Mission Statements
Report on the Missions and Missionaries seminar, Het
Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam, 27 November 2014
If anyone attending the seminar Missions and Missionaries was
sceptical about the truth of one of the event’s underlying
premises – namely, that our cities are increasingly the front lines
for new kinds of conflict – the organisers had only to point them
towards recent headlines. Preceded by the civil protests and
militarised police response of Ferguson, Missions and
Missionaries drew on this news story, through several of the
speakers’ presentations, as a high-profile example of the
changing currents of war and peace it set out to address.
In the introduction, FAST’s Malkit Shoshan, who organised the
event together with the Nieuwe Instituut, highlighted the
findings of the Institute of Economics and Peace (IEP). Out of
162 countries monitored by IEP, we heard, only 11 are not
involved in a conflict in any way. The 151 nations that are
active in conflict zones, she said, are likely to be part of one or
more of the growing number of peacekeeping missions,
intended to prevent or contain conflict and help to reconstruct
civil society. Behind the missions are global coalitions,
generally consisting of UN and NATO member states, private
companies, and perhaps development aid agencies. Multiple
missions are now found in every conflict zone.
The title of the seminar drew a parallel between today’s
peacekeeping missions, with their complex agendas, and
religious missionaries past and present: well-intentioned, but
likely to fall foul of a cultural understanding gap symbolised by
the fictional case of Nathan Price in Barbara Kingsolver’s novel,
The Poisonwood Bible (Price’s message, which he is too
inflexible to change even when advised, is literally lost in
translation). The question for the seminar organisers was
therefore whether architects can play a role in translating the
contemporary peacekeeping mission into a more culturally
sensitive phenomenon, one able to leave behind it a
humanitarian legacy of some kind able to improve the lot of
those affected by war.
Representatives of the Dutch Ministry of Defence and experts
from other fields came together to illuminate the topic, which
forms part of a long-term research project, Drones &
Honeycombs – an investigation into the nexus of issues arising
from the current nature of conflict and its shifting relationship
with architecture and planning. In exploring the role of the
architect in a changed urban landscape that can no longer
guarantee civil security, five different themes were addressed:
religion and geopolitics; economics and militarisation;
migration; war; and peace and diplomacy. Two speakers were
assigned to each subject, one exploring the theory, and one the
application of the topic, with a brief question-and-answer
session with the audience after each one and a short final wrapup discussion.
1 Religion and geopolitics
The coming Middle Ages
Are we currently experiencing an epochal change in world
geopolitics? And does geopolitics impact religious ideas?
Geertjan Dijkink, lately professor of political and cultural
geography at the University of Amsterdam, stated at the outset
that his presentation was an attempt to answer these two
questions. Both questions, he believes, can be illuminated by
history. “We are probably heading towards a new Middle
Ages,” he said. “In terms of the structure of territorial power
especially, with many dispersed authorities from multinationals
to the Pope.”
While similar observations are often made, he added that the
topic is rarely linked to religion, yet, “Biblical textual analysis
would show that the concept of ‘kingdom’ is very different in
the Old and New Testaments,” reflecting a major shift in power
structures. While the former (pre-Roman Empire) accounts refer
to many terrestrial kingdoms, the latter, coinciding with the
widespread dominance of Rome, mentions only the ‘kingdom of
heaven’. This construct of Jesus both accepts and counters the
dominant geopolitical force of the Roman Empire, with its
proto-globalisation ideology, he said. The Christian religion thus
emerged and defined itself in the context of huge geopolitical
transformations. Similarly, he noted that the origin of Islam was
“among Arab tribes sandwiched between the Byzantine and
Sassanid Empires,” the shifting tectonic plates of huge
geopolitical change.
But can the effects of geopolitical change on religious faith be
measured? Apparently, yes: Dijkink related the results of a study
conducted after the Christchurch earthquake, which found that
more people were more religious after the earthquake than had
been before it. Pondering whether religion is ultimately a cause
or a consequence, an excuse or an explanation, of human
behaviour, he then turned to the various geopolitical messages
contained in religion. Terms including ‘holy land’ and ‘holy
war’ have already been with us for many centuries. Current
elaborations he cited include the identification of biblical place
names with modern ones by American Christian
fundamentalists.
