Paul Goble
Staunton, Dec. 6 – Since Vladimir Putin launched his expanded invasion of Ukraine in February, Dissernet activists who have attracted attention by exposing plagiarism in the dissertations and publications of officials and scholars has refocused its efforts to track hatred narratives contained in such publications, Andrey Zayakin says.
The group’s co-founder, charged with being “a foreign agent” and forced to emigrate, describes this shift to the 7x7 news agency (semnasem.org/articles/2022/12/06/narrativ-nenavisti-nash-glavnyj-predmet-issledovaniya-soosnovatel-disserneta-andrej-zayakin-o-rabote-volnogo-setevogo-soobshestva-posle-nachala-vooruzhennogo-konflikta-v-ukraine).
Dissernet, Zayakin says, “continues to examine scholarly works for plagiarism;” but under conditions of war, its activists felt that it was necessary to examine a second issue: “how closely our scholarship and academic community in the social scientists has been involved” in preparing and prosecuting this conflict.
Some of what they have found, he continues, undoubtedly is a response to what officials are doing; but some of it may have autonomously developed and even anticipated and influenced what those officials have chosen to do. Consequently, it is important to track what is going on in order to have some idea about this relationship.
And there is an additional reason as well, Zayakin says. A nation must know its heroes and its villains; and those who work in the academic milieu and think they can escape examination for works that are little more than vicious advocacy for military action and worse must be exposed and held accountable.
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