2011 Conference Program (PDF) - Syracuse University College of Law

PAPER ABSTRACTS
1.1 Friends, Enemies, and the War on Terror
Cary Federman
The Enemy Within and Without: Guantanamo and the Problem of Jurisprudence in the
Age of Terror
Internment camps at Guantanamo represent the central meaning of the war on terror
because it turns the administrative problem of holding prisoners of war into the prime
ethical problem of war in modern times: the management of bodies not connected to
states. The “war on terror” has produced a different set of strategies for the containment
of prisoners of war and enemy combatants than we have previously seen, first, by
removing prisoners of war and enemy combatants from any legal regime of protections
afforded by both the U.S. Constitution and by international treaties, and second, by
restructuring the conflict to an existential struggle between friends and enemies. It has
created a new set of strategies to govern people best summed up by the phrase, biopower.
The purpose of this paper is to describe this creation in law and philosophy. Coauthor:
Dave Holmes, Professor of Nursing, University of Ottawa (dholmes@uottawa.ca)
Samera Esmeir
Violent Enmity: From War to Armed Conflicts to Targets
War has undergone a number of transformations during the twentieth century. One such
transformation has been juridical. An outcome of developments in international
Humanitarian Law, this transformation consisted in the renaming of war as “armed
conflict.” The paper traces this transformation in “violent enmity” and examines the
constitutive force of the law, which engendered two opposite dynamics: First, it released
the evaluation of “violent enmity” from the overdetermination of sovereignty by
subjecting non-state parties to the laws of war, in their capacity as parties to “armed
conflicts;” second, it evaluated all violence through the logic of “targeting” which in turn
reenacted the centrality of sovereignty to the evaluation of all violent enmities. This dual
move at once delivered “armed conflicts” away from classical warfare legalities, while at
same time moving them closer via the mediation of “targets.” The result is an established
symmetry between state and non-state violence, coupled with the triumph of stateviolence.
Heidi Matthews Representations of Trauma: Sexual Violence in Berlin, 1945
Sixty-five years after the end of the Second World War, the mass sexual violence
experienced by German women during the military defeat of the Third Reich – and its
long-term consequences – remains largely inaccessible to German consciousness and
outside historical memory. I posit that the dominant legal category deployed to demarcate
the boundary between friend and enemy – the civilian/combatant distinction – has
contributed to this lacuna of understanding. In light of new historical evidence about the
extent of female civilian participation in Nazi atrocities, this paper traces how Berlin
1945 can help us unpack the costs and benefits incurred by analytical vehicles of
meaning. It is part of a broader project inaugurated by an interdisciplinary panel at
Harvard in September 2010 (“The Meaning of Trauma”), and continued by a
photography initiative involving portraiture of elderly female survivors of 1945. The
paper is intended as an accompaniment to the photography project.
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