Article Blogging Current Affairs History Journal of Contemporary History 46(3) 658–670 ! The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0022009411403341 jch.sagepub.com Juan Cole University of Michigan, USA Abstract The internet poses acute challenges to historians. Blogging and other forms of internet communication have outstripped the reach of more conventional forms of academic publications. They also provide new types of sources that would otherwise be impossible for historians to access, not least in areas of conflict. These new forms of communication must be embraced by contemporary historians as they seek to speak truth to power. They allow contemporary historians to engage with public and political debate in critical new ways. Blogging will not replace the monograph or the peerreviewed journal article, nor will it replace archival research. In affecting public debates and political outcomes, and in obtaining new sources, blogging is a form of communication contemporary historians ignore at their peril. Keywords blogging, internet, Iraq War, Middle East Have historians entered an era in which it is possible and even necessary to write ‘current affairs history’? Is ‘contemporary history’ now too constraining an idea, in an age when historians are called upon to respond to the day’s headlines and when they can do so through blogging and other forms of internet communication? In an age of micro-blogging, what future is there for the 35-page journal article, or indeed for journals as a form of publication? In an age when news cycles are increasingly compressed and the ‘twenty-four-hour news cycle’ is already old hat; when torrents of textual and visual information cascade into our homes at the speed of light along fat pipes, do historians have an obligation to bring to bear their skills – in contextualization, causality, attention to change over time, focus on large social groups, myth-busting and awareness of issues in language and representation – on matters of burning interest to the public? Why did so few professional historians speak out one way or another on the Anglo-American Iraq War of 2003, especially given the penchant of its advocates to argue by historical analogy? What are the trade-offs in personal risk, public voice, and the potential damage to credibility of perceived Corresponding author: Juan Cole, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA Email: [email protected] Cole 659 partisanship, when historians intervene in the public debates of the day? As citizens of democratic nations, can they escape the obligations of truth-speaking (parrhesia) laid upon all such citizens? Do they by guarding their distance and pronouncing only on past decades achieve more public regard for their objectivity, or do they make themselves irrelevant? What good does it do a historian to be respected by the public for her careful work on the nineteenth century if she loses her son to a foreign war prosecuted on false pretenses by her present government in part on the basis of false historical reasoning? As for the issue of public respect, are we fooling ourselves that the North Atlantic ‘public’, in a time when the typical academic monograph sells less than a thousand copies, even knows the names of any professional historians of, say, the nineteenth century, much less entertains a respect for their integrity? These dilemmas are hardly new ones for academic historians, but they are pitched more urgently than ever before by the internet revolution and by the neo-imperialism of the early twenty-first century. Some have argued that blogging has much in common with the pamphleteering and journal-keeping of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.1 While this analysis has some merit if we consider only the author and author practices, I would argue that the medium is the message and that the character of the internet and of the late capitalist security state combine to give blogging historically distinctive characteristics. The idea of blogging history has a more immediate genealogy in the practices of engaged historians of the Cold War era, the decades of the New Left, of decolonization and post-colonialism, and the blog’s predecessors were informal newsletters and little magazines. The tension between striving for objectivity and striving for relevance is not new. The practice of academic history-writing, as it grew up in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, favored dependence on archival sources generated by persons close to the events described in time and space and valued distance from the subject on the part of the historian. What Robert Novick called ‘That Noble Dream’ of objectivity dictated that the professional historian should, unlike the publicists, journalists, philologists, and antiquarians of previous generations, offer a reasoned, analytical account of a historical phenomenon or episode based on years of study and contemplation, and typically it was felt that the episode should be sufficiently distant in the past so that new generations had come on the scene and passions might have cooled.2 From 1965, the British journal Contemporary History intended to violate this latter stricture. Indeed, as the introductory essay to the first issue by Sir Llewellyn Woodward put it, the journal would treat events ‘which happened in the memory of living people’.3 Implied in this phrase was that the events were still consequential for the living, as well. He argued that past generations of British historians had 1 W. Caleb McDaniel, ‘Blogging in the Early Republic: Why Bloggers Belong in the History of Reading’, Common-Place, 5, 4 (July 2005), http://www.common-place.org/vol-05/no-04/mcdaniel/ index.shtml 2 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ’Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge 1988). 