One of the ways we can use The Monkey Cage is to start a real-time discussion about current political developments. I would like to invite people to do exactly that with regard to the recent “WikiLeaks release of US embassy cables”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/world/29cables.html?_r=1&hp. On the one hand, we as scholars may someday benefit from these documents in our own research; Erik has “already shown the tip of iceberg”:https://themonkeycage.org/2010/11/wikileaks_data_and_the_un_secu.html of what can be done with these data, and this I assume was just after a few minutes (or hours) of perusing. It doesn’t strike me as impossible that the documents leaked this past year on WikiLeaks could eventually end up providing important empirical evidence in a doctoral dissertation. More generally, as political scientists, we depend on the availability of information about the practice of politics to ply our craft; as academics, most of us I would guess tend towards seeing the free flow of information as a good thing.
On the other hand, there are legitimate concerns associated with especially the latest trove of Wikileaks materials. As “Drew Conway”:http://www.drewconway.com/zia/ “writes”:http://www.drewconway.com/zia/?p=2537
bq. I still believe that significant and meaningful discoveries are yet to be made from the Afghanistan disclosure about conflict, its effect on civilians, and the spatial-temporal nature of violence. I do not, however, believe that such discovery was ever the intent of the WikiLeaks organization. To the contrary, WikiLeaks’s continued and reckless pursuit of classified document disclosures seems to have much more to do with the proclivities of the organization’s founder, and very little to do with building knowledge or improving democratic discourse.
bq. The latest leak typifies the identity and culture of WikiLeaks and by continuing to analyze new disclosures I am tacitly supporting this, which is something I will not do. WikiLeaks’ motivation is that of a court jester, to mock and ridicule the contradictions of a state. However, they present themselves as a sage with the wisdom to adjudicate the public relevance of all information, which is the greatest contradiction of all…..Openness of information can lead to great things, not the least of which is the democratization of knowledge in ways never before possible. Shoving private messages into the public sphere without any context or care for the consequences can lead to misunderstanding, fear, and aggression. Unfortunately, WikiLeaks appears to be in the business of promoting the latter.
Drew’s point about “the proclivity’s of the organization’s founder” seems especially well taken. From my vantage point, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of guiding principal to what Wikileaks is trying to publish and why. The original Afghan data had a kind “Pentagon Papers”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers feel to it, in terms of shedding light on the realities of a war that had been kept off of the public radar, especially in the United States. I’m having a hard time figuring out how releasing US diplomatic cables relates to this goal, other than just by showing that the authors can publish more classified US documents.
One of the original posts I wrote when I joined this blog concerned the ethics of “research on the efficacy of torture”:https://themonkeycage.org/2009/05/social_science_torture_and_eth.html. I wonder if in the future we’ll need to write about the ethics of WikiLeaks-based research? Either way, I wanted to open this topic up to discussion by readers of The Monkey Cage and political scientists. Is it just open season in terms of research utilizing the WikiLeaks data? Is that what we are supposed to do as political scientists? Or is there reason for restraint? “Drew’s post”:http://www.drewconway.com/zia/?p=2537 is titled _Why I Will Not Analyze The New WikiLeaks Data_. Although he then notes that “this is an entirely personal decision, and is not meant to discourage others from endeavoring to glean insight from this new data”, I am curious as to how many readers of this blog feel the same way.
[h/t to “George Downs”:http://politics.as.nyu.edu/object/georgedowns for helpful conversation on this topic.]