Strategies of inclusion in peacemaking: Beyond box-ticking and photo opportunities?

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‘War and Peace’. Via Wikimedia Commons. Photo credit: (U.S. Air Force art by Staff Sgt. Jamal D. Sutter/Released)

“Inclusion” is becoming an increasingly prominent term in debates about peace, yet the term often remains vague. Hearing calls for an inclusive peace process begs the questions: Whom are we asked to include, how, and why?

The idea for this article resulted from our engagement in research-policy transfer in the field of peace-process design and mediation. We observed that “inclusion” and “inclusive peacemaking” are repeatedly mentioned in contexts including training sessions for mediation professionals, policy documents, UN guidance material, and NGO reports. Of course, inclusion sounds like a benign concept, and (as Devon Curtis put it at a panel we organized at the 2018 ISA annual convention) who would openly oppose it?

While inclusion appears to be a widely accepted idea, its implications are highly political and potentially divisive. There are conceptual confusions and political pitfalls awaiting any mediator setting out to design an inclusive peace process. To take a contemporary example, two months ago, 150 delegates met in Geneva to form the Constitutional Committee for Syria, facilitated by the UN Special Envoy for Syria. It took nearly two years to agree on the set up of this committee. Finally, 50 delegates were nominated each by the Government and the opposition, with the final 50 representing civil society, and a requirement of 30% women delegates across all delegations. This set-up was meant to ensure a broad representation of Syrian voices, and make the process more “inclusive.” But it is unclear whether the civil society delegates in this process will be seen as representative, or  if their voices ultimately impact the constitutional debate. Will it be perceived as largely symbolic or a mere photo opportunity to signal inclusion?

“Women, Peace and Security – High-Level Review of Security Council Resolution 1325” by UN Women Gallery is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0  Photo: UN Women/Ryan Brown

Peace negotiations are clearly no longer envisioned as secret talks in secluded locations between representatives of governments and armed groups (generally men), who hash out an agreement under the auspices of a third-party mediator that is sealed in an iconic, public handshake moment. Today, attention is paid to making peace processes inclusive of other groups—such as civil society, women, and youth. Witnessing first-hand the push and pull between inclusion advocates, mediators, and conflict parties spurred us to take a step back and unpack the concept of inclusion in peacemaking. We were particularly fascinated by some of the rhetoric we encountered among the advocates for inclusion, as it relates to defining whom to include, thereby inevitably touching on questions of identity, representation, and difference. While we, too, are sympathetic to calls for greater inclusion, we noticed a lack of critical reflection on potential trade-offs and risks. For example, the advocacy for women’s inclusion seems to intermingle normative arguments based on equality with instrumental considerations centred on stipulated positive effects of women’s inclusion on peace processes. Furthermore, some of these employ highly essentialised ideas about women, portraying them as vulnerable, peaceful, and often politically unaffiliated actors. While we acknowledge the potential of “strategic essentialism” in political struggles for empowerment of specific groups, questions remain about how this contributes to peace more broadly. While debates about inclusion in peacemaking are often presented as technical pursuits of finding the right inclusion formula, we reckoned that they are in fact related to much deeper debates about peace.

”Hearing calls for an inclusive peace process begs the questions: Whom are we asked to include, how, and why?”

In the article, we therefore set out to unpack inclusion in three dimensions: theory, policy, and practice. First, what does theory tell us about the how inclusion matters for peace? In other words, why would one practice in inclusion? Secondly, how does this emerging policy discourse frame inclusion? And thirdly, how does this relate to practical efforts of mediation professionals?

For the first part, we found different rationales for inclusion. Broad-based inclusion is introduced to make peace processes more legitimate; the inclusion of specific groups is framed as advancing their empowerment and protection; and the inclusion of more relationally defined actors is grounded in advancing conflict transformation. We further conducted a content analysis of UN documents about inclusion in mediation, asking who is framed as “the included”; and finally we interviewed UN mediation professionals about their practices of inclusion in actual peace processes, gathering insights from peace talks ranging from Syria and Colombia to Somalia, Afghanistan, and Yemen. In the content analysis of UN documents on mediation, we found three categories of references to “the included”: Open, closed, and relational terms. Open terms are vague, such as in calls for the inclusion of all “voices” or “stakeholders”, whereas closed terms use specific traits to define actor groups, such as “women” or “youth”, and finally, relational terms denote a specific relationship to other actors, like in calls to include “marginalised” (as opposed to “powerful”) actors. We also examined which framings of the included are found in different types of UN documents, and found that UN Security Council resolutions predominantly use closed framings, while guidance materials on mediation, such as those developed by the UN’s Mediation Support Unit use more open and relational framings when describing who should be included. 

The following tensions arise from this picture: broadly framed, legitimacy-seeking inclusion tends to brush over differences that characterise conflict and is unable to give actual guidance on whom to include. This is because, ultimately, the number of seats at the table is limited. On the other hand, the specific closed framing of empowerment and protection-seeking approaches brings selected struggles to the fore, such as the struggle for women’s representation. In practice, however, the closed framings can also lead to a “box-ticking” mentality, to tokenistic inclusion, and to an assumption of essentialised group interests. Furthermore, this inclusion discourse can be exploited by conflict parties and lead to competition for seats at the table between various groups seeking representation, whereby e.g. women’s groups are pitted against other civil society representatives. The (perhaps unsurprising) finding is that inclusion is easier prescribed than done. In order to avoid becoming an empty buzzword, peace theorists, policy-makers, and practitioners should make efforts to examine and make explicit the term’s political uses and unspoken assumptions.

In the article, we argue for a relational inclusion strategy that aims at transforming conflicts, linking this to considerations in the literature about agonistic peace. We interpret current practices of inclusion as an inchoate attempt to politicize peacebuilding. This would require peacemaking to dare to differ: bringing those differences to the (literal or figurative) negotiation table that really matter for achieving a political settlement. A relational approach potentially offers an avenue for a more context-sensitive practice of inclusion that is able to account for difference, without either fixing or brushing over it. Rather than employing a de-politicised notion of broad inclusion, or a closed notion based on essentialised group interests, relational inclusion can sharpen mediators’ awareness of the power struggles that characterise peace processes, and highlight their own role in (re-)shaping these along the way.

Book review: Securitization and Desecuritization of FARC in Colombia

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Başar Baysal, 2019. Securitization and Desecuritization of FARC in Colombia, Lexington Books.

The study of illegal armed organizations is difficult. Data availability is limited, as is access to key actors. When conflicts end, therefore, scholars face the opportunity to trace processes, and unpack the black box of how illegal organizations work and evolve, and how they adapt their strategies in interplay with the wider international, political, and social context, and with the strategies of their antagonists (usually state or government forces).

Securitization and Desecuritization of FARC in Colombia, by Başar Baysal offers a rare glimpse at the transformation of an illegal armed organization—the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) from the point of view of securitization. The book provides a theoretical framework—labeled ‘dual securitization’—of the mutual securitization among the Colombian state and the FARC rebels across time, as defined initially in the FARC’s founding manifesto and the Colombian Armed Forces’ Lasso Plan. This interplay between the conflict’s main actors is one of the main contributions of the book, as it shows to what extent ‘primary and counter-securitizations are active’ and dynamic, especially in contexts of conflicts of long duration. 