3 Llewellyn Woodward, ‘The Study of Contemporary History,’ Journal of Contemporary History, 1, 1 (1966), 1–13, at 1. 660 Journal of Contemporary History 46(3) declined to teach or write about modern politics, producing an odd situation in which many British politicians knew more about the classics than about modern Europe.4 Woodward dismissed the excuse that source material typically only became available much after the fact, observing that the governments and the press were generating unprecedented amounts of information on which historians could depend. Further, statistical information on the recent past was becoming immediately available, making an opening for what we now might call social science history Another development that moved the past forward for professional historians in the UK was the decision in the mid-1960s of the British government to amend its 50-year rule on opening the archives to researchers, setting a 30-year rule instead (a step that had already been taken in the United States).5 Other authors in the journal’s early years argued for something closer to what I am calling ‘current affairs history’. David Thomas observed in 1967, Any assiduous student can soon know more about quite recent events than the most erudite historian will ever know about many remoter events. Of course, his knowledge will not be complete, and the knowledge he lacks is perhaps more likely to have been kept from him by deliberate secretiveness than by time’s haphazard destruction of evidence: but the knowledge he lacks is unlikely to be more crucial to an intelligent understanding of events than knowledge which was either similarly suppressed long ago or merely got eaten by rats. The historian is faced, in either situation, with similar problems of assessing authenticity, accuracy, and relevance for his own purpose; of explaining the relationship between events and their relative significance for the larger themes which are his objects of study. The main difference is that the writer of contemporary history will have a vastly greater bulk of material to handle.6 Thomas offered as evidence for his conviction that immediate history was feasible that Marc Bloch’s Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence written in I940 ‘remains one of the best explanations of the military collapse of France’. He went on to ask, ‘Is it ‘‘contemporary history’’ – or only ‘‘evidence’’?’ In North America, as Sir Llewellyn acknowledged, the writing of the history of the recent past had already become a common practice. The Soviet launch of the Sputnik in 1957 and the nuclear arms race had created widespread anxiety among American elites over the backward and insular character of the US education system, leading to the passage in 1958 of the National Defense Education Act, which mandated Federal support for foreign language and culture study. Impelled by the same worries, foundations such as Mellon gave grants to major universities to establish area studies centers. Four such centers were established at the University of Michigan in 1961–62 with Mellon money, focusing on Russia and Eastern Europe; China and Japan; the Middle East; and South Asia. Over time, 4 Ibid. 5 David Thomson, ‘The Writing of Contemporary History’, Journal of Contemporary History, 2, 1, Historians on the Twentieth Century (January 1967), 25–34. 6 Ibid., 26. Cole 661 these centers also attracted NDEA monies from the government. Area studies centers bloomed in US universities in the 1960s and after, often strong-arming history and other units into hiring international experts, even though that focus may not have been a priority inside the department. Because of the NDEA and its successor, Title VI, the Department of Education insisted that there be a strong focus on current affairs and recent history in such centers, since they were intended to create experts who could interpret the contemporary world so as to aid the victory of capitalist democracy over international communism. That is, the US role as a superpower in the Cold War may have made its academic historians more open to international history and current affairs than was typically the case in Europe, which was often turning inward after the trauma of decolonization. The youth culture of the 1960s was another impulse to the American focus on global contemporary history. Academic historians in the early 1970s introduced courses on subjects then exciting the undergraduates, such as ‘History since 1960’, and some went on to publish in the areas they were teaching.7 The Cold War competition between the two superpowers for the Third World piqued student interest in the recent history of Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. These interests were reinforced by the increasingly multicultural student body and its identity politics. These demands for the teaching and writing of the contemporary history of the global South challenged the unstated presumption of venues such as The Journal of Modern