Dijkink’s conclusion was that globalisation, just as much in our
time as in ancient Rome, is leading to “geopolitics of chaos”. In
such a context, the function of religion is to order chaos, which
it does in two ways: one institutional (as in the creation of
religious states, as has been the case in the Middle East), the
other involving a charismatic, individual-based ‘disruption of
self’.
Irrational rationality
Jonas Staal, who is currently working on a PhD on art and
propaganda in the 21st century, followed with a presentation
entitled ‘Art, State Terror and the Future of Democracy’. He
began by observing that, in the so-called secular modern world,
faith in the markets is a religion as fervent as any openly
avowed belief system. “The Pope is the most rational socialist
voice in world today,” he said. Meanwhile, as the city becomes
the theatre of conflict, the war on terror means that we are all a
potential threat: it has given rise to “A a society of control: state
terror.” He offered two examples based on his own projects to
further illustrate his point.
The first concerned politician Fleur Agema of the right-wing
Partij van de Vrijheid (which has incidentally called for a ban on
the Koran). Staal had studied at a progressive art college with
Agema a decade ago – interesting, he said, given that her party
disapproves of experimental art. While studying, Agema wrote a
344-page thesis, ‘Gesloten Architectuur’ (Closed Architecture),
containing her ‘new vision’ of prison architecture. For an art
project of his own, Staal set out to interpret this thesis visually
and see how it could be implemented.
The phased approach described by Agema ranges from ‘the
bunker’, a closed monolithic cell, to ‘the light’, the open (but
camera-controlled) fourth phase. “Cameras watch us, yet no one
looks at the footage, how religious is that?” commented Staal. In
Agema’s model, “You have to liberate yourself through good
behaviour,” earning incentives such as windows and, eventually,
relative freedom. “So her ideological opponents would be stuck
for ever,” he said. “She describes society as a prison – a society
of control.” In fact, Agema’s model is already all around us, as
demonstrated by the images he showed of the infamous failed
1970s housing project the Bijlmer, representing ‘the bunker’;
while a supposedly luxurious gated community in Dronte
showed phase 4, ‘the light’.
The second project he discussed was the New World Summit,
an organisation he founded in 2012 which “tries to respond to
the society of control by giving a stage to blacklisted voices.”
Organisations considered a threat to the state are routinely made
stateless, he said, by being deprived of their rights to facilities
such as banking. Since 2012, the annual New World Summit
gathering has seen 30 such blacklisted organisations take the
podium, from the Maoist movement in the Philippines, to
Northern Syrian women fighting for ‘stateless democracy’, to
the Basque independence movement. The New World Summit,
he said, “proposes models that are too democratic for modern
democracy.”
In the brief discussion that followed, Staal also noted how
religion is systematically used to create “a false contrast
between Islamic territories and the West.” For him, the biggest
problem of religion is “that as secular states we don’t recognise
the religiosity of our own society. Yet it is more religious than
ever. It is completely irrational in its rationality.”
Some of the groups represented by the New World Summit are
non-territorial, and Malkit Shoshan wondered how such groups
could be mapped. Staal cited the example of the women of
Northern Syria, who provided a map not of territories but of
ideologies, with which to define themselves.
2 Economy and Militarisation
The economy of conflict
Joel van der Beek, a believer in “the mission of economics for
peace and security,” was the first speaker on the theme of
economy and militarisation. A board member of the
organisation Economists for Peace and Security, he reminded us
how ruthlessly extracting money from Germany after World
War I ultimately continued the cycle of war. When he asked the
audience whether they considered war to be associated with
economics, everyone’s hand went up. Fewer did so when he
asked who had experience of war – and he pointed out that we
all do, vicariously at least, through the media and our personal
contacts with refugees from conflict zones. Even if we are
unwilling to admit it, “Conflicts are invading all our lives,” he
said.
He briefly described the work of the Institute of Economics and
Peace (IEP), which produces an annual Global Peace Index
which aims to quantify levels of conflict risk and peace around
the world [the latest report, it is worth mentioning, calculates
that over 500 million people in 16 countries are currently at risk
of experiencing a deterioration in peace, and of them 200
million live on less than $2 per day, and so are highly
vulnerable].
