Elsevier

Political Geography

Volume 44, January 2015, Pages 64-73
Political Geography

Intimate war

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2014.09.011Get rights and content

Abstract

Contending that domestic violence and modern international warfare are part of a single complex of violence, this paper identifies their shared intimate dynamics. Both violences operate through emotional and psychological registers that are as central to their effectiveness as incidents of direct physical harm. While these dynamics are intimate, they are present across scale, and read here through a feminist lens on intimacy-geopolitics where neither framing has primacy. Research on the connections between domestic violence and international warfare is longstanding, most recently highlighting how intimate violence is produced within warzones. The analysis here begins instead from intimate dynamics, to draw out the warlike nature of domestic violence in peacetime. Tactics of modern warfare are juxtaposed with the dynamics of domestic violence in suburban Scottish homes: shock and awe, hearts and minds, cultural and psychological occupation, just war and collateral damage. Resisting the temptation to regard domestic violence as everyday militarism, the relation is rotated: both violences continuously wind through the intimate-geopolitical. This spatial reconfiguration is structured by gender, race, class, nation and citizenship, resulting in uneven impacts from all kinds of intimate war. The interweaving of military and intimate themes is intended as a casting-off point for progressing political geographies that are attentive to intimacy as foundational in the workings of power across scale.

Introduction

This paper contends that domestic violence and international warfare are part of a single complex of violence. ‘Intimate war’ is not a term for one or the other, but a description of both. For decades, feminist activists and researchers have pointed out the connection and its broader implications (INCITE, 2006, Loyd, 2009, Tickner, 1992). However, with a few exceptions, political geographers have had little to say about domestic or sexual violence. This is unexpected in a discipline with a core interest in how spaces, places and scales produce and reproduce a whole range of social and political phenomena. Instead, over the last decade in particular, geographers have been engrossed in analysing war, terrorism and international conflict. While this attention is warranted, when placed alongside scant scholarship on other forms of violence it looks disproportionate and, ironically, is sometimes led by the mediated spectacle of global events which at the same time is under critique (Pain, 2009). Yet these forms of violence share bases of power with more pervasive intimate forms of violence: they are similarly located, they work through emotions, and there is always some enactment of resistance (Pain, 2014a, Pain, 2014b), all of which points to a shared analysis. Far more than terrorism, which I have discussed elsewhere (Pain, 2014a), war is inseparable from the politics and experience of everyday life (Cuomo, 1996, Woodward, 2005), yet the spatial metaphors used to analyse war tend to situate it as different and distant (Sjoberg, 2013).

The starting point for the analysis here involves a specific articulation of the relation between the intimate and wider political structures. This articulation does not position the intimate as affected, or dripped down upon, by larger (geopolitical) processes. It does not restrict itself to drawing parallels between international/global on the one hand, and everyday/intimate on the other. Instead, it takes the intimate as a starting point or building block from which analysis moves out, both methodologically and conceptually, and asks what insights does this inverted orientation offer? This means examining the intimate dynamics of violence: the ways that military tactics and domestic violence operate through emotional and psychological registers that are as central to their effectiveness as incidents of direct physical harm. Military strategy is also-intimate: domestic violence is also-political. In both cases, these dynamics are made and lived. Wound into everyday lives, they are perpetrated, negotiated and resisted by individuals and groups of people in specific ways. They intersect with and frequently feed off obligations and customs of care, emotion, and social relations with others. And they are framed through gender, race and class, and refracted through the histories of places, nations and citizenship.

The project thus relates to – although it cannot fully answer – recent calls for International Relations as a discipline to understand war from the perspectives of those who experience it (Sjoberg, 2013, Sylvester, 2012), particularly to include a focus on its emotional dimensions (Sylvester, 2013). Sylvester (2013, 4) suggests that scholars should ‘stop averting our eyes and decide to descend into the ordinary of violence’. For over a decade, feminist political geographers have been doing just that, writing about war and its effects in ways that ably blend conceptual, empirical and activist concerns. Most, I suspect, would reject any binary division between scholars whose private and professional lives are supposedly insulated from violence (up here), and the lives of those we study (down there). Nonetheless, geographical research on domestic violence has been almost completely separate from these efforts. Such analysis may also form part of an emotional geopolitics (Pain, 2009) that explicates how emotions produce violence, fear, oppression and resistance across multiple spatial scales and sites (see also Cuomo, 2013, Pain, 2014a, Williams and Boyce, 2013). In this reading of emotions, they become highly significant to politics: rather than individualised or pathologised states, they are collective social forces that explode the boundaries and bifurcations that we too frequently draw.

