War Is Not Just an Event: Reflections on the Significance of Everyday Violence
Chris Cuomo
Published in Hypatia 11.4, (1996): 30-46
Although my position is in agreement with the notion that war and militarism are feminist issues, I argue that approaches to the ethics of war and peace which do not consider “peacetime” military violence are inadequate for feminist and environmentalist concerns. Because much of the military violence done to women and ecosystems happens outside the boundaries of declared wars, feminist and environmental philosophers ought to emphasize the significance of everyday military violence.
Philosophical attention to war has typically appeared in the form of justifications for entering into war, and over appropriate activities within war. The spatial metaphors used to refer to war as a separate, bounded sphere indicate assumptions that war is a realm of human activity vastly removed from normal life, or a sort of happening that is appropriately conceived apart from everyday events in peaceful times. Not surprisingly, most discussions of the political and ethical dimensions of war discuss war solely as an event—an occurrence, or collection of occurrences, having clear beginnings and endings that are typically marked by formal, institutional declarations. As happenings, wars and military activities can be seen as motivated by identifiable, if complex, intentions, and directly enacted by individual and collective decision-makers and agents of states. But many of the questions about war that are of interest to feminists including how large-scale, state-sponsored violence affects women and members of other oppressed groups; how military violence shapes gendered, raced, and nationalistic political realities and moral imaginations; what such violence consists of and why it persists; how it is related to other oppressive and violent institutions and hegemonies—cannot be adequately pursued by focusing on events. These issues are not merely a matter of good or bad intentions and identifiable decisions. In "Gender and 'Postmodern' War," Robin Schott introduces some of the ways in which war is currently best seen not as an event but as a presence (Schott 1995). Schott argues that postmodern understandings of persons, states, and politics, as well as the high-tech nature of much contemporary warfare and the preponderance of civil and nationalist wars, render an event-based conception of war inadequate, especially insofar as gender is taken into account. In this essay, I will expand upon her argument by showing that accounts of war that only focus on events are impoverished in a number of ways, and therefore feminist consideration of the political, ethical, and ontological dimensions of war and the possibilities for resistance demand a much more complicated approach. I take Schott's characterization of war as presence as a point of departure, though I am not committed to the idea that the constancy of militarism, the fact of its omnipresence in human experience, and the paucity of an event-based account of war are exclusive to contemporary postmodern or postcolonial circumstances) Theory that does not investigate or even notice the omnipresence of militarism cannot represent or address the depth and specificity of the everyday effects of militarism on women, on people living in occupied territories, on members of military institutions, and on the environment. These effects are relevant to feminists in a number of ways because military practices and institutions help construct gendered and national identity, and because they justify the destruction of natural nonhuman entities and communities during peacetime. Lack of attention to these aspects of the business of making or preventing military violence in an extremely technologized world results in theory that cannot accommodate the connections among the constant presence of militarism, declared wars, and other closely related social phenomena, such as nationalistic glorifications of motherhood, media violence, and current ideological gravitations to military solutions for social problems. Ethical approaches that do not attend to the ways in which warfare and military practices are woven into the very fabric of life in twenty-first century technological states lead to crisis-based politics and analyses. For any feminism that aims to resist oppression and create alternative social and political options, crisis-based ethics and politics are problematic because they distract attention from the need for sustained resistance to the enmeshed, omnipresent systems of domination and oppression that so often function as givens in most people's lives. Neglecting the omnipresence of militarism allows the false belief that the absence of declared armed conflicts is peace, the polar opposite of war. It is particularly easy for those whose lives are shaped by the safety of privilege, and who do not regularly encounter the realities of militarism, to maintain this false belief. The belief that militarism is an ethical, political concern only regarding armed conflict, creates forms of resistance to militarism that are merely exercises in crisis control. Antiwar resistance is then mobilized when the "real" violence finally occurs, or when the stability of privilege is directly threatened, and at that point it is difficult not to respond in ways that make resisters drop all other political priorities. Crisis-driven attention to declarations of war might actually keep resisters complacent about and complicitous in the general presence of global militarism. Seeing war as necessarily embedded in constant military presence draws attention