War and Peace in Time and Space

My new paper War and Peace in Time and Space was inspired/provoked by the indomitable Yxta Maya Murray, who invited me to participate in a symposium on Law, Peace and Violence: Jurisprudence and the Possibilities of Peace at Seattle University Law School. Yxta's commitment to peace as something that does or can truly exist in the world helped me to see that, in my work on wartime, I was not taking peace seriously enough. This led me to revisit the question of what peace might be in a nation engaged in ongoing armed conflict. My answer to this puzzle is to turn to geography/spaciality. I will keep working on this in my next book, but here's my take so far.

This essay is a critical reflection on peace, written for a symposium issue on Law, Peace and Violence: Jurisprudence and the Possibilities of Peace. Peacetime and wartime are thought to be temporal concepts, alternating in history, but ongoing wartime seems to blot out any time that is truly free of war. In spite of this, peace is the felt experience of many Americans. We can understand why peace is thought to exist during ongoing war by turning to geographies of war and peace. The experience of American war is not only exported, but is also concentrated in particular American communities, especially locations of military bases. Memorialization of war death is one of the “spaces of the dead,” as Thomas Laquere calls it, separated from daily life. The persistence of war and the separation of killing, dying and the dead from the center of American life is an example of the way war and peace are spatial. War is also simultaneously infused into domestic life and segregated in the context of militarization. This has been on display in the crisis in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014. One thing that makes Ferguson so dramatic is the diffusion of war materiel into domestic policing. It also matters deeply that the officers pointing the weapons are largely white, and the demonstrators are predominately largely African American, making clear the racial geography of militarized policing. In the end, this essay raises the question of whether peace should be sought or celebrated. Perhaps the space of peace during persistent conflict can only be a space of privilege.

My paper is on SSRN. It this topic sounds familiar, it's because I started thinking about it on this blog a while ago.

Cross-posted from Balkinization.

The Future as a Concept in National Security Law

I will follow up soon with a post on history and the crisis in Ferguson, Missouri.  Today I'm posting a new paper from a conference on The Future of National Security Law.  The topics of race and national security are intersecting before our eyes. But the paper takes up something more abstract:  the concept of "The Future."  Here's the abstract:

The Concept of the Future in National Security Law

With their focus on the future of national security law, the essays in this issue share a common premise: that the future matters to legal policy, and that law must take the future into account. But what is this future? And what conception of the future do national security lawyers have in mind? The future is, in an absolute sense, unknowable. Absent a time machine, we cannot directly experience it. Yet human action is premised on ideas about the future, political scientist Harold Lasswell wrote in his classic work The Garrison State. The ideas about the future that guide social scientific work are rational predictions, he suggested.

If law is premised on ideas about something unknowable, something that can, at best, be a prediction, then it seems important to examine what those ideas, assumptions and predictions are. This essay examines future-thinking in prominent works related to national security, including the ideas that the future is peacetime, a long war, a “next attack,” and the future as a postwar. Drawing from scholarship on historical memory and conceptions of temporality, this essay argues that understandings of the future depend on more than the rational empirical predictions that Lasswell had in mind. The future is a cultural construct that depends in part on the way we remember the past. It does not exist apart from the politics and values that inform our perceptions. The future does not unfold on its own. We produce our future through both our acts and our imaginations. Culture matters deeply in this context, for the future we imagine is a well-spring of law.

Legal History as Foreign Relations History

I've just posted a new paper, Legal History as Foreign Relations History. Written for the new edition of a leading work on methodology in foreign relations history, I challenge the field's traditional skepticism about law's relevance to international affairs. Many grad students and newer scholars are incorporating the history of human rights and international law into their work, and my intent is to be helpful to those historians, and to build a bridge between fields.  Here's the abstract:

This paper is for a leading work on the methodologies of foreign relations history. Traditionally, diplomatic historians have been skeptical about law as a causal force in international relations, and have often ignored it. Challenging that assumption, this essay shows that law is already present in aspects of foreign relations history scholarship. Using human rights as an example, I explore the way periodization of legal histories is tied to assumptions and arguments about causality. I illustrate the way law has worked as a tool in international affairs, and the way law makes an indelible mark, or acts as a legitimizing force, affecting what historical actors imagine to be possible. Drawing from Robert Gordon’s influential work on the methodology of legal history, the essay shows the way law can help to constitute the social and political context within which international affairs are conducted. I argue that the presence of law and lawyers in the history of U.S. foreign relations is too central to be ignored.

For a scholar without legal training, taking up law-related topics can pose special challenges. This essay ends with a Legal History Survival Guide that includes advice about how to get started and how to avoid mistakes.