Abstract
We argue that the spatialization of violence in the counterterrorism operations of the War on Terror provides insight for understanding how these operations are legitimized and how they pose a challenge to an international order centered on state sovereignty. Against the background of a discussion of the key markers of statehood and recent normative challenges to state sovereignty, we interpret how discourses about “ungoverned spaces” influence the creation of spaces of violence in counterterrorism operations of the War on Terror. We then offer a conceptualization of these new spaces of violence, comparing “ungoverned spaces” discourse with the logic and justification of recent drone strikes. Finally, we interrogate how the existence of these different spatializations of violence fulfill legitimatory purposes in the War on Terror and what this means for the future of the international order.
Keywords
The main aim of this article is to make sense of how new and alternative spaces of violence are conceptualized and legitimized in the counterterrorism operations of the “War on Terror” since 9/11. We shed light on how these new and alternatives spaces of violence relate to the concept of, and recent challenges to, state sovereignty.
We advance two main lines of argument in this inquiry. The first is that the conceptualization of new spaces of violence in the War on Terror—so-called ungoverned spaces—builds on an understanding of sovereignty which is conditioned: on the one hand by Western norms of statehood centered on the monopoly on violence (to the perceived lack of which the discourses on the spaces of violence seek to respond) and on the other hand by technological advances in warfare. The second line of argument is that the creation and discursive legitimation of new spaces of violence has brought to the fore a growing tension between the “monopoly on violence” and “territorial integrity”—constituting elements of the current international, state sovereignty-centered order.
In order to contextualize and gradually develop these lines of argument, the article is divided into four main sections: after a brief introduction to our conceptual understanding of “spaces of violence,” the first section of this article will present an interpretation of the main markers of modern Western statehood as standing in a “triangle of sovereignty.” It will then discuss how shifts to this triangle in the past decades prepared the ground for the emergence and discursive justification of new spaces of violence. This discussion will offer the canvas on which the development of the legitimatory discourse for new spaces of violence in the War on Terror will be sketched. The third section will outline the concept and doctrine of “ungoverned spaces” and relate it to the challenges to the triangle of sovereignty. The fourth section will chart how the logic of recent drone operations, which builds on the ungoverned spaces discourse, further heightens the tension between the professed sovereignty- (and law-) centered international order and the challenge to this order posed by such spaces of violence.
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”)
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or transnational spaces
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as well as in postmodernist work on critical geopolitics.
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Specific arrangements of power, especially colonialism, capitalism, or imperialism, have been examined in terms of the way they “play with space.”
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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.”
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In this sense, space is always social and is constituted by interactions which are both a result of, and a condition for, interpersonal relations. Space contains both a discursive/communicative and a praxis-based dimension. On the one hand, space is discursively constituted and is the outcome of communicative and ideational processes of construction;
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on the other, space provides orientation for everyday practices and can be observed in everyday life. Thus, spatial “orderings” offer guidance for human actions while, for their part, being socially construed through the continuous attribution of meaning by the actors.
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In developing a theory of space, we can therefore regard knowledge, action, and communication as its theoretical constituents, and these constituents must be brought together in order to grasp spatial realities. Unlike the absolutist conception in which space is diametrically opposed to time in a fixed and immovable way, space from the constructivist perspective assumes a liquid and dynamic character. Space is no longer essentialist or container-like but “…always under construction.”
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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.
Neoliberal Shifts
In the course of the second half of the twentieth century, especially in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the triangle of sovereignty, monopoly on violence, and territory for the first time faced growing challenges. A neoliberal understanding of government arguably began to take hold. The state now predominantly appeared to be regarded only as a necessary evil to be kept to a minimum, as the principles of the free market, electoral democracy, and human rights were being rolled out worldwide. At a deeper level, however, the aim to more effectively impose—through a strengthened executive—the infrastructural changes needed to facilitate the dynamics of a new global economy arguably led to “free market strong states.” 28 In short, such states depend on having a strong security apparatus—strong in terms of both its budgetary resources and its legal powers. The changes have, more recently, also involved increasingly outspoken militarization of policing 29 and the merger of, at least, secret service and (private) military companies, as exemplified by the United States. 30 Hence, it appears more appropriate here to speak of a shift in, rather than an erosion of, the state’s functions in the process of neoliberalization.
