“What should we do about our Russian colleagues?” asked the senior scientist in the audience. It’s early summer and 100 degrees in Chicago. I was giving a keynote at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), the United States’s premier particle physics research facility and my former workplace. My talk focused on the Asian-American experience and the impact of deteriorating US-China relations on science, but for many in the auditorium, the Russian invasion of Ukraine commanded a keener urgency.
Days after the conflict began on February 24, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research—a longtime partner of Fermilab—halted all new collaborations with institutions and individuals in Russia and Belarus. The organization announced in June that it intends to cut ties with both countries once their current cooperative agreements expire in 2024. Other international organizations have taken similar or more drastic actions. The Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum of eight Arctic states, paused work in March and is resuming limited research this summer without Russian participation, a potentially devastating setback for climate science. The European Space Agency has terminated its cooperation with Russia, grounding Europe’s first Mars rover, which was expected to board a Russian rocket to the red planet later this year. For a moment, it seemed like the International Space Station would withstand the seismic events on Earth. That hope was dashed in late July, when the head of Russia’s space agency declared his country will leave the project in 2024.
From the icy caps of Earth to the edge of space, the sharp blade of war has cleaved through academic alliances already fraying under the strains of the pandemic and geopolitics, exposing a searing question with no easy answer. In conversations with friends and colleagues in the US and Europe, I’ve sensed a collective frustration bordering on helplessness. Everyone deplores the invasion and agrees on the need to do something to help Ukraine, and that keeping business as usual in the face of such calamity would be morally indefensible. But other than issuing statements and providing aid, what concrete actions can academia and the scientific community take with regards to Russia?
Many tell me the decision is out of their hands: “It’s politics.” Laboratories and their personnel have to abide by government sanctions and funding agency rules, some of which forbid collaborating with colleagues in Russia or accrediting Russian institutions in coauthored papers. Some express regret that Russian scientists who do not actively support the invasion are unfairly ostracized. One scientist, who grew up in the former Soviet Union before emigrating to the West, made a compelling argument that people in democracies should not help advance science in authoritarian regimes; it would only strengthen dictators, who use technology for destructive ends. The scientist has not visited his birth country for years, and urges all of his Chinese students never to return to China either.
Thousands of scientists, science reporters, and students in Russia, as well as many more in the Russian diaspora, have signed open letters condemning the conflict. Among those jailed for their opposition is the politician and journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza, whose father famously refused formal employment in Soviet Russia as repudiation against the totalitarian regime. These brave acts are kindlings of hope in the long nights of war and oppression; they also puncture the illusion that ordinary people bear no culpability for state actions. To dismiss responsibility is to deny agency. In an unjust world, compromise is often a condition of survival.
The varied views toward Russian counterparts from scientists in the West—to rely on official guidelines, to pretend the Russian people are powerless, or to evoke a complete cutoff—all emanate from a shared position: the innocence of the spectator. The bombs, prisons, and purges are blamed on an abstract state and cast in a foreign locale, despite the fact that German cities are powered by Russian gas, Swiss banks are havens for Putin’s cronies, and ostensibly democratic governments also use technology for harm, including the many armed conflicts initiated by the United States. The insistence on innocence prevents a clear understanding of overlapping systems of violence and injustice that are never confined to one war, one country, or one governing model. As the world fractures along political divisions and academia finds itself on the fault lines, how we perceive and react to the designated other is ultimately about ourselves: who we are, where we stand, and what kind of future we strive for.
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The laboratory is built on a border: France to the north and west, Switzerland in the south and east. Founded in 1954 on a continent decimated by war, CERN consists of 23 member states and 10 associate member states, and has cooperative agreements with dozens more countries, many of which harbor historical or ongoing hostilities. The principles of open science and peaceful research are enshrined in the CERN Convention, hailed across the globe as a model for international cooperation—and the deliberate choice of location is the physical manifestation of a lofty ideal, that the peaceful pursuit of knowledge can transcend ideological differences.
Even at the height of the Cold War, scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain found ways to work together. The first experiment conducted at Fermilab was a collaboration between American and Soviet physicists in 1972. That February, President Richard Nixon made his landmark visit to the People’s Republic of China. The resulting Shanghai Communiqué lists science and technology as the first items—ahead of “culture, sports and journalism”—where both sides agreed cross-border exchange “would be mutually beneficial.”
