Tag Archives: Mary Kaldor

War, law and visibilities

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Two more forthcoming books on war.

Coming in May from Cambridge University Press, a book Richard Falk hails as ‘the most significant book on international law published in the last decade’, International law and New Wars by Christine Chinkin and Mary Kaldor:

International Law and New Wars examines how international law fails to address the contemporary experience of what are known as ‘new wars’ – instances of armed conflict and violence in places such as Syria, Ukraine, Libya, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan. International law, largely constructed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rests to a great extent on the outmoded concept of war drawn from European experience – inter-state clashes involving battles between regular and identifiable armed forces. The book shows how different approaches are associated with different interpretations of international law, and, in some cases, this has dangerously weakened the legal restraints on war established after 1945. It puts forward a practical case for what it defines as second generation human security and the implications this carries for international law.

At 595 pages it’s clearly a blockbuster.  Here is the detailed Contents list:

Part I. Conceptual Framework:
1. Introduction
2. Sovereignty and the authority to use force
3. The relevance of international law
Part II. Jus ad Bellum:
4. Self-defence as a justification for war: the geopolitical and war on terror models
5. The humanitarian model for recourse to use force
Part III. Jus in Bello:
6. How force is used
7. Weapons
Part IV. Jus Post-Bellum:
8. ‘Post-conflict’ and governance
9. The liberal peace: peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding
10. Justice and accountability
Part V. The Way Forward:
11. Second generation human security
12. What does human security require of international law?

Coming in June from Rutgers University Press, In/Visible War: the culture of war in twenty-first century America, edited by John Louis Lucaites and Jon Simons:

In/Visible War addresses a paradox of twenty-first century American warfare. The contemporary visual American experience of war is ubiquitous, and yet war is simultaneously invisible or absent; we lack a lived sense that “America” is at war. This paradox of in/visibility concerns the gap between the experiences of war zones and the visual, mediated experience of war in public, popular culture, which absents and renders invisible the former. Large portions of the domestic public experience war only at a distance. For these citizens, war seems abstract, or may even seem to have disappeared altogether due to a relative absence of visual images of casualties. Perhaps even more significantly, wars can be fought without sacrifice by the vast majority of Americans.
Yet, the normalization of twenty-first century war also renders it highly visible. War is made visible through popular, commercial, mediated culture. The spectacle of war occupies the contemporary public sphere in the forms of celebrations at athletic events and in films, video games, and other media, coming together as MIME, the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network.

Here’s the main Contents List:

Part I: Seeing War

Chapter 1: How Photojournalism Has Framed the War in Afghanistan – David Campbell Chapter 2: Returning Soldiers and the In/visibility of Combat Trauma – Christopher J. Gilbert and John Louis Lucaites Chapter 3: (Re)fashioning PTSD’s Warrior Project – Jeremy G. Gordon Chapter 4: Unremarkable Suffering: Banality, Spectatorship, and War’s In/visibilities – Rebecca A. Adelman and Wendy Kozol “War Is Fun,” a Photo-Essay – Nina Berman Chapter 5: Laying bin Laden to Rest: A Case Study of Terrorism and the Politics of Visibility – Jody Madeira

Part II: Not Seeing War

Chapter 6: Digital War and the Public Mind: Call of Duty Reloaded, Decoded – Roger Stahl Chapter 7: A Cinema of Consolation: Post-9/11 Super Invasion Fantasy – De Witt Douglas Kilgore Chapter 8: Differential Configurations: In/visibility through the Lens of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2008) – Claudia Breger Chapter 9: Canine Rescue, Civilian Casualties, and the Long Gulf War – Purnima BosePart III:

Theorizing the In/visibility of War 

Chapter 10: The In/visibility of Liberal Peace: Perpetual Peace and Enduring Freedom – Jon Simons Chapter 11: Why War? Baudrillard, Derrida, and the Absolute Televisual Image – Diane Rubenstein Chapter 12: War in the Twenty-first Century: Visible, Invisible, or Superpositional? – James Der Derian

Doomsday Books

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DOOMSDAYStill wandering through the nuclear wastelands… (see also here, here and here).  Not surprisingly, there is a considerable literature on the United States and nuclear war, but much less on the UK.  I still have my tattered copy of Doomsday:  Britain after nuclear attack by Stan Openshaw, Philip Steadman and Owen Greene, published more than thirty years ago.  Those were heady days: the authors were members of Scientists Against Nuclear Arms, and the book was put together soon after the European Nuclear Disarmament Appeal launched by E. P. Thompson (who famously announced he had “left his desk” to further the campaign), Mary Kaldor, Dan Smith and Ken Coates.

