Chemical Bodies

The Techno-Politics of Control

Alex Mankoo, Brian Rappert

• Editore: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786605870
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Categoria: Geopolitik

In warfare, civil unrest, and political protest, chemicals have served as means of coercion, suppression, and manipulation. This book examines how chemical agents have been justified, utilised and resisted as means of control. Through attending to how, when, and for whom bodies become rendered as sites of intervention, Chemical Bodies demonstrates the inter-relations between geopolitical transformations and the technological, spatial and social components of local events. The chapters draw out some of the insidious ways in which chemical technologies are damaging, and re-open discussion regarding their justification, role and regulation. In doing so the contributors illustrate how certain instances of force gain prominence (or fade into obscurity), how some individuals speak and others get spoken for, how definitions of what counts as ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are advanced, and how the rights and wrongs of violence are contested.

Chapter 1

Transgressive Chemicals

Brian Rappert and Alex Mankoo

When President Donald Trump spoke on the evening of 6 April 2017 regarding his decision to bomb a Syrian airfield, his brief statement raised many themes commonly associated with chemical weapons (CW) today. He began:

My fellow Americans, on Tuesday, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad launched a horrible chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians using a deadly nerve agent. Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women, and children. It was a slow and brutal death for so many – even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror.¹

With these words, definite markers were given for what happened and how it should be understood: a user was named (Bashar al-Assad), characterized (as a ‘dictator’) and deemed directly responsible (‘Assad choked out the lives’). The weaponry involved was classified (a ‘deadly nerve agent’), its severe effects depicted (choking, ‘a slow and brutal death’) and the victimhood standing of the groups targeted forwarded (‘innocent civilians’, ‘beautiful babies’ and ‘helpless men, women and children’).

Just as the condemnation given typified the moral charge so often associated with chemical weapons, the intense international debate about the Trump Administration’s action epitomized the manner in which violence can be contested. So it was asked: Were the images shared around the world of people dying genuine? Were the attacks carried out by the Syrian military under instruction from the president? Was it really the images of beautiful babies suffering that led Trump to strike or were ulterior geopolitical, domestic or personal motivations in play? Since many beautiful babies had died as part of the long-running Syrian conflict, why were these singled out as justifying a U.S. military response? Would this attack serve to escalate violence or help turn warring factions towards some kind of resolution? If the Syrian men, women and children were so blameless, why was the Trump administration simultaneously seeking an outright ban on Syrian refugees entering the United States?²

While this was a highly prominent instance of the hostile use of chemicals, other events also took place around the same time. In the early hours of 17 April 2017, twenty people were injured at a nightclub in London in what was widely described as an ‘acid attack’. Reports indicated a chemical was sprayed as part of a fight.³ Among those assaulted, two were blinded in one eye. One woman affected commented, ‘The pain is indescribable – it feels like your skin is eating itself. The police told us later it was drain fluid’.⁴ The attack was notable for the extent of media coverage given to it compared to previous acid attacks in the United Kingdom – the latter often undertaken against women by their expartners in displays of power.⁵ A recurring feature of the coverage in April was that one of the three men suspected as carrying out the assault was the former boyfriend of a British reality TV star. While the nightclub attack was given extraordinary media attention, this instance would be followed by prominent coverage to a number of similar attacks in public. One reason identified for the rise in incidents was the clampdown on other means of force, notably knives.⁶ Through this cumulative attention, ‘acid attacks’ would move from the fringe to the centre of criminal justice policy in Britain.

The attention to the previous two cases dwarfed that given to another set of events taking place around the same time in Western media. As reported by Amnesty International, the days before the sixth anniversary of the 2011 uprising in Bahrain (17 February 2017) amounted to a human rights crisis. In describing the violence employed as part of the crackdown on the freedom of expression, Amnesty International repeatedly cited the use of tear gas against protesters.⁷ For instance, in relation to large-scale protests in the villages of Duraz, Sitra and al-Daih, ‘security forces were said to have responded with tear gas and shotguns firing birdshot. Eyewitnesses told Amnesty International that they saw security officers in Sanabis fire tear gas, aiming directly at protesters and causing injuries’.⁸

These three contrasting cases exemplify the array of co-existing and shifting notions of what chemical agents are, as well as assessment of how, when and by whom they should (or should not) be used.

Chemical Bodies takes as its topic how chemical agents have been justified and resisted as instruments of coercion across time and space. In taking the potential for contestation as a central concern, this volume explores how the use of chemical agents often entails messy assemblages of materials, equipment, individuals, techniques, modes of argument and forms of accountability. In seeking to understand how chemical agents are made to matter, the contributors to this volume examine how certain instances of force gain prominence (or not), how some individuals speak and others get spoken for, how definitions of what counts as ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are advanced and how the normative rights and wrongs of violence are justified. Chemical Bodies aims to navigate the relationship between chemicals, bodies and space to answer questions such as the following:

•How, when and for whom do bodies become rendered as sites of intervention?

