Postmodern War Research Articles

Terrorism, Crime and Private Armies

The nature of crime and conflict is rapidly evolving. Postmodern war is increasingly influenced by non-traditional and irregular combatants: non-state soldiers. These actors are exploiting technology and networked doctrine to spread their influence across traditional geographic boundaries. This emphasis on non-traditional actors accompanies a shift in political and social organization. This shift may well be a shift in state form: from nation-state to market-state. This transition is fueled by rapid developments in technology and the adoption of network organizational forms. Conflict during this transition blurs the distinctions between and among crime, terrorism and warfare. This essay explores the dynamics of terrorism, crime and private armies during this epochal shift.

Postmodern War in the Age of Bush II

This study charts the genealogy and development of new trends in high-tech warfare that have emerged in the past decade, focusing on both the challenges and dangers. Attention is devoted to the Bush administration's military program and foreign policy moves, highlighting the ways Bush II intensifies the dangers of high-tech war while undermining efforts at collective security, environmental protection, and global peace. The argument here is that the volatile mixture of highly regressive, unilateralist, and militarist tendencies combined with high-tech weapons provides a clear and present danger of a protracted and frightening period of war. This mixture dramatically erupted in Bush's military response to the terrorist attacks of September 11 and is currently intensifying dangers to world peace in the campaign some are labeling "World War III."

Can Postmodern War Be Moral? Questioning Discrimination and Proportion in Kosovo

Can Postmodern War Be Moral? Questioning Discrimination and Proportion in Kosovo

Theatre of War: High Culture and Popular Entertainment in the Spectacle of Kosovo

It is no accident that we speak of “Theatres of War,” for war is surely the ultimate fiction. I have been hideously fascinated by the way in which, in the absence of any significant external threat to justify state violence, aggressive war has become a form of spin doctoring by other means. Postmodern war, like all other parts of the Spectacle, can no longer be understood as “politics by other means.” Such conflicts do make sense, but only at another level of explanation — that of their consumption. They stand in a line of development that goes back to the earliest dramatic rituals and comes to us through tragedy, opera, film and TV drama. Like soap opera, they need no end, for their characters are equally plastic and universal. Only for the people whose homes, lives and deaths serve as the raw material for this production, have the actions any meaning beyond the Spectacle.

Outsourcing war

The article contends that the era of postmodern war has arrived and investigates its implications. Limited warfare is now the only way in which a postmodern society can use war as a political instrument. Moreover, the private sector is gaining importance. The commercial ethos is challenging the traditional professional ethos of the armed services. Military power is judged increasingly by more utilitarian standards, and war is outsourced to the private sector in the form of private mercenary companies. The article suggests that it may even be possible that large corporations will turn to these companies or outfit their own armies in the future. Nevertheless, the article concludes that although the future may witness a more wide‐ranging partnership between the public and private sectors, it will not ‐ in war at least ‐ witness a replacement of the public sector by the private.

They Made a Desert and Called it Peace

This paper addresses the social theorisation of war to the current conflict in the Balkans. It takes its terms of analysis from attempts to develop a sociology of war on the basis of the classic theories of Clausewitz and Jomini, from theories of postmodern war, from Baudrillard's commentary on the Gulf War, and from an extended critical application of recent work by Mary Kaldor on the new mode of warfare. I seek to avoid the blackmail of for-or-against and its loaded ideological positions by undertaking analysis through an exposition of the techniques, rationalities, economies, and social relations of organized violence constituting the current condition of warfare. By working through the complexity of these factors, rather than constructing simple oppositions, the method of critical analysis employed here enables us to explain how and why it is that NATO has failed to engage its primary objectives. The paper is thus able to confront the question not of whether NATO should have intervened in Kosovo, but of whether its campaign did or even could intervene in any real sense. The events in Kosovo are the contestation of war itself, and NATO's failure to recognise this has also been its failure to instrumentalise its violence in direct engagement with its military objectives, leading to circular self-justification in terms of achieving its own operational preconditions. The essay explores multiple dimensions of this misengagement, showing how the failure of NATO's air campaign to engage with the realities of ethnic cleansing illustrates the virtuality of its strategy and policy. The paper concludes by drawing some implications for contemporary projects of global order.

Postmodern war: the new politics of conflict

From Operation Desert Storm to the conflict in Bosnia, computerization and other scientific advances have brought about a revolution in warfare. This book shows how our high-tech age has spawned both increasingly powerful weapons and a rhetoric that disguises their apocalyptic potential in catch phrases like smart weapons, cyberwar, and bloodless combat. A skillful combination of trenchant cultural study, provocative illustrations, and engrossing military, technical, and historical analysis, Postmodern War sheds new light on the ways we conceptualize and conduct today. Analyzing the dynamics of conflicts from Afghanistan to Vietnam, Gray reveals the human forces of nationalism, greed, fear, and images of masculinity beneath the surface of trendy military doctrines such as pure war and infowar. If we can identify and challenge the discourses of war, he persuasively argues, we can propose new discourses to replace them.