Having become an economist because “money is the most
dangerous thing in the world”, Van der Beek cited the work of
Jeffrey Sachs (as set out in the book The End of Poverty) in
demonstrating how economics can alleviate the causes of war,
which is always “a failure of politics”. He also alluded to the
counter argument of the benefits of war – it is still widely
assumed that war is somehow good for the economy –
contrasting it with the findings of the IEP on the costs of war.
The IEP has calculated that 11.3% of global GDP (some US$9.8
trillion) is now needed to contain or otherwise deal with
conflict, and 75% of foreign aid is currently war related. The
role of economists in calculating the cost of war is therefore
important, he said, but to combat conflict and terrorism what is
most vital is “building structures that foster peace,” with peace
defined as “not only the absence of violence, but also the
positive resolution of conflict.”
Making war pay
Of course, it remains true that, although our perception of the
costs of conflict is becoming clearer, for certain elements it is a
guaranteed money-spinner. “Lots of people make lots of money
out of war,” the next speaker, University of Amsterdam
anthropologist Erella Grassiani, reminded us. In a project
examining “private security in a militarised civilian space,” she
studied the activities of Israeli soldiers who, when they leave the
Israeli army, often go on to forge lucrative business careers in
the security industry.
“We live in a state of perceived threat,” she said. “It’s a culture
of fear. But our paranoid fear of terrorism brings economic
opportunities. Private security companies, private armies really,
are something we take for granted.” Security, seen as a natural
state of being rather than a cultural construct, becomes a
positive good that “we always need more of!”
She related the rise of the security industry to the end of the
Cold War and the resulting large number of unemployed
soldiers looking for new opportunities. A critical moment was
9/11, after which demand for security grew considerably. While
the lines between the security forces and private security firms
are now blurred, “they are all part of a system that produces the
need for security.”
Since former members of the Israeli military are perceived as
experienced experts, they do well in the private security
business, invariably trading through their names and logos on
their background and the Israeli Special Forces ‘brand’. Thus
the militarisation of Israel is normalised, and “colonial
techniques are transported back to the West.” She presented a
surreal images of a checkpoint, adopted wholesale from the
Occupied Territories and now employed to guard a wealthy
gated community in New Orleans, courtesy of Instinctive
Shooting International – an Israeli company run by an ex-Israeli
Special Forces soldier. “What does this transplantation do to the
way we look at the other?” she asked.
In the brief questions session that followed, several audience
members related the (in some cases possibly apocryphal)
extension of originally Israeli military technologies to everyday
situations - at Schiphol Airport, for example. It was noted that
the Internet itself is a military construct. “Aren’t we all
experienced in the military?” asked someone, evoking
Foucault’s idea of the “military dream of society.”
3 Migration
Shifting borders
“The map functions as an instrument of control,” said Nora
Akawi of Bezalel academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, by
way of introducing her presentation, called Echoing Borders.
“Mapmaking establishes sovereignty over a region. In colonial
discourse, the ‘natives’ have insufficient knowledge of their
own land. Mapping territory precedes claiming and owning it.
The movement of people across boundaries is ignored.”
The ‘echoing borders’ of the title would counter the controlling
nature of maps by reflecting the experience of human
populations, especially nomads and refugees, as they “shift from
the static, becoming mobile and fluctuating.” Echoing Borders
was also the name of a project conducted by Akawi with
students in Istanbul, which explores the fluid and variable
borders relating to various refugee communities. The project
entailed field visits to Zaatari refuge camp in Jordan [home to
approximately 80,000 Syrian refuges as of July 2014], as well as
studying the related legal and contextual framework. Jordan has
the highest ratio of refugees to indigenous population, including
Palestinian, Iraqi and Sudanese as well as Syrian refugee
communities.
Palestinian refugees in Jordan now number nearly 2 million,
said Akawi, while up to 1 million Iraqi refugees live there too.
