Alison Howell

Resilience, war, and austerity: The ethics of military human enhancement and the politics of data

This article traces the rise of military psychological resilience training, focusing on the US Army’s Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness program, which seeks to assess and instill resilience in soldiers and their families through techniques developed in the discipline of positive psychology. In maximizing the happiness, optimism, and mental fitness of soldiers, military resilience training has two aims: (1) to produce a fit fighting force capable of winning complex wars, and (2) to cut costs, not by averting war, but by ostensibly reducing the need for costly healthcare through a claim to prevent soldiers’ ‘pessimistic’ responses to war. The architects of military resilience are also exporting this model to the civilian sphere of social security, using their military experiment as ‘proof of concept’ of the scientific validity not only of resilience training, but also of positive psychology more generally. The article thus illustrates that ‘social security’ cannot be held separate from inter/national security, because these domains are, in practice, imbricated. It is argued that resilience is not merely a response to war and austerity, but a means for producing these forms of precarity through a fantasy of indomitability. The article concludes by considering the broader ethics of psychological resilience.

Resilience as Enhancement: Governmentality and Political Economy beyond ‘Responsibilisation’

Resilience is without a doubt growing as a schema for the operation of politics, something to which scholars interested in politics and international relations are responding from a multiplicity of perspectives. One set of analytical tools that has become especially popular for understanding resilience are those associated with ‘governmentality’. Indeed, a number of the articles included in last year’s Special Issue of Politics on resilience illuminate our understanding of the role of resilience in contemporary governance practices across an array of sites, including the UK’s Community Resilience Programme (Bulley), responses to the 2011 UK riots (Rogers), international state building (Chandler), urban resilience (Coaffee), and comparative analysis of UK and French security strategy (Joseph). Here, I respond in some part to those articles, but also more generally to a wider and rapidly forming understanding of ‘resilience as governance’.

Sovereignty, Security, Psychiatry: Liberation and the Failure of Mental Health Governance in Iraq

This article examines how psychiatry has been used as a technology of security in post-‘liberation’ Iraq. Drawing on Foucault and Foucauldian work on the history and sociology of medicine, it begins by tracing how, from the 19th century onwards, psychiatry has instantiated its authority through a claim to provide social security within national spaces, both through methods of sovereign confinement and through liberation and governance. Arguing that the various ‘psy’ disciplines — and medicine more generally — are increasingly used as technologies of security internationally, the article examines psychiatric practice in Iraq, where patients in the Al Rashad psychiatric institution were accidentally liberated from their confinement by US Marines in 2003. Iraq’s ‘mentally ill’ were initially considered a manageable security threat and thus subject to liberal community governance efforts. Yet, after the so-called suicide bombing of two pet markets in 2008, reportedly by former Al Rashad patients, those deemed ‘mentally ill’ and others associated with them were once again made subject to sovereign confinement, marking a failure in liberal governance. Thus, this article seeks to explore some of the complex lines connecting sovereignty, security and psychiatry in post-‘liberation’ Iraq, and in global politics more generally.

Peaceful, tolerant and orderly? A feminist analysis of discourses of ‘Canadian values’ in Canadian Foreign Policy

Discourses of Canadian values have been asserted with frequency in Canadian foreign policy documents and public pronouncements. Such statements frequently represent Canada as a peaceful, tolerant, and orderly liberal nation, free of inequalities. This article argues that this discourse has several effects. First, it serves to obscure on‐going histories of marginalization in Canada that occur along the lines of gender, race, disability, sexuality, and class. Second, this discourse represents Canada as heroic and altruistic in its conduct overseas. This can be disrupted through feminist and anti‐racist scrutiny of questionable actions abroad, including those undertaken in Somalia and Afghanistan. Third, discourses of Canadian values produce a narrative of “Canada the good” that is implicated in the governance of Canadians. Such discourses incite Canadians to autonomously self‐govern in accordance with liberal citizenship, to live up to the standards of liberal behaviour set out in discourses of Canadian values. The article concludes with an exploration of the implications of this analysis.