History that ‘history’ pertained primarily to Europe. British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper had written with a straight face in the 1960s that ‘there is only the history of Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness’.8 Historians trained in area studies in the US begged to differ, deploying oral history and social science techniques to write the history of Africans. Indeed, given the dramatic events of decolonization, historians in the USA in the late 1960s and the 1970s tended to make a place for histories of recent events in the global South more generally. Historian Allan Nevins at Columbia University had founded the Oral History Project in 1948, and some of the early interviews, using tape recorders to preserve oral history accounts, were conducted in Africa. The Africanist field took to oral history with alacrity, given the relative paucity of indigenous written records in languages other than Arabic (and the richness of private archives in Arabic has only recently been recognized). But oral history favored a focus on relatively recent events and lent itself to socially relevant issues, such as the recovery of governmentally suppressed histories or informing development projects with local knowledge and perspectives, making African historiography precocious when it came to the contemporary.9 7 Ronald D. Tallman, William H. Beezley and Thomas H. Henriksen, ‘History for the 70’s: An Approach to Contemporary History’, The History Teacher, 6, 1 (November 1972), 9–16. 8 Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Past and Present: History and Sociology’, Past and Present, 42 (1969), 1–17, at 6. 9 Alistair Thomson, ‘Fifty Years On: An International Perspective on Oral History’, The Journal of American History, 85, 2 (September 1998), 581–95; Jan Vansina, ‘Once upon a Time: Oral Traditions as History in Africa’, Daedalus, 100, 2, The Historian and the World of the Twentieth Century (Spring 662 Journal of Contemporary History 46(3) Decolonization had led to the founding of new nation-states in the period between 1947 and 1969, where historians had an impetus because of national pride to begin writing contemporary history, for otherwise they would be condemned to focusing on the colonial. One of the complaints voiced by the Bengal-based Subaltern School about the contours of Indian historiography was that it was trapped in a concentration on the high politics generated by colonialism and the nationalist struggle, epitomized by Mountbatten and Nehru as binary opposites, such that it ignored the lived realities of most Indians.10 Likewise, the postcolonial school arose in response to events such as the Algerian Revolution (Frantz Fanon), the 1967 Israeli capture of the West Bank and Gaza (Edward Said), and the Vietnam War and its aftermath (Benedict Anderson), and its concern with the postcolonial often caused authors to address contemporary history. While postcolonial studies have been most prominently associated with the South Asian field, that area was small in US academia until fairly recently. Middle East Studies was bigger, and contributed to contemporary history in its own right. The Arab-Israeli conflict, the displacement of superpower rivalry into the global South, and world-historical events such as the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran led historians of the Middle East to treat the recent period of history. Gabriel Baer, a social historian at Hebrew University who usually concentrated on the nineteenth century, nevertheless wrote in 1964 on the contemporary demography of the Arab world.11 Richard P. Mitchell’s The Society of the Muslim Brothers, published in 1969, covered the rise of the main Egyptian fundamentalist movement through the mid-1950s, ending the story only 15 years before the publication date.12 Jack Crabbs, Jr., who graduated from the University of Chicago in 1970 and taught history at the California State University at Fullerton, published on the cultural politics of the Abdul Nasser period in 1975, only five years after the leader’s death.13 American historians of the Middle East who came out of the New Left in the 1970s also sometimes turned to contemporary history, and innovated in founding a popular magazine, the Middle East Research and Information Project, later entitled Middle East Report. The 1979 revolution in Iran, wrought up as it was with the culture and institutions of Shiite Islam, stumped many quantitative political scientists and drew historians into its study. Nikki Keddie of UCLA, Shaul Bakhash of Princeton, 1971), 442–68; Melvin Page, ‘Malawians and the Great War: Oral History in Reconstructing Africa’s Recent Past’, The Oral History Review, 8 (1980), 49–61; G.N. Usoigwe, ‘Recording the Oral History of Africa: Reflections from Field Experiences in Bunyoro’, African Studies Review, 16, 2 (September 1973), 183–201. For issues in decolonization see Fred Cooper, The Dialectics of Decolonization: Nationalism and Labor Movements in Postwar Africa (Ann Arbor, MI 1992). 10 Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies (New York 1988); see for contemporary history within a Subaltern Studies framework e.g. Gyanendra Pandey, ‘In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995 (Minneapolis, MN 1997), 1–33. 11 Gabriel Baer, Population and Society in the Arab East (New York 1964). 12 Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (Oxford 1969). 