The book’s main aspiration is of a theoretical nature. It dedicates the bulk of the document to describing existing theories and their limitations. It begins with securitization theory and credits Ole Wæver’s seminal description of security as a ‘speech act’ (Wæver, 1995), which justifies discourse-centered research methodologies. The book complements this approach with a description of International Political Sociology and adds a discussion of the limitations of securitization theory, such as its perceived elitism and its applicability beyond the West. To overcome some of the limitations of Western-centered securitization accounts, it proposes the inclusion of context variables, mainly the quality and level of democracy as well as state capacity as mediating factors in the mutual securitization among actors. In brief, low levels of democracy and state capacity increase the likelihood of securitization. The author also includes the international dimension in the description of contexts shaping securitization. 

The book then proposes its ‘dual’ securitization approach, which it describes as a ‘novel framework for critical security studies to examine the process of securitization’ (p. 69). The approach ‘takes both discourses and practices of security into consideration’ (p.69), defines phases of the securitization process (decision, construction, and (in)securitization-in-action) and adds to the analysis securitizing actors and referent objects beyond the state. The main purpose of this dual framework, according to the author, is ‘to present how different views conflict for their truth claim and how these clashes impact the construction of this truth (i.e. security definition)’ (p. 71).

In the final chapters, the book applies the dual securitization framework to Colombia, specifically to the armed conflict between FARC and the Colombian state. The securitization process, as stated by the author, started in the 1960s with the securitization of communists by the Colombian state (in line with Cold War trends and policies), continued with FARC’s manifesto’s emphasis on the state as enemy of the people, and ended in 2016 with a peace agreement between both actors. The agreement has lasted over three years. The author chose the Colombian case because it ‘is a clear example of a dual securitization’, in which it is possible to trace the dynamic and mutually determined process of securitization among the groups and the state. The Colombian peace process has attracted significant international attention: It managed to overcome seeming intractability and produce an agreement to end conflict with one of the Western Hemisphere’s last insurgent groups. Although it has been studied from multiple angles, this approach of mutual (dual) securitization is indeed unprecedented. 

At the same time, the book leaves several open questions. On the one hand, the reader may be puzzled as to whether the book’s argument benefited from hindsight or from post-factual analysis: How can we know that desecuritization was effective in bringing FARC to the negotiation table? In addition, to what extent can a successful peace process be considered synonymous for desecuritization? Finally, it would be interesting to see if securitization really ends with a peace agreement—as suggested by the author for the case of Colombia—and to what extent current debates on postconflict security issues, in which FARC and the passions it evokes among Colombian citizens still play a central role, are still marked by the legacy of conflict-related securitization. This applies, for example, to the fight against illicit crops, which have for decades fueled the Colombian conflict, and which continue to influence and weaken Colombian security in the aftermath of armed conflict.

The author developed his framework on the Colombian case without any access to primary sources (for example by conducting field work in Colombia) and in fact relied on limited secondary sources. This is a weakness of the research (acknowledged by the author himself), which would have benefited from stronger empirical, archival, and historical work and from the opportunities to substantiate some of the ‘dual securitization’ framework’s assertions with evidence on the ground. It might even have been interesting to better structure the comparison with Turkey and the PKK, which is mentioned occasionally but not developed in a full-fledged analysis.

Despite these shortcomings, this timely work by Başar Baysal provides a valuable look at a topic that has not been addressed in depth and contributes to the academic literature that blooms when armed conflicts end. The book leaves readers with a valuable framework that should be further analyzed and tested across cases.

References:

Wæver O (1995) Securitization and desecxuritization. In: Lipschutz R (ed) On Security. New York: Columbia University Press, 46-96.

AngAngelika Rettberg is a professor at the Political Science Department at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá – Colombia) and a Global Fellow at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO).

Nuclear Governmentality: Governing Nuclear Security and Radiation Risk in Post-Fukushima Japan

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The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan was classified as a level-7 international nuclear event. The disaster disrupted lives and livelihoods; yet, it is but one of many predicted to occur based on the frequency of past nuclear failures. [i] [ii]  However, despite its fundamental riskiness, nuclear energy remains tied to national security and the welfare of the population in governmental and corporate policies and material assemblages in Japan and elsewhere.

Nuclear governance Photo Credit: Greg Webb / IAEA

I couldn’t help but wonder: What must disappear symbolically for nuclear to be so secure? On the one hand, what must disappear is the possibility for cascading technological failures. This is disappearance is accomplished by a governmental logic described as “command and control,” with military-industrial roots, as described by Eric Schlosser. On the other hand, what must disappear is the danger from radiation. Analysis of “nuclear assemblages,” as described by Gabrielle Hecht, discloses that what disappears from the construct of nuclear security is the danger from radioactive contamination up and down supply-and-utilization-chains.

Making the danger of radioactive contamination disappear is quite a trick. Remember that radiation birthed Godzilla in the original film adaptation. However, although the global public distrusts radiation, it has been conditioned by decades of protocols and risk narratives to believe that exposure can be expertly represented and administered, with biological effects governable. Radiation danger is domesticated by radiation risk management, a body of knowledge that was professionalized with “Health Physics,” whose origins can be traced to the US Manhattan Project. The governability of radiation exposure is illustrated by the multiplicity of symbolic systems for representing physical and biological properties, illustrated by the sievert, a unit of measurement claiming to capture precisely the biological impacts of a given (singular or cumulative) exposure.

In Japan, as in most nations, the government has the authority to decide what level of radiation exposure is permissible, although citizen activism has driven down national exposure levels over time. In contrast to this trend, after the Fukushima disaster, citizen and worker radiation exposure levels were increased dramatically, leading to fierce objections to the new permissible dose levels. Concerns about radiation exposure have been amplified by increased incidents of diabetes and thyroid nodules and cancers among Fukushima children. Conflict has raged about whether radiation is responsible. Radiation become dangerous as expert formulations of risk are seen as incongruous with experienced effects.

“the analytical concept of nuclear governmentality explain how nuclear and radiation risks and uncertainties are produced”

Representations of radiation forms and biological effects are inherently political because each system for representing radiation and effects is based in assumptions about physical forms, types of exposure, and range of posited biological effects, with uncertainties and conflicts in expert interpretations. These conflicts are revived after every nuclear accident and radiation mishap, with reassurances given by authorities that risk is governable and public welfare carefully administered. Increased disease incidents in Japanese children have mobilized parents, researchers, and outside observers to challenge the narrative of carefully administered exposures. My paper in Security Dialogue introduces the analytical concept of nuclear governmentality to explain how nuclear and radiation risks and uncertainties are produced, but rendered actionable through technocratic controls and precise calculations of dose-effects, generating resistance from dissident experts and citizens whose experiences belie the control narrative.

The full length article providing the basis for this blog post was published in Security Dialogue 50(6) 2019

[i]           J. Lelieveld, D. Kunkel, M. G. Lawrence. Global risk of radioactive fallout after major nuclear reactor accidents. Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, 2012; 12 (9): 4245 DOI: 10.5194/acp-12-4245-2012

[ii]           Spencer Wheatley, Benjamin Sovacool, and Didier Sornette, “Of Disasters and Dragon Kings: A Statistical Analysis of Nuclear Power Incidents & Accidents,” Physics and Society (2015) arXiv:1504.02380 [physics.soc-ph].

