Chemical Bodies: The Techno-Politics of Control

by Alex Mankoo (Editor), Brian Rappert Professor of Science, Technology and Public Affairs at the University of E (Editor)

Overview

In warfare, civil unrest, and political protest, chemicals have served as means of coercion, suppression, and manipulation. This book examines how chemical agents have been justified, utilised and resisted as means of control. Through attending to how, when, and for whom bodies become rendered as sites of intervention, Chemical Bodies demonstrates the inter-relations between geopolitical transformations and the technological, spatial and social components of local events.

The chapters draw out some of the insidious ways in which chemical technologies are damaging, and re-open discussion regarding their justification, role and regulation. In doing so the contributors illustrate how certain instances of force gain prominence (or fade into obscurity), how some individuals speak and others get spoken for, how definitions of what counts as ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are advanced, and how the rights and wrongs of violence are contested.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786605863
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	10/19/2018
Series:	Geopolitical Bodies, Material Worlds
Pages:	226
Product dimensions:	6.32(w) x 9.17(h) x 0.88(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Alex Mankoo is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Sussex. His research interests include the history of chemical and biological weapons, intersections between science and security, and the sociology of security technologies more generally. His PhD research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and focussed on the technological trajectory of teargas in mid-20th century Britain and the types of legitimacy it gained during this period.

Brian Rappert is a Professor of Science, Technology and Public Affairs at the University of Exeter. His long-term interest has been the examination of the strategic management of information; particularly in the relation to armed conflict. His books include Controlling the Weapons of War: Politics, Persuasion, and the Prohibition of Inhumanity; Biotechnology, Security and the Search for Limits;and Education and Ethics in the Life Science. More recently he has been interested in the social, ethical, and political issues associated with researching and writing about secrets, as in his books Experimental Secrets (2009), How to Look Good in a War (2012) and Dis-eases of Secrecy (2017). For more information see http://brianrappert.net/

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Transgressive Chemicals

Brian Rappert and Alex Mankoo

When President Donald Trump spoke on the evening of 6 April 2017 regarding his decision to bomb a Syrian airfield, his brief statement raised many themes commonly associated with chemical weapons (CW) today. He began:

My fellow Americans, on Tuesday, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad launched a horrible chemical weapons attack on innocent civilians using a deadly nerve agent. Assad choked out the lives of helpless men, women, and children. It was a slow and brutal death for so many – even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever suffer such horror.

With these words, definite markers were given for what happened and how it should be understood: a user was named (Bashar al-Assad), characterized (as a 'dictator') and deemed directly responsible ('Assad choked out the lives'). The weaponry involved was classified (a 'deadly nerve agent'), its severe effects depicted (choking, 'a slow and brutal death') and the victim-hood standing of the groups targeted forwarded ('innocent civilians', 'beautiful babies' and 'helpless men, women and children').

Just as the condemnation given typified the moral charge so often associated with chemical weapons, the intense international debate about the Trump Administration's action epitomized the manner in which violence can be contested. So it was asked: Were the images shared around the world of people dying genuine? Were the attacks carried out by the Syrian military under instruction from the president? Was it really the images of beautiful babies suffering that led Trump to strike or were ulterior geopolitical, domestic or personal motivations in play? Since many beautiful babies had died as part of the long-running Syrian conflict, why were these singled out as justifying a U.S. military response? Would this attack serve to escalate violence or help turn warring factions towards some kind of resolution? If the Syrian men, women and children were so blameless, why was the Trump administration simultaneously seeking an outright ban on Syrian refugees entering the United States?

While this was a highly prominent instance of the hostile use of chemicals, other events also took place around the same time. In the early hours of 17 April 2017, twenty people were injured at a nightclub in London in what was widely described as an 'acid attack'. Reports indicated a chemical was sprayed as part of a fight. Among those assaulted, two were blinded in one eye. One woman affected commented, 'The pain is indescribable – it feels like your skin is eating itself. The police told us later it was drain fluid'. The attack was notable for the extent of media coverage given to it compared to previous acid attacks in the United Kingdom – the latter often undertaken against women by their ex-partners in displays of power. A recurring feature of the coverage in April was that one of the three men suspected as carrying out the assault was the former boyfriend of a British reality TV star. While the nightclub attack was given extraordinary media attention, this instance would be followed by prominent coverage to a number of similar attacks in public. One reason identified for the rise in incidents was the clampdown on other means of force, notably knives. Through this cumulative attention, 'acid attacks' would move from the fringe to the centre of criminal justice policy in Britain.

