Book Chapters

I have written these chapters for edited volumes:

Rogers, D. “Transversal Practices of Everyday Intelligence Work in New Zealand: Transnationalism, Cybersecurity, Diplomacy” in Sebastian Larson & Hager Ben Jaffel (eds), Problematising Intelligence Studies: Towards a New Research Agenda (London/New York: Routledge, 2022), pp. 132-155. 

Despite its importance to the Five-Eyes partnership, New Zealand remains an underexplored, but empirically-rich, site of investigation within most contemporary studies of intelligence. Seeking to help remedy that shortcoming, this chapter uses the concept of transversal practice to briefly highlight routine interactions among New Zealand intelligence professionals and their foreign counterparts, illuminating the transnational character of New Zealand’s intelligence work. The concept of transversal practice also casts light on the recently-formed partnerships between intelligence professionals and commercial enterprises operating within New Zealand’s economy, including private security companies, telecommunications providers and so-called firms of national significance, which, for the most part developed under the auspices of cybersecurity, significantly increase the government’s ability to surveil the daily lives of New Zealanders. Contextualizing transnational and cybersecurity dimensions of everyday intelligence work within an episodic debate over the meaning of national security and who, specifically, gets to enact its limits, this chapter challenges received wisdom on the purposes and effects of New Zealand’s intelligence and security agencies by suggesting that a desire for closer diplomatic relations with the United States of America, shared by intelligence professionals, security bureaucrats and certain parliamentarians, drives these transversal practices.

Find it here

Rogers, D. “Responsibility to Protect: Using armed force to counter atrocity crimes” in Sharon McLennan, Margaret Forster, Rand Hazou, David Littlewood & Carol Neil (eds) Tu Rangaranga: Rights, Responsibilities and Global Citizenship (Auckland: Massey University Press, 2022), pp.190-205. 

What are atrocity crimes? Why do these phenomena concern members of the wider international community, including the society of states and those individuals who claim global citizenship? How does the concept of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) feature in the collective response to this grisly and recurring problem in contemporary world affairs? After answering those preliminary questions, I trace the emergence of R2P through various official reports before locating the concept’s tragic roots amidst the horror of mass atrocity committed as part of the civil wars in Rwanda and the Former Republic of Yugoslavia during the 1990s. I then consider the UN Security Council’s use of R2P to frame its authorisation of armed force countering atrocity crimes committed in Libya and speculate why the Council did not subsequently authorise armed force in response to atrocity crimes occurring in Syria. I conclude by reflecting on the implications for New Zealand’s foreign policy, particularly in relation to the various efforts of the United Nations to maintain peace and international security.

Find it here

Rogers, D. “Overview of International Human Rights in War” in Damien Rogers (ed) Human Rights in War (Springer, Singapore, 2022).

This introductory chapter sets the scene for 20 contributions that follow. It provides an overview of the volume’s organization and content by outlining the key issues of concern explored throughout the ensuing chapters. This includes, in particular, issues that relate to the rise of human rights as a set of concerns taken seriously in times of hostility by the international community. This also includes issues relating to the emergence of public international law designed to regulate war’s conduct by protecting certain categories of persons and prohibiting the use of certain categories of weapons, as well as to issues relating to specific situations where gross violations of human rights are occurring, or have recently occurred. This chapter closes with a reflection on the volume’s likely significance for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars alike.

Find it here

Rogers, D. “Concepts of War and International Human Rights” in Damien Rogers (ed) Human Rights in War (Singapore: Springer, 2022).

Divided into two main sections, this first substantive chapter deals with particularly thorny conceptual problems that frame the ensuing volume. It aims, firstly, to illuminate the meaning of war, a term used here to signify what has been to date humanity’s most lethal form of political violence. More specifically, the chapter notes the empirical difficulties that analysts encounter when they provide accounts of war in all its major aspects. It also canvasses existing notions of war – a much contested concept – before proposing a relatively novel way of thinking about war, one that differs from those conventional approaches which treat “war” as a synonym for “armed conflict.” The chapter aims, secondly, to illuminate the meaning of human rights, placing the internationalization of these rights in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. The drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights within the UN General Assembly in 1948 is especially important here as it not only demonstrates the value placed on these rights by the international community, but also provides a solid foundation for the ongoing development of international human rights law. This chapter seeks to show that the conceptual development of human rights has been, at once, both a causal factor informing and a consequence flowing from the outbreak of armed conflicts of global significance.