Freezing time, preparing for the future: The stockpile as a temporal matter of security

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My paper on stockpiling, published in Security Dialogue, began with party conversations. When I told people that I work on catastrophe preparedness, the conversation inevitably shifted towards stockpiling. Concerned friends would ask how much food, water, and candles you have to store to be safe during an emergency. The gentrification critic would remark that we don’t have enough space in our apartments anyway! Media nostalgics was happy to have found a justification for keeping their video recorders because they would still be able to watch old VHS of Pretty Woman and Terminator 2 after the internet broke down. Someone would surely tell a story of their grandparents stockpiling tons of canned food for the nuclear apocalypse, to which the food snob would reply that he’d rather starve than live without fresh herbs and vegetables. At first, I was glad if the foodie was able to pivot the conversation towards pickling because actually, I didn’t have much to say about stockpiling. I was interested in emergency scenario analysis, critical infrastructures, disrupted circulations, rapid response etc., but not in stockpiling. Little by little, I became more concerned with it precisely because it is mundane enough to qualify as a party conversation but also because, when looked at more closely, it turned out to be pretty exciting.

What I first discovered is that even though stockpiling seems to be a thing of the Cold War past, it is in fact a matter for the future: it is a kind of stuff that freezes or preserves time so that it can keep you safe in a turbulent future. This is the material and temporal quality of the stockpile; a quality, however, that does not come for free, but requires elaborate ordering and maintenance work. You have to can food, freeze vital matter, store emergency equipment, keep away parasitic animals and more generally the “tooth of time” that makes the material world, and with it the securing function of stockpiling, eventually fall apart. Yet stockpiling does not only have a temporality but also a history that seems to be as long as “human civilization”. Stockpiling, it turns out, is not only a security technique but also a tool for the exercise of power. In the earliest states, stockpiling implied a bureaucratic caste that collected surpluses, stored them in a central place and thereby materialized their power over the allocation of resources that they could now make scarce or affluent at will. In modernity, stores became more dispersed as money, commodity exchange, and new infrastructures made it possible to procure resources through circulation. But as more and more disruptions in such circulations escalated into emergencies in the 20th century, stockpiling became a reflexive security device reactive to risks associated with these disruptions. As a reaction to the First and Second World Wars, states started stockpiling critical raw materials (in the paper I analyse the case of the German Office of War Raw Materials during WWI headed by the famous system builder and public intellectual Walter Rathenau). As a consequence of the oil price crisis during the Cold War, elaborate oil stockpiling projects were devised first by the OECD and then by the IEA.

Even in the complex post 9/11 security landscape, stockpiling continues to be an important security technology. The article examines the role of reserves in contemporary German catastrophe preparedness. There are still over a hundred strategically located grain stores in Germany. And new public health threats like emerging infectious diseases prompted the establishment of pharmaceutical stockpiling. Yet fiscal austerity and budgetary constraints limit security stockpiling in catastrophe preparedness. In addition, the rise of just-in-time logistics has reduced buffer stocks so that supply chain disruptions can escalate quickly and potentially – think of food logistics – also affect the population. To compensate for the absence of public and private security stores, the government is now prompting citizens to establish emergency stockpiles. This is one of the reasons so many people have heard about stockpiling because after every other emergency the government and the news media emphasize the importance of private preparedness, and of stockpiling in particular. Although I wouldn’t argue against storing a couple of water bottles or batteries, this governmental advice is not only indicative of the out-of-stock austerity state, but also shows the paradoxical nature of mobilizing the stockpiling self as the storekeeper of last resort. Governments prompt their citizens to engage in something that private corporations and “fiscally responsible” governments are less and less willing to do. What makes stockpiling contemporary is thus precisely that it goes against the grain of current social, economic, and technological trends – from austerity and JIT to streaming – and reacts to the multiple risks associated with them.

Find Andreas Folkers’ full article on Stockpiling in Volume 50, Issue 6 of Security Dialogue: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0967010619868385

Who are the Civilians in South Sudan?

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EPA/JM LOPEZ

Why are local communities so often targeted in South Sudan’s civil wars? How do their attackers justify violence against people defined as civilians in international law? In our article in the current issue of Security Dialogue, we answer these questions by placing recent brutalities within a longer history of conflict logics and practices in South Sudan’s modern history of violent governance. These evolving local norms inform how armed actors engage with residents in today’s conflicts.

State governance has always been violent towards South Sudan’s populations. Since slave raiders and traders shaped the first colonial incursions in the mid-1800s, ordinary people have been strategic assets to be managed and exploited. As such populations are not just legitimate targets in conflicts, but key resources to capture and control. State power was extended over Sudan’s peripheries in the 1900-1920s through mass forced displacement and depopulation of strategic areas (such as Kafia Kingi); through collective ‘punishment’ of defensive populations (for example, the aerial bombardment of Nuer communities); and violent raiding by proxy fighters from other communities, turning residents against each other. Sudan’s civil wars in the South from the 1960s continued these practices. Communities were targeted collectively based on ethnicity and imputed loyalty, displaced, and forced into camps for ‘protection’ and control, by both government and rebel forces.

Today’s UN Protection of Civilians camps, the first UN bases in the world to be turned into protection camps for local populations, are a part of this long history of violent governance. These armed groups continue to see the population in contested areas as part of the war, where everyone is (potentially) part of the collective enemy, and where controlling desperate poor populations is also a convenient way of gaining access to external aid and cheap labour. It thus makes more sense that, since 2013, armed groups have targeted populations in forced displacements, collective ‘punishments’, violent raids and armed control of refugee camps.

The article also shows how this distinction between armed combatants and those defined as civilians in international law is further blurred by violent governance tactics since the colonial period. Successive governments have actively sought to incorporate the population into their militarised security apparatus. During colonial rule, men and women were pressed into service as enslaved or otherwise dependent servants, soldiers, and workers in fortified and militarised garrison towns. After Sudan’s independence in 1956, the government encouraged or coerced residents into acting as spies, ‘national guards’, informers and ‘local protection’ forces. This militarised security state continues, and continues to blur the South Sudanese definition of civilian.

This analysis does not excuse the massive and systematic violence against the general population of South Sudan. But without due consideration of these deeply engraved historical systems and logics of violent governance, today’s brutal conflicts become incomprehensible. Any attempt to implement protection measures for populations affected by war needs to be informed by a proper understanding of these local logics of conflict. In this logic, the UN in South Sudan is already another military-political authority managing local populations and controlling their movements. With the NGOs servicing them and the UN peacekeepers guarding them, these PoC camps are a strategic political asset to be managed and exploited.  

