Black Hawk Down Research Articles

Rescuing Masculinity: Captivity, Rescue and Gender in American War Narratives

A traditional way to persuade young American people they should go to war is to promise them war produces conditions in which they will behave heroically. This tack has been especially effective with young American men, who often learn to equate heroics with masculinity, ostensibly a single, immutable state of power and control that once achieved cannot be altered, and one that occurs in male bodies exclusively. As reflected in many popular American war narratives of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, however, instead of war's bolstering and confirming masculinity, what can be observed are repeated instances of males attempting to perform this purportedly stable gender condition and, instead of exhibiting traditional forms of masculinity, the men manifest traditional femininity, of being out of control and in need of help. This paradox is especially evident in the trope of captivity and rescue, when in trying to perform heroic masculinity men make decisions that lead them into forms of captivity and subsequently the least powerful and in control feminine position of having to be rescued. As a result, this trope challenges traditional American masculinity and the persuasive tack used to lure young people into the American military, not only in condemning as foolhardy the John Wayne efforts of those requiring rescue, but also in blurring traditional distinctions between male rescuers and female rescued. Because the captivity and rescue trope reveals how the urgency to perform masculinity ironically can result in the performance of femininity, it clarifies the precarious and mutable nature of masculinity even under war conditions that, according to the truism, are supposed to convert a (feminine) boy into a (masculine) man. While the repercussions of this situation? of being promised a masculinizing condition and finding oneself in its opposite? can be dire enough for the physical, mental and emotional well-being of the individual, the presence of the trope indicates how such masculinist thinking and its repercussions are also dangerously manifested in war narratives at the national and strategic levels. The notion that war is a gateway, if not the gateway, to masculinity normalizes and even makes seem necessary a nation's using combat to resolve its conflicts. Given these conditions, war can appear to be the only and most natural solution. In a discussion about captivity and rescue during combat it might seem crucial to analyze recent films like Blackhawk Down (2001) or Rescue Dawn (2006). Clearly, one might reason, these films, both based on actual events first depicted in written texts, face head-on the issue of masculine gender when male combatants are captured and require rescue. Were there time or space, one might invest in such analysis of the male soldiers in Blackhawk Down who arrogantly enter combat in Somalia with insufficient weapons, plans, and supplies but are armed heavily with militaristic bravado and a firm belief in their masculine ability to get some. One might also explore the depiction in Rescue Dawn of US Navy pilot Dieter Dengler's persistent and finally successful efforts in 1965 to free himself from his captors after having been shot down over Laos. These texts and others like them, however, are concerned with explicit cases of captivity and rescue, thus making the situations they depict seem aberrant, as isolated and atypical cases of immutable masculinity gone awry. What is more compelling instead is how this trope is quietly and unobtrusively embedded in texts that are not explicitly concerned with captivity and rescue, that do not represent as abnormal or crazy males trying to perform masculinity in combat, that try to normalize as masculine a broad range of gender behaviors. Those texts and scenes that gender critics have overlooked as constructing masculinity are more interesting to explore, as is how this trope can be used to elucidate the rhetorics of war used in various genres and at various discursive levels. …

