At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War is a timely book. Its timeliness is not simply its arrival some twenty years since the United States and allied invasion of Iraq or recounting of the decades long US occupation of Afghanistan that came to a dramatic end in 2021. These are uncanny times when politicians and the media bring together the past and present to make new assessments of the past and present or consolidate received wisdoms. Twenty years on, some backers of the wars have now reconsidered. This does not mean that there has been a wholesale reckoning with the enduring consequences for Iraqis or Afghans on the part of US Americans. Nor has there been a disavowal of the anti-Islam racism that permeates US domestic counter-terrorism practices (Nguyen 2019) and its refugee and migration policy (Paik 2020).

Imperial feminist ideologies that conservatives and liberals invoked to make the case for war in Afghanistan remained a central part of the debate over whether and how the U.S. should withdraw. Since that time, many women have gone into exile fearing for their safety and women’s rights have been curtailed under the Taliban government. Yet what invoking this oppressive reality does now is once again burnish a geopolitical imaginary of the modern west versus uncivilized east. The uncanniness of seeming repetition of imperial feminist talking points makes it feel as if time has stood still even as conditions for women in Afghanistan notably improved under U.S. watch. These uncanny repetitions and redrawing of geopolitical lines erase the worsening of conditions under US watch, with food security, malnutrition, childhood poverty markedly increased, as compiled by the Cost of War project. The war, meanwhile, did not shift outside evaluations of women’s rights as “heavily restricted.”

Humanitarianism as a handmaiden to (imperial feminist) war also was burnished. The horrible scenes of Afghans trying to get on one of the last planes out of Afghanistan were interpreted largely as a failure to prepare (with partisan fingers placing the blame on Biden or Trump). In this understanding, humanitarian action is secondary to “real” military work. What Jennifer Greenburg’s book wants readers to understand is not that the championing of women’s rights or development was a humanitarian façade on the violence of an imperial war, but that “such projects are themselves integral to miliary violence” (20, my emphasis). Rather than treating humanitarian response in binary opposition to military action, Greenburg pushes readers to observe their linkages. The anguished people abandoned on runways are not isolated from the 3.5 million Afghans who were internally displaced and 2.6 million Afghan refugees whom the west had largely failed to resettle while their militaries, nonprofits, and parastatal agencies were working on site (citing UNHCR figures).

In trying to grapple with these uncanny times, especially as educators of students who were not even born in the early 2000s, one of the most important lessons I take from At War With Women is the need for more robust understandings of the relationships among humanitarianism, development as an economic and social project, and imperial warfare. For geographers, I think this lesson has implications for how we teach Economic Geography and Political Geography. When Development is narrated as a post-WWII modernist project that happened to also be anti-communist, the violence inherent to development as part of anticolonial counterinsurgency falls by the wayside. This positions the regular workings of the economy as neutral and non-violent and imperial warfare or scramble for colonial dominion as exceptions when they constitute the workings of political-economy. This implies the need to think about what it would mean to teach about imperialism and violence in economic geography modules rather than solely as part of accounts of colonialism, the nation-state system, or geopolitics in standard political geography modules.

At the beginning of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, there was a moment of retheorizing capitalism’s relationship to imperialism and violence. David Harvey’s The New Imperialism (2003) and Naomi Klein’s Disaster Capitalism (2007) were both important to re-establishing violence as part of capitalist accumulation. Both look to the 1973 moment in the unraveling of the Keynesian consensus and retell this conjuncture as one in which force, not reason, facilitates neoliberal counter-Revolution. The tragedy unfolds in Chile with economist Milton Friedman’s advice to the military dictatorship to enact painful structural adjustments, which would become ubiquitous in countries around the world for years to come. Friedman’s self-defense is that the liberal prediction that democracy followed capitalism was proven true because democratic institutions re-emerged following the imposition of economic reforms. Given how successful this capitalist rewrite of history has been, their challenges to narratives of reason and preference that continue to circulate regarding the virtues of capitalism remain important.

I think At War with Women offers an important revision to this narration. Before getting to this contribution, I want to note that these thinkers are working in the realm of conjunctural analysis. Greenburg’s use of this methodological approach is one of the strengths and contributions of the book. By conjunctural analysis, I refer not to historical contextualization per se, but rather to the Gramscian method of analyzing the social and economic forces, working at different temporal and geographic scales, at work in moments of crisis in order to discern opportunities for oppositional organizing. As part of conjunctural analyses, analysts also examine how particular categories of thought and social practice cohere or become renovated. So, rather than starting with economics as separate from military violence, Greenburg’s project instead shows “how the relationship between development and security is produced through the political, economic, and military ‘relations of force’ that shape the conjunctural terrain” (19).