Read the full article here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0967010619863262

* The article is an outcome of a larger project supported by the Research Council of Norway: “Protection of Civilians: From Principle to Practice” (https://www.prio.org/Projects/Project/?x=1558)

Review of Violence: Humans in Dark Times

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Evans, Brad & Lennard, Natasha, Violence: Humans in Dark Times. San Fransisco, CA: City Lights Books, 2018, 335 pp., ISBN-10 0872867544

In her writings on violence and totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt famously used the term “dark times” to refer to not just the monstrosities of the 20th  century, but the necessity of countering violence with sustained intellectual engagement. Speaking of the importance of challenging abuses of power in all its forms, Arendt writes that, “even in the darkest times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth (Arendt 1968, p 7). In Violence: Humans in Dark Times, authors Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard take these words as inspiration, or rather, provocation, to examine the myriads of ways in which violence operates in the world today, and subsequently, how to confront it. In a series of conversations with theorists, activists, and artists, Evans and Lennard attempt to explore the role that violence plays in modern politics, culture, the media, public speech, intellectualism, and against the environment. This is a work that is meant for both scholarly and general audiences, as it combines nuanced critical analysis and personal testimony to create an accessible, albeit cerebral, picture of violence.

First published in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, the twenty-nine interviews in this volume attempt to confront the complexities of violence in all the ways it is expressed and normalized. This begins, in the volume’s introduction, with a nuanced examination of the concept of violence itself. Evans and Lennard approach violence through an ethical lens, arguing that it is not some abstract or theoretical problem, but a “violation in the very conditions that constitute what it means to be human (p. 3).” Victimization, they contend, is not the only characteristic of violence. It is an intellectual and pedagogical force that is sustained through normalization via the media and rationalized via cultural definitions of what is permissible versus what is impermissible (p. 4). In their approach to violence, Evans and Lennard see art as integral to the political field, and thus, to the study of power. Subsequently, this volume consists of interviews with renowned critical scholars, artists, performers, writers, and thinkers, and it is in this treatment that Evans and Lennard present a powerful, complex, and thought-provoking understanding of violence in its varied forms, scales, and architectures. The medium of the interview, while limiting the depth of inquiry, allows for an increased scope of discussion and a degree of equity between interviewees, which in itself exemplifies the perspective through which Evans and Lennard approach the question of violence. That is, they contend, a discussion on violence demands an ethical platform based upon reciprocity, authenticity, and the inclusion of different voices and perspectives (ibid.).

While all of these interviews offer valuable, poignant, and intriguing conceptualizations of violence, Violence: Humans in Dark Times is structured around a few lines of inquiry that see multiple treatments. In “The Perils of Being a Black Philosopher” and “Violence to Thought,” George Yancy and David Theo Goldberg speak of the link between violence and the intellectual in the public arena (p. 31, p 213), discussing their experiences in the Trump era as a way of understanding the violence of “post-racial” America. In “The Violence of Forgetting” and “Living with Disappearance,” Henry A. Giroux and Allen Feldmen talk of ignorance and disappearance, discussing how denial affects the capacity for critical thought (p. 65, p. 291). These conversations on the threat to intellectualism are presented in tandem with thoughts on modern violence by noted thinkers such as Zygmunt Bauman (p. 43), Brian Massumi (p. 249), Elaine Scarry (p. 263), and Michael J. Shapiro (p. 301), all of whom eloquently discuss the ways in which their scholarship conceptualizes the problem of violence today.

As previously noted, the authors are particularly interested in the ways in which art and aesthetics can confront violence.  As Evans and Lennard suggest, art, when done properly, allows for a fundamental questioning of politics. It is directly concerned with questions of oppression and injustice, and has the potential to inspire new dialogues through alternative mediums of public engagement (p 199). To this end, they present interviews from a number of artists and performers. Simon Critchley discusses how the Roman tragedy affords us a unique perspective of modern U.S. politics (p. 19); Bracha L. Ettinger argues for art as a form of political and ethical intervention (p. 107); Gottfried Henwein examines the role of violence in his own work as an artist (p. 159); and Christopher Alden critiques the gendered politics of the opera (p. 225).

The breadth of analyses experienced in Violence: Humans in Dark Times is both integral to the volume’s argument, and a limiting factor in the search for a thorough conceptualization of violence. It is through these snapshots of how violence is conceptualized in different fields of study and experiences that Evans and Lennard highlight how it is an organizing principle of our modern times — not merely a matter of direct experience or structure, but an ontological phenomenon. However, the structuring of the book via interview, and not, for instance, topic, results in an unfinished, or perhaps uneven, conceptualization of violence. Readers are left wondering as to how these interviews connect to the overarching understanding of violence as an ethics.

While Evans and Lennard note that they are interested in considering the importance of both art and activism in reactions against and understandings of violence, the series would be well suited by the continued inclusion of theorists able to discuss how specific manifestations of violence — for instance, gendered violence, colonial violence, and/or violence against LGBTQ communities — can be understood and acted upon through art and intellectual engagement.

In its introduction, Violence: Humans in Dark Times channels Hannah Arendt in calling for illumination in the darkness. This darkness, Arendt explains, is the disorder and the hunger, “the massacres and the slaughterers … the despair… the well-founded wrath that makes the voice grow hoarse (Arendt 1968, p 6)” that defines our modern times, and yet remains invisible, justified through systemic explanations and obfuscation. The metaphor of light and dark as a way to suggest the concepts of visibility and invisibility is intriguing in this aspect, as it suggests that the darkness itself is a kind of violence; an existential violence that begets acts and systems of violence. It is this violence, this ignorance of violence, that the illumination that Evans and Lennard present attempts to confront. The interviews in this volume, as small kindling or tiny flames, in the dark, begin a discussion on modern violence by speaking to those who experience, learn about, and utilize it in their lives and their work. While the editors do not engage directly with the question of what now, their interviews are perhaps meant more as a “spark” to inspire their readers into action, as a challenge that asks us to re-think our relationship with violence itself. In this way, Violence: Humans in Dark Times is an intriguing beginning to a much-needed sustained intellectual and aesthetic response to the horrors of modern times.

References:

Arendt, H., 1970. Men in Dark Times, First edition. Mariner, San Diego, CA

Evans, B., Lennard, N., 2018. Violence: Humans in Dark Times. City Lights Books, San Francisco, CA.

Charting the impact of ‘gender-sensitive’ DDR and SSR programs in post-conflict reconstruction

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Over the past twenty years feminist activists, civil society groups, and international organisations have argued that there is a need to actively consider gender in all aspects of security policy. Demanding shifts in the way that Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) and Security Sector Reform (SSR) programmes are delivered has been one of the most successful areas of this activism. After a string of examples in the 1990s and early 2000s, where DDR and SSR programs excluded women, or failed to address the particular ways in which their gender made them insecure, real change has since been achieved in international programming.

Rwanda has widely been lauded as a success story in this regard. The externally-funded, locally-owned DDR/SSR programme’s gender-sensitive approach has included actively integrating women into the new national Rwanda Defence Force (RDF), and implementing polices to address gender insecurities across Rwanda, as well as within military families. However, rather than focus on efforts to mainstream gender equality within the national military and reduce overt forms of gendered violence in society, we examined how Rwandan masculinity has been reconstructed through the DDR/SSR programme. To do this, we analysed RDF policy discourse, training materials, the writings of a Rwandan military historian, and statements from Rwandan male and female soldiers during depth interviews. We then questioned whether this reconstruction process smuggled harmful notions of gender and militarism into gender-sensitive programming.

