Homeland Insecurity Manual –– Conditions for a Levée en Masse

Homeland Insecurity Manual is an artist manuscript associated with the animation Homeland Insecurity (2016) in which the main characters are the Centaur–a male human head and torso with a lower body of a horse–and the Horse, an avatar of the artist’s own body with the head of a horse. The colonizing Centaurs are based on the mounted soldiers of the British Mandate of Palestine (1920–1948), while the Horses depict colonized subjects, embodying agency and resistance. ​Homeland Insecurity Manual uses passages from the United States’ Department of Defense Law of War Manual to illuminate on American laws guiding its wars abroad. The selected passages point to contradictions in practice and theory given recent historical events relating to America’s advances in the Middle East since the Cold War. ​Guidelines around military necessity, legality of weapons, treatment of detainees, and proportionality in war––to name a few––render these contradictions flagrant in cases of the invasion of Iraq as pretext response to the 9/11 attacks, Abu Ghraib, and interests of American proxies in the region, as example. ​Guidelines such as the Conditions for a Levée en Masse, on the other hand, reflect how American laws are created and used to enable and perpetuate military occupation for its own power or for its allies.