Identities in the ‘War on Terror’
This book examines the ways in which representations of orientalised and gendered ‘Others’ have been constructed, manipulated, and deployed in the George W. Bush administration’s ‘War on Terror’ discourse, specifically in terms of enabling military interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq. President George W. Bush, in a 2004 speech, reflected on the ‘War on Terror’ thus:
In the last two-and-a-half years, we have seen remarkable and hopeful development in world history. Just think about it: More than 50 million men, women and children have been liberated from two of the most brutal tyrannies on earth – 50 million people are free. All these people are now learning the blessings of freedom.
(Bush 2004)
The speech reiterates what had been claimed by the George W. Bush administration throughout the ‘War on Terror’: that US military responses to the attacks of 11 September 2001 were not simply retaliatory, but designed to spread ‘freedom’ and ‘liberation’ to places and peoples subjugated by barbaric leaders who aimed to inflict terror and impose their worldview on ‘the entire civilized world’ (Bush 2003). The Bush administration presented the al Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001 as constructive of ‘a war to save civilization, itself’ which ‘[w]e did not seek … but we must fight’ (Bush 2001b).
Much ‘mainstream’ scholarship the ‘War on Terror’ that was waged after these attacks has revealed an uncritical acceptance of the assumptions of the ‘War on Terror’ (including its very necessity), focusing on strategic issues such as the most effective way to proceed with the taken-for-granted conflict between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, civilisation and barbarity, that the Bush administration put forward.1 But these approaches take as given a particular set of (highly contested and complex) ‘values’ upon which the ‘War on Terror’ rests. This book seeks to problematise the ‘War on Terror’, specifically, the binary underpinnings of the rhetoric, representations, and actions of the US Bush administration (and its ‘Coalition of the Willing’) in the aftermath of the al Qaeda attacks of 11 September 2001. My aim is to illustrate an under-examined nexus in ‘War on Terror’ scholarship: that the intersection between orientalism and gender is essential to understanding official US ‘War on Terror’ discourse, particularly in terms of how gender and orientalism have operated to discursively ‘create’ the opportunity to engage in military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The deployment of racialised and gendered categories in enabling intervention is not new. Miriam Cooke, for example, points out that the ‘War on Terror’ narrative of ‘saving Afghan women’ has a striking parallel to the British experience in India in which sati became a site for British official and popular discourses to converge, deploying stereotyped Indian men as the cause of women’s suffering and, in turn, of the need for British presence in India (Cooke 2003, 227–228). These depictions, argues Lata Mani, provided justification for ‘civilising’ colonial interventions by deploying gendered and racialised understandings of ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’, to construct narratives in which the coloniser must ‘save’ Indian women from Indian men (1998). Edward Said’s 2003 commentary on the Iraq war identifies and interrogates the orientalism of similar racialised logics in the contemporary context, and in particular the ‘clash of civilisations’ logic at the heart of the ‘War on Terror’ (2003).
Reading Said’s commentary, I became interested in modifying Cooke’s ‘gendered logics’ into a broader conceptualisation of ‘gendered orientalist’ logics through which to examine the ways in which representations in the ‘War on Terror’ functioned to enable military interventions. Official2 US ‘War on Terror’ representations and rhetoric drew on notions of ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarity’ from the outset. For example, soon after the attacks of 11 September 2001, Bush not had only declared a ‘War on Terror’ but also characterised this war as being waged not only against specific terrorist groups but more broadly ‘against barbaric behavior, people that hate freedom and hate what we stand for’ (2001a). Said writes that ‘[w]ithout a well-organized sense that these people over there were not like ‘us’ and didn’t appreciate ‘our’ values – the very core of traditional orientalist dogma – there would have been no war’ (2004, 872). Indeed, in 2009, in his farewell address to the nation, Bush drew on this ‘orientalist dogma’ in his assessment of the military interventions undertaken under the banner of the ‘War on Terror’:
Afghanistan has gone from a nation where the Taliban harbored al Qaeda and stoned women in the streets to a young democracy that is fighting terror and encouraging girls to go to school. Iraq has gone from a brutal dictatorship and a sworn enemy of America to an Arab democracy at the heart of the Middle East and a friend of the United States.
(2009)
A world divided into an essential battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ demanded military interventions into Afghanistan and Iraq.