to the fact that horrific, state-sponsored violence is happening nearly all over, all of the time, and that it is perpetrated by military institutions and other militaristic agents of the state. Moving away from crisis-driven politics and ontologies concerning war and military violence also enables consideration of relationships among seemingly disparate phenomena, and therefore can shape more nuanced theoretical and practical forms of resistance. For example, investigating the ways in which war is part of a presence allows consideration of the relationships among the events of war and the following: how militarism is a foundational trope in the social and political imagination; how the pervasive presence and symbolism of soldiers/warriors/patriots shape meanings of gender; the ways in which threats of state-sponsored violence are a sometimes invisible/sometimes bold agent of racism, nationalism, and corporate interests; the fact that vast numbers of communities, cities, and nations are currently in the midst of excruciatingly violent circumstances. It also provides a lens for considering the relationships among the various kinds of violence that get labeled "war." Given current American obsessions with nationalism, guns, and militias, and growing hunger for the death penalty, prisons, and a more powerful police state, one cannot underestimate the need for philosophical and political attention to connections among phenomena like the "war on drugs," the "war on crime," and other state-funded militaristic campaigns. I propose that the constancy of militarism and its effects on social reality be reintroduced as a crucial locus of contemporary feminist attentions, and that feminists emphasize how wars are eruptions and manifestations of omnipresent militarism that is a product and tool of multiply oppressive, corporate, technocratic states.' Feminists should be particularly interested in making this shift because it better allows consideration of the effects of war and militarism on women, subjugated peoples, and environments. While giving attention to the constancy of militarism in contemporary life we need not neglect the importance of addressing the specific qualities of direct, large-scale, declared military conflicts. But the dramatic nature of declared, large-scale conflicts should not obfuscate the ways in which military violence pervades most societies in increasingly technologically sophisticated ways and the significance of military institutions and everyday practices in shaping reality. Philosophical discussions that focus only on the ethics of declaring and fighting wars miss these connections, and also miss the ways in which even declared military conflicts are often experienced as omnipresent horrors. These approaches also leave unquestioned tendencies to suspend or distort moral judgement in the face of what appears to be the inevitability of war and militarism. Just war theory is a prominent example of a philosophical approach that rests on the assumption that wars are isolated from everyday life and ethics. Such theory, as developed by St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Hugo Grotius, and as articulated in contemporary dialogues by many philosophers, including Michael Walzer (1977), Thomas Nagel (1974), and Sheldon Cohen (1989), take the primary question concerning the ethics of warfare to be about when to enter into military conflicts against other states. They therefore take as a given the notion that war is an isolated, definable event with clear boundaries. These boundaries are significant because they distinguish the circumstances in which standard moral rules and constraints, such as rules against murder and unprovoked violence, no longer apply. Just-war theory assumes that war is a separate sphere of human activity having its own ethical constraints and criteria and in doing so it begs the question of whether or not war is a special kind of event, or part of a pervasive presence in nearly all contemporary life. Because the application of just-war principles is a matter of proper decision-making on the part of agents of the state, before wars occur, and before military strikes are made, they assume that military initiatives are distinct events. In fact, declarations of war are generally overdetermined escalations of preexisting conditions. Just-war criteria cannot help evaluate military and related institutions, including their peacetime practices and how these relate to wartime activities, so they cannot address the ways in which armed conflicts between and among states emerge from omnipresent, often violent, state militarism. The remarkable resemblances in some sectors between states of peace and states of war remain completely untouched by theories that are only able to discuss the ethics of starting and ending direct military conflicts between and among states. Applications of just-war criteria actually help create the illusion that the "problem of war" is being addressed when the only considerations are the ethics of declaring wars and of military violence within the boundaries of declarations of war and peace. Though just-war considerations might theoretically help decision-makers avoid specific gross eruptions of military violence, the aspects of war which require the underlying presence of militarism and the direct effects of the omnipresence of militarism remain untouched. There may be important decisions to be made about when and how to fight war, but these must be considered in terms of the many other aspects of contemporary war and militarism that are significant to nonmilitary personnel, including women and nonhumans.
