Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Narrowly construed, the purpose of this paper is to use the rhetoric generated by the execution of Saddam Hussein as a point of departure to examine if, and how, it illustrates an emerging European identity, particularly one constructed from a perceived opposition to a barbaric, stagnant, and vigilante American presence. It questions: how does the European response to Saddam Hussein’s execution reflect the belief that the abolition of capital punishment has become a distinctly “European” trait? Moreover, how does the use of such rhetoric reinforce particular cultural convictions about Europe as a civilized entity while simultaneously reaffirming the barbaric quality of an alien other? Ultimately, this paper concludes that what is important about the execution of Saddam Hussein is neither whether the execution was indeed barbaric, nor whether the photographs or videos depicting such an act somehow compromised the European quest for the global elimination of capital punishment. Rather, it determines that what is important are the multiple ways in which hierarchical language is deployed as an element to structure and order individual nations, a practice that attempts to define “Europe” by defining what it is not.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper focuses on some of the costs and consequences of the deliberate targeting of non-combatants as a strategy in war (a strategy I call barbarism). In previous work I established that barbarism is much less effective--both militarily and politically--than commonly believed, and that in most cases it is actually counterproductive, placing states or other actors who resort to it at higher risk of failure than if they had not used barbarism. In this paper I explore the costs to perpetrating states of reintegrating "soldiers" tasked with barbarism, as well as the personal costs to veterans themselves. I summarize the logic of competing arguments concerning the expected utility of barbarism, and then reduce this logic to testable hypotheses, before exploring the important policy implications of further research on this topic. Overall, I conclude that war crime only pays for political leaders who can frame such crimes as either necessary for survival or just revenge for prior barbarism. For all other groups and for the state or non-state actor itself, barbarism is most likely to be counterproductive; increasing the costs and risks of war and by extension, of defeat in war, as well as defeat in peace.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Several narratives of white female suffering appeared in circulation during the first year of the Second Seminole War, but none was as sensational as Jane Johns’. Johns and her husband were the victims of a Seminole attack on their farm near Jacksonville in September 1836. Mr. Johns was quickly killed, leaving his wife helpless, yet she survived the attack, during which she was shot, scalped and set on fire. Her sensational story garnered national coverage and pulled at nationalist sentiment with the image of a threatened white woman in the new American territory of Florida. Narratives such as hers, which drew upon and reconfigured Indian captivity narratives, brought Florida into the national community via readerly sympathy for the female victims of the war. The desire to protect and aid those women presumed their shared nationality alongside their need for paternal protection. These “depredation narratives” made an American cultural claim on the Florida territory by positioning white women and civilized domesticity as the victims of the Florida War. Even as Seminole villages were destroyed, and women and children captured, in popular narratives, Indians and blacks were cast as the unequivocal aggressors in this war, and their lack of civilized sympathy was evidenced by their consistent attacks on women and children.
Depredation narratives, like the sensationalist pamphlet describing the attack on Mrs. Johns, reconfigured the racial violence of expansion using sympathy. These stories focused on the danger to American “homes” in Florida, which presumed that it was already an American place, where white American families owned land, shared familial and national histories, and participated in sustaining and defining the republic. The racism of manifest destiny is also apparent and under construction in these narratives, which often mention the presence of escaped slaves among the Seminoles, and position them as more and less civilized or dangerous depending on the context.
In the spring of the following year, Dr. Andrew Welch, who cared for Mrs. Johns, published a pamphlet “for her benefit” and took her on tour in Charleston and Savannah where her scalped head was a main attraction. Published in Charleston in early 1837, and reprinted in Baltimore later that year, the “Narrative of the Life and Sufferings of Mrs. Jane Johns, Who was Barbarously Wounded and Scalped by Seminole Indians, in East Florida” is emblematic of a widely circulating discourse about Florida in the early nineteenth century, which placed white American families in Florida on the frontier, and illustrated their struggle to protect their homes and farms from the brutal Seminoles and the “negroes” who were fighting with them. Mrs. Johns and other stories of the Florida War also had a particular meaning in the American South, which was invested in the Seminole wars as a way to recover/punish escaped slaves and create another slave state in Florida. The vision of the American future in Florida was increasingly one in which civilization included the enslavement of Africans/African-Americans, the removal of native Americans, and the installation of planter society – a distinctly Southern vision.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In the paper I examine the relationship between military technology and the conduct of war in order to consider whether or not technological development in military affairs makes the conduct of war barbarised/civilised. There are at least two different views on this issue: one view is that technological development in military affairs has made warfare barbarised and the other is that technological development has made warfare civilised. These two views seem correct to the point that technological development in military affairs contributes to shaping the characteristics of warfare. In my view, however, these two views do not seem to perfectly describe the relationship between technological development in military affairs and the conduct of war. My argument is that technological development in military affairs does not automatically determine the course of the barbarisation/civilisation of warfare because the application of new technology to military affairs is undertaken in the politico-military context. I argue that such a course is primarily determined by the mode of warfare, which is determined by the strategic need, mission objectives and tactical environments which the political elite and military brass envisage. I conclude by arguing that it is not necessarily technological development per se that makes warfare civilised or barbarised. The question whether or not warfare could be barbarised/civilised primarily depends on the strategic need and surroundings, the mission objectives, and the tactical environments of each individual case of armed conflict, in which the political elite and military brass can utilise technology in military affairs. The upshot of the paper is that it is primarily up to the political elite and military brass how they make warfare civilised/barbarised by utilising technology in military affairs.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This presentation will highlight the learning objectives, course structure and student feedback of an undergraduate course entitled "Gender and International Criminal Justice". This course is meant to be inclusive of issues regarding not only gender, but also class, race and ethnicity. However, it goes further, examining issues related to socioeconomic development and human rights, colonization and indigenous peoples, and other contexts and scenarios such as trafficking in human beings, the male sex industry, war rape, gendercide, female genital mutilation, dowry deaths, honor killings, sexual torture, women terrorists and sexism within truth commissions and peace operations. Strategies to connect the global to the local are discussed, as well as those used to differentiate between culture and structure, and thus enhance students' global understanding of inequality.