Critical War Studies

“Power is war, the continuation of war by other means”: Foucault’s reversal of Clausewitz’s formula has become a staple of critical theory — but it remains highly problematic on a conceptual level. Elaborated during Foucault’s 1976 lectures (“Society Must Be Defended”), this work-hypothesis theorises “basic warfare” [la guerre fondamentale] as the teleological horizon of socio-political relations. Following Boulainvilliers, Foucault champions this polemological approach, conceived as a purely descriptive discourse on “real” politics and war, against the philosophico-juridical conceptuality attached to liberal society (Hobbes’s Leviathan being here the prime example).
However, in doing so, Foucault did not interrogate the conceptual validity of notions such as power and war, therefore interlinking them without questioning their ontological status. This problematic conflation was partly rectified in 1982, as Foucault proposed a more dynamic definition of power relations: “actions over potential actions”.
I argue, somewhat polemically, that Foucault’s hermeneutics of power still involves a teleological violence, dependent on a polemological representation of human relations as essentially instrumental: this resembles what Derrida names, in “Heidegger’s Ear”, an “anthropolemology”. However, I show that all conceptualisation of power implies its self-deconstruction. This self-deconstructive (or autoimmune) structure supposes an archi-originary unpower prior to power: power presupposes an excess within power, an excessive force, another violence making it both possible and impossible. There is something within power located “beyond the power principle” (Derrida). This (self-)excess signifies a limitless resistantiality co-extensive with power-relationality. It also allows the reversal of pólemos into its opposite, as unpower opens politics and warfare to the messianic call of a pre-political, pre-ontological disruption: the archi-originary force of différance. This force, unconditional, challenges Foucault’s conceptualisations of power, suggesting an originary performativity located before or beyond hermeneutics of power-knowledge, disrupting theoreticity as well as empiricity by pointing to their ontological complicity.
The bulk of this essay is dedicated to sketching the theoretical implications of this deconstructive reading of Foucault with respect to the methodology and conceptuality of political science and social theory.

W pierwszym podrozdziale niniejszego opracowania zostaną przedstawione skutki interwencji zachodnich dla roli Rady Bezpieczeństwa oraz używanego przez nią instrumentarium w celu utrzymania światowego pokoju i bezpieczeństwa,
co obejmuje zarówno kwestię autoryzowania użycia siły, jak i wykorzystania operacji pokojowych. W tej części znajdują się głównie odniesienia do operacji w Iraku (1991 r.), Bośni i Hercegowinie oraz Libii, gdyż w ich przypadku państwa interweniujące jako podstawę prawną wskazywały na odpowiednią rezolucję RB autoryzującą użycie siły. Przywołane zostaną również interwencje w Kosowie oraz w Iraku (2003 r.) w charakterze przykładów operacji dokonanych bez jakiegokolwiek
upoważnienia ze strony RB. W drugim podrozdziale przedstawiona
zostanie ewolucja prawa do samoobrony pod wpływem praktyki państw zachodnich.
Poruszona będzie kwestia definicji ataku zbrojnego uruchamiającego prawo do samoobrony oraz ram czasowych tego prawa. W tym kontekście szczególna uwaga została zwrócona na interwencje w Iraku (2003 r.) oraz w Afganistanie, które właśnie koniecznością samoobrony były uzasadniane. Natomiast trzeci podrozdział dotyczy rozwinięcia przez państwa zachodnie prawa do interwencji humanitarnej oraz zbrojnego wymiaru odpowiedzialności za ochronę w stronę prawa do zmiany reżimu z autorytarnego na demokratyczny. Stąd też odwołania
przede wszystkim do operacji w Bośni i Hercegowinie, Kosowie oraz Libii, w przypadku których względy humanitarne miały główne znaczenie w uzasadnieniu legalności interwencji.

