The recent research of Adam Moore, the new chair of the International Institute's International and Area Studies Program, reveals the imperial nature of U.S military power.

UCLA International Institute, January 28, 2022 — UCLA geographer Adam Moore has been a faculty member of the International Institute since 2011.

As of January 1, 2022, he became chair of the International & Area Studies (I A STD) Program, which offers majors and minors focused on specific regions of the world. Moore regularly teaches a required introductory survey course and senior seminar for the program.

“There’s lots of things I like about having a split appointment,” says Moore, whose other appointment is with the geography department.

“It forces me to stay abreast of lots of research that is way outside my area. I also like that my courses draw a lot of different students — area studies majors and minors, but also global health minors and lots of students from South Campus. So my courses are diverse in terms of who takes them and in terms of the topics.”

“The survey course addresses broad issues, such as climate change and democracy, that change over time. For example, when I started 10 years ago, we were talking about democratization and the transition to democracy, and now it’s about democratic backsliding.”

The geographer particularly likes teaching senior seminars; “I don’t often get a chance to teach intensive classes at UCLA,” he explains. The smaller classes address variable topics and concentrate on reading and discussions, with short weekly writing assignments instead of a major research paper.

“Last year, the seminar addressed the politics of victimhood nationalism and how it has played out in different periods in different countries,” explains Moore. The course looked at a variety of cases, including the contemporary white backlash in the United States, as well as notions of national victimhood in Japan, China and Israel. With several international students in the class, he says, “We had some really good conversations.”

From Bosnia to U.S military outsourcing

The UCLA professor is the author of two monographs, both of which received book awards from the American Association of Geographers: “Empire’s Labor: The Global Army that Supports U.S. Wars” (Cornell, 2019) and “Peacebuilding in Practice: Local Experience in Two Bosnian Towns” (Cornell, 2013).

The through line in his scholarly work, says the political geographer, is an abiding interest in “the spatial dynamics of violence and peace.” That is, he looks at how the impacts of peace building, violence and war ripple out across the world and affect unexpected places.

Increasingly, his research has come to examine the little-understood mechanisms by which a combination of military technology, labor outsourcing and “warfighting” ideology have transformed U.S. military engagement overseas from boots-on-the-ground wars to “forever, everywhere wars” that defy temporal and spatial limits, while simultaneously militarizing U.S. foreign policy and domestic policing.

Moore’s research eschews a top-down policy approach for a bottom-up perspective. Extensive ethnographic research gives voice to individuals’ lived experience of military and peace keeping operations. Their grassroots perspectives are then used to examine the unseen costs and consequences of policy choices made at higher levels.

Since the early 2000s, the geographer has spent considerable time doing research and ethnographic fieldwork in Bosnia and Herzegovina (also known as Bosnia), one of the successor states to the former Yugoslavia.

“Peacebuilding in Practice” examines international peace building efforts at the local level in two cities of Bosnia following the Bosnian war of 1992–95. These efforts were unsuccessful in achieving societal and political integration in Mostar, but achieved reasonable success in Brčko, in part due to differences in the practice and organization of international peacebuilding efforts in the two locales.

Bosnia later became one of the local research sites for “Empire’s Labor,” which documents how the practice of outsourcing logistics personnel to support U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan — and to maintain the global U.S. overseas military empire as a whole — involves imperial mobilization not simply of local nationals, but of a large contingent of foreign nationals from countries without direct involvement in these wars, including Bosnia, The Philippines, Albania, Nepal, India, Kenya, Sierra Leone and Fiji.

“I really wanted to tell the workers’ stories. What does it look like from the perspective of these foreign workers? How does it affect their lives? This gets at the spatial dynamics of violence,” explains Moore. He chose to focus his ethnographic research for the book on Bosnian and Filipino workers because it enabled him to compare and contrast the differing histories of U.S. imperial engagement in the two countries.

“People were recruited in Bosnia in the area where the U.S. was based in the 1990s for the peacekeeping mission,” recounts Moore. “Oftentimes, they’d worked as interpreters for the military or they might have worked for an international organization.”

The workers who comprise the contracted logistics workforce for the U.S. military are hired by large U.S. military contractors and their subcontractors. Of note, those hired directly by the contractors, such as the Bosnians, enjoy better salaries and status than those hired by subcontractors, such as Indians.

In the years 2008–2019, Moore estimates that the foreign nationals hired to drive and maintain transport trucks, construct and maintain bases and other installations and provide support services (e.g., food preparation, cleaning, etc.) represented roughly 30–45 percent of the entire workforce contracted by the U.S. military in the Middle East and Afghanistan alone. Over the course of 20 years, he believes the Iraq and Afghanistan wars impacted close to one million people from third-party countries.

The implications of an unseen labor force

“We just had a 20-year war end that most people had no personal connection to and about which you found little to no coverage in major media for the past decade,” says Moore of the war in Afghanistan.

“The effects of these wars radiate from the battlefield and end up affecting people that we don’t see — people from countries that have no formal engagement in the war.”

U.S. military contractors relied extensively on subcontractors based in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia for logistics staffing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of these subcontractors tricked, and then trafficked, contracted laborers from third countries to work in U.S. theaters of war, where they were subjected to terrible exploitation, including wage theft and physical abuse. Moore discovered many instances in which these workers organized to protest their labor conditions and/or or swapped employers while on site.

When the death or abuse of these workers became public, domestic unrest ensued in countries as far away as Nepal and the Philippines. In a globalized economy, however, governments had to weigh demands for retribution against certain countries against the potential loss of valuable employment opportunities for their citizens in those same countries.

“The U.S. is offshoring not only the labor, but the risks and costs, of war onto foreign bodies. In these two wars, there’s been about 7,000 deaths of U.S. soldiers and 3,500 deaths of contracted laborers — 50 percent of the U.S. figure,” concludes Moore.

“The costs of war are tremendous, especially when it comes to healthcare in later decades, but these costs are much less now because we wage wars in what is essentially the cheapest way.

“This practice facilitates a militarized foreign policy,” he insists. “We really don’t know all the things we’re doing. So it’s hard to critique and oppose. The use of outsourced labor also brings the U.S. government and U.S. citizens into existing regimes of labor exploitation, recruitment and offshoring.”
 
Current research projects

Moore is currently pursuing two research projects. One concerns how the black market shaped politics and peace building in Bosnia, changed U.S. military thinking about its role in peace building operations there and involved UN troops in sex trafficking.

His other project is a wide-ranging look at the concept of “warfighting” and its impact on the U.S. military, foreign policy and society in the post–Cold War era. “The priority of a warfighting military was heavily pushed by the Bush administration in the 2000s,” he says, which helped justify the outsourcing of logistical support for U.S. military operations.

This rhetoric has led to “the militarization of American society, especially post-9/11,”says Moore. Starting with President George W. Bush, he explains, there was a rhetorical glorification of “warriors” and “warfighters.” Simultaneously, new Pentagon policies greatly expanded the transfer of older military equipment to U.S. police forces — justified through the motto, “from warfighter to crimefighter.”

“The work will be about drawing these connections across space and time. In a lot of ways, that is the geographical approach. As a discipline, the way in which geographers approach issues of this kind is somewhat distinctive — we have a more horizontal focus compared to other disciplines.”

Published: Friday, January 28, 2022