13 Jack Crabbs, Jr, ‘Politics, History, and Culture in Nasser’s Egypt’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 6, 4 (October 1975), 386–420. Cole 663 Ervand Abrahamian of the City University of New York – all historians who had written on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – were among the major interpreters of the revolution in the 1980s and 1990s. This concern with contemporary Iran among historians who had treated other periods, has continued as with the recent work of Vanessa Martin of Royal Holloway, University of London, on the Islamic Republic of Iran. Note that these are historians producing original monographs on contemporary Iran, not writers of surveys that come down to the present (even in the case of Keddie’s Roots of Revolution, the bulk of the book treated recent events). The Shiite revival also drew historians such as Elie Kedourie and Hanna Battatu to write on contemporary developments in neighboring Iraq.14 Historians working in the global South often lacked access to indigenous archives, or if the archives had been organized and were opened to researchers, they had more like a 70-year rule than a 50-year rule with regard to access. Thus, historians were dependent on newspapers, printed memoirs, journals and literary works, oral history interviews, visual materials and other local sources for the entire twentieth century. The same sorts of material were available for recent decades as for earlier ones in these countries, making it as legitimate to write about the most recent decade as about events of five decades before. The Egyptian National Archives are still not open for the Republican period since 1952, and writing about the late Mubarak regime of the past 10 years would involve using the same sorts of source material as writing on the 1950s. Admittedly, foreign diplomatic archives are open for the earlier period, but these are not always very useful if the subject has a grassroots and local flavor. Another impetus for American historians to write the contemporary history of the global South has been the relative paucity of political scientists with the requisite language and culture skills (which is not at all to deny that there are excellent political scientists who do have such skills; the question is how many, and what proportion they constitute of the comparative politics field). The number of political scientists at American universities in the 1980s who knew Persian and had resided in Iran and could interpret Khomeini’s movement to experts or the public could have been counted on the fingers of one hand. Harvard University does not have a tenured political scientist of the Middle East or of India, nor is it unusual among American political science departments in this regard. Indeed, even many of the universities with Title VI Middle East Centers lack tenured political scientists specializing in the Middle East or South Asia. The digital communications revolution has had a profound impact on the writing of contemporary history, and on academic scholarship more widely.15 14 Nikki Keddie, Roots of Revolution: An Interpretive History of Modern Iran, with a section by Yann Richard (New Haven, CT 1981); Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution (New York 1984); Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (Berkeley, CA 1993); Juan R.I. Cole and Nikki R. Keddie, Shi’ism and Social Protest (New Haven, CT 1986); Martin Kramer, Shiism, Resistance, and Revolution (Boulder, CO 1987); Vanessa Martin, Creating an Islamic State: Khomeini and the Making of a New Iran (London 2003). 15 See the essays in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Cultural Production in a Digital Age, 597, 1 (January 2005). 664 Journal of Contemporary History 46(3) Databases such as Lexis Nexis and the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (now the Open Source Center), available through most research libraries, make searching news sources since the 1970s possible. Documentary collections from US and British archives are increasingly available online. The American and British Freedom of Information Acts have allowed the creation of virtual archives of recent government documents on the World Wide Web, such as National Security Archive at George Washington University. Since the late 1990s, many newspapers and even primary documents have been posted in their entirety to the World Wide Web in the languages of the global South, allowing historians to carry out keyword searches in masses of source material, so that in some ways it is easier to research the very recent past than it would be to laboriously work through newspapers and journals of, say, the 1940s, in hard copy or on microfilm. (While many North Atlantic newspapers and journals are being retrospectively digitized, this effort is rare in the resource-poor global South, though putting new publications online is common there.) The internet archive as a new sort of source available to historians opens possibilities for contemporary history in the same way that oral history did in the postwar decades in fields such as Africa. It is not only sources that are being affected by the digital revolution but also publication. In 1999, Pyra Labs released software called Blogger, which made it easy for anyone to post an internet diary. A weblog or blog is characterized by entries at a website that are