Our research shows that the Rwanda Defence Force has rejected the explicitly violent and aggressive forms of militarised masculinity that have received most attention by feminist critics. However, the RDF’s promotion of a more ‘civilised’, respectable form of militarised masculinity has been used to entrench the central role of an elite-dominated military in the post-conflict state, and has marginalised other ways to be a man in Rwandan society. We show how this has been achieved through the appropriation of Rwandan myths of origin, in addition to internationally imported myths promoting the ideal of the cosmopolitan military in international DDR/SSR programming. In doing so, the Rwandan Defence Force maintains an oppressive pattern of practice (which we term a masculine logic) that while appearing to be egalitarian, has produced several harmful consequences in Rwanda. The most visible of these include the entrenchment of oppressive norms of femininity that demand women behave in ‘respectable’ ways in order to deserve the protection that DDR/SSR has demanded; the silencing of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) soldiers; and by banishing those military men who no longer fit the new Rwandan ideals of militarised masculinity to civilian society. Our field research in Rwanda also revealed that educated young Rwandan men who have been singled out as potential leaders experience increased surveillance under this oppressive masculine logic.

In problematising some of the prevailing ways in which this agenda has been pursued by policymakers and academics, our article reaffirms the importance of remaining attentive to how ‘gender-sensitive’ programs can still smuggle oppressive masculine logics into their design and implementation in post-conflict reconstruction environments.

Droneland: Towards a Domestic Drone Theory

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In December 2018, a civilian drone operator allegedly disrupted hundreds of flights at Gatwick Airport in the UK by flying an industrial class drone across the flight path of aircrafts, causing a major political and security incident. To be sure, the Gatwick drone was neither the first nor the last such incident – similar cases have since been reported at Heathrow, Newark, Dubai, and Dublin airports – but, nonetheless, it seems to represent a new moment in the (short) history of Unmanned Ariel Vehicles (UAVs). If we are all familiar with the deployment of armed predator drones in foreign battlespaces, and increasingly aware that drones are now also being deployed by domestic law enforcement and immigration authorities in Europe and North America, what happened at Gatwick Airport was the most visible sign of the emergence of a new species of non-state drone actor. In a direct reversal of the ‘normal’ power relation between the state and the citizen, the citizen herself is now able to deploy drones against the state – with apparent impunity.

To begin to understand what is at stake in the phenomenon of the domestic drone – a phenomenon which is by no means simply an abstract political or juridical concept, of course, but a concrete reality which is lived by citizens in their everyday lives – we now need a specifically domestic drone theory. It is revealing that most drone theory still tends to view civil drone use through the optic of its military equivalent: law enforcement UAVs are thus commonly read as a symptom of the growing “militarization” of police or immigration control. If this martial logic inevitably tends to reduce civilians to passive targets of state drones, we also now need to consider how civilians may actively engage with, resist or even enjoy their status as drone citizens. In such burgeoning fields as drone art, drone journalism, drone activism and the drone leisure industry, we increasingly encounter a citizen who is not simply a fearful, anxious or suspicious object, but a drone subject, actor or consumer who can exploit UAVs  for her own ends.

In Arthur Bradley and Oliver Davis’s articles in Security Dialogue, as well as in Antonio Cerella’s interview with the acclaimed artist Adam Harvey on the Security Dialogue blog, we seek to begin the work of mapping the political geography of our domestic dronescape. To explore some of the complex ways in which civilian life is lived with, through and against the drone – from active or passive obedience, through complicity, to outright resistance – we focus on a range of empirical sites from the 2016 killing of Micah Johnson by Dallas Police in what was reported to be the first domestic ‘drone strike’ on a civilian on American territory, at one extreme, to the range of anti-drone surveillance clothing created by Adam Harvey, on the other. What exactly, we ask, is at stake in the deployment of law enforcement, border patrol and other domestic drones? Is it a singular, exceptional and unprecedented event in the history of the modern state or the application of a pre-existent military logic? To what extent, finally, does it foreclose upon individual or collective citizen agency – or might it also make possible new species of civil participation, resistance and freedom? In all these ways, the domestic drone must remain under our critical surveillance.

This introduction is a part of the Security Dialogue special compilation ‘Droneland’ edited by Arthur Bradley and Antonia Cerella. An interview Dressing for a machine-readable world with Adam Harvey by Antoinio Cerella accompanies this compilation and can also be found on this blog, and two peer reviewed full-length articles: Deadly force: Contract, killing, sacrifice by Arthur Bradley and Theorizing the advent of weaponized drones as techniques of domestic paramilitary policing by Oliver Davis were published in the 2019 August issue 50(4) of Security Dialogue.

Dressing for a machine-readable world: An interview with Adam Harvey

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‘Think Privacy’
Public Service Announcements by the Privacy Gift Shop
©Adam Harvey 2016

Adam Harvey1 is an award-winning artist and researcher based in Berlin. His work has been widely covered in such publications as the New York Times, CNN and the Huffington Post, and has also been cited by critical theorists such as Grégoire Chamayou and Derek Gregory. Harvey’s work explores the societal impacts of networked data analysis technologies with a focus on computer vision, digital imaging technologies, and counter surveillance. In particular, Harvey is interested in the question of how fashion can be used to address ‘the rise of surveillance, the power of those who surveil, and the growing need to exert more control over privacy’ (Harvey 2012).

To quickly summarize his career thus far, Harvey’s projects include CV Dazzle, camouflage from computer vision; Stealth Wear, his ‘Anti-Drone’ fashion range, and the Privacy Gift Shop, an online marketplace for counter-surveillance art. For his Stealth Wear collection (2012), Harvey fabricated a set of clothing inspired by traditional Islamic dress from silver-plated fabric that reflects thermal radiation, enabling the wearer to avert overhead thermal surveillance. The metal-plated fibres reflect and diffuse the thermal radiation emitted by a body, thereby reducing the wearer’s thermal signature under observation by a long wave infrared camera (Harvey 2012). This range of anti-drone clothing is available for purchase online, alongside other works of counter-surveillance art, at Harvey’s Privacy Gift Shop (https://privacygiftshop.com). In the years since it has been produced, the Stealth Wear collection has been the subject of features in the New York Times (Wortham 2013), Washington Post (Priest 2013) and Der Speigel (Backovic 2013).

If a range of artists such as Trevor Paglen, Mahwish Christy and the collaborative art installation #NotABugSplat (https://notabugsplat.com) undoubtedly address similar questions of the ethico-political status of drone warfare, surveillance and data collection, what arguably distinguishes Adam Harvey’s work in this field is its specifically non-military, or domestic, focus. Grégoire Chamayou (2015: 203-4) provides this description of his work in Drone Theory: ‘One of the questions that arises is whether societies that have, for the time being, failed to rule out the use of this type of technology in wars waged on the other side of the world will eventually realize, perhaps with a jolt, that this technology is designed to be used on them too, and whether they will mobilize themselves to block its use. For it is important for them to become aware that a future of video surveillance with armed drones awaits us if we don’t prevent it. As a last resort, there is always the possibility of purchasing anti-drone clothing, such as that invented by the artist Adam Harvey. It is made from a special metallic fabric that renders the body practically invisible to drones’ thermal imaging cameras’.

