Contemporary epistemologies of militarization in the Global South: Palimpsests and accumulative processes in Lampedusa and Lebanon

Introduction

In the aftermath of the failed military coup in Turkey in 2016, thousands of Turks were deputized in so-called Democracy Watches. As they gathered for overnight vigils, the line between military and civic duty was blurred as public squares became sites of mutual surveillance in the name of patriotism. In Rio de Janeiro in 2018, Marielle Franco, an Afro-Brazilian councilwoman heading a committee investigating police brutality in the city’s favelas, was gunned down outside her apartment. Ballistics results showed a match for the weapons used by military police. And, here in the United States, nearly two decades after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the logic of the resultant War on Terror declared by George W. Bush has spidered into “wars” on drugs, immigration, and the inner-city as federal agencies concentrate their policing, intelligence, and military powers on domestic spaces. Though Turkey, Brazil, and the United States evidence unique local forms of militarization, they remain linked by the strength and prevalence of forces which have been deployed to regulate civic relations in times of supposed peace.

While the realms of the civic and of the military have long existed as connected dimensions of governance, recent trends suggest the convergence of the two and demand a critical reappraisal of the phenomenon referred to as militarization. We use the concept of the Global South as a critical lens through which to understand militarization in today’s world, while challenging the now-customary divisions between North and South. Indeed, Euro-American colonial and imperial practices have subjected (and continue to subject) parts of Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East to an experimental politics of the necropolitical. Yet, the directionality of this form of geopolitical influence has doubled back upon itself: climate change, migration, global capitalism, conflict, and other forces have made it impossible to conceive of the world in such binary hemispheric terms. The circulation of peoples, logics, and goods has produced hybrid spaces and a more convoluted path through which to trace militarization. This fluidity impels us to reconceive of the Global South as inclusive of large swaths of North America and Europe in which policing practices, the politics of refugee and immigration management, and the use of military technologies in and on civilian spaces creates a deadly kinship with the racialized and class-determined so-called Global South.

How have scholars defined “militarization” in the past? In Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Enloe, 2000), political scientist and feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe argues that militarization is a “step-by-step process by which a person or a thing gradually comes to be controlled by the military or comes to depend for its well-being on militaristic ideas” (p. 3). This definition highlights a pervasive and processual encroachment during which “many people can become militarized in their thinking, in how they live their daily lives, in what they aspire to for their children or their society, without ever wielding a rifle or donning a helmet” (p. 2). By framing militarization as a process and not as a product of cultural norms and traditions, Enloe leaves room for the possibility of demilitarizing both “equipment and mind-set” (p. 4). Enloe’s is the first study prior to 9/11 to argue for militarization as banal “decisions made by both civilians and people in uniform” (p. 289). It is this normalization, this lack of a specific “military” signifier, that concerns us: without parades, uniforms, and weapons, how do we come to know militarization—in a global context—today?

We propose that contemporary global militarization be understood as part of a continued legacy and consequence of colonial practices and (neo-)imperial logics. Its contemporary manifestations reproduce asymmetric power dynamics to devastating social, political, and economic effect. However, the path of militarization has not been unidirectional: since its initial southbound travels from the Global North, it has undergone various permutations as it traversed the Global South and returned in new disguise to the Global North. It reflects as many local political values and orientations as the geographies it has colonized.

Urban studies scholar Stephen Graham (2011) also understands militarization as a process and articulates within it a trend specific to contemporary society which he calls “new urban militarism.” New urban militarism is “the social construct of a conceptual division between the inside and the outside of a nation or other geographic areas … the normalization of military paradigms of thought, action and policy … and the deployment of a wide range of propaganda which romanticizes or sanitizes violence as a means of righteous revenge or the achievement of some God-given purpose” (Graham, 2011: 60). Graham employs Foucault’s (2003) concept of the “boomerang effect” (p. 103) to explain how militarized technologies of surveillance and control, first tested in the cities of the Global South, have re-appeared in cities throughout the United States and Europe. The city, Graham (2011) argues, marks a mirroring space of existence in both the North and the South—it becomes the lens through which he discusses “the crossover between the military and the civilian application of advanced technology” (p. xiii). In like fashion, we use the concept of the Global South as a critical method for knowing militarization in today’s world, and in so doing, challenge customary divisions between North and South.

While it has become impossible to frame militarization in binary terms, militarization itself continues to divide the world between an “us”—those who are good—and a “them”—those who are evil. “Such Manichean views of the world,” Graham (2011) writes, are also “the driving force behind the new military urbanism” (p. xxvii). The “imaginative geographies” (Gregory, 1995) created as a result have been manifest in discourses such as Orientalism, “a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’)” (Said, 1979: 43), simultaneously fueling and depending upon militarization. Just as Enloe argued for a process of demilitarization dependent upon a change in collective values and mindsets, Graham argues that it is only in creating a set of counter-geographies which challenge the Manichean world-division at the core of militarization that we can begin to dismantle it. In our understanding, demilitarization begins by deconstructing the ways in which post-conflict memory reckons (or fails to reckon) with the multiple layers of militarization, especially in countries with very recent histories of imperialism. In our case studies—Lampedusa and Lebanon—we show how this deconstruction happens only selectively insofar as each layer must be examined on its own before tracing its legacy in our reality. This is indeed a significant undertaking. In this article, we explore how the documentary film and the museum can be mediums that unveil and break apart the cumulative nature of militarization. Because both are highly visual means of representation and communication, they are able to show us where these histories intersect as well as where blind spots remain—the latter, sometimes unintentionally.