FEMINIST APPROACHES TO WAR AND MILITARY VIOLENCE
In a recent Hypatiaarticle, Lucinda Peach argues that just-war theory, which she takes to be more realistic and useful than pacifism, can be strengthened with feminist insights and analyses. Drawing primarily on the work of Sara Ruddick and Jean Bethke Elshtain, she reconstructs feminist responses to traditional just-war approaches, and illustrates how a more thorough application of feminist principles might lead to "a more careful and considered appraisal of when the use of armed force is morally justified" (Peach 1994, 167). Though she agrees with their criticisms of traditional just-war approaches, Peach finds Elshtain's and Ruddick's alternatives practically and theoretically lacking. Nonetheless, her faith in just-war theorizing is unwavering:
The feminist criticisms discussed do not suggest a need to develop radically new or different criteria for assessing the morality or engagement in armed conflict from those offered by traditional just-war theory ... feminist criticisms and counterproposals suggest a number of specific proposals for modifying the practice more than the theory of the just-war approach to armed conflict. (Peach 1994, 164)
Peach states that one of the problems with nonfeminist critiques of war is their failure to address the fact that "women remain largely absent from ethical and policy debates regarding when to go to war, how to fight a war, and whether resorting to war is morally justifiable" (Peach 1994, 152). But a just-war approach cannot successfully theorize women's roles in these events because formal, declared wars depend upon underlying militaristic assumptions and constructions of gender that make women's participation as leaders nearly impossible. The limitations of Peach's analysis make clear some aspects of the relationships between peacetime militarism and armed conflicts that cannot be addressed by even feminist just-war principles. Her five criticisms of just-war theory, discussed below, are intended to both echo and revise appraisals made by other feminists. But each fails to successfully address the complexity of feminist concerns.
1) Peach finds just-war theory's reliance on realism, the notion that human nature makes war inevitable and unavoidable, to be problematic. She believes just-war theory should not be premised on realist assumptions, and that it should also avoid "unduly unrealistic appraisals" of human and female nature, as found in Ruddick's work.
Peach rightly identifies the pessimism, sexism, essentialism, and universalism at work in just-war theorists' conceptions of human nature. Nonetheless, she fails to see that just-war theorists employ ossified concepts of both "human nature" and "war." Any interrogation of the relationships between war and "human nature," or more benignly, understandings and enactments of what it means to be diverse human agents in various contexts, will be terribly limited insofar as they consider wars to be isolated events. Questions concerning the relationships between war and "human nature" become far more complex if we reject a conception of war that focuses only on events, and abandon any pretense of arriving at universalist conceptions of human or female "nature." Feminist ethical questions about war are not reducible to wondering how to avoid large-scale military conflict despite human tendencies toward violence. Instead, the central questions concern the omnipresence of militarism, the possibilities of making its presence visible, and the potential for resistance to its physical and hegeinonic force. Like "solutions" to the preponderance of violence perpetrated by men against women that fail to analyze and articulate relationships between everyday violence and institutionalized or invisible systems of patriarchal, racist, and economic oppression, analyses that characterize eruptions of military violence as isolated, persistent events, are practically and theoretically insufficient.
2). Peach faults just-war theory for its failure to consider alternatives to war, stating that "the failure of most just-war theorists to seriously contemplate alternatives to war is ... radically deficient from the perspectives of pacifist feminist and others opposed to knee-jerk militaristic response to civil strife" (Peach 1994, 158). She argues that feminist just-war theorists, including Elshtain, should also pay more attention to pacifist arguments.
