Monthly Archives: September 2018

Another Grey Zone

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New from Bloomsbury – though, desperately sadly, at a ruinous price, a collection of essays edited by Mark Lattimer and Philippe Sands, The Grey Zone: The Grey Zone
Civilian Protection Between Human Rights and the Laws of War:

The high civilian death toll in modern, protracted conflicts such as those in Syria or Iraq indicate the limits of international law in offering protections to civilians at risk. A recent conference of states convened by the International Committee of the Red Cross referred to ‘an institutional vacuum in the area of international humanitarian law implementation’. Yet both international humanitarian law and the law of human rights establish a series of rights intended to protect civilians. But which law or laws apply in a particular situation, and what are the obstacles to their implementation? How can the law offer greater protections to civilians caught up in new methods of warfare, such as drone strikes, or targeted by new forms of military organisation, such as transnational armed groups? Can the implementation gap be filled by the growing use of human rights courts to remedy violations of the laws of armed conflict, or are new instruments or mechanisms of civilian legal protection needed?

This volume brings together contributions from leading academic authorities and legal practitioners on the situation of civilians in the grey zone between human rights and the laws of war. The chapters in Part 1 address key contested or boundary issues in defining the rights of civilians or non-combatants in today’s conflicts. Those in Part 2 examine remedies and current mechanisms for redress both at the international and national level, and those in Part 3 assess prospects for the development of new mechanisms for addressing violations. As military intervention to protect civilians remains contested, this volume looks at the potential for developing alternative approaches to the protection of civilians and their rights.

 

I’ve written about attempts to ‘eliminate the grey zone’ before, but this is a different one, as the Contents make clear:

 

Part I: Rights
1. Who Is a Civilian? Membership of Opposition Groups and Direct Participation in Hostilities
Emily Crawford
2. The Duty in International Law to Investigate Civilian Deaths in Armed Conflict
Mark Lattimer
3. Protection by Process: Implementing the Principle of Proportionality in Contemporary Armed Conflicts
Amichai Cohen
4. Regulating Armed Drones and Other Emerging Weapons Technologies
Stuart Casey-Maslen
5. The Globalisation of Non-International Armed Conflicts
Pavle Kilibarda and Gloria Gaggioli
6. Administrative Detention in Non-International Armed Conflicts
Françoise J Hampson
7. The Crime of Rape in Military and Civilian Jurisdictions
Lois Moore and Christine Chinkin

Part II: Remedies
8. The Right to Reparation for Victims of Armed Conflict
Carla Ferstman
9. Arguing International Humanitarian Law Standards in National Courts-A Spectrum of Expectations
Sharon Weill
10. The Death of Lex Specialis? Regional Human Rights Mechanisms and the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict
Bill Bowring
11. Extraterritorial Obligations under Human Rights Law
Cedric Ryngaert
12. What Duties Do Peacekeepers Owe Civilians? Lessons from the NuhanovicCase
Liesbeth Zegveld
13. Civilian Protection and the Arms Trade Treaty
Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh

Part III: Developments
14. A Path Towards Greater Respect for International Humanitarian Law
Valentin Zellweger and François Voeffray
15. The Responsibility to Protect and Non-State Armed Groups
Jennifer M Welsh
16. Protecting Civilians by Criminalising the Most Serious Forms of the Illegal Use of Force: Activating the International Criminal Court’s Jurisdiction over the Crime of Aggression
Carrie McDougall
17. Elements and Innovations in a New Global Treaty on Crimes Against Humanity
Leila Nadya Sadat

Mark introduces the project (and en passant makes clear its relevance to my continuing work on Syria) over at Justice in Conflict here:

As armed conflicts continue to metastasize in many world regions, is the existing international law protecting civilians fit for purpose, or are there gaps in protection? The answer of most lawyers of armed conflict to this question has long been that the gap lies not in the substantive law but in its implementation.

While the need for implementation is plain, it is also clear that the contemporary face of conflict presents aspects which the framers of the Geneva Conventions and their 1977 Protocols – as well as the major human rights treaties – could hardly have envisaged. The growth of transnational armed groups such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS means that a ‘non-international armed conflict’ can now be fought in many states simultaneously or even, according to some proponents, globally. New technologies in warfare, from armed drones to autonomous weapons systems, radically alter the circumstances under which information is made available to commanders and with it the scope and accountability of decision-making….

