‘Going back to history’: Haiti and US military humanitarian knowledge production

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on how contemporary US military trainings ‘go back to history’ as they prepare military personnel for counterinsurgency and humanitarian response. Through ethnographic observations of trainings on US military bases, I discuss how military instructors train troops to manage civilians by drawing on the colonial history of ‘small wars’. In these uses of history, instructors produce a particular military ‘geographical imagination’ that erases differences between specific historical geographies. Instructors argue that interchangeable tactics can be applied to any time, any place, any deployment, whether it is humanitarian or counterinsurgent. In contrast to this military spatial imaginary that effectively erases colonial history, I focus here on Haiti’s role in producing military humanitarian knowledge. Haiti offers a critical geography of counterinsurgency that reveals humanitarian response as a particular theatre for rehearsing counterinsurgency tactics. Haiti’s position within a critical geography of counterinsurgency calls into question military theorists’ promotion of a future that looks like the colonial past.

KEYWORDS:

• military humanitarianism
• Haiti
• Civil Affairs
• military training
• small wars
• colonialism

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Erratum

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Emily Gilbert and Killian McCormack for organizing this special issue, to Harriet Gray for editorial assistance, and to the anonymous reviewers for their generative comments. I am also grateful to Lindsey Dillon and Cécile Accilien for their feedback on previous drafts of this article, to Gillian Hart for her support, to Don Moore, Cathy Lutz, Michael Watts, Jake Kosek, Claudine Michel, Jean Lave, and Jordan T. Camp for all the conversations leading up to this, and to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs for providing the space to complete this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Lt. Col. John Nagl popularized this quote during his 2007 appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, but it is also attributed to retired Marine Corps general and current Secretary of Defense James Mattis.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship Program.