When Peach discusses "alternatives to war," she is clearly referring to alternatives to entering into war, or to participating in "the escalation of conflicts." The avoidance of eruptions of military violence is certainly important, and Peach is correct that feminist insights about conflict resolution could present significant recommendations in this regard. However, feminist moral imagination cannot end there. In thinking of alternatives to war, we need to continue to imagine alternatives to militaristic economies, symbolic systems, values, and political institutions. The task of constructing such alternatives is far more daunting and comprehensive than creating alternatives to a specific event or kind of event. Pacifist writers as diverse as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barbara Deming have emphasized the fact that pacifism entails a critique of pervasive, systematic human violence. Despite its reductionist tendencies, there is much to learn from the ways in which pacifists conceive of war as a presence, as well as the pacifist refusal to let go of the ideal of peace. Characterizing pacifism as motivated by the desire to avoid specific events disregards the extent to which pacifism aims to criticize the preconditions underlying events of war.
3). Following several influential moves in feminist philosophy, Peach rejects just-war theory's reliance on abstraction—of the realities, or "horrors," of war; of enemies as one-dimensional evil, killable Others; and of the ethical responses needed to address the morality of war, such as a privileging of justice and rights over love and caring. Following Elshtain, she believes that feminist just-war principles should be more particularized, contextualized, and individualized.
But the abstraction of the particularities of war depends on an abstraction of war itself. The distance of such abstraction is created in part by willingness to think of war without considering the presence of war in "peaceful" times. Wars becomes conceptual entities—objects for consideration—rather than diverse, historically loaded exemplifications of the contexts in which they occur. In order to notice the particular and individual realities of war, attention must be given to the particular, individual, and contextualized causes and effects of pervasive militarism, as well as the patterns and connections among them.
4). Like other feminists, Peach criticizes the dualisms and dichotomies that underlie war and the other evils of patriarchy, including
dichotomies between male and female, combatant and noncombatant, soldier and citizen, ally and enemy and state and individual which have dominated just-war thinking. Rather than relying on traditional dichotomies, a feminist application of just-war criteria should emphasize the effects of going to war on the lives of particular individuals who would be involved, whether soldier or civilian, enemy or ally, male or female. (Peach 1994, 166)
As should now be obvious, though Peach rejects several relevant dualistic hierarchies, a stark ontological distinction between war and peace remains basically intact.' Thus Peach's rejection of dualisms is undermined by her own failure to question a stark ontological distinction between war and peace. In considering the ways in which violence shapes women's realities, feminists might be better served by analyses of war as part of enmeshed continua or spectra of state-sponsored and other systemic patriarchal and racist violence.
5.) Peach believes just-war theory privileges state authority and the good of the state over individual autonomy and well-being. Instead, she states that just-war theory should include "reformulated understandings of the proper relationships between the individual and the state," considering "both the impact of war on individuals as well as the obligations of both men and women to defend the nation" (Peach 1994, 167). In raising questions about the relationships between individuals and states, Peach fails to question liberal, modernist conceptions of either. But if individual persons are socially constituted, often in conflicting ways, how can membership, or appropriate loyalties, be determined? lithe state is always inevitably a military, patriarchal, racist state, how ought alternative collectivities that will promote the well-being of individuals be conceived without creating or relying on military presence? Feminists concerned with resistances to war need to consider how the pervasiveness of militarism in the construction of the contemporary state implies the need to question nationalism when theorizing critically about war. To give one very clear example of the ways in which just-war evaluations of wars as events fail to address feminist questions about militarism, consider the widespread influence of foreign military bases on gendered national identities and interactions. In Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (1990), Cynthia Enloe illustrates how, while decision-making and economic power are held primarily by men, international relations and politics are inevitably played out on women's bodies in myriad ways, propagating racist, nationalist, and colonialist conceptions of femininity. One ' chapter, "Base Women," is devoted to a discussion of the ways in which local and global sexual politics shape and are shaped through the constant presence of thousands of military bases worldwide—in the symbol of the soldier, the introduction of foreign conceptions of masculinity and femininity, the reproduction of family structures on military bases, and through systems of prostitution that universally coexist alongside military bases. Enloe writes, "military politics, which occupy such a large part of international politics today, require military bases. Bases are artificial societies created out of unequal relations between men and women of different races and classes" and, one might add, different nations (Enloe 1990, 2). The constant, global presence of these bases is an example of the mundane givenness and subtle omnipresence of military violence.
