Suchergebnisse

Gender, innocence, and civilization -- Martial piety in the medieval and chivalric codes of war -- Civilization and empire: Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius -- General orders 100, Union General Sherman's March to Atlanta, and the Sand Creek Massacre -- The 1899 Martens Clause and the 1949 IV Geneva Convention -- The Algerian Civil War and the 1977 Protocols Additional -- The civil wars of Guatemala and El Salvador -- Responsibility

Histories of political science and of the laws of war identify the nineteenth-century scholar Francis Lieber as their modern founder. His 1863 General Orders 100 codified the modern laws of war, internationalizing his political thought. Yet, relatively unremarked is that Lieber wrote his foundational texts during U.S. settler colonization, which he justified in whole. I argue that GO100 facilitated settler colonial violence by defining modern war as a public war, arrogating it to sovereign states; distinguishing revenge from retaliation, attributing revenge to the "savage"; and elevating a certain racialized/gendered governance, ascribing it to the Cis-Caucasian race. Producing Native peoples and Native wars as lacking in the proper characteristics of sovereign belligerency resulted in a subordination of status and a legitimation of exterminatory tactics that were subsequently universalized and (re)internationalized through GO100's determinative influence on the laws of war. Tracing GO100 further exposes the founding of the discipline in Native peoples' dispossession and extermination.

In this article, I explore sleep specifically as a weapon of war, as a logistic of war, and as a metaphor for conscience in war. In proposing the capacity to sleep as a measure of the effects of strategies of war, and to recalibrate understandings of intimacy and vulnerability in war, I highlight the distinct effects of war on all its denizens. I make no claim for sameness among their experiences – far from it. And yet, at the same time, I wish to draw attention to what this exploratory essay also conveys, namely, the possibility for a sort of what Judith Butler terms 'sensate democracy' in the experience of sleeplessness, exposing a counterintuitive commonality among those deemed friends and enemies. Such a focus brings to the fore that which Simone Weil so powerfully articulated – that violence and force destroy those who wield them and those who are subject to them, potentially reducing each to something less than human, rendering them 'brothers in the same misery'. Far from facilitating or structuring a relativistic moral equivalence, this potential solidarity provides a form and a measure that, in turn, make way for an analysis of distinct relations of power.

AbstractI explore the construction of women as the secret for the 'successful' prosecution of war in Afghanistan. To do so, I take up the mobilization of gender in the US counterinsurgency doctrine as deployed in Afghanistan. I draw on the 2006 Counterinsurgency Field Manual, human rights and humanitarian reports, and scholarly works to identify and analyze this mobilization, paying attention to the colonial histories upon which COIN explicitly and implicitly relies. By critically integrating these sources and the paradigmatic moments that exemplify COIN, I demonstrate the constitutive relationship of gender and COIN. The valence of the secret – of women as concealing, revealing, being, and bearing the secret – is still a lesser explored element in the analysis of the gendering of COIN and of its 'military orientalism'. Even as scholars have powerfully shown how, in the case of Afghanistan and elsewhere, the veil functions as an overdetermined and 'multilayered signifier' in its own right, symbolizing the 'tension between disclosure and concealment that defines the dominant conception of the secret', less subject to detailed analysis in case of Afghanistan is the ways in which Afghan women are constituted through COIN in polysemous relation to the notion of the secret.