Jairus Grove's Prospectus

How War Exceeds the State: Insurgencies, Cities, and the Materiality of Violence

Introduction:
What follows is a description of the centrality of warfare’s place in global security. It is not the case that I think that is inevitably the case or has always been the case but that war is a persistent and serious challenge to global order. This is a relatively undisputed fact amongst those often described as Realists and and yet is dismissed as fatalistic and outmoded by those of the Liberal IR persuasion and the growing class of of Kantian inspired international legal activists.  I think that each of these divergent approaches for predicting the future of warfare is greatly hindered by tendencies of state or institutional centrism, overly simplistic historicisms, and an unhelpful anthropocentrism in defining what is considered war and who or what causes or starts wars.
However this is not a dissertation about the causes of war, the why of war as it were. It is rather an attempt to look somewhere between the how and the what of warfare, particularly modern warfare. The central concern being how combat is mobilized and who or what can mobilize it. This of course raises the question of what combat is and what exactly ought to count as mobilization. It is the latter point that will likely be the more controversial of the claims. Mobilization would seem to suggest a mobilizer, or an agent of mobilization. However it is the contention of this dissertation that such an agent is often lacking or insufficient to explain combat, as in the case of non-state organizations such as al-Qaeda where the leadership is pluralized and therefore proceeds by agents. Diverging from the debate over agent or agents, mobilization may be even more dispersed to the point of no longer being usefully described as either agent or agents.
I argue that the mobilization of combat--warfare—can at times be so dispersed as to demonstrate that agents are better described as material contexts or assemblages of material contexts and a myriad of differing agents at varying levels of efficacy such as in the case of urban ghettos and other complex assemblages such as crowds that are not reducible to the mere addition of their parts much less the sum of the rational individual decisions of each crowd member.
I am not attempting to jettison earlier explanations that rely on the state or defined interest groups for explaining the emergence of combat. The value of this dissertation’s approach is not to discount or dismiss the state as outmoded or as a mythical construct as earlier transnational and postmodern approaches have often done. Quite the contrary, the goal is to show that the state, and I think from its beginnings, has been in a competitive struggle with other forms of organization and self-organization.
For the purposes of this study the focus is on the particular competition over the organization and monopoly of force or violence. To put this another way, if the mobilization of warfare is seen as a collective action problem this dissertation demonstrates that the state while having great success in overcoming collective action barriers has never had a monopoly on warfare, and is increasingly losing its comparative advantage over other less centralized or less institutionalized forms. Therefore theorist of international relations, and security studies more broadly, that proceed on the belief that international politics can be analyzed as an anarchy of units defined as political entities with a territorial monopoly over legitimate force—the standard Weberian definition—are leaving out the myriad of forces that complicate and at times even drive global conflict.
To add depth and dimension to these complexities requires the investigation of how warfare exceeds state control and also how else and from where else warfare can emerge. In this picture of global politics the state is not left behind as outmoded or anachronistic as many globalization theorist declared it in the wake of the Cold War. The state has to be brought back in but back in context. If International Relations theory once thought of the globe as a kind desert landscape populated by a single homogenous species of war wielding states competing for advantage, balance or sometimes cooperation (depending on your theoretical leanings), the picture developed here is a richer ecosystem. States are thrown into a veritable rainforest of other species.  Some relatively similar to states such as terrorist organizations with institutionalized goals and human leadership. Others have more alien and less analogous features such as mobs, uprisings, and insurgent assemblages whose organization or control is less directed or thought out but yet sustainable and sometimes more destructive and competitively superior to the state form.
The mystery or puzzle is what holds these collectivities together. Like a colony of bacteria in the human gut or the complex dynamics of urban life that can only be understood in their emergent whole rather than their constituent parts, the collectivities analyzed in this dissertation require theorizing and conceptualizing action that is constituent but leaderless, goal oriented but not conscious, collective but not regimented. Previous theories of institutions such as states, firms, international organization, or social movements provide tools but are insufficient to describe what holds these collectivities together much less adequately describe their behavior or impact on global security. To begin this task we have to dive back into the material context or primordial goo from which states emerged and look at the other, often incipient, mobilizing forces of combat. In so doing providing more tools for understanding why parsimonious theories of state to state behavior describe so little of contemporary global conflict.


