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Contemporary Western war is represented as enacting the West's ability and responsibility to help make the world a better place for others, in particular to protect them from oppression and serious human rights abuses. That is, war has become permissible again, indeed even required, as ethical war. At the same time, however, Western war kills and destroys. This creates a paradox: Western war risks killing those it proposes to protect. This book examines how we have responded to this dilemma and challenges the vision of ethical war itself, exploring how the commitment to ethics shapes the practice of war and indeed how practices come, in turn, to shape what is considered ethical in war. The book closely examines particular practices of warfare, such as targeting, the use of cultural knowledge, and ethics training for soldiers. What emerges is that instead of constraining violence, the commitment to ethics enables and enhances it. The book argues that the production of ethical war relies on an impossible but obscured separation between ethics and politics, that is, the problematic politics of ethics, and reflects on the need to make decisions at the limit of ethics.

German memories of the Second World War are controversial, and they are used to justify different positions on the use of military force. In this book, Maja Zehfuss studies the articulation of memories in novels in order to discuss and challenge arguments deployed in political and public debate. She explores memories that have generated considerable controversy, such as the flight and expulsion of Germans from the East, the bombing of German cities and the 'liberation' of Germany in 1945. She shows how memory retrospectively produces a past while claiming merely to invoke it, drawing attention to the complexities and contradictions within how truth, ethics, emotion, subjectivity and time are conceptualised. Zehfuss argues that the tensions and uncertainties revealed raise political questions that must be confronted, beyond the safety net of knowledge. This is a compelling book which pursues an original approach in exploring the politics of invocations of memory

This article examines the double chronopolitics of managing migrants through tracing how the spatialised state system positions migrants as 'out of place'. Taking its cue from the 2018 Windrush scandal in the United Kingdom, which revealed that the state had declared long-term legal residents illegal, the article interrogates the moral order engendered by the imaginary of the state system. It shows how thinking time unsettles hierarchies that the apparently timeless imaginary legitimises. First, the article briefly explores literatures that highlight the significance of time in making the state system and migration. Second, it examines migrantisation and racialisation in the Windrush scandal by tracing how time is imagined as shared. Third, it investigates how 'migrants' are governed through time and a logic of linear progression. Finally, it shows how 'migrants', who appear to introduce temporal tensions into the community's shared time, are exposed to a double chronopolitics: being imagined as both in the past and of the future. Managing 'migrants' in response involves attempts to (impossibly) govern the future. The article argues that this double chronopolitics faces its own impossibility in the subject position of the more-than migrant, which – by exceeding the system – offers an opportunity to think beyond migration as crisis.

At the height of the so-called 2015 refugee crisis, Angela Merkel, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, is thought to have opened the country's borders to a million refugees. She was celebrated as an international leader and the refugees' savior, while the country was seen as having a welcome culture. Retrospectively, however, her refugee policy is construed as a mistake. Both interpretations agree that Merkel opened the border. Deploying a detailed reading of events, this article asks what political imaginary is invoked through this representation and what its consequences are. It draws out how paying attention to temporality reveals the racialization involved in producing the problem. First, the article sets out the centrality of Merkel and the border opening to accounts of the events, drawing out the temporality of events and its implications. Second, it asks what it means to say that the border was opened, complicating this representation. Finally, it shows how the focus on the border opening invoked a political imaginary marked by a fantasy of control that obscures its own exclusions. Recognizing bordering as about control over the temporality of community alerts us to how the impossible desire to control the future racializes those seeking refuge.

AbstractAt the height of the so-called 2015 refugee crisis, Angela Merkel, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, is thought to have opened the country's borders to a million refugees. She was celebrated as an international leader and the refugees' savior, while the country was seen as having a welcome culture. Retrospectively, however, her refugee policy is construed as a mistake. Both interpretations agree that Merkel opened the border. Deploying a detailed reading of events, this article asks what political imaginary is invoked through this representation and what its consequences are. It draws out how paying attention to temporality reveals the racialization involved in producing the problem. First, the article sets out the centrality of Merkel and the border opening to accounts of the events, drawing out the temporality of events and its implications. Second, it asks what it means to say that the border was opened, complicating this representation. Finally, it shows how the focus on the border opening invoked a political imaginary marked by a fantasy of control that obscures its own exclusions. Recognizing bordering as about control over the temporality of community alerts us to how the impossible desire to control the future racializes those seeking refuge.

During the Iraq War, some US soldiers refused (re)deployment. While liberal states appear to protect individuals' right not to fight against their moral convictions by allowing the right to conscientious objection, those whose objections do not align with the regulations have to break the law in order to follow their convictions. This article explores how the legitimation of liberal war is challenged when we listen to the stories such refusers tell. Focusing on the United States, it briefly sets out the normative context such soldiers faced, highlighting the distinction between permissible conscientious objectors and contemptible deserters. Drawing on Judith Butler, it then focuses on two refusers by reading their own accounts of themselves in their memoirs. Despite not being eligible under the regulations, both invoke their conscience to make their refusal intelligible. By listening to their detailed accounts, the article traces the production and disruption of their subjectivities in relation to the prevailing moral order. Although invoking conscience appears to provide the chance to embrace an authentic self in a bid to resist the problematic moral order, subjectivity remains fractured due to relationality. Put differently, the sovereign subjectivity required by liberal war is simultaneously undermined by it.

