Baruch Malewich awarded APSA Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant
Baruch Malewich is a political science PhD candidate studying international relations and political theory. Baruch has been awarded the 2024 Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (DDRIG) from the American Political Science Association (APSA). The DDRIG provides support to enhance and improve the conduct of doctoral dissertation research in political science which is theoretically derived and empirically oriented. Learn more about Baruch's research and how the DDRIG will support his work in the below Q&A.
What is your dissertation about?
My (temporary) dissertation title is The Enemy Within: The Emergence of Wartime Collaboration in Interstate Conflict. In my dissertation, I look to understand the emergence and the political functions of allegations of wartime collaboration—which I define as working for an enemy state in a manner that constitutes treason. The term collaboration was first used in this meaning—as opposed to in its original and positive meaning of working together—in France during World War II, and has been used often since in interstate conflict. It is generally agreed that collaborators need to be punished, but what punishment is suitable and what kinds of actions constitute collaboration are not consistent across the board. I am looking to understand what could account for this variation. I focus on cases of foreign occupation—as that is the original context in which the term first emerged, and my inclination is that it has to do with mechanisms of occupation and oppression: that the more an occupying military is trying to control an occupied society, the closer the means of surveillance and indoctrination are, the more severe of a transgression collaboration is understood to be, in the eyes of the occupied society.
How did you become interested in this topic?
I really didn't plan to work on this topic when coming to the University of Minnesota. I focused on nuclear weapons and the philosophy of technology in my undergraduate and master's degrees, and expected to do more of the same for my PhD. But my training at UMN drove me to think critically about counterinsurgency tactics and about means of surveillance and how they impact social relations and how people understand themselves and their duties to others. Growing up in Israel and holding leftist opinions meant that people around me sometimes implied—if not outright said—that I'm disloyal, a traitor or a collaborator; I wanted to better understand what those allegations meant and where they were coming from. It was clear to me that part of it had to do with a cultural memory of Jews who collaborated with the Nazis, but another part of it had to do with Israel's own employment of Palestinian collaborators. So it seemed to me like the concept of wartime collaboration is a very interesting one to explore, and one that—in spite of its clear political nature—has barely been researched in the field of political science.
What does research for your dissertation look like?
Essentially I am trying to understand two things that I also see as being closely related. The first is how collaboration emerged and the second is how it changes. In addressing the emergence of collaboration, I try to offer a historical account of how the emergence of the nation-state on one hand, and of modern warfare on the other, made it increasingly important to monitor the loyalty of groups and individuals. I try to offer a long history of how this trend developed from the Napoleonic Wars to World War II, and then do a deep dive on the latter as the first time there is a real discursive explosion around this category of collaboration. As I said, it first emerged in France under a regime that collaborated with Nazi Germany—but is very quickly taken up by other (namely, but not exclusively, European) states as part of their postwar reckoning. The concept then gets taken up again by national liberation movements in the Anticolonial Wars of the late twentieth century, which allows me to explore how the concept travelled throughout space and time, and how it was adjusted to the local context.
The second part of my dissertation is an analysis of the discourse around collaboration in three sites of anticolonial war: Algeria, Palestine, and Northern Ireland. This involves a lot of archival work: I try to focus on the newspapers that are affiliated with national liberation movements and armed groups in these sites and to understand how collaboration is discussed, what happens when collaborators are caught, and how these movements try to tackle the phenomenon more broadly. I also look at the occupiers—this time focusing on government documents—and try to understand their approaches towards the population and what means of population management they employ.
What is the importance and impact of this research?
As I mentioned, wartime collaboration has barely been approached in the field of political science, and yet it is a very common phenomenon in conflict. It is not only common—these allegations, whether founded or not, have very real implications for people's lives. Punishments for collaborators include public shaming, beatings, forced exile, long-term bodily harm, and even summary executions. And while some of these acts of collaboration include providing intelligence to an enemy state, there are also far more benign forms, like giving a pillow to a wounded soldier or selling food to police officers, that get inscribed as collaboration. In addition, a lot of literature in Intelligence Studies has been written on the motivation people have to betray their country or community, and yet the focus on motivation ignores the fact that some people don't realize that their everyday actions could make others suspect them as collaborators. Instead of thinking of betrayal as something that comes from the individual, I'm trying to think of betrayal as a social phenomenon—and about how the threshold of what betrayal is changes. Finally, it is often assumed that violence used by a colonizer and/or an occupier could leave its makr on a colonized and/or occupied society—that violence is contagious in this way. I think that this project—by linking means of surveillance and population control to allegations of collaboration—contributes to this literature by offering some specific mechanisms on how this happens.
How will the DDRIG support your research?
Being awarded the DDRIG means that I have dedicated funding to do archival research in the United Kingdom, France, and Israel—where the relevant archives for this project are being kept. I will need to spend a month or two in each of these sites to truly get a good understanding of the contours of the discourse around collaboration and the dynamics of how it shifts & changes. I am really grateful to APSA for awarding me this grant.
