Imperial mimesis:

Abstract

After 9/11, the US military made a “cultural turn”—a call to understand the culture of the adversary. Under this protocol, cadets in training camps around the United States have rehearsed embodied empathetic connections with Middle Eastern role‐players by miming their interlocutors. In this imperial mimesis, the trainee tries to make the distant proximate by enacting an image of the Other (through gesture, posture, etc.) in order to gain power over those whom they mime (“locals” and, ultimately, potential terrorists). This mimetic labor is charged with anxiety and risk as soldiers negotiate and police the boundaries of alterity to prevent moments of overflow. Amid the seductive tug of mimesis, the trainee is ultimately asked to empathetically “become Other” in order to contain that Other. [mimesis, empathy, empire, militarism, military training, war on terror, human terrain, United States]

Moral Injury and the Psyche of Counterinsurgency

“…Kelly's immediate experience is not reducible to something so straightforward as 'dehumanization' -Kelly imaginatively inhabits and identifies with her potential target's humanity in multiple ways (cf. Delori, 2017;Stone, 2018). Nor does her story depict an instance of morally anguished trade-off and the associated confession and self-indictment suggested by moral injury.…”

Resistant ecologies

“…To decolonize war, we must source our theories from war's lived experience, not our untheorized distance from the killing fields. Alongside scholarship on violence (Feldman, 1991; Scheper‐Hughes, 2007), the experience of imperial soldiers (MacLeish, 2013, Stone, 2018; Wool, 2015), the militarization of everyday life (González et al., 2019; Lutz, 2009; Masco, 2014), and the suffering of victims of war (Nordstrom, 1997), we must recognize and affirm the clever and resistant ways that those who dwell in war make their lives within it (Hoffman 2011; Lubkemann, 2008). When we understand war as a condition that emerges from the same social, political, economic, and ecological processes that make “our” peaceful worlds, only then can we recognize our shared humanity, our collective vulnerability, our complicity, and begin to grow a politics that can challenge this insidious, unequal ranking of life (Fassin, 2009) and humanity (Asad, 2003).…”