The War Comes Home: The Toll of War and the Shifting Burden of Care

Report after report and study after study begins by pointing out that the American military’s post 9/11 engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan are taxing service members and their families like none before. Lessons learned from draft era conflicts are of little use in understanding the full scale of the impact of these wars at home. For example, after the Cold War, the active duty force was reduced from 2.1 million to 1.4 million, 1 thus requiring fewer service members and families to carry war’s deadly burden and requiring longer and repeated deployments, especially in the Army and Marine Corp. American soldiers in Vietnam trying to survive the carnage of that killing field, and their families waiting at home, could count down a 365 day clock, knowing that if they survived that long, they wouldn’t have to go back. That is not the case today. The increasing pace of military operations necessitated by America’s militarized response to 9/11—what is euphemistically referred to as OPTEMPO—is taking an unacceptable toll at home on both service members and their families. As General Chiarelli, Army Vice Chief of Staff, put it: we now must face the unintended consequences of leading an expeditionary Army that included involuntary enlistment extensions, accelerated promotions, extended deployment rotations, reduced dwell time and potentially diverted focus from leading and caring for Soldiers in the post, camp and station environment. 2 The summary of the 2009 National Leadership Summit on Military Families noted “There was consensus among participants that service members and their families are experiencing severe strain due to wartime deployments. The length and frequency of these deployments and lack of sufficient dwell time for recovery and reintegration has no parallel in the history of the modern all-volunteer force, or in the extent to which they tax Reserve component families.” He also reported that “A number of participants strongly believed that policymakers should strive to reduce the length and frequency of deployments.” 3 The difficulty of military deployments always extends beyond the battlefield; when units deploy, local consumer economies suffer, families must adjust to life without loved ones and with the knowledge of the danger they may well be facing. When service members return, they may bring physical and emotional pain back with them, exacerbated by the new daily rhythms their families have had to forge in their absence. In addition to the more acute physical and emotional wounds service members must manage upon their return with uneven access to services, they face the challenge of readjusting to the rules, expectations, and pace of life at home and repositioning themselves in a social network that has shifted over the year or more they have spent in a war zone. 1

Neuroscience and War: Human Enhancement, Soldier Rehabilitation, and the Ethical Limits of Dual-use Frameworks

Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience have led to increasing concern about its uses in warfare. This article challenges the primacy of dual-use frameworks for posing ethical questions concerning the role of neuroscience in national security. It brings together three fields – critical war studies, bio-ethics, and the history of medicine – to argue that such frameworks too starkly divide ‘good’ and ‘bad’ military uses of neurotechnology, thus focusing on the degradation of human capacities without sufficiently accounting for human enhancement and soldier rehabilitation. It illustrates this through the emergence of diagnoses of Traumatic Brain Injury and Polytrauma in the context of post-9/11 counterinsurgency wars. The article proposes an alternative approach, highlighting the historical co-production and homology of modern war and medicine so as to grapple with how war shapes neuroscience, but also how neuroscience shapes war. The article suggests new routes for thinking through the connections between war, society, science, and technology, proposing that we cease analysis that assumes any fundamental separation between military and civilian life.

Forget “militarization”: race, disability and the “martial politics” of the police and of the university

ABSTRACT This article investigates the limits of the concept of militarization and proposes an alternative concept: martial politics. It argues that the concept of militarization falsely presumes a peaceful liberal order that is encroached on by military values or institutions. Arguing instead that we must grapple with the ways in which war and politics are mutually shaped, the article proposes the concept of martial politics as a means for examining how politics is shot-through with war-like relations. It argues that stark distinctions cannot be made between war and peace, military and civilian or national and social security. This argument is made in relation to two empirical sites: the police and the university. Arguing against the notion that either the police or the university have been “militarized,” the article provides a historical analysis of the ways in which these institutions have always already been implicated in martial politics – that is, of producing White social and economic order through war-like relations with Indigenous, racialized, disabled, poor and other communities. It concludes by assessing the political and scholarly opportunities that are opened up for feminists through the rejection of the concept of militarization in favor of the concept of martial politics.

Human Interest and Humane Governance in Iraq: Humanitarian War and the Baghdad Zoo

Abstract This article argues that the story of the Baghdad zoo in the Iraq war and the ‘human interest’ it attracted are important for the analysis of warfare and humanitarian intervention. The activities at the zoo are notable precisely because they provide a specific site through which to analyse the increasing entanglements between war and humanitarianism, and practices associated with civil–military cooperation. The recovery and reconstruction efforts at the Baghdad zoo brought together a diverse, ad hoc assemblage of civilian, military, local and international actors around a common problem: how to turn a symbol of the tyranny and ‘backwardness’ of the Hussein regime into a space that would foster liberal humane values amongst the Iraqi population. The activities at the zoo thus tell us much about the kind of warfare that not only involves lethal force, but also fosters civilian and military action in reforming a carceral and leisure institution. They also reveal a broader aspiration of reforming the whole Iraqi population around an idea of humane governance, while providing a potentially profitable investment opportunity for foreign speculators.

