Can’t live with them, can’t live without them: ‘the enemy’ as object of controversy in contemporary Western wars

Abstract

An authenticated document published in 2008 by Wikileaks and entitled 'NATO in Afghanistan: master narrative' implicitly makes clear that the 'enemy' should never be recognized as an enemy of NATO by its personnel. This is the point of departure of this article, dealing with the different and partly incompatible uses of the notion of the enemy by (in particular) politicians and the military in contemporary Western conflicts. In this paper I do not give an a priori meaning to the signifier 'enemy'. I am here interested in the consequences of the loss of previously institutionalized and official definitions of the enemy and the resulting relative avoidance of the term in contemporary wars. At the same time I show how this loss of meaning allows for the cohabitation of widely divergent usages of the term by distinct state-professionals (politicians, diplomats, military leaders, international lawyers.. .). These uses are at the same time logically incompatible but pragmatically complementary. I hence highlight that the absence of a clear understanding of what enmity implies has become an asset in contemporary unrecognized 'asymmetric wars'. This confusion around the word 'enemy' enables these actors to speak different languages to different people and to engage in 'wars against enemies' while presenting them as 'police operations against criminals'.

8. Terrorism and asymmetric conflicts

“…This occurs as authorities blur the line between the criminal and the political enemy, the one who breaks the law of the land and the one who tries to impose a new law on the land. Clandestine political violence and asymmetric conflict hence generally borrow their representations from warfare and policing without being reducible to either of these categories (Olsson 2019). In fact, as highlighted by Walter Benjamin (2009), the violence that subverts the law always contains, even if only potentially, an alternative law waiting to be put into action (see 4.4).…”

How violence dis/appears in narratives on war-like operations: a conceptual framework

“…Some aspects of war are typically brought to light while others may slip from view -e.g. the geopolitical context of war (McSorley 2012, 55), its dehumanizing aspects (Toros and Mavelli 2014), the injuring of others (Basham 2016;Scarry 1987, 63-81;Zehfuss 2009), or the enemy figure itself (Olsson 2019). Previous research uncovers how arrangements of visibility delimit the field of perception, and thus the possibilities for radical reflexivity and critique (e.g.…”

Wartime paradigms and the future of western military power

“…In a good managerial logic, the consequence is a temptation to use armed forces as a way to pre-emptively shape a political environment in order to minimize the risks of deviance from accepted behaviour. Therefore, in such military campaigns, the adversary is no longer seen as an enemy with opposed political objectives who needs to be fought (as illustrated by the conceptual confusion over the term "enemy" in political-military circles in the past two decades 31 ), but rather as a potential offender whose nefarious activities need to be managed, policed and reduced to a level of acceptable risk. The problem with this approach is that it directly leads to never-ending military operations: "cyclical open-ended approaches remain necessary since risks cannot be completely eliminated and require constant management" 32 , thus laying the groundwork for "forever wars" or the establishment of a "permanent state of emergency" 33 following terrorist attacks.…”