Experiencing War

Christine Sylvester, Christine Sylvester

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136888519
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This edited collection explores aspects of contemporary war that affect average people –physically, emotionally, and ethically through activities ranging from combat to television viewing.

The aim of this work is to supplement the usual emphasis on strategic and national issues of war in the interest of theorizing aspects of war from the point of view of individual experience, be the individual a combatant, a casualty, a supporter, opponent, recorder, veteran, distant viewer, an international lawyer, an ethicist or other intellectual. This volume presents essays that push the boundaries of war studies and war thinking, without promoting one kind of theory or methodology for studying war as experiential politics, but with an eye to exploring the possibilities and encouraging others to take up the new agenda. It includes new and challenging thinking on humanitarianism and war, new wars in the Third World, gender and war thinking, and the sense of the body within war that inspires recent UN resolutions. It also gives examples that can change our understanding of who is located where doing what with respect to war –women warriors in Sierra Leone, war survivors living with their memories, and even an artist drawing something seemingly intangible about war –the arms trade.

The unique aspect of this book is its purposive pulling together of foci and theoretical and methodological perspectives from a number of disciplines on a variety of contemporary wars. Arguably, war is an activity that engages the attention, the politics, and the lives of many people. To theorize it with those lives and perspectives in mind, recognizing the political contexts of war, is long overdue.

This inter-disciplinary book will be of much interest to students of war studies, critical security studies, gender studies, sociology and IR in general.

1
Experiencing war

An introduction

Christine Sylvester

War is a repetitive politics of violence that crosses human history. No one is immune from its touch: there are pieces of war in peacetime and pieces of peace in war. Sadly, the practices of violent politics show few signs of letting up, giving up, or relinquishing a hold on the imaginary of international politics and over the lives of so many people caught up by it. This collection takes the last phrase of that sentence as its starting point: the lives of so many people. It draws our attention away from strategic and national interest politics of war to the prospect of theorizing war from a starting point in individuals, the ones who experience war in the myriad ways possible – as combatants, casualties, voyeurs, opponents, artists, healers, grave diggers, and so many other identities. What unites them all is the human body, a sensing physical entity that can touch war, and an emotional and thinking body that is touched by it in innumerable ways. But there are also many divides – cultural, religious, historical, national, generational, linguistic, gender, race, class that can lead to conflict. Difference exaggerated, invented, or politicized in the extreme can explode into large-scale armed conflict between groups that find others so “other” that they must be killed. Weapons and bodies then get aimed at other bodies, even if they are said to be aimed primarily at “strategic targets,” “pockets of resistance,” armed opponents and the like. A key characteristic of war in practice is that it engages and acts on bodies.

Judith Butler knows this. She advocates an approach to theorizing war, and to building a politics to stop it, that pays consummate attention to wartime emotions common to friend and enemy alike: mourning, grieving, feeling inexplicable loss. She asks:

What form political reflection and deliberation ought to take if we take injurability and aggression as two points of departure for political life … [knowing] that there are others out there on whom my life depends, people I do not know and may never know.¹

Historians who talk to warriors and veterans also know that bodies are the locus of powerful war experiences. Christian Appy hears a former Lieutenant General in the US Marine Corps struggle with his lingering Vietnam War emotions:

Trainor once wrote that the Vietnam War produced a “genie of anguish” that he had bottled up inside. Asked to elaborate he says, “Well, I still can’t go to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.” With these words he suddenly chokes up. A dam of emotion seems about to break, but within seconds he regains control … “Deep down there’s a hurt and I don’t know what it is. I can’t control it. It’s always there and I think I’ll just live with it for the rest of my life.”²

The famous British war photojournalist, Don McCullin, writes books and exhibits his pictures from all the wars he saw through the lenses of cameras and felt through the skin on his body and pulsations in his brain. Writing of his time with the Biafran secessionist forces in 1969, McCullin offers a telling aside about taking food

and other things for the children of a man called Chinua Achebe, one of the genuine idealists on the Biafran side. He was a novelist, who wrote a book called Things Fall Apart. That was precisely what was happening now. He was a young man, an honourable man, a nice man. I remember the last time I saw him. He took the gifts without any emotion. He had cut off any feeling he may once have had for the one or two Westerners he thought really cared. I felt he was looking through me as if I didn’t really exist. And I could see that the ruin of the Ibo culture had made him feel exactly as I had when coming out of Hue [Vietnam] – totally shell-shocked.³