In the years that followed, a small but growing number of Chinese scientists were able to visit the US for training or conferences. Upon returning to China, they helped rebuild science and education in their homeland from the ruins of the Cultural Revolution. Decades later, several were my professors. I graduated from university in China in 2009 and spent a summer doing research at CERN, before moving to the US for my PhD in physics. Like many who grew up in a country with limited means, I’m a direct beneficiary of transnational cooperation in the academy.
The stirring saga of science as a unifying force is only one side of the story. Progress in cross-border collaboration since the end of World War II conceals but cannot negate the fact that scientific alliance among countries has always been limited and fragile, and is subject to geopolitics. Objective pursuit of a universal truth may be a worthy aspiration; mistaking it for what science is contradicts history. The pretense of a pure, intellectual endeavor appeals with its promise of absolution, relieving the scientist from having to confront the social cost or political reality of their work, which falls far short of purported ideals.
In fact, the now-prevalent view that science should know no borders can be traced to Cold War propaganda. As historian Audra Wolfe details in Freedom’s Laboratory, the US government promoted a vision of open, curiosity-driven research, unencumbered by dogma and untainted by politics, as superior to the closed, state-controlled science in the Soviet Union. Like many concepts appropriated for great power rivalry, “free” became synonymous with “American.”
Yet during the McCarthy era, the US government routinely refused visas to foreign scientists and withheld passports from Americans suspected of Communist sympathies. In 1958, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a physicist, a psychiatrist, and an artist whose passports were denied by the State Department. Chinese-American scientists who facilitated the opening between their birth country and adopted home weathered interrogation and surveillance by the FBI. For decades, researchers in Cuba and Iran have struggled to acquire basic equipment or travel overseas as a result of US-led sanctions.
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In 1993, during the Bosnian War, the United Nations called for the suspension of “all scientific and technical cooperation and cultural exchange” with Serbia and Montenegro. Though not a direct destinee of the UN Resolution, CERN swiftly severed ties with the country and revoked access for all Serbian scientists at the institution. The American Physical Society (APS), on the other hand, conveyed grave concern for Bosnia but decided it would be “unjust and counterproductive” to impose the embargo on individual Serbian physicists, some of whom were vocal opponents of their government.
The realization of the noble goals expressed in the CERN Convention calls for a more capacious understanding of academia not as a standalone entity but as embedded in history and relations of power. Just as claiming to not see race is to deny the existence of racism, pretending that science is borderless in a world of nation-states overlooks the many ways politics shape the development of science. Citizens of countries historically exploited by the West face higher financial and bureaucratic hurdles to access facilities and resources concentrated in their former suzerain. A laboratory is not exempt from the sins of war by virtue of its work alone, if it receives material support from states waging war. Yet among those quick to cut off Serbia, Russia, or Iran for its belligerence, few have applied the same standards to the United States for its many foreign wars. Without contesting the underlying power structure, reactive performances of solidarity by academic institutions risk becoming another tool of the ruling states to advance their geopolitical agendas.
At the front of Wilson Hall, the main building at Fermilab, a striking row of national flags symbolizes the American institution’s global reach. The billowing colors are as diverse as its international community. In the summer of 1989, Chinese scientists at the lab requested their flag be flown at half-mast to commemorate the deaths at Tiananmen. Leon Lederman, the lab’s director, ordered the Chinese flag removed from the site.
I wish I had known this story when I was a student in Chicago and had the privilege of crossing paths with Lederman on various occasions. I would love to have heard his reasoning behind the decision. I can picture the Nobel laureate’s outrage at the Chinese government that had slaughtered its people. I share his fury. But by taking down the flag, he prioritized his own feelings over the explicit wishes of those directly affected by Beijing’s actions—the Chinese researchers—and denied them a vehicle of public mourning. Despite their grief, anger, and shame, the Chinese members of the lab could not reject their association with the Chinese state by stripping a piece of fabric from a pole. With the Chinese flag out of sight, it’s easier for others in the same space to regard the bloody night as an atrocity that could take place only elsewhere. It created the illusion that the rest of the flags were innocent.
