TENTATIVE SYLLABUS - THIS SYLLABUS IS SUBJECTED TO CHANGE WITH PRIOR NOTICE
Week I: Introduction
PART I: Theories
Week 2: War, Peace and History
How can we begin to make sense of colossal movements of people and powers, such as wars and revolutions, without always already resorting to an all too easy and all too familiar pattern of looking for big men and great minds behind them? How can we start thinking about past and future events without always seeking the mastermind, the strategist, the leader? How can we challenge our actor-centered view of history and society by allowing more serendipity, less rationality, more pluralism and less faith in human agency and determination? This session will tackle these questions by bringing together the epilogue on War and Peace written some centuries ago and the tremendous events in Egypt since 2011.
Main readings
- Greer, Erin. 2013. Tolstoy and Tahrir. http://wikiworldorder.org/2013/03/21/tolstoy-and-tahrir-by-erin-greer/
- Tolstoy, Leo. 2010 (1868). War and Peace. Translation by Louise and Almer Maude. Oxford University Press. Part I: Chapters 1-4 pp.1215-1225; Part II (all): pp.1270-1308.
Week 3: War, Peace and Society
How can we account for war’s contribution to our thinking and analyzing of human society? How can war serve as a general model of intelligibility of social relations both in violent and in peaceful times? If Clausewitz had famously claimed that “war is politics by other means”, how would an inversion of that formula give credit, credence and heuristic value to a more ‘polemocentric’ – and thus less liberal democratic - perspective on past and present social relations? This session will explore these questions by way of the foucauldian critique to Hobbes and Machiavelli.
Main readings
Foucault, Michel. 2003 (1997). Society must be defended. Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador. Lecture II, pp. 23-40; lecture III, pp.43-62
Further Readings:
Protevi. War in the Foucault Lexicon.
Week 4: War, Peace and Science
How can we extend the Tolstoyan model of a radical anti-anthropocentrism to the epistemological and ideological core foundations of Enlightenment - and, by default, of Western hegemony? How can we think of science and technology not once again as a history that is always already made up of heroes, such as Pasteur and Steve Jobs, and martyrological figures, such as Galileo and Chelsea Manning? How can we open up the field of possibilities and actions to include more unexpected agents, whether they be humans like hygienists, biologists, doctors, sanitary engineers, and administrators or nonhumans like chickens, drains, insects, parasites, microbes, diptheria or yellow fever? Bruno Latour is the best introduction to this intriguing line of thought, according to which Louis Pasteur did not conquer France by the sheer brilliance of his scientific ideas, but rather through a genius of political or military quality and his skill in making alliances with groups of experts (and viruses) who could advance his interests even as they furthered their own.
Main readings
Latour, Bruno. 1993. (1984) The Pasteurization of France. Translated by Alan Sheridan and John Law. Harvard University Press. Pp. 3-58 (War and Peace of the Microbes: Introduction; Strong Microbes and Weak Hygienists)
Latour, Bruno. 2013. War and peace in an age of ecological conflicts. http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/130-VANCOUVER-WARandPEACE_0.pdf
Part II: Technologies
Week 5: The Bomb
How did the development of the nuclear bomb and the universal expansion of the threat of a potential nuclear apocalypse during the Cold War influence the way that Americans today think about security, time, nature, race, citizenship and everyday life? How did the bomb shift the logic of the U.S national security culture, and by extension, the global debate and development of security during the Cold War and in its aftermath? This session will use Masco’s award-winning book to explore these questions as well as the efforts of the nuclear security state to reinvent itself in a post-Cold War world and to expose the nuclear logic supporting the twenty-first-century U.S. war on terrorism.
Main readings
Masco, J. (2010). Bad Weather On Planetary Crisis. Social Studies of Science, 40(1), 7-40.
Further readings
Masco, Joseph. 2006. The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico. Chapter 1: THE ENLIGHTENED EARTH 1, pp.1-40
Week 6: The Report
How can we account for the myriad ways and efforts to develop counter-discourses that seek to fight terror, silence, fear and security-prone paranoia? How can we explore the best available medium and form to enter the game of speaking ‘truth’ to power, to alert and to inform about the consequences of overt and covert wars and pacifications? From Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Wikileaks and contemporary whistleblowers, such as Edward Snowden, forces such as technology, morality and power(-lessness) have been entangled in a genealogy of public denunciation of atrocity and state surveillance. This genealogy has produced, if not culminated into, the universal form of the ‘report’. This session will explore the technology of the report, its possibilities and its shortcomings in contributing to the creation of a global state of alertness vis-à-vis new forms of control and violence.
Main readings
Taussig, Michael. "Culture of terror—Space of death. Roger Casement's Putumayo report and the explanation of torture." Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 03 (1984): 467-497.