‘From killing to mortality? History and race in Death and Security’

Death and Security: Memory and Mortality at the Bombsite asks a provocative question about the field of security studies: why have we not dealt with death adequately, and how might we do so more robustly? Charlotte Heath-Kelly’s answer is to focus her attention on what she theorises is an ontological relationship between mortality and security ‘after the death of God’. From this perspective, security appears as a response to death anxiety, and thus as a means for shoring up state sovereignty in the process. This approach is then ‘tested’ against the empirical material that the book illuminates: practices of memorialisation in ‘post-terrorist’ bomb sites, from New York, to London, Norway and Bali. The book offers an alternative framework for thinking about death in International Relations, beyond existing conceptualisations. As such, Heath-Kelly challenges frameworks that draw on Agamben, Derrida or Mbembe (13–14), which, she argues, each focuses on how ‘death is placed in the hands of the state, rather than vice versa’ (14). From this perspective, she seeks to move beyond what she considers the reduction of the study of death to killing (or, more broadly, the governance of life/biopolitics versus the distribution of death through necropolitics), in favour of an approach that eschews a focus on killing in favour of one on mortality. This focus on mortality, she argues, allows us to see, via Heidegger, that ‘death comes first’: we should not only or primarily be interested in how security or the state produces life or death, but instead, that we should examine how the effacement of mortality is achieved through security. From this perspective, all kinds of practices of memorialisation can be examined. The book provides rich detail concerning the memorialisation of 9/11, the London bombings, Anders Breivik’s violence in Norway and the Bali bombing. Based on interviews with planners, architects and other stakeholders, as well as engagement with architectural drawings and built sites, Heath-Kelly is able to deploy this framework to argue that memorials (attempt to) do the work of effacing death, even as they might also publicly memorialise violence and its aftermaths. The book is on strong ground in these empirical sections. How can we evaluate the argument that we forgo the study of killing in favour of mortality (so as to understand that ‘death comes first’, i.e. that death is more aptly positioned prior to security, rather than solely a product of it)? In this review, I identify two elisions produced by this perspective, which I hope will provide broader engagement with this book. Each relates to a core problem with the perspective advanced in

The empire of resilience

Sometime in 2010, I was in a meeting bringing together a group of academics with a major UK-based international NGO working in the field of disaster response. The meeting was intended to explore possibilities for collaboration surrounding the theme of resilience, which at the time was hitting the radar of some major funding bodies. During the meeting, representatives of this organisation spoke about how they had come to see the populations they worked on and with as not wholly incapacitated, even during some of the worst disasters. In fact, they had come to see individuals and communities less, they avowed, as debilitated victims than as resources possessed with coping techniques that could be harnessed in disaster situations to more effectively move towards a state of recovery. This quality – resilience – was something that they had come to discover, they recounted, within about five years of that meeting (i.e. from the mid-2000s onwards). What accounts for this turn in the philosophy and organisation of emergency planning and disaster response? Why did NGOs like the one in the meeting (and other actors including various organs of the state) ‘discover’ resilience in earnest over the last 10-plus years? And what precedents were there for this ‘discovery’ in techniques of security governance? In Zebrowski’s The Value of Resilience: Securing Life in the Twenty-first Century (Routledge, 2015) we move some distance closer to an answer to these questions, precisely by turning them on their head. As Zebrowski argues, it is not so much that the resilience of populations was discovered, prompting a re-thinking of emergency management, but rather that long-standing shifts in the governance of security have provided the conditions in which ‘resilience’, as an artefact of contemporary security arrangements, could appear and be made useful (see especially Chapter 3). The scope of this genealogy is broad. Its historical reach spans the rise of resilience through the twentieth century, involving transformations in governance wrought by everything from changing strategies of warfare to attempts to quash or manage the actions of organised labour and to a history of ideas that spans ecology, economics, engineering and psychology, to name a few. Without denying that something new is afoot, the book simultaneously provides a necessary alternative to accounts of resilience that too often emphasise its apparent novelty. Resilience governance, however, does give us a good window through which to re-think some central assumptions and commonly used concepts in (critical) IR. Forms of security governance pursued through discourses of resilience are of significant interest precisely because they suggest a supposed ‘breakdown’ in the separation between the ‘external’ and ‘internal’ actions of the state in attempting to achieve security. In the earlier chapters, the