Show Your Face: Women's Rights as Casus Belli

What drives humanitarian military intervention? This essay proposes that women's rights as casus belli is not a rational ethical argument but a libidinal one — and that this distinction changes everything. Introducing the concept of libidinal war, the essay argues that the structure of contemporary intervention reproduces an archaic logic in which women function not as subjects of liberation but as currency in an economy of conquest between male groups. The liberator's indifference to the actual death of the women he claims to free is not hypocrisy — it is structural. The dead woman has simply fallen out of the libidinal schema.