Scholasticide, Dual Use Technology, and Data-driven Wars

On statements and why this isn’t one

Public statements and politicians condemnations have often remained performative gestures as genocidal violence continues unabated “in the region.” So much has been said and written about the horror of genocidal violence yet these words often fail to achieve what they are promising. Statements are important when it comes to solidarity over a distance, to back up friends, colleagues and anyone who is becoming a target. And yet reading these words and gestures can be frustrating if they prove to be a gesture of performative solidarity and an affective technology that primarily calm the nerves of their authors. Way too often a statement mainly responds to feelings of helplessness or sends a public signal while we are at the same time succumbing to indifference. Writing a public statement at times paradoxically makes it even easier to do nothing, to occupy a cynical and defeatist position where the worst possible outcome was always already expected. The result is a further emptying of the public sphere, a persistent absence of action against war crimes and genocidal violence in institutions and beyond, despite a ubiquity of statements that pretend otherwise.

What I write below is a statement and it is not. I write because we want to back up the CML contributors, colleagues, and friends working on the ground, even if another public statement is probably the last that they need. At the same time, I don’t write this for the world to know where we stand but to tease out some of the mechanisms that drive genocide, displacement, ecocide, and scholasticide (defined as the deliberate targeting of educational spaces and knowledge making more generally). The following short text is a way of processing the entanglement between the horror of genocidal violence and the digital infrastructures we are pressed to use each day, and a primer for research and education that tries and live up to our committment to alternative, life-affirming infrastructures.

Scholasticide and Datafication: two sides of the same coin

What I want to address here is the link between converging attacks on knowledge and life in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iran. The history of attempts at erasing educational infrastructure and killing educaters in Palestine is well documented (see e.g., a timeline since 9 October 2023 & a Toolkit for international actions against scholasticide), as is the resilience of the Palestinian people who have always found ways to teach and learn, even as schools are being re-used as shelters and universities are being bombed.

In the past months, Israel has also committed several acts of scholasticide in Lebanon, targeting and murdering two professors, Pr. Mortada Srour and Pr. Hussein Bazzi, Dean of the Faculty of Sciences at the Lebanese University in Hadath, while they were on campus carrying out their academic duties. This is an escalation of previous attacks on entrances of the Lebanese University throughout October and November 2024, which shows that these attacks were not isolated events.

In Iran, the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab was targeted, killing more than 170 people. Meanwhile, even mainstream media acknowledge that the school was hit by a US missile, but at the same time claims are made that the strike was a “tragic mistake,” a result of obsolete data about the position of a complex of the Iranian navy (www.nytimes.com). But the use of words like mistake, error, etc. in this context is fundamentally at odds with the reality of purportedly *targeted military operations*. These build on comprehensive surveillance and knowledge-engineering operations, where entire countries are pre-emptively datafied to construct narratives around purported threats and to convince publics of the necessity of wars waged (to prevent war).

At least since the US war on Iraq in the 1990s, warfare has become a data-driven endeavour where supposed *proof of intent* to have outlawed weapons at some point in the future is leveraged to legitimize attacks on *civilian infrastructure*—be it homes in residential areas, hospitals and ambulances, energy infrastructures, farmland or in this case: schools and universities. What all these attacks have in common is that they try and complicate survival through the destruction of infrastructure and that they are legitimated by a recourse to “data” that purportedly prove that the civilian aspect of infrastructures is no more than a cover up for its military use. That is, the flattening of reality into a data set turns a school or hospital into a military control center that is rendered erasable in front of everyone’s eyes.

This is not the last time we will hear excuses when *civilian infrastructure* is hit (although no one has so far apologized for this “tragic mistake”). Over the last decade or so, machine learning technology has been gradually introduced to process all kinds of surveillance data, collected by satellites, surveillance plans or drones as well as by intelligence on the ground. The resulting hypervisibility helps automate the identification of targets—a move that will result in more “tragic mistakes” that we all contribute to by using ‘tools’ like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Azure Cloud infrastructure, which render genocidal wars from afar increasingly facile and supposedly “targeted”, because: data-driven (www.nplusonemag.com).

Scholasticide—the erasure of educational infrastructure and knowledge—and data-driven warfare are intimately linked. Where the very concept of knowledge is collapsed into data, data are increasingly leveraged to deny the need for other, non-datafied or non-datafiable knowledges, and used to obscure or erase knowledge that doesn’t conform with “the data”. When these other knowledges are mobilized in academic contexts, they are increasingly de-platformed, silenced, erased (see the Krisol letter in support of researcher and filmmaker Basma Al-Sharif for some context). In this context, the foundational tale of establishing objectivity as the gold standard for academic knowledge production turns into a tale of leveraging ideals of objectivity against the production or maintenance of knowledge that isn’t data produced according to the standards of the end-to-end apparatus that is corporate machine learning technology. New realities are generated based on what is acknowledged in the euro-atlantic academic system which again is increasingly narrowed into an extension of industry & military interests—e.g., through research on dual use technology. Meanwhile the realities we seemed to know are collapsed into data of what once was.

The epistemic blur introduced through so-called AI and the hypervisibility generated through comprehensive surveillance in data-driven wars correspond with political maneuvres that undermine or outright reject legal assessments of genocidal violence and illegal wars by calling it a “scientific debate”—also and maybe primarily due to the fact that the “unconditional support” of violations of international law or “neutrality” would count as complicity in genocide if the rule of law was (re)established.

Political neutrality in times of genocide is not only an illusion, it quickly turns into a form of complicity that proceeds through scholasticide. As researchers and educators, we must therefore confront its many forms as one integral element of genocidal violence. Academic knowledge production is not (always) the answer, but it is our primary leverage, and the academy is where we, too, can become a target.