Introduction toJoGSSForum “Censorship in Security Studies”

Abstract

> Do You Know That Newspeak is the Only Language in the World Whose Vocabulary Gets Smaller Every Year? Winston Did Know That, of Course. > > –George Orwell, 2013 (1949) The idea to organize a forum on censorship—the control of information and ideas circulated within a society through the suppression of words and images—emerged among the editorial team in summer 2015. In July, the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, gave an interview to the German news magazine Der Spiegel in which he suggested that English-speaking IR scholars are reluctant to use material made public by WikiLeaks for their research (Assange 2015). This was picked up in blogs, and a sort of debate ensued among American commentators because, indeed, very few articles had been published in ISA journals using WikiLeaks sources (The Ben Norton Blog 2015). Why? On one side, Dan Drezner argued that academics are simply indifferent to WikiLeaks, because the material it contains is not very interesting (Dan Drezner 2012; 2015). Others disagreed and suggested that “the academy has been extremely cautious” and that self-censorship is at work, fanned by concern that the US government would take legal action against those who used WikiLeaks material (Gabriel 2015). Either way, positions of “indifference” and “caution” support each other or, at least, meet in the view that dealing with WikiLeaks is not a risk worth taking. However, evaluations regarding the usefulness, legality, and risk of engaging classified sources touch on fundamental questions IR scholars cannot escape: the relationship between academia, politics, and the state; the scope of academic freedom and the nature of “responsible scholarship”; and to what extent research can and should …