Pour qu’un conflit se termine, il faut soit qu’il se résolve par une entente plus ou moins satisfaisante entre les parties, soit que l’une des parties s’impose aux autres qui abandonnent leur opposition, de guerre lasse ou par manque de moyens. Il y a donc une nécessaire dichotomie à opérer entre trois éléments du conflit: la transformation politique, l'intensité de la belligérance et la rivalité stratégique.

Mark Neocleous’s War Power, Police Power reproblematises the relation between war and police and develops a systematic critique of discourses of ‘the new’ across policy and academic fields. To nuance Neocleous’s powerful critique, I show that disjunctures between war and police are as politically
important as their conjunction.

War has become a fixture of American culture. It has been a constant background fact of U.S. geopolitics, it forms the theme of countless books, films and games, and despite many deaths and mostly failed military campaigns, it seems to exert an enduring fascination on politicians and citizens alike. This book explores how war has been portrayed in the United States since the Second World War, with a particular focus on an emotionally charged but rarely scrutinized topic: combat death. The author argues that most stories about war use three main building blocks: melodrama, adventure, and horror. Melodrama and adventure have helped make war seem acceptable to the American public by portraying combat death as a meaningful sacrifice, and by making military killing look necessary and often even pleasurable. Horror no longer serves its traditional purpose of making the bloody realities of war injury and death repulsive, and has been repurposed in recent years to intensify the positivity of melodrama and adventure. What emerges from this book is an in-depth attempt to understand how war stories perform ideological and emotional work, and how they manage to have such a powerful grip on the American imagination.

Each conflict has components which mark for simple and uncomplicated evaluation to the previous ones. It has been American history that whenever it involved in any war, it had to come across much difficult and unpleasant situations. In the World War II, Vietnam was boondocks for American armed forces, and nothing much was important as far as an absolute struggle against Japan and American officials charged with the contours of the post-war world, was concerned. Still paradoxically, United States became involved in Vietnam even before the eruption of armed hostilities between the French and Vietminh. It is generally believed that the US has neither fought any war larger than Vietnam War nor has any of its war been criticized so far. And there is no weighing up of the sufferings. The toll in suffering, grief in resentful national commotion can never be put into a table. Today the US is again entangled in a war in Afghanistan which has entered in 13th year with no results and success in the offing. This paper is an attempt to analyze whether Vietnam War, fought 48 years ago, was indeed the first episode of today’s Afghan War or not? The study will comprise of all the details of those times in order to bring out comparison between the two wars.

Is nuclear strategic reason rational? Barack Obama’s April 2009 speech looking towards a world free of nuclear weapons appeared to promise positive new directions in global disarmament and non-proliferation. Yet it came on the heels of one of the most destabilising periods in global nuclear security since the early 1980s. This article argues that the growing interpenetration of nuclear and conventional conflict, and the dangers of nuclear terrorism, provide disarmament with compelling security logic. However, progress will hinge on key states adopting nuclear postures that reduce nuclear dangers and can acknowledge the fundamental impossibility of nuclear strategy as a system of reason: one that has never been able to connect nuclear means and security ends in a way that is either viable or legitimate. In an era of radically asymmetric conflict and competition, disarmament is an imperative, but to succeed it must find a rational way through strategic irrationality.

The roundtable discussion ‘Simulation, Exercise, Operations’ took place at The Old Power Station, Oxford, on 11 July, 2012. Proceedings of the presentations and subsequent discussions throughout the day were recorded and transcribed for editing and redistribution to participants prior to publication.

https://www.urbanomic.com/book/simulation-exercise-operations/

Full programme of the international online conference "(Re)pensar Malvinas / (re)thinking Falklands — Visiones y versiones en las culturas argentina y británica / Visions and Versions in Argentinian and British Cultures" (1982–2022).
The event is hosted jointly by the School of Modern Languages (Cardiff University) and the Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani (Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Buenos Aires)
Free Registration (deadline: 5 April 2022, 13:00 BST): https://bit.ly/3LmVaYE
Twitter: @malvinas2022
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MalvinasFalklands2022

From ubiquitous surveillance to drone strikes that put “warheads onto foreheads,” we live in a world of globalized, individualized targeting. The perils are great. In The Eye of War, Antoine Bousquet provides both a sweeping historical overview of military perception technologies and a disquieting lens on a world that is, increasingly, one in which anything or anyone that can be perceived can be destroyed—in which to see is to destroy.

