Conditioned Sovereignty

Spaces of Violence

The linkage between violence and space has received relatively little scholarly attention, as Springer and Le Billon ¹ have recently pointed out. This comes as a surprise, since violence evidently includes a spatial dimension. ² Spaces of violence appear in social formations such as places, scales, territories, networks, or positionalities. ³ Concrete examples for spaces of violence are, for example, “checkpoints,” “battlefields,” “cyber war,” or the “body.” ⁴ Imaginative geographies such as imperial or ethnoreligious cartographies also include an inherent logic of violence. ⁵ If anyone was in doubt about the links between space and violence, the emergence of geography as an academic discipline as rooted in colonialism and particularly in military studies reinforces this point. ⁶

While our understanding of spaces of violence connects notions of space with specific forms of organized violence in general, in this article, we focus on spatial figurations in counterterrorism warfare. Hereby, we follow a narrow understanding of violence as an organized act, which intends to do physical damage to a body or an object, ⁷ although we acknowledge that there is an intensive and ongoing debate about the ontology of violence, ⁸ which tends to include structure, communication, representation, and symbols. ⁹

When it comes to defining “space” (etymologically from the Latin spatium: room, area, distance; and the French espace) as a scientific term, disagreements abound. Indeed, we find almost contrary definitions in its use by the natural sciences, on the one hand, and the social sciences and humanities, on the other, with each set of disciplines increasingly employing space as a criterion of demarcation as they seek to define their specificity. From a classical, phenomenological perspective, space is understood as the base on which human action takes place. This approach conceives space above all as something physical and objective. It is this prevailing conception of space that we shall call “absolutist” in the sense that space appears as a nonsocietal independent magnitude constituted without reference to human thoughts and actions. This absolutist notion of space faced growing criticism in social sciences from the 1990s by pointing to people’s active role in constructing spaces, even natural spaces. Interest then shifted to “constructivist” understandings of space, which allow us, in particular, to theorize the reciprocal positionality of actors and observers. This critical rediscovery of space is illustrated, for instance, in the exploration of Erinnerungsräume (“spaces of memory”) ¹⁰ or transnational spaces ¹¹ as well as in postmodernist work on critical geopolitics. ¹² Specific arrangements of power, especially colonialism, capitalism, or imperialism, have been examined in terms of the way they “play with space.” ¹³ The constructivist understanding is essentially characterized by the following characteristics:

Space is above all “social.” Human interactions, perceptions, and cognitions produce and reproduce space in a process of actively arranging living entities and social goods into relational structures of “ordering.” ¹⁴ In this sense, space is always social and is constituted by interactions which are both a result of, and a condition for, interpersonal relations.

Starting from this constructivist understanding of space, we have to consider that mankind time and again is attempting to interrupt or suspend the fluid character of space—this can be regarded in itself as an act of violence. The idea of territory is perhaps the most prominent example of the endeavor to statically bind space to the exercise of violence. ¹⁸ Territory is not only the spatial expression of the sovereignty of the nation-state. What is more, the implementation and continuity of a territory go hand in hand with the production of logics, rules, representations, and practices which are constitutive to the spatial imagination linked to a particular territorial formation. In short, then, what distinguishes spaces of violence is that such spaces either are directly linked in their emergence to practices of violence and/or they present a certain spatially mediated form of violence.

Considering that the field of space of violence is an emerging one and different approaches can be identified, ¹⁹ our approach is inspired by two strands of research which both start from the War on Terror. On the one side, there is Stuart Elden’s ²⁰ seminal work on how the relations between territory and terror are being reconfigured under the conditions of the War on Terror. On the other side, Derek Gregory’s ²¹ significant studies explore how the War on Terror gives way to an “everywhere war,” which blurs the distinction between war and peace and between territorial boundaries. We will use the example of ungoverned spaces to bring both strands of thought together and to show how new spaces of violence emerge which are both territorial and exceptional. We thereby seek to question the possibility of an exclusively descriptive use of the term ungoverned spaces, linked to the operational stocktaking of the complete absence of state power. ²² We will now turn to the political importance of territory as ordering principle of organized violence which serves as the departing point for our discussion of the creation and legitimation of spaces of violence in the War on Terror.

The Triangle of Sovereignty

The world order based on nation-states, dominant since the nineteenth century, relies on a necessary connection between statehood and the use of coercive force across a geodetically fixed territory. ²³ Thus, sovereignty rooted in a state’s monopoly on the use of violence entailed a spatial dimension, giving rise to a triangular relationship between territory, organized violence, and statehood. ²⁴ The concept of “territory” expresses this spatialized exercise of power and constitutes a necessary condition for national sovereignty. ²⁵ So the sovereignty of a state has “classically” been judged by the state’s capacity to enforce a monopoly on violence across its territory. This sets the limits on the shape and size of the respective state. The territorial order can be seen as the most prominent formation of spaces of organized violence.

