Papers & Review Essays by Neil Balan
Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020
Over four sections, the paper approaches the biomedical and biopolitical production of COVID-19 b... more Over four sections, the paper approaches the biomedical and biopolitical production of COVID-19 by linking the discourse of the pandemic and the discourse of war. The first section considers the drift and imposition of martial language, discourses and analogies in relation to framing and conceptualizing the pandemic. The second section describes the military territorialization and martial genealogy of K'jipuktuk (Halifax) to think through the pandemic. The third section considers how the object of population is shared by military counterinsurgency methods and pandemic public safety measures in relation to the idea of proportionality and acceptable losses. The fourth section ends by engaging with notions of biopolitical pre-existing conditions in advance of COVID-19 to consider the provision and production of safety in a post-pandemic recovery. RÉSUMÉ Cet article traite, en quatre sections, de la production biomédicale et biopolitique de la COVID-19 en l'associant au discours sur la pandémie et au discours sur la guerre. La première section examine l'imposition du langage, des discours et des analogies martiaux en lien avec la conceptualisation de la pandémie. La deuxième section décrit la territorialisation militaire et la généalogie martiale de K'jipuktuk (Halifax) pour réfléchir à la pandémie. La troisième section considère la manière dont l'objet de la population est partagé par les méthodes de contre-insurrection militaire et les mesures de sécurité publique en temps de pandémie en lien avec l'idée de proportionnalité et de pertes acceptables. La quatrième section termine le tout en réfléchissant sur les notions de conditions biopolitiques qui existaient déjà avant la COVID-19 pour contempler l'apport et la production de sécurité dans un rétablissement post-pandémique.
Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 2020
"We start with a war story."
A review of Whitehead, Neil and Sverker Finnström, eds. 2013.Virtual War and Magical Death: Techn... more A review of Whitehead, Neil and Sverker Finnström, eds. 2013.Virtual War and Magical Death: Technologies and Imaginaries for Terror and Killing. Durham, NC: Duke University.
A review of Ilan Pappe. Out of the Frame: The Struggle for
Academic Freedom in Israel. Pluto Pre... more A review of Ilan Pappe. Out of the Frame: The Struggle for
Academic Freedom in Israel. Pluto Press, 2010.
![Research paper thumbnail of A Corrective for Cultural Studies: Beyond the Militarization Thesis to the New Military Intelligence [TOPIA 2010]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/37086314/thumbnails/1.jpg)
This paper theorizes a new military intelligence and offers a modest corrective to the orthodoxy ... more This paper theorizes a new military intelligence and offers a modest corrective to the orthodoxy of the militarization thesis prevalent in cultural studies and the critical human sciences. The biopolitical orientation of population-centric counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare in Afghanistan reveals the multidirectional travel of rationalities, logics, and forms of coherence between modern liberal ways of rule and Western-bloc expeditionary of ways of war. Through the work of Michel Foucault, and drawing on Michael Dillon and Julian Reid’s analysis of the biopoliticization of war (2008), COIN is interrogated as a continuation of biopolitics by other means. Conceptualizing a continuum of ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ military violence to produce islands of security and stability, COIN generates a mix of coercive and persuasive material forces that, while not ‘kinetic or combat-oriented, are internal to the battlespace of military warfighting. The aim of this theoretical intervention is to trouble our understanding of military violence and power. Rather than subscribe unconditionally to the idea of a domineering military contaminating domestic civilian environments, the paper establishes a different trajectory: perhaps there is always-already a spirit of counterinsurgency internal to the art of biopolitical governmentality, which in turn conjugates contemporary military ways of war?
American Book Review, 2007
![Research paper thumbnail of Review of Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries [CJC 2003]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/43660721/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Back to previous page document 1 of 1 -2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&genre=unknow... more Back to previous page document 1 of 1 -2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:journal&genre=unknown&sid=ProQ:ProQ%3Aabiglobal& atitle=Bodies%3A+exploring+fluid+boundaries&title=Canadian+Journal+of+Communication&issn=07053657&date=2003-10-01&volume=28&issue=4& spage=479&au=Longhurst%2C+Robyn%3BBalan%2C+Neil&isbn=&jtitle=Canadian+Journal+of+Communication&btitle=&rft_id=info:eric/&rft_id=info:doi/ [Robyn Longhurst]'s study is first a useful theoretical arc that maps the discursive terrain of critical geography. It then moves to a series of ethnographic case studies that interrogate the status of messy, material bodies in specific places. Her framework is ubiquitously feminist, which is to say that it seeks to negotiate masculinist discourses that govern and manage the implications of study and the larger discipline. Longhurst's conceptual methodology is corporogeographical. A concept generated by critical geographer Gillian Rose in reference to the lack of critical mappings of actual material bodies in space, Longhurst uses it to address the current "body craze" in critical discourse. According to Longhurst, negotiating hegemonic discourses of geography means moving through and beyond these post-structural and postmodernist conceptualizations of bodies as sites of textual inscription. This is not to say Longhurst denies the discursive, political, and certain cultural events, narratives, and practices but locates how the subordinate bodies and the material trajectories they follow indicate the play of power in the larger circuits of the academy as an institution. In Longhurst, authority vested in apparent solidity is exposed itself as leaky, closer to an always-permeable barrier constantly subject to fluid movements.