The attention to the previous two cases dwarfed that given to another set of events taking place around the same time in Western media. As reported by Amnesty International, the days before the sixth anniversary of the 2011 uprising in Bahrain (17 February 2017) amounted to a human rights crisis. In describing the violence employed as part of the crackdown on the freedom of expression, Amnesty International repeatedly cited the use of tear gas against protesters. For instance, in relation to large-scale protests in the villages of Duraz, Sitra and al-Daih, 'security forces were said to have responded with tear gas and shotguns firing birdshot. Eyewitnesses told Amnesty International that they saw security officers in Sanabis fire tear gas, aiming directly at protesters and causing injuries'.

These three contrasting cases exemplify the array of co-existing and shifting notions of what chemical agents are, as well as assessment of how, when and by whom they should (or should not) be used.

Chemical Bodies takes as its topic how chemical agents have been justified and resisted as instruments of coercion across time and space. In taking the potential for contestation as a central concern, this volume explores how the use of chemical agents often entails messy assemblages of materials, equipment, individuals, techniques, modes of argument and forms of accountability. In seeking to understand how chemical agents are made to matter, the contributors to this volume examine how certain instances of force gain prominence (or not), how some individuals speak and others get spoken for, how definitions of what counts as 'success' and 'failure' are advanced and how the normative rights and wrongs of violence are justified. Chemical Bodies aims to navigate the relationship between chemicals, bodies and space to answer questions such as the following:

• How, when and for whom do bodies become rendered as sites of intervention?

• What kind of geopolitical spaces make body-controlling chemicals possible and permissible?

• What concerns and whose experiences are made visible and invisible?

• How can the analysis of the past inform scholarship, policy making and activism?

This introductory chapter provides an overview of how these weapons have been shaped by scientific and technical advancements, geopolitics, international law and normative standards. These matters will be explored through an analysis that seeks to develop sensitivities for approaching disputes about the use of chemicals; sensitivities opened up to in subsequent chapters. The next section considers how distinctions have been drawn over time in defining and assessing 'chemical weapons'. Determining whether chemical agents are unlawful, unadvisable, offensive, prohibited or reprehensible entails distinguishing them from what is legal, advisable, defensive, allowed or above board. Building on this, the third section analyses how attempts to legitimate and contest chemical weapons have entailed efforts to link and delink contexts, technologies and forms of expertise from each other. In the manner that chemical agents have been embraced as a means for sorting individuals and spaces as well as resisted as unleashing forms of uncontrollable contamination, their introduction has entailed experimentation with bodies and spaces. The fourth section examines how the notion of experimentation has figured as part of contests about chemical force.

DISTINCTIONS

Distinctions matter. They cordon off parts of the world from each other in order to distinguish events, objects, locales and so on. Events, objects and so on must have their limits if the world is not to be treated as one indistinguishable goo. While distinctions are needed, too many would result in an unruly and confusing scattering of unique objects. In marking off certain acts or objects, distinctions bring into effect relations of resemblance and difference. For instance, is the kind of 'acid attack' in London mentioned earlier properly put under the umbrella of a 'chemical weapon' attack? If the determination is 'yes', then a host of imaginations and concerns would be evoked associated with their terror potential or their status as an instance of 'weapons of mass destruction' (WMD). These concerns, however, were not prevalent in public coverage. In taking as its concern 'chemical agents', this volume seeks to bring into view a range of coercive uses of chemicals that might fall outside of analyses concerned with a narrow definition of 'chemical weapons'.

Distinctions matter as well in the sense of telling us what matters, what is important. This point is highly relevant to the topics at hand in these chapters because the use of 'chemical weapons' is often highly charged. As with terms like 'violence', to say someone has used chemical weapons is typically not taken as a mere description. It comes pre-loaded as an evaluative category. Aversion, disgust and repulsion are the types of emotional recoil often connected with chemical weapons, not least because of the manner they are associated with bodily contamination, pollution and defilement. Although to a lesser extent, much the same spark characterizes associated words. In news reports, terms like 'tear gas' regularly stand as bywords suggestive of severe disorder or iron-fist policing.

