Harvard Director Faces Flak For Helping Military

Collaboration or consultation between a human rights organization and the United States military might seem like a positive strategy in light of recent negative media attention to troop behavior towards Iraqi civilians.

But Sarah B. Sewall ’83—director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government—has recently come under fire in a prominent political magazine for writing the introduction to the U.S. Army’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual.

An article published recently on the Web site of The Nation magazine questioned the merits of this partnership, especially since the collaboration coincided with the increase in American troops in Iraq and continued offensives against insurgents.

But Sewall said that the claims made by the article’s author, Tom E. Hayden, are completely unfounded.

“The Carr Center’s mission is to make human rights principles central to the formulation of public policy,” Sewall said. “Civilian protection in war is premised on core human rights and has become a cornerstone of international humanitarian law. Helping to ensure that international humanitarian law is fully embraced in military doctrine will contribute to human rights protection.”

In recent articles for the Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle, Sewall highlighted the lack of instruction given to U.S. troops when dealing with civilians.

She said she hopes this new manual will fill this educational gap in the soldiers’ training.

As to Hayden’s concerns that “counter-insurgency, being based on deception, shadow warfare and propaganda, runs counter to the historic freedom of university life,” Sewall said that, as a knowledgeable outsider, it was her role to help educate the military about humanitarian concerns.

“Academia has a unique responsibility and opportunity to apply its research and insights to public policy challenges,” Sewall said.

Sewall’s colleague, Carr Center Faculty Affiliate Jonathan Moore, echoed the sentiment about whether a university should be able to advise the military, calling Hayden’s argument “worse than nonsense.”

“If the scholarship is serious and thorough and knowledgeable, or at least has a base of knowledge that it attempts to expand,” Moore said, “it should not restrict itself by a narrow interpretation of the mandate of the organization it stems from. You do not let an ideology distort your scholarly efforts.”

Nina M. Catalano ’09, co-president of the Harvard College Human Rights Advocates, wrote in an e-mail from Bogota, Colombia that the Carr Center and similar institutions cannot afford to remain isolated from important world events.

“The human rights movement did not win a place on the global stage just by engaging other like-minded organizations,” Catalano wrote. “While Hayden fears the Carr Center may be succumbing to what he dramatically calls ‘the Pentagon occupation of the academic mind,’ he offers no alternate, ‘clean’ opportunity for human rights defenders to influence wartime policy.”

Though she said her organization has not taken an active stand against the war in Iraq, Catalano wrote that, “one need not accept the validity of war as a political option or the premises of the current war to appreciate the desperate need for strong legal and moral guidelines for warfare.”

Sewall said she thought it was absurd for people to think that collaborating with the military went against the Carr Center’s mission.

“How can you hope to change the conduct of war without engaging those who practice it?” Sewall said. “We should all hope to live in a world without war, but there are many steps we can take to minimize war’s horror along the way.”

—Staff writer Nathan C. Strauss can be reached at strauss@fas.harvard.edu.