Why do some soldiers racialize, and eventually dehumanize, both enemy combatants and non-combatant civilians during military conflicts? This project will trace the ways in which soldiers’ experiences in combat and the resultant trauma may lead to the development of racialized threat perceptions. Racialized threat perceptions are a belief system that teaches soldiers to view all members (combatants, noncombatants, and civilians) of a specific race as “the enemy” regardless their role in combat. This racialized threat perception leads to indiscriminate violence against all individuals in the militarized jurisdiction, including women, children, and the elderly, resulting in atrocities.
Racism, racially motivated violence, and violent extremism all have a complex web of origins and drivers that this paper does not have the space to fully explore. Racism against the Asian American Pacific Islander community in the United States can point to institutionalized roots in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 or explicitly racist propaganda during the Second World War or individual prejudices that appear to manifest ex nihil. The goal of this paper, however, is to analyze an understudied source of racism and racially motivated violence in the United States: counterinsurgency warfare. By conducting process tracing through 100 years of U.S. military expeditions abroad, this paper will demonstrate an additional generative source of racism and violence that continues to shape our world.
I present a novel theory that explains how combat generates racialized threat perceptions in the mind of a soldier, how those racialized threat perceptions erode the ethics of the soldier and eventually return home with him. These three mechanisms include: call to civilize, psychological insecurity, and inability to discriminate between friend and foe. I specifically look at three case studies to understand the mechanisms behind a racialized threat perception over the past century: the War in the Philippines, the Vietnam War, and the Forever Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The paper concludes by demonstrating how this racialized threat perception generated during combat “comes home” with soldiers and impacts American society after the war has ended.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/45181 |
| Date | 25 September 2022 |
| Creators | Lindey, Caroline MaryRose |
| Contributors | Crawford, Neta |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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