Most bases have managed to slip into the daily lives of the nearby community. A military base, even one controlled by soldiers of another country, can become politically invisible if its ways of doing business and seeing the world insinuate themselves into a community's schools, consumer tastes, housing patterns, children's games, adults' friendships, jobs and gossip. . . . Most have draped themselves with the camouflage of normalcy. . . . Rumors of a base closing can send shivers of economic alarm through a civilian community that has come to depend on base jobs and soldiers' spending. (Enloe 1990, 66)
Just-war theory—even feminist just-war theory—cannot bring to light the ways in which the politics of military bases are related to the waging of war, how militarism constructs masculinity and femininity, or how international politics are shaped by the microcosmic impacts of military bases. It therefore cannot address some of the most pressing ways in which militarism and war involve and affect women.
JUST WAR AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS
I turn now to a discussion of the environmental effects of war, because I believe these effects to be significant to feminists for two basic reasons. Though women are no more essentially connected to nature than any other organic beings, cultural constructions associate women with nature and help justify the mistreatment of both. Many feminists and ecological feminists have discussed these problematic conceptual connections as created or fueled by the dichotomous thinking discussed above (Griffin 1989; King 1990; Warren 1990; Cuomo 1992; Plumwood 1993). Others, including Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies (1993), focus on the practical, or material connections between environmental degradation and women's oppression. In any case, if women's oppression is connected to the unjustified destruction of nature, or if, as Karen Warren argues, feminists must be against oppression in any form, including the oppression of nature, it is arguable that the ecological effects of war and militarism are feminist issues. Because military ecological destruction occurs primarily "during peacetime," and because it is so directly tied to other forms of ecological and social violence, attention to the ecological impacts of war further illustrates the limitations of only thinking of war in terms of events. In "The Military Commander's Responsibility for the Environment," Merrit Drucker, a major in the U.S. Army and philosophy instructor at the United StatesMilitaryAcademy at West Point, utilizes an expanded application of just-war principles to argue that military commanders ought to protect natural environments during peace and warfare. The commander's peacetime responsibilities
are founded on the commander's professional responsibility as an agent of the state. Wartime responsibilities stem from the well-established prohibitions against harming noncombatants and destroying works of art and objects of historical or cultural value. (Drucker 1989, 136)
Drucker's analysis rests primarily on a sharp distinction between peace and war, and a broad interpretation of the just-war principle of noncombatant immunity. This principle requires military discrimination between combatants and noncombatants and states that it is justifiable to intentionally kill only the former. In essence, Drucker believes military commanders ought to protect the environment during war because, like noncombatants and cultural artifacts, natural entities are inherently valuable, morally inappropriate targets of military aggression. Drucker argues from analogy that because "the environment" (which he represents as a unified, self-evident entity) is free of intention and cannot wage or fight in war, it is an innocent noncombatant in the realm of human affairs. If a just-war must be fought without intended or excessive harm to noncombatants, justice requires that wars also be fought without intended or excessive harm to environments. In fact, he believes restraint is due not only because of nature's lack of intention, but also because of its functions:
The environment is remarkably like a special group of soldiers who are considered to be noncombatants. Just as [medical personnel and religious professionals] protect and foster life, the environment, if treated properly, makes possible and sustains life in the most basic way imaginable . . . [and] should be accorded the considerations we grant human nurturers and healers. (Drucker 1989, 147)