Arguing that modern-day global targeting is dissolving the conventionally bounded spaces of armed conflict, Bousquet shows that over several centuries, a logistical order of militarized perception has come into ascendancy, bringing perception and annihilation into ever-closer alignment. The efforts deployed to evade this deadly visibility have correspondingly intensified, yielding practices of radical concealment that presage a wholesale disappearance of the customary space of the battlefield. Beginning with the Renaissance’s fateful discovery of linear perspective, The Eye of War discloses the entanglement of the sciences and techniques of perception, representation, and localization in the modern era amid the perpetual quest for military superiority. In a survey that ranges from the telescope, aerial photograph, and gridded map to radar, digital imaging, and the geographic information system, Bousquet shows how successive technological systems have profoundly shaped the history of warfare and the experience of soldiering.

A work of grand historical sweep and remarkable analytical power, The Eye of War explores the implications of militarized perception for the character of war in the twenty-first century and the place of human subjects within its increasingly technical armature.

The Kukri knife, also written as Khukuri, Khukri, Khookree, Kookeri, Kukoori, Koorkerie, Kookery, Kukery, Koukoori, Khokreis, Cookri, Gurkha Knife and other variations, takes its name from the Nepali word "खुकुरी" . This dagger-knife is today world famous and known as the Symbol of the Gurkhas, National weapon of Nepal and a most excellent knife with a long and ancient history. Ive used the term "Kukri" over the more proper "Khukuri" as it is
probably a wider used word and thus more familiar to the reader. We here explore what has been written regarding the Kukri knife over the past 200 years, from the dawn of modern Nepal, Anglo-Nepal War, The Great Wars and until modern day.

In measure to the development of projectile weaponry, the conduct of modern war has accorded perception with destruction, marshalling and enfolding human vision into ever more sophisticated sociotechnical assemblages of targeting. Drawing upon Paul Virilio’s notion of a “logistics of perception”, this article charts the four successive orders of targeting constituted by the alignment of the line of sight with the line of fire (aiming), the measurement of distance to a target (ranging), the trailing and prediction of a target’s movement (tracking), and the directed navigation to a target’s position in space (guiding). Alongside the functional specification of each of these orders are concurrently drawn out the accompanying corporeal regimentations of the living organisms thus imbricated. With its capillaries now spanning the wider ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum, the contemporary war machine has simultaneously extended its sensorial reach far beyond the confines of its original human strictures. Its culmination may well lie in the advent of laser technology and the promise of a weaponisation of light through which the definitive coincidence of perception and annihilation will be realised, even as it dispenses with the ocular orb that initiated their convergence.

My doctoral dissertation examines the experiences of the Italian volunteers in the Waffen-SS troops using in-depth interviews with former volunteers as the main primary source. This phenomenon, even if significant in size (depending on the source, some 15 000-20 000 Italian men volunteered in the Waffen-SS), has been hitherto largely unknown to historical research. The available literature on the Italian volunteers, mainly written by military history enthusiast journalists and methodologically weak, concentrates mainly on the combat operations and military organization, and offers a rather stereotypical profile of the volunteers.

My dissertation does not aim to reconstruct the military history of the different divisions of the Waffen-SS in which Italian volunteers operated but instead to examine the subjective, private and intimate experience of the volunteers in order to understand the motivations, attitudes, beliefs and cultural and family background, as well as their political ideas. The main objective of my doctoral dissertation is to discover the ideological precepts of the volunteers’ political credo. As the last phase of fascism and its ideology, often defined as the “Germanisation” or “Nazification” of fascism, is still the object of wide academic debate, a better understanding of the volunteers’ ideology also contributes to deepening overall knowledge of the nature of this last phase.