Not all bodies in war experience the “genie of anguish” – at least not all the time. A former soldier on the Vietnamese side admits that the war was very often a depressing experience. But he also says:

How could you allow yourself to be depressed when you saw people making their homes inside the hulk of a tank like this? [He points to one of his photographs of a Vietnamese family living inside the remains of a destroyed U.S. tank.] Looking at people like them, we knew our task wasn’t finished. They were the real source of our psychological motivation.⁴

Miranda Allison interviewed a woman in the Irish Republican Army of Northern Ireland who told her that joining up “was not a personal experience and it was not emotional. … No, I thought very long and hard and I thought how best to achieve what I believed in, and I believed that that was the way forward.”⁵ Some people embrace war, get addicted to it, celebrate it, and keep lining up for it by displaying horrendous weapons at arms fairs or by becoming iteratively mercenary. They might live comfortably in the Green Zone of Baghdad or feed off it, willingly or most likely not, like Mother Courage did during the Thirty Years War, and like the kidnapped bush women had to do during the Liberian civil wars.⁶ Or they can isolate themselves from threats around them and thereby make the situation of their otherness very obvious: “The American military closed off streets near its bases in the city, regardless of whether they were vital thoroughfares … The sight of barricaded roads was a daily reminder to Iraqis that they were under occupation.”⁷

This collection has its origins in a program of events I planned and directed at Lancaster University over the 2008–9 academic year. It was called Touching War.⁸ For seven months, a variety of speakers, round tables, discussion groups, workshops, films, and studio art sessions probed war as a bodily set of experiences. The program was inspired by the realization that global communications leave few people in today’s world isolated from and unaffected by specific wars or the constancy of war ethics, war economies, war language, and or actual combat around them. Rather than focus, as many do in the field of international relations, on military strategy, battlefield tactics, weaponry, foreign policy, or causes and correlates of war, Touching War considered many ways that people in different locations touch war and are touched by it in physical, emotional, and intellectual ways. Those physically and emotionally proximate to war have different experiences to those at more distance from it. Fiction writers and artists experience war through the characters they invent or the marks they make. Scholars who research war have different reference points for war experiences to those who engage in war for a living. No one’s narrated experience or research, therefore, can be considered final and complete. We all touch war or are touched by it nonetheless.

War itself, though, is a difficult phenomenon to pinpoint beyond the now inadequate sense that it always involves armed conflict between states. In the post-World-War-II era, armed conflict can envelop states and entities other than states. Wars that do involve states are rarely declared or conducted in the pitched battles of yore that ended with one side decisively winning. Anti-colonial wars, cold war proxy wars, genocidal or separatist wars, communal wars, humanitarian interventionist wars, and wars against terror characterize the post-war period. These can remain unfinished, as they are in parts of the Middle East, flaring up episodically and morphing in form over years. They can be highly asymmetrical, with professional soldiers facing hit-and-run militias or hidden resistant communities. Wars are conducted today using high-tech weaponry flung from the air, robotic machines, computers, and also machetes wielded by neighbors. War-fighting strategies encompass rape and individual suicide plus other forms of physical assault that directly challenge established international law (on humane treatment of prisoners, for example). Touching War confronted the varieties of armed conflicts that have helped define the second half of the twentieth century up to today with bodily experience in mind.