The conjunctural analysis in At War With Women helped me to understand events in Chile in 1973 as part Cold War development projects that were in “inseparable relationship to militarization” (117). Greenburg recounts the figure of Walt Rostow within this conjuncture. Rostow, you’ll all recall, was an economic historian and served as an assistant national advisor to President Kennedy and national security advisor to President Johnson. He was staunchly anti-communist, and his modernization theory was offered like a self-help guide to capitalist success: 5 steps to prosperity and American modernity! And this theory informed the creation of the USAID at this time. This much is commonly recollected. Greenburg resurfaces Rostow’s strong support for US military intervention in places like Vietnam, calling his career “one of the clearest examples available of a theory of third world development that works hand in glove with military force” (117). This is a significant retelling because it places US imperial and geopolitical prerogatives at the center of US economic development policy and capitalist crisis. Chile and this 1973 moment typically is told as the exception, or break, that becomes the rule in the 1980s and 1990s. But if “development” is the velvet glove of the iron fist of US military aggression (as “humanitarian” counterinsurgency was the velvet glove of British and French imperial efforts to retain their colonial spaces following WWII), as Greenburg recounts in chapter 3, then treating 1973 as exception rather than exemplar actually helps to obscure the colonial and imperial violence that was there all along. Indeed, Greenburg traces the emergence of “military learning about how counterinsurgency can weaponize development and humanitarianism” to Haiti amidst the US Marine Corps occupation of the island nation (111)

In “The specificity of imperialism,” historian Salar Mohandesi recounts how Harvey reconsidered his take on imperialism a few years after the publication of The New Imperialism given the complex realities of a multipolar world. Mohandesi suggests that Harvey arrived at this cul-de-sac because like other capital-centric analysts before him, imperialism was viewed as an inevitable outcome of capitalist development. Mohandesi argues that imperialism should be retained as a concept, but that its explanatory force comes through attention to the state as a contradictory and contingent site of struggle. For Mohandesi, imperialism, then, is best understood as “relationship of domination between states, rather than as a synonym for capitalist expansion.”

I see Greenburg’s book homing in on the contingent (that is, conflictual) workings of the U.S. imperial state. She shows us contradictions within the military, such as the disputes over gender and counterinsurgency within military trainings and operations detailed in chapters 2 and 4, but also how these disputes and enactment of counterinsurgency on the ground reproduce categorical distinctions ideologically that do not hold in practice. She writes, “The allegedly ‘less violent,’ aspects of counter-insurgency …, including military uses of gender and development, may be more accurately understood as violence by other means, often enabling violent events such as raids, targeting, and bombings” (93). To this end, Greenburg is in conversation with historian Micol Seigel’s Violence Work (2018), which theorizes and traces how the ideological boundaries between state and market, public and private, foreign and domestic are themselves constituted through the blurred work of police and military.

I think these looks inside the state are significant not only for understanding violence done in our name, but how this violence constitutes society and the economy. It is not simply that money, human capacities, and the earth’s resources go into making war, though that is problem enough, but that these “state effects” constitute development and humanitarianism as phenomena distinct from or even remedies to war. As women were integrated into combat missions during the time Greenburg studies, many were placed in counterinsurgency roles that involved meeting with women and engaging with children in ways that were gendered as women’s work as compared to the men’s work of soldiering. However, the work of “‘calming’ women and children” was “linked to the military objective of collecting information about people and weapons involved in the insurgency” (136, 137). So, upholding the humanitarian-military distinction obscures the violence spanning and constituting those categories. As Greenburg writes, reading these missions “as a humanitarian guise to distract the public from military violence completely misses these teams’ relationships to combat. This relationship is crucial to understanding gendered counterinsurgency because it undermines liberal feminist arguments to women’s increasing equality within the military” (200). I would add that it also undermines imperial feminist arguments for military interventions. But I think it is vital to understand this relationship because it shows us how the U.S. operationalized its understanding of Afghan society. Such encounters were where boundaries between military and economy, state and society were constructed (and gendered).

