Female Engagement Team questions Afghan boy during vehicle interdiction. Credit: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service
My research agenda comes out of a desire to understand the forces that animate permanent war in order to build a less violent future. Over the past several years, my research has focused on the relationship between US militarism and the politics of humanitarianism and development. I have looked at this relationship from several perspectives, with US imperialism as a through line stretching from the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars to UN intervention in Haiti to the domestic politics of US militarism. My first book, At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War (Cornell University Press, 2023) is about the post-9/11 politics of gender and development. For this project, I conducted ethnographic observations of US military trainings during the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Combining ethnography with archival and historiographical research, this book shows how colonial histories of counterinsurgency actively shaped military tactics in the post-9/11 wars, including conceptions of development as a weapon. At War with Women places post-9/11 militarizations of development within broader struggles over US hegemony, attending to how new gendered forms of labor and gender meanings more broadly were negotiated during the post-9/11 wars. You can read more about that book here.
Wooden Carvings outside UN base, Port-au-Prince Haiti. 2011.
If my first book began with the question of what happens when the military adopts allegedly humanitarian rhetoric as a weapon of war, my second book flips the script, asking how we might better understand humanitarian practices and concepts as formed through violence. Haiti has fundamentally shaped my thinking about the relationship between military violence and humanitarianism. For over a 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. During the time I spent in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, I was struck by how Haitians experience and speak about humanitarian organizations exacerbating the very conditions of insecurity that these organizations were supposed to be improving. My next book, Humanitarian Insecurities: Haiti, International Organizations, and the Making of Disorder, starts by asking how humanitarianism – something we often see as responding to or ameliorating violence – has actually been formed through military violence in the first place. Humanitarian Insecurities will provide a conjunctural analysis of how humanitarian politics emerged in relation to US militarism in Haiti, starting at the end of the US occupation in the 1930s and continuing through the present moment of danger. Conceptually, I draw on a trove of Haitian feminist scholarship from La Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale, Haiti's first formal feminist organization founded in the dynamic years following the first US occupation, to present-day scholar-activists contending with and redefining ensekirite in Haiti today. 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 research trajectory has also been formed through close collaboration with the Costs of War project at Brown University, where I write research papers directed at policy and media audiences. I am currently directing a research project related to this public and media-facing work that seeks to understand the basis of consent, or taken-for-granted assumptions, that undergird the political economy of war and militarism in the United States. This collaborative, multi-year public opinion study is funded by the Carnegie Corporation Rethinking US Foreign Policy Program. In partnership with the Purdue Policy Research Institute, the Costs of War Project, Rethink Media, and multiple community partners, our research team conducts polling, media analysis and media reception studies, and ethnographic engagements in five communities across the United States that each hold a particular relationship to the military-industrial complex. This project will culminate in a journalist roundtable and a series of media and policy briefings to reimagine public discourse about war.