North America Critical Military Studies

North America – Critical Military Studies

Autumn 2016

AndreeaNicutar

Course description

This is a course organized as a cluster of questions about war and political violence departing from classical IR theories. Its main objective is to destabilize some of the conventional categories by which we think we know what is war, such as the nation-state and its boundaries between home and battlefields, soldiers and civilians, the monopoly of violence and even de separation between war and peace. Instead, we will ask questions from below, from practices in war-making and peace-making, from the people involved in such practices, but with a suspicion that the lives that are touched by violence might be far more numerous than those we usually consider in IR. War-making affects lives to a far wider extent than we usually are led to see in our contemporary media spectacle. This course will investigate the more insidious, less visible, undervalued forms of militarization of people’s lives, of their everyday worlds and their bodies and affects.

In short, the readings and our discussion will hopefully displace conventional understandings of war. The invitation here is to ask questions about violence and how it affects actual people from embodied experiences of war, from perspectives that take into consideration the body as vulnerable to war’s destruction for instance. This is a call that critical feminists have raised precisely in order to question the distribution of visibility and responsiveness to the destructive effects of war. The lines between war and peace are not easily drawn, “there is peace in wartimes and war in peacetimes” (Sylvester 2005) and one essential task of the critical IR scholar is precisely to show how official times of peace, when investigated carefully, reveal states of war in which some subjects are more vulnerable than others. This presence of war in peacetimes will be one dominant thread that will articulate our conversations along the course.

Critical geography and critical security scholars also raise valuable points about the locations and temporalities of the “battlefield” and “home” and the consequences of violence in sites that we are not often considering as touched by wars. They also signal much needed attention to the dichotomous construction of subjects of war and invite us to look at war/knowledge practices in order to understand how we, students of politics, are making sense of war as participants in various relations in the “global” wars of our present. We are not detached spectators, but already involved in the contemporary mechanisms of global warfare. It is our task to question and think through how we participate in this regime and how much we make sense of war’s effects throurgh our questions.Similarly, humanitarianism, development work, peacemaking operations and security will be read through a critique of war practices that will again displace our “knowledge” about wars when we start asking from local settings of violence how certain subjects of war are made visible while others are rendered invisible to our (the public spectator, the civilians, the media etc) attention. We will focus on the effects and affects of war-making when we will consider themes such as urban battlefields, health problems and other forms of vulnerability.

The focus of this course is on the case of US war-making, but the objective is to think about the global landscape that war practices articulate presently, where the local and the global might be meeting in unsuspecting ways for more classical takes on political violence, such as the city, refugee camps and even the “homeland” as we are taught to imagine as both a peaceful and threatened place.

Assessment

You will be asked to write 3 short reaction papers (1-2 pages) to readings of any weekly topic you wish to focus on. They should be sent via email anytime prior to our class meeting dedicated to the respective reading. Say, should you choose to discuss a text due in a week time, you can do it at any time before the class. A reaction paper should not be a summary of the reading. What I want to see is that you read it and thought about the argument – what it wants to convey, the manner in which the argument is built, where the focus of the argument goes and, possibly, what it might ignore in privileging a certain perspective. Most importantly, I want to see how you evaluate the ideas presented. To evaluate means that you ask yourself how convincing the argument is, by confronting it with other ideas, political phenomena, scholarly or media debates etc. This is anything complicated if you imagine these papers as short conversations you would have with the authors you select for the papers.

The reaction papers will hopefully help you in writing better and also contribute to the ideas for the final essay to be handed in at the end of the semester. Regarding the essay, I also expect you to choose a topic you find captivating, and we will have time along the semester to discuss it. I will ask you to come up with a provisional topic for the final paper in the fourth week of our course and from then on we will talk about it and work on drafts in order to formulate a good research question, collect bibliographic work and think about the research design. I encourage you to think early on about this and ask for conversation about your essay.Preparing the final work with initial drafts and peer feedback will prove helpful, and we will possibly organize a roundtable around the middle of the semester to shortly present each student’s idea about the final paper. What I do want is to see that you are already thinking seriously about the paper, have collected some arguments in the literature during the course and are able to guide yourself through the literature. I will assist you in this along the semester and will be available for discussion at any time. The essay should be in the 3000 words range.

