Curiosity is often unwanted. Curiosity
is often discouraged. Curiosity is often an initial practice to holding
accountable those who seek impunity for their actions. As such, curiosity is
itself a political practice. It is a mental faculty-as-practice that is a
precondition to establishing a firm ground upon which one may cast judgement.
Although perhaps flawed in her incomplete articulation of judgement itself, as
Hannah Arendt teaches us, judgement is always directly interconnected to, or
inside the orbit of, political action within the public realm as politics par
excellence. (Arendt, 2009; Steinberger, 1999; D’entrèves, 2000)
Hence, as an act of seeking to ‘dig’ so as to ‘know’, through judgement,
curiosity is endowed with an innately political character.
To many Feminists and Queer Theorists,
the political character of curiosity is not novel. Indeed, feminist curiosity
has been well documented and in has certainly contributed to the
epistemological discourse, exploring ‘how we know what we know’ when thinking
about International Relations. (Enloe, 2004) In her most recent work Twelve
Feminist Lessons of War, Cynthia Enloe unpacks a series of observations
about the manner in which women experience war. (Enloe, 2023) A certain
feminist curiosity, Enloe states, allows us to “make realistic sense of the
women’s experience of War”, keep track of the priorities and practices of
prosecutors, “weigh who is worth listening to during wartime,” observe how
fighting forces operate in relation to women, “slow down even militarization,”
and much more. (Enloe, 2023: 83-84)
One finding from such curiosity concerns
the temporal demarcation of war’s end. The ending to a conflict is often
thought to be an event, temporally delineated to a given time and date. One
does not have to go far to find illustrations of this, wherein representatives
or emissaries of sovereign bodies (usually men, but not always) meet to
negotiate the terms of a conflict’s conclusion. Matthais Erzberger met with
Ferdinand Foch, Napoleon Bonaparte capitulated to Frederick Lewis Maitland, and
Mamoru Shigemitsu and Douglas MacArthur formally brought the Second World War
to a close. One could go on; formalised inter-state conflict is usually brought
to a close with such events. The Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years
War, the Dayton Agreement the Bosnian War, the Kumanovo Agreement the Kosovo
War, or even the Pretoria Agreement, which in November 2022 brought the Tigray
War in Ethiopia to an end.
Through too many numerous examples
to count, it is the evental-act of signature that brings an end to a conflict.
Gallons of blood, Rankean history tells us, are halted in their flow by just
one drop of ink. In these cases, the activity of treaty-signing is supposed to
be a performative one. With the flick of a pen and the scribbling of the right
names on the right piece of paper, the bullets, the shells, the gas, the
drone-strikes, the rape, the theft, the fear, the suffering, the
trauma-production, everything, all of it, is supposed to halt – ushering in the
new-beginning of a ‘secure’ age.
The same can be said of failed campaigns
of militarisation and ‘humanitarian’ military activity, be that in Afghanistan,
Vietnam, Mali, Syria, Haiti, Afghanistan again, and too many other
cases to mention. Here, the conflict comes to a formal close with the event of
the formal retreat, usually ossified into memory as visual evidence that
emasculates the military, revealing its incompetence – the last helicopter out
of Saigon, the disregard for Afghanis waiting on the tarmac of Kabul’s
remaining airstrip, the termination of Operation Barkhane, the final vehicle
column crossing the Hairatan Bridge into Uzbekistan. This too is sovereign
performativity in the manner of traditional Austinian speech-acts. (Austin,
1962) Be they a civilian leader, a monarch enshrined by the divine, or a
military commander, the sovereign entity with whom ultimate decision-making
power over the state’s forces rest comes to decide the conflict shall be no
more. The utterance of this sovereign speech-act has the legitimate
illocutionary and perlocutionary force of bringing a conflict to a close with
the command of withdrawal. Once again, the sovereign utterance brings an end to
a conflict. Feminist and Queer curiosity reveals to us that this is but
one of the many necessary fictions we construct for our own adherence to.
Time as inside/outside – ‘post’
demarcates the formalisation of this following the sovereign decision to end
fighting. Nonetheless, the experience of war continues and can itself
re-militarise so to create future dilemmas of security, what Hugh Gusterson
describes as a ‘perpetual motion mechanism’. (Gusterson, 2016; Kaldor, 2018:
37) ‘Post-War’ for many (who care, who hold state-sanctioned
expectations, who harbour trauma, who hold scars both material and immaterial)
is still ‘Per-War’. Indeed, it is only the experience from the
perspective of the sovereign that war truly ever becomes ‘Post’ and in this
way, the Realist is perhaps correct, that peace itself always entails conflict.
Nonetheless, Enloe reminds us to hold our curiosity steadfast, and ask where
are the women in such a 'peace'?
-∴-
Arendt, Hannah (2009) Responsibility
and Judgment. New York: Schoken Books
Austin, John L. (1962) How To Do
Things With Words. London: Penguin.
D’entrèves, Maurizio Passerin
(2000) “Arendt’s theory of judgment”. In Danna Villa (Ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. pp. 245-260.
Enloe, Cynthia (2004) The
Curious Feminist: Searching For Women in a New Age of Empire. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Enloe, Cynthia (2023) Twelve
Feminist Lessons of War. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Kaldor, Mary (2018) Global
Security Cultures. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gusterson, Hugh (2016) Drone:
Remote Control Warfare. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Steinberger, Peter J. (1999) ‘Hannah Arendt on Judgment’. American Journal of Political Science, 34(3): 803-821.