In his interview with Antonio Cerella, Adam Harvey discusses the conceptual origins and reception of his work, its relationship to critical theory on drones, surveillance and biopolitics by figures like Chamayou and Gregory, the growing militarization of the domestic sphere and, more widely, how art can be used to – playfully – resist or challenge what he calls the fatalism of living under the gaze of domestic drone surveillance.

Antonio Cerella (AC): In recent years, your work has become increasingly influential in theoretical and philosophical circles – Grégoire Chamayou refers to your anti-drone camouflage in his Drone Theory (Chamayou 2015). To what extent are you aware of, or interested in, contemporary theoretical debates about biopolitics, drone theory, surveillance and security studies? Do they inform your work at all?

Adam Harvey (AH): Theoretical debates around surveillance are of great interest to me, but I’ve intentionally unhinged myself from thinking through the more historical part of these debates because I think the current state of surveillance and security is mostly unprecedented.

For example, Bentham’s Panopticon is of limited value in thinking about how social media is designed to accumulate data that’s used to train neural networks which are eventually licensed to government surveillance programs. And the Orwellian concept of Big Brother seems to anesthetize more complex discussions about computer vision being used to infer sexuality, criminality, or one’s psychological state.

As an artist, I see an opportunity for imaging new ways to represent the current state of surveillance, if it can even be called that. We are being observed by drones in many ways that we can’t know. And my project Stealth Wear (Figure 1) was about asking what are the limits of perceptibility – how do you know how we’re being looked at?

Figure 1 Stealth Wear: ‘Anti-Drone’ Burqa
Photo: ©Adam Harvey 2013
Materials: Burqa with silver-plated rip-stop nylon exterior and black silk interior.
Credits: Engineered by Adam Harvey. Designed by Adam Harvey and Johanna Bloomfield.
Model: Tate

One of the biggest challenges in discussing topics related to surveillance technologies is to avoid becoming fatalistic. My work aims to imagine new and expressive ways of adapting to this environment. In my own work, there is an object attached to it that is a ‘discussion-generator’ that people can easily refer to. From my perspective, it’s important to use wording that is appealing and provocative, and to frame the work so that there is an overlap with different circles, because the most important thing is what happens next, once the project is activated.

Only after working on these projects have I discovered, and enjoyed, becoming involved in actual contemporary discussions about drones, which I’m grateful to be included in.2 For me, experimental art projects become a gateway to other forms of related knowledge.

AC: An important theme informing much of the research on drones is the question of what happens when military drones come ‘home’ and begin to be deployed by domestic law enforcement agencies, immigration and border patrol services and so on. According to Chamayou, your work addresses the kind of society which has finally realized that the drones they are using in other parts of the world are designed to be used on them too – that a future of civilian surveillance by armed drones is here. For example, it has recently been reported that the Metropolitan Police in London are now using drones equipped with thermal imaging technologies for counter-terrorism purposes3 and, as Arthur Bradley and Oliver Davis discuss in their contributions to Security Dialogue, last year in Dallas the police killed a suspect by using a robot bomb (see also Graham 2016). Could you say something about how your work addresses this ‘militarization’ of the domestic sphere? Does it challenge that process? Or perhaps even reinforce it by encouraging civilians to adopt processes of camouflage?

AH: I think the reality is that dense urban areas have become military sites. It’s not a pleasant thought, but it’s how adversaries have adapted to asymmetrical military power, by advancing their mission into vulnerable non-militarized areas. The response from national security agencies has been to infiltrate communications, and to create deterrence through surveillance accountability. In New York City, where I previously lived, armed soldiers, bomb-sniffing dogs, and cell phone interceptors are a regular part of life. In 2012, when I began research and development on Stealth Wear, it seemed clear that drones were an inevitable next step once the economics worked out.

In my work, I encourage people to engage with, but essentially resist militarization, by adopting camouflaging techniques to modulate their visibility and hopefully mitigate the negativity of this militarization. The big challenge is to confront the preexisting narratives of privacy-paranoia.

So, the tension is: ‘do I accept this garment at the risk of being labelled paranoid’ or ‘do you embrace it as a fashion-forward concept?’ I tell people that you may only wear a tuxedo once or twice a year, but it’s still a great garment. So, if your rationale is that you’re okay with this garment that you wear once a year, then maybe it’s okay that you wear a camouflaging garment once a year if you want to evade thermal surveillance. But I guess it’s not that simple because it’s still tied up with the dangerous idea of ‘why do you want to hide?’, instead of thinking about it as an act of protection or defense. In some ways, that’s what fashion is: a kind of defense against categorization. Fashion gives you control over how people interpret you.

AC: What do you mean by protection against categories and categorization? It seems that this is related to your current work as well.

AH: Fashion gives you the ability to role-play and to shape-shift between social classes. By appearing in different garments, you can convince people that you belong to a different social class. There are different types of camouflage and one of them is social camouflage where I try to blend in to a crowd of really smart people when I’m not smart by wearing smart clothes. Or the opposite, that you dress down as an undercover agent wearing a T-shirt, carrying a newspaper, with a baseball hat on. These are equally valid forms of camouflage that aren’t seen as military, but can be still used in military ways: covert agents deploy a very basic street fashion to camouflage them. Fashion is an integral part of deception, both for civilian and military appearance.

AC: Why is the idea of camouflage so important to your work? In your work, it sometimes seems as if we can’t really stop or block surveillance as a society – the best we can do is hide ourselves as individuals or even run away. Is this the only solution to the kind of categorization you’re talking about?

AH: I agree that we can’t stop surveillance. I think this would be an unattainable goal and this is where surveillance fatalism re-emerges. It’s not possible to opt out or hide completely. Framing it this way guarantees failure. However, there is still a lot of room to be expressive and successful in defeating, blocking, or reducing certain kinds of surveillance. In a way, both fashion and camouflage are about staying one season ahead of the latest trends.

There is an interesting story about the word ‘camouflage’. In the early 1900s, Theodore Roosevelt considered it as a ‘form of effeminate cowardice, a mere defensive strategy [that] all but announced an unmanly desire to hide instead of fight’ (Elias 2016). Throughout the early 20th century camouflage quickly proved useful and by the end of World War II it had finally evolved into sign of humanity’s increasing intelligence – of our ability to outwit our opponents, outmaneuvering their sensory or perceptual strategies.

I find it strange that we don’t see the same connection happening with privacy right now. In the beginning of this century, there was a lot of negativity around the words “hiding” and “privacy”. And now in 2017, we’re beginning to see the same situation unfold: privacy is increasingly becoming a sign of intelligence.

AC: So, you’re putting forward a reverse argument. You’re saying that in the last two centuries, camouflage has been used for military purposes, but we can use it for civilian purposes in order to get some privacy back?