This construction and representation of ‘the world’, prescriptions of ‘proper’ or ‘acceptable’ behaviour for the ‘types’ of people in it, and of the actions and events that take place in it, depends on certain relations of power to be masked, and hierarchies to be presented as ‘natural’. As such this book is concerned with the ways in which gendered and orientalist understandings of the world allow particular representations to become dominant and authoritative. This is important because, as Jutta Weldes explains, ‘[d]ifferent representations of the world entail different identities, which in turn carry with them different ways of functioning in the world, are located within different power relations and make possible different interests’ (Weldes 1996, 287). As such, I see ‘War on Terror’ representations (of people, places, ideas, ‘truth’, and so on) as intrinsically tied to what Jennifer Milliken explains as the character of ‘knowledge’ as ‘(re)constructed through discourse, an ordering of terms, meanings, practices that forms the background presuppositions and taken-for-granted understandings that enable people’s actions and interpretations’ (1999a, 92). This entails asking how ‘us’, ‘them’, ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘civilised’, ‘barbaric’, and so on are constructed in the discursive representations of the ‘War on Terror’, in particular in terms of the military interventions into Iraq and Afghanistan.
Thus this book examines how gendered and orientalist identity categories (such as women, men, masculinities, femininities, us, them, backward, civilised) are created and categorised (for example some ‘types’ of ‘women’ are in need of rescue, some categories of ‘men’ are a threat) and how these categories are deployed to make military interventions in the ‘War on Terror’ legitimate. This places my work outside ‘mainstream’ International Relations (IR), which Judith Squires and Jutta Weldes explain is largely concerned (substantively) with relations between nation-states, with theoretical perspectives (such as neorealism, neoliberalism, neoliberal institutionalism) that are based on rationalist assumptions, and ‘rigorously police[s]’ these boundaries (2007, 188). A range of scholars have pointed out that mainstream IR, if it does not overlook them entirely, fails to problematise and ‘silences’ the politics and power inherent in constructing and deploying the categories and operation of race and gender, taking racialised and gendered identities for granted by largely ignoring how they affect the ways in which international politics play out (inter alia Agathangelou and Ling 2009; Doty 1993a; Tickner 2001; Youngs 2004).
I draw on the poststructural, postcolonial, and feminist IR scholarship that seeks to undermine the naturalness of identities underwritten by race, gender, and sex, and their deployment in global politics. I understand international politics to be ‘characterised by practices that have been implicated in the production of meanings and identities’, understanding practices of representation by ‘the West’ of ‘the East’ as discursively constructing ‘the East’ in ways that produce dominant regimes of legitimate ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ (Doty 1996, 2). Such dominant regimes work to create meanings and attach them to certain subjects and objects, which in turn creates and justifies certain possibilities and actions, and excludes or limits others. This depends on naturalising particular knowledges about ‘us’, ‘them’, and the world. The types of people who might properly fall into identity categories such as ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘terrorist’, ‘barbaric’, those who ‘hate what we stand for’, and those to be ‘saved’ or ‘liberated’ are by no means ‘natural’ or pre-given. Rather, I see such categorisations, as well as the very creation of these (and other) identity categories themselves, as discursive whereby understandings of the world (and the people in it) are ‘(re)constructed through … an ordering of terms, meanings, practices that forms the background presuppositions and taken-for-granted understandings that enable people’s actions and interpretations’ (Milliken 1999a, 92). Specifically, I am interested in understanding in what ways ‘War on Terror’ discourse is orientalist (as a type of racialisation) and gendered, and to what effect, in order to illuminate how (imperialist) foreign policy practice (as embodied in US ‘War on Terror’ discourse) prescribes military action as discursively ‘necessary’. My key aim in this book, then, is to illustrate that legitimacy, power, and authority (to create knowledge, to identify and classify groups of people, to prescribe and undertake certain actions) in the ‘War on Terror’ are discursively constructed through ‘official’ discursive representations that are gendered and orientalist.
Discourse: language, identity, power, and representation
Understanding how gendered and orientalist categories and identities ‘work’ in international relations entails exploring the relationship between power, discourses, and representation. Rather than attempting to uncover ‘what is out there’ (that is, rejecting the idea that ‘reality’ is something that is knowable), this research is focused on the politics of knowledge, on questioning the emergence of categories such as ‘barbaric’, ‘oppressed’, ‘civilised’, ‘free’ (to name a few), and how they work to produce and sustain knowledge about ‘us’ and ‘them’, making specific courses of action such as military intervention possible and legitimate. The theoretical framework for this analysis is poststructural, and informs the ‘analytical strategy’ that guides my research and analysis in this book. My research is concerned with how gendered and orientalist categories are utilised in ways that necessitate military intervention through the construction of an enemy (and thus creating a ‘Self’ in reference to this enemy). I argue that this is done by exploiting long-held assumptions about race/ethnicity and gender, such as the naturalness of ascribing ‘feminine’ traits like sensitivity, weakness, and emotionality to ‘women’, and ‘Othered’ traits such as irrationality, lack of development, and a lack of civilisation to non-‘Western’ peoples.