While often charged, the meaning of categories formed from distinctions should not be taken as invariant or context-free. In 'From Reviled Poisons to State Arsenals: The Un(necessary) Proliferation of Chemical Weapons', Jeanne Guillemin sets the development and the post–World War II protection of Japan from prosecution for its chemical warfare (CW) in China against three distinct phases in the legal restraint of chemical weapons in the twentieth century; each which offered a particular set of prevalent meanings. As she argues, in the decade after the Great War, the moral revulsion for poison weapons supported universal legal restrictions; foremost among them was the 1925 Geneva Protocol (GP) that forbade their use in war. Beginning in the early 1930s, support for the universal rules of war declined in a new age of total war theory and the rise of the Axis powers, two of which with impunity conducted chemical warfare against defenceless enemies – Italy against Ethiopia and Japan against China. Guillemin's third phase began with the 1945 U.S. dropping of atomic bombs on Japan and the dawn of the nuclear age. As she maintains, the ill-considered 1948 United Nations (UN) definition of chemical weapons as 'WMD' accorded them strategic value.

James Revill and Marcos Favero's chapter covers much of the same time period as Guillemin, but they offer a more thematic take on the assessments made of the use of chemical weapons. 'Lesser Appreciations: A History of Interwar Chemical Warfare' takes as its primary focus how distinctions between those 'ingroup' and 'outgroup' as well as 'civilized' and 'other' has enabled otherwise-'unacceptable' weapons to be rendered acceptable or at least tolerable.

Moving from such wide-ranging historical analyses, the meaning of categories formed from distinctions is also accomplished as part of situated, day-to-day interactions. Consider both the importance of distinctions and the potential scope for their negotiation in relation to the issue of what counts as a 'chemical weapon'. When Sean Spicer, then press secretary for the White House, stood before reporters on 11 April, high on the list of questions were ones related to the sarin attacks that took place a week earlier on the Syrian town of Khan Shaykhun and the Trump administration's subsequent airstrike on 6 April. In responding to questions from the floor, Spicer situated chemical weapons as types of 'WMD'. Shortly after doing so the following exchange took place:

Reporter: Thanks a lot, Sean. The alliance between Russia and Syria is a strong one; it goes back decades. President Putin has supplied personnel; he's supplied military equipment to the Assad government. What makes you think that at this point, he's going to pull back in his support for President Assad and for the Syrian government right now?

Sean Spicer: I think a couple things. You look – we didn't use chemical weapons in World War II. You had someone as despicable as Hitler who didn't even sink to using chemical weapons. So you have to, if you're Russia, ask yourself is this a country that you and a regime that you want to align yourself with? You have previously signed on to international agreements rightfully acknowledging that the use of chemical weapons should be out of bounds by every country. To not stand up to not only Assad, but your own word, should be troubling.

Russia put their name on the line. So it's not a question of how long that alliance has lasted, but at what point do they recognize that they are now getting on the wrong side of history in a really bad way really quickly.

As part of this exchange, when asked a question about why Russia would stop its long-running support for the Assad government in Syria, Spicer initially responds by mobilizing a negative evaluation of chemical weapons. He does so by offering a couple contrasts, one with the non-use of these weapons by the United States in World War II and the second the non-use of chemical weapons by Hitler in the same war. With regard to the latter, the comparison reference to Hitler makes use of a culturally widespread moral marker. Doing so not only brings together Hitler and Assad for the purpose of setting them apart from other world leaders, the Syrian president is positioned as even going beyond the taken-for-granted deplorable status of Hitler. This is so because the latter 'didn't even sink to using chemical weapons'. In this way, the use of chemical weapons gets morally set apart from other kinds of violence.

The attempt to justify a distinct standing for Assad through linking him with CW would subsequently be queried later in the briefing:

Reporter 2: Sean, thanks. I just want to give you an opportunity to clarify something you said that seems to be gaining some traction right now. 'Hitler didn't even sink to the level of using chemical weapons'. What did you mean by that?

Sean Spicer: I think when you come to sarin gas, there was no – he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing, I mean, there was clearly – I understand your point, thank you.

Reporter 2: I'm just getting –

Sean Spicer: Thank you, I appreciate that. There was not – he brought them into the Holocaust centre, I understand that. But I'm saying in the way that Assad used them, where he went into towns, dropped them down to innocent – into the middle of towns. It was brought – so the use of it – I appreciate the clarification there. That was not the intent.