The paper deliberately focuses on domestic violence close to home rather than at a distance; situated in the west, and experienced by women, children and men in some ways privileged as well as those marginalised by economic processes, social exclusion, racism and contexts of colonization. This helps to expose the political geographies of domestic violence in peacetime as well as in wartime. The two empirical cases here are women with different backgrounds that shaped the outcome of the violence they experienced, especially concerning their ethnicity and claims to citizenship. This too is a purposeful choice, intended to illuminate the everywhereness of intimate violence and the powerful underpinning of class, race and geopolitics in the political work that it does.

Because of this focus, inevitably a number of salient issues cannot be discussed here. The paper does not analyse domestic violence within international conflict, although these important connections are referred to in a number of places. It refers to some forms and contexts of war more than others, reflecting geographers' recent work which has paid much attention to US involvement in conflicts overseas. In discussing war and domestic violence as parts of a single complex of violence, the aim is not to homogenise either. They tend to have some core characteristics, but are shaped by temporal, spatial, cultural and political contexts, and the efforts made by a whole range of actors to resist and combat them. The paper does not unpack the issue of civilian men affected by domestic violence or war. Women and children are more likely to be affected by these violences and their aftermaths, but that is not to erase the important and distinctive gendered experiences of men.

The paper begins with the assertion that domestic violence is political and should be analysed as such. It then summarises existing work exploring the connections between intimate violence and international warfare. The conceptual framing of intimacy-geopolitics is introduced. The paper then draws on empirical material to explore some of the intimate emotional and psychological dynamics of violence. Continuing to move between wider literature on war and domestic violence, it asks how we can make sense of the warlike nature of domestic violence in peacetime. The ways in which unequal victims are produced in the aftermath of war are discussed, and the paper concludes with some implications for political geography. The interweaving of military and everyday themes and terminology throughout is intended as a provocation, providing some openings or casting-off points for further conversations within political geography about intimate violence in particular, and intimacy more generally as foundational in the workings of power across scale.

Section snippets

Domestic violence is political

Domestic violence is political, although it is not always considered in that way. If, as this paper goes on to argue, domestic violence is closely connected with warfare, sometimes part of warfare, and located within a network of violences which appear to be operating at different scales but in fact closely resemble each other, then it seems odd that this form of systemic violence is not routinely analysed as political. Its intimate dynamics are motivated by a wish to exert control, as we shall

Domestic violence and warfare

Gender relations are like a linking thread, a kind of fuse, along which violence runs. They run through every field (home, city, nation-state, and international relations) and every moment (protest, law enforcement, militarization), adding to the explosive charge of violence in them.

Cockburn, 2004, 44.

War has predominantly been theorised by mainstream scholars of political science, war studies, international relations and human geography as a phenomenon that is spatially, socially and

intimacy-geopolitics

The spatial concept underpinning this analysis is intimacy-geopolitics (Pain & Staeheli, in press), the hyphen between each sphere signalling the supposed divide and the actual leakage between them. This framing provides a framework for connecting violences across scale, following a recent body of work that has unpicked and drawn together different forms of violence and insecurity (e.g. Pain, 2014a, Pain and Smith, 2008, Pratt, 2012, Staeheli and Nagel, 2008). In much work in critical

Domestic violence as warfare

The analysis here highlights the intimate in the violence of warfare, through the use of military themes to analyse private experiences of violence in the home. Some provisos are needed, as distinctions between war and peace are clearly hazy, military violence often permeates ‘peacetime’ (Cuomo, 1996), and militarism certainly shapes the spaces of ‘peaceful’ countries (Woodward, 2005). Nonetheless, there is a reason for this starting point for analysis, which I examine more critically at the

The uneven impacts of war

This spatial configuration is uneven. Structured by race, class and gender, the landscapes of victimization, survival, outcomes and aftermath are unequal. As I have argued elsewhere, as scholars we often display contradictory tendencies, distancing ourselves from sites of violence and any direct involvement in them, and downplaying the ways that (our) histories of power relations shape these objects of study (Pain, 2009). The white universalism that sometimes results can be read in mainstream

Conclusions

Framed by an understanding of intimacy-geopolitics that rejects scalar or spatial hierarchy, domestic violence and international warfare can both be understood as intimate war. As feminists have argued for decades, war is not separate from the private realm. Nor does it simply drip down into domestic space as it impacts on the men, women and children who live there. War is both driven by intimate dynamics and, in turn, exacerbates their violence. This is less a two-way flow, and more a single

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the women and men interviewed who shared their stories with me on the research project referenced here. The project was supported by the British Academy (SG111095), facilitated by Scottish Women's Aid and enriched by conversations with Jo Ozga and Cheryl Stewart of that organisation. Many thanks to the editors of this journal for their kind invitation to present the Plenary lecture, especially to Phil Steinberg for organisation and editing, and to the three readers for their

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