•What kind of geopolitical spaces make body-controlling chemicals possible and permissible?

•What concerns and whose experiences are made visible and invisible?

•How can the analysis of the past inform scholarship, policy making and activism?

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how these weapons have been shaped by scientific and technical advancements, geopolitics, international law and normative standards. These matters will be explored through an analysis that seeks to develop sensitivities for approaching disputes about the use of chemicals; sensitivities opened up to in subsequent chapters. The next section considers how distinctions have been drawn over time in defining and assessing ‘chemical weapons’. Determining whether chemical agents are unlawful, unadvisable, offensive, prohibited or reprehensible entails distinguishing them from what is legal, advisable, defensive, allowed or above board. Building on this, the third section analyses how attempts to legitimate and contest chemical weapons have entailed efforts to link and delink contexts, technologies and forms of expertise from each other. In the manner that chemical agents have been embraced as a means for sorting individuals and spaces as well as resisted as unleashing forms of uncontrollable contamination, their introduction has entailed experimentation with bodies and spaces. The fourth section examines how the notion of experimentation has figured as part of contests about chemical force.

DISTINCTIONS

Distinctions matter. They cordon off parts of the world from each other in order to distinguish events, objects, locales and so on. Events, objects and so on must have their limits if the world is not to be treated as one indistinguishable goo. While distinctions are needed, too many would result in an unruly and confusing scattering of unique objects. In marking off certain acts or objects, distinctions bring into effect relations of resemblance and difference. For instance, is the kind of ‘acid attack’ in London mentioned earlier properly put under the umbrella of a ‘chemical weapon’ attack? If the determination is ‘yes’, then a host of imaginations and concerns would be evoked associated with their terror potential or their status as an instance of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMD). These concerns, however, were not prevalent in public coverage. In taking as its concern ‘chemical agents’, this volume seeks to bring into view a range of coercive uses of chemicals that might fall outside of analyses concerned with a narrow definition of ‘chemical weapons’.

Distinctions matter as well in the sense of telling us what matters, what is important. This point is highly relevant to the topics at hand in these chapters because the use of ‘chemical weapons’ is often highly charged. As with terms like ‘violence’, to say someone has used chemical weapons is typically not taken as a mere description. It comes pre-loaded as an evaluative category. Aversion, disgust and repulsion are the types of emotional recoil often connected with chemical weapons, not least because of the manner they are associated with bodily contamination, pollution and defilement. Although to a lesser extent, much the same spark characterizes associated words. In news reports, terms like ‘tear gas’ regularly stand as bywords suggestive of severe disorder or iron-fist policing.⁹

While often charged, the meaning of categories formed from distinctions should not be taken as invariant or context-free. In ‘From Reviled Poisons to State Arsenals: The Un(necessary) Proliferation of Chemical Weapons’, Jeanne Guillemin sets the development and the post–World War II protection of Japan from prosecution for its chemical warfare (CW) in China against three distinct phases in the legal restraint of chemical weapons in the twentieth century; each which offered a particular set of prevalent meanings. As she argues, in the decade after the Great War, the moral revulsion for poison weapons supported universal legal restrictions; foremost among them was the 1925 Geneva Protocol (GP) that forbade their use in war. Beginning in the early 1930s, support for the universal rules of war declined in a new age of total war theory and the rise of the Axis powers, two of which with impunity conducted chemical warfare against defenceless enemies – Italy against Ethiopia and Japan against China. Guillemin’s third phase began with the 1945 U.S. dropping of atomic bombs on Japan and the dawn of the nuclear age. As she maintains, the ill-considered 1948 United Nations (UN) definition of chemical weapons as ‘WMD’ accorded them strategic value.

James Revill and Marcos Favero’s chapter covers much of the same time period as Guillemin, but they offer a more thematic take on the assessments made of the use of chemical weapons. ‘Lesser Appreciations: A History of Interwar Chemical Warfare’ takes as its primary focus how distinctions between those ‘ingroup’ and ‘outgroup’ as well as ‘civilized’ and ‘oth...

Indice dei contenuti

• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Transgressive Chemicals
• 2 From Reviled Poisons to State Arsenals: The Un(necessary) Proliferation of Chemical Weapons
• 3 Lesser Appreciations: A History of Interwar Chemical Warfare
• 4 Biological Warfare, Chemical Warfare and the Public Body
• 5 Opening Spaces through Exhibiting Absences: Representing Secretive Pasts
• 6 Tear Gas Epistemology: The Himsworth Committee and Weapons as Drugs
• 7 What Counts as a Chemical Weapon? The Category of Law Enforcement in the Chemical Weapons Convention
• 8 Tear Gas and Colonial Bodies in the British Interwar Period
• 9 Controlling and Caring for Public Bodies: Civil Defence Gas Tests in World War II Britain
• 10 ‘Chemical Bodies’ and the Future of Control
• About the Contributors
• Index