The geopolitics of militarism and humanitarianism

Abstract

In this article, we trace the interconnections between humanitarianism and militarism. We highlight the significance of a geographical perspective in emphasizing the spatial and multiscalar dimensions of this changing relationship, particularly in Western states. In doing so, we reveal the violent geographies produced through militarized humanitarianism and demonstrate the ways political violence can be obscured through invocations of humanitarianism. We look at five overlapping lines of enquiry: the way humanitarianism is used to modulate war; the rationalization of military intervention as humanitarian; military deployment in response to humanitarian crises; the military take-up of humanitarian-style practices; and weapons development and humanitarianism.

Hegemonic Sanctions and Global Economic Ramifications in the Context of the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict: A Commentary

“…The seriousness of this conflict has been described by Kristalina Georgieva, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as 'a powerful earthquake that will have ripple effects throughout the global economy, especially in poor countries.' This is by no means the only geopolitical 1 military action (McCormack and Gilbert, 2022) that European soil has witnessed since the Second World War. In 1974, Turkey 2 (a NATO member 3 ) invaded Cyprus, displacing one quarter of the country's population, whilst in 1999 NATO initiated a bombing campaign against the former Yugoslavia.…”

Reclaiming the politics of South-South cooperation

“…The aforementioned Northern/Western ideological categories of 'democracy', 'human rights', 'freedom'/'individual liberty' and 'rule of law' are integral to the colonial matrix of power, enforced via a spectrum of governance mechanisms ranging from conditionalities as part and parcel of official development assistance (ODA) within the framework of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC), and overt and covert NATO intervention, including coups d'état and so-called humanitarian intervention. As critical scholarship has exhaustively discussed, democracy, as the political complement to neoliberal technocratic economism, denotes elite rule (polyarchy), authoritarian if necessary, legitimated through carefully managed formal electoral procedures and emptied of social justice or equality contents; human rights, reduced to (at best) individual civil and political rights at the expense of social, cultural, economic and collective rights, implies their instrumentalisation as 'humanitarian imperialism' and/or 'human rights imperialism'; freedom connotes the freedom of capital, combined with 'individual liberty' to exploit and accumulate without constraints within the so-called free-market; and rule of law means the establishment and enforcement of the rules for the smooth and effective operating of the free-market order, protecting private property and entrepreneurial liberty against demands for mass-based democratization (Bricmont, 2006;Chauí, 2021;Costa & Zolo, 2007;Erlinder, 2000;Fairclough, 2006;Fine & Saad-Filho, 2017;Gills & Rocamora, 1992;Kiely, 2017;McCormack & Gilbert, 2022;Mirowski & Plehwe, 2009). 'Imperialism', as a member of the Mont Pèlerin Society, which was instrumental in constructing neoliberal hegemony after the Second World War, stated in 1957, then is 'the geographic expansion of a system of order (rule of law, etc.)'…”

“…With co-optation of SSC backed by coercion as a contemporary tactic within the strategy of re-Westernisation, NATO (2020) leaves little doubt that, in the context of crisis of the capitalist world order, the Global North is determined to step up its 'global totalitarianism' (Gosovic, 2016, p. 741;also, Mignolo, 2021, p. 734). After all, virtually all Global South governments that pose only the slightest challenge to the 'rules-based order' -'authoritarian states' in NATO newspeak -have become targets of Global North aggression, notoriously legitimated by fake news (Blum, 2013;Bricmont, 2006;Chandler, 2006;Erlinder, 2000;McCormack & Gilbert, 2022;Zolo, 2009). Thus viewed, the current Russia-Ukraine war is not so much about Russian imperialism, but an act of 'resistance' to 'Western encroachment' provoked by three decades of continual NATO expansion (Roberts, 2017;also Greene, 2022;Prashad, 2022).…”

The US military's malaria research in Kenya and the geopolitics of global health

“…Finally, the paper demonstrates how the Walter Reed Project's health intervention sites are intimately connected to US war‐making across global space. I build on work on the geopolitics of humanitarianism that shows how the employment of humanitarian‐style practices by militaries further war‐making and can establish the conditions for political violence (Bryan, 2015; Duffield, 2007; Gregory, 2011; Khalili, 2013; McCormack & Gilbert, 2021). In doing so, I identify the Walter Reed Project as an institution that localises the geopolitical imperative to overcome malaria's threat to the US military across global space in a series of health intervention sites in Kenya's Kisumu region – which, as I discuss further in section 4, is an area that has become a central node in mainstream global health networks.…”