I will close with how I think Greenburg’s conjunctural analysis enables deeper conversations between studies of imperialism and refugee studies. This conversation is already happening. Yên Lê Espiritu (2014), for example, has advanced the concept of militarized refuge that seeks to displace the ontologization of “the refugee condition” by bringing militarism back into frame. The common, hegemonic understanding of refugee operations is that it is humanitarian work that responds to war-making. Amidst the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Greenburg observes how “official US government descriptions of the Kabul airlift as a humanitarian rescue mission and even a success are especially pernicious” (207). This account relies on an erasure of US military occupation that created these conditions while the humanitarian frame extends racist, civilizationist imagination of the west as a site that receives and cares for refugees.

At the time of this writing, nearly two later, some 2000 Afghan citizens who were evacuated from Afghanistan on privately chartered flights remain stuck in Emirates Humanitarian City in the United Arab Emirates. The Emirates Humanitarian City (EHC) grew out of a free zone the UAE established to serve as a logistics hub for humanitarian response in the region (Ziadeh 2019). It gathers prominent NGO and parastatal organizations, like the UNHCR, on site and has warehousing and transportation capabilities to assemble aid kits and redistribute them on a just-in-time basis. People remaining on site have protested their situation, equating the humanitarian center to little more than a jail: “It doesn’t matter if we are safe[.] … Psychologically, physically, mentally, medically, we will die. This is a slow death” (Global Detention Project and Migrant-rights.org 2023.)

One explanation for this instance of “carceral humanitarianism” (Oliver 2017) is that people remain stuck in legal limbo because a private rather than military jet evacuated them, according to CNN reporter, Haley Britzkey. So, on the one hand this story can be read as an account of the failures of the US withdrawal and failed collaboration between private entities and the US government. On the other, here the military’s abandonment of people who had worked with military and private contractors and NGOs of all sorts extends to a humanitarian zone in the territory of an allied country. At War with Women helps us understand how the arbitrariness and ideological purchase of this private-military distinction is precisely what enables militarized and carceral violence in the name of humanitarianism. It also helps us understand how the imperial construction of society renders people displaced by imperial war as separate from western society, positioning them simultaneously as objects of paternalistic care and security threat. The outrage of the situation facing Afghans stuck in the UAE is not the failure of humanitarianism but that the humanitarian present has no answer for the millions of people displaced by imperial war and moreover that the west seems to think it has a responsibility to repair and justice, projects that are not one-sided and would require the reworking, even dissolution, of empire and its worldly divisions.

At War with Women should be read as a feminist conjunctural analysis of the imperial present. Greenburg offers tools for understanding how war works through the reworking of categories like economy and society that remain hegemonically understood as not within the purview of the military. For scholars of war and women’s military roles, Greenburg’s fine-grained ethnography exemplifies the contested nature of state institutions, the military included. As she writes, this “lens onto empire is wholly different than more widespread perceptions of the military as a monolithic force” (200). These intimate accounts illustrating contingent operations of “the military” in turn opened onto, and were enabled by, a revision of received understandings of counterinsurgency and development. I focused most of my remarks in this realm because it remains just as pressing as ever to understand the imperialism movements aim to oppose.

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References

Espiritu, Y L (2014) Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees. Oakland: University of California Press.

Global Detention Project and Migrant-rights.org (2023) “THIS IS A SLOW DEATH”: An urgent appeal on the plight of Afghan refugees indefinitely and arbitrarily detained in the UAE. Global Detention Project. Global Detention Project. Available here (accessed 30 August 2023).

Harvey, D (2003) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Klein, N (2007) Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing out of Catastrophe. New York: Verso.

Nguyen, N (2019) Suspect Communities: Anti-Muslim Racism and the Domestic War on Terror. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Oliver, K (2017) Carceral Humanitarianism: Logics of Refugee Detention. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Paik, A N (2020) Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century. Oakland: University of California Press.

Seigel, M (2018) Violence Work: State Power and the Limits of Police. Durham: Duke University Press.

Ziadah, R (2019) Circulating power: Humanitarian logistics, militarism, and the United Arab Emirates, Antipode 51(5): 1684-1702.

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Jenna Loyd is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose work focuses on health politics, carceral and abolition geographies, and the politics of asylum, refugee resettlement, and deterrence in U.S. migration policy.