arranged so that the most recent come first. The entries can take the form of an essay or a short observation. Typically, the work of other authors on the web with whom the blogger is in dialogue is referenced by means of a clickable hyperlink, creating a field of intertextuality for readers. The advent of the weblog and of increased video and other multimedia capabilities on the internet in the decade of the 2000s coincided with dramatic events in world politics, including: the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington, DC, and the rise of a Muslim terrorist fringe in dozens of countries; the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by the United States and NATO forces; the AngloAmerican 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq; increasing NATO tension with Iran; two further Israeli-Arab wars; new confrontations between NATO and the Russian Federation over the former’s expansion into the Balkans and the Caucasus; the increasing emergence of China and India as global economic powers; a startling run-up in petroleum prices; the banking meltdown and profound economic contraction of 2008–9, and increasing signs of significant climate change. Given that my own fields are Middle East and South Asian studies, in what follows I will, in the nature of the case, have more to say about historians’ adoption of blogging in those areas. That my examples are drawn from these fields is not intended to detract from the wide scope of historians’ engagement with current affairs in other areas. Any attempt to present an exhaustive survey would make this essay unmanageably long. The coincidence of these riveting crises with new digital media created a tidal wave of public interest in current affairs that generated billions of hits on computer servers carrying analysis of them. A public ill-served by corporate mass media and Cole 665 government propaganda often turned to weblogs to make sense of these events, and the rise of a new medium with low entry fees and no gatekeepers allowed academic experts to enter into political conversations from which they had increasingly been excluded by the corporate television news channels. In consequence, some historians (and other academics) began intervening through the Internet or actually blogging current affairs.16 Several historians, mostly Americanists, intervened on these political issues, beginning in the early zeroes at the group blog Cliopatria at the History News Network (http://hnn.us/ blogs/2.html), with a generally Libertarian philosophical viewpoint. Because of network neutrality, the principle that all users of the internet have the same access to all public sites, historians were sometimes able to acquire a big megaphone by publishing on the web. If one of their essays at their personal websites struck the public imagination, it was as accessible as an opinion piece at a major newspaper or at a corporate news site such as CBS or MSNBC. Unlike the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, moreover, there were few (or in the case of blogging, no) gatekeepers between the historians and their audience. Right-wing historians such as Bernard Lewis or Niall Ferguson had easy access to the op-ed pages, but critics of government policy were seldom as favored.17 An example of such an intervention from the Left was John Dower’s essay in the online Boston Review in February of 2003, just before the Iraq War, in which he threw cold water on the idea that post-invasion Iraq would be in any way similar to US-occupied Japan or Germany. He was responding to propaganda talking points of Neoconservatives who attempted to configure the illegal and largely unprovoked Bush administration’s pouncing on Iraq as somehow like replying to fascist aggression in the second world war. Dower, who had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his work on postwar Japan, systematically refuted that argument.18 As time went on, what were essentially co-op magazine sites for public comment by historians emerged, such as Huffington Post or the Daily Beast, where op-ed pieces could be posted that perhaps resembled traditional newspaper commentary more than personal blogging. My own story is pertinent here. I began blogging in spring of 2002, as a result of the September 11 attacks, in an attempt to answer the questions I was asked on email discussion lists about al-Qaeda, Muslim politics, and Afghanistan and Pakistan (I had lived in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Pakistan, and India, and know Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and some Turkish). The Iraq War created a vast audience for my blogging, since the US military and civil commitment to Iraq was then much 16 Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell, ‘Web of Influence’, Foreign Policy, 145 (November– December 2004), 32–40. 17 Bernard Lewis, ‘Questions and Answers’, Wall Street Journal, 3 April 2003 (explains that Iraqis have not greeted the US enthusiastically because they are afraid the US might not make a long-term commitment to them); Niall Ferguson, ‘The E Word’, Wall Street Journal, 6 June 2003 (argues that Bush’s invasion of Iraq had cowed Iran, Syria and other Muslim states, but that the war’s effects would only have a long-term beneficial effect if the USA committed to a 5-to-40-year occupation of Iraq). 