Political scientist Naomi Klein (2016) argues that militarization is a product of a set of racist and orientalist narratives that “allow the powerful to discount the lives of the less powerful.” In an essay on climate change, she maps the interconnections of the world’s contemporary crises, which, we argue, share in common militarized infrastructures and actors. ¹ Klein cites as an example Eyal Weizman’s study, The Conflict Shoreline, which highlights how an increase in US drone attacks in the Middle East coincides with the drought currently affecting the aridity line, the border that marks the beginning of the desert. This is to say that the consequences of climate change and militarized practices in already vulnerable geographies multiply upon themselves, at times in unexpected ways. Indeed, the movement of borders—natural and manmade—has prompted actions by Western powers in reaction to what is treated as a perpetual state of emergency. In Violent Borders (2016), political geographer Reece Jones (2016) understands the border as inherently violent, provocatively dubbing the European Union “the world’s deadliest border” (p. 12). We recall here Gregory’s neologism “imaginative geographies” used to describe the Manichean ideals which separate peoples into “us” and “them,” those who “belong” and those who do not. The nation-state, its borders, and—glossing Graham—its cities, become laboratories for both a politics of militarization and its justification.

Our study of contemporary epistemologies of militarization in the Global South begins on this very border, with the Italian island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean. Historian Derek Lutterbeck (2006) articles that, in today’s Mediterranean, migration is seen by European countries as a “security risk” (p. 59), and thus is treated as a phenomenon to be contained and policed; yet, it is simultaneously a “humanitarian challenge” (p. 59) catalyzing the efforts of numerous international NGOs. The two approaches are at odds but place both parties in a position of needing to quickly adapt to changing “migratory patterns” (Lutterbeck, 2006: 60) which, paradoxically, change as a direct result of European policing. The “deployment of more and faster patrol boats and the use of … military-style surveillance equipment” (Lutterbeck, 2006: 77) across the Mediterranean is then justified by leaders of European nation-states who point toward the growing intricacy of smugglers’ networks, themselves an adaptation to the increased militarization of the Southern European border. This vicious cycle of violence is similar to the one playing out on the US–Mexico border. ²

The cycle is also reminiscent of the Cold War years: Lutterbeck argues that the dividing line that once existed between East and West has now shifted to one that divides North and South (p. 78). Italy is one of several sites that may be considered ground zero for this shift: “once almost exclusively concerned with monitoring its Adriatic coast and illegal immigration from Albania” (Lutterbeck, 2006: 77) and other Eastern bloc countries, it has now become one of the main protagonists “controlling the Channel of Sicily and clandestine migration from Libya” (p. 77). In recent years, Southern European countries have sought the collaboration of North African countries, namely, Morocco and Libya, incentivizing these actors to help stem migration with various economic and military packages which intensify violence against migrants before they have even arrived at the Mediterranean Sea. Roping the northern fringes of Africa into this policing network implicitly extends the space of the Mediterranean beyond its given geographic borders. Architect and cartographer Lorenzo Pezzani (2011), whose Forensic Oceanography project investigates the militarization of the Mediterranean, imagines the sea as a “complex force field that organizes system of movement across vast geographical scales but requires us to rethink both geographical (sea/land) and political (interior/exterior) spatial binaries” (p. 305). By including the Maghreb among the spaces affected by the so-called “migration crisis,” Pezzani’s (2011) study further extends the reach of the Mediterranean well into Sub-Saharan Africa, making the Sahara “a mirror of the other sea, the Mediterranean” (p. 308). The migratory flows between Northern Africa and Europe are but a repetition, if not a continuation, of trans-Saharan circulations (Pezzani, 2011: 308).

Thinking about the Mediterranean as a force field as opposed to a border highlights an aspect of the current migratory practices that often gets lost. Lampedusa is an ideal location through which to visualize the combined impact of these forces because it is officially part of Italy, a country that belongs to the G7 but rests only 70 nautical miles from the shores of Africa. Literary critic Joseph Pugliese (2009) borrows the Foucauldian concept of the heterotopia to analyze the genealogy of Lampedusa as simultaneously a site of control and a site of freedom: it hosts both a migrant rescue center as well as the popular tourist destination of Rabbit Beach. As a heterotopic space “temporally juxtaposing two absolutely dichotomous figures—the wealthy tourist from the Global North and the utterly disenfranchised refugee from the Global South—within the same geographical space” (Pugliese, 2009: 664), Lampedusa functions as a critical lens to understand inequities based on class, race, and gender, their bearing on militarization, and why the latter has become so easy to accept.

