Ethics and International Relations | University of Westminster: 2015

I've just had the pleasure of attending the International Feminist Journal of Politics conference at the University of Queensland. It was such a delight being able to connect with friends and make new friends working in the field of gender, feminist politics and LGBTQ studies within International Relations.

Please find below the PowerPoint slides and notes from my paper presented at the International Feminist Journal of Politics conference at the University of Queensland. This paper explores how we need to think about bodily conceptions of justice and how just war theory operates as a disembodied rationality.

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Attempts to apply ethical theories to ‘real world’ problems in security politics have tended to establish an ontological divide between the legitimate business of ‘doing violence’ through the political collective and the unencumbered realm of private individuals as liberal agents. Just war theory has historically demarcated between the public and private conditions of violence, nurturing a foundational myth of violence in which ethical continuums of killing are linked to the legitimacy of the Weberian state and its capacity to structure moral vocabularies of justice negotiated through rationalised discourses of killing. This paper engages with feminist critiques of just war theory in international political thought (Sjoberg; Hutchings; Mann) and suggests that it in putting forward a ‘dialogic’ approach to political violence there is also a need to examine alternative conceptions of political subjectivity in relation to contemporary just war theory. The revival of just war theory in times of moral crisis – Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq – can be understood in terms of moralised discourses of violence. As just war theorists readily proclaim, the account of political violence developed through the Judeo-Christian just war tradition cannot be reduced to either political realism or moral pacifism. Just war theory needs the Queer subaltern, as its unilateral conception of political agency limits the ethical landscape to violent questions of action/inaction in world politics. Sexual orientation and gender identity is core to the normative framing of just wars and queer imaginings allow us to see different configurations of justice that constitute the multiple orthodoxies of nationalism(s), racialism(s) and heterosexualism(s).

International ethics is often understood as the domain in which questions of right and wrong are debated, evaluated and consequently used as the basis for making comprehensive judgements about foreign policy and the deployment of military force within international relations. This understanding of international ethics establishes ‘ethics’ as the normative basis for thinking about war and peace within the discipline of international relations and contains within it the assumption that the task of military ethics is to determine the right moral pathway for the military within a world system threatened by competing discourses of danger and risk. To talk of ‘ethical failure’ (Frost: 2008, 125) or conduct as belonging to an ‘ethical landscape’ (Geras: 1999, 59) presumes that there is a minimum standard of moral behaviour within the political community.

Many attempts to apply ethical theory to the ‘real world’ events of international relations have rightly acknowledged the need to differentiate between the individual and the state in determining the problem of ethics within international relations. Reinhold Niebuhr’s claim that “a sharp distinction must be drawn between the moral and social behaviour of individuals and of social groups, national, racial and economic” has tended to operate as the dominant logic in assessing the ethical basis of international relations (Niebuhr: 1932, xi). But what is missing from the domain of international ethics is how what we understand as ‘ethical’ is developed and articulated through political communities and complex discourses of identity and violence within international relations. It is this embodied domain of ethics – how individual military bodies are operationalised politically and located in wider ethical debates about the use of violence in international politics – which forms the analysis of American military practices in the war on terror.

What is missing from the domain of international ethics is how what we understand as ‘ethical’ is developed and articulated through political communities and complex discourses of identity and violence within international relations.

It is this embodied domain of ethics – how individual military bodies are operationalised politically and located in wider ethical debates about the use of violence in international politics – which forms the analysis of discourses of nuclear insecurity within world politics.

The revival of international relations as a domain of radical difference (in contrast to the liberal rendering of IR as the slow but steady path to economic prosperity and institutional cooperation) has demonstrated the need to examine the political functioning of modern militaries. The notion of forces for good or humanitarian intervention understood as categories with final ethical value (that is, taken at face value and closed off from political contestation) has played a key role in remaking modern military culture since the early 1990s. The push towards new military identities has attempted to remake soldiering according to new cosmopolitan understandings where ‘saving strangers’ replaces ‘national interest’ as motivation for the use of violence within international relations (Elliott and Chesterman: 2004, 3).

Recent discussions of military ethics in international relations have tended to overlook the question of the constitution of national political community. This results from thinking of military ethics as problem-solving devices than in considering how national militaries are constitutively formed through military ethics. Consequently, the military dimensions of the ‘war on terror’ needs to be understood through the specific practices of national militaries rather than assuming that all the parties to the ‘war on terror’ can be identified by a similar military ethic. Examining the recruitment practices of the US Armed Forces and the US Standards of Military Fitness it is possible to discern how the military subject is constituted through both official and non-official discourse. These subject positions play a key role in the constitution of the ‘warrior-diplomat’ within the US led ‘war on terror’. In paying attention to the constitution of the US military through its recruitment practices the ethical dimensions of the ‘war on terror’ are understood less in terms of enemy combatants and more in terms of who is authorised to represent the national political community within the struggle against terrorism.