Disssertation by Neil Balan
![Research paper thumbnail of On Counterinsurgency: Firepower, Biopower, and the Collateralization of Military Violence [PhD Diss 2015]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/43685443/thumbnails/1.jpg)
[Please cite accordingly. See Title Page + Table of Contents below. Full text available in the Fa... more [Please cite accordingly. See Title Page + Table of Contents below. Full text available in the Fall 2015.]
This dissertation investigates the most recent cycle of North Atlantic expeditionary warfare by addressing the resuscitation of military counterinsurgency doctrine with a specific focus on the war in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2014. While the debate and discourse around counterinsurgency has largely disappeared, the project interrogates the lasting aesthetic, epistemological, philosophical, and territorial implications of counterinsurgency, which should be understood as part of wider transformations in military affairs relating to adaptation, complexity, and systemic design for the ever-abstract repertoire of global contingency and stability operations. Afghanistan served as a laboratory for the conduct of counterinsurgency, and the experiments will pollinate future wars, domestic security practices, and the increasingly indistinct boundary between them.
Drawing especially on the interdisciplinary field of Foucauldian-influenced new war studies, the project undertakes a genealogy of contemporary population-centred counterinsurgency and interrogates how its military conduct is constituted by and as a mixture firepower and biopower. Insofar as this mix employs force and violence with a range of different speeds, rates, and intensities, the dissertation argues that counterinsurgency unrestricts and collateralizes violence, which is emblematic of liberal war that kills selectively to secure and make life live in ways amenable to local and global imperatives of liberal rule. Contemporary military counterinsurgents, in conducting operations on the edges of liberal rule's jurisdiction and in influencing the domestic spaces of North Atlantic states, actually realize and invert Foucault's work on biopolitics without knowing it, fashioning biopower—as pastoral power, as police power, and as custodial power to conduct the conduct of life—to shape different types of missives and munitions that intervene into the everyday lives of target populations. The 'lesser evil' logic (i.e., proportionality, necessity, and restraint) used to justify counterinsurgency as low-intensity and less harmful actually lowers the threshold for violence, which makes increasingly indiscriminate the ways in which its employment damages, saps, and envelops populations and communities, in turn allowing counterinsurgents to speculate on the practice of expeditionary warfare and efforts to sustain ongoing occupations.
Thus, the dissertation argues that counterinsurgency is a communicative process, better understood as mobile military media with an atmospheric-environmental register blending acute and ambient measures that are always-already kinetic. The counterinsurgent gaze enframes a world picture where everything can be a force amplifier and everywhere is a possible theatre of operations; it is an ontologically anxious perspective perpetually 'sensing' and supplying a pandemonium of signs and signals to nominate insurgents/insurgency as ecological features.
The dissertation is organized over five chapters. The first chapter outlines the project's theoretical and biopolitical basis, outlining Foucault's method of genealogy as the way to critically disturb the counterinsurgency's contemporary conceptual life. It provides an overview of the return of counterinsurgency in North Atlantic military affairs from 2006 onward.
The second chapter considers military doctrine and knowledge production, interrogating the multiple histories of counterinsurgency, which in turn reveals a military 'limit-attitude' aiming to unrestrict warfare and 'regularize' unconventional and irregular war.
The third chapter explores Foucault's theory of biopower and biopolitics, its shortcomings in relation to war, imperialism, and colonialism, and the 'missed encounter' between Foucault and French counterinsurgency theory of the 1960s on the conceptualization of population before culminating in a fictional account of the 'lessons learned' from an advanced military seminar on Foucault.
The fourth chapter examines the post-2009 counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, considering how North Atlantic forces mobilized biopolitical measures—pattern of life patrols, agricultural reforms, infrastructure development, biometrics, and gender—to undertake village stability operations, or decentralized counterinsurgency 'from the groud up'.
