The ‘individualization of war’: discussion and critique of a discourse

ABSTRACT

‘Individualisation of war’ is an expression used by several scholars to conceptualise in a holistic way contemporary forms of political violence as targeted killings or extraordinary renditions. Yet, the expression does not simply mirror the practices of the real world, but it also constitutes and is constituted by the practices, thus it can be framed as a discourse. This article questions how the discourse on the ‘individualisation of war’ has emerged, in what context it has gained institutional legitimacy, and what is the meaning that the discourse produces and re-produces. To answer such questions, the article in a first part outlines the intellectual context in which the ‘individualisation of war’ has emerged and how it has been articulated in specific knowledge domains. While in a second part, the article analyzes the discourse’s meaning(s) by questioning separately the two conceptual components: ‘individualisation’ and ‘war’. Eventually, the article claims that ‘individualisation of war’, despite the insightful interpretative tools it offers to decipher the role of the individual in the realm of in contemporary war, serves more a rhetorical and legitimising role than analytical functions.

KEYWORDS:

• International relations theory
• war and the state
• targeted killing
• individualisation
• discourse
• warfare

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Professor Alessandro Colombo and Dr. Chiara Graziani.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The argument is explained at large by Rousseau in the following paragraph: ‘Men are not naturally enemies, if only for the reason that, living in their primitive independence, they have no mutual relations sufficiently durable to constitute a state of peace or a state of war. It is the relation of things and not of men that constitutes war; and since the state of war cannot arise from simple personal relations, but only from real relations, private war – war between man and man – cannot exist either in the state of nature, where there is no settled ownership, or in the social state, where everything is under the authority of the laws’ (Rousseau, Dunn, and May 2002, 160). Rousseau, as Hobbes, starts from an atomistic, individualistic base but his endpoint, different from Hobbes, is that it is civil society where a state of war produces because war is social institution, see Hoffmann (1963)

2. Ideas have an explanatory power even at the international level where divergent linguistic and cultural layers may operate. See (Armitage 2019; Keene 2017) Also, a clear account on how IR and intellectual history can encounter is provided by Vergerio (2019)

3. Secrecy has not really disappeared from ‘individualized’ forms of war and it is still a defining feature of targeted killing, even in the contemporary war. However, as highlighted by Alston (2011), in contemporary war secrecy should be read as ‘lack of transparency’ of the institutional complex where the CIA, the military, and other national agencies operate.

4. Here ‘context’ means a specific intellectual milieu where certain structures of power, norms, and narratives influence the meaning and use of ideas (Pocock 2019).

5. The intellectual shift that underpins this reflection has its roots in the long tradition of liberal thinking and has found a proper international stature through a Rawlsian conception of justice and morality inevitably reducible to an individualistic theoretical basis situated in the liberal internationalism tradition, see Allen Buchanan, ‘Political Liberalism and Social Epistemology’, Philosophy&Public Affairs 32, no. 2 (April 2004): 95–130, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088/4963.2004.00008.x.

6. Broadly speaking and considering the different interpretation of the term, ‘lawfare’ refers to those cases where state or nonstate actors engaged in an armed conflict resort to ‘the strategy of using or misusing law as a substitute for traditional military means to achieve an operational objective’. The term has recently been popularised by U.S. Major General Charles Dunlap (2015) to describe the abuse of law in the context of the war on terror. In particular, lawfare implies all discursive or practical strategies – such as accusing the adversary of war crimes, distorting law for legitimising torture, stigmatising IOs appeal to law, etc. – that may end to substitute, justify or facilitate military actions that tend to be in breach of International Humanitarian Law. For different interpretations, see Werner (2010b), and Luban (2010).

7. (Kelsen 1943) It should be noted that, faithful to his formalistic view, Kelsen was bitterly critical to the Nuremberg Tribunal for its inconsistent application of retroactive rules to cope with the principle of nullum crimen sine lege. Kelsen argued the Tribunal attempted to deduce criminal responsibility from the Briand-Kellogg Pact, which however contained none.

8. Technology here is understood as the ‘sum of specific scientific knowledge and of technic development turned into material artefacts’ (Winner 1980).

9. This argument is raised with a critical and genealogical approach also by Bousquet, who reconstructs with historical evidence how scientific rationality and military operative necessities have co-constituted each-others in Western modern strategic thought, culminating in a proper scientific way of warfare. See A. J. Bousquet (2009, 21).

10. Representations of the killing can be found at https://www.lawfareblog.com/unlawful-us-killing-ayman-al-zawahri or at https://www.justsecurity.org/82605/what-was-the-international-legal-basis-for-the-strike-on-al-zawahiri/

11. Examples can be found at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/12/before-soleimani-there-was-yamamoto-history-is-very-different/; at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-authorized-soleimani-s-killing-7-months-ago-conditions-n1113271

12. The entire speech can be found at https://www.c-span.org/video/?467859–1/president-trump-statement-death-iranian-commander

13. See for instance the IDF report on ‘Guardian of the Wall’ operation, https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/wars-and-operations/operation-guardian-of-the-walls/operation-guardian-of-the-walls-1/

14. This argument is put forward in theoretical terms by Schmitt as ‘the state-centric system had the extraordinary merit of limiting and channeling inter-European warfare’ in (Schmitt and Ulmen 2006, 112 & passim), but it is proven with historical evidence also by authors as Howard (2008, 12 & passim) and Whitman (2012, 25–29).

15. Here it is referred, among the others, to some of the arguments raised by Bousquet, Grove, and Shah (2020)

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Martino Tognocchi

Martino Tognocchi is postdoc fellow in International Relations at the University of Pavia. In 2022 he obtained a Ph.D. in International Studies at the University of Milan with a thesis focused on the transformation of enemy’s concept in comtemporary war.