The Echoing Borders projects maps these refugee communities
in various ways. For example, it charts both the movements of
refugees between camps and cities, and the decision trees that
caused them to move there. “There is incessant movement even
within Jordan,” she said. “We see evidence of tracks between
Syria and Jordan and informal settlements. Borders are not hard
and impermeable, but shifting.” The multiple risks navigated by
Afghan refugees were also mapped, and new types of border
defined by legal and physical risk.
In addition, other projects explored the real and virtual
boundaries of the refugee camps, which are influenced by
everything from trees to cameras forming strategic buffer zones,
and the evolution of Palestinian refugee identification
procedures, from recognition points to biometrics. Nevertheless,
said Akawi, “These projects only begin to pose the essential
questions.”
Decolonising architecture
The presentation which followed, by Pelin Tan, a sociologist
and art historian from the architecture faculty of Mardin Artuklu
University in Turkey, addressed, she said, the dilemma of “how
to institute architecture education in a warzone.” Herself a
migrant of sorts, she has been setting up an architectural faculty
in Mardin, in the traumatized Kurdish territory in the south east
of Turkey - a long way from Istanbul. Turkish is only the third
language spoken, after Kurdish and Arabic. “We had only one
graduate last year,” she told us. Meanwhile she also pursues a
different educational strategy with the Silent University, a
knowledge exchange platform for refugees, asylum seekers and
migrants.
The title of her presentation, Arazi, is an Arabic-origin Turkish
word – a word that has itself crossed borders, and represents
many shifting shades of meaning, encompassing “bones, camp,
ruins, territory”. In the case of establishing an architecture
faculty in Mardin, “the important thing is to decolonise
architecture education, decolonise territory – but first I have to
decolonise myself.”
In the past, the borders in this area of the world have been
extremely fluid, she told us. Recently, there have been great
efforts to make them more rigid. She recounted one instance,
when the Turkish military wanted to build a separation wall in
Nusaybin. The local mayor went on hunger strike for nine days
to stop it, and succeeded. Other new spatial influences are
refugee camps: over the past few years, refugees from Syria and
Iraq have arrived in south-eastern Turkey, and camps have been
built to house them – often guarded by the military.
Administered by AFAD and the UN, the camps sometimes
occupy other structures – Tan worked with students on one
housed in a former bus station. Almost overnight, Midyat Bus
Terminal became home to 1000 Ezidi [Yazidi] refugees from
Iraq, with a kitchen quickly installed and volunteer teachers
establishing a school for 400 children. With her students, she set
out to explore the potential for design in the temporary context
of an emergency camp.
The brief discussion that followed Tan’s presentation focused on
the possibility of changing our definitions of territoriality and on
the potential of education to be similarly ‘decolonised’ resulting in disciplines that could be more flexible and so serve
a variety of different needs. Research and grassroots discussions
were seen as vital to achieve this in both cases, to expose the
contradictions inherent in the systems and enable new
methodologies to be devised. As Nora Akawi said, “A single
border on a map has to be unacceptable.”
4 War
You can run, but you can’t hide
As an exploration of the way in which war has become a part of
our social space, architect and curator Marina Otero presented
her research project on the raid on Osama Bin Laden’s
compound in Abbottabad, entitled Bodies in Custody. Since
October 2011, she told us, a model of a Bin Laden’s compound
has been on permanent display in the lobby of the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) in Springfield, Virginia.
Even after being declassified, only employees and authorised
visitors are able to see it. Images of the model, however, as well
as artists’ impressions of every kind, circulate freely in the
media.
When President Obama made his statement that the compound
had been stormed, she said, and Bin Laden’s body “taken into
custody” as he termed it, no photographic evidence of either feat
followed. The ‘body in custody’, said to be buried at sea,
disappeared, as did the compound, which was quickly
demolished – and so the architectural images of the compound
took the place of both. The compound, in fact, seems to inhabit
the shadowy territory of modern war – between fact and fiction,
as underlined in the fictionalised account of the action in the
film, Zero Dark Thirty. Appropriately enough, there are
photographs of Bin Laden in the compound which show him in
the media room: “Fiction and reality are merged, and impossible
to tell apart.”
