File(s) not publicly available
'Accidents don't just happen: the liberal politics of high-tech humanitarian war'
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-07, 17:32 authored by Patricia OwensFrom the bombing of Serb residential neighbourhoods to the destruction of Afghan refugee convoys, a series of dramatic events in recent military campaigns have come to be labelled 'accidents'. From the vantage point of a wider cultural and political history of technology, this article suggests that civilian deaths are being constructed as permissible, not impermissible, when normalised as 'accidents'. For while the number of 'accidents' involving civilian death may increasingly be known and the potential of high-tech warfare to produce disaster may also be recognised, small massacres of civilian populations are nonetheless - and perhaps necessarily- becoming normalised as part of the post-9.11 order of entrepreneurial (pre-emptive) war. Some of the most important military dimensions of recent campaigns - 'accidents' in which civilians or Western military personnel were killed or injured - need to be understood as both technological acts and spaces of political subjectivity partly productive of liberal-state 'humanitarian' war as currently conceived.
History
Publication status
- Published
Journal
MillenniumISSN
0305-8298Publisher
SAGE PublicationsExternal DOI
Issue
3Volume
32Page range
595-616Department affiliated with
- International Relations Publications
Full text available
- No
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2012-02-06Usage metrics
Categories
No categories selectedKeywords
Licence
Exports
RefWorks
BibTeX
Ref. manager
Endnote
DataCite
NLM
DC