ARC Under Pressure With Regard to its Grants to Study the Causes of Terrorism. (September 16, 2006)

    Following the accusations by University of Queensland terrorism researchers Carl Ungerer, a foreign affairs and national security adviser to former federal Labor leader Simon Crean, and David Martin Jones a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Queensland that research in Australia is skewed towards the concept that Western policies are to blame for terrorist attacks but ignores the psychology of terrorists and the ideology driving them, the chief executive officer of the Australian Research Council (ARC), Peter Høj has vigorously defended the its funding of peer reviewed research projects.

The two University of Queensland academics are critical of terrorism projects funded by universities and the Australian Research Council, which has committed $24.02 million to 82 projects over 10 years.

The matter has received increasing media attention over the past several weeks which was highlighted by the report that  Flinders University sociologist, Riaz Hassan, awarded more than $800,000 by the ARC to study suicide terrorism, for which he proposed to interview terrorist leaders, was to be abandoned or markedly modified.

Federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock warned Professor Hassan that in pursuing his proposed study he might be in breach of Australia's new terror laws.

According to The Australian, Mr Ruddock said the Government wanted to ensure that academic research into terrorism was appropriate, "It is an important issue for academics and it is important to me. We are funding research and we want that research to be able to better inform us."

A turn of phase George Orwell would have been pleased to find place for in 1984.

And it is noteworthy that prior to Mr Ruddock's warning to Professor Hassan, James Cook University lecturer, Merv Bendle, described terrorism research in Australia as being in crisis and had questioned the ARC funding of Professor Hassan's project because he had declared in his application that a link between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism was not only spurious, but possibly fostered Western policies that worsened the situation.

Robert Pape, associate professor of political science at the University of Chicago has had high level access to both Pentagon and US State Department officials. He has drawn the conclusion that the premise of the so-called war on terror is wrong. Having examined almost 500 suicide attacks since 1980, he has come to the conclusion that terrorists are not inspired chiefly by religious extremism and a desire to attack Western values. Instead, he's says they're driven by political and strategic motives, like forcing the US out of the Middle East.

The American Conservative's Scott McConnell interviewed Professor Pape in June last year following the publication of his book on suicide terrorism, Dying to Win.

According to McConnell "Pape has found that the most common American perceptions about who the terrorists are and what motivates them are off by a wide margin. In his office is the world’s largest database of information about suicide terrorists, rows and rows of manila folders containing articles and biographical snippets in dozens of languages compiled by Pape and teams of graduate students, a trove of data that has been sorted and analyzed and which underscores the great need for reappraising the Bush administration’s current strategy."

Now in response to the criticisms by Drs Ungerer and Martin Jones, Professor Høj has replied in The Weekend Australian saying the ARC proposed to support research into "the origins, motivations and dynamics of trans-national security threats" in its planned Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security.

Furthermore, he went on to say, "The ARC does not give preference to research applications that adopt a particular perspective. The ARC seeks to support research that is in the national interest and is of the highest quality."

And as a rebuttal to Drs Ungerer and Martin Jones, Professor Høj also pointed to five projects funded by the ARC that examined links between terrorism and Islam and the legal responses to terrorist threats.

The Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop, has previously indicated that she would avoid rejecting grant applications that had been approved by the ARC's peer review system, in contradiction to a number of such interventions that had been made by her predecessor, Brendan Nelson. It is not unlikely that pressure will be brought to bear on the ARC and the minister as to grant approvals in this subject area. How well that pressure will be repelled remains to be seen.

But more insidious is the possibility of what Ian Lowe has referred to as pre-emptive crumble.

Mr Ruddock's warning to Professor Hassan was certainly intimidating. Will it discourage future grant applications which propose research along similar lines, and will the ARC and its reviewers be dissuaded from objectively assessing such applications if they are forthcoming?