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The Body of International Relations

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The Body of International Relations The Body of International Relations A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY Lauren Beth Wilcox IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Raymond Duvall, Adviser November, 2011 Copyright 2011 @ Lauren B. Wilcox Acknowledgements Many thanks are due to my advisor, Raymond Duvall, for supporting this project and my development as a scholar from the very beginning of graduate school, for his wisdom, patience and encouragement, for giving me the space to grow and for asking the right questions at the right time so my project could move forward. Thanks also to my excellent committee, Ron Krebs, Nancy Luxon and Naomi Scheman for their close readings of my work, for challenging me at every step of the way and for pushing me to do better work than I thought possible. Thanks also to Lisa Disch for guiding this project in its early stages. Profound thanks to Jennifer Lobasz, Sheryl Lightfoot, Aaron Rapport and Joyce Hekman for their unfailing support as friends, colleagues, and fellow-travelers throughout this long and sometimes difficult journey. Thank you to Judith Mitchell, Alexis Cuttance and Beth Ethier and the rest of the administrative staff at the Department of Political Science for their essential help in navigating the ins and outs of graduate school life. I‘m also grateful to Alex Barder, Caron Gentry, Lene Hansen, Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, Janice Bially Mattern, Pashmina Murthy, David Mutimer, Dan Nexon, Laura Sjoberg, Maria Stern, Gillian Youngs and various members of Bud‘s dissertation group who have all read and commented on parts of this dissertation. Thanks to David Blaney, Renee Marlin-Bennett, Alex Montgomery, Rosemary Shinko and Laura Sjoberg for their support and for enlightening and provocative discussions about my project. An extra thank you to David Blaney for his mentorship in matters of scholarship, teaching and life in academia that began when I was his advisee as an undergraduate at Macalester College and continues to this day. Thank you to my family for always believing in me and supporting my ambitions throughout my life. i Table of Contents Epigraph……………………………………………………………………………..iii Chapter 1: Bodies, Subjectivity and Violence………………………………………1 Chapter 2: Feminist Theories of Embodiment…………………………………........55 Chapter 3: Dying is Not Permitted: Sovereignty and Biopower at Guantanamo Bay……………………………………………………………………………….…100 Chapter 4: Explosive Bodies: Suicide Bombing as an Embodied Practice and the Politics of Abjection………………………………………………………………...…….....141 Chapter 5: Body Counts: The Politics of Embodiment and Precision Warfare……………………… ………………………....…………...184 Chapter 6: Vulnerable Bodies and ―Responsibility to Protect‖……………………..225 Chapter 7: Conclusion……………………………………………………………….260 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………....278 ii --The body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency: the skin and the flesh expose us to the gaze of others but also to touch and to violence (Judith Butler, Precarious Life, pg. 26). iii Chapter 1: Bodies, Subjectivity and Violence International politics has been characterized in recent years by a proliferation of modes of violence that use, target, and construct bodies in complex ways. Virtually invulnerable pilots and drones operated from thousands of miles away drop precision- guided bombs intended to destroy buildings or individual people, often causing the ‗accidental‘ slaughter of dozens of others at a time. Suicide bombers seek certain death by turning their bodies into weapons that seem to attack at random. Images of tortured bodies from Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib provoke shock and outrage, and prisoners on hunger-strikes to protest their treatment are force-fed. In each of these instances, the body becomes the focal point central to practices of security and international relations— the body brought into excruciating pain, the body as weapon, or the body as that which is not to be targeted and hence is hit only accidentally or collaterally. Such bodily focus is quite distinct from prevailing international security practices and the disciplinary ways of knowing those practices in IR. Convention has it that states or groups make war and, in doing so, kill and injure people that other states are charged with protecting. The strategic deployment of force in the language of rational control and risk management that dominates security studies presents a disembodied view of subjects as reasoning actors. However, as objects of security studies, the people that are protected from violence or are killed are understood as only bodies: they are ahistorical, biopolitical aggregations whose 1 individual members breathe, suffer and die. In both cases, the politics and sociality of bodies are erased. One of the deep ironies of security studies is that while war is actually inflicted on bodies, bodily violence and vulnerability, as the flip side of security, are largely ignored. By contrast, feminist theory is at its most powerful when it denaturalizes accounts