One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward: The United States Institute of Peace‪.‬

Knowledge-Producing Institutions and Hegemony Hegemonic power structures, be they domestic or international, rest on a tissue of ideas that is beefed up with economic and military muscle. Rationality dictates that powerful actors in a society or international system cannot permanently rely on coercion to achieve their ends. This is due to the impossibility of policing each nook and cranny of the space that is subject to rule, as well as the natural instinct of the weak to attempt "everyday forms of resistance" (Scott, 1985). No system of rule can completely avoid slippage and subversion at the margins, but it can employ a vast intellectual apparatus to ensure that dissenting knowledge is contained at manageable levels or quarantined, so that the whole forest does not catch flame. Successful power operators tend to recognise the seductive talents of the intelligentsia in winning general consent for their rule and edging out anti-systemic nuisance value. The case of government-sponsored think tanks bears this strategy out in clear-cut terms and serves as an apt illustration.