Emily Gilbert

The Inevitability of Integration? Neoliberal Discourse and the Proposals for a New North American Economic Space after September 11

Abstract The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 had an immediate impact on Canada–U.S. relations. Whereas security became foremost among U.S. concerns, Canada became preoccupied with ensuring that the newly fortified border would not impede trade. Within days of the attacks, Canadian analysts argued that the only way to guarantee open access to U.S. markets would be to negotiate some form of deeper North American economic integration. Previous proposals for a North American Monetary Union were revived, while new initiatives such as a customs union or a “strategic bargain” also emerged. These schemes were designed to forge a “new economic space” in North America. Business think tanks and interest groups played a central role in pushing forward a platform of deeper integration, but the ideas have also made their way into the policy platforms of the Canadian federal government. This paper draws upon discourse analysis and theories of governmentality to interrogate the rhetoric of inevitability that has underpinned these proposals. The fatalism has been justified by allusions to the shifting North American geopolitical relations in the post-September 11 context and the fear and risk that have prevailed since the terrorist attacks. It also, however, resonates more broadly with neoliberal and globalizing narratives that externalize and naturalize market forces, and, therefore, limit alternative futures. More importantly, the logic and language of inevitability have provided advocates of deeper integration with a strategic manoeuvre to downplay concerns regarding the loss of political sovereignty and the transformations to state-society relationships that would result from the new North American economic space that is being imagined.

‘Ornamenting the Facade of Hell’: Iconographies of 19th-Century Canadian Paper Money

In this paper I explore the iconographies on 19th-century Canadian paper money. Drawing upon the recent debates regarding the intersection of culture, society, and economy, it is argued that the form of paper money conveys not only economic but social and cultural values. The paper is divided into three parts. The first section situates Canadian paper currency in terms of the consolidation of paper monies more generally in the 18th and 19th centuries, but with particular reference to Britain and the United States. I then turn to a more specific analysis of the design and production of paper money, illustrating how monetary images were transferred among artistic media. A third section focuses on some of the spatial aspects of paper money by exploring national and imperial monetary narratives which are in turn related to specific monetary practices. In a brief conclusion the importance of an historical analysis to our contemporary understanding of paper and other kinds of monies is outlined and points to our complicity in economic, social, and cultural networks.

Money as a “weapons system” and the entrepreneurial way of war

In US counterinsurgency doctrine, money has been characterized as “ammunition” and as a “weapons system”. Money is being wielded to win over the “hearts and minds” of the population, and to protect the lives of the occupying forces. Soldiers are taking on greater responsibility for spending money on reconstruction and development projects on the battlefield. Billions of dollars have been spent by the military in Iraq and Afghanistan on a wide range of projects including building schools, developing infrastructure, and providing agricultural assistance as well as microfinance. But military doctrine now extends to helping implement free-market economies, supporting business creation, setting up banking facilities, and promoting entrepreneurialism. In fact, economic development has been recast as a constitutive form of combat, not simply as a supplement to conventional warfare, or as part of post-conflict reconstruction. The use of money as a “weapons system” speaks to both a different kind of military and a different kind of war. Fighting and violence have not been replaced or even displaced, but are joined with new strategies and tactics that sit uneasily side by side. As soldiers have been retooled to be economic decision-makers, we need to better understand how money and markets are increasingly both the weapon of military intervention and the anticipated outcome.

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

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.

War, Law, Jurisdiction, and Juridical Othering: Private Military Security Contractors and the Nisour Square Massacre

In September 2007 private contractors working for Blackwater, a private military contracting firm based in the US, killed seventeen people in Nisour Square in Iraq and severely injured more than twenty others. For over seven years the contractors evaded legal liability. This paper examines the way that legal jurisdiction played out in this evasion of accountability. We first examine the role of Order 17 in mandating that private contractors in Iraq “be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of their sending states”. We then turn to interrogate the ways that ‘juridical othering’, which operates through appeals to jurisdiction, has been employed by the state to distance itself from its own actions, in that the contractors were seen to be accountable neither to martial nor to domestic civilian law. Subsequently, we examine the impact of this juridical othering on the victims of the violence, as they too are ‘othered’ in the law. Through this analysis we demonstrate that the processes of juridical othering are the result not only of deliberate state action, but also of complex spatiolegal jurisdictions that are historically ingrained and are called into being in times of war in particular kinds of ways. In our conclusion, we point to the October 2014 ruling in the US federal courts that found three Blackwater employees guilty of manslaughter and one of murder, to show how law is continually unfolding and, as it does so, reinforces the intimate ways that law and war are co-constituted.

Elasticity at the Canada–US border: Jurisdiction, rights, accountability

Borders are being stretched as they are deterritorialized, reterritorialized and extra-territorialized. But borders are not only being relocated elsewhere: just as they are extended they are also snapped back into place in order to limit the rights of travellers and migrants, and to deny the accountability of border officials. This elasticity—expansion but also contraction—is the focus of this paper, with particular attention to the Canada–US border with respect to how legal jurisdiction is being reworked territorially, and the ways that the law gets attached to particular bodies. Three contemporary case studies are examined: the Safe Third Country Agreement, the Shiprider program, and the expansion of preclearance programs. While each of these cases is quite different in that they deal with asylum seekers, cross-border policing, and extra-territorial customs programs, together they illustrate how borders are being made elastic, and with what political implications.