Moreover, the accelerating flows of people, data, and commodities, conventionally referred to as globalization, increase the porosity of territorial borders and present a challenge to the state’s ability to maintain a monopoly on the use of violence. 31 This is why we today see politicians as well as security think tanks identifying refugee flows, economies of violence, terrorist networks, piracy, cyber-attacks, or epidemics as threats to the prosperity and security of Western states. 32 Moreover, smoldering civil conflicts that repeatedly flare up—like those in the Middle East, the Hindu Kush, the Horn of Africa, Africa’s Great Lakes region, or Eastern Europe—not only involve challenges to national sovereignty but are also perceived as a threat to Western interests (e.g., free world trade, immigration controls) and to values that are declared universal (as captured by the idea of human rights). The response to this increasingly visible gap between a (neo)liberal world order and the perceived disorder is, on the one hand, a return to the idea of the state as a marker of territorially defined order and, on the other hand, a search for mechanisms to suspend national sovereignty in cases where a state fails to meet international standards or to accept Western interests. This, again, can be read as an indicator that the process of neoliberalization is not per se aimed at hollowing out the state but uses the state apparatus as an organized force in pursuit of imperial (and/or elite class) interests. 33 Overall, these processes and discourses bring tensions to the fore between efforts to uphold a state- and sovereignty-centered, formally egalitarian world order and the simultaneous moves that seem to undermine it. We will elucidate those tensions through considering the changes in the conceptualization of spaces of violence in the War on Terror. The next step to take in this regard is to consider the normative conception of statehood and the codification of the monopoly on violence in order to understand the recent challenges to the latter.
Ideals of Statehood, the Monopoly on Violence, and Conditioned Sovereignty
Public discussion of statehood over the last twenty years has been in the grip of categorical thinking leaving little space for qualitative changes to how state power is exercised: at one end of the scale are the extreme cases of a “failed” or “fragile” state, while at the other end is an imagined ideal of order. This ideal has its roots in a normative model of the state that was first succinctly consolidated in Max Weber’s writings in 1921/1922. 34 Central to the model is the idea of a monopoly on violence, giving the state exclusive powers to tax, to set and enforce rules and regulations that apply to every citizen and denizen, and, importantly, to impose sanctions whenever these rules are violated. In this sense, the state is defined as sovereign because no other political authority stands above it. 35 Right up to the present day, this focus on an ideal-typical autonomous statehood has produced negative definitions of anything that deviates from it. Where states do not meet the standards set, for which their monopoly on the use of force is a central criterion, attributes are found to express the gap between reality and ideal. Terms like “ailing,” “weak,” fragile, failed, or “deformed” imply that the respective state “functions” in a manner that is outside the normative model of a state and its relationship with society. 36 This normative disqualification of political and social orders is ahistorical inasmuch as it ignores the extremely violent history behind the emergence of many different forms of state, including Western states, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 37 Even though nation-building historically does not correspond to good governance criteria, the following, doubly problematic assumption is a commonplace: an idealization of one’s own, that is, Western, statehood is combined with inadequate consideration for how this idealization conflicts with path dependencies from the process of formation of those (postcolonial) states whose sovereignty is being called into doubt.
Such criticisms of the functionality of certain states or, rather, of the consequences of their dysfunctionality have led to challenges to the “classic” sovereignty model in which the monopoly on violence is a necessary ingredient. When the Montevideo Convention of 1933 laid down, under the aegis of the United States, the criteria for statehood, it established the principle that states—no matter how weak they may be—have sovereignty over all internal affairs. 38 This amounted to a ban on interventions and accorded legitimacy to the respective states with regard to upholding their territorial sovereignty and asserting their monopoly on the use of force, the latter in accordance with their own standards. This framework remained more or less unquestioned until the dominant powers stuck to the nonintervention rule in the face of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. 39 The strong criticism of the established understanding of national sovereignty which ensued initiated a shift in normative debates from the focus on functionality of the state to the freedoms, opportunities, and protection of the individual: the widely discussed and cited concepts of “human security” and “responsibility to protect” (r2p), which are designed to legitimize interventions to protect individual rights, played a prominent role for this shift. 40 However, initial attempts to establish the standards of ethical responsibility for interventions and to bring them to bear on political practice have proven to be extremely challenging. 41 The normative conditioning of sovereignty has been undermined by the fact that high-cost interventions are, in practice, ultimately driven by political will and economic and geopolitical interest. 42 It is further problematic that even if normative concepts such as r2p played a role, the gap between theory and practice has thus far tended to discredit the theory as well as the practice, for example, in the case of Libya. 43 Arguably the contradiction between the normative conditioning of sovereignty and the continuity of an international system formally based on equal state sovereignty has thus far limited the sway of discourses of conditioned sovereignty. Recently, however, the conditioning of sovereignty has reached heightened importance in the context of counterterrorist operations of the War on Terror. Particularly, the concept of ungoverned spaces accommodates these tensions well and connects normative justifications with geopolitical interests. This is why we turn next to the emergence of the concept of ungoverned spaces.