The fifth chapter details what Foucault, in describing the displacement of war from the colonial edges to the metropolitan core, calls boomerang effects, and argues that stability and security in the context of liberal government is informed by the spirit of counterinsurgency. The chapter connects the biopolitical damage and violence of expeditionary warfare waged globally to Canada in particular, mapping its return in relation to, among other things, conceptions of resilient critical infrastructure, indigenous struggle and settler colonialism, urban wealth inequality and racism, and the Canadian petrostate.
The project ends with a short conclusion summarizing the implications of the work and outlining future directions of inquiry.
Recent Conference Papers & Presentations by Neil Balan
Slides from a CAG 2017 double-session panel on Militarization Beyond the Battlefield...
![Research paper thumbnail of Disrupting Orthodoxy & Disappearance: On Cultural Studies and the Theory of Sustainable Warfare [CACS 2016]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/43702632/thumbnails/1.jpg)
This paper aims to do two things: resuscitate the critique of expeditionary North Atlantic milita... more This paper aims to do two things: resuscitate the critique of expeditionary North Atlantic military violence contemporary liberal war (Evans 2011), policing wars (Holmqvist 2014), or
later modern warfare (Gregory 2014) as a core matter of concern for contemporary cultural studies; and propose a theory of sustainable warfare, which follows from my own work on firepower, biopower, and the collateralization of military violence. Initially, I provide a humble disruption to the field of Canadian cultural studies, arguing for the need to attend more explicitly, polemically, and politically to matters of North Atlantic military violence and its boomerang effects. More substantively, the paper then explains the theory of sustainable war in aesthetic, epistemological, and atmospheric-environmental terms. I argue that it is immensely productive and analytically accurate to locate the discourse of sustainability a generally affirmative but hegemonic master signifier and metanarrative as the missing 'interpretive key' to understanding the conduct and employment of North
Atlantic military violence today. After discussing in brief the neoliberalization of sustainability discourse, I lay out three general sites where we can understand the conduct of liberal war and the employment of military violence as sustainable warfare.
This conference paper works to return Deleuze (and Guattari) to the well-established literature a... more This conference paper works to return Deleuze (and Guattari) to the well-established literature around liberal war studies, which relies substantially (and very usefully) on Foucault's paradigmatic genealogy of biopower and biopolitics. The paper considers new figures of liberal war at a time when the latest expeditionary cycle of wars waged by North Atlantic states appears to be drawing to a close, or at least entering a new phase space. . I focus primarily on figures of liberal war that have been called into being by the last fifteen-odd years of expeditionary warfare, among them the special forces operator, the joint-terminal attack controller, the embedded law enforcement advisor, and the all-female cultural support team.
![Research paper thumbnail of Air-Atmosphere-Affect: On Operational Art, Envelopment, and Contemporary Military Environmentalism [CCA 2014]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/37086503/thumbnails/1.jpg)
In starting from a position that understands war and military violence as communications and medi... more In starting from a position that understands war and military violence as communications and media at the outset, the paper attempts to integrate and extend critical arguments and theoretical developments from both liberal war studies (Neocleous 2013; Evans 2011; Duffield 2011; Dillon & Reid 2009) and radical human geography (Anderson 2010 & 2011; Gregory 2008, 2009, and 2012). If military violence is becoming interdisciplinary and if streams of this violence are becoming Contemporary state war formally and informally partitions, separates, and divides spaces, materials, and populations—producing boundaries without borders. Departing from the conference theme, I consider war and military affairs in the context of North Atlantic states drawing down deployments after almost fifteen years of highly-visible expeditionary operations at the edges of (neo)liberalism's reach and influence. These operations—counterinsurgency; stability operations; contingency operations; foreign internal defense missions—are reliant on increasingly complex mixtures of firepower and biopower, which blend together different doses, speeds, and yields of political violence. If military violence is becoming interdisciplinary and if streams of this violence are becoming increasingly imperceptible and unrestricted—as the critical literature and my own work aims to demonstrate—then our methods must also merge different disciplinary approaches to make this violence legible and intelligible. This paper is a humble attempt to continue doing this work.
