Visions of Peace Thesis Prize Award 2019 & War/Truth: Civilian Harm in Remote Warfare

Stichting Vredeswetenschappen and the Utrecht University Centre for Global Challenges organised and hosted the annual Visions of Peace Thesis Prize Awards 2019, which brings together students and young academic talents to award the nominees a prize for their final graduate work. The awards ceremony is preceded by a seminar with four speakers that professionally and scholarly engage and address the increasingly blurred boundary between War and Truth.

Introduction

Dr. Lauren Gould commenced the afternoon by elaborating on the obscure way in which Western states have increasingly resorted to remote warfare to safely govern ‘threats at a distance’ in the wake of 2001 and 2003 invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. She explained that remote warfare is a form of military interventionism characterized by a shift away from boots on the ground, and it generally involves a combination of drone- and airstrikes from above, special forces operations, private contractors, and military training teams. While these training teams assist local forces to do the fighting and dying on our behalf, we, in the west, protect our military men and women from danger by outsourcing the burden of war. Thus, we understand that the three characteristics of remote warfare are danger-proofing, delegation, and secretiveness through operating with special intelligence units and private military contractors.

Distraction from War

This shadowy and seemingly risk-less contemporary way of warfare serves Western political interest since returning military body-bags and transparent parliamentary scrutiny are a thing of the past. However, when information becomes available (like the recent uncovering of Dutch military involvement in the bombing of Hawija in Iraq as a part of the United States led anti-IS coalition) a lack of political transparency on what was known at the time and by whom undermines the work of those that try to bring the reality to light. Also, this means that we are distracted from a good debate on responsibility and accountability, and a more fundamental question on the long-term effects of this novel way of waging war.

Regime of Truth

The regime of truth that emerged from a lack of transparency and the increased legitimation of this way of warfare through emphasizing the ‘surgical’ and ‘harm-less’ nature of this warfare is the overarching theme of the seminar preceding the Visions of Peace award ceremony. After dr. Gould her elaboration on remote warfare, Laurie Treffers, a conflict researcher and alumnus of Utrecht University, talked us through the aims, methods, and importance of independent reporting with regards to the hidden realities of distance wars. As a representative of Airwars, Ms. Treffers explained that the official numbers published by the US coalition significantly differ from the reports Airwars has assessed and verified. Exemplifying the negligence and obscurity within official reports on this matter. Following Laurie Treffers, Marrit Woudwijk, who investigated the experiences of Syrian refugees that have lived through remote interventions in their homeland, as well as their experiences of living in a country with a population that does not know what war their government is waging and is consistently failing to acknowledge. She pointed out that people from Syria did not comprehend these airstrikes as ‘surgical’ or ‘precise’. Syrian people saw the actions of the coalition as the main source of urban destruction and civilian deaths, since airplanes could not differentiate between schools and terrorists. War is not a gift. Marrit Woudwijk her thesis was also nominated for the Visions of Peace Thesis Prize 2019.

Difficult Realities

The last two speakers of the seminar were Ali Aljasem and Mohammed Kanfash, who talked us through local stories and experiences related to the actions of the US led coalition and their surrogate proxies from Aleppo and Raqqa. Stories from Syrian civilians informed us that the international coalition sees their operations as liberation, but this could not be further from reality. The airstrikes by the coalition and especially the actions of their proxies in Syria are not as innocent as they seem. These proxies, or supposed ‘freedom bringers’, also engage in forced displacements and various other dirty operations that contrast the beliefs or knowledge in the west.

Thesis Prize Awards

            After the seminar, the thesis prize nominees presented their respective theses and dr. Gijsbert van Iterson Scholten, chairmen of the jury, announced the winner of the 2019 Visions of Peace Thesis Prize. Congratulations Gieneke Teeuwen (Leiden University) with winning the master thesis prize with her thesis “Innocence and impunity: Accountability of child soldiers as part of the process of reintegration”. Read her summary here.