Comments on the <i>Mass Atrocity Response Operations (MARO) Handbook</i>

Comments on the <i>Mass Atrocity Response Operations (MARO) Handbook</i>

Khat in the Horn of Africa: Historical perspectives and current trends

This article looks at the history of the expansion of khat consumption from the traditional chew regions to Western countries and assesses the implication of possible international control for its use and trade in the Horn of Africa. Ten months of initial field work in Ethiopia, three follow up field work, archival work in Ethiopia and Europe, as well as study of available relevant literature. The debut of khat in the West in the 1980s was initially greeted with disdain and indifference. Authorities dismissed it on grounds that the mode of consumption, chewing the leaves for an extended period of time to extract a miniscule amount of the active ingredient, would not be appealing to Western users. Following the Mogadishu debacle of 1993, as depicted in the movie Black Hawk Down, authorities in the West began to express concern that khat was a new drug of abuse. Its trade was increasingly linked with terrorism because of its association with immigrants from the traditional khat use countries in the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Amid hysteria and moral panic, many Western countries classified khat as a highly potent controlled substance, rendering its possession, cultivation, and trade illegal. This article argues that more and more Western governments, out of panic rather than definitive evidence of harm, will be instituting national laws banning the leaves, but khat will not be placed under international control because the scientific evidence of harm is unlikely to rise to a critical mass that would justify its illegalization. States in the source countries would continue to tolerate khat because banning it would be disastrous from an economic and social welfare standpoint. Because of its ambiguous legal position and the unstable nature of its active ingredient, cathinone, khat would not be successfully commoditized as a global commodity or transformed into a highly concentrated illicit drug. In this situation, khat would continue to be chewed in the traditional-use areas of the Red Sea littoral marketed by local syndicates who work with a large network of petty commodity traders.

Challenging the border as barrier: Liminality in Terrence Malick's the thin red line

This paper is about the cultural production and negotiation of borders and boundaries in and through contemporary Hollywood war and action movies. It works on the assumption that the way borders are represented in artifacts of popular culture has an impact on political discourse and, therefore, on border practices. War and action movies are read through the concept of the border, i.e. the way in which conventions of representing self and other, friend and foe, give rise to epistemological and topographical barriers limiting the subject positions available within a particular movie discourse are sketched out. After having assessed these border effects in Aliens, Black Hawk Down, and 300, the article turns to The Thin Red Line. The concept of liminality is introduced in order to describe the techniques through which Malick's movie challenges and disrupts the notion of borders as barriers interlocking self and other in relations of mutually exclusive hostility. In reconfiguring the border as a zone of contact and negotiation, liminality enables a subversion of the subject positions implied by these barriers and enables a reconstitution of both the divided entities, effectively turning dogs‐of‐war back into human beings.

Rethinking State–building in a Failed State

As warships from a dozen nations patrol the waters off Somalia, trying to stem the piratical tide, the international community is once again trying to rebuild a centralized government in Mogadishu ...

Difficult transitions: foreign policy troubles at the outset of presidential power

New presidents have no honeymoon when it comes to foreign policy. Less than three months into his presidency, for example, John F. Kennedy authorized the disastrous effort to overthrow Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs. More recently, George W. Bush had been in office for less than eight months when he was faced with the attacks of September 11. How should an incoming president prepare for the foreign policy challenges that lie immediately ahead? That's the question Kurt Campbell and James Steinberg tackle in this compelling book. Drawing on their decades of government service --in the corridors of Capitol Hill, the intimate confines of the White House, the State Department, and the bare-knuckles Pentagon bureaucracy --Campbell and Steinberg identify the major foreign policy pitfalls that face a new presidential administration. They explain clearly and concisely what it takes to get foreign policy right from the start. The authors set the scene with a historical overview of presidential transitions and foreign policy including case studies of such prominent episodes as the Black Hawk Down tragedy in Somalia that shook the Clinton administration in its first year and the Bush administration's handling of the collision between a U.S. reconnaissance plane and a Chinese fighter jet in the spring of 2001. They pinpoint the leading causes of foreign policy fiascos, including the tendency to write off the policies of the outgoing administration and the failure to appreciate the differences between campaign promises and policy realities. Most important, they provide a road map to help the new administration steer clear of the land mines ahead. America's next president will confront critical foreign policy decisions from day one. Dif ficult Transitions pr ovides essential guidance for getting those choices right.

