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).
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.