The century-long history of colonization and militarization in Lampedusa is often made invisible in media accounts about the contemporary migration “crisis” portrayed in the media. But as Pezzani (2011) argues, because legacies of colonial struggles are deeply embedded in Italy and Libya, it is “from colonialism that we have to start to track the genealogy of the contemporary border regime” (p. 305). ³ In 1911, 35,000 Italian soldiers arrived in Tripoli. Unprepared for their colonial campaign, their quest for control of Libya lasted for more than 20 years, a conflict marked by modern weapons such as mustard gas and, for the first time in warfare history, military aircrafts. In 1934, Italy finally gained control of the territory that we know today as Libya, a stretch of land that comprises two regions that have historically been divided: Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. ⁴ The invasion of Libya and the construction of the Italian empire fostered the myth of an Italic race (Re, 2010) that found its heritage in the Roman Empire. Northern Africa, or the so-called fourth shore, provided an “Italian” alternative for the numerous Southern Italian peasants who would otherwise have left for the Americas (Welch, 2016). The colonization of Libya also meant that the internal racism which had been directed toward southerners could now be externalized. Simultaneously, Lampedusa and neighboring Mediterranean islands were converted into penal colonies, de facto prisons where the new Italian kingdom dispatched their political enemies from the south, and later, interned anti-colonial leaders from Libya. That Lampedusa today remains a camp of sorts, receiving disenfranchised bodies on its shores and collecting them in an enclosed “safe” space, awakens what post-colonial scholar Sandra Ponzanesi (2018) calls “the elaboration of a new ‘post-colonial consciousness’” (p. 132). This consciousness, we argue, exists buried within the island itself; it is only a matter of choosing to make the militarization of Lampedusa, not only the one displayed internationally in the media but also the other one, embedded in the social and economic fabric of the island, visible.

The possibility of visibility is manifested in Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea), which won the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2016. More than simply a documentary of the migration crisis in Lampedusa, it is a high-quality aesthetic work that raises questions about what militarization looks like and how we represent it. It is notable that Rosi’s film does not show the material consequences of the island’s militarization on its people: the Collettivo Askavusa—a group of Lampedusa-based activists attempting to demilitarize the island and expose its function as the Fortress of Europe—astutely note this in a 2016 blog. ⁵ Nonetheless, Rosi’s film carefully juxtaposes sequences of the islanders’ everyday life alongside military rescue operations for migrants in a way that attends to the quotidian, banal ways in which civilians become entangled. This selective editing also occurs in our second case study of Lebanon, in which we outline how three sites mediate not only memories of sectarian civil war but also Lebanon’s broader history of militarization. The curators of these spaces struggle to articulate a pluralist account of Lebanon’s palimpsestic sites, sometimes selecting only one layer of this history to mediate.

Fuocoammare revolves around Samuele, a 12-year-old boy who lives on the island with his father, a fisherman, and his grandmother. Rosi films segments of Samuele’s everyday life on the island: going to school; visiting the doctor; hanging out on the boat with his father; and playing with his slingshot. Parallel to these scenes from Samuele’s everyday life, Rosi films two military rescue operations and presents footage taken from inside the Centro di Primo Soccorso e Accoglienza (CPSA), the island’s First Aid and Reception Center. Though Samuele never gives the viewer the impression that he is cognizant of the latter world, or of the interactions between it and his world, the viewer should note that Samuele is unaffected by his environment. Indeed, in many scenes in which Samuele overlooks, or is on the sea, the viewer may glimpse a military “rescue” boat on the horizon. At one point, while learning how to row, he becomes trapped between two boats of the Guardia Costiera (Coast Guard)—the boats, which the media has taught us to recognize as rescue boats, briefly threaten Samuele’s life: if it had not been for a friend nearby, Samuele’s boat would have capsized. We can think of Samuele’s entrapment between the two boats as a symbol of the encroachment of military infrastructure on the island.

Another sequence highlighting Lampedusa’s role in today’s geopolitical order consists of a scene in which Samuele’s grandmother reminisces about the tempo di guerra (time of war) during World War II (Fire at Sea 41:40). She explains to Samuele that the fishermen could not go upon the sea at night due to the danger from rockets—their glare, she recalls, made the sea look red, a phenomenon which gave rise to the expression “fire at sea.” Through Samuele’s grandmother we learn that military ships patrolled the coast of Lampedusa many decades before the so-called “migration crisis.” In other words, despite the fact that Italy has not been directly involved in any wars in the Mediterranean since the end of World War II, military infrastructure has remained a constant presence on the island. In the absence of rockets that turn the sea red as Samuele grows up, however, how would a young boy like him become aware of the militarization surrounding him? Though Samuele himself may be blind to his surroundings, Rosi has constructed the scene in such a way that the viewer cannot be: following his grandmother’s story, we see Samuele at work on his English homework. The history of the relationship between Lampedusa and US military intervention—extending to the Allies’ use of the island as a port from which to liberate Italy, and NATO’s use of Lampedusa as a base from which attack Libya in 2011—is suggested during this brief exchange between an elderly woman who lived through World War II, and her grandson, who now learns English as a consequence of US imperialism.