Black Hawk Down and the Framing of Somalia: Pop Culture as News and News as Pop Fiction

Black Hawk Down and the Framing of Somalia: Pop Culture as News and News as Pop Fiction

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Have You Seen Any Good Films Lately?’ Geopolitics, International Relations and Film

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Have You Seen Any Good Films Lately?’ Geopolitics, International Relations and Film

Warrior geopolitics: Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and The Kingdom Of Heaven

The “war on terror” and remilitarization of political anxiety in the aftermath of September 11th in the West, is both facilitated and challenged by representations of geopolitical danger and the supposed necessity for warriors to fight wars in distant lands. Ridley Scott's three movies, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and most recently The Kingdom of Heaven explore the morality and identity of warriors. They do so in exotic landscapes and settings that emphasize the confrontation with danger as external and frequently unknowable; political violence is presented as something that has both simple and very complicated geographies. The public discussion of the necessity for warfare and “intervention” in Western states is enmeshed in discourses of moralities, rights and “just war”. The professional Western warrior, whether a special forces operative or garrison soldier in peacekeeping mode, is a key figure of the post September 11th era, physically securing the West, and simultaneously securing its identity as the repository of virtue against barbaric threats to civilization. These themes are key to Ridley Scott's work. Analyzing them in terms of the warrior, empire and the particular geographies of combat adds a specifically military dimension to the critical geopolitical literature on war and representation.

Revisiting the Iranian Hostage Crisis

O 4 November 1979, a group of radical Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in a surge of idealistic zeal. Demanding the extradition of their former leader, the Shah of Iran, the students held 52 U.S. citizens hostage for the next 444 days. Writing over 25 years later, Black Hawk Down author Mark Bowden examines the crisis in his latest book, Guests of the Ayatollah. Bowden has accomplished a rare feat—an astutely observed and sympathetic page-turner infused with a keen eye for both detail and the global context. He draws political conclusions from the hostages’ stories, as well as those of the relevant players within the U.S. government, about the driving forces behind U.S.-Iranian antagonism. This technique is effective at times but unconvincing at others. His careful rendering of psychological, emotional, and even trivial details sometimes fails to match up to his sweeping judgments. Nevertheless, Bowden has made a valuable contribution to the study of Iranian history, U.S.Iran relations, and what he calls “America’s war with militant Islam.” Bowden’s removed style—succinct descriptions and unadorned prose—reveals his past career as a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Atlantic Monthly. Like many journalists, his personal opinions are rarely far from the surface. In Guests of the Ayatollah, he demonstrates that he has transitioned from a cut-and-dry reporter to a politically persuasive commentator. He devotes the final chapters of the book—after the hostages have gone home and Iran has plunged fully into the depths of the Islamic revolution—to elucidating his own conclusions about the incident and the larger ‘war’ of which it was a part. He suggests that the students who performed the attack were naive pawns of the radical mullahs and the religious hierarchy’s campaign to institutionalize radical Islam. Bowden bases his conclusion that most of the Iranian population would rather live in a free and pro-Western society on anecdotal evidence, such as that presented in the final sentence of the book. There he quotes a guard standing in front of the “adolescent memorial display” at what was once the U.S. Embassy in Tehran shouting with a ‘thumbs up,’ “Okay for George W. Bush!”1 SAIS Review vol. XXIII, no. 2 (Summer–Fall 2003)

Team Communication with and without Aids for Transmitting Remote Information

The introduction of unmanned vehicles (UVs) and real-time electronic information presentation to military teams is intended to keep Soldiers safe and enable more effective performance. Two game-based experiments were conducted in which teams conducted a time-limited “Black Hawk Down” rescue mission with and without UV-provided information. When UV information was available, it was relayed between team members in face-to-face communication or remotely, with or without electronic maps, and with or without video images from the UV. Three types of analyses were performed. The communication content of the verbal protocol was analyzed and the use of information display technologies and employment of strategies was tabulated. The verbal protocol analyses revealed the push/pull of team communication and common confusions. Results of the technology use and strategy assessment form the basis for recommendations for display design and recommended practice for the use of such technologies in the field.

