Caroline Holmqvist

Swedish Defence University, Department of Security and Strategy, Faculty Member

Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Research department, Faculty Member

Université libre de Bruxelles, Centre de recherche et enseignements en politique internationale REPI, Adjunct

Tel Aviv University, Department of political Science, Tel Aviv university, Adjunct

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Centred on contemporary war and violence, my research follows three main tracks. The first track concerns war and the human subject. This is in many ways the point of origin of my work: the question of what it means to be human, and how the interpretation thereof is conditioned by the ever-presence of violence, insecurity and war. My work explores vulnerability and precariousness, and the pivotal role they occupy in contemporary power relations. The article ‘War, “strategic communication” and the violence of non-recognition’ (Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26:4 (2013) interrogates the ethical relations between intervening US military forces and local populations in Afghanistan, drawing on Judith Butler and Emmanuel Levinas to explore the ethical relation embedded in the idea that a population’s hearts and minds can be ‘won’. A book chapter, ‘Enlisting Madison Avenue: contemporary war masquerading as a communications enterprise’ (in Masquerades of War ed. Christine Sylvester, 2015) extends this inquiry to the realm of the global capitalist system, to show how such ethico-political relations carry over from ‘war’ to ‘peace’. I have pursued war and the human also via the questions of embodiment, including a critical material inquiry into contemporary automated/robotic warfare (‘Undoing war: war ontologies and the materiality of drone warfare’, Millennium Journal of International Studies 43:4 (2013).

My second research track concerns war and society. Building on earlier work on liberal interventionism (Holmqvist, Policing Wars: On Military Intervention in the Twenty-First Century (2014), and its military-civilian-humanitarian assemblage structure (co-edited War, Police and Assemblages of Intervention, contributions by Laleh Khalili and Mark Neocleous), I am currently working on European societal developments in relation to the renewed ‘war on terror’, focusing on France. I am interested in the racial and gendered structures of debates surrounding the refugee ‘crisis’.

The third research track concerns time, temporality and global relations of violence. Funded by a Swedish Research Agency Project Grant (2014-2017), this project asks how subjective understandings of time (temporality) condition the way in which we think about politics and the political. Moreover, I am working the conflation of ‘war time’ and ‘peace time’ and the ways in which the modern understanding of war as spatially and temporally bound seems to haunt our ability to understand contemporary violence in political terms.

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Books by Caroline Holmqvist

War, Police and Assemblages of Intervention, Routledge Interventions Series

by Colleen Bell, Jan Bachmann, and Caroline Holmqvist

This book reflects on the way in which war and police/policing intersect in contemporary Western-... more This book reflects on the way in which war and police/policing intersect in contemporary Western-led interventions in the global South. The volume combines empirically oriented work with ground-breaking theoretical insights and aims to collect, for the first time, thoughts on how war and policing converge, amalgamate, diffuse and dissolve in the context both of actual international intervention and in understandings thereof.

Reviews
This is a vital and timely collection. These essays work superbly well together to unpack one of the deadliest terms of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries -- "security forces" -- and they do so with that rarest of combinations, intellectual creativity and substantive depth.
- Derek Gregory, Peter Wall Distinguished Professor, Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Canada.

The militarization of police has been discussed a great deal lately, but the use of police personnel and policing logics in wars and post-war situations has received far less attention. This volume contains great empirical research, but it is also important for theorists of domestic law and of transnational governance; in addition it will be of interest to criminologists as well as international law scholars. It reveals that international coercive action, far from being straightforwardly military, now combines the logic of domestic policing with those of institutional reform, humanitarian aid, and military victory. An extremely timely volume with an appropriately multinational set of authors.
- Mariana Valverde, Professor of Criminology, University of Toronto, Canada.

Apparently, we live in a world that has never been more peaceable. As this excellent volume explains, however, this appearance is deceptive. While the term war is now seldom used, the meting out of international violence hasn't gone away. As the contributors explain, war has been replaced by an apparatus of international policing operations linked to restorative programmes variously labelled 'stabilisation', 'counterinsurgency' or 'the responsibility of protect'. In forcibly bringing order to an uncertain world, such interventions typically disavow all political resistance as the work of throwbacks, criminals or terrorists. For the populations living under these corrective measures, the surveillance regimes, selective detentions and drone strikes are far from peaceable. War, Police and Assemblages of Intervention is one of the best single collections of cutting-edge critical thinking on our current international predicament that you can find. It's an invaluable guide for those who want to know what the price of freedom actually is.
- Mark Duffield, Emeritus Professor, Global Insecurities Centre, University of Bristol, UK.

