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Abstract
The prevalence and persistence of impunity for human rights violations in the war on terror have attracted significant interest from scholars and practitioners. Insufficient attention, however, has been paid to the ways in which impunity might be shaping key objectives and practices of the war on terror and enabling or constraining their pursuit in war zones. Drawing on insights from security cultures theory and analysis of empirical evidence from Afghanistan, this article demonstrates how impunity serves as a mechanism for reproduction and diffusion of the security culture of the war on terror and for cooption and subversion of central components of another security culture: the liberal peace. The argument is elaborated by investigating the functions of impunity in generating the kind of politics that justify an endless war and facilitate the pursuit of its shifting goals and methods. The article suggests that the role of impunity in shaping global security pathways might be more significant than previously understood and highlights the potential of security cultures theory to help explain human rights outcomes in counterterrorism and peace operations.
Notes
Notes
1 See, for example, the discussion in Clark (Citation2013).
2 See the fifteen declassified US State Department and US Embassy documents obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, available at https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB325/index.htm (accessed 15 January 2018).
3 In December 2014, the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence declassified parts of its Study of the Central Intelligence Agency”s Detention and Interrogation Program, which totals more than 6,700 pages. Only 525 pages of the study were declassified, and they are available at https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study/2014/sscistudy1.pdf (accessed June 3, 2015).
4 There is a substantial empirical literature that examines how abuse and predation by government- and US-aligned actors has shaped the ability of the insurgency to recruit and gain traction in local communities. See, for example, Ladbury and CPAU (Citation2009), Carter and Clark (Citation2010), Giustozzi (Citation2012), Chayes (Citation2015), and Weigand (Citation2017).
5 Media reports suggest that the CIA has expanded its covert operations in Afghanistan in recent years, deploying small teams of officers and contractors to hunt down Taliban fighters (Gibbons-Neff, Schmitt, and Goldman Citation2017).
6 For an insightful analysis of the resulting tensions and contradictions from a gender perspective, see Wimpelmann (Citation2017).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Iavor Rangelov
Dr Iavor Rangelov is assistant professorial research fellow at the Conflict and Civil Society Research Unit, Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science, and cochair of the London Transitional Justice Network. His research interests include human rights and security, transitional justice, and civil society. He is the author of Nationalism and the Rule of Law: Lessons from the Balkans and Beyond (Cambridge University Press 2014) and coeditor of The Handbook of Global Security Policy (Wiley 2014) and From Hybrid Peace to Human Security (Routledge 2018).
Marika Theros
Marika Theros is a doctoral candidate at the Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science. She is senior fellow at the Institute for State Effectiveness and she currently directs the Afghanistan Engagement Project, an initiative supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. She has published extensively on justice and security issues in Afghanistan.