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The flag removal was indicative of US academia’s response to the massacre. Institutions and professional associations canceled conferences and suspended exchange programs in China. Some scientists, including prominent Chinese-Americans who pioneered collaboration between the two countries, objected to the measures as hurting the Chinese people. Debates among academics were nevertheless overshadowed by business objectives. The need to hold Beijing accountable soon gave way to Washington’s desires for stable diplomatic ties and expanding trade relations with the world’s most populous country. The Chinese Student Protection Act of 1992 granted permanent residency to Chinese nationals who were in the US in the months after the crackdown. The law extended only to those who had the means to leave China in the first place, often by way of advanced training in the sciences, which the US government deemed beneficial to its national interests.
In the eyes of the state, the border, like the walls of a prison, forms an artificial barrier against the undesirable other whose only crime is the place of their birth, whose only chance at redemption is to prove their usefulness to the state. When harm happens on the other side of this division, the impulse to dissociate privileges one’s own innocence over the needs of those most impacted. The root causes of harm are left unexamined lest they implicate the self. A hasty ban along national lines does little to alleviate or prevent harm. To the contrary, the sanctimonious act upholds the carceral logic of exclusion and reinforces dominant structures of power. It perpetuates harm.
Hours after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, calls for a boycott of conservative states swarmed on social media. Public Responsibility in Medicine and Research, the largest professional research ethics organization, pulled its annual convention out of Utah over the state’s abortion ban and another bill discriminating against transgender athletes. The American Society for Human Genetics has done the same. For many Americans oblivious in their entitlement, the casual cruelty of imposing a border has finally hit home.
This is not the first time research organizations changed conference locations to protest a domestic policy. The American Association for the Advancement of Science moved its 1979 meeting out of Chicago when Illinois failed to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, and the 1999 gathering from Denver when Colorado’s new constitutional amendment allowed discrimination based on sexual orientation. In 2020, as uprisings for racial justice inflamed the nation, the American Physical Society announced that it will take police conduct into consideration when selecting future venues. Not unlike the academic boycotts after Tiananmen, in each of these instances, there are serious, valid concerns about intellectual freedom and attendee safety. Conventions are also a lucrative business. To contribute to the economy and prestige of a place is to be complicit in its policies.
Yet women, queer people, and Black and Brown people also live in these areas outsiders find dangerous or contemptible. Only about one-fifth of American students go out of state for college. Mobility across borders is predicated on privilege: physical, social, and financial. While capital flows freely in chase of profit, people without means are bound in place. As is the case with international sanctions and embargoes, punitive measures in the name of justice often end up aggravating present injustices; the most marginalized shoulder the worst consequences.
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Avoidance is not a solution. As a Chinese woman, I too have ranked and even refused locations of academic engagement on the basis of personal safety. I concede the selfish logic enabled by my privileges, that I deserve better than what’s happening over there. For people at the epicenters of harm, such withdrawals by outsiders achieve little more than virtue signaling as they mistake a systemic ill for a localized error. Racism, misogyny, and homophobia are not uniquely Southern or partisan problems. Those who feel morally superior in the north, like where I live, should be reminded that many of the justices who struck down reproductive rights, the legislators who pass abortion bans, and the prosecutors who go after pregnant people are graduates of elite schools in deep-blue states.
As part of its well-intentioned gesture to address police violence in the fall of 2020, APS put forth a list of criteria for police conduct in meeting locations, including banning chokeholds and de-escalation training. These superficial reforms, which have been carried out year after year to little effect, fail to recognize that it’s the institution of policing, not individual practice, that constitutes the violence. It’s therefore ironic that APS leadership has compared its proposal favorably to the Sullivan Principles. In 1977, as American businesses with operations in South Africa faced rising public demands to divest, Reverend Leon Sullivan developed this corporate code of conduct that promised fair and equal treatment for all employees regardless of their race. Supported by the apartheid South African government, a US ally in the Cold War, and US presidents Carter and Reagan, the Sullivan Principles were slammed by anti-apartheid organizations as a rhetorical shield for companies that continued to profit from the apartheid regime while Black South Africans remained in squalor.