Just looking at the fundamental conflict activities of killing and detaining, the grey areas appear to be wide. With conflict conducted in areas of high population density, there are a number of practical problems in distinguishing civilians from combatants or fighters, but also legal ones. Civilians lose their immunity from attack when directly participating in hostilities, but how is direct participation defined and how long does it last? In Iraq and Syria individuals have been targeted on account of their membership of ISIS or Jabhat al Nusra. But what of members of armed groups who do not engage in combat? What of the driver, the cook, or the recruiter? The treatment of ISIS members and their families is a sensitive subject in Iraq, but it appears to encompass the targeting and/or punishment of those who had no combat function.

The growth in armed conflict jurisprudence from human rights and monitoring bodies has in many cases recast the headline question: rather than identifying gaps in the law, the challenge is to determine which set of laws or legal regimes apply. Should it be human rights law or the international humanitarian law (IHL) applicable in armed conflict? Or indeed both?

Trauma Geographies online

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My Antipode Lecture on Trauma Geographies is now available online via YouTube.

(If you wonder why I’m hunched over my laptop, the microphone was fixed to the podium….).  Since I’m now turning this into an essay, I’d welcome any questions, comments or suggestions.

You can find more details  including open access to a series of related articles – at the Antipode Foundation website here.

Martial politics, violence and the everywhere war

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CFP: MARTIAL POLITICS, VIOLENCE, AND THE EVERYWHERE WAR
International Conference of Critical Geography (ICCG), Athens, 19-23 April 2019.

Session organisers
Craig Jones, Newcastle University
Rhys Machold, Glasgow University
Derek Gregory, University of British Columbia

New wars and old wars, everywhere and nowhere wars, forever and unending wars. This nomenclature can distract from the immediate and local ways in which war is fought and the intimacies of time and space upon which its prosecution relies (Kinsella, forthcoming). Recent and not-so-recent debates about war take for granted what we mean when we talk about war (and not-war), but through these very debates it has become clear that we are not always talking about the same thing(s).

In this session we re-pose and extend a question asked by Etienne Balibar a decade ago: ‘what’s in a war?’ (Balibar, 2008). Balibar’s question was motivated by a desire to understand the shape, content and changing character of the ‘war on terror’ – a war (or set of wars) that has inspired many critiques across the social sciences and beyond. But the war on terror has also inspired several ways of reconceptualising war and its relation to other forms of violence, so much so that we must extend Balibar’s question about war in ways that allow us to more fully interrogate its spatiotemporal horizons as well as it’s putative exceptionality and relationship to other forms of (re)emergent violence.

Emerging approaches to war, violence and militarization herald all sorts of possible ways forward for re-thinking the war-violence continuum. Recent feminist scholarship on military and police violence instruct us to see their connections, for instance, via ‘the right to maim’ (Puar, 2017). Alison Howell has recently implored us to dispense with the concept of militarization altogether in favour of what she calls “martial politics”, signalling both a ‘need to be attentive to war-like relations or technologies and knowledges that are “of war”, and aiding in our understanding of ‘the indivisibility of war and peace, military and civilian, and national and social security’ (Howell, 2018: 118). Extending interrogations of the intersections between war and police power (Neocleous 2014) Micol Seigel’s notion ‘violence work’ develops a slightly different critique of ‘militarization’ calling out the idea of separated military/civilian spheres a liberal “fiction” yet emphasizing that the “Twin vehicles of state violence, police and military rub up against each other in productive friction” (Seigel 2008: 6). Ann Laura Stoler defines her notion of “duress” as “a relationship of actualized and anticipated violence” (2016: 8), arguing that duress is “increasingly found to be ricocheting back and forth across the imperial world” (64). In different ways, these interventions encourage us to move beyond a critique of entrenched boundaries and binaries – war/peace, military/police, civilian/combatant, etc. – to consider the politics at work within these representations. This emerging work also suggests possible novel ways forward for reclaiming and reframing these binaries and imagining new modes of resistance to war and war-like violence.