18 John Dower, ‘A Warning from History: Don’t Expect Democracy in Iraq’, Boston Review, February–March 2003, at http://www.bostonreview.net/BR28.1/dower.html 666 Journal of Contemporary History 46(3) bigger than in the case of Afghanistan. The page views (every time a browser hits the server) at my blog site went from roughly 5000 a month in April of 2003 to a million a month in April of 2004.19 I was in consequence invited to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, invited to publish opinion pieces in the Washington Post and other major newspapers, and interviewed on numerous television and radio programs. In my blog postings that first year of the American military occupation, I commented daily on the news coming out of the country, as did many other bloggers. But I also set the events in historical context in a way that was unique at that time (I had published professionally on Iraqi history).20 I attended to the Shiite majority and its history, institutions, and movements at a time when journalists and policy specialists and most political scientists knew little on that subject. Arabic-language Iraqi newspapers proliferated online, and many movements and parties put up their own websites. My ability to read and then paraphrase or translate into English these Arabic-language sources gave my website special value for many Anglophone readers. Relatively little translation or dissemination of Arabic-language journalism from Iraq was then being carried out. I often went on to use the research I did for the blog postings to write academic articles.21 I consider blogging to be a genre of writing, which can be endowed with academic attributes, even if it is not like the genre of the academic article. A blog entry is intended to intervene in a debate raging in the blogosphere, and it is best if it is dashed off quickly, incorporating as much original thinking and analysis as possible, and based on the best information, given the constraints of immediacy. There is a place for a thoughtful, well-researched essay that appears months or years after a heated public debate on an issue has subsided. But, in the nature of the case, it will likely have much less impact on public opinion or policy-making than a timely intervention. The approach of social historians to contemporary history or current affairs overlaps in significant ways with that of political scientists of International Relations and sociologists. Arabist Marc Lynch (now at George Washington University), a political scientist, blogged anonymously as Abu Aardvark in the early 2000s, and now has a perch at Foreign Policy magazine’s website. It is difficult 19 Juan Cole, ‘Blogger Hits the Hundredth Monkey Phase’, in Kristina Borjesson (ed.), Feet to the Fire: The Media after 9/11 (Amherst, NY 2005), 395–426. 20 Juan Cole, Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi‘ite Islam (London 2002). 21 Juan Cole, ‘Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in the Twentieth Century’, Macalester International, 23 (Spring 2009), 3–23; Idem, ‘Marsh Arab Rebellion: Grievance, Mafias and Militias in Iraq’, Fourth Wadie Jwaideh Memorial Lecture, (Bloomington, IN, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, Indiana University 2008), 1–31; Idem, ‘The Decline of Grand Ayatollah Sistani’s Influence’, Die Friedens-Warte: Journal of International Peace and Organization, 82, 2–3 (2007), 67–83; Idem, ‘Shia Militias in Iraqi Politics’, in Markus Bouillon, David M. Malone and Ben Rowswell (eds), Iraq: Preventing a New Generation of Conflict (Boulder, CO 2007), 109–23; Idem, ‘The Ayatollahs and Democracy in Iraq’, (ISIM Papers Series) (Amsterdam 2006), 1–27; Idem, ‘A ‘‘Shiite Crescent’’? The Regional Impact of the Iraq War’, Current History, January 2006, 20–6; Idem, ‘The Reelection of Bush and the Fate of Iraq’, Constellations, 12, 2 (June 2005), 164–72; Idem, ‘The United States and Shi’ite Religious Factions in Post-Ba’thist Iraq’, The Middle East Journal, 57, 4 (Autumn 2003), 543–66. Cole 667 for me to identify in what way our methodologies differ significantly. International Relations political scientists of the sort who wrote on post-invasion Iraq in academic journals were sufficiently interested in political actors and narratives that their concerns also coincided with my own. Issues that they took up, such as whether, given that Iraq is 60 per cent Shiite, a single-chamber legislature would produce a tyranny of the majority, or the prerequisites for democratization, were also of concern to me. As for the quantitative political scientists, most of them had little interest in Iraq per se, as opposed to American policy toward it, since a focus on Iraq required a contextual and culture-based approach not typical of the nomothetic research engaged in by most American political scientists, which aims at arriving at large-scale generalizations based on multitudes of data points. Beyond these more abstract theoretical concerns and issues in high politics, as a social and cultural historian I was interested in understanding Iraqi political and religious movements under Anglo-American occupation, with an attention to detail and personalities and ordinary persons, but also to theories of social and political movements. The mobilization of the Mahdi Army, the ethnic cleansing of the Sunni Arabs of Baghdad, the tribal mafias competing for gasoline-smuggling rights in the southern port city of Basra, changes in the social and legal position of