Human Behavior Models for Agents in Simulators and Games: Part II: Gamebot Engineering with PMFserv

Many producers and consumers of legacy training simulator and game environments are beginning to envision a new era where psycho-socio-physiologic models could be interoperated to enhance their environments' simulation of human agents. This paper explores whether we could embed our behavior modeling framework (described in the companion paper, Part 1) behind a legacy first person shooter 3D game environment to recreate portions of the Black Hawk Down scenario. Section 1 amplifies the interoperability needs and challenges confronting the field, presents the questions that are examined, and describes the test scenario. Sections 2 and 3 review the software and knowledge engineering methodology, respectively, needed to create the system and populate it with bots. Results (Section 4) and discussion (Section 5) reveal that we were able to generate plausible and adaptive recreations of Somalian crowds, militia, women acting as shields, suicide bombers, and more. Also, there are specific lessons learned about ways to advance the field so that such interoperabilities will become more affordable and widespread.

Imagining America at war: morality, politics, and film

Ten films released between 9/11 and Gulf War II reflect raging debates about US foreign policy and what it means to be an American. Tracing the portrayal of America in the films Pearl Harbor (World War II); We Were Soldiers and The Quiet American (the Vietnam War); Behind Enemy Lines, Black Hawk Down and Kandahar (episodes of humanitarian intervention); Collateral Damage and In the Bedroom (vengeance in response to loss); Minority Report (futurist pre-emptive justice); and Fahrenheit 9/11 (an explicit critique of Bush’s entire war on terror), Cynthia Weber presents a stimulating new study of how Americans construct their identity and the moral values that inform their foreign policy. This is not just another book about post-9/11 America. It introduces the concept of 'moral grammars of war', and explains how they are articulated: Many Americans asked in the wake of 9/11 – not only 'why do they hate us?' but 'what does it mean to be a moral America(n) and how might such an America(n) act morally in contemporary international politics? This text explores how these questions were answered at the intersections of official US foreign policy and post-9/11 popular films. It also details US foreign policy formation in relation to traditional US narratives about US identity ‘who we think we were/are’, 'who we wish we’d never been', 'who we really are', and 'who we might become' as well as in relation to their foundations in nationalist discourses of gender and sexuality.This book will be of great interest to students of American Studies, US Foreign Policy, Contemporary US History, Cultural Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Film Studies.

Film, geopolitics and the affective logics of intervention

Abstract This paper explores the way in which questions of affect are implicated in the relation between film and popular articulations of geopolitics. Recent work in political and cultural geography has foregrounded the role of affect in the performative enactment of space and spacing. Drawing upon such work, in this paper we explore the particular role of film as an affective assemblage through which geopolitical sensibilities emerge and are amplified. More specifically, we argue that the relation between cinema and enactments of geopolitical intervention must be understood not only in terms of the way one reproduces or subverts the discursively framed codes and scripts of the other but also in terms of the amplification and anchoring of particular affects through specific tactics and techniques. We illustrate this through a brief discussion of how the relations between the affective and geopolitical logics of intervention are implicated in U.S. involvement in Somalia in 1993 and its depiction in the 2002 film Black Hawk Down. In moving towards a conclusion, we draw upon this engagement with film in order to point to the possibilities for a more expansive engagement with the role played by the logics of affect in contemporary geopolitical cultures.

Public Character and the Simulacrum: The Construction of the Soldier Patriot and Citizen Agency in Black Hawk Down

This essay examines how the film Black Hawk Down functions rhetorically to reconstruct the legitimacy of political and military institutions and policy, and the possibilities for efficacious, responsible citizen agency within the post-September 11, 2001 context of increasingly unconventional warfare. Black Hawk Down reconstitutes popular perceptions of war and the appropriate response of citizens to it. It continues a pattern of contemporary war films established by Saving Private Ryan in 1998, reducing the patriotic purpose of war to surviving and protecting one's fellow soldiers. This pattern is developed through a hyperreal spectacle of war that both encourages audiences to empathize with the dominant “pro-soldier” message and discourages critical public discourse concerning justifications for and execution of military intervention policy.