Despite his characterization of the rule of noncombatant immunity as "an established part of our moral tradition and international law," Drucker himself admits that it is often violated (1989, 146). Drucker's argument presupposes the just-war principle of proportionality, which requires that the benefits of going to war, and of particular strategies or missions within war, must outweigh its harms. The proportionality requirement, like a principle of utility, allows him to consider ecological damage without necessarily taking an absolutist stance against any military activity that results in ecological harm or manipulation. In other words, proportionality enables a step back from strict observance of noncombatant immunity. Drucker concludes that military ecological damage (damage to nonhuman noncombatants) must be weighed as one of a number of significant factors determining the justifiability of a military action, but that it is ultimately allowable and reasonable to cause damage to the environment in the service of just ends. Summing up his position, he writes:
If we accept the view that the environment and its inhabitants all have inherent worth, then we need to give genuine consideration to the well-being of all—plants, animals, and persons. In addition to exercising due care I think commanders should take at least minimal risks with their soldiers' lives to protect the environment. (Drucker 1989, 151)
Like Peach, Drucker believes that amended just-war criteria are adequate to critically assess the ethics of war. A telling aspect of Drucker's argument is his illustration of environmentally sound warfare, which I'll quote extensively to provide a sense of his goals concerning military impact on the environment:
The German army in World War II serves as an excellent historical precedent for the compatibility of highly effective training and real protection of the environment. The Germans used garrison training areas near towns for as much individual training as possible. Their larger training areas, used for unit maneuvers, were carefully managed. They were usually located on land unsuitable for agriculture; however, much of the land had to be cultivated to prevent food shortages. These cultivated areas helped make the training more realistic. . . . Large training exercises were held in the fall to prevent damage to crops and soil erosion. Because they were forced to train a very large army in a very small area, the Germans developed training methods which were gentle on the land. (Drucker 1989, 142)
Drucker completely abstracts specific martial decisions and events from other aspects of the Nazi military campaign in World War II, including its underlying xenophobic, hypemationalist, and imperialist core. He therefore sees German military practices as environmentalist, rather than as pragmatic, logical extensions of a near-religious glorification of the Fatherland, implemented by an efficient and extraordinarily destructive military. But thinking of war through environmental ethics is not a matter of conceiving of military practices that are less destructive to a nation's own land and economy. How does the blitzkrieg fit into the ethos Dnicker describes above? Drucker's isolation of German military decisions and events in his ethical assessment is enabled by the complete abstraction of these decisions from their contexts, and the ways in which they were shaped by pervasive Nazi militarism. An obvious danger of this approach to the ethics of war is the fact that one can argue favorably for ecologically sound warfare—clean wars—without attention to the connections among the technologies of war, the motivations for war, and the social contexts of war. Connections between Nazi "environmentalism," and contemporaneous German implementation of eugenic and "population-control" measures that included genocide should not be passed over lightly in efforts to construct an environmental ethic that promotes the flourishing of human, as well as nonhuman, life. Drucker's view depends on sharp distinctions: between combatants and noncombatants, between war and peace. But both human and nonhuman noncombatants are always harmed or otherwise affected by militarism, even when they are not directly harmed in battles. This simple truth was captured in a popular Vietnam War era antiwar poster that read, "War is not healthy for children and other living things." Because natural noncombatants are everywhere; their destruction is necessary for war and for the existence of military institutions, even when wars are not explicitly being fought. The ecological realities of war, and of what it takes to be prepared for war in the contemporary world, are mind-boggling. To take nature at all seriously entails acknowledging the effects of combat as well as the severe harm caused by everyday military practices.
