‘The damage was permanent, there would always be scars’: Vulnerability and Accountability in a Post-Rational World

Abstract

Accountability is a concept that we assume to be problematic in global politics in anarchical realms. But even in the domestic realm, in those polities which utilise democratic mechanisms for accountability, we find some problems as well — problems which are linked to the role of a related concept, intentionality and with the broader political field of power relations. And yet there is another accountability, I would posit, ‘out there’ in global politics that uses the insecurities (vulnerabilities) and tendencies (irrational and hyper-emotionalised need to ‘act’) of powers like the United States as its substrate for accountability – as in ‘being held to an account’. This is an alternative form that I title ‘the accountability of the scar’.¹ It refers to the way in which various fields of global relations might be held to account by the physical damage produced by violence. After another destructive decade, where perpetrators of systemic violence have largely avoided responsibility and accountability, the physical and visually shocking outcomes of violence, juxtaposed with the constructed hyper-beauty of postmodernity, reveal the vulnerability of human beings and human constructs and remain one of our most compelling forms of accountability.