Investigating Remote Warfare as the Radical Undoing of Life: The compounding civilian harm effects of US-led coalition bombings in Iraq

Abstract

The increased reliance on remote warfare by US-led military coalitions presents us with questions of “what war is” and “how to know about war” in the 21st century. In this article we substantiate calls for an embodied epistemology of war by introducing a transdisciplinary research agenda to investigate the temporal and spatial civilian harm effects of late modern warfare. Through on-the-ground research, we empirically illustrate how a US-led bombing campaign against the ISIS-held city of Hawija, Iraq, did not merely provoke harm instantly; its impact reverberates and compounds. This approach enables us to advance a de-militarised ontology of war, which highlights how remote warfare is essentially centred on multiple ways of “undoing”: not merely the undoing of bodily and material life, but also the undoing of the human ability to seek redress and speak back. With this we—however briefly—open debates on lines of responsibility and political accountability.