To theorize war from the multi-pointed view of experience is long overdue. This collection, therefore, pushes the boundaries of critical and conventional war studies and war thinking. It does not promote one kind of theory, definition, approach, or methodology but rather explores new possibilities of conceptualizing aspects of an old social institution and its practices. In doing so it draws on perspectives from law, history, art history, anthropology, ethics and philosophy, development studies, international relations, and art practice. Focusing specifically on post-cold-war wars, it offers challenging thinking on humanitarianism and war, on so-called new wars in Africa, on cold war memories, the women’s bodies of war that inspire recent UN resolutions, and war as a repeating exception to laws against killing, a repeating cycle of technological innovation and arms trade, and a repeating anointment of war artists to sketch the next war. It lays out arguments for focusing more on the politics of war as human experience than is usually the case in the social sciences, particularly in war studies and political science, and brings readers war-relevant literatures that they might not be familiar with in strict disciplinary contexts.

The undertaking begins with a chapter that is fittingly by the first speaker in the Touching War program: law professor Anne Orford, who traveled to Touching War from Melbourne University. “The passions of protection: sovereign authority and humanitarian war” addresses this question: does the existence of vulnerable bodies in wartime, especially those experiencing pain, serve as a break on the militarized power of states or does it in fact urge on state authority and power? She asks that question in the context of humanitarian interventionist warring, a form of post-cold-war intervention that Orford previously criticized the legal profession for defending;⁹ it is a form of warfare that I describe as “kill some to be kind to others.”¹⁰ Humanitarian intervention is carried out by major military powers in situations where there can seem to be no other way to protect the lives of suffering people caught up elsewhere in civil wars, insurgencies, or failed state scenarios. It is interventionist war backed up by the legal concept of sovereign responsibility to protect. Orford shows how major states can be both opposed to cruelty in war and willing to impose cruelty on civilian populations through a form of warring meant to protect them, or more accurately protect their theoretical freedoms. Orford’s discussion of contradictions in humanitarian intervention and law is compelling, not least because it confronts the continuing tendency to reaffirm the state as the rightful subject of war – and the United Nations acting universally in its name – not individual people affected by state violence. Appealing to ideas from widely varying times and locations, including political philosophy, art, and poetry, Orford launches the book by asking readers to rethink responsibility, protection, and authority as they relate to bodies that are touched violently by war, yet are placed, in effect, off stage by international law.

The next chapter takes the discussion of experiencing war in a related direction by considering the ethics of gender and humanitarian war. Kimberly Hutchings, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, focuses on moral rather than legal issues in “Gendered humanitarianism: reconsidering the ethics of war.” She argues that humanitarian intervention actually operates not by universalizing the human to be rescued from suffering, but by reproducing assumed gender differences between people. Some bodies are deemed rescuers and others (women and children) are nearly always cast as needing rescue and protection from villains by heroes. Some feminist work in international relations would circumvent gender-based dichotomies by distinguishing between kinds of violence and by building feminist theory of war making around certain kinds and circumstances of violence only. Hutchings does not see this as a solution to the gender differentiation problem. Needed is greater contemplation of moral authority and moral agency when addressing the relational ethics of humanitarianism, not a recalibration of degrees of gender responsibility, authority, deservedness, and agency. For her, a violent moral agency based on gendered fictions of any kind would not be the way forward.

These early chapters, each addressing issues of bodies and ethics surrounding humanitarian intervention, are followed by two pieces that bring specific bodies of war to light: women in the wars of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Brigitte M. Holzner, Head of the Gender and Development Department of the Austrian Government, and a former colleague at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, has considerable experience working with bodies of war in the global south. In “Wars, bodies, and development” she writes about gender-based violence in the Bosnian and Liberian wars as the backdrop or prelude to UN actions to recognize gender-particular challenges in war zones. UN resolutions 1325 and 1888 endeavor, in effect, to render women more human, more rights-bearing, before wars, in wars, and in post-conflict deliberations. The resolutions endeavor to bring experiences that have been habitually subsumed in the term “civilian” into clear view and thereby into the politics of war and recovery. In effect, the UN authorizes a new inclusion to the sovereign-like passion for protecting “passive” women in wartime, namely, an emphasis on women’s participation in wars and in peace. However, Holzner’s own observations in the field indicate that the UN has not nuanced the identity “women” in ways that escape the usual dichotomous associations with victimhood and war prey....