Despite recent changes of the understanding and practices of sovereignty and of governance, the dominance of this triangle of sovereignty and its internal structure has been an element of great continuity. We hold that still today, the idea of a triangle of sovereignty has traction. At its core is the notion of sovereignty as the measure of statehood on the international stage, yet the relationship between government and population is increasingly viewed in terms of a rationality of macrocontrol (which Michel Foucault ²⁶ called gouvernmentalité). Such advanced forms of macrocontrol (“conduire des conduits” ²⁷ ) intervene in the social patterns of life of the population. This shift leads us to endorse a broader and more indirect understanding of state power than classical accounts (e.g., by Thomas Hobbes or Max Weber). We will consider below how the formation of new spaces of violence is influenced by the persistence of sovereignty, on the one hand, and the further development of the rationality of governance with a focus on indirect power, on the other hand.

Ungoverned Spaces: Legitimating New Spaces of Violence in the War on Terror

Since the 9/11 attacks, the functional and normative dimensions of the conditioning of national sovereignty have been increasingly linked to pragmatic considerations of Realpolitik—a trend exemplified by the 2001 intervention in Afghanistan. ⁴⁴ State failure was now placed in a direct causal connection with terrorist threats and human insecurity (poverty, hunger, etc.). ⁴⁵ Policy makers began explaining security deficits in particular by emphasizing a spatial–causal interpretation of the connection between terrorism and state failure. In 2003, for instance, Joschka Fischer, then Germany’s Foreign Minister, saw “black holes of disorder” in every part of the world ⁴⁶ —holes thought to be causing government collapse and destabilize whole regions through spillover effects. Suddenly, it was possible to question not only the performance of states, especially in the area of governance, but also their very sovereignty and, implicitly, their territorial authority. This way of demarcating spaces of disorder and violence began to be taken up by political think tanks and academics from around 2004. The Clingendael Center for Strategic Studies presented, in 2005, the first study with a claim to scientific rigor that included a world map of “black holes.” ⁴⁷

From 2004, we can observe a shift in the debate—especially in U.S. political circles—from “fragile states” via black holes on to “ungoverned spaces/territories.” ⁴⁸ Unlike the concept of black holes, which did not catch on due to its bleakly negative connotations and has now all but disappeared, the synonymously used terms ungoverned territories and ungoverned spaces appear at first glance to represent a far more sober and analytical outlook. ⁴⁹ The U.S. military has, since 2006, been commissioning research (especially by the Rand Corporation) to provide some theoretical underpinnings capable of promoting these concepts. Both concepts have been used repeatedly in speeches by former U.S. President Barak Obama and by the previous three Secretaries of State (Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry) as well as in core strategy documents from the U.S. security community. ⁵⁰ More recently, the terms have also gained currency in transatlantic ⁵¹ and European debates: in January 2013, the British Prime Minister David Cameron called Mali an ungoverned space; on June 13, 2014, German Foreign Minister Franz-Walter Steinmeier voiced concerns about an ungoverned space, this time one emerging in Iraq due to conquests by the so-called Islamic State/Daesh. ⁵²

Responding to Ungoverned Spaces: The Logic of Drone Strikes

In the War on Terror, the formation of new spaces of violence is driven by asymmetry. While this had already been proclaimed as the hallmark of the “new wars” at the beginning of the present millennium, ⁷⁶ asymmetry confronted the Western world in the form of terrorism with a new urgency in the post-9/11 era. With attacks by “insurgents” (especially in the form of improvised explosive devices) leading to high numbers of casualties in Iraq or Afghanistan, the response has, for some years now, been to follow a similar logic and orchestrate drone attacks. ⁷⁷ The permanent insecurity and fear of sudden attacks with which insurgents have kept Afghanistan and Pakistan in suspense is matched by the military strategy and above all psychological principle ⁷⁸ applied in U.S.-drone warfare in places such as the Pakistani region bordering Afghanistan known as the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA). Grégoire Chamayou ⁷⁹ has pointedly classified this type of military operation as a form of state terrorism. If terrorists first created an asymmetry by fighting conventional armies with guerrilla techniques, a new asymmetry has been achieved by means of technical superiority: drone attacks create spaces of exception in which the inhabitants are permanently exposed—without defence and without warning—to the threat of extermination. If these interventions ever had any legitimacy beyond the context of domestic U.S. politics (and even this is questionable), it has arguably been lost through the deployment of drones. ⁸⁰ As reflected in the decision to deploy drones, ungoverned spaces are “wild zone of power” ⁸¹ in which any rule of law is suspended and the rules of civilization do not apply. The logic of drone strikes is an extension of a colonial argument for the right to attack “savages.” After all, the rationalization for the use of lethal drones as an asymmetric form of warfare is based on the view that its potential victims are the enemies of civilization, if not enemies of humanity. The people targeted are classed as “evil doers,” condemned without trial, deprived of all rights—people who may be killed preventatively. ⁸² The justification for this extreme form of preventative warfare builds on the ethical and cultural denigration and depoliticization of the potential victim. In this way, the discourse on ungoverned spaces echoes Carl Schmitt’s dichotomy by implying that the targets of drone warfare no longer constitute “real enemies” but “absolute enemies,” that is, enemies who are standing outside the legal order, indeed outside the accepted global community/civilization. ⁸³ Rather than the assassins, it is now the assassinated who stand outside the social order and hence their worth as victims in political struggles is undermined:

