the History Book Club.
Eden's book Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation(Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2004; New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2004)
explores how and why the U.S. government--from World War II to the
present--has greatly underestimated the damage caused by nuclear
weapons by failing to predict damage from firestorms. It shows how
well-funded and highly professional organizations, by focusing on what
they do well and systematically excluding what they don't, may build a
poor representation of the world--a self-reinforcing fallacy that can
have serious consequences, from the sinking of the Titanic to not
predicting the vulnerability of the World Trade Center to burning jet
fuel. Whole World on Fire won the American Sociological Association's 2004 Robert K. Merton Award for best book in science, knowledge, and technology.
