Movie still from The Wild Geese
This seminar traces the historical and contemporary frames of representation of mercenary violence, and interrogates the ways in which those frames shape international legal responses to mercenarism in situations of civil war, revolution and foreign intervention.
The figure of the mercenary was once the quintessential symbol of bloody foreign interference into the domestic affairs of newly-independent states: violent imperialism by covert measures. The criminalisation of mercenary activity was understood to hold great emancipatory potential for the Global South, but the move to criminalisation was heavily resisted by the West. Four decades later, the crime of mercenarism, one of the first offences to be the subject of international and regional treaty law, is all but dead in the water. As the private military industry has been normalised to the point of respectability, there have been observable discontinuities in legal narratives of commercial violence on the battlefield, resulting in the abandonment of archetypal figure of the mercenary as a visible concern of international law.
This seminar focuses on framing mercenary violence in the context of the use of force, taking up Judith Butler’s call to treat the frames of war as ‘politically saturated’, and as ‘operations of power’. First, it traces the dominant and hidden narratives of mercenary violence from 1945 to the present day, arguing that these narratives entail specific framing choices that are themselves operations of power concerned with privileges in war. Next, it addresses the productive effects of the various framing choices. Finally, it traces the ways in which the framing of commercial violence in civil war and revolution has helped to shift broader contests over the permissible and impermissible recourse to force, blurring the boundaries between armed conflict and policing, or war and humanitarianism. It shows that the framing of mercenarism goes to the very heart of modern contests over the legitimacy of the recourse to violence in international law.
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Katherine Fallah is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Technology Sydney. Her work is concerned with the global regulation and administration of violence. She explores the acute contradictions inherent in international law’s execution of its humanitarian project, with a particular focus on the place of mercenaries and private military contractors in international law’s ordering of irregular violence. Katherine holds a PhD in international law from the University of Sydney, and was previously a member of Faculty at Sydney Law School. She has held visiting positions at Harvard Law School, the Institute for International and Comparative Law in Africa, the Paris Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, and the European University Institute, Florence. Before taking up her academic appointments, Katherine served as a Prosecution Officer at the NSW Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions and as a Research Associate to the Judges of the Federal Court of Australia. She is admitted as a Solicitor of the Supreme Court of NSW. During her visit with the Laureate Program, Katherine will develop her project on Framing the Mercenary in International Law.