Predatory War, Drones and Torture: Remapping the Body in Pain

Abstract

Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain that war is a vast and reciprocal swearing on the body, with corporeality key not only to its brutal prosecution but also to the eventual ending of the political 'crisis of substantiation' that war entails. However, her work has not been extensively explored with reference to significant transformations in the embodied experiences of contemporary warfare. This paper thus analyses a particular articulation of late modern warfare that I term predatory war, whose current signature motif is the drone strike, through the lens of Scarry's work. Here, the associated modes of embodiment are radically non-reciprocal, the woundscapes of conflict are profoundly asymmetric, and the affective mediation of bodily injury does not substantiate any ending to the conflict. As such, I argue that the ontology and phenomenology of predatory war increasingly resembles what Scarry identifies as the underlying structure of torture.

War craft: The embodied politics of making war

“…The method proposed in this article is not suggested as a panacea for the challenges of researching embodiment, and particularly doing so within a wider research agenda on war, security and international relations that pays due attention to the everyday and to people within the broadest and largest-scale geopolitical processes. Rather, the intention is that ethnographies of making can contribute to an emerging set of existing cross-disciplinary strategies (Bulmer and Jackson, 2016; Dyvik, 2016; McSorley, 2013) for writing about embodiment, offering a means by which the neglect of makers and making bodies in accounts of war, security and the international can be addressed.…”

“…Understanding war through people’s ‘variable compositions, emotions, and experiences’ (Dyvik, 2016: 56) entails an analytical focus on those things that are encompassed by concepts such as embodiment, emotion and corporeality (Åhäll and Gregory, 2015; Dyvik, 2016; McSorley, 2013; Parashar, 2013; Sylvester, 2013; Wilcox, 2015). Correcting the erasure of people in the theorization and study of war (previously understood and analysed purely as a domain of state institutions) involves putting bodies ‘back in’ and accounting methodologically and conceptually for what McSorley (2013: 1) terms ‘politics incarnate’. Considering these two areas – objects and embodiment – together, there has been little attention paid to bodies engaged in the active, lived and productive ‘making’ of the ‘stuff’ of war.…”

“…The second contribution made by the article is the development of a method for researching and writing about embodiment. Academic to bodies and embodiment in relation to the particularities of war, security and international relations has been a relatively recent and burgeoning area (Dyvik and Greenwood, 2016; McSorley, 2013; Wilcox, 2015). As Catherine Baker (2016: 120) has observed, writing about embodiment is an act of compression, abstraction and translation, an interpretive endeavour that requires the researcher to mediate between that which is fleshy, felt and lived (often by others) and the page.…”

The Psychosocial Effects of Drone Violence: Social Isolation, Self‐Objectification, and Depoliticization

“…Lack of concern for lived experiences is also characteristic of the majority of drone violence scholarship in IR, which has focussed on drone violence's effects on nation‐state sovereignty, international law, and developments in military technologies. Even feminist and postcolonial IR scholars, who have been concerned with the people on the receiving end of drone attacks (Gregory, ; Holmqvist, ; McSorley, ; Shaw & Akhter, ; Wilcox, ), have not yet brought sufficient attention to the wide range of psychosocial harms that drone violence inflicts. The reasons for this are manifold and specific to drone violence, so require unpacking.…”

Rethinking militarism as ideology: The critique of violence after security

“…Altınay, 2004; Conway, 2012; Enloe, 2000; Segal, 2008; Sjoberg and Via, 2010), through corporeal activity (e.g. Higate, 2012; McSorley, 2013, 2016; Sasson-Levy, 2008), through the manipulation of class and/or racial identities (e.g. Basham, 2016; Sasson-Levy, 2003), or even through the eroticization of submission to the state (Crane-Seeber, 2016).…”