Find it here

Rogers, D. “Laws of Political Violence” in Damien Rogers (ed) Human Rights in War (Singapore: Springer, 2022).

The rule of law features prominently in state-based responses to an array of contemporary security problems, especially those involving acts of political violence. Laws are used not only to prohibit and, in some cases, criminalize certain acts relating to such violence, but also to authorize and then place limits on the use of force by states and state agents. While these laws are often treated as separate systems or branches of public international law by legal scholars and practitioners, they are, perhaps from a politico-analytical perspective, better understood as artifacts produced by relatively distinct, but at times interconnecting, social fields in the Bourdieusian sense. These fields tend to emerge and evolve through a transversal dynamic that occurs between horizontal interstate conduct and vertical state reach, a dynamic spurred on through the drafting and negotiation of certain instruments of international law, the implementation and administration of those instruments by state parties, and the monitoring and enforcement of state compliance relating to any duties and responsibilities flowing from those instruments. This chapter describes certain types of political violence before offering a brief overview of four fields of law that regulate that violence: namely, (1) the general prohibition on the use of armed force in international affairs; (2) international humanitarian law; (3) international criminal law; and (4) transnational criminal law. Signaling key struggles occurring within these fields, this chapter warns of the wide scope for the misuse of various instruments of international law. The chapter finds that these fields of law, which frame the possibilities for, and the limitations of, regulating various types of political violence, can contribute in important, but always limited, ways to the protection and advancement of internationally-recognized human rights in times of war, broadly understood.

Find it here

Rogers, D. “Anthropolemos: Modernity’s Silent War on Nature” in Damien Rogers (ed) Human Rights in War (Singapore: Springer, 2022).

What is the Anthropocene and how does it relate to the modernist project? In an epoch defined in large part by the consequences flowing from humanity’s untrammeled and harmful dominion over nature, is nature now an existential threat to humanity? What is at stake nowadays when political leaders securitize nonhuman life? With an eye to an ever-darkening horizon, this chapter takes focus at the scale of the human species and contemplates war, not as a set of practices that involve armed force mediating relations among states and other sovereign-seeking polities, but as seldom remarked upon violence perpetrated by humans against other phenomena living within the natural world. In order to signify this war – a type of human-made violence which, targeting other life species, plant life, and the environment more generally, has seemingly accompanied much of human evolution, but which is especially salient within the modernist project – I propose a new term, Anthropolemos, before calling for the right to life of other life forms to be taken seriously and more strongly respected in practice as well as for a misanthropic study of the politics of contemporary world affairs.

Find it here

Rogers, D. “An Evolving Agenda for International Human Rights in War” in Damien Rogers (ed) Human Rights in War (Springer, Singapore, 2022).

This final chapter concludes the present volume by reflecting on the significance of its content. I suggest that this volume’s significance lies not only in its continuities with the themes of the preceding volumes in the series on International Human Rights, but also, and especially, in its departures. The present volume shows, for example, how the rise of human rights and, by extension, the development of human rights law have been shaped by armed conflict. It also situates the promise and precarity of human rights in the context of war which, broadly understood, includes international armed conflict and non-international armed conflict as well as crimes against humanity, genocide, and transnational terrorism. As such, this volume serves as an invaluable handbook that enhances collective understanding of human rights and war, and of the ongoing relationship between the two; it is, therefore, an important resource for all those wanting to take new, or perhaps more effective, action to realize the promise of human rights during those times of strife when governments are either less able to protect their citizens from harm or, worse, take the opportunity to deliberately subject their populations to political violence. I also suggest this volume is significant because its diversity of approaches helps challenge conventional thinking on the evolving relationship between human rights and war. These diverse approaches open spaces for new and emerging issues to be explored within an evolving research agenda on international human rights in war. I close out this concluding chapter by foregrounding the role of “the expert” in the production of knowledge on this important nexus not only when academics write for an academic audience but also when researchers of all varieties write for those who exercise bureaucratic or executive power.

Find it here

Rogers, D. “Historicising International Criminal Trials within the Modernist Project” in Mark Klamberg, Mats Deland & Pal Wrange (eds) International Humanitarian Law and Justice: Historical and Sociological Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 17-29.