Iraqi women, and the nature of clerical authority all had a social and cultural aspect that I attempted to tease out. In fact, my blog entries on the Shiites of contemporary Iraq took up concerns and used sources little different from the ones I would have deployed had I been writing about Iraqi Shiism in the 1950s, save that the sources were now conveniently on the web and searchable. Historians on the internet offer what they always do: attention to change over time; the challenging of essentialisms; close analysis of texts and other primary sources in the original languages; the exploration of rival narratives; the weighting of evidence; and the problematizing of easy binaries. Few other historians blogged Iraq, but then because of the difficulty of doing field work in that country after the Baath takeover in 1968, there were not many historians specialized in Iraqi studies. Few of that handful who had written on the subject academically were driven to blog or even to write opinion pieces for the newspapers, for reasons that are not clear to me. An exception was UCLA-trained Iraqi historian Hala Fattah, who blogged at the History News Network for a while, but found that as the Iraq story turned ever darker, it was too difficult to keep it up. Norwegian historian of south Iraq, Reidar Vissar, established an influential blog in English on Iraqi politics, deploying an impressive array of Iraqi local newspapers available on the internet. There were a handful of other historians of the Middle East who began blogging, some of them inspired by my Informed Comment columns. Joshua Landis, a Princeton PhD specialized in the study of modern Syria, who now teaches at the University of Oklahoma, founded Syria Comment and quickly became a must-read for analysts of Syrian affairs (and influential with the Bush administration and with the Syrian political elite). Leila Hudson of the University of Arizona, also a historian of Syria, maintained a blog for a while. Mark LeVine, a scholar of Israel and Palestine as well as a specialist in popular 668 Journal of Contemporary History 46(3) culture at the University of California, Irvine, blogged at the History News Network, and more recently at Aljazeera.net. Brian Ulrich, a historian of the medieval Middle East now at Shippenburg University, has a weblog on current events in the region. Manan Ahmed, a historian of the Mughal Empire trained at the University of Chicago, blogs contemporary South Asia at Chapati Mystery. The contentious Arab-Israeli conflict has generated some blogging by academically trained historians, especially (on the stridently pro-Israeli side) Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer. Typically, a journal article in academic history is the result of months or years of research in primary sources, and then more months of writing and revision in the light of the existing secondary literature. When the author submits it to a journal, it is vetted through double-blind refereeing (where the editor takes the author’s name off the submission and sends it to several experts in the field, whose reports are then also anonymized and shared with the author). Blogging and other forms of digital communication are more likely to be immediate and spontaneous. Having blog entries refereed would be impractical, since the consequent delay would often render them stale and irrelevant as the debates in the blogosphere move on. But immediate and wide publication of short essays without refereeing does also have academic virtues. First of all, it is a form of truth-telling, which, as Foucault reminded us, the ancient Greek theorists of democracy called parrhesia in its positive sense.22 This practice differs from – indeed, is the exact opposite of, mere rhetoric – in which the speaker is not necessarily sincere but simply attempting to persuade the audience to a certain view (for whatever reason). In parrhesia, speakers are genuinely convinced of the truth of their speech. (The Greeks would have considered much of what we hear in our corporate mass media to be the work of rhetoricians rather than truth-tellers.) Parrhesia, moreover, entails a certain amount of risk, the chance that speaking the truth (aletheia) as one sees it about a subject will provoke anger, and even possibly retaliation. Historians who settle a millennium-old political controversy typically face no peril more serious than cranky book reviewers. Publicly challenging today’s talking points from the White House or the Pentagon can be riskier, as can weighing in on contentious issues such as Israel and Palestine, and this sort of parrhesia can have a real impact on careers.23 What we now call democracy, as Aristotle pointed out, all too easily spirals down into demagoguery, and citizens of democratic politics have a duty to counter that tendency. Historians who worry that they will lose respect if the public views them as political partisans because they have intervened in a debate on current affairs should also worry that the public will consider them irrelevant if they never have so intervened. They should further worry that the political framework 22 Michel Foucault, Le Courage de la ve´rite´: Le gouvernment de soi et des autres, 2 vols (Paris 2009), 1:140–2, 2:11–20; Michael A. Peters, ‘Truth-Telling as an Educational Practice of the Self: Foucault, Parrhesia and the Ethics of Subjectivity’, Oxford Review of Education, 29, 2 (June 2003), 207–23; Thomas Flynn, ‘Foucault as Parrhesiast: His Last Course at the College de France’, in Barry Smart (ed.), Foucault: Critical Assessments, 3 vols (London 1994), 3:302–15. 