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Accidents Don't Just Happen: The Liberal Politics of High-Technology `Humanitarian' War

Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford

From 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. ————————————————————————

Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Vol. 32, No. 3, 595-616 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/03058298030320031101


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