We have discussed, and many have written extensively about, the future of war and of warfare over the past two or three decades. Discussions have ranged from the possibilities of humanising war, eliminating war altogether, the end and endings of war, the ethics of war in an era of high technology and an emergent “warrior ethos”.
Reflecting on wars of the past two decades and on policing and enforcement of domestic and international law, there has been a curious pattern taking shape. It is not apophenic nor conspiratorial to pull together images of masked warriors into a disturbing trend of abdication and that somewhat odious claim of “plausible deniability”. We see across the world ubiquitous images of masked warriors, from the Philippines westward to Israel, Russia, Ukraine, Mexico, Burkina Faso and the US.
When Rodrigo Duterte fought his “war on drugs” during the early 2000s, police and members of the armed forces of the Philippines wore masks. Masked military and police forces are a defining feature of Mexico’s “war on drugs”. In the US, masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have carried out searches and deportations of migrants. Most recently, pictures of masked Israeli soldiers were captured on digital media.
Within Russia, in a blurring of lines between the military and policing, Special Purpose Mobility Unit members are regularly masked. Russia has also deployed masked operatives attached to the Wagner Group. In Ukraine, masked Special Operations Forces have been deployed. In West Africa, masked French legionnaires have been captured in Mali. In May 2020 masked soldiers paid their respects to French foreign legionnaires on the streets of Paris. The transitional president of Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traoré, is often masked in public.
There may be nothing significant about these masked warriors. Masking has been a common practice of militaries over centuries of war. In 2021 archaeologists in Turkey discovered an iron mask worn by a Roman soldier 1,800 years previously. Until the Meiji Restoration, Japanese samurai frequently wore masks. It has been used for protection and for performativity.
What has changed over the past two or three decades is that military, paramilitary and police force members have become fearful of retaliation against their families and of prosecution for crimes committed in the process. It may also be part of the changing nature of warriors and war.
Warriors are becoming anonymous; they’re no longer persons. The hiding of faces separates warriors from society by concealing any truth about individuals involved in injustices or criminality. The mask also dissociates individual responsibility from the violence of states or political orders. Any violation of human rights on the part of the masked warrior is dismissed as “just following orders” and anyway, if you can’t identify the perpetrator then accountability is difficult to prove because the perpetrator is “just a soldier” and not responsible for the consequences of their actions.
There have been instances, in the past, when no actual mask was needed to deny accountability. In his final statement at the Nuremberg trials, Hermann Göring said there was no “documentary or convincing proof” of his complicity or intent to commit atrocities.
In our times, police and military warriors simply hide their faces to avoid demonstrative evidence of individual accountability in conflict and the committing of atrocities. This inability of courts to identify perpetrators was evident in Duterte’s Philippines and during Mexico’s drug wars, and the anonymity of ICE agents is becoming a legal barrier to arrests and prosecution for human or civil rights violations.
A picture that emerges is that individual soldiers are increasingly becoming featureless, while others are becoming warriors connected to cybernetic networks as part of the extension of warfare by autonomous drones and remotely controlled land robots. In somewhat Shakespearean terms (adapted ill-fittingly from Hamlet), the masked soldier is relieved of conscience and “unhumanised” and becomes a coward who “just follows orders” or becomes simply a soulless cog of a war machine.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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