Global Military Studies

The United States operates 900 military facilities in 46 countries. The number of international peacekeeping forces worldwide has quadrupled in the past 10 years to more than 100,000. The Institute analyzes the intended and unintended consequences of such vast deployments of forces.

Conduct and Discipline in UN Peacekeeping Operations: Culture, Political Economy and Gender

Watson Professor (Research) Catherine Lutz and anthropology professor Matthew Gutmann are leading a project to recommend improvements in understanding the roots of problems with the abuse of local populations by UN peacekeepers, under a recent $50,000 grant from the Compton Foundation.

“Cultural awareness is at the core of many UN peacekeeping challenges and calls for reform,” Lutz says. Two of the biggest issues that have arisen are sexual exploitation of local women and girls, and racial attitudes leading to indifference to local populations or violent abuse of them. The UN has recently established Conduct and Discipline Units in most missions to monitor and enforce compliance with codes of conduct.

Project team members are visiting UN Department of Peacekeeping mission sites. Field research has been conducted in Haiti and Lebanon in this period and included interviews with peacekeepers at both sites. Research will be conducted in the Kosovo mission by Keith Brown. A final report to the UN will suggest what conditions and practices have made abuse more or less likely.

Cultural Awareness in the Military

In a range of deployments since the early 1990s—to Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and now Iraq and Afghanistan—the U.S. military has been tasked with making peace as well as waging war. From the transformation of conventional war-fighting to counter-insurgency and stability operations, the military has been coming to terms with the importance of culture across a wide spectrum of social relationships. Since 2003, "cultural sensitivity" has become a key component of training for troops deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, having identified a “culture gap” in U.S. military capability, high-ranking military and congressional leaders have begun to advocate new training and educational programs to promote understanding of the "cultural terrain” navigated by the military.

All this raises new questions for social scientists concerned with the use (and potential abuse) of the concept of "culture" by the U.S. military. In 2004, the Politics, Culture and Identity Program launched a project with the Global Security Program, which set out to investigate the ethical, practical, and technological issues raised by the military's quest for greater cultural awareness.

In collaboration with the Pell Center for International Studies at Salve Regina University, a workshop was held in December 2004, titled "Prepared for Peace?: The Use and Abuse of 'Culture' in Military Simulations, Training, and Education," which brought together social scientists and military personnel as well as U.S. Senator Jack Reed (RI) who opened the event just after returning from a fact-finding trip to Iraq. The workshop sought to draw lessons from participants' experiences in diverse cultural milieus, especially in the Balkans and Iraq, concentrating on training, education, and the use of simulations in operational environments.

A second workshop, titled “The Production of Cultural Knowledge in the United States Military” is scheduled for April 28-29, 2006. This workshop will convene military and civilian experts to discuss from research perspectives as well as personal experience the theoretical, practical and ethical issues involved in the production, consumption, and circulation of ‘cultural knowledge.’ The aim of the workshop is to produce edited outputs as well as to establish a network for future peer collaboration and consultation.

Overall, the workshops series is dedicated to advancing through multiple media a critical, pluralist, and empirically-informed dialogue on the ways in which the concept of culture is and has been ‘operationalized’ by the military in the post-Cold War period.

In addition to these workshops, Professors Keith Brown, James Der Derian, and Catherine Lutz, are spearheading collaborative research projects in three distinct but related areas.

Keith Brown is tracing the development of US military interest in culture since the 1990s, when all the services faced squarely the new challenges posed by operations other than conventional war.

Catherine Lutz is working on the development of cultural awareness training in UN peacekeeping operations.

In conjunction with the Global Media Project and Udris Productions, James Der Derian has produced a documentary film, Human Terrain, on how the US military deals with culture as a critical variable in the complex and asymmetrical conflicts of the 21st century.

US Military Bases and Global Response

In this project, Catherine Lutz examines two types of contemporary globalisms that are increasingly interconnected, crisis generated, and change generating: a vast global network of US military installations, and small groups of activists and their supporters critical of the installations' often harmful impact on surrounding communities of people, sovereignty claims, political economies, and environments. The project goals are to understand these social movements, which first came together in a truly global way in 2003, and their various ideological underpinnings. This study has three foci. First, it asks how powerful and differently conceptualized social movements have arisen to challenge US bases in at least four areas: South Korea, Okinawa, Guam, and the Philippines. Next, the project looks at the regional impact of those installations, particularly in relation to gender issues including prostitution, rape and other violence against women, and female labor force participation and wage rates. Finally, it analyzes the US military's changing basing strategy and configuration, which recently has undergone its most radical transformation since World War II.

During the last several years, Lutz has done field research in the four target regions, reported on in several conference papers and invited talks, and completed an edited book of essays drawing on two international conferences in 2004 and 2006 at the Watson on this issue.

War Epiphanies: When Iraq Veterans Break Ranks

This project seeks to document the stories of veterans and soldiers who oppose US involvement in the war in Iraq. While a number of oral history collections focusing on those who support US policy in Iraq have been initiated across the country, these interviews provide a unique critical perspective on the war.

Thus far, thirty five interviews have been conducted with these veterans. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will store the interviews in their oral history collection for historical research. Conducted under the coordination of Betsy Brinson, an oral historian, and with the help of several Brown undergraduate research assistants, including Anna Christensen, Spencer Amdur, and Lindsay Cunningham, the research is being written up in manuscript form by Catherine Lutz and Matthew Gutmann, of the Brown Department of Anthropology. The book reflects on common themes and sociological distinctions in the experience of these young men and women through the recruitment, training, and combat periods. It also explore their postwar experience, which includes, for most, significant anti-war activism and service to fellow veterans, as well as coping with their wartime physical and mental injuries.