Maja Zehfuss

Constructivism and identity: A dangerous liaison

Constructivism is regarded as increasingly important in International Relations. More often than not the approach is related to the issue of identity. constructivism and identity are, however, in a dangerous liaison. This article argues that Alexander Wendts constructivism needs identity as a central concept but that this very concept threatens to undermine the possibility of his constructivism. It is further suggested that this problem has some relevance to other constructivist approaches positioned in the middle ground between rationalist and reflectivist theorizing. The argument is illustrated with a consideration of the debates around the redefinition of the role of the Federal Republic of Germany to include the possibility of German military involvement abroad.

Targeting: Precision and the production of ethics:

War necessarily involves destruction. The development of precision-guided munitions seems to have made it possible to produce intended damage with increasing efficiency and to reduce ‘collateral’ damage. This has given rise to the expectation that fighting with such weapons reduces the extent of destruction and, crucially, that it is therefore becoming increasingly possible to protect non-combatants during war. This article examines this idea by exploring in some detail what is meant by ‘precision’ and asking how far this actually entails protection for non-combatants. The article shows how praise for precision not only produces Western warfare as ethical but also both relies upon and reproduces a particular kind of ethics, based on the notion of non-combatant protection. The conclusion draws together the implications of the faith in precision for how we think about war and challenges the underlying assumption that more precision is better.

Hierarchies of grief and the possibility of war: Remembering UK fatalities in Iraq

In her recent work, Judith Butler offers a critique of war that revolves around the related issues of what she calls the grievability of lives and the framing of violence. This article explores aspects of the remembrance of UK military personnel killed on Operation TELIC in Iraq, drawing on Butler’s powerful arguments about the way in which some lives are produced as more grievable than others. It explores a particular set of obituaries from Operation TELIC: those posted by the Ministry of Defence on its website. The concern is not with the fact that some lives remain unacknowledged, but rather with how the loss of lives that are acknowledged as grievable is represented. The obituaries here are a significant part of the production the frame that makes war possible. In Butler’s scheme of grievable Western lives versus ungrievable non-Western lives no consideration is given to members of the military whose lives are grievable and yet put at risk in order, apparently, to protect other lives. Introducing this complication makes it possible to examine further how hierarchies of grief enable the possibility of war.

Generalising the international

Ironically, since 11 September 2001, world politics seems to have taken a turn towards certainty. This article is an intervention that demonstrates how the illusion of the sovereign state in an insecure and anarchic international system is sustained and how it might be challenged. It does so through a Derridean analysis of Hedley Bulls The Anarchical Society . The article examines how International Relations (IR) thinking works; it teases out the implications of our reading of Bulls work and proposes that what we call generalising the international could lead to an alternative analysis of world politics, one that retains an openness to the future and to politics.

Culturally sensitive war? The Human Terrain System and the seduction of ethics

Since around 2005, efforts have been made within the US military to highlight the significance of culture or the ‘human terrain’ for counterinsurgency operations. The US Army responded to the asserted ‘cultural knowledge gap’ by establishing an experimental programme called the Human Terrain System (HTS), which involves deploying social scientists alongside combat forces. While HTS was received favourably in the US mainstream media, it has been fiercely criticized by anthropologists in particular, who argue not least that participation in the programme would constitute a violation of their professional ethics, which require them to protect their research subjects. This article explores the anthropologists’ critique and its limitations, arguing that it fails to tackle the problem of ethics deployed as a supposedly extra-political standard that can serve to (de)legitimize political projects. In particular, it is unable to dislodge the fantasy of protection at the heart of the argument for HTS.

Contemporary Western War and the Idea of Humanity

In the post-cold-war period Western military force has been deployed in the name of protecting humanity despite the obvious paradox of trying to achieve such protection through means that undermine this very aim. This has generated much debate about the merits of (humanitarian) intervention. In this paper I aim not to take a position in this debate but, rather, to examine its terms. I seek to draw out what is assumed, implied, and obscured by this debate. I explore the larger issue of how the framing of the debate in terms of protecting humanity works to exclude the apparent beneficiaries from the realm of politics and generates the demand for an urgent, violent resolution to what is produced as an ethical dilemma. I start by exploring the ways in which post-cold-war Western war has been represented as war for humanity. I then draw out how critical scholarship has brought into view the fact that the apparently universal category of humanity is marked by hierarchy, and thus undermines itself. I end by arguing that the idea of humanity provides an ethical framing which both relies on and responds to the problematic association of politics with intelligibility, leaving us with a predicament that cannot be resolved.

Killing Civilians: Thinking the Practice of War

Much discussion of the ethics of war revolves around civilians’ alleged special claim to protection, expressed in the principle of non-combatant immunity. This article shows that its supporters do not give persuasive reasons for why civilians should be protected from deliberate harm ahead of combatants. The principle moreover problematically relies on the significance of intention. Intriguingly, the principle is defended in the face of recognising these issues. Its defenders argue that the principle must be maintained because without it we would be unable to distinguish legitimate uses of political violence from mass murder and terrorism. This article argues instead that the principles role in making permissible political violence classified as ‘war’ must be considered: it works to enable what it seeks to prevent, namely making the killing of civilians acceptable.

Nuclear) war and the memory of Nagasaki Thinking at the (impossible) limit

On the 70th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the world remains marked by violent conflict and the possibility of nuclear war. This seems an apt moment to ask whether the bombings have left a trace in our thinking. This article thus explores how particular articulations of their memory or, alternatively, failures to articulate such a memory, conjure up our world: how they represent and account for violence and how, if at all, they assign specific significance to nuclear weapons. Reading two very different texts, Jacques Derrida’s ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’ and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows, alongside each other, the article shows how remembering finds itself at the impossible limit between the conceptual and the particular, in the space of politics. It argues that the violence that continues to form an everyday part of our world can only be challenged or even understood by thinking at this (impossible) limit where no answer can be generated in the abstract and decisions are necessary.