The Duty of Care in International Relations: Protecting Citizens Beyond the Border by Nina Graeger & Halvard Leira

Author:Nina Graeger & Halvard Leira [Graeger, Nina & Leira, Halvard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138545892
Google: YiAgwAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 43496233
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-01-15T08:18:59+00:00

Inspired by lessons from Vietnam about the negative significance of casualties and empowered by conventional superiority through new weapons systems the West – led by the US – is, according to British sociologist Martin Shaw, developing a new kind of warfare. Termed risk-transfer warfare, this kind of warfare is in Shaw’s critical analysis, able to reduce and discriminate the destruction associated with the use of armed force and significantly reduce risk to own military personnel. On the other hand, this reduced risk of destruction and risk to own soldier’s life makes war easy, leading to militarism. The impression of a clean, victimless war functions only in hiding its human costs and by transferring the risk of death from Western militaries to enemy combatants and civilians.

While undeniably causing less death and destruction than the total wars of the 20th century, Shaw’s main critique of risk-transfer warfare centres around two points. First, this kind of war is politically based on the premises of no or very few civilian casualties. However, in the actual conduct of the war, the risk of death is traded between the Western serviceman and the local civilian. In these wars the death of civilians is an always probable accident – a normal accident. Always thus an accident, but always unavoidable, the loss of civilian life is a recurring side-effect of the risk transferred to them. (Shaw, 2005: 84). These risks of ‘small massacres’ are part of the political and strategic calculus and thus ‘programmed into the risk analysis of war’ (Shaw, 2005: 86). This leads to the second point of criticism – that these wars must be risk-free or very limited in the risks they produce for western ‘politics, economies and societies’, (Shaw, 2005: 72). Essentially these wars, in Shaw’s analysis are, ‘exercises in political risk-taking’. A number of risk-management strategies consequently follow, for instance silencing of dissent, hiding of own, enemy and civilian casualties, reduced duration, reliance on airpower and use of proxies. Following this line of reasoning, Smith for instance shows how reducing risk through a US focus on force protection in very specific – and tragic – ways transferred risks to Iraqi civilians (Smith, 2008).

In short, this kind of warfare transfers risk from western military and political actors to disempowered civilian populations in zones of war separated and contained in time and space (Kristensen, 2008), to be equally contained and limited in their political significance for the West. Risk transfer wars need to be short. A long war is a risk waiting to materialize; a disaster – at least in electoral terms – lurking at the ballot. And thus, it is only as these wars draw out, or in other ways produce risks that need to be addressed that they turn from risk transfer warfare to risk-management war, making the handling of risk a proper strategic rationale and creating a genuine political economy of risk.

Examples of strategic risk-management are many – force protection, as noted above, is one of them. Another is outsourcing military functions to contractors.

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