Civilians and the Technoscientific Thoughts Used to Think Them: Exploring the Ontologies of Difference that Divide Entangled forms of Existence

Hakemuksen tiivistelmä

One of the most striking contrasts of contemporary conflict is the extensive institutional energy seemingly spent mitigating civilian casualties, and the empirics of high levels of civilian casualties.That is, the proliferation of humanitarian gestures in military practice has seemingly had little effect on the ascending arc of civilian casualty rates since the 1900s. Illustratively, such gestures have widely encompassed an increasing turn towards military legalism and the increasing adoption of various so-called precision technology across the targeting cycle through which it is possible to, for example, model expected collateral harm of the individual strike or extensively gather data on possible targets. The “inevitable” high level of civilian harm witnessed in current practice therein emerges from decisions, plans, and actions whose consequences are at least seemingly foreseen and extensively taken into account by both military practitioners and lawyers alike. This naturally leads us to the question: How can we simultaneously speak of the fact that it has become ‘business-as-usual’’ in terms of large-scale permissible civilian death, and the proliferation of humanitarian objectives and technologies of precision seeking to address the plight of the noncombatant? While the academic commentary seeking to confront this tension between the “awful but lawful” has generated a wealth of important contributions contextualizing regulatory effectiveness, there has been a seeming reluctance to confront the fragility of the civilian concept as a mode of organizing and assembling the political, ethical, and legal relation to permissible violence in the Western imaginary. On this basis, and despite its common perception as the bulwark against indiscriminate warfare, I argue in my three-fold exploration of the assembly of the civilian concept that cuts, blurs, and reduces complexity in ways that come to encourage the infliction of violence above its restraint.