Dan Drezner, I think, gets it substantially wrong. Nobody is upset at people going to Libya to try to convince the regime to be more open and less oppressive. What people are upset about is political scientists flacking for the regime: telling people that they were succeeding.
It is a case of who you are working for. When Plato went to Syracuse he was working not for Dion but for the people of Syracuse--a laudable effort. When Aristotle went to Pella he was working not for the people of Macedon but for Alexander--not such a laudable effort. When Seneca went to Rome's Palatine Hill he was working not for the people of the Roman Empire but for Nero. And when Sir Thomas More went to Hampton Court he was--well, he was not sure at first who he was working for.
Dan Drezner:
Thoughts about IR scholars for dollars: an awful lot of high-powered academics and academic institutions have some 'splainin to do about their relationship with Libya's Qaddafi family. The Monitor Group ferried a number of high-profile international studies scholars, including... Benjamin Barber to the shores of Tripoli in an effort to burnish the regime's image. The London School of Economics and some of its faculty were deeply involved with Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi, as he earned his Ph.D. there in 2007 with a dissertation on -- wait for it -- liberal democracy and civil society....
As the Qaddafi family has morphed from pragmatic strongmen to bloodthirsty killers.... Howard Davies resigned as the head of LSE in the wake of the Libyan revelations.... On the other hand, Benjamin Barber sounds totally unapologetic in his interview with FP. His basic message is that "second-guessing the past, I mean, it's just 20/20 hindsight." Then there's this response [from Barber]:
I mean, did LSE take Saif's money -- the Gaddafi Foundation money -- improperly? No, they all took it properly. And promised a scholarly center to study the Middle East and North Africa. And offer scholarships to students from the region. Just the way Harvard and Georgetown and Cambridge and Edinburgh have done -- not with Libyan money, but with Saudi money (look at Prince Alwaleed bin Talal). By the way, not just Monitor, but McKinsey, Exxon, Blackstone, the Carlyle Group -- everybody was in it. The only difference for Monitor was that it actually had a project that was aimed at trying to effect some internal change. Everybody else who went in, which is every major consultancy, every major financial group, went in to do nothing more than make big bucks for themselves. But now people are attacking Monitor because they took consulting fees for actually trying to effect reform and change.
Finally, there is an important background controversy here: It is about whether academics should stay in the ivory tower and do research and write books? Or engage in the world on behalf of the principles and theories their research produces? Do you simply shut your mouth and write? Or do you try to engage? This is an old question that goes back to Machiavelli, back to Plato going to Syracuse: Do you engage with power?...
My answer is that each person has to make their own decision. I don't condemn those who prefer the solitude of the academy, though they lose the chance to effect change directly; and I don't condemn those who do try to influence power, risking being tainted by it, even when power doesn't really pay much attention to them.... The notion that there is something wrong with people who choose to intervene and try to engage the practice of democracy -- that they are somehow more morally culpable than people who prefer not to intervene -- is to me untenable. Rereading his 2007 Washington Post op-ed, I think it's safe to say that Barber embraced sucking up to power juuuuuuuuust a wee bit more fervently than everyone else. That said, the man has half a point here...
