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Risk and the fabrication of apolitical, unaccountable military markets: the case of the CIA ‘Killing Program’1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2011

ANNA LEANDER
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Abstract

This article argues that risk is central in (re)producing the unaccountable commercial military/security markets that are a normal part of our political reality. The argument is twofold: first it is suggested that risk rationalities and the associated ‘preventive imperative’ has a depoliticising effect – accentuated by the impersonal spread of risk rationalities and the strategies of risk professionals – which lowers the eagerness to seek accountability. However, and second, depoliticisation is significant above all as a serious obstacle to the innovative thinking that is the sine qua non of effective accountability. The enmeshed, ‘hybrid’, nature of the market places it in the ‘blind spot’ of law and is as such fundamental to the current lack of accountability. Consequently, moving beyond established regulatory frameworks and technical understandings of accountability (that is, politicising the market) is a precondition for more effective accountability. Failing to do so, will leave the current rapid legal innovation impotent while reinforcing impunity as the focus on and confidence in established regulatory frameworks grows. The failure to politicise creates an ‘accountability paradox’ where the pursuit of accountability diminishes it. The article develops this argument with reference to Blackwater's (now Xe) role in the so called CIA ‘Killing Program’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 5 , December 2011 , pp. 2253 - 2268
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2011

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References

2 A search of the Review of International Studies on articles with the word ‘risk’ in the abstract gives a meagre five hits.

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38 For the US context the changes to the MEJA and the UCMJ as well as the possibility of using the Alien Tort Statue against contractor (currently tried out in Viriginia against Blackwater employees involved in the Nisour incident) are significant changes. But they have yet to result in convictions. See Waits, Elizabeth K., ‘Avoiding the “Legal Bermuda Triangle”: The Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act's Unprecedented Expansion of US Criminal Jurisdiction over Foreign Nationals’, Arizona Journal of International and Comparative Law, 23 (2008), pp. 493–540Google Scholar .

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58 For example the Fallujah lynching where four Blackwater employees were killed has triggered court cases by the families of the employees in question Scahill, Jeremy, Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army (Washington: Nation Books, 2007)Google Scholar .

59 It has been investigated for overcharging and not respecting its engagements for example in relation to a plane incident in Afghanistan killing six people including three soldiers Karp, Jonathan, ‘Private Firms Like Blackwater Could Be Held Liable for Casualties During Military Tasks’, Wall Street Journal (8 March 2007)Google Scholar .

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64 It is perhaps telling that Representative Jan Schakowski – who has worked on privatisation of security for a long time and was on the intelligence committee – was kept at the margins of the discussion around the CIA Killing Program. She was given 1 minute to address the house of representatives on 16 Sept 2010.

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67 As clear from the references above, this article is far from the only one reflecting on this.

68 Europeans are far closer to the US logic than they usually think, but so are many other countries because technologies of government (in this case risk thinking and law) may be given a contextual content and structure but they also span borders as do the professional communities that implement them. Making this argument in detail is far beyond the scope of this article but see, for example, Goede, Marieke De, ‘Beyond Risk: Premediation and the Post-9/11 Security Imagination’, Security Dialogue, 39 (2008), pp. 155–176CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Bigo, Didier, ‘Globalized (in)Security: The Field and the Ban-Opticon’, in Bigo, D. and Tsoukala, A. (eds), Terror, Insecurity and Liberty: Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes (New York and London: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar ; Bigo, Didier, Bonelli, Laurent, Chi, Dario and Olsson, Christian, Mapping of the Field of the Eu Internal Security Agencies (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2007)Google Scholar ; Bigo, Didier and Tsoukala, Anastassia (eds), Terror, Insecurity and Liberty: Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes (New York and London: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar .

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