One year after the raid, in May 2012, said Otero, the model built
by the NGA was put on public display for the first time, and a
copy is now exhibited at the CIA Museum together with a brick
claimed to have come from the demolished compound. “This
gives the public limited access what was billed as so valuable,”
she stated. She quoted a senior NGA analyst who explained to
the Federal Times, “We say, when you can see it, you can
believe it, and when you can see it, you can understand it.”
Keystone Cops to Robocop
The Barcelona-based critic and curator Ethel Baraona Pohl took
the stage next, with a visually engaging presentation called,
How to Dress up the Police, or A Short History of Decay. A
slideshow of photographs of police uniforms from 1921 up to
the present day demonstrated the force’s dramatically changing
public face. Simple cloth suits gradually gave way to fully
armoured battle gear, as the police’s public image morphed from
Keystone Cops to Robocop. “Whereas they once looked friendly
and approachable, today they look positively scary – an
imposition in public space,” she said.
And of course, it’s not only the public image that has changed.
In the USA, SWAT teams, she told us, were created in 1966 to
combat hostage takings, sniper shootings and violent unrest.
Now, they have proliferated to the point where they raid 137
homes a day. Meanwhile even the regular police are overequipped with Pentagon hand-me-downs – to the tune of
$450,000 worth of army equipment in one single year. “When
you see the Ferguson footage on CNN, it seems the police are
starting to the see the people as their enemy,” she said.
Naturally, there’s a whole industry behind this transfer of gear,
focused on the trade fair Urban Shield, which presents the giant
black armoured vehicles, assault rifles, drones and other
hardware that police forces can’t seem to resist buying –
especially in the USA, where spending on such items is, she
said, 100 times greater than it is in the Netherlands. Meanwhile,
she added, surveillance technology has become ubiquitous, an
unquestioned part of daily life, with biometrics already used for
gated communities in Guatemala. That fact was the cue for a
concluding quote from sombre Romanian philosopher Emil
Cioran who, in A Short History of Decay, wrote: “Life inspires
more dread than death.” The final image: a little old lady
protester holding a mirror up to a storm trooper-like, heavily
armed policeman.
In the following discussion, Pohl added that there is no
difference anymore between the parties the equipment is used
on: “The terrorist threat is collapsed into one. There’s an
inflation from the police side – the looter is a threat to global
security.” Someone added that the obvious question then
remains: if everyone is a potential terrorist, what is the state of
civil society? Meanwhile, others suggested that, as the Bin
Laden compound story demonstrates, in such a landscape it
seems doubtful that architecture can continue its old function of
providing safe retreats. There is thus no hiding, only running.
5 Peace and Diplomacy
Building a base
The next speaker, Captain Wouter Eidhof, a Dutch Ministry of
Defence engineer, offered an insight into how mission buildings
are actually designed and created. He described a process with
five distinct phases: planning (“mostly a political process”);
preparation (“assessing what’s already there and what’s
needed”); design (“influenced by local circumstances and
NATO regulations”); deployment and sustainment; and finally,
redeployment. Currently, the Dutch Ministry of Defence is
involved in operations in Afghanistan, Mali, the Middle East
and Turkey, with “excursions” around the world from the UK to
Burundi. In addition to designing, the engineering corps is also
active in training the units to build and operate the mission
bases.
Mission design, he admitted, “tends to use drills, in order to be
effective and efficient”, and the result tends therefore to be “a
containerised architecture.” Deployment normally uses local
materials and equipment, which may impact local costs and
supplies, while the sustainment phase can have both a positive
and a negative aspect: “The base can generate the idea of
security but also of threat. It can cause traffic but also give an
economic impulse; it can result in pollution, but also
development. The appearance of the base can be alienating, and
that can also make it harder to hand over.”
Since mission requirements vary, ideally the base design should
be agile and low impact, he said. The redeployment phase could
be reoriented towards a legacy – “thinking more about the effect
on civic space. There would be a lot to gain in already looking
to achieve the legacy at the earliest stage, by cooperating with
different disciplines.”
A role for civil architects?
Malkit Shoshan of FAST, the last speaker of the day, began by
reiterating the morning’s opening statement: of 162 countries
surveyed by the IEP, only 11 are not involved in any conflict.