 Section 1: Traditions of Materialism in International Relations

Chapter 1: Real Materialism
Analyzing the micropolitical or sub-state and supra-state or global context of conflict is not new. A strand of this kind of materialist thinking runs from Thucydides to Hans Morgenthau and beyond. However it has been at best an undercurrent of International Relations thinking and with the behavioral revolution’s drive to structural reductionism has been, in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, reduced to almost a trickle. This first chapter focuses on Hans Morgenthau and E.H. Carr materialist explanations of the recurrence of war and national competition while flushing out a deep ambivalence in both scholars for the increasingly formative role of technological and material change; a nascent theory of complexity. In both thinkers is a rich theory of the empirical world driving change and behavior but a lingering commitment to ahistorical or cyclical view of human nature even as they were writing about dramatic, system altering changes, such as airpower and nuclear weapons. Ultimately, Morgenthau and Carr have useful critiques of earlier forms of idealism and understands the role of technology and natural material conditions play in altering the constraints or possibilities of politics but are both trapped in an unhelpful paradox where they assert that war and national interest do not change and asserts that human nature, the origin of national interest and war, is a result of a changing technological and natural context. However what is useful and lost in later theories of neorealism is Morgenthau and Carr’s insistence that the empirical ought to drive thought rather than the expectation that “reality change to fit the model.” For Morgenthau this results in a sustained engagement with Alfred North Whitehead’s critique of 19th century scientific rationality in the book Scientific Man Versus Power Politics. Carr took his cues on non-linearity and complex materialism from the writings of Henri Poincare. I read Whitehead’s concepts of reason and becoming and Poincare writings on complexity and self-organization back into the Morgenthau and Carr’s limited materialism to show how their chastened views of natural history results in the fatalism of war and hierarchy but could be opened up to include the efficacy of the world’s material becoming to make a richer mode of analysis possible.

Chapter 2: Cybermaterialism
Inspired by the groundbreaking work of Norbert Wiener and Alan Turing scholars such as Karl Deutsch and Hayward Alker began to investigate and apply the then underdeveloped and untested concepts of cybernetics to explain global change as well as propose new means for engineering global order. The central assumption of Deutsch’s book The Nerves of Government is that humans, their behavior and habits, are fundamentally plastic. There was no theory of transcendental human nature, we are our brains and our brains can change. Despite this interest in a very rich understanding of the mutability of the materiality of human beings Deutch and Alker were both relatively indifferent to the materiality of the rest of the world much less the second-order dimensions or ecological dimensions of the larger system. The emphasis was on humans in their relationship to information and the resulting behavioral modifications that could be made or as Deutsch thought had to be made to escape nuclear Armageddon. Hacking the human species and re-engineering or ‘steering’ human civilization was his way out of the security dilemma of Political Realism. However, in all of their talk of feedback loops and control mechanisms very little attention was played to the feedback of non-human factors or the material contexts those plastic humans lived in. Where as cybermaterialism’s view of history is less cyclical than early strands of real materialism—in part because assumption about the universality or stability of human nature are jettisoned—there is little attention to what factors, both material constraints and possibilities, may have produced the recurrence of violence and war. The failure of this approach left only the mathematics and quantitative measurements of cybernetics in the case of Deutsch’s pursuit of behavioralism and in the case of Alker lead to a focus entirely on language and the development and integration of postmodern discourse analysis into his theories of international change. I take from this a useful understanding of power as steering that sees the world as alterable and the concept of control that understands patterns of behavior as not being the result of individual rational decisions but of broader more dispersed logics or protocols of behavior that emerge through complex and large scale interaction. However what is still lacking is an engine for the becoming or unfolding of the world that is not reducible to human ideas. The world is left behind and the relations that change that world are left untheorized. Deutsch and Alker’s unhelpful anthropocentrism ignores many of the feedbacks involved in global politics and retains a transcendental position from which Deutsch can code and quantify politics and Alker can more interestingly, but still insufficiently, investigate discursively constituted ontologies of security and war.

Chapter 3: Ecological Materialism 
I see this strand of materialism as a synthesis of earlier description of the formative materiality of the world and the plasticity of cybermaterialism. The position is captured succinctly by philosopher and biologist William Wimsatt who provides some of the conceptual language for integrating complexity theory and materialism in this chapter:
“[We Live in] variegated ecologies of reality supporting and increasingly bent to our science and technology, but we are embodied socialized beings; evolved and developing in a world conditioned by our sociality and technology… embedded in a larger supporting complex that is both of the world and self-continuing in the world.” (Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings)
To develop this concept of embedded or what I call ecological materialism I draw on three I.R. theorists Daniel Deudney, James Rosenau, and T.F. Homer-Dixon and from theorists Manuel DeLanda , Gilles Deleuze, Alfred North Whitehead, and William Wimsatt. This section develops the main thrust of the concepts necessary for the following three chapters. Using Deudney’s security materialist account of violence interdependence and Rosenau’s application of complexity theory to global change I explain why states are increasingly unable to either guarantee security territorially or effectively compete with other combat mobilizing forces abroad. Additionally I draw on Deudney and DeLanda in particular to explain how technological and ecological changes alter the conditions of both macro and microscale violence. The philosophers are brought in to support and illustrate the position that materialism is neither deterministic nor constructed. The point is to develop a theory of becoming and complexity that accounts both for humans agency and their environment without falling prey either to the anthropocentrism and discursive focus of constructivism nor the fatalism and determinism of classical Realism.
The main problematic to be developed and explained is the difference between power as the ability to wield force and power as the ability to control outcomes or patterns. This requires explaining why control as consistency of outcome or consistency of organization does not require a controller. The slogan of theorists Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker “no one controls networks, but networks are controlled” raises the question of how control exists after decentralization or without hierarchy. I also unpack the terms network, assemblage, emergence, and non-linear change to explain how the violence capacity of non-state forms is mobilized and executed as well as why seemingly local incidence of combat increasingly have global effects.