![Research paper thumbnail of On Collateralized-Distributed-Speculative War: 'Adaptive Dispersed Operations' & Unrestricted Military Violence [CACS 2014]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/37086546/thumbnails/1.jpg)
Following from my work on biopolitics, battlespace, and liberal war studies, I offer an account o... more Following from my work on biopolitics, battlespace, and liberal war studies, I offer an account of the culture of war and warfare particular to state militaries on the North Atlantic basin. This humble paper interrogates innovations in military violence by considering contemporary Canadian military doctrine with specific emphasis on the future force employment concept known as 'Adaptive Dispersed Operations' (ADO). ADO is emblematic of transformations in the conceptualization and delivery of military-political violence realized during the most recent cycle of expeditionary wars waged by North Atlantic states, which mix both firepower and biopower to territorialize a unique kind of military ecology and environmentalism.
Coincident with developments in counterinsurgency doctrine, so-called 'culture-centric war', and the wider human turn in military affairs, ADO enframes and enables speculative warfare by distributing and collateralizing slower and less explicit types of violence into social and cultural milieus. Indexed to contingency, complexity, and what military agents call the continuum of operations, ADO indicates a military logic focused on artfully programming, designing, and fabricating architectures and infrastructures for the conduct of war. This approach subtly unrestricts the circulation of military violence and makes it indiscriminate. I provide examples of this process by drawing on recent events in Afghanistan and Mali, which demonstrate how violence is delivered acutely via traditional 'kinetic' combat measures but dispersed in more ambient ways through increasingly prevalent 'non-kinetic' flows.
I end by briefly discussing the implications of today's military violence in two ways. First, I connect this new war practice and culture to what Eyal Weizman has elsewhere called the dangerous calculus and normalization of lesser evils (2012), which has implications within and outside military organs. Second, drawing on Randy Martin's conception of derivative wars (2011), I explicate the intersection between the violence of adaptive dispersed war and the violence of financial capital.
![Research paper thumbnail of “Society’s Infrastructures Must Be Defended!” On Sapper Epistemology and Epidemiological Conceptions of Contemporary Warfare [BAWMU 2013]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/37086611/thumbnails/1.jpg)
The paper animates and explains the positive and negative biopolitical contexts of contemporary w... more The paper animates and explains the positive and negative biopolitical contexts of contemporary warfare—life sacks, life-preservation zones, and making life live; kill sacks, life-negating zones, and making life die—through the figure of the sapper, historically known as the agent of military engineering. In an era of civil-military coordination, information operations, and joint-enabled network-centric capabilities, the sapper remains a productive site for interrogating the act, event, and intelligibility of war.
Using the American-led counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, I consider the sapper in relation to current military doctrine regarding complexity and “the continuum of operations.” This philosophy pollinates the current round of North Atlantic-led expeditionary wars and interventions in which military actors conceptualize, design, and produce streams of perceptible and imperceptible violence, undertaking kinetic and non-kinetic measures with variable velocities and “speeds” depending on the desired enemy-centred or population-centred orientation of force.
Sappers are commonly understood as agents shaping and inscribing the necessary built environments for warfare—what Virilio has called, in physical and metaphysical terms, the theatre of operations (1978 [1990]). I offer a reassessment of the sapper in an era where state-waged warfare is indexed to universalizing rhetorics of cosmopolitanism, human rights, and peace; and to instrumentally sustaining local political ecologies, infrastructures, and ways of life (i.e., civil, social, and economic development). Sappers may well clear fields of fire (glacis, esplanades, kill boxes) or allow soldiers to topologically transform battlespace and ‘walk through walls’; however, the paper aims to rediscover the epistemology of the sapper by locating her as a non-kinetic actor engineering and influencing the built environment in epidemiological and social contexts. Further, in closing, the paper suggests the implications and consequences of this epistemology in relation to a generalizable kind of governmentality that identifies ‘the people to come’ as a threatening blemish on the critical (and utopian neoliberal) infrastructure (i.e., retain the habitat but not the inhabitants, whether they be pacified and domesticated or otherwise).
This paper continues my own work around military aesthetics, the biopoliticization of military battlespace, and counterinsurgency warfare, contributing to discussions about the human turn in military affairs and the military mixture of ambient and acute political violence intended to affect, communicate, compel, mediate, and persuade. This work connects humbly (if ambitiously) to several important matters of concern: recent Foucaultian-inspired studies of liberal war, biopolitics, species-life, and ecologies of military violence (Dillon & Neal 2009; Dillon & Reid 2009; Massumi 2011; Evans 2011; Bell 2012); the tradition Virilio-Deleuze-Guattari war studies; and Weizman's ongoing analysis of territorializing strategies, technologies, and practices that minimize and moderate—that is, collateralize and in fact ‘unrestrict’—political violence undertaken by state military actors and agents (2007 & 20102; c.f. Gregory 2008 & Graham 2010); and Butler's consideration of how bare life, lives themselves, and species-life are apprehended, framed, and made useful in relation to the problems of human-centred warfare (2009).