AH: Right. I’m also saying that embracing military-strategy surplus is not taboo. I think a lot of people aren’t comfortable engaging with military culture. But, if it can be reformulated in a more fashionable way, then people will be more willing to engage with topics such as thermal surveillance or facial recognition. When I started working on CV Dazzle in 2010, face detection was mostly linked to national security, not consumer products. Subverting it meant also meant subverting national security. Similarly, in 2012-2013, the primary use of thermal drone surveillance was to locate foreign enemy combatants. Now both are a daily part of the UK’s domestic surveillance program (Davis 2017)

AC: In your project CV Dazzle (Figure 2), you show how some very lo-tech fashion modifications that anyone can make can be used to overcome hi-tech surveillance technologies. You can even buy some of the technologies you develop on your website the Privacy Gift Shop (Figure 3). Another theme from our recent work in Security Dialogue is the extent to which the ever-increasing penetration of drones into the domestic sphere might also create the possibility of new forms of civil resistance. To what extent do projects like CV Dazzle describe a politics of ‘everyday resistance’?

Figure 2: CV Dazzle Look 3
Photo: Adam Harvey
Model: Jude
Hair: Pia Vivas
Art Direction: DIS Magazine

AH: That’s a great way to look at it. When you put clothes on in the morning, when you style yourself to go out, you need to consider the new environments of mass surveillance we’ve created and aren’t easily escapable. Machine vision is a reality: you’re being observed and analyzed and will be continually analyzed for the next decades whenever that information is stored on a database. How do you reflect that in the way that you appear throughout time? Well it’s not possible to see into the future, but it is possible to see into the present, to a certain degree. A lot of the important information on what’s happening in the computer vision industry is buried in long technical papers, but as you become more aware, the decisions you make in the morning – everyday resistance – will begin to affect the way that you dress. You start dressing for a machine-readable world.

AC: Can you say a bit more the relationship between everyday resistance and the idea of play? It seems you are talking about something slightly different from the militarization of the private sphere. It’s not about militarizing yourself, it’s more about a playful mode of resistance.

AH: Yeah, I like to avoid thinking of these projects as resistance. In fact, they’re the opposite. Where resistance costs you, these projects are designed to afford new opportunities. I mean, they’re politically-motivated and serve the same purpose, but I absolutely want to avoid creating more resistance for people.

AC:  How, if at all, do you see the political debate around drones and surveillance changing in the next few years? Do you envisage any kind of concerted attempt by governments to challenge the monopolies of the big tech companies? Is the idea of ‘a human right to our own data’, for example, possible or desirable?

AH: I think we’re only at the beginning of learning what it means to be digitized at varying resolutions. Take the capabilities of cameras now (a lot of my research is on visual information) – it’s astonishing how much you can learn through aggregate information with neural network classifiers. For example, with a 6 x 7 pixel face image, you can do facial recognition on a group of 50 people with 95% accuracy. At 100 x 100 pixels, you have enough information to recognize hundreds of thousands of individuals. But even with 11 x 11 pixels, it’s now possible to resynthesize a low-resolution image into a higher-resolution image, meaning 11 x 11 pixels is nearly enough for some facial recognition applications.

I can imagine an EU-centric push towards a human right on protection of personal visual data. It’s astonishing how much biometric information can be obtained remotely without one’s consent. For example, it’s possible to extract your heart rate and skin conditions and iris data from over a hundred meters away. This information could eventually be augmented by multispectral sensors that can measure body temperature (thermal) or vein patterns (infrared). But first we need to develop a better understanding of what exactly we mean when we say ‘face’ or ‘biometric’. Do we mean to include psychological inferences and heart irregularities along with facial recognition?

AC: Who has the upper hand at this moment in these new forms of visual recognition technologies? The private companies or the government? Or are they working together for security purposes?

AH: They are both working together. I think the corporations have the upper hand of talent, but not funding or hardware. The NSA will always be years ahead of corporations with their computational capabilities. But this could be changing with regards to quantum computing. You can see evidence of collaboration in the Snowden documents, which reveal that the NSA received a license for facial recognition software called PittPatt from Google. But PittPatt was a start-up from Carnegie Mellon. And Carnegie Mellon receives significant funding from the Department of Defense, DARPA, and IARPA. Depending on how you look it, it’s one ecosystem.

AC: This is very much related to the idea of the fungibility of technology. The government only funds those projects that are fungible for military purposes. When a technology is invented, it has to be functional for security purposes, otherwise they would never invest any money in it.

So, anyway, you are currently in London for the opening of a new project. Could you tell us a little about this and your future plans?

AH: Recently, I’ve come to the realization that visual machine communications are an integral part of how the new world is operating. I used to approach computer vision and surveillance from the perspective of counter-surveillance and avoidance. But now this limits my ability to communicate. I’ve now changed my approach and I’m embracing these technologies, because as I understand that they’re here to stay. I’m thinking about how they can be applied to helping human rights groups, how they can be used by groups like Forensic Architecture.4 To ignore the technological capabilities that enable you to keep protesting surveillance is the wrong strategy moving forward. I now believe visual machine communications to be an essential way of understanding the world and communicating information.

The work I am presenting here in London is called MegaPixels.5 It’s a real time facial recognition query into the databases that are used to train facial recognition software. Most people don’t know that they might be in these databases because the databases are created from social media images. They are created from photos posted online. The installation currently uses MegaFace, which is the largest publicly available facial recognition training dataset. When you walk up to the installation you’ll see the highest confidence matches from the dataset, and there is a small chance that you may find yourself. Out of the billions of people in the world, this dataset has 672,000 people. By chance, at least 2 people during the exhibition were positively identified in the dataset.

AC: Can I ask you a very difficult final question? I don’t know if you are familiar with the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, but I wanted to raise what I think might be his response to the situation you are describing, namely, that we are very easy to profile because we are so easily identifiable through these new media technologies, social media, Facebook, Google, etc. Is this because of our behaviour, or is it because the system compels us to behave in a specific way which can be recognized? I think Foucault would say the latter: it’s not because we are always very similar to ourselves but because the system provides us with very detailed, structured pathways which we need to follow to behave as ourselves. We have to invent ourselves by means of the system and that is the reason why we are recognizable. So, in a way, the only way out would be to unplug the system.

AH: This is reality, and you can certainly see it with facial recognition and facial analysis. People become recognizable as the identities they bought into. Faceception (www.faception.com) is one company that clearly shows this feedback loop. It’s a filter bubble effect in the physical world. We can become trapped in the datasets of our former selves.

References

Backovic, L (2012) ‘Hier kommt der Drohnen-Schutzanzug’. Spiegel online, 17th January. http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/stealth-wear-modedesigner-adam-harvey-stellt-drohnen-schutzanzug-vor-a-877844.html (accessed 24.05.18).

Elias, Ann (2016) ‘Camouflage and its impact on Australia in WWII: An Art Historian’s Perspective’. Salus Journal. Vol 4, No. 1.

Chamayou, Grégoire (2015) Drone Theory tr. Janet Lloyd, London: Penguin.

Davis, Caroline (2017) ‘London could get 50m armed police base to tackle terrorism’, The Guardian, 11 September. Accessed 01.11.17. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/sep/11/london-new-armed-police-base-met-tackle-terrorism

Graham, DA (2016) ‘The Dallas shooting and the advent of police killer robots’, The Atlantic  http://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2016/07/dallas-police-robot/490478/ (accessed 01.11.17).

Harvey, A (2013) https://ahprojects.com/projects/stealth-wear/ (accessed 24.05.18).