Targeted killing is, in part, an attempt to transpose the dishonourable connotations associated with assassins on to the one who is assassinated. Targeted killing thus becomes a means of de-politicising the potential political and symbolic meanings (e.g., martyrdom, honour, public significance, heroism, bravery, resistance) that could be cultivated from the death of an individual. This is done through the decontextualisation of the killing from the broader conflict by focusing attention upon the claimed characteristics of the specific person targeted. ⁸⁴

Drone strikes might also be seen as a kind of preemptive punitive expedition which is designed to prevent violations of disciplinary rules (even if these have not actually been announced to the victim) from reaching a higher level of organization. This follows a neocolonial logic, because preventing forms of organization from emerging outside Western norm requirements is an attempt to curb the development of political and social orders and thus helps turn the discourse on ungovernedness into a self-fulfilling prophecy. In this way, any political movement that aims to create a form of political order other than the nation-state—such as so-called Islamic State in Syria/Iraq or al-Shabaab’s Islamic State in Somalia—is portrayed as an “absolute enemy.”

A not inconsiderable factor when assessing the impact of drone deployment on the relationship between space and violence, or spaces of violence, is the new way in which space is experienced. First of all, for the drone operators, the perception of the space is mediated via the screen in their work environment, while the potential victims usually find themselves in a familiar space. The way in which this space is transformed from one moment to the next into a space of organized violence is certainly something we would associate with terrorist methods. It illustrates that the logic of drone missions is the mirror image of aspects of the operational strategy of terrorists and insurgents. Target killings challenge the everyday places in the victim’s social order, for example, by turning private spaces of sanctuary to public places of counterterrorism operation. ⁸⁹ While a drone-based counterterrorism strategy necessarily enters deeply into the social environment of potential targets for data gathering, ⁹⁰ the resulting strikes arguably “depoliticize” by cutting the victims from their social surroundings which are crucial for attempting a political interpretation of the conflict in which they allegedly played a part. The strategy of target killing is then always also a form of governance through asymmetrical relations of seeing and thus seeking to influence population behavior. ⁹¹

Moreover, the use of drones potentially gives rise to a borderless space of violence that is no longer subject to any territorial containment and undermines the sovereignty of the nation-state:

From this point of view, it is clear that “sovereign borders are among the greatest allies” that a fugitive can have. The hunter’s power has no regard for borders. It allows itself the right of universal trespassing, in defiance of territorial integrity of sovereign states. It is an invasive power which, unlike the imperial manoeuvres of the past, is based less on a notion of right of conquest than of a right of pursuit. ⁹²

An expression of this instrument is the term “kill box,” a space of military violence developed by the U.S. Army in 2005. ⁹⁴ It refers to a temporarily defined, three-dimensional spatial target cube in which integrated joint weapons fire is concentrated. The kill box differs in a number of aspects from the concept of ungoverned spaces. For one thing, it is a purely functional, operational space of violence for the military and does not even raise the question of legitimacy at large but describes purely technical procedures of military attack. In the case of nuclear strikes, Henry Nash ⁹⁵ has designated such target selection as the “bureaucratization of homicide.” In the case of “kill boxes,” as arithmetically defined parameters, there is also no requirement to construe and qualify a space with reference to governance qualities, something that is attempted in the ungoverned spaces discourse. The positioning of a kill box remains situative and unlimited since it can be opened as a temporary minispace, as a space of exception, anywhere and at any moment as soon as a target is located. ⁹⁶

