The Western state-led turn to remote forms of military intervention as recently deployed in the Middle East and across Africa is often explained as resulting from risk aversion (avoidance of ground combat), materiality (‘the force of matter’) or the adoption of a networked operational logic by major military powers, mimicking the ‘hit-and-run’ tactics of their enemies. Although recognizing the mobilizing capacities of these phenomena, we argue that the new military interventionism is prompted by a more fundamental transformation, grounded in the spatial and temporal reconfiguration of war. We see a resort to ‘liquid warfare’ as a form of military interventionism that shuns direct control of territory and populations and its cumbersome order-building and order-maintaining responsibilities, focusing instead on ‘shaping’ the international security environment through remote technology, flexible operations and military-to-military partnerships. We draw upon assemblage as a heuristic device and the case of the US Africa Command (AFRICOM) to flesh out the complex and fluid nature of liquid warfare and the ways by which power operates across space. We outline how the forging of a transnational military assemblage in the name of ‘hunting Kony’ allowed for the buildup of an archipelago of military bases and operational capabilities across Africa, which serve as hubs for the monitoring, disrupting and containment of potential risks and dangers.

No abstract

A global discourse on cosmopolitan humanism can become tragically disconnected from how it plays out locally. By analyzing Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign, this article examines how and why the “new war” discourse presented in Kony 2012 does not correspond to how an array of local actors frame the violence that took place in Uganda. It also highlights how the Kony 2012 narrative and the interventions it advocates are translating into “perverse consequences”: a militarization of the central African region and a decline in awareness and in funding for more complex security issues on the ground. Finally, insight is provided into why the development of cosmopolitan norms and laws favors strong states and institutions, while civilians on the receiving end of “humanitarian interventions” lack the power to define what rights should be protected, by whom and how, and have no way of holding the intervening “humanitarian” actors accountable for their actions.

How must we understand and conceptualize the rationales and repercussions of remote warfare? This article contributes to scholarship on the ontology of remote war by analysing how Dutch officials engage with responsibility for the bombardment of an Islamic State weapons factory in Hawija, Iraq in 2015 under Operation Inherent Resolve. It observes that the main feature of Dutch officials’ accounts of Hawija is their diverse claims to not knowing about civilian casualties. Official narratives shifted from denial to secrecy to strategic ignorance. Bridging work on secrecy from the field of critical security studies with work on strategic ‘unknowing’ from ignorance studies, we propose a new take on the Foucauldian notion of ‘regimes of truth’. The regimes of truth that emerge to justify shifts to remote warfare – that it is riskless, precise and caring for civilian others – rely not merely on secrecy and denial but on feigned and imposed ignorance about casualties. Whereas denial can be disproven and secrecy has an expiration date, ignorance is more elusive and open-ended and hence politically convenient in different ways. Deliberate unknowing does not just postpone investigation and accountability but fundamentally and indefinitely obstructs it and thus sustains the regimes of truth for future remote wars.

How is public engagement perceived to contribute to open science? This commentary highlights common reflections on this question from interviews with 12 public engagement fellows in Utrecht University’s Open Science Programme in the Netherlands. We identify four reasons why public engagement is an essential enabler of open science. Interaction between academics and society can: (1) better align science with the needs of society; (2) secure a relationship of trust between science and society; (3) increase the quality and impact of science; and (4) support the impact of open access and FAIR data practices (data which meet principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability). To be successful and sustainable, such public engagement requires support in skills training and a form of institutionalisation in a university-wide system, but, most of all, the fellows express the importance of a formal and informal recognition and rewards system. Our findings suggest that in order to make public engagement an integral part of open science, universities should invest in institutional support, create awareness, and stimulate dialogue among staff members on how to ‘do’ good public engagement.