U.S. Africa Command, medical assistance, and special warfare

Description

The ‘war on terror’ has seen a growing overlap between humanitarian and medical assistance efforts and military operations in the actions of the U.S. military globally. In particular, this overlap has been prominent in the practices of the U.S. military’s geographic combatant command for Africa, US Africa Command (AFRICOM). Established in 2007, all U.S. military operations in Africa fall under AFRICOM’s remit, and it represents both the ambition of the U.S. to further extend military intervention globally under the banner of the ‘war on terror’, and an articulation of the interconnected core tenets of contemporary U.S. foreign policy: the “3Ds” of defence, diplomacy, and development. Military led medical assistance practices have been a central feature of the command’s efforts. However, the seeming benevolence of these practices obscures their intersecting geopolitical and biopolitical underpinnings, and the logic of war that ultimately guide them. This talk will explore these dimensions of the medical assistance efforts of AFRICOM through a study of its Medical Civic Action Programmes (MEDCAPS) and Medical Readiness Training Exercises (MEDRETEs). After situating these contemporary efforts in the context of earlier colonial and counterinsurgency wars, the talk will discuss how medical assistance operations extend military logics to practices of care, tying geopolitical performance and rationale to biopolitical management at the scale of the body, while also contributing to the further generation of knowledge of target populations on-the-ground.

Killian McCormack is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. He holds a BA (Geography and History) from University College Dublin, and an MA (Geography) from the National University of Ireland, Galway. His Ph.D. research focuses on the biopolitical and geopolitical dimensions of the medical assistance efforts of the US military in Africa.