Samuele and his grandmother represent two different epistemologies of militarization: the latter, that of direct exposure, and the former, indirect mediation. The indirectness of Samuele’s experience, however, does not make any less real the saturation of military technologies and infrastructures in his home. This then begs the question: what is militarization to Samuele? If there is no tangible proof of active combat such as the sight of fire at sea, in what terms does Samuele understand the presence of the military ships, radio towers, and helicopters that he encounters every day? Samuele cannot set them apart as something “special” because he has internalized the military structures that permeate the island. Moreover, seeing the impermeability of his world to that of the “migrant crisis” also prevents Samuele from perceiving the supposed threat of migrants which legitimizes these infrastructures.

Nonetheless, as the following sequence makes clear, Samuele has an impellent desire to destroy, marking his personal, if unwitting, militarization in his interactions with the island. Immediately after showing us the Navy ships on the horizon, Rosi returns the focus of his camera to Samuele and his friend Tonino: the two are shooting imaginary machine guns—putting their arms together as if each was holding one—making noises imitating automatic weapons. Finally, Tonino says to Samuele, “Enough, you killed ‘em all” (Fire at Sea 43:19) though they continue their imaginary warfare until Samuele says of his imaginary target: “I got him stone-cold dead” (Fire at Sea 43:24). This disconcerting moment, which Rosi places immediately after the description of the tempo di guerra, offers several points for reflection.

First, on whom does Samuele fire his imaginary weapon? Unclear though the nature of the perceived threat may be, Samuele has clearly internalized the binarism embedded within militarized societies which produces an “us” versus “them.” The latter an entity that needs to be annihilated. Second, can we excuse Samuele’s inherently violent (and morally wrong) role-playing as simply a child’s game? Despite the fact that Samuele is crystal clear in his intent to kill the supposed enemy, we are inclined to understand this scene as an innocent part of his childhood: role-play with no real consequences. Undoubtedly, many would have looked upon the scenario differently if instead of Samuele, a white boy from Lampedusa, we witnessed these actions from a black or brown boy from anywhere else in the globe—North or South. ⁶

The sequence closes with Rosi pointing the camera back at the ships on the horizon. Samuele’s war-like moment is thus framed by two still shots depicting the ever-presence of the military in the Mediterranean. While the ships might not actually engage in combat, Samuele does. Through this careful editing, Rosi makes visible something that otherwise can be easily glossed over: the ships involved in these so-called rescue missions are ultimately deadly weapons of war. The unconscious influence of these ships on Samuele can be seen again during a sequence in which Samuele and Tonino anthropomorphize a grove of cactuses by carving eyes and mouths upon the flora and then fire their slingshots at the “human” cactuses. Unlike with the invisible targets of their imaginary guns earlier, in this scene, Samuele literally rehearses combat, inclusive of petards and explosions. “We’re grinding them down” (Fire at Sea 27:54) Tonino remarks. Samuele confirms “Yeah, we’re destroying them” (Fire at Sea 25:54). Thus, even if Samuele never directly meets the “other” world, that of the migrants whose presence is the apparent justification for militarization, his attitudes toward an imagined “other” remain shaped by the environment in which he lives. While Samuele and Tonino attack the cactuses, Rosi takes a shot of the grove from behind the two boys, making the symbolism undeniable: the humanized cactuses, faces without names, bear an uncanny similarity to now-familiar images of migrants on rescue boats—anonymous images that the media often exploit, never mentioning the identity of these people. Despite the media’s visualization of the migrant crisis, we remain unable to see the structure of the crisis, why it started, or the militarized apparatus that controls it. ⁷ As the scene concludes, the rage with which Samuele and Tonino hit the cactuses appears in direct contrast with the gentle care used to “fix” them with tape once the combat is over. “All good,” Samuele pronounces (29:29 Fire at Sea) as the camera lingers on a close-up of the taped-up cactuses for several uncomfortable seconds. Abruptly, Rosi shifts to a night scene at the harbor, where a rescue boat is about to make landfall and the medical staff wait to examine the migrants. Samuele and Tonino’s solicitude in repairing the cactuses they destroyed, and the presence of not only military but also medical personnel at landfall, hints to the humanitarian discourse that at times glosses over the products of militarism. ⁸

In selecting Samuele as the subject of his film about Lampedusa, Rosi unveils what it means to live in a space in which militarization has become normalized. The tension between the kind of militarization made visible by the immediacy of the military ships, and that which is “hidden in plain sight” (Ferguson and Turnball, 1999: xv), is represented by Samuele being diagnosed with an occhio pigro (lazy eye). Due to Samuele’s constant playing with the slingshot, the eye that he closes when aiming this rudimentary weapon, cannot see as it should—thus the diagnosis “lazy eye.” For Samuele’s sight to properly recover, he has to retrain his eye to see. So, too, must we retrain our own lazy eyes in order to reveal the militarization of the everyday marking our contemporary moment and articulate new epistemologies of militarization. The power of Rosi’s documentary lays precisely in stimulating our lazy eye: instead of depicting spectacular images of migrants aboard rescue boats, or the destruction occurring to Lampedusa’s ecosystem and economy, Rosi asks the audience to reflect upon how Lampedusa’s militarization, an accumulative process, has become constitutive of Samuele’s worldview, that of the West, and, implicitly, our own.

