Accidents Don't Just Happen: The Liberal Politics of High-Technology `Humanitarian' War

Abstract

From the bombing of Serb residential neighbourhoods to the destruction of Afghan refugee convoys, a series of dramatic events in recent military campaigns have come to be labelled `accidents'. From the vantage point of a wider cultural and political history of technology, this article suggests that civilian deaths are being constructed as permissible, not impermissible, when normalised as `accidents'. For while the number of `accidents' involving civilian death may increasingly be known and the potential of high-tech warfare to produce disaster may also be recognised, small massacres of civilian populations are nonetheless - and perhaps necessarily- becoming normalised as part of the post-9.11 order of entrepreneurial (pre-emptive) war. Some of the most important military dimensions of recent campaigns - `accidents' in which civilians or Western military personnel were killed or injured - need to be understood as both technological acts and spaces of political subjectivity partly productive of liberal-state `humanitarian' war as currently conceived. ————————————————————————

Humanitarianism as liberal diagnostic: humanitarian reason and the political rationalities of the liberal will‐to‐care

“…For all the ideological theatrics of such proclamations as a ‘clash of civilisations’, modern wars are no longer framed as the product of engagements in a struggle for survival or accretion: as a fact of necessity , that is to say. They are framed, rather, as a strategic and moral choice (Owens ). Eyal Weizman has usefully drawn attention to the resulting deployment of humanitarian arguments in the name of justifying and expanding the reach of modern‐day state violence (Weizman ).…”

The Cosmopolitan Military

“…The vicarious manner in which Western publics may observe the unfolding of this cosmopolitan-minded violence against the Other, from a safe distance, and the renewed vigour with which the nation's troops are reified as symbols of national pride and virtue, further reinforce the moral asymmetry between the Western Self and the non-citizen Other. As Chapter Two suggested, this sense of moral asymmetry is likely to do little to assist cosmopolitan-informed human security approaches, where local populations are regarded as key security referents, rather than lower valued human beings against whom 'accidental' violence may be excused (Owens, 2003). The increasing prevalence and implications of this remote and risk averse approach to the operational practice of cosmopolitan ethics is discussed further in Chapter Six.…”

The mediatisation of war in a transforming global media landscape

“…They present Western operations as precise, discriminative and clean (Coker 2001). For states, therefore, the ability to frame the representation of their military operations via traditional media as humane, surgical and clean has been essential to creating and sustaining the legitimacy of warfare in the eyes of the public (Der Derian 2002, 9Á17;Owens 2003). By enlisting publics in virtual and virtuous ways, the state-policed mediatisation of warfare has not only altered the physical experience of conflict through the means of technology, but has also sought to obscure the fact that waging war is still about killing others (Der Derian 2002;Virilio 2002).…”