On the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the world remains marked by violent conflict and the possibility of nuclear war. This seems an apt moment to ask whether the bombings have left a trace in our thinking. This article thus explores how particular articulations of their memory or, alternatively, failures to articulate such a memory, conjure up our world: how they represent and account for violence and how, if at all, they assign specific significance to nuclear weapons. Reading two very different texts, Jacques Derrida's 'No Apocalypse, Not Now' and Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows, alongside each other, the article shows how remembering finds itself at the impossible limit between the conceptual and the particular, in the space of politics. It argues that the violence that continues to form an everyday part of our world can only be challenged or even understood by thinking at this (impossible) limit where no answer can be generated in the abstract and decisions are necessary.

Much discussion of the ethics of war revolves around civilians' alleged special claim to protection, expressed in the principle of non-combatant immunity. This article shows that its supporters do not give persuasive reasons for why civilians should be protected from deliberate harm ahead of combatants. The principle moreover problematically relies on the significance of intention. Intriguingly, the principle is defended in the face of recognising these issues. Its defenders argue that the principle must be maintained because without it we would be unable to distinguish legitimate uses of political violence from mass murder and terrorism. This article argues instead that the principle's role in making permissible political violence classified as 'war' must be considered: it works to enable what it seeks to prevent, namely making the killing of civilians acceptable. © 2012 Political Studies Association.

Since around 2005, efforts have been made within the US military to highlight the significance of culture or the 'human terrain' for counterinsurgency operations. The US Army responded to the asserted 'cultural knowledge gap' by establishing an experimental programme called the Human Terrain System (HTS), which involves deploying social scientists alongside combat forces. While HTS was received favourably in the US mainstream media, it has been fiercely criticized by anthropologists in particular, who argue not least that participation in the programme would constitute a violation of their professional ethics, which require them to protect their research subjects. This article explores the anthropologists' critique and its limitations, arguing that it fails to tackle the problem of ethics deployed as a supposedly extra-political standard that can serve to (de)legitimize political projects. In particular, it is unable to dislodge the fantasy of protection at the heart of the argument for HTS.

Much discussion of the ethics of war revolves around civilians' alleged special claim to protection, expressed in the principle of non-combatant immunity. This article shows that its supporters do not give persuasive reasons for why civilians should be protected from deliberate harm ahead of combatants. The principle moreover problematically relies on the significance of intention. Intriguingly, the principle is defended in the face of recognising these issues. Its defenders argue that the principle must be maintained because without it we would be unable to distinguish legitimate uses of political violence from mass murder and terrorism. This article argues instead that the principle's role in making permissible political violence classified as 'war' must be considered: it works to enable what it seeks to prevent, namely making the killing of civilians acceptable.

In the post-cold-war period Western military force has been deployed in the name of protecting humanity despite the obvious paradox of trying to achieve such protection through means that undermine this very aim. This has generated much debate about the merits of (humanitarian) intervention. In this paper I aim not to take a position in this debate but, rather, to examine its terms. I seek to draw out what is assumed, implied, and obscured by this debate. I explore the larger issue of how the framing of the debate in terms of protecting humanity works to exclude the apparent benefi ciaries from the realm of politics and generates the demand for an urgent, violent resolution to what is produced as an ethical dilemma. I start by exploring the ways in which post-cold-war Western war has been represented as war for humanity. I then draw out how critical scholarship has brought into view the fact that the apparently universal category of humanity is marked by hierarchy, and thus undermines itself. I end by arguing that the idea of humanity provides an ethical framing which both relies on and responds to the problematic association of politics with intelligibility, leaving us with a predicament that cannot be resolved. © 2012 Pion and its Licensors.

Since around 2005, efforts have been made within the US military to highlight the significance of culture or the 'human terrain' for counterinsurgency operations. The US Army responded to the asserted 'cultural knowledge gap' by establishing an experimental programme called the Human Terrain System (HTS), which involves deploying social scientists alongside combat forces. While HTS was received favourably in the US mainstream media, it has been fiercely criticized by anthropologists in particular, who argue not least that participation in the programme would constitute a violation of their professional ethics, which require them to protect their research subjects. This article explores the anthropologists' critique and its limitations, arguing that it fails to tackle the problem of ethics deployed as a supposedly extra-political standard that can serve to (de)legitimize political projects. In particular, it is unable to dislodge the fantasy of protection at the heart of the argument for HTS. © The Author(s) 2012.