War, Citizenship, Territory

Deborah Cowen, Emily Gilbert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135917227
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

For all too obvious reasons, war, empire, and military conflict have become extremely hot topics in the academy. Given the changing nature of war, one of the more promising areas of scholarly investigation has been the development of new theories of war and war's impact on society. War, Citizenship, Territory features 19 chapters that look at the impact of war and militarism on citizenship, whether traditional territorially-bound national citizenship or "transnational" citizenship. Cowen and Gilbert argue that while there has been an explosion of work on citizenship and territory, Western academia's avoidance of the immediate effects of war (among other things) has led them to ignore war, which they contend is both pervasive and well nigh permanent. This volume sets forth a new, geopolitically based theory of war's transformative role on contemporary forms of citizenship and territoriality, and includes empirical chapters that offer global coverage.

1

The Politics of War, Citizenship, Territory

DEBORAH COWEN AND EMILY GILBERT

Who is a friend?

Who is an enemy?

Who is a target?

Who is a terrorist?

Who is a combatant?

Who is innocent?

Who is “high risk”?

Who is “illegal”?

Who is free?

Who serves?

Who belongs?

Who decides?

Who’s next?

These simple questions emerge forcefully out of contemporary political crises. They constitute some of the most basic and pressing challenges of citizenship in the context of war. They prompt us to think about how organized human violence shapes our spaces, practices, and identities. They are questions about territory, for political belonging in the modern world has meant formal belonging to a spatially bounded state. More broadly, as the “spatial turn” in the social sciences and humanities has illustrated, being political is always a matter of being, becoming, in place and through space. Being political does not necessarily entail engagement in formal or electoral politics but occurs in a broad range of relations between people and groups wherein norms, practices, ideas, and ways of organizing material life are challenged, questioned, and potentially reconstituted. The above questions ask us to think war and territory through social and political subjects—or, in other words, through the lens of citizenship. In this sense, these questions prompt the provocative investigations that constitute the seventeen chapters of this book.

For millennia, conflicts over the control of people and places have reshaped the organization of collective human life. War kills, starves, displaces, and destroys. War can be deeply rupturing—an exceptional event—that shatters the institutions and norms of citizenship while it ravages human bodies, and natural and social worlds. War fractures the habits and common sense of everyday life, sometimes unexpectedly and instantaneously. A destructive frenzy of war can erupt quickly and destroy rights and relations that have taken generations to cultivate. Civil rights, political freedoms, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism are all repeat casualties of war. But this violence also entails creative destruction; war has repeatedly fostered the invention of new political forms. War has been a watershed for citizenship. It has helped cultivate expanded social entitlements, strengthened collective identities, and broadened suffrage and other citizenship rights to new groups. War has generated countless new political forms and social technologies throughout recorded history.

In the modern era, a geography of absolute national spaces has been mapped and regularly reconfigured through organized human violence. For more than two hundred years, political territory was assembled along national lines. At the same time, wars were typically fought between nation-states or by factions within them seeking national sovereignty. In this international state system, formal citizenship became interchangeable with nationality. Despite their relatively brief history as the scalar metrics of global political geography, nation-states and national citizenship were invested with a sense of primordial being. Both nations and nation-states have been naturalized, such that they became the assumed territorial unit of political community across space and time. It is not uncommon to find citizenship defined as the equivalent of formal belonging within a nation-state, even by scholars who would otherwise extol a more nuanced historical and geographical sensibility. Nation-states became the common sense of politics, assumed and uninterrogated, and yet, this normalized and nationalized political geography was constituted and reproduced through tremendous expenditure of labor and extreme and coordinated violence. The state system that emerged out of eighteenth-century Europe heralding the birth of industrial capitalism was the product of violent bourgeois revolutions, and the European-centered nationalization of the state, politics, and war at this time was premised upon a globalizing political economy of imperial rule. The birth of national citizenship in Europe therefore presupposed new forms of colonial violence abroad that contradicted these very premises of European nation-state building. This collection focuses primarily, though not exclusively, on the amalgam of state, politics, and war as it took shape in Europe, an experience that came forcefully to shape politics in colonial and postcolonial states, even in the systematic breach.

It is perhaps only as the national geography of war, citizenship, and territory is recast that its former contours have become so crisp and visible. Roland Barthes famously described “mythologies” as collectively generated ways of knowing the world that allow people to make sense of their daily lives and through which they orient their practice. Mythologies are not false or untrue; they are knowledges and narratives that govern our relationships to the world and to ourselves. Mythologies do not hide the “true” world, but organize our relationship to it in particular ways. When they operate successfully they appear natural rather than historical and geographical in their constitution. Most importantly, Barthes suggests that mythologies become visible as such only when they become outmoded. It is when they can no longer usefully govern our relationship to a changing world, when they are not able to maintain a practical ordering, that we are confronted by the contours of mythologies as particular rather than universal ways of knowing and acting. The contributions to this volume question the resilient mythologies around war, citizenship, and territory, to problematize their historical salience and the presumed universality of their applicability, as well as to understand their contemporary resonance.

