Dual use as a political technology of contemporary military violence

Recent wars are marked by a political technology of “dual use” that blurs military and non-military worlds to legitimise military violence. This article sets out three key conceptualisations of dual use that further our understandings of contemporary military violence. Tracing the history of dual use discourses and infrastructures, we demonstrate how military and civilian worlds are disentangled from two diametrically opposed viewpoints: first, in humanitarian and legal efforts to codify civilian space in a way that counters dual use, and second in the instrumentalisation of dual use to legitimise military harm to civilian sites and bodies. The third conceptualisation we develop here—that we propose as an important contribution to geographical understandings of contemporary military violence—is that “dual use” as an idea and/or as a materially identifiable site, object, or body is a fiction of liberal lawmaking and warmaking. Drawing on the notion of ‘martial politics’ we argue that civilian and military spaces are importantly co-constitutive, co-produced, and thus only ever partially disentangled, if at all. Recognising the ethical risks of such an argument, we argue that focusing on the co-constitutive nature of civilian-military space must take a line away from parallel military logics (i.e., therefore everything is targetable) to instead fully excavate civilian-military contingencies to the ends of disrupting the means of distributing military violence.