17 - Distant Conflicts, Southern Deaths: The Trials of Neoliberal Internationalism in ‘Southern Nowhere’

Summary

Introduction

We’re God knows where, out in the desert, in the middle of fucking nowhere … rattling around in the back of our Warrior as the RPGs and machine gun fire rattle in. (Wood, 2019: 3)

Discussing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Derek Gregory (2004: 11) assesses the imperial legacy they embody. He suggests that the ‘War on Terror’ marks ‘a violent return of the colonial past, with its split geographies of “us” and “them”, “civilisation” and “barbarism”, “good” and “evil” ‘. Such categories invoke the distancing that ‘otherness’ has facilitated, empowering the deployment of righteous violence against those who were neither assumed to know, nor presumed to deserve, any better. Where once this violence was orchestrated by gentlemen wearing red tunics, jodhpurs and pith helmets (cited in Sanghera, 2021), more recently it arrives with camouflaged ‘Dusty Warriors’ scrambling from the back of armoured personnel carriers (Holmes, 2007). One may be tempted to suggest that, in other respects, little has changed since these very same regions were contested in the 19th and early 20th centuries as empires fought over territories, drew lines in the sand (Barr, 2012) and the British, in particular, sought to protect overland routes (and, later, oil – Barr, 2019) from Russian and Turkish incursion, to India, the supposed ‘jewel’ in its imperial crown (Satia, 2008). For indeed, as we have seen in earlier chapters in this collection, and as a host of revisionist historical scholarship has confirmed, violence and conflict – either the military violence of warfare, genocide or massacre, or the economic violence of dispossession, enslavement and exploitation – were irretrievably enmeshed within the experience of empire (Walter, 2017). This might be the initial violence of discovery and conquest (Callwell, 1896/1996; Gott, 2011), the normalization of imperial expansion and daily rule (Dwyer and Nettelbeck, 2018; Muschalek, 2019) or the bloody struggles of withdrawal and emancipation (Elkins, 2005; Thomas, 2012).

And yet, as has been argued (see Chapter 2, this volume) the ruling narrative story is also one of increasing regulation, sometimes referred to as the ‘liberal paradox of empire’ (Dwyer and Nettelbeck, 2018; Andrews, 2021) or even of ‘liberal militarism’.