Gender and “Postmodern War”

In this essay I argue that war is not “above” gender analyses. I question in particular whether the concept of “postmodern war” is adequate to explain the intersections of gender with ethnicity and nationality, which underlie the sexual violence against women in wartime. The poststructuralist concept of the “fluidity” of the category of gender needs to be modified by an analysis of how “non-fluid” configurations of gender are entrenched in material conditions of existence.

Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society ed. by Les Levidow, Kevin Robins

technology and culture Book Reviews 1131 who seek to fill the gaps in the existing literature will find this book a useful resource. Stephen Hilgartner Dr. Hilgartner, a sociologist, is an assistant professor at the Center for the Study of Society and Medicine, Columbia University. His current research concerns the social world of genome mapping and sequencing. Cyborg Worlds: The Military Information Society. Edited by Les Levidow and Kevin Robins. London and New York: Free Association Books and Columbia University Press (distributor), 1989. Pp. 186; refer­ ences, index. $35.00. The cyborg—a being both human and machine—preoccupies mainstream Western imagination. Fembots, robocops, cyberpunks, and transformers abound in literature, film, toys, comic books, and advertising. Despite this domesticated cyborg, the authors repre­ sented in Cyborg Worlds argue that this postmodern icon signifies a fusion between military paradigms and information technology, and that military values ineluctably guide infotech’s “research, develop­ ment and application—in areas ranging from advanced weaponry to industrial design to educational methods” (p. 8). In other words, underlying such cyborg worlds as video games, advertising, home appliances, and the modern office is a common “search for total control through simulation” and “the desire to shape people into perfectly flexible ‘human components’ of a control system” (p. 8), reducing human behavior to that of a machine, and the social order (in Mumford’s words) to a megamachine. Moreover, infotech systems and the various cyborg worlds all promote new models of human subjectivity, rationality, cognition, and intelligence—all of which are compromised, since derived from military worldviews. David Noble argues that “cyborg” values are militarizing education, evidenced in the current emphasis “on thinking, intelligence, problem­ solving and learning strategies” (p. 21), all grounded in a computer model of the learner’s mind. In his interdisciplinary “The Cyborg Soldier,” Chris Gray draws on popular culture and the writings of military strategists to propose an understanding of postmodern war and warriors. Postmodern war requires soldiers created through the “psychotechnologies of drugs, discipline and management” (p. 44) to suit the requirements of high-technology weapons. Gray concludes by examining the challenges to postmodern war posed by those (including feminists, pagans, Native Americans) who appropriate the concepts of warrior and cyborg, turning them into emblems of resistance. A thoughtful essay by Dennis Hayes examines the milieu and mindsets of professional workers who design and build advanced 1132 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE weaponry, concentrating on military secrecy enforced through ex­ treme fragmentation of labor and self-censorship. Vincent Mosco regards as secondary the debate over whether SDI (“Star Wars”) could ever work. Rather, he insists, we must look at its profound ability to institutionalize further militarism in Western society. Other essays by Tom Athansiou and Paul Edwards explore the fetishization of artifi­ cial intelligence in military paradigms and the confluence of systems engineering and military thinking toward a “closed-world discourse.” Finally, the editors further define their understanding of the “military information society” as well as the notion of a “cyborg self” that seems to contain the postmodern subject’s “contradictory feelings of omnip­ otence and powerlessness, of mastery and dependence” (p. 173) but achieves this by denying the body and fostering an illusion of total control over one’s self and one’s environment. All of these essays stem from a Left, antimilitarist, and often Marxist perspective, taking leads from the criticism of technology/machine culture spearheaded by Lewis Mumford. They solidly support the volume’s thesis—that the goals and practices of information technology are rooted in its military origins, and that those often blissfully imagined cyborg worlds must be inspected for structural flaws—and are informative and thought provoking. The editors and contributors hasten to assure the reader that they are not sketching out a military-information system of perfected control, but one that should be subjected to criticism so that it might be subverted. Here, however, is the central flaw of this work. The contributors, all men and probably all of European ancestry, are simply too homogeneous. Central to the project of challenging the total control they deplore is opening up the dialogue to marginalized voices—those feminists, pagans, Native Americans, and other subversives referred to by Gray...

The Western Canada Communciation Graduate Students Conference: Notes from the Organizers

The Western Canada Communication Graduate Students Conference (more commonly known as “The Nelson Conference”) is co-organized and co-hosted by the University of Calgary and Simon Fraser University. The conference is held annually in the spring in Nelson, BC, which is the geographic midpoint between Calgary, Alberta and Burnaby, British Columbia. Nine students from the University of Calgary and ten students from Simon Fraser University presented at the conference with topics ranging from Heath Technologies, Postmodern War, Gaming Studies to work on Transnationalism, Trauma/Memory Studies and Cultural Theory.
 
 The breadth of topics and areas of inquiry that were represented at the conference were indicative of the scope of work being done in the field of Communication Studies. A sign that like most interdisciplinary programs, the discipline is home to a variety of innovative and interesting areas of research.
 
 This year’s conference marked the 19th consecutive meeting between the University of Calgary and Simon Fraser University. A conference organized for graduate students by graduate students, it offers a unique opportunity for students in Western Canada to collaborate across institutional boundaries.