Next to Doomsday is my equally battered and well-thumbed copy of a book of essays edited by two other British geographers, David Pepper and Alan Jenkins, The geography of peace and war, which appeared in 1985.  It was in three Parts, ‘The geography of the Cold War and the arms race’, ‘The geography of nuclear war’ (which included an update from Stan and Philip) and ‘The geography of peace’ (with an essay on nuclear weapon free zones).

Fast forward twenty years, and these emphases are in stark contrast to Colin Flint‘s edited collection, Geography of war and peace, in which nuclear war receives just passing mention(s).  The same is true of Audrey Kobayashi‘s still more recent Geography of peace and armed conflict – apart from one brief chapter concerned with Iran.

HOGG British Nuclear CultureAll of this will explain why I am looking forward to the publication of Jonathan Hogg‘s British Nuclear Culture: official and unofficial narratives in the long 20th century, coming from Bloomsbury in January:

The advent of the atomic bomb, the social and cultural impact of nuclear science, and the history of the British nuclear state after 1945 is a complex and contested story. British Nuclear Culture is an important survey that offers a new interpretation of the nuclear century by tracing the tensions between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ nuclear narratives in British culture.

In this book, Jonathan Hogg argues that nuclear culture was a pervasive and persistent aspect of British life, particularly in the years following 1945. This idea is illustrated through detailed analysis of various primary source materials, such as newspaper articles, government files, fictional texts, film, music and oral testimonies. The book introduces unfamiliar sources to students of nuclear and cold war history, and offers in-depth and critical reflections on the expanding historiography in this area of research.

Chronologically arranged, British Nuclear Culture reflects upon, and returns to, a number of key themes throughout, including nuclear anxiety, government policy, civil defence, ‘nukespeak’ and nuclear subjectivity, individual experience, protest and resistance, and the influence of the British nuclear state on everyday life. The book contains illustrations, individual case studies, a select bibliography, a timeline, and a list of helpful online resources for students of nuclear history.

Joseph Masco – author of The nuclear borderlands: The Manhattan Project in post-Cold War New Mexico and The theater of operations: National security affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror  – likes it, which is more than enough for me:

We know the atomic bomb fundamentally transformed modern life, but Jonathan Hogg shows us that it did not do so in the same way everywhere. This is a important contribution to nuclear studies as it takes both nation and region seriously in the production of a nuclear culture. Hogg does not just follow expert concerns or defense policy debates, he also attends to the vernacular forms of local activisms across British cities and generations. British Nuclear Culture leads the way to a new comparative nuclear studies, and with it, a deeper understanding of the nuclear revolution.

Here is the Contents List:

Introduction
1. Early Nuclear Culture
2. The Manhattan Project
3. 1945 – 1950: Early Responses to the Bomb
4. 1950 – 1958: Maturing Responses
5. 1958 – 1979: Radicalised and Realist Responses
6. 1979 – 1989: Extreme Realism
7. 1989 – 2011: The Persistence of Nuclear Culture
8. Conclusion

For those who don’t think it surprising that – apart from people like Michael Curry, Matt Farish, Scott Kirsch and Fraser MacDonald– human geographers should have turned away from a critical scrutiny of atomic geographies so speedily with the presumptive waning of the Cold War, notice the title of Chapter 7…

The new peace

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The text of a lecture given by Mary Kaldor, Professor of Global Governance at the LSE,  at Tufts University on October 2012, when she was awarded the Dr Jean Mayer Global Citizens Award, named for Tufts’ former President and Chancellor.  The lecture also coincided with the publication of the third edition of Kaldor’s New and Old Wars: organized violence in a global era.

