In the face of escalating insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq, the ‘cultural-turn’ refers to the emergent preference within the U.S. military to overcome the strategic and ethical challenges of irregular warfare through leveraging cultural rather than technological fixes. This transformation has been widely understood as embodying a more human, humane and humanitarian approach to warfare than the highly-kinetic and conventional approach that defined the initial posture of the U.S. military in the ‘war on terror’. This paper interrogates the ways in which the narrative of a ‘cultural-turn’ has functioned to enable, excuse and obscure particular forms of violence within the ‘war on terror’. This will be developed through an analysis of the interplay between the narratives of the human, humane and the humanitarian. It is argued that these narratives play a crucial role in rehabilitating certain forms of violence as central components of an ethical foreign policy.