Taking its cue from mainstream accounts and critical scholarship, this chapter argues that propitious politico-strategic circumstances are necessary, but, on their own, insufficient factors to fully explain the rise of the International Military Tribunal for the Trial of German War Criminals, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the International Criminal Court. It begins by illuminating the relationship between shifting politico-strategic circumstances and the design of these institutions before signaling the important politico-economic dimension of international criminal trials. The chapter the goes further, highlight a politico-cultural dimension by situating those trials in the deeper and more profound context of modernity.

Find it here

Rogers, D. “Prosecutors’ Opening Statements: The Rhetoric of Law, Politics, and Silent War” in Nobuo Hayashi & Cecilia Bailliet (eds) The Legitimacy of International Criminal Tribunals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 325-350.

This chapter is the first scholarly work to demonstrate how the rhetoric of international prosecutors’ opening statements operates within three distinct registers of law, politics and war. Used as evidence of political preferences, opening statements reveal, significantly, that the idea of an international prosecutor as a judicial actor who is above all political considerations is a fiction. Despite prosecutors’ politico-legal claims to the contrary, institutions designed to enforce international criminal law are much less concerned with promoting peace and justice than they are with securing those at the helm of world affairs.

Find it here

Rogers, D. “Snowden and GCSB: Illuminating Neoliberal Governmentality?” in Andrew Colarik, Julian Jang-Jaccard & Anuradha Mathrani (eds) Cyber Security and Policy: A Substantive Dialogue (Auckland: Massey University Press, 2017), pp. 217-238.

While Edward Snowden’s unauthorized disclosures alarmed many intelligence officials and political leaders, these revelations were welcomed by scholars interested in better understanding the roles played by signals intelligence in the pursuit of national security. This chapter is the first scholarly work to use those revelations to cast light on the Government Communications Security Bureau’s operational activities, strategic partnerships and organizational purposes, three areas where senior officials and their political masters have recently gone on the public record. Significantly, the chapter exposes a gap between what is officially acknowledged and what remains secret, raising important questions over the use of New Zealand’s surveillance apparatus, which was originally designed and funded to help protect New Zealand’s machinery of government, natural resources and citizenry from various harms, but which is now used to monitor and control the population of New Zealand.

Find it here

Rogers, D. “New Zealand Security Intellectuals: Critic or Courtesan?” in Wil Hoverd, Nick Nelson & Carl Bradley (eds) New Zealand National Security: Challenges, Trends and Issues (Auckland: Massey University Press, 2017), pp. 308-325.

This chapter begins by outlining the purposes of the university and the role of the academic. It then notes that some academics, who deal with intellectual problems as a matter of routine, possess cognitive skills and expert knowledge that are valuable to security officials tasked with protecting New Zealand from serious harm. The chapter goes on to cast light on the evolving relationship between security intellectuals and those officials who work within New Zealand’s security sector. It argues that while this development—provocatively characterized here as a transformation of the security intellectual from critic to courtesan—might appear attractive in the first instance, it is nevertheless accompanied by serious longer-term risks that warrant explicit acknowledgement. The surrendering of intellectual independence by security intellectuals ranks foremost among these risks because it diminishes the collective ‘whole-of-society’ capacity to comprehend complex security challenge.

Find it here

Rogers, D. “Our Unfinished Humanity: Contextualising the International Responses to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses” in Mohit Kumar Ray & Rama Kindu (eds) Salman Rushdie: Critical Essays Vol.2 (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2006), pp. 1-53.

This chapter deals with varying reactions, responses, and positions drawn in relation to The Satanic Verses. In particular, it posits that responses to The Satanic Verses can be broadly clumped into two groups. On the one hand there are those demonstrating a reacting opposition whereas on the other hand there are those demonstrating an endorsing support. There are, of course, a myriad of possible positions between these polarities. By exploring responses from both these clumps, the chapter illustrates that there is no single authoritative vantage point from which to interpret the novel or to objectively assess the key dynamics of the affair. It explores the politico-spiritual discourses underpinning these polarised responses and claims that those responses are ironic since the novel portrays a world in which cultural hybridity occurs, albeit uncomfortably at times. 

Find it here