We encourage papers that broadly address the following questions and topics, not limited to:

· What is war?
· What, if anything, is exceptional, heightened or exemplary about war and how does it relate to other forms of violence and coercion?
· ‘Paradigmatic’ wars, warfare ‘laboratories’, war ‘hot-spots’
· Targeting bodies and populations
· Killing, injuring, maiming, and disability
· War power/police power
· Gendered violence and intimate war
· Infrastructural warfare
· Urban warfare/ war in/on cities
· War, medicine and health care under fire
· Intersections of war and law
· Sensate regimes and corpographies of war
· War and occupation
· Locating the everywhere war
· Algorithmic, electronic, robotic and cyber war
· More-than-human/other-than-human war
· War, ruins and historical memory

Please submit abstracts of around 200 words to craig.jones@ncl.ac.uk by 29 September 2018. Please send expressions of interest ASAP given the very short time-frame – our apologies for this.

Trauma geographies, woundscapes and the clinic

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I returned from the RGS/IBG Conference in Cardiff to the start of term (which explains and I hope excuses my silence: I’ve updated my two course outlines for this term, and you can find them under the TEACHING Tab if you are interested; if you have any comments or suggestions I’d be happy to have them).

My next order of business is to turn my Antipode Lecture on “Trauma Geographies” into a text (the video will be online soon, I hope); I’ve already started on the translation, helped by questions and feedback from the presentation, and I’ll post the draft when it’s ready.

The argument moves from medical care and casualty evacuation in Belgium and France, 1914-1918 through Afghanistan 2001-2018 to Syria 2011-2018, and in each case I address both combatants and civilians.  Much of this trades on (and develops) posts that will be familiar to regular readers – and if you’re not the GUIDE tab ought to help direct you to the most relevant ones – but I’ve also returned to my ideas about corpography and used them to flesh out (sic) the concept of a ‘woundscape‘.  I decided to that because one of the themes of the conference was landscape, and the idea of a woundscape seemed to take that debate in a fruitful new direction.  I first encountered it in Jennifer Terry‘s brilliant Attachments to War, and she in turn found it in the work of Gregory Whitehead (particularly Display Wounds).

I’m drawn to the way in which both authors/performers try to coax wounds to speak, to read their violent ruptures of the body, and to transcend the typically narrowly bio-medical discourse that frames them.  At the same time, I don’t want to ignore that scientific framing, not least because it is profoundly performative and has such vital consequences (both physical and affective), so in my rendering a ‘woundscape’ is constituted through the explosive intersection of the military gaze (‘the target’) and the medical gaze (the injured body) but immediately spirals beyond those visual registers – and indeed beyond visuality – to include a range of other senses and sensibilities. A woundscape thus includes the bio-physical, cognitive and affective landscapes in which casualties are created, moved and treated.  The affective envelope that surrounds and invades the injured body is a constant concern; this extends beyond the casualty to a host of other actors – as Omar Dewachi shrewdly observes, when wounds travel they ‘enter new social worlds and multiple histories of violence’ – but I I focus on physical injury (rather than PTSD) because so many accounts of later modern war have represented it as what James Der Derian dubbed ‘virtuous’ war whose seeming remoteness is rendered as at once increasingly virtual, fought on and through screens and algorithms, and at the limit radically, absurdly disembodied. Against this, I’m trying to respond to John Keegan’s dismayed observation that the wounded – he included the dead too – ‘apparently dematerialize as soon as they are struck down…’

So here are the slides from my presentation that summarise my interim propositions about woundscapes, drawn from the three case studies; I’ll be revising and elaborating them as I proceed, but I hope this might start a conversation:

Finally, Omar’s wonderful essay that I cited earlier appeared in MAT – Medicine, Anthropology, Theory – and I would be remiss not to draw attention to its most recent issue.  The editorial on ‘Clinic and Crisis‘ by Eileen Moyer and Vinh-Kim Nguyen sends me back to the other essay I’m currently trying to finish, on “The Death of the Clinic“, which plainly intersects with ‘Trauma Geographies’:

