Julie Bessler Final Post

Taking 4/5 of my classes this semester in French, I thought I’d really be taken out of my comfort zone and challenged academically. Surprisingly enough, this class, and my only class in English, has definitely challenged me the most. Studying Security Policy as one of my concentrations in DC, I realize that this class has forced me to think about conflicts and conflicted areas in a completely new way. GW, and DC in general, has a very traditional approach to studying International Affairs and I’m really pleased that this class, through political philosophy, anthropology, human perspective and awesome class discussions, broke this mold.

On January 29, a note I took in class said the following: “To understand something, we must deconstruct a self-evident perspective” and I think that to get the most out of this class, that is something we all had to do. For me, the Gregory and Khalili readings did this for me the most. Right in the beginning of Gregory’s article, he lays out the mainstream viewpoints of drone warfare made by the media/politicians and continues to explain why/how it isn’t as black and white as it’s portrayed.  In the article, he talks about spaces of visibility, explaining how certain degrees of understanding are culturally and socially created, and shared. This is particularly evident when Gregory recounts the experience of the drone pilots that wrongfully killed a group of civilians by prescribing their actions to a certain ‘pattern of life’ that is necessary to “understand” in counterinsurgency operations. The thing that is most fascinating about Gregory’s article is the human perspective that is absent from most traditional understandings of IA and mainstream rhetoric. It makes me think of Vice documentaries- each one gives a voice to a human perspective that isn’t heard, yet is important in understanding a situation further.

This theme of visibility/invisibility and the human perspective carries on to Khalili’s article as she explains the use of black sites and proxy-run prisons. In her article she intertwines the themes of race and gender into her argument. I laugh now because while reading it, I was excited by her thoughts about this and the link to 19th century colonialism in the Middle East. In class, however, it was interesting to hear how many thought it was an easy argument to make, how it has been done many times before, and it is not really 21st century colonialism that we’re experiencing in Western encounters with the Middle East. I’m glad that the class was continuously able to open my mind after such a steadfast 2.5 years as an IA major! I realized I was attracted immediately to the article because it was comfortable...so this is a thank you to everyone for making me realize that.

Going back to the overall theme of war and peace, it has been fascinating to read about, write about, and discuss the way we can deconstruct preconceived understandings of war/peacetime. In many ways, we’ve argued against the popular understanding that states or heroic figures control the fate of war/peacetime. From discussing knowledge production, to “truth” finding, to spaces of invisibility/visibility, to the role of the trickster, we have gained valuable knowledge and tools to analytically render information/situations/conflicts in completely new ways.