![Research paper thumbnail of Military Communications at the Edge: Limits, Violence, and Biopolitics [CCA 2013]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/37086419/thumbnails/1.jpg)
This paper extends some of my current work, which has been connecting communications, continua of... more This paper extends some of my current work, which has been connecting communications, continua of military violence, and emerging theories of liberal war and the biopoliticization of warfare (Evans 2011; Dillon & Reid 2009; Dillon 2011; Bell 2012). In particular, I explore the continuum of different speeds and types of contemporary violence specific to Western militaries operating after an extended expeditionary period of interventionist counterinsurgency operations. While counterinsurgency has for the most part fallen out of circulation in public and scholarly discourse, it remains a constellation of significant concern regarding wider debates about the discursive invention, the limits, and the variable material effects of violence as a constituting, communicative, and territorializing force. I develop a communicative theory of contemporary warfare but in a way different from critical assessments of information- and network-centric war. Ultimately, the paper returns to a basic but still-important consideration in relation to theories of biopower and the biopoliticization of war: how the power of life and ways of life are actively shaped, normalized, and regulated so as to co-produce their own neutralization, domestication, and occupation by a marriage of foreign military, state, and non-state forces.
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Papers & Review Essays by Neil Balan
Academic Freedom in Israel. Pluto Press, 2010.
Disssertation by Neil Balan
This dissertation investigates the most recent cycle of North Atlantic expeditionary warfare by addressing the resuscitation of military counterinsurgency doctrine with a specific focus on the war in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2014. While the debate and discourse around counterinsurgency has largely disappeared, the project interrogates the lasting aesthetic, epistemological, philosophical, and territorial implications of counterinsurgency, which should be understood as part of wider transformations in military affairs relating to adaptation, complexity, and systemic design for the ever-abstract repertoire of global contingency and stability operations. Afghanistan served as a laboratory for the conduct of counterinsurgency, and the experiments will pollinate future wars, domestic security practices, and the increasingly indistinct boundary between them.
Drawing especially on the interdisciplinary field of Foucauldian-influenced new war studies, the project undertakes a genealogy of contemporary population-centred counterinsurgency and interrogates how its military conduct is constituted by and as a mixture firepower and biopower. Insofar as this mix employs force and violence with a range of different speeds, rates, and intensities, the dissertation argues that counterinsurgency unrestricts and collateralizes violence, which is emblematic of liberal war that kills selectively to secure and make life live in ways amenable to local and global imperatives of liberal rule. Contemporary military counterinsurgents, in conducting operations on the edges of liberal rule's jurisdiction and in influencing the domestic spaces of North Atlantic states, actually realize and invert Foucault's work on biopolitics without knowing it, fashioning biopower—as pastoral power, as police power, and as custodial power to conduct the conduct of life—to shape different types of missives and munitions that intervene into the everyday lives of target populations. The 'lesser evil' logic (i.e., proportionality, necessity, and restraint) used to justify counterinsurgency as low-intensity and less harmful actually lowers the threshold for violence, which makes increasingly indiscriminate the ways in which its employment damages, saps, and envelops populations and communities, in turn allowing counterinsurgents to speculate on the practice of expeditionary warfare and efforts to sustain ongoing occupations.
Thus, the dissertation argues that counterinsurgency is a communicative process, better understood as mobile military media with an atmospheric-environmental register blending acute and ambient measures that are always-already kinetic. The counterinsurgent gaze enframes a world picture where everything can be a force amplifier and everywhere is a possible theatre of operations; it is an ontologically anxious perspective perpetually 'sensing' and supplying a pandemonium of signs and signals to nominate insurgents/insurgency as ecological features.
The dissertation is organized over five chapters. The first chapter outlines the project's theoretical and biopolitical basis, outlining Foucault's method of genealogy as the way to critically disturb the counterinsurgency's contemporary conceptual life. It provides an overview of the return of counterinsurgency in North Atlantic military affairs from 2006 onward.
The second chapter considers military doctrine and knowledge production, interrogating the multiple histories of counterinsurgency, which in turn reveals a military 'limit-attitude' aiming to unrestrict warfare and 'regularize' unconventional and irregular war.
The third chapter explores Foucault's theory of biopower and biopolitics, its shortcomings in relation to war, imperialism, and colonialism, and the 'missed encounter' between Foucault and French counterinsurgency theory of the 1960s on the conceptualization of population before culminating in a fictional account of the 'lessons learned' from an advanced military seminar on Foucault.