23 ‘Can Blogging Derail Your Career? 7 Bloggers Discuss the Case of Juan Cole’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 28 July 2006. Cole 669 within which they produce their academic work could deteriorate so badly at the hands of rhetoricians and demagogues as to have a deleterious effect on academic integrity. Blogging is a way for historians to add the role of parrhesiast to their other repertoires, of teachers, researchers, analysts, masters of technique, and (sometimes) sages. Web publication, moreover, can enlist a wide range of public expertise and comment, since the internet is a distributed or collaborative information environment.24 Historians addressing current affairs can function journalistically, doing information-gathering, presenting analysis and synthesizing or aggregating large numbers of narrow articles. They can also deploy the authority gained from their credentials, positions and body of refereed work to intervene in the debates of politicians and pundits as experts and jurists. Publishing on the World Wide Web allows historians to present their information and analysis to a much wider audience than in the past, and to come to collective judgments as experts and public arbiters more quickly and efficiently. An academic journal article typically attracts comment only from other specialists in the same field, and often much after the original research was carried out. In contrast, a popular blog entry by a historian is often critiqued immediately not only by other historians but also by economists and anthropologists and professionals or educated laypersons with experience in the field. In essence, blogging is often refereed after the fact, and often far more effectively than a journal editor could hope to arrange. This process is in essence an open-source implementation of the goals of the traditional peer-reviewed journal. In the hard sciences, the circulation of research papers on the internet before formal publication has become common, so as to garner the widest possible range of critiques. Blogging can function for historians in a similar way, ensuring that if the entries are written up more formally, they are much more solid and mature. Some historians have all along been driven to bring their training in contextualization, the weighting of evidence, and the consideration of competing narratives to bear on current affairs. Today’s blogs differ little in form from cyclostyled newsletters of the era of the Vietnam War. What is different is their potential reach. Virtually nothing most historians could have written 40 years ago could have hoped to have a million readers over a single month, with some rare exceptions (e.g. public historians who happened to catch the fancy of the public). Few historians could have hoped to crack the editorial pages of prestigious newspapers, save if they were at elite institutions and already had the ear of the powerful. The digital revolution is undermining many publication practices that have been taken for granted for two centuries. Newspapers as we know them may not survive, and many are closing, raising questions about the future of professional journalism. The academic journal article as a preserve of specialists, published in small print 24 Michael W. Giles, ‘Gutenberg to Gigabytes: Scholarly Communication in the Age of Cyberspace’, The Journal of Politics, 58, 3 (August 1996), 613–26. 670 Journal of Contemporary History 46(3) runs and thereafter more or less hidden away in research libraries and accessible only to other specialists is a form of expensive elitism that society may increasingly be unwilling to support. Academics have created valuable techniques aimed at preserving the integrity and, as far as is possible, the objectivity of their writing. But in this new world, where barriers between the ivory tower and the public are being eroded by the internet, and where, it turns out, the public is sometimes deeply interested in the results of our researches, historians have to ask themselves if they want always to leave the popularization of their findings to journalists, generalists and (sometimes) mere rhetoricians. If John Dower had not spoken publicly, there were political figures who would have appropriated and misrepresented his work on postwar Japan to justify the Iraq War. Double-blind, refereed journal publications may be just one of the genres of writings in which academics of the future engage. Just as a creative writer might compose poetry, short stories, literary fiction, and perhaps a lighter ‘entertainment’ (Graham Greene’s term) such as a thriller, so academics producing works read online may sometimes blog and sometimes write monographs. Each kind of writing is validated in different ways, and each has its own kind of value as truth-telling. Biographical Note Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan and director of its Center for South Asian Studies. He is the author of Napoleon’s Egypt (2007). His Engaging the Muslim World (revised 2010) recently appeared in a revised, paper edition. He has chapters forthcoming in edited works on Shiite voting patterns in Iraq since 2005, and on the failures of the Bush Administration’s democratization projects.