of individual subjectivity so as to analyze the relations of force, violence, and language that compose our profoundly unnatural bodies. Security Studies lacks the reflexivity necessary to see its contribution to the very context it seeks to domesticate. Security Studies has largely ignored work in feminist theory that opens up the forces that have come to compose and constitute the body: by and large, security studies has an unarticulated, yet implicit, conception of bodies as individual organisms whose protection from damage constitutes the provision of security. In IR, human bodies are implicitly theorized as organisms that are exogenously determined—they are relevant to politics only as they live or die. Such bodies are inert objects: they exist to be manipulated, possess no agency and are only driven by the motivations of agents. Attentive to the relations provoked by both discourse and political forces, feminist theory redirects attention to how both compose and produce bodies on terms often alien and unstable. Contemporary feminist theorizing about embodiment provides a provocative challenge to the stability and viability of several key concepts in IR such as sovereignty, security, violence, and vulnerability. In this project, I draw on recent work in feminist theory that offers a challenge to the deliberate maintenance and policing of boundaries and delineation of human bodies from the broader political context. 2 Challenging this theorization of bodies as natural organisms is a key step in not only exposing how bodies have been implicitly theorized in IR, but in developing a reading of IR that is attentive to the ways in which bodies are both produced and productive. In conceptualizing the subject of IR as essentially disembodied, IR theory impoverishes itself. An explicit focus on bodies is important for two broad reasons. First, we can understand much more about violence in International Relations if we expand our conception of embodiment beyond a picture of bodies as inert, biological entities solely driven by the minds of agents. Theorizing the constitution and agency of bodies can reveal consequences of political violence that have not previously been recognized. Second, there are normative and political implications of the body both in terms of IR theory and the world of international politics. Explicitly theorizing the body in IR in relation to the subject and violence opens up space for thinking about politics and resistance in ways that are overlooked. By theorizing bodies, we can see bodies as sites of politics, not only as organisms that suffer from violence. In a broad sense, the subfield of security studies has defined its topic of study as ―the study of the threat, use, and control of military force‖ (Walt 1991, 212), with emphasis on the causes of war and the conditions for peace. Despite the traditional focus on military force, security studies has by and large ignored the bodies that are the intended or inevitable targets of the use of such force. One classic work in the field, Schelling‘s Arms and Influence (1966) specifically addresses coercion as the threat to cause pain and to hurt human bodies in order to manipulate a certain outcome. Few works are so explicit—that force involves the threat or use of military power to hurt and kill 3 human bodies is usually implicit in security studies. Furthermore, when the violence to human bodies is made explicit, such as in Schelling, such bodies are implicitly theorized precisely as organisms that can be hurt or killed. Contributing to the neglect of theorizing bodies has been the emphasis placed on national security. National security has long been the center of analysis in security studies, but in recent decades, the field has broadened to consider the referent object of security to be the individual as ―people represent, in one sense, the irreducible basic unit to which the concept of security can be applied‖ (Buzan 1991, 18). The concept of ‗human security‘ posits the question of violence against human bodies as a central issue in security studies, yet this theorization accepts the individual as an exogenous unit of analysis. The relationship between bodies, subjects and violence still remains undertheorized. Furthermore, in the issue areas in which one might expect IR and security studies more specifically to address the question of bodies as central to theories of violence, the IR literature has not done so. The three forms of contemporary political violence that I address in depth in this work—torture/force-feeding, suicide bombing, and precision warfare—all engage the human body in a fundamental ways that that are ignored or obscured by the literature. The IR literature has asked, for example, whether suicide bombing can be considered a rational practice and what strategic functions it serves (Pape 2005; Gambetta 2005; Crenshaw 2007), as well as asking what meanings this practice has for its practitioners and the audience for this type of violence (Hafez 2006; Roberts 2007; Dingley and Mollica, 2007; Fierke 2009). Theorizing the body allows us to ask questions that have not, and cannot, be asked given prevailing implicit conceptions of the body in 4 IR.
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