The Politics of Noncooperation:

Abstract

In 1974, the General Conference of UNESCO approved three resolutions condemning Israel. In retaliation, a group of physicists promoted a boycott of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), an institute created to foster collaboration in theoretical physics between industrialized and third world countries and partly supported by UNESCO. This political action against the “politicization” of UNESCO was led by American and Israeli scientists. I show that the position toward the boycott was very different among European scientists. I shall argue that the boycott of the ICTP was motivated as much by the formal connection between UNESCO and ICTP as by the identification of the ICTP with the third world, which was blamed for the “exclusion” of Israel from UNESCO. The episode reflects the contradictions and workings of scientific noncooperation. It also reveals the limits of scientific internationalism in the second half of the twentieth century. In this context, I investigate the meaning ascribed by the actors to the term the “politicization of science.”