It is conventionally assumed that the masculine ideal for soldiering is a strategy to motivate men to fight and to partition out from the experience of warfare the subjective domain of feeling and emotion from the experience of modern militaries (Goldstein: 2003, 283). The military subject is constructed as the heroic, masculine subject since they play a key role in defending raison d’etat. The debate on gender and identity within modern militaries has not just concerned liberal questions of gender equality but concern the constitutive patterning of the political communities which soldiers are called to defend. The hegemonic construction of masculinities, defined by Connell as "masculinity that occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations”, has been reflected in the US Army's own recruitment material (Connell: 2005, 76). The notion that the “US Army builds MEN” (Keene: 2006, 58) has been part of recruitment advertising since World War I. This construction of warfare as the process of making men needs to be factored into the ethical evaluation of modern militaries. Kohlberg's concern that women lacked the required capacity to make moral judgements has tended to associated masculinity with the public world of social power, whilst women's involvement in warfare has been concerned with the private domain. This dualism associates femininity with relational understandings of ethics in which women exercise an ethic of care in political life (Held: 2006, 138). Nonetheless, an ethics of care approach to national military ethics yields little in terms of understanding the national constitution of militaries. The ethical trajectory of the ethics of care approach is largely pacifist and, unlike just war theory, pursues non-violent engagement within the context of a global polity.

The Failure of Just War theory

Michael Walzer has noted the dangers of giving just war theory a prominent placement in the official discourse of modern militaries (Walzer: 2004, 15). This is not surprising given the placement of Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars in senior officer training in the curriculum of modern militaries. Many have confused the moral vocabulary of just and unjust for a binary ethics in which good must be made to triumph evil. The tendency to reduce moral reasoning down to an orthodox list of jus ad bellum and jus in bello criteria has also contributed to what Walzer calls the “softening of the critical mind” (Walzer: 2004, 14). The presumption that just war theory will operate at a critical distance from modern militaries is inherently problematic given Walzer’s communitarianism. Ethical deliberations about the use of force within international relations necessarily reflect their respective political cultures. But it is less the truce between the warrior diplomat and the just war theorist that should give Walzer cause for concern. Walzer distinguishes between fighting a just war and fighting a just war justly. Soldiers are not to be held responsible for jus ad bellum but have control over the battlefield operating system in which decisions about the conduct of the war itself are made. Nonetheless, this hygienic understanding of battlefield morality makes a clear separation between soldiers and the political community which authorises military action (whether it is deemed to be just or unjust).

In demanding that we assess the ethical foundations of modern militaries according to their embodied assumptions about violence and force the focus shifts less from the easy picture of soldiers as representative devices of their respective political communities to soldiers as warrior diplomats in which the theoretical tidiness of jus ad bellum and jus in bello can no longer be sustained. This theoretical tidiness is reflected in Walzer's understanding of soldiering in which the soldier's identity is subsumed to the larger identity of the state which alone possesses the jus ad bellum: “It is the sense that the enemy soldier, though his war may be criminal, is nevertheless as blameless as oneself. Armed, he is an enemy; but he isn’t my enemy in any specific sense; the war itself isn’t a relation between persons but between political entities and their human instruments (Walzer: 1976, 36).

The preeminence of the political entity in determining the trajectory of warfare is linked to the Walzer’s communitarian ethic of warfare. This means that military ethics must be assessed in terms of the political entities that decide on the use of force against other states. Walzer’s assumption that military ethics is a rule-based activity involving permissions and prohibitions establishes soldiering as a licensed activity of the modern state. Soldiers are the human instruments of their national political communities. The values that these political communities project in their war making should be differentiated from the conduct of soldiers in times of war. For this reason, “though there is no license for war-makers, there is a license for soldiers" (Walzer: 1976, 36).

James Hugh Toner’s discussion of military ethics in the context of the US military puts forward ‘cardinal virtues' of soldiering which should be used as a yardstick for ethical conduct. These ‘cardinal virtues’ are wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance and these are reflected in the normative assumptions of the 1998 Defense Authorisation Act (Toner: 2000, xi). According to Toner, it is the fact that these virtues have endured for more than two thousand years which makes them an important basis for providing moral guidance to modern soldiers. Unlike Walzer, whose concept of ‘dirty hands’ involves morality being forced through a cannon of complexity, Toner’s discussion emphasizes the importance of courage for successful soldiering. “Courage,” Toner argues, "helps us to act heroically and thus to escape wickedness (which we are to fear more than death” (Toner: 2000, 113). This virtue ethics approach to national military culture romanticizes the classical tradition of moral and ethical thought. The need to ‘restore’ the values of the ancients in a modern world weakened by moral decay presents a neo-conservative vision of military culture. It also reinforces a rather limited view of military ethics, in which ethics becomes the framework which allows for soldiers to make decisions about conduct in times of warfare.

