ECPR

Install the app

Install this application on your home screen for quick and easy access when you’re on the go.

Just tap Share then “Add to Home Screen”

The Military Camp as a Living Space and its Effects on Knowledge About a "Host Country"

NATO
Knowledge
Political Sociology
Policy-Making
Kerstin Tomiak
FernUniversität in Hagen
Kerstin Tomiak
FernUniversität in Hagen

Abstract

In the summer of 2021, Afghanistan’s government, institutions, and security forces all dramatically collapsed following the withdrawal of the international troops. The swift return of the Taliban to power brought oppression and violence back to a country the international community had aimed to stabilise for twenty years. World leaders, diplomats, military, and international intervention actors were all surprised by the rapid collapse, and several analysts have since phrased requests for systematic reviews of the Afghanistan mission to formulate “lessons learned” for future peace operations. Yet, the question of why the sentiment in the local population towards the Doha peace accords and the return of the Taliban was missed despite decades of international engagement with the country has yet to be satisfactorily answered. This paper aims to contribute to efforts to answer this question by investigating how intervention actors engage with and consequently produce knowledge and perceive a so-called “host country”. Drawing on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews conducted with international intervention actors living in the Resolute Support (RS) headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan, I explore how the material environment shapes engagement practices of international intervention actors with local populations and, hence, knowledge production about an intervened-in country. RS was a NATO-led mission with the aim “to help the Afghan security forces and institutions develop the capacity to defend Afghanistan and protect its citizens in the long term.” (NATO, 2022). RS headquarters in Kabul was a high-security military facility. Over the last decades, “bunkerization”, the tendency of international intervention actors to live and work behind walls and barbed wire, has steadily increased as work in (post)conflict countries got more dangerous. Scholars have analysed life in the “bunker”, but the onus has been on international organisations and international nongovernmental organisations, and often on the emotional effects of bunker-life on employees (Andersson & Weigand, 2015; Hor, 2022; Philipsen, 2021; Weigand & Andersson, 2019). In this paper, I shift the analytical focus onto the military environment and the question of how the material surroundings affect knowledge production and perception of the so-called “host country”. I argue that RS HQ produced distance by being created as a monocultural instead of an intercultural space, which prevented international intervention actors from better perceiving Afghan environments. In this way, “bunkerization”, the comfortable, Western-oriented living environment, perpetuates a disconnect from host countries. The paper makes its argument by drawing on personal observations and interviews with civilian NATO employees in RS HQ, who were, e.g., tasked with monitoring and analysing political and social developments in Afghanistan. The findings challenge prevailing assumptions that policy-relevant knowledge can be produced despite distance and that security measures alone create distance between intervention actors and local populations. Instead, the study identifies structural tendencies within intervention spaces, such as the lack of intercultural engagement and a consequently narrow engagement practice that relies on elite interlocutors, as key drivers of distorted perceptions and misjudgements. It calls for reimagining intervention spaces as intercultural arenas that allow for the facilitation of more diverse engagements with host nations.