Subscribing to an understanding of discourse that is poststructural in its commitment to the constructedness of knowledge, I argue that language is a not simply a neutral medium used to convey ‘facts’ or pre-existing meaning. Instead, I view discourse as a ‘structured, relational totality’ (Doty 1996, 6) in which language (writing, speech, pictures, any system of signification that represents our ideas in a way that allows others to ‘read’ meaning) is not simply used to ‘communicate information’ (carrying meaning that we intend to project), but is the site of the creation of meaning and implicated in the establishment of the ‘regimes of knowledge and truth’ (Gee 1999, 1; Shaprio 1985–1986, 193–194). Language is not an objective means through which we interpret the world, conveying predetermined, natural, or neutral ‘meanings’ which exist a priori and are intrinsic to things, events, people, or groups. Rather, as Terrell Carver argues, language has ‘meaning only in virtue of our inscribing it there’; it is used to inscribe meanings onto the world, objects, and experiences, and to read ‘those meanings back to ourselves as if they had always resided in the objects or experiences’ (2002, 50). This approach most closely reflects my research concerns, in particular for exploring the construction of identity in terms of discourse, and the role of power in discursive identities (Torfing 1999, 90–91, 96). That is not to say that this post-structuralist understanding of discourse conceives of objects, events, and people as ‘not existing’ outside discourse: rather, it asserts that they have no meaning and are incomprehensible to us without language and discourse as interpretive tools (Campbell 1992, 6).
Discourses, in this understanding, are ways of constructing knowledge, and of referring to knowledge, about particular topics. They are groups of ideas, images, and practices that are relational (they all refer to another in some way), providing us with ways of talking about, knowledge about, and conduct associated with particular topics, events, activities, or institutions (Hall 1997, 6). As such, they are ‘practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault 1972, 54). These ‘discursive formations’ enable and limit our knowledge and ways of speaking about something by defining what is appropriate (and inappropriate), useful (or unimportant), and ‘true’ about particular subjects, and ‘what sorts of persons or ‘subjects’ embody its characteristics’ (Hall 1997, 6). By setting out these ‘rules of acceptability’, discourses become ‘regimes of knowledge and truth’ that utilise procedures of inclusion and exclusion to ‘regulate our approach to ourselves, each other and our surroundings’ (Andersen 2003, 3). That is, discourses produce insiders and outsiders by excluding/including particular ‘themes, arguments and speech positions’, denouncing some groups of people as ‘abnormal or irrational’ and granting others ‘the right and legitimacy to treat these people’ (Andersen 2003, 3).
Therefore, discourses are imbued with power: discursive representations define and limit what is ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ (by allowing one ‘truth’ to be elevated over another), and these representations or ideas about people can be used to subjugate, control, and order them discursively. Discourses reflect, enact, and reify power relations, and certain actors play a privileged role in the discursive production and reproduction of meaning (Weldes et al. 1999, 13). Within discourses certain meanings and statements are privileged, objects and subjects are created and ascribed attributes and others are ignored, certain acts are legitimated whilst others are made improbable. Dominant discourses successfully marginalise and displace alternative (contesting) arguments, activities, and discourses by naturalising certain meanings and hierarchies; they ‘seek to render themselves incontestable’ by defining what is ‘common sense’ knowledge, creating an a priori ‘givenness’ for certain identities, the relevance (and irrelevance) of particular categories, and simultaneously obfuscate the construction of these categories and identities (Laclau and Mouffe 2001, 134–145; Martin 2000, 24–25). Identity (gendered, racialised, for example), then, is not something we possess but is constructed out of discursive practices. It is not pre-given or ‘natural’, but always being constructed and reconstructed, and is established in relation to someone or something else (another group, individual, or state, for example), in relation to what it is not (Connolly 1991, 64–66; Street 1997, 141). These relationships allow discourses to make things intelligible: they provide us with ways of knowing the world, of being in it and acting towards it by ‘operationalizing a particular ‘regime of truth’ whilst excluding other possible modes of identity and action’ (Milliken 1999b, 229). Hegemonic practices that attempt to fix meaning in discourses are inextricably linked to representational practices, and it is in these practices that we can locate the operation of power in identity-making (Doty 1996, 8–10).
However, this does not mean that gendered relations of power and gender discrimination and inequality are ‘merely’ constructs (created through discourse); they are also material ‘realities’ that (while they cannot be understood outside discourse) give rise to practices, acts, and material effects that can (and need to) be challenged, transformed, and changed. Women (and men) in Afghanistan and Iraq (but also in the broader ‘global south’ ...