Understanding military ethics as a question of decision has important consequences for the constitution of the American military subject. Toner's claim that "[t]he essence of military professionalism is responsible choice" results in ethical deliberation being reduced to abstract narratives (or story-telling) about the tragic-heroic choices of soldiers in times of warfare. The military profession is the most prominent example of ‘morals under the gun’ owing to the extreme character of warfare in defending the security of the state (Toner: 2000). However, morality made ‘under the gun’ assumes that soldiers within the context of the US military are all able to draw upon a similar set of cardinal virtues in the decisions they make in fighting wars.

Despite the democratic configuration of political communities, Walzer does acknowledge that democratic intentions in warfare often evaporate under the weight of patriotism. The professionalisation of modern militaries, including the removal of conscripted soldiers from the US Army in 1973, has significantly altered the ways in which civil society and soldier are operationalised through political community. Walzer notes that what is "important here is the extent to which war (as a profession) or combat (at this or that moment in time) is a personal choice that the soldier makes on his own and for essentially private reasons. That kind of choosing effectively disappears as soon as fighting becomes a legal obligation and a patriotic duty" (Walzer: 1976, 28).

A remarkable feature of the Global War on Terror (understood in this limited context as Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom) is that the structural transformation of the US military into a professional, voluntary army has resulted in a different set of questions about the relationship of the soldier to the wider political community. The crisis of legitimation that was a prominent feature of the Vietnam War (Shay: 1994) resulted in a severe disillusionment with the very essence of the military covenant. The democratic legitimacy of the Global War on Terror, despite concerns about electoral accountability in 2004, can be taken as a sign that the bond between civil society and the US military is significantly stronger compared with the later period of the Vietnam War. This has important consequences for the way in which military ethics is theorized and understood. The specificity of national political cultures and their deployment of force within international relations demands closer inspection within IR itself.

It would be wrong to accept the decisions of political elites as the primary basis upon which the ethics of military engagement are to be assessed. Lynndie England’s involvement in the abuse of Iraqi prisoners of war should not be reduced to the level of individual agency, evaluated in terms of liberal notions of autonomy. On the contrary, the conduct concerns the embodied nature of military life. The separation of civil life from military life is a key assumption within just war theory. The administrative punishment of transgressions in conduct, widely criticised in the case of Abu Ghraib, does not necessarily acknowledge the wider contexts of action within military life. Who is deemed fit to fight the Global War on Terror says as much about the validity of the wars themselves.

In this regard, it is important to take into account the ways in which military bodies are subject to regulation through both official and non-official discourses of the US military. Mary Douglas observed that “the concern for the unity and order of the body politic is mimetically reproduced in the preoccupations about the purity and impurity of the physical body” (Douglas: 1966, 128). In the history of strategic studies there has been a direct connection between bodily purity and military capacity. Clausewitz explicitly linked masculinity to efficacy in warfare. “If the state only hangs loosely together, if its people are an effeminate race unaccustomed to war, then, without our taking much trouble, a considerable extent of country will open behind our victorious army (Clausewitz: 1832). Machiavelli earlier expressed the importance of masculinity for military success in his declaration that “I do not believe that any man can dress in civilian clothes who wants to be quick and ready for any violence; nor can that man have customs and habits, who judges those customs to be effeminate and those habits not conducive to his actions” (Machiavelli: 2005, 3).

Julia Kristeva’s observation that abject bodies are “what disturbs identity, system [and] order” is relevant in the hierarchical ordering of bodies within US military culture (Kristeva: 1982). The decades of legal regulation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) persons within the military should not be read exclusively in terms of liberal egalitarian claims for justice. The bodily regulation of the American military subject can also be read as the syntactical regulation of what constitutes the core values of the political community itself. Abjection is a ‘terror that dissembles’ (Kristeva: 1982).

The death of Major Alan Rogers, an intelligence officer who trained soldiers in Iraq, demonstrates the contested nature of bodies within US military culture. Killed in January 2008 whilst on foot patrol in Baghdad, Major Rogers’ death was at the centre of a controversy about sexuality and military culture in the US media. Claims that the Pentagon had altered his Wikipedia entry to remove any references to his homsexuality brought to the fore questions of bodily regulation through the US Army's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. In a similar way, the Best Warrior Competition is an annual competition to “test a soldier’s mettle” and their knowledge of various “warrior tasks and battle drills.”[1] The tasks are explicitly linked to battlefield tasks associated with the war on terror. Many of the scenarios are designed to incorporate urban warfare training that are “drawn from real-life scenarios in the global war on terror”.[2] The two awards in the Best Warrior Competition are the Noncommissioned Officer and Soldier of the Year. The winners walk away with $10,000, a selection of prizes (including a trip to Disneyworld Florida) and even time off work.