She emphasises that this lecture is a work in progress, a way-station en route to a book she is writing with Christine Chinkin, Professor of International Law who is also at the LSE.  Building on her discussion of ‘new wars’, and on her collaboration with Shannon Beebe, The ultimate weapon is no weapon: Human security and the new rules of war and peace, Kaldor argues for a ‘new peace’ in these terms:

I am arguing for international law that prohibits the use of force, as in domestic contexts, except in the very limited case of individual self-defence. The only argument for the international use of force is the scaling up of individual self-defence, e.g. genocide or massive violations of human rights. But in this case, the conduct of force is not the same as war-fighting. It is defensive, aimed at protection. Those responsible for the attacks are to be arrested where possible rather than killed. Any international use of force would take place under the authority of a reformed United Nations Security Council. Such an approach would require something like international emergency services rather like in a domestic context, we have police, fire fighters and emergency medical services.

In case this sounds excessively utopian, it is worth noting that something along these lines has been developing in parallel with the War on Terror. All sorts of new techniques have been developed in wars in the Balkans and Africa – safe havens, humanitarian corridors, the establishment of courts to try war crimes. New types of security capabilities are being developed by the European Union and in the thinking about civilian protection in the United Nations. New commitments to humanitarian intervention or Responsibility to Protect have been adopted by the African Union. Many international missions, not all successful of course, have been taking place alongside the War on Terror and have involved a learning experience. We tend to focus on Iraq and Afghanistan because they are so visible but they may well turn out to be exceptions as a consequence of a more traditional war-fighting military intervention.

To put it more simply, in difficult situations like for example Syria, it is important to identify an alternative between old-fashioned military intervention where the aim is to win and where many get killed and there is a risk of escalation, and doing nothing. Or in the case of the War on Terror, it is about taking the problem of terrorism seriously. When terrorists are treated as enemies in a war, they are elevated and legitimised. In the case of the drone attacks, for example, it is not just a problem that mistakes are made and civilians sometimes get killed, more importantly, it escalates the violence. It provides an argument and justification for mobilising more recruits to extremist causes. What I worry about is that the combination of the economic crisis and what is happening the Middle East could portend a spreading protracted new war in large parts of the world.

I think there is a slippage between the first and last paragraphs of this extract: to claim that, in the circumstances Kaldor outlines, ‘the conduct of force is not the same as war-fighting’ is to ring-fence ‘war’ in ways that are increasingly problematic, as that last sentence concedes.  And to assume that a re-calibrated international law can somehow insulate the one from the other is utopian, isn’t it?

Humanitarianism: Past, present and future

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While I was thinking about  Eyal Weizman‘s reflections on what he calls ‘the humanitarian present’, I stumbled across what looks set to be a fascinating conference organised by the University of Manchester’s Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, 8-10 November 2012:

The provisional programme includes keynotes from (among others) Mark Duffield, ‘How did we become unprepared? From modernist to post-modernist conceptions of disaster’, Mary Kaldor, ‘The evolution of humanitarian intervention’ [with a response from Maja Zehfuss] and Janice Gross Stein and Michael Barnett, ‘The globalization of humanitarianism’, and papers from (among others) Simon Reid-Henry, ‘Humanitarian Reason, Moral Geography and the contemporary Will-to-Care’, Michael Givoni, ‘Gazing back: local perceptions and humanitarian knowledge’, Larissa Fast, ‘Aid and violence: reaffirming “Humanity” in Humanitarianism’, Gary Blank, ‘Framing Third World Victimhood: Oxfam, the “Biafra Lobby”, and the politics of famine in Britain 1968-1970’, Roland Bleier, ‘The visual dehumanization of refugees’, James Thompson, ‘Humanitarian performance’ and Kathleen Coppens, ‘Long-term conflicts and humanitarian aid’. My selections just scratch the surface, but what’s particularly interesting is the mix of presenters – scholars, professionals and activists.