Section 2: Crowds, Cities, and Assemblages.
This section applies the theoretical work of section 1 to the two concrete examples crowds and cities and then concludes with a final chapter further illustrating the conceptual usefulness of assemblages and resonance machines or agents embedded and in a co-constitutive relay with their material context rather than the simple theory of networks that attempts to just theorize the collective capacity of connected individual agents.

Chapter 1: Crowds
This chapter starts with the popular uprising in Spain against Napoleon to illustrate the power of emergent insurgencies in the context of the beginning of modern state warfare, meaning nationalist warfare. The chapter subsequently reviews the early theories of crowds including Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud, and Elias Cannetti and then delves into contemporary scientific work on uprisings and riot ‘intelligence’ inspired by Deleuze and Guattarie’s concept of swarming. The ultimately goal is to conclude that seemingly disorganized groups have real effects upon the security environment and are not adequately described by either rational choice theory, collective action theory (Mancur Olson), nor contemporary theories of terrorist networks that conflate uprisings with coordinated attacks as in the case of the U.S. Counter-Insurgency Field Manual and the failed efforts of the U.S. Air Force and Army to develop ‘Effects Based Operations’ that rely on network targeting and behavioral modification through strategic bombing and other forms of often highly lethal coercion or intimidation.

Chapter 2: The City 
This chapter investigates the role spatial relations play in both undermining the state’s control as well as enabling forms such as crowds and riots that would not otherwise be possible or likely in other spatial arrangements such as agrarian or suburban life. After a brief history of the city as a form of social control or social organization I shift to a focus on the Ghetto or the super-dense urban environment. Drawing on evidence from the drug war in New York City, the drug conflict and increasingly warlike behavior of the Brazilian Favelas and Baghdad’s persistently violent enclaves such as Sadr City I argue against what I call the creator myth. This is the false presumption that the creator of a thing is the master of that thing. While cities are human built and often even state built they take on a life of their own. They may not have agency but they have efficacy, real effects that are not controlled by architects, city planners, or those that maintain the city such as the police or other state officials.
Cities change and degrade to create new ways of living or environments for conflict and they concentrate or alter human behavior or relations in ways that are beyond the intended purposes of their original design. Some ghettos emerge haphazardly as a result of marginalization as in the case of Brazil. Others are built for centralized control as in the case of the projects in the United States. Or further still result from racialization and perceptions of difference as in the case of the Shiite enclave Sadr City. Cities also intensify or amplify that perception of difference as in the case of all three. However in all cases the ‘built’ properties have effects that complicated state control and enable or even create often deadly and highly destructive mobilizations of violence. These examples further demonstrate the central thesis that materiality alters calculations of power.  Being superior at the application of force can become a liability in such an environment. Power is shown to be more obviously about control and the consistency of mobilization than about how many pounds of explosives or bullets you can deliver.

Chapter 3: From Networks to Assemblages
This chapter begins with a critique of network theory as it has been espoused by Marc Sageman and others as a quantitative means for analyzing terrorism and insurgency. What I hope to make clear is that Graph Theory, the mathematical approach to studying networks that is used to develop Sageman et all’s coding and quantitative study of terrorism, over privileges nodes or individuals in the determination of a network identity rather than taking into account qualitatively different kinds of edges or connections between nodes/individuals. The relative indifference to the edges or connection, i.e. the context or the materiality of the connection, misses the variable intensity of latent or incipient connections of, for instances, nationalism or religion that may become more pronounced as the result of a foreign invasion or collateral damage. The materiality of edges may also effect what emerges as in the case of hand held communication devices or in the case of IEDs where economic networks have resulted in the dumping of surplus goods. Seemingly harmless and outdated technologies such as old weapons and garage door openers accumulating in sufficient quantities in 3rd world countries produced a new weapon that caught the most advanced military in the world off guard. These changes in intensity or changes in context can transform or activate even create a new network (what I would call an assemblage) that may previously have only existed in its most rudimentary form. Suddenly familial connections or neighborhood affiliation can become the bonds of insurgent solidarity. A peaceful civilian can suddenly become an effective combatant as the result of rage or simply fear as a result of an unexpected armored division attempting to squeeze through a crowded alleyway. Or the attempt to dump cheap outdated munitions and the promotion of telecommunications world wide can resonate in a new way to develop a new form of warfare. Therefore it is important to understand that the connection feedback and can even alter the identity or content of the node or individual.
In this last section I draw on William Connolly concept of resonance to describe how these shifts can and do occur as well as the similar account of change described by David Kilcullen’s concept the ‘Accidental Guerilla’. The point is to show how uprisings, insurgencies, and even military defeats and technological innovations can occur as the result of unplanned, emergent collectivities, that are embedded in the world but not obviously identifiable as institutions, either state or non-state.