At the same time, offering a narrative of the island-prison through Samuele remains a form of selective mediation of the reality of militarization. By contrast, the use of selective mediation by Lebanese curators ambivalently addresses the visibility of the material and spiritual traces left by military occupation and war. In many cases, the curators leave elements of these processes invisible, signaling both the profound uncertainty about how to narrate a pluralist history and a reticence to address the full scope of Lebanon’s recent past. In order to further complicate what a contemporary epistemology of militarization may look like in today’s world, and why the concept of the Global South is a useful lens through which to study militarization, we shift our focus to nearby Lebanon, a tiny country linked to both Christian Western Europe as well as the polytheistic Middle East. Lebanon has spent the last century under various occupations and navigating myriad civil and internationalized conflicts. Though the last of these officially ended in the mid-2000s, evidence of militarization remain: former militia leaders occupy some of the highest levels of political leadership; buildings pockmarked by the scars of bullets signpost ongoing violence and land-rights disputes; and, colorful banners wave on streets in homage to the celebrated “martyrs” who have died in the country’s many recent conflicts. ⁹ Perhaps these scenes suggest the hypervisibility of militarization, misleading us into thinking that there is no need to stimulate our “lazy eye” when studying the consequences of the accumulative processes of colonization and militarization in Lebanon. At closer glance, however, it becomes clear that behind these symbols, in fact, there is no coherent narrative. Quite the opposite, in fact. While in the selective mediation of Fuocoammare, the documentarist Rosi consciously curated a story, here the superimposition of so many narratives attached to the country’s many sects makes it impossible to curate a narrative that accounts for them all. Thus the “lazy eye” here is not so much an unwillingness to acknowledge the legacies of militarization in a deeply contested space, as it was in Lampedusa, but a form of protection against the unveiling of trauma that would otherwise blind us. As both sites make clear, there cannot be just one epistemology of militarization when using the Global South as a lens for studying this process. Instead, there are multiple, and they each attest to the multi-layered nature of militarization as a process.

Despite (or perhaps because of) modern Lebanon’s history as a site of refuge for minoritized ethnic and religious groups, as well as its reputation as a remarkably cosmopolitan and polytheistic part of the Middle East, Lebanon has been the site of warring nations—nations with, within, or without a state—for the last century. In the decades after its independence from France, two civil wars broke out fueled by debates over the role the country would play in a region increasingly characterized by Arab nationalism, and reeling from the impact of the creation of the neighboring state of Israel. In 1975, the second of the two wars begun and would last for 15 years, followed by an additional decade and a half of violence. Lebanon’s internationalized civil war was characterized by Israeli and Syrian occupations, military interventions on the part of the United States and several Western European countries, and the presence of mercenary fighters from the Middle East, Iran, and North Africa. The nearly 20 ethno- and politico-religious groups which make Lebanon so distinct would be split into enmities and alliances which still shift today. In the aftermath of the war, the newly reconstituted Lebanese government declared a general amnesty and embarked upon an extensive campaign to rebuild infrastructure in Beirut.

The question of how to reconstruct and narrate contemporary Lebanese history in the absence of a strong sense of nationalism, or an official national history, has reverberated across multiple scholarly disciplines, not least because it is unclear how to answer this question when the violence and its legacies have not truly passed. Contending with a century-long history of imperial, foreign, and civilian militarization is difficult even when evidence of militarization remains hyper-visible, to say nothing of sites in which this evidence has been obfuscated or invested with new narratives. Three sites in particular illustrate the challenge posed to narrative memory by legacies of militarization: the Karantina district in Beirut, the restored Barakat mansion in downtown Beirut, and the former detention site in Khiam, Southern Lebanon.

From the turn of the 20th century to the late 1970s, Karantina was host to waves of newcomers. The site was historically a quarantine for goods and people dating to the French occupation, before becoming home to Armenians fleeing genocide in the Ottoman Empire. Serving as a refugee camp for several of the intervening decades, this space is emblematic of the layered histories of imperialism and militarization. With the tidal change in Middle Eastern geopolitics midway through the 20th century, the camp became home to displaced Palestinians. The strong association of Karantina with quarantine and refugees was such that the neighboring Maronite Christian Lebanese erected a wall to keep the non-citizens on the city’s periphery. During the initial years of the 1975–1990 civil war, the camp was the site of an infamous massacre by Maronite militias bent on driving Palestinians out of Lebanon. The militias burned Karantina to the ground.