Across the wide-ranging interpretations of contemporary politics and violence, there is broad consensus that things have changed. Although emergent since World War II, the end of the Cold War has given way to a heightened period of conflict between nonstate bodies, supranational bodies, coalitions of nation-states, subnational groups, and private military companies hired by states and corporations, working around the world, unregulated, and on violent and uncharted paths. National militaries hold no monopoly on the “human resources” of war, nor do they maintain close ties to the obligations of citizenship in many nation-states. Long-standing obligations to military service through conscription have been severed in a growing list of countries, where the benefits of education, health care, housing, and pensions that come from service life are distributed according to a voluntary market logic, in good neoliberal form. Cities have emerged at the center of both violence and belonging, and this urban geography operates in complicated ways within a world still carved up into absolute spaces of national territory. A wide range of questions regarding belonging has been prompted by our changing political and cultural geographies, by increased human migration and the related complexities of mobility and identity. The reliance of many nations on temporary migrant work pushes communities to ask whether working and living in a place should constitute entitlements to the rights of citizenship. Dual citizenship and diaspora push national governments to question their ethical obligations to protect citizens who live abroad. Official policies of multiculturalism push courts and politicians to consider whether religious or ethnic communities within the nation should be entitled to govern themselves differently. Genocide prompts international agencies to question national sovereignty in light of debates regarding the ethical “obligation to protect” other peoples (Hyndman, this volume). Mythologies of primordial nation-states fighting other states for sovereign power over sovereign territory cannot account for the complex forms, agents, and spaces of war we see today. So too, popular mythologies of peaceful politics, if they ever made any practical sense, are now entirely obsolete.

This collection takes up the challenge of thinking politics in their wake. The chapters that follow, in different ways, suggest that it is at the nexus of war, citizenship, and territory that the monumental and mundane of political life are reproduced. The authors explore both the constitution of national forms through these forces, as well as instances where alternative political geographies are in evidence. They all insist that a deliberate focus on these themes yields new ways of understanding not only our present, but also our past and possibly our future. The contributions offer a historical and geographical diversity that suggests that the nexus of war, citizenship, and territory is rich terrain for investigating the political. Before delving into the specific questions addressed in the chapters that follow, we explore the distinct and entwined nature of our central concepts. How might war, citizenship, and territory combine in changing and lasting assemblages? How does scholarly work on each theme help and hinder an entwined analysis? What is the power of looking at war, citizenship, and territory, together, today?

War

Social science gives us precious few tools for answering these fundamental questions of modern society. Most disciplines … write war out of the analysis. … But if war is a regular, recurring, indeed structural feature of modernity, it remains a profoundly troubling one, which retains its capacity to unsettle the assumptions of social and political analysis.

Shaw (2000, 112)

War has long been a central feature of political life. War is pervasive and recurrent. It shapes the everyday lives of millions of people. When we take a global perspective and consider the perpetual nature of warfare over the last century, it becomes clear that war is a regular, rather than exceptional, event. As Shaw suggests, war is a defining feature of modernity, its presence uninterrupted for nearly one hundred years. “The world as a whole has not been at peace since 1914, and is not at peace now,” asserts the eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm (2002), who has also called the twentieth century “the most murderous in recorded history.” And yet, beyond the confines of the discipline of international relations (IR), which focuses almost exclusively on the state as political actor and holds national war as perhaps axiomatic, there is a dearth of scholarship devoted to this vital topic. Traditional social science, with its concern for typical phenomena and norms of social life, has tended to bracket war as an anomaly. “Peace is seen as a shorthand for a complex set of relations,” Kirby (1994, 301) argues, “whereas war is a thing in and of itself; moreover, peace is normal, whereas war is an aberration that interrupts and punctuates normalcy.” We might qualify these claims by limiting their historical and geographical breadth. The specific traditions of scholarship to which they apply are those which developed, in their modern incarnations, within the context of the national state. War was a central topic of academic and political inquiry prior to and during the consolidation of national territory, but since then became increasingly specialized and contained. War was simultaneously assigned to specialists in fields like strategic studies and IR, and at the same time was consigned to interstate relations making peace the norm of analysis within national society.