Put another way, the logic of drone strikes as demonstrated by the kill box is not fully congruent with the discourse on ungoverned spaces. More precisely, there are a number of tensions between the two with regard to the conceptualization of spaces of violence and the political legitimation rationale. First, the concept of ungoverned spaces is geocentric, if not per se territorial, and remains within territorial thinking; by contrast, the concept of the kill box is target-centric, concentrating on destroying the body of the enemy or the prey. Whereas military campaigns increasingly narrow their focus to individual kill boxes (note here the return to, or continuity of, the container idea!), the operational space, that is, the possibility of such an organized violence zone, spreads without limits. Such war is conceivable and possible everywhere. By constructing kill boxes, control is therefore no longer understood as something permanently territorial but—following the splitting of the idea of sovereignty into the state’s monopoly on the use of force and its territorial integrity—is replaced by an operational form that is otherwise ascribed to terrorists, a form in which violence becomes a constant possibility. Secondly, in the case of kill boxes, the attempt to maintain an international system of states in its present form and simultaneously stick to the political objective of hunting “terrorists” demands a concentration on individuals who—as already noted—can be viewed as standing outside the framework of civilization, in a way reminiscent of Carl Schmitt’s category of the moral, absolute enemy. ⁹⁷ This approach depoliticizes while at the same time depending on a deep pattern of life analysis of its targets. Whether this approach can be used to achieve disciplinary effects (e.g., deterrence) capable of improving control over “threatening” norm deviations on a global scale, with drones acting as a kind of mobile Panopticon, remains highly doubtful. Maybe it makes most sense to think of the ungoverned spaces discourses as a legitimatory layer which provides the political and social assessments and case for action whereas the operationalization through, for example, kill boxes can already built on the acceptance of such narratives. And whereas the discourse of ungoverned spaces seeks to uphold a hierarchical version of a world order of sovereign states, its operationalization via kill boxes poses a challenges to the foundations of this order.

Conclusion

The triangle of sovereignty, which defined international politics in the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century, has ceased to represent the realities of the relationship between statehood, monopoly on violence, and territory. The concept of sovereignty has been split in recent years, being divided into the state’s monopoly on violence on the one hand and its territorial integrity on the other. The result is that territory and monopoly on violence are no longer congruent. In short, while the international system of states, and thereby the territorial integrity of states, still constitutes a cornerstone of the political order, there is a growing challenge, both in theory and in practice, to the role of the state’s monopoly on violence. After the military interventions in the War on Terror, we need to address the question of the objectives of the normatively justified conditioning of the monopoly on violence.

The construction of ungoverned spaces involves a legitimation discourse in which there is at least an attempt to deal with the tensions, outlined above, that drone attacks create with regard to the principle of respecting national sovereignty. This legitimation discourse is highly questionable, not least because it links spatialization to culturally charged enemy images. In particular, the military operations in kill boxes seem to suggest that, ostensibly, spaces of violence can be limited by means of drone attacks (surgical warfare), but at a deeper level, they actually dissolve spatial limits and, through their sudden deployability, perpetuate warfare and open the prospect of “ubiquitous war.” This dissolution of spatial boundaries can be explained by the logic of the spiral of violence: the response to asymmetrical warfare is asymmetrical warfare. Thus, the perpetuation of this form of warfare is inherent in the “logic” of drone strikes. The question of legitimation, inasmuch as it is even posed from without, is answered in the case of kill boxes simply by pointing to the eliminated prey. If the target can be identified as an absolute enemy, as in the case of the execution of Osama bin Laden, no further questions are in order.

The concept of ungoverned spaces then appears as an intermediate step between the territorial principle of the nation-state and the security paradigm. ⁹⁸ The creation of new spaces of violence along the lines of ungoverned spaces represents an extension of the sovereignty of an attacking state beyond its own territory, although without seeking to maintain a permanent monopoly on violence over the space attacked. Certain states, thanks to their technological lead (especially in the drone/robotics sector), are in a position to wage war globally in order to enforce and legitimize the economic and political order they prefer. They thus create new spaces of violence to achieve their ends. These new spaces of violence, however, have taken shape not as part of a qualitative change in the international system of states but as an adaptation of the formally equal system of sovereign states to a changing environment in which the weak structures of other states can actually be turned from a risk factor to an opportunity for dominant powers in pursuit of their ambitions. The United States conducts intelligence operations in spaces it declares to be ungoverned, for example, in Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan, and argues that it is defending its own national security interests by violating the sovereignty of those states. ⁹⁹ It remains to be seen if the tensions within the current formally equal but actually hierarchical international order heightened by the increasing conditioning and violation of sovereignty will unravel this order; or if we are witnessing the reinforcement of this order through furthering the actual hierarchy between states through freeing considerations of security from regard for state sovereignty.