The fourth chapter examines the post-2009 counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, considering how North Atlantic forces mobilized biopolitical measures—pattern of life patrols, agricultural reforms, infrastructure development, biometrics, and gender—to undertake village stability operations, or decentralized counterinsurgency 'from the groud up'.
The fifth chapter details what Foucault, in describing the displacement of war from the colonial edges to the metropolitan core, calls boomerang effects, and argues that stability and security in the context of liberal government is informed by the spirit of counterinsurgency. The chapter connects the biopolitical damage and violence of expeditionary warfare waged globally to Canada in particular, mapping its return in relation to, among other things, conceptions of resilient critical infrastructure, indigenous struggle and settler colonialism, urban wealth inequality and racism, and the Canadian petrostate.
The project ends with a short conclusion summarizing the implications of the work and outlining future directions of inquiry.
Recent Conference Papers & Presentations by Neil Balan
later modern warfare (Gregory 2014) as a core matter of concern for contemporary cultural studies; and propose a theory of sustainable warfare, which follows from my own work on firepower, biopower, and the collateralization of military violence. Initially, I provide a humble disruption to the field of Canadian cultural studies, arguing for the need to attend more explicitly, polemically, and politically to matters of North Atlantic military violence and its boomerang effects. More substantively, the paper then explains the theory of sustainable war in aesthetic, epistemological, and atmospheric-environmental terms. I argue that it is immensely productive and analytically accurate to locate the discourse of sustainability a generally affirmative but hegemonic master signifier and metanarrative as the missing 'interpretive key' to understanding the conduct and employment of North
Atlantic military violence today. After discussing in brief the neoliberalization of sustainability discourse, I lay out three general sites where we can understand the conduct of liberal war and the employment of military violence as sustainable warfare.
Coincident with developments in counterinsurgency doctrine, so-called 'culture-centric war', and the wider human turn in military affairs, ADO enframes and enables speculative warfare by distributing and collateralizing slower and less explicit types of violence into social and cultural milieus. Indexed to contingency, complexity, and what military agents call the continuum of operations, ADO indicates a military logic focused on artfully programming, designing, and fabricating architectures and infrastructures for the conduct of war. This approach subtly unrestricts the circulation of military violence and makes it indiscriminate. I provide examples of this process by drawing on recent events in Afghanistan and Mali, which demonstrate how violence is delivered acutely via traditional 'kinetic' combat measures but dispersed in more ambient ways through increasingly prevalent 'non-kinetic' flows.
I end by briefly discussing the implications of today's military violence in two ways. First, I connect this new war practice and culture to what Eyal Weizman has elsewhere called the dangerous calculus and normalization of lesser evils (2012), which has implications within and outside military organs. Second, drawing on Randy Martin's conception of derivative wars (2011), I explicate the intersection between the violence of adaptive dispersed war and the violence of financial capital.
Using the American-led counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, I consider the sapper in relation to current military doctrine regarding complexity and “the continuum of operations.” This philosophy pollinates the current round of North Atlantic-led expeditionary wars and interventions in which military actors conceptualize, design, and produce streams of perceptible and imperceptible violence, undertaking kinetic and non-kinetic measures with variable velocities and “speeds” depending on the desired enemy-centred or population-centred orientation of force.
Sappers are commonly understood as agents shaping and inscribing the necessary built environments for warfare—what Virilio has called, in physical and metaphysical terms, the theatre of operations (1978 [1990]). I offer a reassessment of the sapper in an era where state-waged warfare is indexed to universalizing rhetorics of cosmopolitanism, human rights, and peace; and to instrumentally sustaining local political ecologies, infrastructures, and ways of life (i.e., civil, social, and economic development). Sappers may well clear fields of fire (glacis, esplanades, kill boxes) or allow soldiers to topologically transform battlespace and ‘walk through walls’; however, the paper aims to rediscover the epistemology of the sapper by locating her as a non-kinetic actor engineering and influencing the built environment in epidemiological and social contexts. Further, in closing, the paper suggests the implications and consequences of this epistemology in relation to a generalizable kind of governmentality that identifies ‘the people to come’ as a threatening blemish on the critical (and utopian neoliberal) infrastructure (i.e., retain the habitat but not the inhabitants, whether they be pacified and domesticated or otherwise).