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
Ungoverned Spaces as Spaces of Conditioned Sovereignty
The selection of spaces being designated “ungoverned” is guided by a classical definition of state territory. Ungoverned spaces are primarily identified on the peripheries of spaces effectively controlled by governments. 53 These spaces include border regions as well as air corridors and maritime transport routes. We are also seeing the term ungoverned spaces increasingly used for civil war regions such as Afghanistan/Pakistan, Syria/Iraq, Somalia, or Libya. 54 Among U.S. think tanks, there has been what can only be called a race to identify new ungoverned spaces. This boom in identifying ungoverned space highlights the underlying problem of distinguishing “governed” from ungoverned spaces. 55
The discourse on ungoverned spaces seeks to localize nonstate actors who are seen as a threat mainly by Western security agencies. It proceeds on the assumption that where there are effectively no state structure spaces emerge which can serve violent actors such as terrorists, rebels, or mafia networks as spaces for transit, flight, and refuge and as “safe havens.” 56 From this perspective, “ungovernedness” per se creates a situation in which, having neglected certain areas, a state permits, enables, or even promotes on its territory threats which then indirectly or directly endanger third-party states. Even though some authors 57 emphasize the causal connection between the loss of control over national territory and the emergence of a terrorist threat, a causal connection between territorial control and the rise of terrorism is still strongly disputed. Ken Menkhaus, 58 for instance, points out on the example of Somalia that terrorists do not find the logistics necessary for their operations in weak states and argues that they are unlikely to enjoy any reliable protection in precisely in such countries.
Echoing the debate on fragile statehood, the discourse of ungoverned spaces conceives them as the antithesis of an imaginary ideal, governed state. It is this comparison that makes ungoverned political structures automatically negative. And the negative perception is then reinforced by the claim that premodern and/ or illegitimate forms of society are bound to dominate in ungoverned spaces. Note, for example, how often the term “tribe” appears in contrast to “state” in an influential study of Rand Corporation 59 whenever patterns of order in ungoverned spaces are discussed. Thus, the concept of the ungoverned ultimately implies that only a state has full political legitimacy and that nonstate institutions and actors are, in essence, politically illegitimate. 60 However, this understanding overlooks the very fact that, even in societies not permeated by the state, elements of social order always exist and the condition of being ungoverned is never permanent. 61 Indeed, one could almost make the opposite case: namely, that phenomena considered illegitimate, like warlordism, clientelism, and corruption, occur most intensively in “hybrid zones of competing governance” 62 where informal logics have become embedded in state structures, that is, in situations where the state is very much present; and that they are less common in spaces far removed from state penetration. Furthermore, the concept of ungoverned spaces is rooted in a classic nation-state understanding of territory. This puts into question the aptness of the ungoverned spaces approach to capture what goes on in the so-called ungoverned spaces, as it overlooks the fact that people are spatially mobile and have their own supraregional networks and structures. They are certainly not limited to rigid territorial references when making political decisions. Indeed, a further aspect ignored here is that social groups themselves construct spaces—ranging from mental maps to their own territories—and these spaces frequently run counter to the territorializing ambitions of a state. 63
Much of the importance of the concept of ungoverned spaces thus stems from the fact that locating ungoverned spaces is connected to questioning sovereignty. In the eyes of those seeking exclusive power to determine where and when spaces are ungoverned, a state can be targeted once it fails to perform—even if only in part—its most essential function: territory-wide enforcement of its monopoly on the use of force. Thus, inherent in the ungoverned spaces discourse is the possibility of delegitimizing certain states and legitimizing external interventions. Much like in the debate over “failed states,” legitimizing an at least partial suspension of the international legal order requires the identification of ungoverned spaces. This may seem contradictory in as far as one of the reasons for developing the ungoverned spaces concept is protection from terrorist attacks and upholding the current world order of sovereign nation-states. Ungoverned spaces thus turn into territorialized containers in which external political and military interventions are legitimate, as part of an imperative to uphold the world order based on nation-states. Yet, this means nothing less than rolling back the sovereignty of the states affected:
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U.S. drone attacks and deployment of Special Forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan, in Yemen, or in Somalia are all too well-known examples of how this happens. As such, preventive action in ungoverned spaces may be considered an offensive pursuit of interests rather than defense against threats. Arguing in favor of this approach, Barry Zellen,
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for example, sees ungoverned spaces not only as a threat to U.S. security but also, on the contrary, as an opportunity, that is, they become spaces for the United States to take military/intelligence steps to reassert its global hegemony: The underlying tribal topology of these ungoverned territories or tribal zones as I prefer to think of them presents numerous strategic opportunities for containing and/or rolling back communism (in China, Laos, and Vietnam), combating dictatorship and oligarchy (in Burma, Guatemala and southern Mexico; and the Andean highlands) and securing access to newly emergent natural resources (in the Arctic regions, Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines, and much of South and Central Asia).