Instead of relying on the good will of the powerful to effect change, campus activists during the anti-apartheid movement sought to shift the terrain of power by applying economic and political leverage. Heeding calls from Black South Africans at the center of this fight, students and faculty pressured their universities to stop investing stocks in companies that do business in South Africa, and lobbied state and federal legislatures to pass laws mandating divestment. The campus campaign built on lessons and organizational infrastructure from the earlier antiwar protests, as well as the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and ’70s. Tactically focused on the local community while connected with global battles, the divestment campaign was situated in a longer, larger lineage of struggle against racism, colonialism, and militarized violence. It persevered through decades of setbacks and, after the end of apartheid in South Africa, has left behind a rich blueprint that continues to inform campus organizing, such as divestments from fossil fuels and the prison industrial complex, and offers valuable lessons for scientists facing ethical dilemmas today.
It’s a failure of the political imagination when academics perceive their role in confronting injustice primarily as deciding where to have a conference or whether to collaborate with a colleague. There are times when withholding one’s labor or presence is necessary and just, but making the distinction along convenient divisions, such as the national border, further entrenches systems of segregation and reproduces disparities. A more effective boycott requires a broader and deeper comprehension of one’s relations to politics: Who enjoys the lion’s share of the benefits from my participation and who bears the costs of my withdrawal? What are the material conditions that sustain this injustice and how can they be disrupted? Do similar conditions exist where I am and what is my role in it? Answers to these questions should guide our actions, whereas a passive gesture to avoid complicity merely reduces the work of liberation to an intellectual exercise while oppressive power structures stay intact. As philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò writes, we “need to focus on building and rebuilding rooms, not on regulating traffic within and between them.”
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The academy, like the state, is not an abstraction. Major universities are often the dominant employers and real estate owners in their cities, and operate some of the largest private police forces in the world. The real mission of advancing gender equality and racial justice from the academy lies not in attending bias training or making tokenized diversity hires, but in contesting unfair labor conditions and economic practices maintained by the university on and off campus.
Similarly, the fight against state violence must progress from denouncing foreign actors to examining the material basis of one’s own livelihood, how it’s sustained by or contributes to the vast machinery that makes war and oppression possible. As the anti-apartheid campaign has shown, abuses that appear far and hard to reach can be as near and dear as the school endowment and stock holdings. Academia, as well as the rest of society, must resist blanket bans against groups of people on the sole basis of nationality while remaining vigilant against the flow of capital that funds atrocities. Targeted sanctions against the Kremlin and other state actors must be accompanied by support for those displaced by war, and the right to refuge must not be conditioned on one’s profession or degree of education. Scientific collaboration, like the work of science itself, is not morally neutral or uniformly good; the refusal to work with Russian or Chinese researchers on weaponry and surveillance technology must also hold for ostensibly peaceful and democratic states, including one’s own.
Reckoning with one’s position in interwoven systems of oppression is a daunting and deeply unsettling task. I feel the anguish keenly as a physicist, as an employee of an elite university, as a resident in a country sliding towards fascism, as a Han Chinese person witnessing Beijing’s tightening grip over dissidents and ethnic minorities, and as a consumer of the carbon economy on the precipice of climate collapse. But to accept responsibility is also to recognize power. The magnitude of the challenge is its emancipatory potential. While individual rebellion proves possibility and gives permission to others, real change is rooted in community. Only organized collective action can move the grounds current power structures subsist on.
The laboratory and the classroom, the field and the archive: the sites of knowledge production and dissemination are also terrains of struggle. Instead of simply describing things as they are and offering justification, it’s the professional duty and moral obligation of the academy to interrogate the world as it is and to imagine what it can be. My teenage self thought that by crossing the greatest ocean on Earth I would reach safety and enjoy undying freedom, that the elegance of elementary particles would be a refuge from political disarray. The permanence I had pictured was an illusion, conditioned on a world order crumbling under its own weight. As people who survived wars and genocides teach us, many worlds have ended before us; some worlds are unsalvageable and not worth saving. In this moment of planetary disasters, there is no retreat to the normalcy of yesterday or escape to the comfort of elsewhere. The undertaking of remaking this world begins here and now.