This paper continues my own work around military aesthetics, the biopoliticization of military battlespace, and counterinsurgency warfare, contributing to discussions about the human turn in military affairs and the military mixture of ambient and acute political violence intended to affect, communicate, compel, mediate, and persuade. This work connects humbly (if ambitiously) to several important matters of concern: recent Foucaultian-inspired studies of liberal war, biopolitics, species-life, and ecologies of military violence (Dillon & Neal 2009; Dillon & Reid 2009; Massumi 2011; Evans 2011; Bell 2012); the tradition Virilio-Deleuze-Guattari war studies; and Weizman's ongoing analysis of territorializing strategies, technologies, and practices that minimize and moderate—that is, collateralize and in fact ‘unrestrict’—political violence undertaken by state military actors and agents (2007 & 20102; c.f. Gregory 2008 & Graham 2010); and Butler's consideration of how bare life, lives themselves, and species-life are apprehended, framed, and made useful in relation to the problems of human-centred warfare (2009).
Academic Freedom in Israel. Pluto Press, 2010.
This dissertation investigates the most recent cycle of North Atlantic expeditionary warfare by addressing the resuscitation of military counterinsurgency doctrine with a specific focus on the war in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2014. While the debate and discourse around counterinsurgency has largely disappeared, the project interrogates the lasting aesthetic, epistemological, philosophical, and territorial implications of counterinsurgency, which should be understood as part of wider transformations in military affairs relating to adaptation, complexity, and systemic design for the ever-abstract repertoire of global contingency and stability operations. Afghanistan served as a laboratory for the conduct of counterinsurgency, and the experiments will pollinate future wars, domestic security practices, and the increasingly indistinct boundary between them.
Drawing especially on the interdisciplinary field of Foucauldian-influenced new war studies, the project undertakes a genealogy of contemporary population-centred counterinsurgency and interrogates how its military conduct is constituted by and as a mixture firepower and biopower. Insofar as this mix employs force and violence with a range of different speeds, rates, and intensities, the dissertation argues that counterinsurgency unrestricts and collateralizes violence, which is emblematic of liberal war that kills selectively to secure and make life live in ways amenable to local and global imperatives of liberal rule. Contemporary military counterinsurgents, in conducting operations on the edges of liberal rule's jurisdiction and in influencing the domestic spaces of North Atlantic states, actually realize and invert Foucault's work on biopolitics without knowing it, fashioning biopower—as pastoral power, as police power, and as custodial power to conduct the conduct of life—to shape different types of missives and munitions that intervene into the everyday lives of target populations. The 'lesser evil' logic (i.e., proportionality, necessity, and restraint) used to justify counterinsurgency as low-intensity and less harmful actually lowers the threshold for violence, which makes increasingly indiscriminate the ways in which its employment damages, saps, and envelops populations and communities, in turn allowing counterinsurgents to speculate on the practice of expeditionary warfare and efforts to sustain ongoing occupations.
Thus, the dissertation argues that counterinsurgency is a communicative process, better understood as mobile military media with an atmospheric-environmental register blending acute and ambient measures that are always-already kinetic. The counterinsurgent gaze enframes a world picture where everything can be a force amplifier and everywhere is a possible theatre of operations; it is an ontologically anxious perspective perpetually 'sensing' and supplying a pandemonium of signs and signals to nominate insurgents/insurgency as ecological features.
The dissertation is organized over five chapters. The first chapter outlines the project's theoretical and biopolitical basis, outlining Foucault's method of genealogy as the way to critically disturb the counterinsurgency's contemporary conceptual life. It provides an overview of the return of counterinsurgency in North Atlantic military affairs from 2006 onward.
The second chapter considers military doctrine and knowledge production, interrogating the multiple histories of counterinsurgency, which in turn reveals a military 'limit-attitude' aiming to unrestrict warfare and 'regularize' unconventional and irregular war.
The third chapter explores Foucault's theory of biopower and biopolitics, its shortcomings in relation to war, imperialism, and colonialism, and the 'missed encounter' between Foucault and French counterinsurgency theory of the 1960s on the conceptualization of population before culminating in a fictional account of the 'lessons learned' from an advanced military seminar on Foucault.
The fourth chapter examines the post-2009 counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, considering how North Atlantic forces mobilized biopolitical measures—pattern of life patrols, agricultural reforms, infrastructure development, biometrics, and gender—to undertake village stability operations, or decentralized counterinsurgency 'from the groud up'.
The fifth chapter details what Foucault, in describing the displacement of war from the colonial edges to the metropolitan core, calls boomerang effects, and argues that stability and security in the context of liberal government is informed by the spirit of counterinsurgency. The chapter connects the biopolitical damage and violence of expeditionary warfare waged globally to Canada in particular, mapping its return in relation to, among other things, conceptions of resilient critical infrastructure, indigenous struggle and settler colonialism, urban wealth inequality and racism, and the Canadian petrostate.
