Decolonization scholarship made academia less useful, shifting state reliance to think tanks

Evidence

The rise of national liberation movements from India to Algeria in the postwar period brought new scholarship that challenged Orientalism and the modernization paradigm. Academics became less reliable as sources of instrumental knowledge. After the 1970s, the state developed a greater reliance on think tanks. In his book Foreign Policy, Inc.: Privatizing America’s National Interest, historian Lawrence Davidson argues that the best-funded think tanks play a decisive role in shaping foreign policy and setting the terms of public discussion through their members’ frequent appearances as “experts” in the mainstream media. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 746

Categorization

• QUESTION: A testable historical claim: did the rise of anti-colonial scholarship actually cause think-tank growth, or were they parallel developments?
• XREF: Echoes the reader’s Milgrom material on institutions emerging to fill information gaps — here the state substitutes think tanks when academia stops producing usable knowledge. — connects to: Think tanks replaced academic Middle East studies when scholars turned critical of empire — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 251; Decolonization-driven academic critique pushed empire toward think tanks — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 263

Broader Connections

• Decolonization-driven academic critique pushed empire toward think tanks #corroborates (1.00) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 263