THE ECOLOGICAL IMPACTS OF WAR
In Scorched Earth: The Military's Assault on the Environment, William Thomas, a U.S. Navy veteran, illustrates the extent to which the peacetime practices of military institutions damage natural environments and communities. Thomas argues that even "peace" entails a dramatic and widespread war on nature, or as Joni Seager puts it, "The environmental costs of militarized peace bear suspicious resemblance to the costs of war" (Thomas 1995, xi). All told, including peacetime activities as well as the immense destruction caused by combat, military institutions probably present the most dramatic threat to ecological well-being on the planet. The military is the largest generator of hazardous waste in the United States, creating nearly a ton of toxic pollution every minute, and military analyst Jillian Skeelclaims that, "Global military activity may be the largest worldwide polluter and consumer of precious resources" (quoted in Thomas 1995, 5). A conventionally powered aircraft carrier consumes 150,000 gallons of fuel a day. In less than an hour's flight, a single jet launched from its flight deck consumes as much fuel as a North American motorist burns in two years. One F-16 jet engine requires nearly four and a half tons of scarce titanium, nickel, chromium, cobalt, and energy-intensive aluminum (Thomas 1995, 5), and nine percent of all the iron and steel used by humans is consumed by the global military (Thomas 1995, 16). The United States Department of Defense generates 500,000 tons of toxins annually, more than the world's top five chemical companies combined. The military is the biggest single source of environmental pollution in the United States. Of 338 citations issued by the United States Environmental Protection Agency in 1989, three-quarters went to military installations (Thomas 1995, 17). The feminization, commodification, and devaluation of nature helps create a reality in which its destruction in warfare is easily justified. In imagining an ethic that addresses these realities, feminists cannot neglect the extent to which military ecocide is connected, conceptually and practically, to transnational capitalism and other forms of human oppression and exploitation. Virtually all of the world's thirty-five nuclear bomb test sites, as well as most radioactive dumps and uranium mines, occupy Native lands (Thomas 1995, 6). Six multinationals control one-quarter of all United States defense contracts (Thomas 1995, 10), and two million dollars per minute is spent on the global military (Thomas 1995, 7). One could go on for volumes about the effects of chemical and nuclear testing, military-industrial development and waste, and the disruption of wildlife, habitats, communities, and lifestyles that are inescapably linked to military practices. There are many conceptual and practical connections between military practices in which humans aim to kill and harm each other for some declared "greater good," and nonmilitary practices in which we displace, destroy, or seriously modify nonhuman communities, species, and ecosystems in the name of human interests. An early illustration of these connections was made by Rachel Carson in the first few pages of The Silent Spring (1962), in which she described insecticides as the inadvertent offspring of World War II chemical weapons research. We can now also trace ways in which insecticides were part of the Western-defined global corporatization of agriculture that helped kill off the small family farm and made the worldwide system of food production dependent on the likes of Dow Chemical and Monsanto. Military practices are no different from other human practices that damage and irreparably modify nature. They are often a result of cost-benefit analyses that pretend to weigh all likely outcomes yet do not consider nonhuman entities except in terms of their use value for humans and they nearly always create unforeseeable effects for humans and nonhumans. In addition, everyday military peacetime practices are actually more destructive than most other human activities, they are directly enacted by state power, and, because they function as unquestioned "givens," they enjoy a unique near-immunity to enactments of moral reproach. It is worth noting the extent to which everyday military activities remain largely unscrutinized by environmentalists, especially American environmentalists, largely because fear allows us to be fooled into thinking that "national security" is an adequate excuse for "ecological military mayhem" (Thomas 1995, 16). If environmental destruction is a necessary aspect of war and the peacetime practices of military institutions, an analysis of war which includes its embeddedness in peacetime militarism is necessary to address the environmental effects of war. Such a perspective must pay adequate attention to what is required to prepare for war in a technological age, and how women and other Others are affected by the realities of contemporary military institutions and practices.
