The liberal warrior after 2014: visibilities and invisibilities
Julia Welland (J.Welland@warwick.ac.uk)
This blog was previously published on August 5, 2016
I tend to find returning to work written years ago somewhat disconcerting. Often my own thinking on whatever it is I have written about has moved on and I find myself wishing I could go back and rephrase, delete or restructure. All of these reactions are present when I read the below blog post and the accompanying IFJP article it was published alongside. While my research and thinking has taken me away from the conceptualisation of a ‘liberal warrior’ (and, indeed, the conflict in Afghanistan), a concern with and for bodies remains. Thinking specifically to this blog post’s topic of visible and invisible bodies and writing now against the backdrop of the 2020 global COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, whose bodies are rendered visible and whose fade from view or fail to be accounted for at all can– as ever – reveal much about global structures of race and gender, economic priorities of states, and colonial legacies.
Critical race and postcolonial scholars – long attuned to these power relations – point to the unequal economic, health and affective impacts of COVID-19 on Black and Brown bodies, while feminists have drawn attention to militarised and masculinised language of ‘waging war’on the virus. However, despite this war waging rhetoric in the UK and US (likely to be two of the worst affected countries in relation to COVID-19) when military bodies have materialised – helping to deliver national testing and personal protective equipment in the UK and deployed by President Trump to Washington D.C. to ‘quell’ peaceful protests in the city – they have not appeared as the illusory ‘cure all’ that militarism oftentimes presents itself as. Rather, the UK military seems to be struggling to appear relevant in a national context that will demand increased budgets in healthcare as opposed to defence, while in the US, there was horror and unease across the political spectrum at the possibility of US troops deployed against their own citizens. In my optimistic moments, I hope these ‘cracks’ in a military commonsense offer the possibility of a reorientation away from martial responses to ‘crises’ and a centring of bodies and lives oftentimes excluded or ignored in global consciousness.
During the thirteen years British troops were stationed in Afghanistan, I often found myself thinking about visibilities and invisibilities. I thought about the bodies that populated visual grammars of war: the veiled and supposedly oppressed Afghan women, the AK-47-toting Taliban fighter, and the NATO counterinsurgency soldier. I thought about the violences that I saw and heard on news reports and in newspapers, on the car radio during my morning drive to work, and occasionally even on the bodies of veterans themselves. And I thought about what stories or narratives of war – about who we were fighting, why we were fighting, and who was doing the fighting – were visible, and even became familiar. I also thought about what remained invisible, or at least not readily available to an incurious observer: the bodies that failed to appear as part of the warscape, violences I didn’t bear witness to, and the stories of war that remained unfamiliar. I was particularly interested in asking questions about the specific conceptualisation of militarised masculinity that I saw as being overwhelmingly visible: the body through which nearly all our understandings of the conflict was mediated through.
The Liberal Warrior
In-line with the demands of counterinsurgency warfare, its ‘softer’ and ‘gentler’ approach to soldiering, and its simultaneous need for soldiers who can both fight wars and build nations, I claimed that a ‘new’ militarised masculine subjectivity was emerging: the liberal warrior.
This liberal warrior was produced both through everyday counterinsurgency practices—foot patrols; shuras; firefights—and through its being-in-relation with other(ed) subjectivities. The training, or ‘partnering and advising’ as the British military referred to it, of Afghan security forces was one site where the liberal warrior could be performatively enacted through both practice and relation. In the mentoring of Afghan security forces, liberal warriors demonstrated both their ‘hard’ masculinity—in their provision of command and fire battle support—and ‘soft’ femininity—by providing advice on leadership and operational procedures. These practices produced a softened and slightly feminised militarised masculinity: one that was strong yet restrained, rational yet compassionate.
For audiences in the west, it was the liberal warrior and its specific embodiment of masculinity that became the dominant frame of reference for understanding the conflict, and the centrality of this subjectivity engendered particular visibilities.
The Obfuscating Visibility of the Liberal Warrior
It was through a liberal warrior’s soft-hatted patrols and population-centric tactics that counterinsurgency entered the public imagination;It was through liberal warriors’ deaths and amputated limbs that we knew of the continued danger and threat of the Taliban; And it was through the liberal warrior’s relation to Afghan security personnel that Afghans were scripted (simultaneously and paradoxically) as effeminate, homosexualised and hypermasculine.
Thus, concomitantly, the centrality and visibility of a liberal warrior masculinity engendered particular invisibilities: the concealing of the continued ‘kinetic’ side of the operations, the unknown numbers of injured and killed Afghans, and the papering over of masculinity’s lack of ontological solidity.
The Liberal Warrior in Peace
However, as of November 2014, the majority of NATO troops left Afghanistan and handed responsibility for combat and security missions over to their Afghan counterparts. The liberal warrior is no longer re-enacted and reproduced in the counterinsurgency environs of Afghanistan, but now largely resides in their home country, thousands of miles away from the context, which it both constituted and was constituted by. What now then for a liberal warrior militarised masculinity? Will the liberal warrior itself be rendered invisible now?
While no longer performatively enacted through counterinsurgency practices, the liberal warrior continues to materialise in the post-Afghanistan context. In March 2015 a service was held in St Pauls Cathedral in the UK, commemorating British involvement in Afghanistan, with members of Parliament, the Royal family, and service personnel and their families in attendance. During the service, we were reminded of the sacrifices of the 453 British troops who had died, as well as the countless others who bear the physical and emotional costs of war.
Increasingly however, liberal warriors emerge as disconnected from war, combat or Afghanistan, and as central figures in the continued militarisation of everyday life. The visibility of liberal warriors – both current service personnel and veterans – is today overwhelmingly in the supposedly civilian sphere. In the Invictus Games, liberal warriors demonstrate their continued physical strength despite the injuries they have endured; this physical capability is apparent again in their position as fitness instructors and personal trainers in British Military Fitness; and they emerge as ‘solutions’ to multiple problems – ‘problem’ children, ‘problem’ schools, civilian security provision – that are then, in turn, militarised.
Through these visibilities the liberal warrior is becoming increasingly personalised and increasingly familiarised to even those with little or no connection to the formal military institution. No longer absent fighting forces, the bodies and visibility of liberal warriors increasingly fills our field of everyday vision. These practices, these visibilities, operate to contain and render invisible the practices, effects and questions of war. These bodies are continually separated from acts of violence and their visibilities script very specific boundaries around what can or cannot be asked or told about their experiences.
The Invisible Remains
And what about Afghanistan? What about the spatial location where so many of these liberal warriors were deployed and constituted? Afghanistan—its population we supposedly protected and its security forces we trained—continues to fade from our field of vision, becoming ever more invisible in our understanding of militaries and liberal warriors.
It has been reported that despite the British government’s claim that its lasting ‘legacy’ in Afghanistan would be the trained and strengthened Afghan military and police), in the first few months of 2015 casualties within the security forces have increased by around 70%, with an average of 330 casualties a week. With the Afghan spring fighting season only recently started, the country’s first without the combat support of NATO, the legacy of NATO’s involvement in Afghanistan may in fact be a carefully scripted and hypervisible liberal warrior, and the continued invisibility of violence aimed towards those already located in vulnerable and precarious positions.
Read the full article here: Liberal Warriors and the Violent Colonial Logics of “Partnering and Advising”
Each blog post gives the views of the individual author(s) based on their published IFJP article. All posts published on ifjpglobal.org remain the intellectual property and copyright of the author or authors.
Julia Welland is an Associate Professor of War Studies in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick. She is currently attempting to write a book on affect and militarism, and has broader research interests in the affective experiences of gender, race and militarism.