A visitor to this same site today would find only a sprawling warehouse district and, strangely, one of the world’s most popular bars, B018. The architect, Bernard Khoury, deliberately designed the subterranean bar so that it would be level with the floor of the 1920s quarantine. He readily acknowledges that he was motivated to place his bar on such a destitute site because it would defy the narrative of a phoenix-like Beirut resurging from the ashes of war (Salem, 2003: 83). The mythos of the phoenix has informed much of the glamorous post-war rebuilding and post-war luxury consumerism. Sociologist Samir Khalaf (2012) has critiqued this narrative as an example of the country going “adrift” in the aftermath of the war. ¹⁰ Predicting that the site would become a place to “see and be seen,” Khoury intended the irony of requiring owners of expensive cars to use a run-down warehouse district as a parading ground.

Some have cited Lebanon’s hard-partying culture as a symptom of a desire to forget the decades spent at war and an all too-quick embrace of nostalgia-driven and revisionist narratives of pre-war grandeur. Such narratives, of course, elide the reality of the decades prior to the 1975 war spent under imperial mandate or at risk of conflict. Khoury’s project brings to mind Paul Ricouer’s theory that remembering must be a labor-intensive act: one has to recall—as in call back to mind, or summon—otherwise a memory remains dormant. In the case of political violence, however, Ricoeur (2004) muses about the value of forgetting for the sake of moving forward: “Could forgetting then no longer be in every respect an enemy of memory, and could memory have to negotiate with forgetting, groping to find the right measure in its balance with forgetting?” (p. 413). These questions are intimately bound up in the evolving history of Karantina, whose current landscape includes a subterranean edifice whose purpose could not be at greater odds with the century-long history of the site. Today’s Karantina both recalls and forgets the militarized history of the site. The incredibly subtle threads through which Khoury’s nightclub sutures together a 100-year history are thin, causing some to project a more concrete memory agenda onto his work in hopes of articulating B018 direct confrontation with the civil war—which itself accounts for only a fraction of the subterranean site’s history. Khoury cites a perplexing article by a foreign journalist who claimed that Khoury’s construction team had encountered a mass grave from the war during their excavation of the site. The journalist also incorrectly interpreted images of jazz musicians propped up on chairs in preparation for a music exhibition as a display of photographs of the dead and missing from the early-war battles. “Strangely, B018 was recuperated […] as some sort of war memorial. In the beginning I went with the flow,” Khoury acknowledged. “I was very happy with the attention I was getting but after a while I realized I was becoming this fabricated architectural soldier who was really playing on the drama of war and I read all sorts of strange articles, and then I really understood the fantasy that the West has about our part of the world, particularly war.” ¹¹

Though it is debatable that the misinterpretation of his project is reducible to Western fantasies of a war-torn Middle East, Khoury’s comment reveals the extent to which globalizing logics limit our ability to see local particularities. In this case, it would appear that just as cultures of militarization have been exported, imported, and transformed according to various spatio-temporal contexts, so, too, has the global politics and expectations of memory practices. While B018 may be dissatisfying as a site of politicized memorialization, it nonetheless revives—albeit subtly—a portion of a (literally) buried history. As Khoury observed, after the camp’s destruction in the late 1970s, few would openly discuss Karantina. The silence is especially remarkable considering that refugee camps continue to prominently mark Lebanon’s landscape, populated as they are by decades-long displaced Palestinians and, more recently, Syrians. Indeed, the tiny Mediterranean country now hosts the most refugees per capita, and its military subjects refugees to curfew, deportation, raids, and harassment. Undoubtedly in a bid to avoid bringing more attention to the presence of “others” on Lebanese soil in light of the country’s tumultuous history, the Lebanese state has done its best to make these camps invisible and illegitimate pockets of exception. It is precisely in this context that B018 remains an ambivalent lieu de memoire—marking a Lebanese variant of an occhio pigro, “lazy eye.”

The role of the Lebanese state in regulating memory can also be seen through the case of Bayt Bayrut, a restored Ottoman-era mansion which became the domicile of snipers during the civil war. The evolution from the original plans for the building to its current status suggests an answer to whether Beirutis are ready to excavate the process by which a city and its civilians became militarized. The building now known as Bayt Bayrut was a residential building owned by a wealthy Lebanese family, the Barakats. Originally built in 1924, the edifice’s neo-Ottoman construction was a landmark of bourgeois society. Its facade has since been partially destroyed by bullet holes (not an uncommon sight in this city) and graffiti coats some of the internal walls. At the war’s end, the Barakat family planned to have the building demolished, but the architect of the Bayt Bayrut project, Mona El Hallak, successfully petitioned the city to take it over in 2003. Since 2008, El Hallak worked to design and construct a museum of the civil war from the building. In implicit acknowledgement of the complexity of the politics of memory in Beirut, El Hallak made clear to establish that her vision for the site was one in which patrons could discuss the experience of war—not the politics of it (Fordham, 2017). Indeed, in an interview with National Public Radio in 2017, Beirut’s governor opined that “a museum covering the civil war now is a good idea” and suggested that the delayed opening was due to bureaucratic as opposed to political concerns. This notwithstanding El Hallak’s insistence that a museum discussing the war would bother many, including her own parents.