American history and contemporary Hollywood film

major thesis of this challenging, stimulating book rests on the proposition that the historical record is not fixed, inviolate, and unchanging. Both thoughtful and engaging scholars, McCrisken and Pepper reach fascinating, provocative conclusions. Those interested in the intersection of film and history will appreciate this unique study. Essential.-Choice Magazine Hollywood has always been fascinated by America's past, but never more so than in the past fifteen years. Bringing exciting new perspectives to how and why Hollywood has sought to repicture American history, this book offers analysis of more than twenty mainstream contemporary films, including The Patriot, Amistad, Glory, Ride with the Devil, Cold Mountain, Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line, Pearl Harbor, U-571, Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, Heaven and Earth, JFK, Nixon, Malcolm X, Ali, Black Hawk Down, and Three Kings. Both authoritative and engaging, American History and Contemporary Hollywood Film is the first book to comprehensively explore the post-cold war period of filmmaking, and to navigate the complex ways that film mediates history-sometimes challenging or questioning, but more frequently reaffirming traditional interpretations. The authors consider why such films are becoming increasingly integral to the ambitions of a globally focused American film industry. Structured by historical periods, chapters cover significant events and eras such as the American Revolution, slavery and the Civil War, World War II, the sixties and seventies, civil rights and black nationalism, the Vietnam War, and post-cold war global conflicts. The lessons learned from the examples will be illuminating for general readers and college students alike. Trevor McCrisken is lecturer in American politics and international studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of American Exceptionalism and the Legacy of Vietnam: US Foreign Policy Since 1974. Andrew Pepper is lecturer in English and American literature at Queen's University, Belfast. He is the author of The Contemporary American Crime Novel.

The New Face of Global Hollywood:Black Hawk Downand the Politics of Meta-Sovereignty

This article uses Ridley Scott's 2001 blockbuster film Black Hawk Down to examine the claim that popular film is the “newest component of sovereignty.” While the topic of the film – the 1993 UN/US intervention in Somalia – lends itself to straightforward politicization, this article is equally interested in the film's production history and its reception by global audiences. While initial reactions to the film focused on its ideological commitments (e.g. racism, collusion between Hollywood and the Pentagon, post-September 11th patriotism), these readings continually posed an imagined “America” against “the world.” This article argues that Black Hawk Down is not about sovereignty as traditionally conceived, that is about national interest shaping global affairs. Rather, Black Hawk Down articulates, and is articulated by, a new and emerging global order that operates through inclusion, management and flexibility. Drawing on recent theoretical debates over this new logic of rule, this article illustrates how Black Hawk Down invokes much more diffuse, complex and deterritorialized categories than national sovereignty. In effect, Scott's film goes beyond traditional notions of sovereignty altogether: its production, signification and reception deconstruct simple notions of “America” and “the world” in favor of what Hardt and Negri call “Empire,” what Zizek calls “post-politics,” and what we refer to as “meta-sovereignty.”

Leaving No Warriors Behind: The Ancient Roots of a Modern Sensibility

The ethos of leaving no one behind has traditionally animated military forces distinguished by elite status, closed cultures, and frequent operational isolation (e.g., the French Foreign Legion, US Marines, and US Army Rangers). With the recent approval of the Soldier’s Creed, however, the exhortation to leave no one behind has been formally disseminated throughout the US Army. This creed, embraced by the media and further popularized by Hollywood cinema, dates back to ancient Greece, specifically to the literary models found in Homer. However, profound changes to the nature of warfare as well as to the structure of the force and the society it serves have dramatically altered the moral and political significance of retrieving the fallen for the US military. Renewed emphasis on returning for not only the wounded but also, more provocatively, the dead, reveals the enduring appeal of aristocratic sentiment to a democratic force. This article traces the roots of this gesture back to the classical epics of Homer and Virgil in order to evaluate the implications of its recent reemergence in popular and military culture. The analysis extends to contemporary film ( Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down) and to recent US operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Computer games as political discourse

The paper analyses how the March 1993 American intervention in Somalia is represented in the movie Black Hawk Down and the computer game of the same name. Using a discourse historical approach, the paper combines three methods: (1) analysis of the ‘special operations discourse’ that underlies both film and game, and social actor analysis of the way the parties involved in the conflict are visually and verbally represented; (2) the political history of the conflict represented in the two entertainment products, and the history of the ‘special operations discourse’ itself; and (3) an account of the collaboration between the US military and entertainment industry in the production of both film and game.

