Strategic ignorance and the legitimation of remote warfare: The Hawija bombardments

Abstract

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.

Strategic non-regulation as migration governance

“…In the end, migration governance is a weathervane for the workings of political power more broadly (Bakewell, 2014;Eule et al, 2019). Our synthesis of the ways in which strategic non-regulation is salient and can be studied in the domain of migration thus has ramifications beyond that domain, perhaps specifically for the study of the governance of society's 'marginalized' and 'undesirables' (Agier, 2008, Bayat, 1997, Chomsky, 2012in Stel, 2020 and the handling of all files 'sensitive' or 'classified' (Gould and Stel, 2021). Introducing strategic non-regulation as a focal point of migration scholarship, then, is a promising way to live up to the often-recognized but not always realized interdisciplinary potential of this field of study (Favell, 2022).…”

Beyond Advice Deserts: Strategic Ignorance and the Lack of Access to Asylum Legal Advice

“…Strategic ignorance has been used as a framework for discussing a wide variety of administrative and public sector policies, including removal of environmental regulation (Pope & Rauber 2004), consideration of risk in hydropower developments (Huber 2019), and the non-acknowledgment of civilian casualties incurred through remote bombardment (Gould & Stel, 2022), for example. In the latter case, the authors point out that 'denial can be disproven and secrecy has an expiration date … [but] ignorance is more elusive and open-ended and hence politically convenient in different ways' (Gould & Stel 2022: 57).…”