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If some states are unable to fulfill these obligations…there will be considerable pressure on others, whose people are targeted by terrorists enjoying sanctuary in ungoverned areas, to take matters into their own hands.
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We will work with and through like-minded states to help shrink the ungoverned areas of the world and thereby deny extremists and other hostile parties sanctuary. By helping others to police themselves and their regions, we will collectively address threats to the broader international system.
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Ungoverned Spaces and New Forms of Organized Violence
The construction of ungoverned spaces in which external violence becomes legitimate (and necessary to prevent violence in governed spaces) is associated with new forms of organized violence. As mentioned above, the ungoverned spaces discourse revolves around the idea of these spaces as “territories of the other”—especially of Islamist movements like Islamic State/Daesh, al-Shabaab, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or Boko Haram. In the selection of ungoverned spaces, there is an almost exclusive concentration on regions in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The very selection of regions follows a hierarchization that has its precursors in colonial world views as well as in certain development policy assumptions. 69 The West, with the exception of the so-called Muslim ghettos 70 in major West European cities, is regarded as “governed space,” while the ungoverned comes with an exoticization. Ungoverned spaces are directly associated with exotic spatial imagery that emphasize the “tribal,” the “disorderly,” and the “inscrutable.” 71 External actors who enter such ungoverned spaces will not only be stepping into a danger zone but will likely be fighting with the odds against them, as ungoverned spaces appear as regions that a military mission on the ground can hardly control, let alone “civilize.”
The discourse on ungoverned spaces is hence no longer concerned primarily with nation-building, which is seen as mission impossible. And it is no accident that discussion of ungoverned spaces coincides with a shift in U.S. policy away from constructing a functioning, normatively legitimate state through its War on Terror interventions in Afghanistan (since 2001) and Iraq (2003–2011). Although the United States still analyzes the weaknesses of states with a desire for them to build capacity and take control of their own territory, there is little willingness to engage in time-consuming and cost-intensive interventions for nation-building. The turn away from policies entailing a regime of occupation has led to a transition to a new stage of warfare, one geared to rapid, localized strikes based on high mobility: interventions light. 72
The concept of ungoverned spaces, with its principal emphasis on the extraordinary lawlessness within a space, allows external interventions without any basis in law to appear as legitimate means. Ungoverned spaces are, therefore, conceived in a way that serves the establishment of a territorial definition of a zone in which violence is no longer bound by state order or the rule of (national or international) law but is merely a matter of the attacker’s own choice of instrument or a zone for which specific laws are written which further demarcate such spaces and the kinds of persons that fall under them. 73 Military interventions and other security measures are no longer directed at the national territory as a whole but only at specific areas. In these new spaces of violence, the U.S.-American superpower no longer has to occupy whole countries in order to put them under its control, that is, they no longer appear to be bound by the conventions of warfare that apply to land war. 74 We can see here how the United States is fine-tuning its intervention policies to the conditions of zones of exception that can be far smaller than a whole national territory. This understanding of ungoverned spaces makes them predestined to become the target of covert operations and punitive actions by Special Forces, intelligence operatives, or drone attacks.
The way the concept of ungoverned spaces has developed is, therefore, closely bound up with the development of new military technologies and, more important, with strategies as well as with the question of how organized violence as a means for rule is envisaged in the future. The concept of ungoverned spaces can be employed to legitimize a policy of intervention that is no longer rooted in notions of political responsibility, as expressed for instance in the idea of state-building (as problematic as this concept may be), but based solely on the need to exert control, thus opening the prospect of increasingly undemarcated war. 75 It is also possible, however, to interpret the notion of ungoverned spaces in such a way that it serves as an argument against such a complete removal of the spatial boundaries of war and provides a formula for compromise between territorial containment of interventions and their potentially ubiquitous rapid deployment, for example, through drones in the so-called kill boxes. In order to become clearer on this question, we shall now examine some operationalizations of the new spaces of violence.
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,
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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As reflected in the decision to deploy drones, ungoverned spaces are “wild zone of power”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The casual appeal to the vernacular of law enforcement—“We finally got the perp!”—is by no means exceptional, and is embedded in the administrative apparatus that authorizes targeted killing and also in the more general juridification of the kill-chain. Military lawyers insist on maintaining what they term a “visual chain of custody” throughout “the prosecution of the target”; they are Defense attorneys not defence attorneys, and these formularies evidently weigh the scales against those who are caught in the militarized field of view.
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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.
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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.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.