Dual-Use Knowledge: A Critical History of the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex

The war-machine is epistemically productive. The very way in which we know and encounter the world has been radically shaped by the military and its adjacent industries — from the use of defence tech to visualize and quantify the environment to the outsourcing of military doctrines for the ‘management’ of select human and nonhuman populations. Based on this claim, the first half of this project seeks to examine the concrete processes underlying what I term "military worldbuilding," particularly the relationship between armament/war and education/knowledge. I do this by tracing the epistemic, monetary, and structural exchanges between higher education in the UK/US/EU and the military-industrial complex, covering a period which stretches from the Cold War to the present day. As part of the project, I analyze a range of pedagogical texts and university-based projects that have directly (and indirectly) contributed to the development of military frameworks, capacity-building, and the legitimization of strategic narratives and imaginaries. I also collate examples of epistemic extraction occurring during, and in the aftermath of, military conflict, including the use of atmospheric and environmental data to shape emergent planetary theories and the absorption of military terms/concepts by so-called ‘critical’ disciplines. My project is reliant on archival research, freedom of information requests, oral history interviews, and ethnographic research conducted during defence exhibitions, arms fairs, military conventions, professional networking events, and modelling-simulation-training events. The second half of the project provides a historiographical overview of anti-war/anti-military scholarship produced by an array of campus-based collectives and groups, foregrounding the essential role of academics in contesting the military-industrial complex. I trace the emergence of demilitarization initiatives within several UK/US/EU universities — interviewing key scholars and collating strategies of (epistemic) resistance. By offering a historical perspective, I hope to highlight how the struggle for demilitarization and disarmament inspired a wider culture of contestation — unsettling normative understandings of academic responsibility, political subjectivity, and complicity.