The Guardian. 2013. NSA Files Decoded. What the revelations means to you.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/snowden-nsa-files-surveillance-revelations-decoded#section/1
Week 7: The Drone
How does the recently developed drone technology shift geography, ecology, morality and future in war and peace? How does the making of war through distant killing re-create relationships between warrior and victim, proximity and distance, reality and virtuality? How does it create new kinds of post-traumatic stress disorder, and new forms of costs and calculations? This session will take a closer look at the technology of the drone through both a virtual and a corporeal journey to its most intimate features.
Main readings
Derek Gregory. 2014. Blog entries on Grégoire Chamayou’s The Theory of the Drone
http://geographicalimaginations.com/tag/gregoire-chamayou/
Week 8: The Workshop
How do technologies of peacemaking create and recreate notions of professionalism, morality, efficiency and citizenship? How do arrangements of space, time and knowledge constitute what a post-war civil society should look like? This session will investigate the advent of one of the flagship techniques of peace expertise in the Middle East and elsewhere, the so-called conflict resolution workshop. It will ask why for the transnational and hyper-mobile clan of peacemakers and peace experts, the workshop constitutes today the absolute travel device: it can be transported and deployed everywhere without the need for translation into local vernaculars; it can exemplify the moral ambition for peace in the world backed with technical arrangements of space, time and learning mostly imported from other disciplinary settings; it can address sustained needs for knowledge and hopes for personal betterment by introducing a unique style of pedagogy based on both academic credentials and moral superiority.
Main readings
Kosmatopoulos, Nikolas. 2014. The Birth of the Workshop. Techno-morals, peace expertise and the care of the self in the Middle East. Public Culture, 26,3.
Further readings
The debate over the Stirlitz workshop
III. Regimes
Week 9 Incarceration
How have detention and confinement—of both combatants and large groups of civilians— become fixtures of asymmetric wars over the course of the last century? How does the new regime of massive incarceration of suspects and security threats, comprised of concentration camps, strategic hamlets, "security walls," and offshore prisons come to be? How can notorious sites such as Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, CIA black sites, the Khiam Prison, and Gaza, among others, be linked to a history of colonial counterinsurgencies from the Boer War and the U.S. Indian wars, to Vietnam, the British small wars in Malaya, Kenya, Aden and Cyprus, and the French pacification of Indochina and Algeria? This session will use Khalili’s recent book to explore the claim that whatever the form of incarceration—visible or invisible, offshore or inland, containing combatants or civilians—liberal states have consistently acted illiberally in their counterinsurgency confinements.
Main readings
Khalili, Laleh. 2012 Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies. Stanford University Press.
Further Readings
Alexander, Michelle. The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press, 2012.
Wacquant, L. (2001). Deadly symbiosis when ghetto and prison meet and mesh. Punishment & Society, 3(1), 95-133.
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London : New York : Verso, 2009
Week 10 Pacification
How are counterinsurgency doctrines — known in an earlier incarnation as pacification – revived by George W. Bush’s Iraq mission and U.S. policy elites? How do Counterinsurgency Field Manuals produced by the US Army define, structure and organize pacification overseas? How does the new regime of pacification include local security efforts, programs to distribute food and medical supplies, and lasting reforms (like land redistribution) in an effort to win the „hearts and minds“ of populations? With the help of Jacobsen’s provocative pamphlet, this session will explore “pacification” and its synonym, “counterinsurgency,” as euphemisms for violent suppression of popular resistance movements abroad and as the rehabilitation of repressive practices and technologies.
Main readings
Jacobsen, Kurt. 2009. Pacification and its Discontents. Prickly Paradigm, pp.1-40
Week 11 Siege and counter-siege
How has the age-old medieval tactic of naval and territorial siege of an enemy city or territory developed into a complex regime of low-intensity warfare today ? How are contemporary regimes of blockade and embargos constituted and countered? This final session will examine the case of the Gaza Flotilla as an exemplary case in which technology and materiality are assembled in novel ways that enabled civil society activists to challenge some of the most technologically advanced armies in the world today.
Main readings
Fahmy, Shahira, and Britain Eakin 2013 High Drama on the High Seas: Peace versus War Journalism Framing of an Israeli/Palestinian Related Incident. International Communication Gazette: 1748048513504046.
Schumacher, Pascal N.d. The Gaza Flotilla: A Case of Civil Disobedience? SAFRAN: 43.
Steinberg, Philip E. 2011. The Deepwater Horizon, the Mavi Marmara, and the Dynamic Zonation of Ocean Space. The Geographical Journal 177(1): 12–16.
Sumiala, Johanna Maaria, and Minttu Tikka 2013. Broadcast Yourself—Global News! A Netnography of the “Flotilla” News on YouTube. Communication, Culture & Critique 6(2): 318–335.
Week 12 Epilogue
