The Consortium for Strategic Communication (CSC) at Arizona State University has received a grant from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to study extremist narratives in populations targeted by terrorists. The project is led by CSC Director Steve Corman. Bud Goodall, Angela Trethewey, and Pauline Hope Cheong from the Hugh Downs School of Human Communication, and Daniel Bernardi from Film and Media Studies, complete the ASU team.
The $2.5 million, 3-year grant aims to develop a database of narrative forms and examples of their use by extremists in Southeast Asia, Southern Europe/Northern Africa, and the Middle East. The project will also develop a model that can be used to assess the degree of traction these messages are achieving in target audiences.
Corman sees the project as an opportunity for the field of human communication to promote more effective use of "soft power" by the military. "Killing extremists is not the way to defeat them. Without support in contested populations they will wither on their own," he said. "Our field has a lot to say about how to understand and disrupt narratives of violence, and this is our opportunity to prove it."
For some time, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has argued for an increased role for the social sciences in national security. In a November 2007 speech he said, "What is clear to me is that there is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on civilian instruments of national security -- diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action, and economic reconstruction and development." Last year his department initiated Project Minerva and other programs like to one at ONR to fund more unclassified research to help meet this need.
These initiatives are controversial in some academic quarters. Trethewey agrees that the role of academia in defense efforts is worthy of debate. "But at the same time there can be no question that terrorist ideologies threaten the liberal values that all communication scholars share," she said. "We're confident that developing ways to understand these ideologies and resist the rhetoric that promotes them is the right thing to do."
The project includes funding for three postdoctoral fellowships. The grant team is especially interested in people with language and culture expertise in the three regions being studied. Recent Ph.D.s who also have expertise in strategic communication, counterterrorism, ideology, narrative analysis, media analysis, transmediation, and/or computational modeling are encouraged to apply. Applications are due April 7, and more details can be found in the position announcement at http://comops.org/asu-csc-postdoc.pdf.
