An Insurgency of Things: Foray into the World of Improvised Explosive Devices

Abstract

IED attacks in Afghanistan went from 797 attacks in 2006 to 15,222 attacks in 2012. In that time, 53,997 IEDs and their human collaborators injured more than 11,416 US soldiers and killed over 1,298 soldiers in Afghanistan. If you include Iraq, IEDs account for almost two-thirds of all US soldiers wounded and killed in both wars. This article investigates why something as low-tech as an improvised bomb is so significant to contemporary warfare. The article contends that, contrary to the effort to “beat” the IED by the US Department of Defense, the IED is not a thing. The IED, I argue, is a condition of possibility present in almost all of contemporary life. IEDs are native inhabitants of a world of global relations and things that hover on the edge between tool and weapon. IEDs are the weaponization of the throbbing refuse, commerce, surplus, violence, rage, instant communication, population density, and accelerating innovation of contemporary global life. IEDs are ambient, integrated, and distributed by methods that make it difficult to detect and combat. Unlike precision weapons, IEDs are neither smart nor dumb. They are, I argue, environmentally aware.