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Edited Books & Special Issues by Wes Attewell
Geopolitics, 2012
The unfurling of violent rhetoric and the show of force that has lead to the arrest, imprisonment... more The unfurling of violent rhetoric and the show of force that has lead to the arrest, imprisonment, and impending extradition of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, serve as an exemplary moment in demonstrating state-sanctioned violence. Since the cables began leaking in November 2010, the violent reaction to WikiLeaks evidenced by numerous political pundits calling for Assange’s assassination or execution, and the movement within the US to have WikiLeaks designated a ‘foreign terrorist organization’, amount to a profound showing of authoritarianism. The ‘Wikigate’ scandal thus represents an important occasion to take stock and think critically about what this case tells us about the nature of sovereign power, freedom of information, the limits of democracy, and importantly, the violence of the state when it attempts to manage these considerations. This forum explores a series of challenges inspired by WikiLeaks, which we hope will prompt further debate and reflection within critical geopolitics.
Papers by Wes Attewell
Emerging critical scholarship on logistics has shown how the field is implicated in a broader nec... more Emerging critical scholarship on logistics has shown how the field is implicated in a broader necropolitics of violence, disposability, and exploitation. While much has been made of logistics’ historical linkages to military and market forces, this paper, in contrast, explores how logisticians have played an increasingly central role in development and humanitarian missions to theatres of conflict and emergency. It focuses on the effort of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to supply mujahideen forces in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan with the non-lethal materiel necessary for their insurgency. It argues that USAID understood its relief and rehabilitation mission as a problem of logistics. By sketching the shifting contours of USAID’s cross-border programming, this article offers a more nuanced diagnosis of how logistics has become essential to the management of life and death across multiple temporalities, spaces, and scales.
In this article, I explore the role that the United States Agency for International Development a... more In this article, I explore the role that the United States Agency for International Development and its implementing partners played in the ‘alternative development’ effort to provide Afghan farmers with sustainable and economically viable alternatives to growing poppy. I argue that alternative development programs in occupied Afghanistan sought to wean farmers off of poppies by creating a rural ‘environment’ conducive to the cultivation of legal alternative crops. My argument proceeds in four steps. First, I theorize alternative development as a form of ‘environmental power’. Second, I put this theoretical framework to work in eastern Afghanistan through a close reading of one of the United States Agency for International Development’s flagship alternative development projects: Development Alternative Inc.’s ‘Incentives Driving Economic Alternatives – North, East and West’. As Incentives Driving Economic Alternatives: North, East and West (IDEA-NEW) ran its course, its end-state goal shifted from improving production to promoting market exchange. Third, I suggest that IDEA-NEW’s marketization efforts produced differentiated subjects of rule, exacerbating already existing patterns of uneven development in the process. Finally, although IDEA-NEW is represented as productive, humanitarian and therapeutic, I conclude by reflecting on how it is undergirded by – and also provides a legitimating armature for – techniques of population management that are destructive of life.
This paper will provide historical and geographical nuance to Eyal Weizman's concept of the ‘huma... more This paper will provide historical and geographical nuance to Eyal Weizman's concept of the ‘humanitarian present’ through an interrogation of the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) entanglement in Cold War counterinsurgency. Specifically, it focuses on Cold War Vietnam, where USAID, through its Offices of Rural Affairs and Public Safety, spearheaded the ‘other’ war for rural ‘hearts and minds’ through two distinct, yet related, suites of spatial interventions. First, it sought to indirectly ‘conduct the conduct’ of the South Vietnamese people by providing technical assistance and commodity support to the Strategic Hamlet and Revolutionary Development programs. USAID's counterinsurgency programming, however, was not only traversed by a ‘will to improve’: it was also marked by a ‘will to police’. Here, I am specifically referring to the central role that USAID's Office of Public Safety played in helping the government of South Vietnam establish a functioning National Police whose ‘internal security’ mandate eventually encompassed both a biopolitics of population control as well as a necropolitics of neutralization. Over the course of this essay I will theorize these two tracks of counterinsurgency programming as the Janus faces of a broader ‘war–police’ nexus geared towards catalyzing the fabrication of a modern social order in the Vietnamese countryside.
The importance of war blogs is increasingly acknowledged, but their political dimensions remain l... more The importance of war blogs is increasingly acknowledged, but their political dimensions remain largely unexplored. This paper provides a series of critical readings of Riverbend's Baghdad Burning and addresses two main issues. First, there is a systematic tension between the ways in which Riverbend is “subalternized” (by her readers and herself) and her attempts to reclaim the ground upon which post-invasion Iraq is represented. Second, the invasion has fundamentally reworked the ways in which the figure of the “Iraqi” is constructed. These epistemological and ontological processes are always complex and partial: they occur at a variety of geographical scales and they are mobilized by a diversity of actors, making it very difficult to pin them down in time and space. Nevertheless, they highlight the difficulties of reducing Riverbend's project of resistance to a simple act of speaking out: of telling the reader what life is “really like” in occupied Baghdad.
