One of my tasks this past week has been to complete the revisions to ‘The Natures of War’ which, to my delight, Antipode has agreed to publish in its entirety (and with a handful of illustrations too).  I’ve added a discussion of the ways in which the narratives on which I draw – for the Western Front, the deserts of North Africa, and Vietnam – were all, for various reasons, ‘white boy’s stories’.  I had made it clear that there were troops from other continents fighting and dying on the Western Front, for whom the militarized nature of trench warfare in Europe would have been doubly strange (see also here), and I had also explained that in Vietnam there were at least two other stories to be told: most of the US memoirs were written by white soldiers so that the experiences of African-Americans were written out of the narrative, and the (not so different, as it happens) experiences of Vietnamese fighters only flickered in the footnotes.  I now address all these issues in the body of the text, and the racism of military violence – the racism within militaries ad coalitions as well as racial violence directed at ‘the enemy’ – speaks directly to racializations of nature, and I plan to write another essay drawing on the few extant and relevant memoirs from the People’s Army of North Vietnam and their ancillaries (for a taster, see here: scroll down).

But Juanita Sundberg has raised an altogether different though related question, about the ways in which non-white and (post)colonial subjects construed violence and, indeed, experienced it as quotidian.  In short, is war itself – in so far as its dominant conceptions privilege Europe and North America – seen from the position of a white subject, which is then confounded by the ‘intemperate natures’ of desert and rainforest?

The unrevised draft is still under the DOWNLOADS tab.  More soon.

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While I’ve been rooting around with these questions, I discovered another way of thinking about ‘The Nature of War’.  Not sure how I missed this, but over at the Vision Machine Roger Stahl previews an essay on ‘The Nature of War’ and the ways in which

‘the discourse of “war” in news, pop culture, and weapons industry PR has taken on a host of biological metaphors. I call this discourse “biomimetic war,” and it is one that, in the end, tacitly extends military jurisdiction to the governance of life itself…

Of course, biological metaphors have been a part of war/security discourse for a while. Consider the fact that “drone” came from a WWII experiment in unmanned flight that relied on a control center called the “Queen Bee.” Surveillance, especially during the Cold War, has been rife with “bugs” and “flies on the wall.” In the post-9/11 period, however, the biological has edged toward the center as ultimate object of military power. War has gone ecological. Here, terrorism fuses with the natural disaster, Homeland Security responds to disease outbreak and domestic bombing alike, and the specter of biological weapons haunts the public imagination. In such a discursive environment, the contest we call “war” has effectively been mapped onto the biosphere as a permanent and ubiquitous condition determined less by the policing of national boundaries than policing life systems. ‘

You can download the full essay, ‘Life is War: the rhetoric of biomimesis and the future military’ at Democratic Communique 26 (2) (2014) 122-137 here.