Bruce Robbins has written that “Infrastructure needs to be made visible, in order to see how our present landscape is the product of past projects, past struggles.” This paper makes visible crucial transport infrastructures in Kuwait and excavates their emergence in war and contention, and their embedding in webs of exploitation and conflict that traverse the world, with nodes in the US and in the Gulf. Significant works of historical sociology have delineated the mechanisms through which warfare as social and political practice, and militaries as vast and powerful institutions, transform social and political relations over time and shape the contours of states, nations, genders, “races”, rights, and social stratification (Abdel-Malek 1968; Ayubi 1996; Barkawi 2006; Enloe 1989; Heydemann ed. 2000; Kandil 2012; Mann 1986; 1993; 2003; Massad 2001; Tilly 1993). I expand on these works by examining the conjuncture of military expansion and capital accumulation in the making of transport and logistics infrastructure in Kuwait, not only “the US Government’s largest military logistics hub in the world” but also a significant transport entrepôt in its own right. In interrogating the relations of US militaries with large commercial firms (headquartered both in the region and beyond) that provide strategic mobility and logistical infrastructures, I view the role of private enterprise in the tertiary sector as an adjunct to the economic machinery of the military. Given that Kuwait has been the staging ground for the War on Iraq, a number of significant logistics firms have emerged to take advantage of such large-scale movement of personnel and materiel. Among them, Agility is notable, both because of its massive size, the fact that it was the second largest recipient of US contracts in Iraq, and that it has parlayed its US military contracts into a global commercial reach which now sees it finding new markets in Africa and China. I analyse how a boom in commercial logistics activity as a result of US military presence or decamping can influence local commercial organisation and urban infrastructure (ports, warehousing, roads, etc.) in the countries that serve as US hosts. I argue that this confluence of transnational commerce, US military presence, and local government coercion gives a more comprehensive sense of the broader sociological effects of how war is “productive” -in countries that have served as battlefields, and in the region as a whole.

Thousands of tons of nuclear waste, in the form of weaponized depleted uranium, were dropped on Iraq between 1991 and 2011. The consequences for Iraqis, who have and will continue to confront a variety of environmental and public health dangers from DU’s use, have been catastrophic. Environmental suffering, particularly the kinds of slow violence that result from toxic exposure, often remain unseen alongside the more spectacular horrors of war. The effects of depleted uranium are not unknown in Iraq, but the ontologies that its use has fashioned, and how to think about toxic materiality and environmental suffering, are uncertain and deeply contested. In the last third of the 20th century, depleted uranium was turned from nuclear waste into a valuable military commodity in the United States and other nuclear-power countries. Manufactured into a cutting edge technology of war because of its particular “heavy” and armor penetrating qualities, DU has circulated widely. The effects of depleted uranium’s use were particularly terrible in places like Iraq, but not only there. From the 1970s through the 1990s depleted uranium was manufactured in weapons factories throughout the United States, in places like Concord, Massachussetts and Colonie, New York. There too the toxic and environmental effects of depleted uranium were deeply felt, threatening land, bodies, water, and public health. While deplete uranium’s environmental and ecological effects have often been severe, experts, policymakers, and various observers often contest how dangerous DU has been, is, and will remain in the future. In may paper I will examine depleted uranium’s global material and political economic histories, with particular attention to the varieties of suffering its manufacturing and use have engendered with the hope of encouraging new kinds of geographic and temporal thinking. I also want to draw attention to the political contests and especially the techno-scientific mobilizations that depleted uranium’s use and impact has produced in the West while being interrupted in places like Iraq. Americans affected in New York and Massachusetts were able to shut down toxic factories by mobilizing experts and state power. These things have often been denied to Iraqis. The science of toxicity, in spite of empirical evidence that shows DU’s pernicious effects, is uneven and should be understood as rooted in global politics and political economy, serving the interests of power rather than the sick.

In light of recent developments across the Middle East and North Africa, increasing attention has been paid to the evolving tactics, geographies, and technologies of war, especially in light of trends toward drone warfare. Most studies of late-modern war however have tended to theorize war in terms of unmitigated “geopolitical excess,” whether unbridled military force as seen in the U.S. invasion of Iraq, torture in Guantanamo or “targeted killings” in Yemen, Pakistan, and beyond. Rarely is war considered within the remit of development and humanitarian technologies, discourses, and practices. Drawing on Foucault’s prescient observation that the institutions of liberal modernity are themselves invested with the force of war, this paper traces the deepening entanglements between liberal war, colonial violence, and civilian intervention in Palestine. Based on research conducted in the West Bank on the U.S. Agency for International Development and the vast web of aid intermediaries, experts, lawyers, and contractors through which it operates, this paper attends to the ways in which tactics of war and liberal counterinsurgency are proliferating through networks, institutions, and administrative bodies entrusted with administering civilian aid to the Palestinian population. Centrally this paper argues that the foreign aid regime which has emerged over the last half century in the West Bank and Gaza has served to mitigate the effects of military occupation and dispossession while further extending a regime of colonial governance into ever-more intimate spaces of Palestinian everyday life. It so follows, this paper contends, that liberal aid intervention in Palestine constitutes the means through which colonial war is both mitigated and maintained. The paper begins by contextualizing American aid within the broader nexus of political and security forces that shape aid allocation to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, tracing in particular the specific linkages between USAID and liberal counterinsurgency. Then turning to debates circulating within Palestine, it examines how those living in the West Bank and Gaza are negotiating the military-humanitarian complexes that have come to govern their lives. In so doing, this paper brings to the fore the persistence of war in moments when direct military violence is held in abeyance. More broadly it asks what the case of Palestine might tell us about other sites across the Middle East where war as such has been declared officially over.

Carl von Clausewitz famously declared that war is a continuation of politics by other means; Michel Foucault notoriously wondered whether the inverse is rather the case, before reluctantly suggesting that liberal peace is the continuation of race war by other means. Bruno Latour provocatively argued that we have never been …peaceful, since neither Nature nor Reason nor Science can any longer be the arbiter of last resort in contemporary controversies. If war constitutes our existential predicament, our ontological presence, our philosophical telos, are we then to forsake peace forever? And if we are all to embrace Heraclitus, should we not at least know what exactly we rejected? This paper seeks to contribute to a centuries-old debate on war and peace by way of an ethnographic exploration among peacemakers and crisis experts in post-Civil War Lebanon (1975-1990). The main argument portrays the country as fertile ground for the deployment of a Deleuzian assemblage around the problematization of political violence. Based on fieldwork and archival work, the paper offers a panorama of the deployment of master peace, as I suggest calling this novel form of power. It shows how master peace is made up of complex forms of techno-politics and simulacra, hypermobile expertise and hyperbolic concepts, hybrid technologies and hype techniques; how it travels from metropolitan centres to restive peripheries; how it constructs subjects and subordination; finally, how it redraws the conceptual map of the Middle East. To master peace has been the perennial aim of all ruling power. Pacification arguably has a long history in the West long before Vietnam. It has been the constant preoccupation of any colonial power when faced with disobedience, armed insurgencies and subaltern revolts. Yet, this paper seeks to show that after the end of the Cold War, the deployment of a novel power to pacify continues to be the most comprehensive, intrusive and expansive effort thus far to control unrest and discontent at a global scale in a world that is nevertheless proving less and less masterable.