The theoretical frame of my dissertation lies in oral history, in particular in the postmodernist approach to oral history, through which I reconstruct the volunteers’ ideology. In-depth interviews with former volunteers are the main primary source, but multiple data collection methods have been adopted. Phone interviews and correspondence with the volunteers have also been considered as primary sources. In addition to interviews and correspondence, family archives consisting of diaries, correspondence with the volunteers’ relatives and photographic material have also been collected and examined. An ethnographic observation of the volunteers’ domestic spaces has been conducted during the in-depth interviews, and photo self-elicitation techniques have been used in cases where the volunteers were willing to share their photographs.

An exhaustive portrait of the ideological structure of the volunteers has been obtained, as well as of the cultural and social origins of the values that contributed to the rise and adoption of this ideology. Further, the volunteers’ motivations to enlist have been clearly reconstructed, together with their cultural, political, social and military backgrounds. The results of the research are particularly relevant both for comprehension of the Italian phenomenon of volunteering in the Waffen-SS and for the reconstruction of the ideological dynamics of the last phase of fascism. The volunteers’ political and ideological system, which can be defined as the Italian SS-fascist ideology, disagrees strongly with the vaguely described ideological profile offered by previous studies that describe volunteers as generically “super-fascist”. The research also offers the opportunity for a deeper understanding of the final fascist ideological trajectory, currently defined, not without a certain level of approximation, as the “Germanisation” or “Nazification” of fascist ideology.

More so than in any other sphere of social existence, the brute physicality of war confronts us with the pervasive role that material objects occupy in the life (and death) of human collectives. But while the rapid and dramatic changes in the practices of warfare experienced in the modern era can be directly correlated to the evolutions of technique, we should be wary of simplified linear accounts that all too hastily read developments on the battlefield as incipient to the character of specific technical objects. It is only when these are related back to the wider sociotechnical assemblages in which they are embedded that we can begin to draw out the complex interdependencies and co-constitutive interactions that make up the war machine. Such an intellectual endeavour can contribute to developing more sober and nuanced appreciations of the transformative potential of technological developments than those which have animated RMA enthusiasts and at times intoxicated policy-makers.

Published, The Bible and Interpretation, June 22, 2018
http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/2018/06/and428022.shtml
While Sessions’s appeal to biblical authorization has failed, the larger question is why. Is it that the Bible has been interpreted adequately and rejected by modern society? Or, might it be that a flawed interpretation of a Biblical text has been wielded to support a problematic ordinance, calling for a closer look this notorious passage from Romans? Indeed, the latter is the case, and here’s why.

The science of ammunition lethality is a field that seeks to define the point at which military ordnance takes life and produces death. By historicising lethality's epistemology, I reveal the intellectual fissures and scientific uncertainties that have been reified and embedded into contemporary conceptions of military power. This not only tells us something about the processes by which science is subordinated to war but also offers a new lens from which to consider the way knowledge claims about battle are co-constructed and legitimated through military practices. As a result, this paper places science back into a narrative that otherwise frames the ontology of war in terms of fighting.

Digital and data technologies are actively transforming the archives of contemporary warfare. Bringing together a range of scholarly perspectives and artistic practices, (W)archives investigates digital archiving as an integral technology of warfare and how artists respond to these changes. Throughout the book, the (w)archive emerges as a term to grasp the extended materiality of war today, wherein digital archiving intersects with images, bodies, senses, infrastructures, environments, memories, and emotions. The essays explore how this new digital materiality of war reconfigures the archival impulses that have shaped artistic practices over the last decades, and how archives can be mobilized to articulate political demands, conjure new forms of evidence, and make palpable the experience of living with war.