In the end, it seems, politics were unavoidable. After myriad delays—including speculation about disagreements among various confessional politicians—the museum did indeed open its doors in 2018, but to a limited-run exhibition featuring contemporary art from the Middle East. The website now advertises the project as a museum “Dedicated to the history of the city of Beirut since the 19th century” and advertises its eventual auditorium, a gift shop, a coffee shop, and media library. Beirut remains challenged by the question of how to create a museum in, of, and about a palimpsest of the city’s history “underscored by the recent history of the building”—a history of militarization for which a narrative consensus has not yet been reached. Was shifting the narrative of a landmark from a specific acknowledgment of post-colonial war to a broader chronology of the city helpful or harmful? How would we evaluate this decision if the alternative were silence, relegating these sites to abandonment or destruction? Is it ethically justifiable, even if politically savvy, to downplay the conditions which made the building a museum and to treat them as incidental to the building’s narrative as an index of Beirut’s contemporary history? Nicole Loraux and Paul Ricoeur understood amnesty such as the general amnesty announced at the conclusion of Lebanon’s war in 1990 as a “commanded” or “institutional forgetting” separated by only a “thin line of demarcation” (Ricoeur, 2004: 453–455) from amnesia. The act of wiping clean the proverbial slate, they postulate, euphemistically signaled erasure. For theorists such as Ernest Renan and Maurice Halbwachs, this post-conflict political amnesia was a pre-requisite to social cohesion in the modern nation-state.

A final example of the negotiation of memories of militarization in Lebanon can be found in Southern Lebanon. Although Beirut has dominated historical narratives and creative representations of the Lebanese civil war alike, rendering the city a synecdoche for the country, other regions have had their own distinct experiences with pre- and post-colonial militarization. This reality is reflected in local practices of memory, including at the site of a former prison in Southern Lebanon. Claire Launchbury (2014) has described the historical trajectory of Khiam, the now non-existent clandestine prison as having gone “from barracks, to prison, to museum, to ruin” (p. 516). The edifice’s history began in 1933 during the French mandate when imperial soldiers used the outpost as a headquarters for their regional army. After independence in 1943, the desert outpost was taken over by the Lebanese Army. In 1978, it was taken over from the defunct military by the militia known as the Southern Lebanese Army (SLA). The SLA used the site as a clandestine detention and torture center with the unofficial backing and material support of the Israeli army who occupied Lebanon until 2000. The prison’s existence was initially denied by both Israel and the SLA; they collaborated to combat the Shi’a militia, Hizbullah, quashing resistance in their territories. Even after the SLA permitted a visit from the International Red Cross in 1985, the SLA and Israeli Defense Forces banned the Red Cross from reporting on what they had seen (Lavie, 1997: 35). The site continued to remain a black hole for those who ran afoul of the SLA until 2000—10 years after the civil war had officially ended.

In 2000, Hizbullah took over the site, turning it into a museum where former detainees volunteered as tour guides (Deeb, 2008: 393; Launchbury, 2014: 516). The compromised infrastructure was preserved, lending it an “un-sterile and raw” air, and highlighting that the history it preserved was “just lived” (Deeb, 2008: 393). A solitary confinement cell and an electric pole used to torture prisoners were among the few standing items in the prison’s ruins. But in 2006, as outright war renewed between Hizbullah and Israel, the Israeli air force bombed the musealized archive of their occupation. The bombing of the prison was not only an attempt to destroy evidence but also to prevent the legitimization of a nation-state model of memory as practiced by a single political party inimical to Israeli interests. Even in an era of hyper-musealization, to borrow a concept from Andreas Huyssen, the right to erect monuments or museums is still—like the right to declare war—an act of the state declared in the interest of the nation. Hizbullah’s cooptation of this practice was tantamount to an attempt to “construct [its own] citizenry” (Deeb, 2008: 373). Indeed, the possibility of turning the French barracks-Israeli/SLA prison into a lieu de memoire for Shi’a Lebanese in the south remained viable—considerably more so than similar projects in Beirut—united as they were by shared experience and considerably fewer disagreements as to the nature of the campaign led by foreigners and their domestic proxies. The organization’s decision to turn Khiam into a museum was an exceptional if short-lived example of institutionalizing a story of militarization.

And yet, it was no more than that: a story. It, too, remained problematic in its selectivity. It seems as if, just like we have seen in Fuocoammare, an epistemology of militarization mediated by the Global South cannot but be plural in nature, precisely because of the accumulative nature of the process of militarization. Left unaddressed by the former museum are the histories of the French military occupation of Southern Lebanon, as well as that of the Lebanese national army, to say nothing of the foreclosure of other narratives about the militarization of civilians who joined Hizbullah. By framing the site’s history in a certain way, Hizbullah erases both itself and a broader history of a region of Lebanon whose landscape has been all but permanently altered by foreign or other regional powers for a century.

Karantina, Bayt Bayrut, and Khiam are representatives of an array of options for how histories of militarization can be, and are, remembered—or not. While the sites in Beirut are deeply palimpsestic in their imperial, colonial, post-colonial, and militarized histories, the heterogeneity of the population and their equally variable orientations toward memory work and its purpose impacts whether and how periods of militarization are discussed. Farther from the city, however, and more deeply in homogeneous territory, the establishment of a memory culture mimics the model of the nation-state’s infrastructure of memory. Though the process entails a less fraught negotiation, a narrative enunciated from a peripheral region (peripheral not only in a geographic sense but also in its remove from the capital city’s declaration of nationwide peace) continues to risk obscurity, even in the absence of an official narrative.