Reaction papers worth 30% of your grade, the final essay 50%and your participation in class and in our semester long discussion about your essay 20%.

Design of the course

The weekly assigned texts are suggested for careful reading and this is necessary in order to have a good conversation in class. However, what is more important is for all of us to work together to create a welcoming space for thinking together, starting from the readings, but slowly moving to contemporary events, including similar cases we can think of and our own questions about the authors’ reasoning. Nothing should be taken for granted, and one important logic of this course is for us to develop our skills in reading a text and engaging with it as if we were in a conversation with the author. This requires some skills and patience, as well as generosity and courage. Most texts are from critical scholars in IR, security studies, geopolitics, feminists – a very diverse crowd and each with her or his take on the topic on the table. We will engage each text by asking basic questions about the argument and the manner of presenting it from start to finish, but this is not all. We will be engaged in investigating further what are the fundamental assumptions that make the question of the article “stand” and what are the consequences of the things said. No theory, no argument is innocent, they do create or consolidate real objects. Besides analytical skills, this requires a generous consideration of what the authors offer us, followed by a considerate critique of her/his work.

Critique is something to be valued, it comes from the hard work of paying attention and walking side by side with the author. I hope we will have the same generosity when listening to each other in class, no matter our initial skills in speaking in a foreign language or arguing in public.

Readings

Week 0: Introductions and course overview

Week 1: Modern Power and the Body

Michel Foucault,’ Docile Bodies,’ in The Foucault Reader,ed. by Paul Rabinow, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 179-187 and ‘Right of Death and Power over Life,’ pp. 258-267.

Week 2: What do we see/know as “war”?

Judith Butler, “Introduction: Precarious Life, Grievable Life,’ in Frames of war. When is Life Grievable?, London, New York: Verso, 2009, pp. 1-32.

Veena Das, ‘Violence, Crisis and the Everyday’, Int. J. Middle East Stud., No. 45, 2013, pp. 798-800.

Further readings

Judith Butler, ‘Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect’ in ‘Frames of war. When is Life Grievable?, London, New York: Verso, 2009.

Kleinman Arthur, Das Veena, Lock Margaret, Social suffering, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Carolyn Nordstrom, A Different Kind of War Story, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

Week 3: What do wars know about us (IR)?

SwatiParashar, ‘What wars and ‘war bodies’ know about international relations,’ Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 26, No.4, pp.615–630, 2013.

Further readings

PhillipeDufort, ‘Introduction: Experiences and Knowledge of War,’ Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 26, No. 4, 2013, pp. 611-614.

Week 4: War/gender

Carolyn Nordstrom, ‘Girls behind the (front) lines’ in Lois Ann Lorentzen, Jennifer Turpin, The Women and War Reader, New York: New York University Press, 1998, pp. 80-89.

AnnickWibben,’Feminist Interventions. The politics of identity,’ AnnickWibben, Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach, Routledge: New York, 2011, pp. 10-26.

Further readings

Carolyn Nordstrom, ‘(Gendered) war’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Vol. 28, pp. 399–411, 2005

DubravkaZarkov, The Body of War: media, ethnicity and gender in the break-up of Yugoslavia, Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

GeetaChowdhry and Sheila Nair, “Introduction: Power in a postcolonial world: race, gender and class in international relations’ in GeetaChowdhry and Sheila Nair, Power, Postcolonialism and International Relations. Reading Race, Gender and Class, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 1-28, 2002.

Allison Miranda, Women and Violence: Female Combatants in Ethno-National Conflict, London, Routledge, 2009.

Week 5: War and knowledge of the “enemy”

Derek Gregory, ‘The rush to the intimate.’ Counterinsurgency and the cultural turn in late modern war’, (unpublished)

James DerDerian, ‘Imaging terror: logos, pathos and Ethos’, Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2005, pp. 23-37

Further readings:

Susan Sontag, ‘In Plato’s Cave’ in On Photography, Rosetta Books, New York, 2005.

NeocleousMark,’Police Power, All the Way to Heaven. CujusEstSolum and the No-fly Zone,’ Radical Philosophy, No. 182, November/December 2013.

Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: the Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Week 6: War by other means. Torture

Allison Howell, ‘Victims or madmenThe DiagnosticCompetition over ‘‘Terrorist’’ Detainees

at Guantanamo Bay, International Political Sociology, Vol. 1, 2007, pp. 29–47.

Allison Howell, ‘Torture as Evidence-based policy Making? Race, War and Science,’ Duck of Minerva, October 7 2015, available at

Further readings

Judith Butler, ‘Guantanamo Limbo,’ The Nation, April 1, 2002.

Judith Butler, ‘Torture and the Ethics of Photography,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 25, 2007, pp. 951-966.

Sontag Susan, ‘Regarding the Torture of Others’, The New York Times, May 2004.

Week 7: War and the soldierly body/health

Kenneth T. MacLeish, ‘Armor and Anesthesia: Exposure, Feeling, and the Soldier’s Body,’ Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Vol. 26, issue 1, pp. 49-68.

Further readings

KevinMcSorley,(ed.),WarandtheBody:Militarisation,PracticeandExperience, London:Routledge, 2012, pp. 1—39.

Elaine Scarry, The body in pain: the making and unmaking of the world, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1987.

Didier Fassin (2011) The Trace: Violence, truth and the politics of the body, Social Reasearch: An International Quarterly, vol. 78, Nr. 2, Summer 2011.

Week 8: On the Victim-Perpetrator

We will be Watching Lori Grinker’s documentary “The Wilderness after War: Living with PTSD,’ january 15, 2013, PBS, following the life of three former US service members diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Available at

Ken MacLeish, ‘Resiliency and the Problem of Soldierly Personhood,’ Paper presented at 4S/EASST, Copenhagen, Denmark, 19 October 2012, pp.1-9.

Benjamin Sledge, ‘The Conversation About War and Our Veterans We Refuse to Have,’ June 27, 2016. Available at

Further readings

Howell Allison, Madness in International Relations: Psychology, Security and the Global Governance of Mental Health, Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.

Week 11: Other ‘battlefields’(1) Care and Humanitarianism

Jennifer Hyndman, ‘Refugee Camps as Conflict Zones. The Politics of Gender,’ in Wenona Giles and Jennifer Hyndman (eds.), Sites of Violence, Gender and Conflict Zones, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004, pp. 193-212.

Carolyn Nordstrom,Shadows of war. Violence, power and profiteering in the 21st century, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of California Pres 2004, pp. 5-17.

Further readings

Chrystine Sylvester, ‘Bare life as a development/postcolonial Problematic,’ The Geographical Journal, Vol. 172, No. 1, March 2006, pp. 66–77.

Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Gendered Humanitarianism: reconsidering the Ethics of War,’ in Christine Sylvester (ed.) Experiencing War, London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 28-41.

Week 12: Other battlefields (2) Development and conflict

Brigitte Holzner, ‘Wars, Bodies, and development,’ in Christine Sylvester (ed.) Experiencing War, London: Routledge, 2011, pp. 42-63

Further readings

Maria Stern, ‘Naming Security-Constructing Identity: ‘Mayan Women’ in Guatemala on the Eve of ‘Peace,’ Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.

Week 13: Witnessing (in)war

VeenaDas,‘The event and the everyday’ in Das, Life and Words. Violence and the descent into the ordinary, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London : University of California Press, 2007, pp. 1-17.

Veena Das, ‘Listening to voices.An interview with VeenaDas,’Altérités, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2010, pp. 136-145.

Week 14: Writing about experiences of war/violence

Christine Sylvester, ‘War Experiences/War Practices/War Theory,’ Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 40, No. 3, pp. 483 –503.

Further readings

Christine Sylvester,‘The Forum: Emotion and the Feminist IR Researcher,’ International Studies Review, Vol. 13, 2011, pp. 687–708.

Karin Fierke, Political Self-Sacrifice. Agency, Body and Emotion in International Relations, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Ronald Bleiker, Emma Hutchison, ‘Fear No More: Emotions and World politics,’ Review of International Studies, Vol. 34, 2008, pp. 114-135.