The gift of war: Cash, counterinsurgency, and ‘collateral damage’

Abstract

As part of the counterinsurgency initiatives in Afghanistan and Iraq, military forces have been making payments to civilians in cases of ‘inadvertent’ injury, death and/or damage to property. There are no legal norms governing civilian compensation in war. Rather, military payments are seen as a way to help ‘win’ the hearts and minds of the population. This article examines this turn to military payments, with a focus on US practices and the implications for our understanding of contemporary changes to warfare. I suggest that while monetary payments can alleviate short-term economic need, the lack of legal liability is problematic as it may help amplify the impunity of warring soldiers. The article begins with an overview of the bureaucratic ways in which monetary values are attributed to death and injury. It then turns to consider how military payments reinforce the notion of ‘collateral damage’ that is legitimized in international humanitarian law. Finally, I draw upon theories of the gift, and of the gift of war, to interrogate the affective register in which military payments are made, inserted as they are in narratives of sympathy and condolence that bind the giver and receiver in relations of indebtedness and dependence.

The geopolitics of militarism and humanitarianism

“…Eyal Weizman argues that it is through IHL that violence gets calculated and managed: a ‘humanitarian minimum’ is invoked – a moderation of ‘lesser evils’ ( Weizman, 2011 : 4). The principles of ‘proportionality’ and ‘distinction’ that are at the core of IHL and which are intended to limit ‘collateral damage’ actually provide the terms under which violence is permitted and legitimized ( Gilbert, 2015a ; Kinsella, 2011 ). As is now widely recognized, however, these limits effectively legitimize the deaths of civilians under specific conditions, in specific places ( Gilbert, 2015a ).…”

International Political Economy

“…Both are now part of a broader research agenda that seeks to view monetary and financial circulation through the lens of security, as well as security practices through the lens of monetary and financial logics (Amoore 2013;Gilbert 2015). In this line of research the boundary between IPE and IPS is well and truly blurred, and we are likely to see more such work in the future, especially as IPS scholars start to delve deeper into the security uses of algorithms and big-data analytics.…”

Finance/security infrastructures

“…Though now relegated to broadly separate disciplinary domains, it is difficult to disentangle historically the violent practices of imperial statebuilding from political economy (and vice versa). The profound historical relations between financial practices and security politics is now subject of a growing literature that explores the finance/ security nexus (for example Boy et al, 2017;Gilbert, 2015;Tellmann, 2018;Westermeier, 2020).…”