Collaboration and Its Political Functions

P E Digeser

doi:10.1017/s0003055421000745

Abstract

What functions does “collaboration” play in our moral and political practices and how did it come to play those roles? We use the term “collaboration” to identify a valued partnership, but it also names a morally compromised association and functions as a reason for blaming and punishing complicitous behavior. However, it has also played nefarious political roles: shoring up patriarchy, legitimizing ethnic cleansing, and bolstering a myth of national unity. “Collaboration” plays various roles because it is both ambiguous and vague. It is ambiguous in that there are multiple conceptions of collaboration, and it is vague because it contains borderline cases that are difficult, even impossible, to resolve. An exploration of “collaboration” combined with the history of its coming of age shows why its study is so vexing and how it functions in unexpected and disturbing ways.

Highlights

Blaming and punishing those who have had a particular kind of association with a perpetrator
In addition to identifying and attributing moral responsibility, “collaboration” has been used, paradoxically, to enact wrongs and deflect moral responsibility: it has been employed as a pretext for ethnic cleansing, as a way to enforce patriarchal norms, and as an aid in securing a myth of national unity
If collaboration is about wrongful activity, why did accusations of collaboration became so entangled in the forced removal of thousands of individuals in Eastern Europe? How can collaboration be about who one is and not what one has done? What’s up with “collaboration?”

Summary

Introduction

Blaming and punishing those who have had a particular kind of association with a perpetrator. Both of these features matter for the uses (and abuses) of “collaboration.” Grasping collaboration’s ambiguity and vagueness sheds light on why historians, social scientists, and others cannot overcome the problem of fully nailing down the meaning of the term in addition to why the study of collaboration (from a historical or social scientific perspective) requires an acknowledgement of the positionality of the researcher.

Results

Conclusion