A common thread runs through the articles of this issue of MAT: the conjoining of clinic and crisis. Here we refer, in the manner of Foucault (1963) to the clinic as both an epistemology (a way of knowing) as well as a material space where the ill seek care. Crises are moments of rupture, where the surface of everyday life splinters to reveal what lies underneath and new dangers can appear; they are also turning points where futures can be grasped and foretold. Moments of social crisis manifest in bodies, and therefore in the clinic. Das’s notion of ‘critical events’, as discussed in Affliction: Health, Disease, and Poverty and also taken up in MAT’s September 2017 issue, furnishes perhaps the most thorough consideration of crisis. As she and others have pointed out, crisis is an everyday reality for many who live in conditions of precarity and existential instability. More generally, the current geopolitical climate and the growing urgency of climate change contribute to the sense of crisis. The clinic is symptomatic of crisis, a place where a state of emergency becomes finally visible.

More soon – and I haven’t forgotten that I need to return to my series of posts on Ghouta and, in particular, to address the issue of medical care and casualty evacuation (or lack of it) there too.

Cities Lost & Remade

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An editorial from Steve Niva, the new editor of the indispensable Middle East Report introduing the new issue:

The merciless killing by Israeli snipers of over 100 mostly unarmed Palestinians approaching the militarized fence around the Gaza Strip in May of 2018 was significant not simply for what it says about Israel’s callous disregard for Palestinian human rights. Israel’s misleading attempt to legitimate its shoot-to-kill policy in terms of a right to defend its sovereign borders belies the fact that its self-proclaimed “border” around Gaza is simply the outer boundary of an open-air prison of barbed wire fences, fortified gates and no-go zones over which Israel retains full control as an occupying power. The Palestinians being killed at the fence area are not hostile invaders but rather displaced and stateless peoples protesting against the cage Israel has built to keep them both boxed in and out.

Israel’s violence against displaced and stateless Palestinians in Gaza is significant more broadly as a dark exemplar of an unfolding global future: the proliferation of militarized walls, fences, no-go areas and increasingly lethal actions that police the space between the “green zones” of wealth and privilege and the “red zones” of the poor, excluded and stateless around the world. Israel’s militarized population management systems, border security technologies and anti-civilian weapons that are “battle tested” against Palestinians and then sold on the global market have found willing buyers and emulators among those seeking to contain, deter or eliminate unwanted populations. Increasingly militarized systems whether “made in Israel” or not, can be found along the US-Mexico border, Europe’s southern facing border zones, India’s border zone around Bangladesh, as well as the zones outside of gated communities in various global locations.

The articles in this issue of Middle East Report take us beyond these fortified walls and zones to illuminate some of the sources of displacement, dispossession and loss found throughout urban areas in the contemporary Middle East, which often produce the very population outflows that militarized border zones seek to contain. In our age of “planetary urbanization” many cities have become battlegrounds where insurgents seek asymmetrical advantage against opponents who increasingly target cities as if civilians no longer exist—the way Israel labels the entire urban fabric of Gazan society a “terrorist infrastructure” or the urban destruction campaigns undertaken by Syria, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the US against ISIS. At the same time, global capitalist deregulation and privatization has given rise to what global sociologist Saskia Sassen terms “predatory formations” of investors, states and economic elites that target cities for speculative profit and nepotistic rewards, emptying them of their poor or rebellious inhabitants, whether in Amman, Istanbul or Morocco. Some urban inhabitants are forced to flee while others resist, remain and keep alive more just visions of their collective urban past and future whether in Gezi Park, Mosul or elsewhere.

 

Contents:

The Urbanization of Power and the Struggle for the City Deen Sharp

Globalized Authoritarianism and the New Moroccan City Koenraad Bogaert

“The Dubai of…” Yasser Elsheshtawy

Amman Eliana Abu-Hamdi

Alexandria, City of Dispossession Youssef El Chazli

The Destructive Dreams of AKP Urbanism Ayse Çavdar

Abadan Kaveh Ehsani and Rasmus Christian Elling

Generational Dislocations Joanne Randa Nucho

Jerusalem’s Colonial Landscapes of Loss Thomas Abowd

“Mosul Will Never Be the Same” Omar Mohammed

Sur Serra Hakyema