Chapter 4.1: Open Source Investigations before the Age of Google: The Harvard Sussex Program
This chapter is based on research conversations between Henrietta Wilson and: Mary Kaldor (Professor Emeritus of Global Governance and Director of the Conflict Research Programme at The London School of Economics and Political Science, and HSP co-Founding Director Julian Perry Robinson’s life partner and widow); Matthew Meselson (Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University and co-Founding Director of the Harvard Sussex Program); Peter Pringle (former foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times, The Observer and The Independent and close friend to Julian Perry Robinson and Matthew Meselson); and James Revill (Head of the Weapons of Mass Destruction and Space Security Programmes at UNIDIR, former Research Fellow at the Harvard Sussex Program and co-author of this book’s Chapter 4.3). It was written with warm thanks to them.
This chapter shows how open source research can be used to inform national and international policy-making. It takes as a case study an open source research project that predates the current generation of digital online investigations – that is, the Harvard Sussex Program on Chemical and Biological Weapons (HSP). Starting in 1990, HSP formalized the collaboration between Professor Matthew Meselson (Harvard) and Professor Julian Perry Robinson (Sussex), and institutionalized their work strengthening global prohibitions against chemical and biological warfare.
The chapter overviews HSP’s open source research, and shows how it underpinned the group’s efforts to inform and impact policy. It also considers wider insights that derive from HSP’s experiences, including how the distinction between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ sources is not always fixed or clear, and broad lessons about best practice in open source research and its applications.