The project ends with a short conclusion summarizing the implications of the work and outlining future directions of inquiry.
later modern warfare (Gregory 2014) as a core matter of concern for contemporary cultural studies; and propose a theory of sustainable warfare, which follows from my own work on firepower, biopower, and the collateralization of military violence. Initially, I provide a humble disruption to the field of Canadian cultural studies, arguing for the need to attend more explicitly, polemically, and politically to matters of North Atlantic military violence and its boomerang effects. More substantively, the paper then explains the theory of sustainable war in aesthetic, epistemological, and atmospheric-environmental terms. I argue that it is immensely productive and analytically accurate to locate the discourse of sustainability a generally affirmative but hegemonic master signifier and metanarrative as the missing 'interpretive key' to understanding the conduct and employment of North
Atlantic military violence today. After discussing in brief the neoliberalization of sustainability discourse, I lay out three general sites where we can understand the conduct of liberal war and the employment of military violence as sustainable warfare.
Coincident with developments in counterinsurgency doctrine, so-called 'culture-centric war', and the wider human turn in military affairs, ADO enframes and enables speculative warfare by distributing and collateralizing slower and less explicit types of violence into social and cultural milieus. Indexed to contingency, complexity, and what military agents call the continuum of operations, ADO indicates a military logic focused on artfully programming, designing, and fabricating architectures and infrastructures for the conduct of war. This approach subtly unrestricts the circulation of military violence and makes it indiscriminate. I provide examples of this process by drawing on recent events in Afghanistan and Mali, which demonstrate how violence is delivered acutely via traditional 'kinetic' combat measures but dispersed in more ambient ways through increasingly prevalent 'non-kinetic' flows.
I end by briefly discussing the implications of today's military violence in two ways. First, I connect this new war practice and culture to what Eyal Weizman has elsewhere called the dangerous calculus and normalization of lesser evils (2012), which has implications within and outside military organs. Second, drawing on Randy Martin's conception of derivative wars (2011), I explicate the intersection between the violence of adaptive dispersed war and the violence of financial capital.
Using the American-led counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, I consider the sapper in relation to current military doctrine regarding complexity and “the continuum of operations.” This philosophy pollinates the current round of North Atlantic-led expeditionary wars and interventions in which military actors conceptualize, design, and produce streams of perceptible and imperceptible violence, undertaking kinetic and non-kinetic measures with variable velocities and “speeds” depending on the desired enemy-centred or population-centred orientation of force.
Sappers are commonly understood as agents shaping and inscribing the necessary built environments for warfare—what Virilio has called, in physical and metaphysical terms, the theatre of operations (1978 [1990]). I offer a reassessment of the sapper in an era where state-waged warfare is indexed to universalizing rhetorics of cosmopolitanism, human rights, and peace; and to instrumentally sustaining local political ecologies, infrastructures, and ways of life (i.e., civil, social, and economic development). Sappers may well clear fields of fire (glacis, esplanades, kill boxes) or allow soldiers to topologically transform battlespace and ‘walk through walls’; however, the paper aims to rediscover the epistemology of the sapper by locating her as a non-kinetic actor engineering and influencing the built environment in epidemiological and social contexts. Further, in closing, the paper suggests the implications and consequences of this epistemology in relation to a generalizable kind of governmentality that identifies ‘the people to come’ as a threatening blemish on the critical (and utopian neoliberal) infrastructure (i.e., retain the habitat but not the inhabitants, whether they be pacified and domesticated or otherwise).
This paper continues my own work around military aesthetics, the biopoliticization of military battlespace, and counterinsurgency warfare, contributing to discussions about the human turn in military affairs and the military mixture of ambient and acute political violence intended to affect, communicate, compel, mediate, and persuade. This work connects humbly (if ambitiously) to several important matters of concern: recent Foucaultian-inspired studies of liberal war, biopolitics, species-life, and ecologies of military violence (Dillon & Neal 2009; Dillon & Reid 2009; Massumi 2011; Evans 2011; Bell 2012); the tradition Virilio-Deleuze-Guattari war studies; and Weizman's ongoing analysis of territorializing strategies, technologies, and practices that minimize and moderate—that is, collateralize and in fact ‘unrestrict’—political violence undertaken by state military actors and agents (2007 & 20102; c.f. Gregory 2008 & Graham 2010); and Butler's consideration of how bare life, lives themselves, and species-life are apprehended, framed, and made useful in relation to the problems of human-centred warfare (2009).