On the Political Animal and the Return of Just War

On the Political Animal and the Return of Just War Paolo Palladino (bio) Introduction As recurrent, bellicose arguments over the legitimacy of ‘rogue states’ attest, we are today witnessing a momentous struggle to assert a new international order, wherein recourse to the force of arms can once again be deemed ‘just’ (Elshtain, 2001; see also O’Donovan, 1995). Strikingly, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, which took place on 11 September 2001 and would seem to have done much to advance the legitimacy of this new order, the President of the United States spoke of ‘terrorist parasites that threaten . . . the peace of the world’ (Bush, 2002). Three years later, when commenting on another, arguably related, terrorist attack, this time on Madrid, the President of the European Union warned against ‘a terrible animal’ spreading across the world. Although he did not speak of ‘parasites’ in any explicit way, he also called for greater international cooperation to remove the terrorists on ‘our skin’ (Prodi, 2004). Such repeated zoological figuration of the foe, which would justify the consolidation of the new international order, calls into question the renewal of ‘just war’ as a legitimate juridical concept. Aristotle once argued that ‘man is by nature a political animal’ (Aristotle, 1992: 59; see also Miller, 1995: 27–66). On a conventional reading of this foundational dictum, the meaning of ‘animal’ is relatively secure and ‘political being’ is an additional qualification, appertaining to humans alone. Consequently, those who would transgress the bounds of political life are ‘animals’. The above zoological figuration of the foe is therefore unsurprising. On the other hand, the classical tradition also maintained that war could only be ‘just’ when the parties confronting each other shared a common ideal, be it the realisation of the polis or imperium, but disagreed about who should be sovereign. From this perspective, war against ‘animals’ could only be rendered as ‘just’ with the greatest difficulty, if at all, because this would require the very recognition of something shared that is in fact excluded by the characterisation of the foe as ‘animal’ (Tuck, 1999: 51–77; see also Muldoon, 1979: 1–28). The matter is made more complicated still by an official report, which articulates the new mode of war that goes by the name of ‘network centric warfare’ and seems increasingly important to securing the new international order (Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 1997a; see also Dillon, 2003). Athena’s Camp, as this report is entitled, is replete with images of animals, but they are no longer reserved for the foe alone. These images are instead integrally important to fleshing out the following, future scenario of war: Small numbers of your light, highly mobile forces defeat and compel the surrender of large masses of heavily armed, dug-in enemy forces, with little loss of life on either side. Your forces can do this because they are well prepared, make room for maneuver, concentrate their firepower rapidly in unexpected places, and have superior command, control, and information systems that are decentralized to allow tactical initiatives, yet provide the central commanders with unparalleled intelligence and top-sight for strategic purposes (Arquilla & Ronfeldt, 1997b: 23). Learning how to ‘swarm’ is critically important to the realisation of this future scenario, and the gist of Athena’s Camp is simply that, to secure the new order against those ‘animals’ that would contest its legitimacy, we who will enjoy its benefits must begin to act as if we were ‘animals’, if we must not in fact become something that is neither ‘human’ nor ‘animal’. In this essay, I seek to consider the meaning of ‘just war’ as the boundaries between ‘human’ and ‘animal’ are thus blurred.1 More importantly, however, I wish to argue that Paul Verhoeven’s ‘Starship Troopers’ (1997) and Ridley Scott’s ‘Blackhawk Down’ (2001), films that are concerned with the theme of ‘just war’ and more or less explicitly present the foe against whom such war is to be fought as ‘animal’, serve very usefully to articulate some important, but often overlooked, conceptual aspects of the contemporary juxtaposition of war, politics and the figure of the ‘animal’. Securing the peace of the world There can be...