Insights

Drawing in part on research in the SSRC’s archives, Pete Millwood’s essay tells the story of how, in the 1970s, some US social scientists gained access to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). In collaboration with other scholarly organizations, the SSRC sponsored the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the PRC starting in the mid-1960s. The PRC was open to US natural scientists, but wary of social science scholars traveling to China and engaging with their counterparts. Millwood reports that, as a workaround, social scientists would accompany natural scientists as escorts and translators until the late 1970s, when leadership changes in the PRC created a relatively more open environment for scholarly exchange.

The recent re-capturing of state power by the Taliban has led to much speculation of how they will rule Afghanistan. In this essay, Adam Baczko argues that one key part of the answer is to understand how the Taliban governed the rural territories they controlled while insurgents, in particular the judicial system they established. The Taliban courts, run by clerics, in many cases were seen as more legitimate and consistent, and less corrupt, than those set up by the NATO-backed Afghan government. Whether the localized social order that the Taliban created as a rebel group can now be replicated throughout the country as the ruling regime is open to question.

Based on original research in the SSRC’s archives, Rafael Khachaturian chronicles the rise and influence on its Committee on States and Social Structures (CSSH), including its most prominent publication, Bringing the State Back In. Both a sequel and a rejoinder to the work of the prior Committee on Comparative Politics, CSSH brought together Marxist and Weberian perspectives to examine the state’s relation to, and autonomy from, class structures. Khachaturian concludes by arguing that CSSH’s incorporation of critical New Left perspectives into professional social science had the effect of occluding the more overtly political dimensions of those critiques.

As he waged his fight for civil rights for Black Americans in the US South, Martin Luther King Jr. paid attention to American social science work on race. King was critical of this work, especially the notions of “social pathology” used to describe and explain the social conditions of African Americans. Many liberals, particularly in the US North, while critical of Southern racism, used this theory to justify their own neglect and discriminatory actions. Building on her presentation at the SSRC’s event on Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, Jeanne Theoharis draws attention to Myrdal’s blind spot for Northern liberals and how the broader social sciences’ language of pathology and culture were employed by Northern elites. King, she explains, challenged these concepts and argued that Black precarity was rooted in inequality and racism.

The postwar Behavioral Revolution, Michael Desch argues, aimed to infuse social science with “scientific” approaches while preserving its applicability in the policy world. Focusing on two of the Behavioral Revolution’s leading figures, Talcott Parsons and Gabriel Almond (and their ties to the SSRC), he contends that, in fact, the goal of relevance was sacrificed through the pursuit of behavioralist theories and approaches. With a focus on comparative politics, Desch claims that the marginalizing of area studies, by focusing on more universal models of politics, took attention away from the contextual knowledge that was more needed by, and thus relevant to, policymaking.

Johanna Crane examines the devastating health effects of incarceration in US prisons, which dramatically deteriorate rates of physical and mental well-being, constituting what she calls a “slow death” by imprisonment. Crane’s research finds that imprisoned people refer to themselves as “being institutionalized”—“a biopsychosocial state” of anxiety that has long-term bodily and mental impact. Crane concludes by arguing that looking at prison through a public health lens is important but must not detract attention from the structural reasons for mass incarceration and how to address them.