Geopolitics, 2012
The unfurling of violent rhetoric and the show of force that has lead to the arrest, imprisonment... more The unfurling of violent rhetoric and the show of force that has lead to the arrest, imprisonment, and impending extradition of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, serve as an exemplary moment in demonstrating state-sanctioned violence. Since the cables began leaking in November 2010, the violent reaction to WikiLeaks evidenced by numerous political pundits calling for Assange’s assassination or execution, and the movement within the US to have WikiLeaks designated a ‘foreign terrorist organization’, amount to a profound showing of authoritarianism. The ‘Wikigate’ scandal thus represents an important occasion to take stock and think critically about what this case tells us about the nature of sovereign power, freedom of information, the limits of democracy, and importantly, the violence of the state when it attempts to manage these considerations. This forum explores a series of challenges inspired by WikiLeaks, which we hope will prompt further debate and reflection within critical geopolitics.
Emerging critical scholarship on logistics has shown how the field is implicated in a broader nec... more Emerging critical scholarship on logistics has shown how the field is implicated in a broader necropolitics of violence, disposability, and exploitation. While much has been made of logistics’ historical linkages to military and market forces, this paper, in contrast, explores how logisticians have played an increasingly central role in development and humanitarian missions to theatres of conflict and emergency. It focuses on the effort of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to supply mujahideen forces in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan with the non-lethal materiel necessary for their insurgency. It argues that USAID understood its relief and rehabilitation mission as a problem of logistics. By sketching the shifting contours of USAID’s cross-border programming, this article offers a more nuanced diagnosis of how logistics has become essential to the management of life and death across multiple temporalities, spaces, and scales.
In this article, I explore the role that the United States Agency for International Development a... more In this article, I explore the role that the United States Agency for International Development and its implementing partners played in the ‘alternative development’ effort to provide Afghan farmers with sustainable and economically viable alternatives to growing poppy. I argue that alternative development programs in occupied Afghanistan sought to wean farmers off of poppies by creating a rural ‘environment’ conducive to the cultivation of legal alternative crops. My argument proceeds in four steps. First, I theorize alternative development as a form of ‘environmental power’. Second, I put this theoretical framework to work in eastern Afghanistan through a close reading of one of the United States Agency for International Development’s flagship alternative development projects: Development Alternative Inc.’s ‘Incentives Driving Economic Alternatives – North, East and West’. As Incentives Driving Economic Alternatives: North, East and West (IDEA-NEW) ran its course, its end-state goal shifted from improving production to promoting market exchange. Third, I suggest that IDEA-NEW’s marketization efforts produced differentiated subjects of rule, exacerbating already existing patterns of uneven development in the process. Finally, although IDEA-NEW is represented as productive, humanitarian and therapeutic, I conclude by reflecting on how it is undergirded by – and also provides a legitimating armature for – techniques of population management that are destructive of life.
This paper will provide historical and geographical nuance to Eyal Weizman's concept of the ‘huma... more This paper will provide historical and geographical nuance to Eyal Weizman's concept of the ‘humanitarian present’ through an interrogation of the United States Agency for International Development's (USAID) entanglement in Cold War counterinsurgency. Specifically, it focuses on Cold War Vietnam, where USAID, through its Offices of Rural Affairs and Public Safety, spearheaded the ‘other’ war for rural ‘hearts and minds’ through two distinct, yet related, suites of spatial interventions. First, it sought to indirectly ‘conduct the conduct’ of the South Vietnamese people by providing technical assistance and commodity support to the Strategic Hamlet and Revolutionary Development programs. USAID's counterinsurgency programming, however, was not only traversed by a ‘will to improve’: it was also marked by a ‘will to police’. Here, I am specifically referring to the central role that USAID's Office of Public Safety played in helping the government of South Vietnam establish a functioning National Police whose ‘internal security’ mandate eventually encompassed both a biopolitics of population control as well as a necropolitics of neutralization. Over the course of this essay I will theorize these two tracks of counterinsurgency programming as the Janus faces of a broader ‘war–police’ nexus geared towards catalyzing the fabrication of a modern social order in the Vietnamese countryside.
The importance of war blogs is increasingly acknowledged, but their political dimensions remain l... more The importance of war blogs is increasingly acknowledged, but their political dimensions remain largely unexplored. This paper provides a series of critical readings of Riverbend's Baghdad Burning and addresses two main issues. First, there is a systematic tension between the ways in which Riverbend is “subalternized” (by her readers and herself) and her attempts to reclaim the ground upon which post-invasion Iraq is represented. Second, the invasion has fundamentally reworked the ways in which the figure of the “Iraqi” is constructed. These epistemological and ontological processes are always complex and partial: they occur at a variety of geographical scales and they are mobilized by a diversity of actors, making it very difficult to pin them down in time and space. Nevertheless, they highlight the difficulties of reducing Riverbend's project of resistance to a simple act of speaking out: of telling the reader what life is “really like” in occupied Baghdad.