James C. Scott in Kinshasa, and a response to Jeremiah Arowosegbe

When the American political scientist James C. Scott passed away in July 2024, tributes praised him as one of the most influential thinkers of his generation. 1 Building on years of ethnographic research in Southeast Asia, his numerous books offered new ways of thinking about subaltern resistance, as well as the mechanisms of state oppression and control. A self-professed anarchist, he organized against the Vietnam War as a junior faculty at the University of Wisconsin in the latter part of the 1960s, and he maintained a forty-six-acre farm for decades while teaching at Yale. While obituaries widely remembered Scott as a figure of integrity, some dissonant voices on social media commented more negatively on his involvement with the CIA as a young man and as a leader in the United States National Student Association (USNSA). The political scientist Karen Puget first brought this episode in Scott’s life to light in a book that carefully exposed the ties of the USNSA with US intelligence (Puget 2015). Puget showed how, in the 1950s and 1960s, what was then the most important student organization in the USA allowed itself to be fully infiltrated by the government. The young liberal-minded students at the helm of the organization worked hand in hand with CIA handlers to curb Soviet influence among their peer organizations in Europe, Asia and Africa. For a few years, after graduating from Williams College and before embarking on his doctoral studies at Yale, Scott occupied a prominent role among these young shadow Cold Warriors, first as the USNSA’s representative in Paris and later as its vice president in charge of international affairs.