EU spending on defence, she added, is closer than expected to
USA levels. Since peacekeeping missions are expanding, there
is an opportunity for architects to contribute designs that may be
more conducive to succeeding in creating the conditions for
peace, she said.
She then discussed the formative period for modern missions, in
Kosovo. Experimental efforts here saw the mission conducted in
the city realm. NATO, the UN, and later the EU all collaborated
with aid organisations and private companies to restore the
country and put in a new infrastructure – a task of civil
engineering. To achieve this complex task, many forces came
together – and so the tiny country became the focus for a global
transformation. Of course, all these foreign representatives
required lots of spaces, so in no time at all the country was filled
with compounds. They were, almost inevitably, out of scale
with the local context: “They were and still are enormous,” she
said. The USA’s Camp Bondsteel is a prime example
[accommodating up to 7,000 soldiers, sports fields, a Burger
King and a Taco Bell as well as many other facilities]. She
calculated that you could fit 35 hospital complexes inside its
footprint.
But Bondsteel was not the last word. After Kosovo, Afghanistan
became the scene for the largest and most expensive mission in
military history. This coincided with a new tactic:
counterinsurgency. “So in Afghanistan the compound became
closer to the city, overlapping it, and almost fluid. In an inkblot
diagram depicting the different zones, it is almost impossible to
tell the difference between battle zone and the compound. They
are both merged into the ordinary urban realm,” she said.
The modern 3D approach to missions – a combination of
diplomacy, defence, and developmental peacekeeping efforts –
resulted in the construction of schools as well as bases in
Afghanistan. In the province of Uruzgan and in just five years,
Shoshan said, a startling 9,821,000 euros was laid out on
schools. By 2010, 159 schools had been constructed, “usually
with no architect involved.”
When a mission ends, the bases themselves are normally simply
cleared out – leaving lots of waste behind, which can potentially
be turned into a resource. This depends on approaching design
in a different way, with a legacy in mind – much as the London
Olympics broke the mould by planning structures not only for
use during the games, but also for use afterwards. The new 4D
mission model – with legacy joining diplomacy, defence, and
development – would need to have design at its centre, she said,
courtesy of civil architects, so that after a mission, the structures
left behind would adapt to a pre-planned local use. Long-term
thinking should be integrated into the design.
With a conversation starting with the Ministries of Defence and
Foreign Affair concerning a possible legacy design for a new
Dutch mission in Mali, Shoshan said that such a project could
offer much to this very poor African country, which has little in
the way of infrastructure. “It’s easy to be critical of the
militarisation of society,” she said, “but it’s happening anyway,
so for architects the question is how to work with it.”
In the final discussion, members of the audience wondered how
the needs of local people could be gauged. Shoshan, who
created a plan for a newly recognised Palestinian village in
Israel called Ein Hawd, described the process of consultation
with the villagers. This would be the way to discover local
needs in the case of mission building, too. Currently, the
Ministry of Defence representatives added, consultation with
local populations takes place during the mission – but it should
ideally happen before, in order to facilitate legacy planning.
Obviously, consulting in a potentially hostile environment could
be problematic. In Afghanistan however, army patrols on
bicycles with interpreters helped to make the mission personnel
more approachable. It was also felt that the existing information
could be better used.
There was some concern at “militarising the design process,”
but for other commentators, the question was of “adding other
values” to the design process. A well-intentioned collaboration
between civic and military could pragmatically create the most
value from design. Nevertheless, unintended impacts due to
missions were noted – for example, steep rises in the price of
concrete and other local resources.
For some, the question was whether designers and architects
should ever work with the military – it was noted that
anthropologists have been subject to a similar debate. For most
members of the audience, this comes down to a personal
decision. Some voices in the final debate rejected the “false
opposition” of working inside or remaining outside the system,
and instead called for “contra knowledge.” Others were more
pragmatic, wanting to improve the situation and impact of “facts
already on the ground”. The range of ideas opinions on this front
was certainly very wide, and could only be reconciled by a
statement from Ethel Baraona Pohl: “All positions are
valuable,” she said. “There are many voices and many ways to
open a discussion – and they are all useful.”