Nicoline van Harskamp - DeLVe | Institute for Duration, Location and ...

GDJE SE SVE TEK TREBA DOGODITI / WHERE EVERYTHING IS YET TO HAPPEN
tions that make up the various systems in the ecology of contemporary war and crisis
zones, in addition to the military and the government.
“Lesser evil” is the common justification of the military officer who attempts to administer
life (and death) in an ‘enlightened’ manner; it is the brief of the security contractor
who introduces new and more ‘efficient’ weapons and spatio-technological means of
domination and advertises them as ‘humanitarian technology’. Lessening evil is moreover
the logic defining the actions of the subjects of this regime, who, sometimes assisted
by human rights organizations, lodge petitions challenging the brutality of these means
and powers. “Lesser evil” is the argument of the humanitarian agent as he seeks military
permission for providing life substances and medical help in places where it is in fact the
duty of the military in control.
This logic of the “lesser evil” somewhat obscures the fundamental moral differences
between the various groups that compose the ecologies of conflict and crisis in allowing
for the aforementioned moments of cooperation. Significantly, the Western system of
domination learned to use the work of local and international organizations to fill the
void left by ‘dysfunctional’ Third World governments and manage life in their stead. Indeed,
the urgent and important criticism that peace organizations often level at Western
militaries, to the effect that they de-humanize their enemies, masks another process by
which the military incorporates into its operations the logic of, and even seeks to cooperate
directly with, the very humanitarian and human rights organizations that in the
past opposed it.
At the core of the paradoxes of the lesser evil is a tactical compromise that could deteriorate
into a structural impossibility – one that would entangle the state and its opposition
in a mutual embrace, making non-state organizations de facto participants in a diffused
system of government. In Slavoj Žižek’s words, the state thus “externalizes its ethical
self-consciousness in an extra-statal ethico-political agency, and this agency externalizes
its claim to effectiveness in the state”. 14 In this manner, human rights and humanitarian
NGOs could do the ethical thinking and some of the ethical practice, while their state
does the killing.
The spatial order of contemporary military power does not only emerge from a series
of open acts of aggression, but through attempts at the moderation and restraint of its
own violence. 15 Recently, western militaries began using the vocabulary of international
law, with the effect that human rights principles such as ‘proportionality’ have become
compatible with military goals such as ‘efficiency’. 16
The Government of Evil (in Souls)
The common use of the term “lesser evil” masks a rich history and various intellectual
trajectories. What may otherwise seem to be a perennial problem endemic to ethics and
political practice, a dilemma that simply reappears at every period anew in the same
shape and form, in fact reveals something peculiar about each historical moment and
situation. The different trajectories of the term cast different shadows on the investigation
of the lesser evil as one of the problems of the politics of the present. What follows
is not a sustained history of the concept but rather several of its paradigmatic moments,