In the context of more recent scholarship, Kirby (1994, 301) suggests that a reason for the neglect of war in so many fields of study relates to the geography of academic production, which stands in stark contrast to the geography of conflict itself. “Anglo social science has been cocooned by nearly fifty years of peace,” he argues. Concentrated in the advanced capitalist nations that frequently fight wars, but rarely on their own soil, Anglo social science is “punctuated only infrequently and partially by territorial struggles in distant places such as Korea, Aden, Algeria, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Kuwait.” Since 1945, war has increasingly been waged outside Europe and North America, creating an uneven geography of war. The shift in the geography of conflict to the poorer regions of the world is, according to Kirby, part of what allows academics in the wealthiest regions to neglect the central importance of war to the politics of everyday life.

From the perspective of Anglo social science and advanced capitalist regions of the world, warfare is a cutting example of John Berger’s prescient claim that today it is space that “hides consequences from us” (Berger 1974). Kirby (1994, 301) echoes this observation when he writes, “In reality of course, there is perpetual warfare around the globe, but these wars appear as the struggles of others, even when fought on our behalf and probably with our tax dollars.” In places outside the Western hegemon, war has been less of an unusual rupturing event and instead a more constant feature of politics. Struggles against imperial and colonial rule, and militarized conflicts in the aftermath of colonialism, have been a definitive aspect of political life for perhaps the majority of the world’s peoples.

Given its perpetual and powerful presence on the planet, war has indeed been underinvestigated in many disciplines. However, there are important exceptions to any rule. Many scholars and schools of thought have written extensively on the topic of war in relation to politics, and some even directly address questions of citizenship and territory. But even if it were possible to outline all of the important scholarly work that addresses the topic of war, it is certainly not our goal here. Large bodies of highly insightful scholarship have described war as central to the reproduction of the global capitalist political economy (Luxemburg [1913] 2003; Klare 1974; Blaut 1970; Cohen 1973; Melman 1974; Shiva 2002); to its specifically racist and colonial powers (Fanon 1965; Davis 1971; Amin 1976; Barkawi 2005); to the American Empire’s particular brand of “military Keynesian,” “permanent war economy,” and “military industrial complex” (Cliff 1957; Kidron 1970; O’Connor 1973); and to patriarchal and masculinist relations of rule (Enloe 1988, 2000; Theweleit 1993; Mies 1988). These critical interventions and others have helped to map the contours and effects of armed conflict and resistance in different times and places as features of broader political struggles.

However, it is only recently that widespread critical attention has focused on the normalcy of war and placed it at the center of theoretical scrutiny. War is typically understood as the shape political struggles take when they get out of civil hands and beyond the everyday avenues of conflict resolution. This has become the common sense of war—it is defined as the violent acts that happen when politics are taken to the extreme. Whether contemporary scholars mobilize this conception of war deliberately or unknowingly, the notion that war is an intense form of political conflict has a history. It was almost 200 years ago that the then controversial thinker Karl von Clausewitz insisted on the political nature of war. What were then provocative and radical claims—that war was a political act—helped propel him to iconic status in military and strategic thought. For Clausewitz, war begins when politics ends, when bullets “take the place of diplomatic notes” (Huntington 1957, 57; Clausewitz 1976, 87). Samuel P. Huntington, leading Anglo theorist of civil-military relations in the post–World War II period, insists that Clausewitz’s role in military thought is “roughly comparable to that of Marx in the history of socialist theory.” He explains how “most of the writing which came before him was preliminary, fragmentary, and subsequently embodied in his work,” while “that which came after him was exegetic and interpretive of the meaning of the master” (Huntington, 1957, 56).

As an aside, Karl Marx was himself a reader of Clausewitz, and in a letter to Friedrich Engels, he exclaimed that “the rascal has a common sense bordering on wit” (quoted in Howard 1976, 44). War metaphors are furthermore in evidence in Marx’s own descriptions of the operation of power. These are clearly operative when Marx draws parallels between military organization and the emerging division of labor in the context of early industrial capitalism. Marx writes,

Just as the offensive power of the squadron of a cavalry, or the defensive power of a regiment of infantry, is essentially different from the sum of the offensive or defensive powers of the individual cavalry or infantry soldiers taken separately, so the sum total of the mechanical forces exerted by isolated workmen differs from the social force that is developed, when many hands take part simultaneously in one and the same divided operation. (Marx [1867] 1976, 308; see also Foucault 1979, 163–64)

This use of military metaphors, and the connections that this comparison draws between social organization in military and industrial forms, hints at a different relationship between politics and war than that set out by Clausewitz. Indeed...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• List of Contributors
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Politics of War, Citizenship, Territory
• Part I: At War: Struggle, “Strategy,” and Spatiality
• Part II: Re/constituting Territory
• Part III: Citizens and the Body Politic
• Afterword
• About the Contributors
• Index