Priest (2013) ‘Government surveillance spurs Americans to fight back’, Washington Post, August 14. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/government-surveillance-spurs-americans-to-fight-back/2013/08/14/edea430a-0522-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html?utm_term=.45579b1d8d92 (accessed 24.05.18).

Wortham, J (2013) ‘Stealth Wear aims to make a statement’, New York Times, June 29. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/technology/stealth-wear-aims-to-make-a-tech-statement.html (accessed 24.05.18).

 

This interview is a part of the Security Dialogue special compilation ‘Droneland’ edited by Arthur Bradley and Antonio Cerella. An introduction to this compilation can also be found on this blog, and two peer reviewed full-length articles: Deadly force: Contract, killing, sacrifice by Arthur Bradley and Theorizing the advent of weaponized drones as techniques of domestic paramilitary policing by Oliver Davis were published in the 2019 August issue 50(4) of Security Dialogue.

Liberia’s Women Veterans: War, roles and reintegration

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Leena Vastapuu (2018) Liberia’s Women Veterans: War, roles and reintegration, London: Zed Books Ltd. Book review by Linn Marie Reklev

Scholars and policy makers put increasing attention on the role of women in conflict and peacebuilding. However, women are often portrayed as “victims”, and their multiple roles in conflict are often ignored. Leena Vastapuu’s new book aims to address this knowledge gap by exploring the various experiences of women in wartime and its aftermath. In doing so, Vasatpuu contributes to academic debates in peace and conflict studies by advancing arguments in feminist peace research, and fleshes out additional insights regarding women’s involvement in civil wars in West Africa. She also provides policy-relevant knowledge, uncovering the consequences of peacebuilding policies that lack an adequate gender analysis. The book is well-written, thorough and thought-provoking, and should be of great interest to a broad audience engaged in peacebuilding issues.

The book addresses the two Liberian civil wars and the post-conflict period, formulating four research questions that aim to capture the life trajectories of women war veterans: 1) addressing the roles of women and girls during the war, 2) the extent to which these roles were recognized in the Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) programmes implemented, 3) the situation of women war veterans in today’s Liberia, and 4) their aspirations and dreams today. These are discussed individually and chronologically in the book. By applying the theoretical concept of social rafters, arguing that the tactical agency of the Liberian women war veterans is somewhat limited due to their disadvantaged position in society, Vastapuu examines how these Liberian women use available resources to create sturdier “rafts of survival” in a complex security environment (p. 78). She does this through the methodological approach of curious contrapuntalism, which is a way to “critically observe and challenge overlapping and constantly evolving social realities” (p. 8). This approach allows for overlapping narratives and perspectives addressing the same phenomenon, also uncovering marginalized narratives often deemed insignificant. In this way, the author makes visible the perspectives of the women war veterans which provides a more nuanced and comprehensive picture of post-conflict Liberia.

Vastapuu’s book is an important work of methodological innovation as she explicitly acknowledges her limitations as an ‘outsider’ in the environment under study due to differences in culture, social structures and class. To shift the agency from herself to her interlocutors, she applies the ethnographic method of auto-photography, providing her interlocutors with cameras with which they took photos in line with particular themes. Following this, the researcher conducted individual interviews with the participants, where the participant explains why she took the specific photos and what insights they provide in relation to the given topic. In this way, the participants explain their “life-worlds” to the researcher in a “non-imposing manner” (p.5). Chapter 1 delves further into this method, showing how it can be used in practice to examine the everyday life of three Liberian women war veterans as social rafters, through their own eyes. The book’s autoethnographic style at times feels more like reading a novel than an academic book. However, this is not to say that the academic arguments come across as less sound, well-founded or significant.

Traditional notions of gender roles in conflict situations are consistently challenged. In chapter 2, Vastapuu opens up the reader to the realities of her interlocutors’ wartime actualities, including their reasons for joining armed groups and their experiences on the battlefield. She finds that the women’s reasons for joining are complex and diverse: a significant number of girls and women joined to avenge the deaths of loved ones, while some joined due to peer pressure and/or to gain material goods. As Vastapuu notes, the motive of revenge is a factor that “does not fit neatly into the picture of a peace-seeking Liberian mother” (p.49). She also finds that gender was not the most significant category of discrimination within the ranks. Female fighters and commanders were not perceived to be different from, or of less importance than, their male counterparts. In this way, the book highlights that gender relations in conflict contexts work in different ways, and that no assumptions of gender roles should be made without a context-specific analysis.

Chapter 2 also addresses the issue of sexual violence in conflict, finding that the main difference between male and female fighters was that the women were more likely to be raped. By emphasizing the personal stories of her interlocutors, Vastapuu effectively makes clear the brutality and scope of the problem, and not least the severe psychological trauma these women still suffer from today. However, the book also delves into the “strategic” use of intimate relationships in combat situations, which is rarely addressed in the academic literature. The author draws upon the individual stories of her interlocutors to show how many female combatants viewed intimate relationships with male fighters as an important survival strategy – a “channel for sturdier rafts of survival” (p. 79). In this way, the ‘social rafters’ concept proves a useful tool to uncover the complexities of women’s constrained agency in conflict situations.

Chapter 3 assesses the DDR programmes that were implemented in Liberia after each war. Vastapuu uses the curious contrapuntal approach, stringing together the ‘official’ institutional narrative, the experiences of women war veterans themselves, and the ‘external views’ of NGOs, external evaluators and independent researchers in order to discover a fuller story of “what really happened and why” (p. 86). In doing so, she successfully shows how the DDR programmes in reality failed to provide the results they had promised, and argues that they were not sufficiently adapted to the situation on the ground. The ongoing process was in itself seen as a manifestation of justice, “rather than instruments of justice” (p.113). Although arguments that the peacebuilding process must be locally grounded and context-specific are not particularly new, Vastapuu’s approach gives compelling empirical substance to these arguments, and provides new insights into how and why these processes may fail. As such, while conceptually and methodologically innovative, the book also proves to be highly policy-relevant.

Chapter 4 and 5 highlight the real-life consequences of the conflict and the failures of the DDR processes. These chapters address the women veterans’ attempts of ‘social rafting’ in post-conflict Liberia and their hopes and aspirations for the future. Moving between structural issues in modern Liberia related to corruption, employment and education, and the personal stories of the women war veterans, she presents a subtle postcolonial critique. Without explicitly stating so, Vastapuu shows how international actors deserve criticism for how they have operated and continue to operate in Liberia. In this regard, Vastapuu also makes clear the need to implement a gender perspective in all peacebuilding efforts, and the consequences of failing to do so. Indeed, the subtle way of uncovering structural problems by combining personal stories and other narratives to tell “the full story”, is one of the book’s greatest strengths.

Ultimately, the book is a compelling read and an important academic contribution also beyond the field of feminist peace research. The innovative methodological approaches of the book, although perhaps perceived to be radical by some, generate insights that traditional research methods may not have. Despite that the context-specific nature of gender relations in conflict are highlighted in the book, one should assume that women play multiple roles in conflict contexts also outside of Liberia. Yet, by emphasizing the perspectives of women war veterans, the perspectives of others – such as male war veterans – are lacking. This has been a conscious and justified choice by the author, from which others may build through additional comparative perspectives that distinguishes between the experiences of other social groups in environments of civil war and post-war reconstruction.