Spatial Structures and the Phenomenology of Inter-National Identity

The Private Militarized and Security Contractor as Geocorporeal Actor

“…Here, geocorporeality draws attention to the complex and nuanced character of embodied human agency in its inseparable international/local aspects, where recourse to utility maximizing (Kessler :89) perspectives are noted to inhere within industry rules and regulations, to which it is assumed contractors will respond rationally. As we have argued however, like combatants, contractors “are not simply bare life units of strategic calculation but are also [embodied] repositories of meaning” (Brighton :102), and while regulation is to be welcomed, attempts to modify the social practice of trigger happy or high profile contractors who unsettle, injure or kill member of the host population, depends on more than “idealized forms of corporeal being… [as] ways of life [able to be] informed by international law” (Caraccioli :100). The ICoC is but a blunt instrument of reform since it is ill‐equipped to fully grasp the experiential realities and legacies of military conditioning underscored in vague recommendations for the further training of contractors, for example.…”

“…The ICoC is but a blunt instrument of reform since it is ill‐equipped to fully grasp the experiential realities and legacies of military conditioning underscored in vague recommendations for the further training of contractors, for example. As indicated then, embodied trajectories shape contractor intentionality by bringing into sharp relief the embodied limits of human selfhood (Caraccioli :99). Contractors surging with adrenaline who respond inappropriately on account of pre‐reflective disposition are not those implicitly conceived of in the ICoC as “Western subject[s] of modernity—a subject that champions abstractions over embodiment through its ability to be sovereign, self‐sufficient, and universal” (Caraccioli :99).…”

“…The concept of geocorporeality is contingent on two analytical moves. In the first, it is premised on rethinking the connections between typically reified units of analyses or abstract scaffolding (Caraccioli :98). These link the everyday/embodied with the international/geopolitical, and while these realms are “often seen as distinct [and] fixed in a hierarchical relationship” (Basham :25), the aim here is to move from bifurcation toward seamless unity.…”

“…Drawing on Pain and Smith's () model of a double helix where the everyday and the international are shown as intertwined, Basham outlines attempts to locate the corporeal dimension of flows that “are overlapping at multiple junctures… this entails tracing the… bodies… that conjoin them” (Basham :27). Ultimately then, it is the phenomenological awareness of ties between the immensity of the global and the intimately tiny through which the body‐in‐space can be said to be experientially linked to IR theorists' concerns (Caraccioli :99). Or, put rather less prosaically, it is the material infrastructure of (soldiers') bodies that are linked to the state (Sassoon‐Levy ).…”

“…Habit bridges the external, objective world with conditioning such that there “no longer exists any contradiction between them… [for body‐subjects to exist] there is a necessity for the habitual body” (Merleau‐Ponty :87). This phenomenological conceptualization of the body offers “a vantage point… which takes us closer to political phenomena” (Jacobi :87) through a focus on “the experiential unity… of bodies” (Caraccioli :98) as sites of agency. Thus, bodies are more than abstract appendages or benign adjuncts to social practice that contain cognition.…”