Preface: Militarism and Humanitarianism

This dossier explores some of the ways that contemporary practices of development and humanitarianism have recently come to interpenetrate with military activities. In recent years, counterinsurgency, reconstruction, and aid have all emerged as important elements of contemporary military strategy, drawing on the concepts and tools of emergency care and socioeconomic development. At the same time, the benefits associated with both humanitarianism and development (healthcare, shelter, food, improved economic growth, welfare, opportunity, and personal choice) are increasingly framed as imperatives for achieving security. Given this practical overlap in goals and operations on the ground, it is not always easy to distinguish between militarism, humanitarianism, and development. This dossier asks: What are the consequences of such new configurations, formations, and alliances?

Seen from the vantage point of modernist conceptions of warfare, the confluence of the military with the humanitarian might seem a surprising one. Accounts of the rise of humanitarian thinking and action often depict the humanitarian as the conceptual and practical polar opposite of warfare—a salve and a guard against the horrors of war.¹ "War is cruelty," U.S. general William Tecumseh Sherman remarked in his memoirs. "There's no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over."² The so-called total wars of the twentieth century, which aimed at securing victory by destroying civilian infrastructure and populations, were seen by both pacifists and proponents of this way of war as the very opposite of the humanitarian's ethic of kindness, benevolence, and commitment to reduce suffering and respect the sanctity of individual life. From the point of view of most mid-twentieth-century observers, the notion of "humanitarian war" would have seemed close to oxymoronic.

Yet total war from another perspective may be less the norm than the anomaly. As the essays in this dossier each show in distinct ways, another tradition of nineteenth-and twentieth-century warfare, the colonial tradition of war as a means to subdue and reform a subject people, has provided an important precedent for today's dominant mode of partial warfare that aims not for the total capitulation of a political opponent but rather to win the sympathies of a contested population. While some colonial wars aimed at the annihilation of the subject populations—from the Black Hawk War of 1832 in the United States to the Herero War (1904-7) in German Southwest Africa—other colonial wars sought more moderate solutions to the challenge of rebellion, solutions not infrequently justified at least in part by references to emergent humanitarian ethics.³ All the wars waged by today's great powers in the global south continue this latter historical tradition of warfare.

In scrutinizing the contemporary intersection of humanitarianism and militarism, the dossier of essays included here focuses little on how discourses and rhetorics of humanitarianism or development are used to justify military action (an important but analytically distinct set of questions). Instead, the essays concentrate with special intensity on how developmental and humanitarian "technologies" are being implemented in conjunction with military force (and vice versa). The tightening of the relationship between humanitarianism and the military has taken a variety of different forms. First, Western militaries in the post-9/11 era have emerged as crucial vectors for delivering "humanitarian" or "developmental" benefits, including basic services such as infrastructure, education, and healthcare, both in war zones and in the aftermath of natural disasters. Second, nonmilitary humanitarians have increasingly had to rely on protection from military forces in order to conduct their business in places like Afghanistan or central Africa, as they would otherwise become targets for predators or those opposed to the secular force of their interventions. Third, Western militaries have increasingly begun to try to appropriate knowledge and technology traditionally seen as useful mainly for "development" or humanitarian purposes as instruments of warcraft.

Each of the essays in this dossier takes up different versions of these configurations, helping to put the contemporary interdigitation of militarism and humanitarianism into firmer contextual and historical view. All of them focus, more specifically, on the topic of counterinsurgency (COIN), the old Vietnam-era concept that has found an extraordinary...