War, Police and Assemblages of Intervention (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2014) Interventions Series, edited by Jenny Edkins and Nick Vaughan-Williams

Policing Wars: On Military Intervention in the Twenty-First Century

Contemporary liberal thought imagines war as a perpetual policing exercise, in which disorder is ... more Contemporary liberal thought imagines war as a perpetual policing exercise, in which disorder is made into order. Demonstrating a command of theory few analysts of war can muster, Holmqvist shows how liberalism supplies a set of metaphors -an intellectual scaffolding encompassing time, space, agency and power -through which war becomes a management tool for the restoration of the social contract in other peoples' countries. While real in its effects, such imagination amounts to an illusory construct of war, with results for all to see in Iraq and Afghanistan. Surpassing earlier analyses of liberal war in depth and sophistication, Holmqvist is now the definitive guide.' -Tarak Barkawi, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK 'War without antagonism is one of the great oxymorons for our time. Holmqvist explores the sense in Western military theory that war can be fought without ultimate opposition when it is about reducing disorder and policing good governance. Those who resist this oxymoronic post-adversarial logic get branded and punished as obstructionist criminal elements. Holmqvist stretches the concept of contemporary war as a form of policing liberal order by tracing its roots to pre-9/11 times and spaces and by theorising its depths today. She is a compelling and important new voice on the forms, logics and implications of today's Western ways of warring.' -Christine Sylvester, University of Connecticut, USA This interdisciplinary study provides an original account of the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to show how, why and with what consequences, twenty-first century wars became seen as policing wars. Holmqvist starts from the assumption that wars always reflect the societies that wage them and combines the analysis of Western strategic thinking with a philosophical examination of the core ideas that structure the contemporary liberal imagination. She argues that the US-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were characterised by a widespread understanding of war as 'policing' -that is, waged against opponents deemed 'criminal' rather than political, and directed at the creation and maintenance of a certain type of 'order'. Holmqvist turns to themes of social theory and philosophy to offer new perspectives on why the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were waged in the way they were, and why the fantasy of policing wars came to resonate so widely amongst policy makers and academics alike. This unique contribution to the study of war and international politics will appeal to scholars of the philosophy and sociology of war, military strategy and international relations.

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The Character of War in the 21st Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2010)

Papers by Caroline Holmqvist

War/space: shifting spatialities and the absence of politics in contemporary accounts of war

Global Crime, 2012

Understandings of war – its shape, form, character and content – are conditioned by conceptualisa... more Understandings of war – its shape, form, character and content – are conditioned by conceptualisations and narratives of social and political space. As such, the history of writing on war is also a history of spatiality, expressed through a particular circumstance and practice. Through analysis of early modern conceptualisations of space, politics and war, this article considers the shift in political spatiality associated with the demise of modern linear spatiality that firmly established the territorial state as site of politics and war. The central argument of this article is that contemporary accounts of war reveal a political spatiality in flux coupled with an insistence on the global, such that many accounts of war neglect its political content. Three key accounts of contemporary war are engaged: liberal discourses of war as ‘policing’; accounts of war as ‘biopolitical empire’; and discourses of war as ‘risk management’ – all found, in different ways and collectively, to disregard the political confrontation that war necessarily entails.

On Agency: Policing Logics and War ‘Without Antagonism’

Policing Wars, 2014

Policing the Globe

Policing Wars, 2014

Power in Policing Wars

Policing Wars, 2014

Narratives of Disorder

Policing Wars, 2014

Les Affaires et la sécurité : quel rôle pour le secteur privé ?

Politique Etrangere, 2006

Les Affaires et la s�curit�: quel r�le pour le secteur priv�?

Les Affaires et la sécurité : quel rôle pour le secteur privé ?

Politique étrangère, 2006

Always already war power, police power

War power and police power are, in Neocleous's rendition, always already intertwined. This short ... more

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War, 'strategic communication' and the violence of non-recognition

Cambridge Review of International Affairs

Contemporary Western war-fighting is animated by the fictitious imagination of a war free from an... more Contemporary Western war-fighting is animated by the fictitious imagination of a war free from antagonism. In this logic, winning wars is about winning the 'hearts and minds' of local populations, about persuasion rather than confrontation. In recent years, the concept of 'strategic communication' (SC) has been elevated to the top echelons of strategic thinking in United States military circles, focusing attention on how to communicate 'effectively' with local populations. Via an analysis of the concept of SC, this article examines the ethico-political dimensions of contemporary Western-led 'population centric' war. Through a reading inspired by Judith Butler's recent work in Precarious life (London: Verso 2006) and Frames of war (London: Verso 2009), and an analysis that turns on the link between ethics and ontology, I reflect on the significance of the 'communications turn' in warfare for our study of war in ontological terms.

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Undoing war: war ontologies and the materiality of drone warfare

Millennium Journal of International Relations

The turn to military robotics is a striking feature of contemporary Western warfare. How then to ... more The turn to military robotics is a striking feature of contemporary Western warfare. How then to make sense of the increasing reliance on unmanned weapons systems, in particular, the use of combat-enabled Unmanned Aerial Vehicles/drones? Questioning the intuitive and oft-repeated claim that robotics 'take the human experience out of war' (reducing it to a video game), I argue that in order to make sense of current developments, we need precisely to reconsider our understanding of the human, her role in, and experience of, war. In this, we are aided by a critical materialist inquiry that investigates the human-material assemblage as a complex whole, taking both fleshy and steely bodies into account. Drawing on the philosophies of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Judith Butler, I show that only by considering what being human means -in ontological terms -and by asking how human experience is altered through new technologies will we be able to think politically and ethically about contemporary war.

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