In her initial remarks, this reporter pitches her question in the form of a requirement for clarification, not a criticism; this face-value purpose is subsequently supported by the phrasing of her question in the open-ended, non-directed formulation of 'What did you mean by that?'. In reformulating his depiction of what Hitler did, Spicer offers the qualification that Hitler had not used chemical weapons 'the same way that Assad is doing' and acknowledges a need for clarification in relation to a point, but what that point is remains unstated and indefinite.

Not in the official White House transcript but reported elsewhere, after the initial response by Spicer and overlapping with the interjection by Reporter 2 of 'I'm just getting – ', another reporter present was said to shout off mike that Jews had been targeted. Spicer's follow-on comments then speak to the plight of Jews under Nazi Germany with allusion to the gas chambers and further his previous qualification about the difference between Assad and Hitler by contending the former 'went into towns, dropped them down to innocent – into the middle of towns'. In other words, a distinction seems to be offered on the basis of how chemicals were used, rather than that they in and of themselves were used. While the remarks by Spicer might be taken as question begging in relation to what attributions of sameness and difference are being made, the referential adequacy of some claims and the meaning of terms such as 'Holocaust centre', at the time in the press briefing, no further clarifications were sought or given.

Subsequent media coverage though would make relevant a host of points. In relation to the question of whether chemical weapons were used, commentators would note that millions of Jews and others had been killed during the Holocaust, including through the use of 'chemical gas agents'. The National Jewish Democratic Council would be quoted in one report as stating 'Hitler used chemical weapons. Period. No amount of clarification or walking back from the press secretary's office should be accepted for Spicer's horrific mistake. We demand a full apology and a promise that these sorts of dangerous comparisons by the Trump administration are over'.

While in such statements the use of gas chambers was treated as a clear case of the use of chemical weapons, it can be noted that not everyone would subscribe to such classification. For instance, Spicer's contention that Hitler 'didn't even sink to using chemical weapons' would not at all be out of place in many academic and policy analyses of the history of chemical weapons. As with the previously mentioned example of 'acid attacks', within such professional discourse, confined chemical chamber exposures are often treated as falling outside of the category of 'chemical weapons'. Instead this term is routinely taken to apply to situations of armed conflict. More generally, the twentieth century is replete with examples of disputes about what to include under the heading of chemical weapons – including many options used by the United States in wars, such as Agent Orange and napalm – rooted in differing criteria about what matters.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements / Abbreviations / Transgressive Chemicals, Brian Rappert and Alex Mankoo / From Reviled Poisons to State Arsenals: The Un(necessary) Proliferation of Chemical Weapons, Jeanne Guillemin / Lesser Appreciations: A History of Inter-War Chemical Warfare, James Revill & Marcos Favero / Biological Warfare, Chemical Warfare and the Public Body, Etienne Aucouturier / Opening Spaces through Exhibiting Absences: Representing Secretive Pasts, Brian Rappert, Kathryn Smith, and Chandré Gould / Tear Gas Epistemology: The Himsworth Committee and Weapons as Drugs, Brian Balmer, Alex Spelling, Caitriona McLeish / What Counts as a Chemical Weapon?: The Category of Law Enforcement in the Chemical Weapons Convention, Michael Crowley / Tear Gas and Colonial Bodies in the British Interwar Period, Anna Feigenbaum / Controlling and Caring for Public Bodies: Civil Defence Gas Tests in WWII Britain, Alex Mankoo / ‘Chemical Bodies’ and the Future of Control, Alex Mankoo and Brian Rappert

Editorial Reviews

Chemical Bodies gathers notable experts, using case studies across time and space, to examine how chemical agents have been framed as weapons (or not), by whom, for whom, and the political/policy stakes involved. The book is a critical read for academics, intelligence officials, and policymakers who wrestle with how to make sense of chemical and biological threats past and present.

Kathleen Vogel

At a time of intense political scrutiny of chlorine and acid attacks, this book takes a deeper dive into historical framings of the chemical weapons taboo. The contextually rich body of work carefully teases out how chemical agents have been justified and resisted as instruments of control, coercion and warfare across time and space. Its portrayal of the dynamics and shifting notions of normative values makes the book indispensable reading to anyone who holds dear the ban on chemical weapons.

Filippa Lentzos