Killing Civilians: Thinking the Practice of War

Much discussion of the ethics of war revolves around civilians’ alleged special claim to protection, expressed in the principle of non-combatant immunity. This article shows that its supporters do not give persuasive reasons for why civilians should be protected from deliberate harm ahead of combatants. The principle moreover problematically relies on the significance of intention. Intriguingly, the principle is defended in the face of recognising these issues. Its defenders argue that the principle must be maintained because without it we would be unable to distinguish legitimate uses of political violence from mass murder and terrorism. This article argues instead that the principle's role in making permissible political violence classified as ‘war’ must be considered: it works to enable what it seeks to prevent, namely making the killing of civilians acceptable. </jats:p

Culturally sensitive war? The Human Terrain System and the seduction of ethics

Since around 2005, efforts have been made within the US military to highlight the significance of culture or the ‘human terrain’ for counterinsurgency operations. The US Army responded to the asserted ‘cultural knowledge gap’ by establishing an experimental programme called the Human Terrain System (HTS), which involves deploying social scientists alongside combat forces. While HTS was received favourably in the US mainstream media, it has been fiercely criticized by anthropologists in particular, who argue not least that participation in the programme would constitute a violation of their professional ethics, which require them to protect their research subjects. This article explores the anthropologists’ critique and its limitations, arguing that it fails to tackle the problem of ethics deployed as a supposedly extra-political standard that can serve to (de)legitimize political projects. In particular, it is unable to dislodge the fantasy of protection at the heart of the argument for HTS. </jats:p

The political import of deconstruction—Derrida’s limits?: a forum on Jacques Derrida’s specters of Marx after 25 Years, part I

Jacques Derrida delivered the basis of The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International as a plenary address at the conference ‘Whither Marxism?’ hosted by the University of California, Riverside, in 1993. The longer book version was published in French the same year and appeared in English and Portuguese the following year. In the decade after the publication of Specters, Derrida’s analyses provoked a large critical literature and invited both consternation and celebration by figures such as Antonio Negri, Wendy Brown and Frederic Jameson. This forum seeks to stimulate new reflections on Derrida, deconstruction and Specters of Marx by considering how the futures past announced by the book have fared after an eventful quarter century. Maja Zehfuss, Antonio Vázquez-Arroyo and Dan Bulley and Bal Sokhi-Bulley offer sharp, occasionally exasperated, meditations on the political import of deconstruction and the limits of Derrida’s diagnoses in Specters of Marx but also identify possible paths forward for a global politics taking inspiration in Derrida’s work of the 1990s