Victim compensation for acts of terrorism and the limits of the state

ABSTRACT Little academic attention has been directed towards the victims of terrorism. This article begins to do so by interrogating how victims get compensated, and for how much, in North America and Western Europe. This article examines compensation from three vantage points. First, attention is directed to the variety of state programmes that have been mobilised over the last several decades to build individual and state resilience. I will suggest, however, that many of these programmes fall short, as they fail to meet victim needs. Indeed, as I subsequently illustrate, public and private philanthropy are playing an increasingly important role in providing victim support, sometimes superseding state contributions. Yet while they speak to an affective response that emerges out of and reinforces community building, they are also highly uneven and can entrench existing social inequalities. I then turn to examine the turn to the courts as a means both for recouping further compensation and for achieving some kind of accountability. Notably, the drive to provide victims with other mechanisms for compensation has led to new legislative mechanisms that are reshaping geopolitics by reworking the principle of sovereign immunity. Together, these examples of compensation trouble simplistic characterisations of victimhood while also illustrating how both victims and terrorism are being made governable, often with chilling consequences. They also expose the limits of the state and of state sovereignty.

Spaces at the intersections of militarism and humanitarianism

This special issue of Critical Military Studies addresses the ways that militaries engage with humanitarianism as well as the militarization of humanitarianism. The contributions each bring different critical perspectives to these issues, but all assert the need to understand the historical-geographical context of these relations, and how they produce and reproduce space and place. As Matthew Rech et al. have argued, spatial approaches to critical military studies address how ‘war, armed conflict, militarism, militarization, military activities, and military institutions, organizations and capabilities [are] both geographically constituted and geographically expressed’ and how this impacts on both people and places (Rech et al. 2015, 49, 57). The papers in this special issue tackle the political stakes of military humanitarianism by undertaking rigorous analysis that is attuned to historical context, as well as spatial relations at various scales, e.g. local, national, international (Woodward 2014). They attend to space from a variety of perspectives – of war and peace; of battlefield and homefront; of soldier and civilian; of danger and vulnerability; of reconstruction and development; of intervention and resistance; of routinization and exception – and the spatial imaginaries that inform each of these characterizations. And in so doing, the papers provide a rich understanding of the actors, institutions, techniques, and practices that are assembled to legitimize and normalize violence and conflict. This special issue builds on the emerging work that has sought to think through the spatial dimensions of militarism and humanitarianism (e.g. Gregory 2010; Bryan 2015; Lopez, Bhungalia, and Newhouse 2015). In turn, this work builds upon a much broader scholarship that interrogates militaries, militarism, and humanitarianism, and where they intersect. Some of this critique has been levied at the co-optation of humanitarian discourse in the justification of interventions and war (Zehfuss 2012). For instance, the US-led war on terror was partially justified in humanitarian terms, with the plight of women under the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan seemingly rendering the military intervention of Operation Enduring Freedom a moral imperative (Hunt 2002). As scholars have shown, along with such moral invocations, humanitarianism and the related idea of human security have emerged in the international community as causes that can legitimate military interventions and war, particularly through the emergence of the mandate of Responsibility to Protect (Barnett 2011; Fassin 2011). Along with such practices that draw on moral discourses to justify geopolitical intervention,

Globalization and Money: A Global South PerspectiveGlobalization and Money: A Global South Perspective, by SinghSupriya. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. 227 pp.

radar to many U.S. citizens and academicians. The ironies associated with efforts to address problems that plague the border are hard to miss. To take one striking example, a number of authors observe how President Felipe Calderón’s war on drug cartels, notwithstanding praise from U.S. presidents, actually increased brutality and human rights abuses rather than lessened them. There are some limitations to the book. As with most edited volumes, the quality of the contributions varies. Some of the chapters would have benefited from a tighter statement of purpose at the outset. While the details were almost always interesting, sometimes the larger argument got lost. And, with so many contributions covering a rather broad collection of topics, the burden of tying it all together rests on the editors. They tried to meet this challenge in the opening chapter by introducing (or re-introducing, as the case may be) concepts like structural violence, states of exception, and cauterization. My only complaint here is that I wish they had gone further. More ink could have been spent defining these concepts and carrying them throughout the subsequent chapters. It is unfair to critique a book for not doing something that it never promised to do. Thus, I have mixed feelings about the uniformly pessimistic tone that is found throughout. On one hand, it is energizing to read scholars and activists speaking truth to power in light of what are many obvious violations of human rights and failed policy efforts. On the other hand, the book’s central thesis could have been strengthened in two ways. First, it would have been helpful to include some opposing viewpoints. Perhaps the editors are victims of their own success, since I found the arguments compelling and was left to wonder how others might respond. It is too easy to paint the world in black and white—pitting those who care about human rights and take issue with the policies that have shaped our current state of affairs against xenophobes who want high walls on the border and a militarized police force to guard it. But surely there are other reasonable voices whose perspectives might shed additional light on the complexity of the issues, and dealing with their views would have made the authors’ arguments more convincing. Second, the book could have been aided by a discussion of what the authors would regard as promising policy alternatives. To some degree, one can read between the lines and divine their preferences, but I would have preferred that the authors—or the editors, at least—be more explicit by suggesting what they regard as smart steps forward. These quibbles aside, scholars and students will appreciate the many contributions that these authors make.