In
a few different talks this semester, I plan to build on the ideas in my
last book, and finally take up a question I did not previously have a
good answer to. The book,
War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences,
critically analyzes the way the concept of “wartime” works in law and
public policy. It focuses on war and temporality, arguing that the
ideas about war and time that are implicit in law and policy (e.g. that
wartime and peacetime are distinct, and follow each other in sequence)
are in tension with the history of U.S. military engagement, which has
been persistent, not episodic.
When I gave talks about the project, I was often asked about whether
space mattered – essentially whether I should consider time and space
together. I would answer that yes, space/geography is important to
American war in part because U.S. military action takes place outside
U.S. territory, and, relying on
Catherine Lutz’s work,
some domestic communities, especially communities with military bases,
experience directly domestic costs of war, while other areas are not
directly affected. But time and space did not come together in the work
itself. I figured that the topic of war and time was important enough
to be the singular focus of the book.
But I am occasionally asked to say something about peace, and that has
finally helped me with how to think about war’s times and spaces
together. The most helpful provocation was an invitation from Yxta
Murray of Loyola Law School to speak at a symposium on Law, Peace, and
Violence: Jurisprudence and the Possibilities of Peace, at Seattle
University School of Law in March. My difficulty: what to say about
“peacetime” when I think there is, essentially, no such thing.
Yxta’s generative call for papers seemed
to require more than a suggestion that peacetime is an anachronism – in
part because peace is such a fervent hope, and peacefulness has been an
important political strategy for social movements.
The answer, which I am still working out and which may not be fully
satisfactory for Yxta’s conference, was to turn to scholarship on
spatiality. When I began working on temporality, I found my way to a
tremendously interesting literature on the history and culture of time.
The same is true of space, with developing new work in critical
geography. This is helping me to see that my initial thoughts about
wartime and space were too simplistic. And many law-related works that
take space or place into account are similarly limited. When space or
place are invoked, sometimes that just means focusing on the local, or
perhaps being comparative. In this way of thinking, there is an
implicit normative space, which is the nation. All else is a departure.
But this is, ultimately, not very interesting or helpful.
I started by returning to Stephen Kern,
The Culture of Time and Space, and looking carefully at his chapters on spatiality, and to
Mary Favret’s focus on war and distance. And I am finding my way into
critical geography.
The argument for the peace conference is falling into place: that peace
is not a time in the United States, it is a geography. The geography
of peace is driven in part by social class. Those engaged in the work
of American war (soldiers, reservists, military contractors, their
families and communities) have a direct experience of “wartime,” while
the rest of us can go about our daily lives minimally affected by
American military engagement. Whether it is wartime and peacetime
within the United States depends upon who you are and where you live.
There are consequences of this for the politics of war, and for
political checks on presidential war power – but this will await another
paper. For now, thinking about peace as a geography can be a way of
thinking about time and space as different yet intersecting dimensions
of the culture and experience of American war.
My first take on this will be a
lecture at the Robert S. Strauss Center at the University of Texas next week. The abstract is below.
In law, history and public policy, we conventionally divide the past
into wartimes and peacetimes. Peacetime is thought to be normal time,
and wartime is exceptional. Harsh wartime policies are tolerable in
part because they are temporary. In the long war-era of the 21st
century, these temporal assumptions have been remarkably persistent,
with President Obama and others suggesting that we will at some point
return to peacetime. This lecture will begin with a critique of wartime
as a temporal concept, drawing upon my recent book War Time: An Idea,
Its History, Its Consequences. If war’s time limits have eroded, what
has become of “peacetime”? Going beyond the wartime critique, I will
argue that for the United States “peace” is not a time, but is a spacial
concept. It is because peace is experienced geographically, rather
than temporally, that much of the U.S. population can experience peace,
while war’s violence is the province of its soldiers and of those who
reside in the places of its export.
Take two will be in Seattle, and take three will be at a symposium on
The Future of National Security Law at Pepperdine. Then I hope to take
the spatial analysis in a different direction, focusing more on a global
community of the surveilled that is produced by contemporary security
practices for a symposium at Yale’s Center for Historical Enquiry and
the Social Sciences. This blog was a helpful place for me to work out
the War Time ideas, so I hope you will indulge this new project.
Comments are open -- with thanks in advance for your reading
suggestions!
Cross-posted from
Balkinization.
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