ABSTRACT
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) program is designed to give academics, mostly in the natural and social sciences, exposure to policy-making. It examines the Department of State as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Diplomacy Fellow in 2001 in the Office of International Religious Freedom (IRF). In 2008, three years after starting work in INR, he applied for and received an intelligence community fellowship to conduct research on a project of his own design the role of foreign religious education in the Central Asian Islamic revival. INR is one of the least clandestine of the intelligence agencies. It encourages its analysts to engage with experts and other informants outside the US government. As with Mark Dawson's narrative, Abramson seeks to demystify the practice of anthropologically trained government analysts as a category of work. It is very different for intelligence analysis to inform diplomatic policy-making versus front-line military activity.