CONCLUSIONS AND CAUTIONS
Emphasizing the ways in which war is a presence, a constant undertone, white noise in the background of social existence, moving sometimes closer to the foreground of collective consciousness in the form of direct combat yet remaining mostly as an unconsidered given, allows for several promising analyses. To conclude, I will summarize four distinct benefits of feminist philosophical attention to the constancy of military presence in most everyday contemporary life. 1) By considering the presence of war and militarism, philosophers and activists are able to engage in a more effective, local, textured, multiplicitous discussion of specific examples and issues of militarism, especially during "peacetime" (when most military activities occur). These include environmental effects, such as the recent French decision to engage in nuclear testing; and effects on conceptions of gender and on the lives of women, such as the twelve-year-old Japanese girl who was recently raped by American soldiers stationed in Okinawa. 2) Expanding the field of vision when considering the ethical issues of war allows us to better perceive and reflect upon the connections among various effects and causes of militarism, and between aspects of everyday militarism and military activities that generally occur between declarations of war and the signing of peace treaties. 3) As Robin Schott emphasizes, focusing on the presence of war is particularly necessary given current realities of war, in an age in which military technology makes war less temporally, conceptually, and physically bounded, and in which civil conflict, guerilla wars, ethnic wars, and urban violence in response to worsening social conditions are the most common forms of large-scale violence. 4) Finally, to return to a point which I raised earlier, it is my hope that a more presence-based analysis of war can be a tool for noticing and understanding other political and ethical issues as presences, and not just events. In a recent article in The New Yorker, Henry Louis Gates relays the following:
"You've got to start with the families," [Colin Powell] says of the crisis in the inner cities, "and then you've got to fix education so these little bright-eyed five-year-olds, who are innocent as the day is long and who know right from wrong, have all the education they need. And you have to do both these things simultaneously. It's like being able to support two military conflicts simultaneously." Military metaphors, the worn currency of political discourse in this country, take on a certain vitality when he deploys them. (Indeed, there are those who argue that much of the General's allure stems from a sort of transposition of realms. "I think people are hungry for a military solution to inner-city problems," the black law professor and activist Patricia Williams says.) (Gates 1995, 77)
How (where? when? why?) are institutions of law enforcement like military institutions? How is the presumed constant need for personal protection experienced by some constructed similarly to the necessity of national security? How does the constancy of militarism induce complacency toward or collaboration with authoritative violence? Looking at these questions might help interested parties figure out how to create and sustain movements that are attentive to local realities and particularities about war, about violence, and about the enmeshment of various systems of oppression. It is of course crucial that the analysis I recommend here notice similarities, patterns, and connections without collapsing all forms and instances of militarism or of state-sponsored violence into one neat picture. It is also important to emphasize that an expanded conception of war is meant to disrupt crisis-based politics that distract attention from mundane, everyday violence that is rooted in injustice. Seeing the constant presence of militarism does not require that middle-class and other privileged Americans suddenly see themselves as constantly under siege. It does require the development of abilities to notice the extent to which people and ecosystems can be severely under siege by military institutions and values, even when peace seems present. NOTES I would like to thank Bat-Ami Bar On, Claudia Card, Robin Schott, and other participants of the International Association of Women Philosophers' Symposium on War in Vienna, Austria, for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Thank you also to Maria Lugones, whose incredibly helpful face-to-face conversations with me concerning the ideas in this paper made me realize what a tragedy it is that philosophy departments seldom house more than one feminist philosopher. 1. I certainly believe that the presence of war and armed conflicts varies greatly across history and space. I also think that an expansive conception of war as presence might shed light on many different examples of warfare and military societies, and on the ways in which war is experienced as a presence by soldiers as well as "noncombatants." 2. Of course, wars might be other things too, and they certainly result from other kinds of circumstances, ideologies, and institutions. My point here is that consideration of military conflict cannot neglect the various forms and aspects of oppression embedded in war and militarism. 3. Peach does acknowledge that "Elshtain also criticizes the way just-war theory dichotomizes war and peace because it leads to a conception of peace as simply the absence of war rather than a 'chastened patriotism' which would restrain thinking in warist terms" (1994, 161). Note that this particular questioning of the dichotomy between war and peace does little to unsettle assumptions that war is merely an event.
Reference:
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