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Legal Absurdities and Wartime Atrocities: Lawfare, Exception, and the Nisour Square Massacre

According to the United States Department of Defense (DOD), as of 2013
there were over 12,000 DOD contractors supporting the U.S. mission in Iraq (DASD, 2013). This thesis explores the laws and legal systems that operate to keep contractors, and the companies that employ them, resistant to legal oversight. I ground my analysis in the 2007 Nisour Square massacre, exploring how every attempt to prosecute those responsible was doomed due to Blackwater’s legal position of being American-headquartered, hired by the State Department, privately owned, and operating in Iraq. I conclude that the legal indeterminacy of the US deployed security contractor normalizes violence towards Iraqi civilians while simultaneously downloading the risk and responsibility associated with the US war efforts onto the shoulders of individual contractors. Moreover, I suggest that this legal indeterminacy is of particular interest to geographers as it arises, in part, out of overlapping legal systems, jurisdictions, and authorities.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OTU.1807/42940
Date28 November 2013
CreatorsSnukal, Katia
ContributorsGilbert, Emily
Source SetsLibrary and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
Languageen_ca
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeThesis

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