Contributions by DANIELA AGOSTINHO, HEBA Y. AMIN, ARIELLA AZOULAY, SVEA BRAUNERT, ANTHONY DOWNEY, SOPHIE DYER, ANDERS ENGBERG-PEDERSEN, SOLVEIG GADE, CRISTIÁN GOMEZ-MOYA, SOFIE LEBECH, AIMÉE ZITO LEMA, KATHRIN MAURER, KEVIN MCSORLEY, DIMA SABER, ORAIB TOUKAN, SARAH TUCK, LOUISE WOLTHERS, ARKADI ZAIDES

https://www.sternberg-press.com/product/warchives/

"This article explores two questions about the tactical mechanics of the Roman manipular legion. Firstly, what frontages did the Roman legion field in set-piece battle? Given that Hellenistic forces deployed in standardized formations, the length of Hellenistic infantry lines can be used to calculate the opposing Roman formation. This in turn permits consideration of the nature and tactical function of the gaps between the maniples.
The paper deduces that Roman legions presented fronts between 320 and 570 meters in five set-piece battles. The range of frontages suggests that modest inter-manipular gaps were maintained even when the heavy infantry lines clashed."

""Im deutsch besetzten Italien fielen zwischen 1943 und 1945 mehr als 70.000 Menschen dem Partisanenkrieg zum Opfer, darunter etwa 10.000 Zivilisten, die bei Massakern und Geiselerschießungen durch die Besatzer getötet wurden. Diese Ereignisse haben sich tief in das kollektive Gedächtnis Nachkriegsitaliens eingeprägt.
Der Autor, der ein Jahrzehnt lang als Sachverständiger bei Kriegsverbrecherprozessen vor Gerichten tätig war, stellt in diesem Buch erstmals systematisch und auf breite Quellenbasis gestützt das Vorgehen der deutschen Besatzungstruppen dar. Sachlich und differenziert werden u. a. mehrere durch die Prozesse der letzten Jahren bekannt gewordene Kriegsverbrechen wie Sant’Anna di Stazzema, Civitella in Val di Chiana und Marzabotto sowie deren Täter untersucht.""

In stark contrast to the abstraction and radical disembodiment of hi-tech virtual war, the mediascape of contemporary counter-insurgency is increasingly dominated by material that is lo-fi, intimate, multi-sensory and decisively linked to the embodied experiences and risks of soldiering. In this article, I explore the visual grammar and affective logics of two recent prominent public mediations of the war in Afghanistan, both dominated by the use of video footage recorded from camcorders mounted on soldiers’ helmets. Epitomized in this helmetcam footage, I suggest that it is through an emerging aesthetic regime of ‘somatic war’ – that foregrounds sensory immersion and real feeling, vital living and bodily vulnerability – that the endless war in Afghanistan is currently being made perceptible and palpable.

The rapid increase in the use and capabilities of Unmanned Aerial
Vehicles (UAVs), or “drones,” has led to debates on their place in US strategy, particularly their use in assassination missions, or so-called targeted killings. However, this debate has tended to focus narrowly on two questions: first, whether the US use of UAVs to assassinate its enemies,including US citizens, is legal, and second, whether drones shouldbe given the autonomy to decide when to kill humans. This paper uses the concept of “necro-politics”—the arrogation of the sovereign’s right both to command death and to assign grievable meaning to the dead— as it emerges in the work of Achille Mbembe to criticize the assumptions
of these questions. It is argued that debates over endowing drones with the autonomy to kill humans assume that the current human operators of drones work outside of the context of racial distinction andcolonial encounter in which they already make decisions to kill. The paper supports this argument with reference to the text of a USinvestigation into a strike which killed civilians in Uruzgan province, Afghanistan

Une des lignes de force qui traversent la revue Cultures&Conflits depuis ses débuts a trait à l’épuisement relatif de l’heuristique clausewitzienne de « l’ascension aux extrêmes » de la guerre. Nous analysons ici les implications et la portée de ces analyses des conflits avec une vision rétrospective sur les trente années écoulées. Les concepts heuristiques de Clausewitz (duel, ascension, polarisation), et plus largement les  modèles centripètes des conflits armés de la science politique contemporaine (d’un part celui des compétitions éliminatoires jusqu’au monopole territorial dans les guerres civiles, d’autre part celui des centralisations compétitives jusqu’à « l’indifférenciation fonctionnelle » des Etats dans les guerres internationales) doivent être considérablement complexifiées, si l’on veut comprendre les conflits multi-centrés contemporains de manière multi-scalaire. Dans la majorité de ceux-ci, forces centrifuges et centripètes coexistent et font s’entrelacer de multiples niveaux d’interaction politique, du ‘local’ au ‘mondial’.

