My first book, At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War, will be published by Cornell University Press in February 2023. This book examines the modern assembly of US imperialism through changes in gender and development politics during the post-9/11 wars. At War with Women draws on ethnographic observations of US military trainings that weaponized development during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. This weaponization of development relied on new forms of women’s military labor as the military assembled all-female counterinsurgency teams to access Afghan and Iraqi households. These teams were drawn into combat during a time when women were technically banned from direct assignment to ground combat units. At War with Women challenges liberal feminist narratives that justified the Afghanistan War in the name of women’s rights, and celebrated women’s integration into combat as a victory for gender equality. I examine how women were incorporated into combat through emotional labor deployed to “calm” and “soothe” war’s victims. Military uses of emotional labor reinforced gender essentialisms as female counterinsurgency teams represented themselves as global ambassadors for women’s rights. Drawing on ethnography of military trainings, interviews with female counterinsurgents, and archival research into the colonial histories on which post-9/11 military doctrine was based, this book provides an analysis of US imperialism that keeps the present in tension with the past, clarifying where colonial ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality have resurfaced and how they are changing today.
Another dimension of my research focuses on related questions of security and humanitarian politics in Haiti. For the past decade I have worked on research projects ranging from contemporary peacekeeping to the first US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1935 to Haiti's role in US military knowledge production. My second book project emerges from this longstanding interest in the historical and geographical relationship of Haiti to the United States. Humanitarian politics in Haiti questions the way in which humanitarian studies has largely conceptualized humanitarianism as a reaction to violence, rather than as formed through it. My current research project, Humanitarian Insecurities, is a response to this conceptual gap and its material stakes in Haiti, asking how a continuum of military-police violence has shaped humanitarian institutions in Haiti. Humanitarian Insecurities unravels this tangle of securitized and humanitarian interventions in Haiti, with an eye to the global value of developing a more rigorous conceptual understanding of how humanitarianism is produced through its relationship to violence. Concretely, this takes the form of asking how a securitized logic informs the way in which UN organizations decide to allocate humanitarian resources such as water or shelter. I am also conducting archival research on how the US Marines established a security apparatus in Haiti in the early twentieth century that informs how we might better understand security and insecurity today.
My other publications include an article in Development and Change looks at how militarized development has accelerated the trend of for-profit development contracting and an article on "military femininity" in Gender, Place and Culture. Based on a collaboration with Jordan T. Camp, I am also working on a research project that looks at how racist constructions of the enemy have worked to achieve consent to counterinsurgency at various turning points in U.S. imperial history from the development of small wars doctrine in the 1930s to renewal of counterinsurgency in the post-9/11 wars. You can read our article, "Counterinsurgency reexamined: racism, capitalism, and US military doctrine," in Antipode.
I am a contributor to the Costs of War project at Brown University, where I have written research papers directed at policy and media audiences on veterans, sexual violence, and gender inequality in the context of the post-9/11 wars. In an effort to provide a better understanding of Haiti beyond the headlines, I have written for outlets such as Responsible Statecraft and the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Hot Spots Editor’s Forum.
I am a contributor to the Costs of War project at Brown University, where I have written research papers directed at policy and media audiences on veterans, sexual violence, and gender inequality in the context of the post-9/11 wars. In an effort to provide a better understanding of Haiti beyond the headlines, I have written for outlets such as Responsible Statecraft and the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Hot Spots Editor’s Forum.
