'Those who genuinely want to help the movement should study the rich and powerful, not the poor and powerless... The poor and powerless already know what is wrong with their lives and those who want to help them should analyse the forces that keep them where they are.' (Susan George, 2004, p.211).

There is no such thing as neutral research any more -- if there ever was. The social role of political and social research, just like biological or electronics research, is determined by who uses it, and in whose interests it was produced in the first place. An example of this is the research collected in Waves of Protest, Social Movements Since the Sixties, edited by Jo Freeman and Victoria Johnson(1999). The chapter by sociologist Luther Gerlach has been reprinted in a work, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy, edited by John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt. What's the problem? This book is published by the Rand Corporation -- a think tank that 'delivers a wide range of expertise to clients in need of objective analysis and effective solutions'. The clients include the US Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, and corporations such as AstraZeneca, Ford and Pfizer. Rand also shares advisors with the arms company Carlyle Group. Hence it seems that in this case activist energy has helped this Pentagon-sponsored project to develop its analysis of activist networks. In an email to Corporate Watch, Jo Freeman suggested that Gerlachs motivations was 'doing what all academics do: looking for interesting things to write about, regardless of the audience.' Gerlach confirmed this to us: 'This is one of the things scholars do. I found Ronfeldt's ideas interesting and useful. I shared the Ronfeldt ideas with students and colleagues. This is what we do'. The goodwill of writers like Freeman and Gerlach is almost certainly not returned by David Rondfeld, the Rand researcher who acquired Gerlach's research for the Networks and Netwars book. Harry Cleaver, professor of Marxism at the University of Texas, has described Rondfeldt as one of the most sophisticated opponents of grassroots social movements: 'these guys really do read our stuff seriously, not just spying on us (which they are effectively doing) but to see if they can learn something from us. If you look at Ronfeldt's book on netwar and the Zapatistas you'll see lots of references to my stuff. I've had a few exchanges with him, and I've read him, as he has read me, and I think there are a lot of parallels in what we do, though from opposite sides of the barricades, so to speak.'