Lampedusa and Lebanon both serve as case studies for paradigms for contemporary epistemologies of militarization within and beyond the fluid contours of today’s Global South. They are deeply contested sites whose dense histories are embodied in generations of inhabitants, with consequences that resonate in real-time. The future of these sites and their populaces are open-ended. Memories and their narrative representations are still, in many ways, contingent on current events. The contributors to this special issue on contemporary epistemologies of militarization in the Global South delve into both the legacies and contemporary manifestations of militarization on the US–Mexico border; in East Africa; between Guatemala and Israel; in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; and the East Asian trans-Pacific. In their analysis of the sites, agents, processes, and movements of the phenomenon we collectively understand as militarization, the articles lay bare the entanglements between politics; military logics and technologies; capitalist economies; as well as the quieter, yet equally forceful, systems of racialization and gendering that accompany a militarized agenda.

Unsurprisingly, the policies, history, and practices of the United States are integral to several of these accounts of a militarizing global order. Indeed, it is impossible to talk about contemporary global practices of militarization without mentioning the War on Terror and the outcomes to which it has given rise. The role of the United States appears in nuanced accounts of the forms of agency exerted by both the Global North and the Global South, the local transformations undergone in the process of exporting the logic of the War on Terror, and the underlying geopolitical imaginaries that are at stake for all parties involved. In “Drone Futures,” for instance, Camilla Fojas, a media studies scholar, explores the technological advancements which have accelerated surveillance and policing on the US–Mexican border in the wake of the War on Terror. She calls attention to the myriad ways in which the politics of this border war are simply a newer iteration of narratives of the frontier, whose origins can be found in the genre of the American Western and which are equally dependent upon a complementary relationship between state discourse and the imaginings of popular culture.

Of course, while the actions of the United States have shaped much of the discourse delimiting the contours of the Global North and South and defining present-day militarization, these exported paradigms have taken on lives of their own in the regions to which they have traveled. In “#SomeoneTellCNN,” political scientist Samar al-Bulushi explores the local transformations enacted upon the logic, rhetoric, and actions of the US War on Terror in East Africa. She charts how the circulation of a policy from the Global North has fostered a global economy which continues to subordinate the Global South, even as its political leaders argue for a reshaping of this geopolitical imaginary. The reshaping exempts certain countries—placing them on par with the Global North—while continuing to subordinate others. In these reappropriated logics, militarization is normalized and rapidly spawns new progeny.

The exportation, transformation, and re-packaging of militarized values from the Global North to the Global South is further explored in “Enclosing Embassies,” historian Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn’s analysis of the collaboration between the Israeli government and Guatemalan dictator, Efrain Rios Montt, in the 1980s. He analyzes the transplantation of settler colonial practices designed to weaponize the environment, revamp agricultural practices, and introduce a campaign of ethnic cleansing. As with al-Bulushi’s essay, Cutipa-Zorn’s discussion of the political economy and circulation of militarism highlights the formidable agency the Global South has in shaping the manifestations of contemporary militarization. Notwithstanding this dismal outlook, Cutipa-Zorn’s essay gestures in its conclusion to the possibilities of resisting militarized racial capitalism.

Diana Coleman’s anthropological article attends to the militarized response of the United States to refugee migration, and now, climate change-induced migration in “El Sur Tambien Existe.” Her research demonstrates how the US military based in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a former torture warehouse, has morphed into the site of an experimental US military-backed effort to intern migrants fleeing the consequences of climate change. Coleman’s essay demonstrates how the US military-industrial-carceral complex, so carefully honed over the last several decades, prepares to offer itself as a solution to global environmental conditions, highlighting the banalization of militarism.

The special issue concludes with literary scholar Jeong Eun We’s “When the Divine Wind Blows on Ye.” We’s historico-literary essay on militarization in the East Asian trans-Pacific traces the development of a decolonial ideological and theoretical framework, articulated in conversation with writers from the Caribbean. This framework, she argues, imagines a post-militarized world order: one which delinks modernity—itself a fraught concept—from militarization, undoing the Manichean divisions underscoring the logic of militarization through allegorical counter-geographies and radically deconstructing memory in service of a more promising future.

Taken as a whole, the contributions to this issue present a multidisciplinary epistemology of militarization in and with the Global South. They argue for an understanding of militarization that is process-based, more so than material, and which is as reliant on the civil sphere as it is on the state, the transnational, and the international. The articles reveal a Janus-faced practice which blurs the lines between policing and militarizing, domestic disenfranchised and the stateless non-subject. Militarization insidiously blends concern with (trans)national security with environmental politics and the everyday. In all these ways, and more, contemporary practices, logics, and aesthetics of militarization continue to reprise the problematic introduced by the advent of the modern nation-state: an imagined geography predicated on belonging, otherness, and borders.