Dall’estate del 1943 e alla primavera del 1945, mentre la Wehrmacht arretra dal sud al nord Italia e il nuovo fronte della resistenza prende corpo, il Terzo Reich scatena la violenza delle sue truppe sulla popolazione civile. Uomini, donne e bambini diventano nemici da annientare, bersagli scelti di corpi speciali. Di quelle stragi Carlo Gentile si è occupato da studioso e da perito nei processi che in alcuni casi – come Sant’Anna di Stazzema – sono ancora storia viva. Frutto di anni di ricerca nei principali archivi internazionali – compreso il noto «armadio della vergogna – il suo lavoro ripercorre la storia delle vittime e ci offre un ritratto inedito dei carnefici, spesso militari molto giovani ma fortemente ideologizzati. Già pubblicato in Germania, dove è stato accolto come un importante contributo al dibattito storiografico, lo studio di Gentile è la cronaca di un biennio che ha ferito l’Italia nel profondo, ma soprattutto è un quadro dettagliato, assai significativo, delle strategie di guerra tedesche nel nostro paese.

In this paper, I discuss contemporary readings of Machiavelli (styled ‘radical’) that perceive in his work the foundations for what they conceive as a political ontology — an ontology based on force, potency and conflictuality. I contest this interpretation, both for philological and theoretical reasons. Through readings of Foucault, Deleuze, Esposito, Negri and Abensour (among others), I interrogate the notion of Machiavelli’s ‘realism’, and challenge the traditional articulation between ‘force’ and ‘reality’ with reference to Derrida's writings on force, potency and virtuality. This essay takes aim not only at the fashionable notion of ‘political ontology’, but also at the use that is made of it in allegedly progressive circles within disciplines such as political science and International Relations.

During the onslaught of the Islamic caliphate on Kobanî, Syria, media outlets across the globe broadcast pictures of brave and often unveiled Kurdish women fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), a quintessentially male force of destruction. The images of women fighting Islamist male aggressors aroused outrage, admiration, and pity among observers. But had all Kurdish fighters been male or had women fought for ISIS, viewers might have reacted differently. To examine some of the most widely disseminated gendered pictures and videos of the Syrian uprising in the media, this article draws on Mohja Kahf’s three categories, which typify how Muslim women, Arab women, or both are perceived by the Anglophone reading and viewing public: the first is victims; the second, escapees; and the third, pawns of patriarchy and male power. While this typology helps in examining gendered images of the Syrian uprising, it also obscures the socioeconomic realities on the ground.

The Russian National Security Strategy of 2015 aims at achieving autarky from Western influences on global security, the rule of law and global trade. Russia aims at attaining this by applying a holistic mix of military, political and economic means to weaken the West and to strengthen its own role as a global player. The Russian approach builds on a strategy of reflexive control which as such is an old method, but the outcome of the application of this approach results in hybrid warfare which as such is a new emerging concept of warfighting. This short article looks at one particular aspect of this Russian strategy, namely using Hybrid, or non-linear, Warfare against its Western direct neighbours in particular and the West in general. We will discuss the underlying cultural logic in Russia's actions and will reflect on the impact of Russia's utilization of the existing cultural asymmetry as a form of warfare in regard to the West. The examples used in this text are taken from the context of the conflicts of Ukraine and Syria, but have to be seen as constituting a part of an ongoing global conflict aimed at NATO and the EU. The text builds on years of research within the hybrid threat, warfare respectively, context by both authors.

