- Philosophy, War Studies, International Relations, Critical Theory, Judith Butler, Drones, Targeted Killing, Ethics of War, and 10 moreCritical Materialism, Poststructuralist ethics, Politics, Poststructuralism, Political Violence and Terrorism, Critical Military Studies, Philosophy of Time, Temporality, History of Ideas, and Critical War Studiesedit
- Centred on contemporary war and violence, my research follows three main tracks. The first track concerns war and the... moreCentred on contemporary war and violence, my research follows three main tracks. The first track concerns war and the human subject. This is in many ways the point of origin of my work: the question of what it means to be human, and how the interpretation thereof is conditioned by the ever-presence of violence, insecurity and war. My work explores vulnerability and precariousness, and the pivotal role they occupy in contemporary power relations. The article ‘War, “strategic communication” and the violence of non-recognition’ (Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26:4 (2013) interrogates the ethical relations between intervening US military forces and local populations in Afghanistan, drawing on Judith Butler and Emmanuel Levinas to explore the ethical relation embedded in the idea that a population’s hearts and minds can be ‘won’. A book chapter, ‘Enlisting Madison Avenue: contemporary war masquerading as a communications enterprise’ (in Masquerades of War ed. Christine Sylvester, 2015) extends this inquiry to the realm of the global capitalist system, to show how such ethico-political relations carry over from ‘war’ to ‘peace’. I have pursued war and the human also via the questions of embodiment, including a critical material inquiry into contemporary automated/robotic warfare (‘Undoing war: war ontologies and the materiality of drone warfare’, Millennium Journal of International Studies 43:4 (2013).
My second research track concerns war and society. Building on earlier work on liberal interventionism (Holmqvist, Policing Wars: On Military Intervention in the Twenty-First Century (2014), and its military-civilian-humanitarian assemblage structure (co-edited War, Police and Assemblages of Intervention, contributions by Laleh Khalili and Mark Neocleous), I am currently working on European societal developments in relation to the renewed ‘war on terror’, focusing on France. I am interested in the racial and gendered structures of debates surrounding the refugee ‘crisis’.
The third research track concerns time, temporality and global relations of violence. Funded by a Swedish Research Agency Project Grant (2014-2017), this project asks how subjective understandings of time (temporality) condition the way in which we think about politics and the political. Moreover, I am working the conflation of ‘war time’ and ‘peace time’ and the ways in which the modern understanding of war as spatially and temporally bound seems to haunt our ability to understand contemporary violence in political terms.edit
Understandings of war – its shape, form, character and content – are conditioned by conceptualisations and narratives of social and political space. As such, the history of writing on war is also a history of spatiality, expressed through... more
Understandings of war – its shape, form, character and content – are conditioned by conceptualisations and narratives of social and political space. As such, the history of writing on war is also a history of spatiality, expressed through a particular circumstance and practice. Through analysis of early modern conceptualisations of space, politics and war, this article considers the shift in political spatiality associated with the demise of modern linear spatiality that firmly established the territorial state as site of politics and war. The central argument of this article is that contemporary accounts of war reveal a political spatiality in flux coupled with an insistence on the global, such that many accounts of war neglect its political content. Three key accounts of contemporary war are engaged: liberal discourses of war as ‘policing’; accounts of war as ‘biopolitical empire’; and discourses of war as ‘risk management’ – all found, in different ways and collectively, to disregard the political confrontation that war necessarily entails.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
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... Private military and security companies - an analytical overview. Autores: CarolineHolmqvist; Localización: Collegium: news from the College of Europe = nouvelles du Collège d'Europe, ISSN 1371-0346, Nº. 36, 2007 (Ejemplar ...