In this article, I deconstruct the concept of legitimacy (notably in the form elaborated by Max Weber) by emphasising its conceptual complicity with the notion of sovereignty. Through an analysis of Derrida's critique of Austin's theory of performativity, I elaborate another, non-ontological 'concept' of legitimacy, located before and beyond sociological methodology, International Relations theory, and performative ontologies of power. This legitimation-to-come signifies the structural fallibility and pervertibility of the performative, and instantiates the archi-originary force of an unconditional resistance, conditioning both the position and the deconstruction of ontologies of sovereign ipseity (ipsocracy). Pursuing the efforts of Cynthia Weber and Rob Walker, I attempt to sketch the implications of this post-performative legitimacy with respect to the protocols of legitimation of International Relations theory and sociological methodologies, through an analysis of their persistent ontological presuppositions.

In this article, I engage with Derrida’s deconstructive reading of theories of performativity in order to analyse Max Weber’s sovereignty/legitimacy paradigm. First, I highlight an essential articulation between legitimacy and sovereign ipseity (understood, beyond the sole example of State sovereignty, as the autopositioned power-to-be-oneself). Second, I identify an originary force of alteration, an unconditional deconstructibility of sovereignty, foreign to the order of performative legitimacy. This disjunctive force implies an essential fallibility of the performative. The differential co-implication of legitimacy and sovereignty suggests an irreducible coloniality of law and language, but also points to an unconditional resistance located in the radical interpretability of the law, beyond determined positions of powers, dominations, sovereignties or resistances.
My reflection is triggered by a reading of Cynthia Weber’s theory of ‘performative states’, describing sovereignty under the form of an impossible ontology, which leads me to elaborate the notion of legitimation-to-come as a non-ontological ‘concept’: this unconditional legitimacy, beyond sovereignty, binds beliefs and phantasms to the unpresentable force of the event. Pursuing the efforts of scholars such as Rob Walker and Cynthia Weber, I sketch the implications of this archi-performative force of legitimacy with respect to the methodologies of International Relations and sociology, in view of elucidating the persistent ontological presuppositions of these disciplines.

Secular arabic traditions have emphasized the potential of dreams to foretell the future.  Sometimes the prediction is seen as obvious and on other occasions elaborate systems of symbolic translations were consulted such as the tenth century Oneirocriticon of Achmet.
    In Islam, many of the foundations of the Koran were revealed to Muhammad in dreams. Muhammad ordered the practice of adhanthe daily call to prayer from the minarets and a central ritual of Islam to this day after one of his followers dreamed of it. The split of Islam into the conflicting factions of Sunni and Shi'ite was based partly on a dream of Mohammed, which the Sunnis used to justify their rights as his successors.
    The autobiographies of Muslim rulers often contain extensive dream diaries and examples of decisions obstensibly based on dreams.  When the Shah of Iran was deciding whether to seek a loan from Russia, he dreamed that a famous theological figure dressed in primitive Muslim garb approached the Shah and threw at his feet a sack containing gold and silver.  The interpretation of this dream was that the Shah shouldn't make any new loans with unbelievers but should trust that fellow servants of the faith would restore his finances. Sadam Hussein reported dreaming that Allah told him to enter and take back Kuwait just before the first Gulf War. Before the second Gulf War, he reported a dream that a snake came upon his path but he chopped off it’s head with a sword which he interpreted to mean western invaders would be vanquished.
    Because of this emphasis on dreams as foretelling the future rather than arising from the past, Arabs who are having PTSD nightmares of an event occurring each night--such as Kuwiati survivors of the Iraqi invasion or Iraqi survivors of the American invasion--experience even more anxiety over whether this will indeed occur again than dreamers in other cultures.
    The positive side to this emphasis on dreams foretelling the future happens when oppressed people dream of positive outcomes.  These are a source of much inspiration in arab society, while in western traditions they would be dismissed as "wish fulfillment" without the beneficial impact.
    We  collected dreams associated with events of the Arab Spring and discuss how they inspired and guided those taking part, and what dreams right now may have to offer the reshaping of the Arab world.