Abstract
This chapter presents three difficult cases for the theory of interstitial war advanced in the book more generally: filibusters, whose abrupt disappearance from world affairs challenges the idea that interstitial warfare displays cross-historical continuities; drones and targeted killing, whose lack of war-winning capacity challenges the idea that interstitial warfare is instrumental; and US-backed “proxy wars by proxy” in Somalia and elsewhere, which do not so much challenge the model as mandate an examination of its capacity to look forward to future developments in the use of interstitial war to sustain global security systems.
The three cases are used to highlight the ongoing importance of the domestic face of states’ international exercise of sovereignty, thereby adding a dynamic dimension to the analyses found in the previous chapters and establishing the need for an exploration of how changing sovereign norms produce, via changing “sovereign orders”, a historical trajectory for interstitial war.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (USA: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 118–141.
- 2.
“A Klee painting called Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open. This is how one perceives the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise. It has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennins, Walter Benjamin. A Critical Life (USA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
- 3.
Angus Konstam, The World Atlas of Pirates (USA: Lyons Press, 2010), pp. 103–105.
- 4.
US Department of State Archive. January 2009. Annexation of Hawaii 1898. https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/gp/17661.htm. Accessed January 31, 2019.
- 5.
By which, of course, Cleveland meant Secretary of State Stevens. For the rest of Cleveland’s statement, as well as other communiques from Stevens, Dole, and others; see Office of the Historian, Bureau of Public Affairs United States Department of State. FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES, 1894, APPENDIX II, AFFAIRS IN HAWAII. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1894app2/ch7subch1. Accessed January 31, 2019.
- 6.
David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (USA: Houghton Mifflin, 2007).
- 7.
R.J. Rummel, Death By Government (USA: Transaction Publications, 1994).
- 8.
Bell, Idem.
- 9.
Library of Congress, The World of 1898: The Spanish-American War. Mark Twain, https://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/twain.html.
- 10.
For an example of these dynamic partnerships, see Erik W. Esselstrom, “Rethinking the Colonial Conquest of Manchuria: The Japanese Consular Police in Jiandao, 1909–1937,” Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Feb., 2005), pp. 39–75.
- 11.
For a representative spread of legal discussions of TK, see the papers presented at the University of Pennsylvania’s 2011 conference on Targeted Killing. https://www.law.upenn.edu/institutes/cerl/conferences/targetedkilling/. See also Michael L. Gross, “Assassination and Targeted Killing: Law Enforcement, Execution or Self-Defence?” Journal of Applied Philosophy 23. 323 (2006).
- 12.
For a discussion of the challenges of drawing data in this manner, see Asher Fredman, “Precision-Guided or Indiscriminate? NGO Reporting on Compliance with the Laws of Armed Conflict” (June 1, 2010). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1633412.
- 13.
For samples of these kinds of contradictory findings, see Steven R. David, “Fatal Choices: Israel’s Policy of Targeted Killing,” Mideast Security and Policy Studies 51 (2002), pp. 1–25; Aaron Mannes, “‘Testing The Snake Head Strategy: Does Killing or Capturing its Leaders Reduce a Terrorist Group’s Activity?” Solutions 9 (2008), pp. 40–49; Mohammed Hafez and Joseph M. Hatfield, “Do Targeted Assassinations Work? A Multivariate Analysis of Israel’s Controversial Tactic during Al-Aqsa Uprising,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 29 (2006) 359–382; and Jenna Jordan, “When Heads Roll: Assessing the Effectiveness of Leadership Decapitation,” Security Studies 18 (2009), pp. 719–755.
- 14.
For a further discussion of the role of this statement in pursuing domestic political agendas, see Frank James, “Obama in no appeasing mood as he goes after Republicans,” NPR “It’s All Politics” Blog (December 8, 2010), accessed at http://www.npr.org/blogs/itsallpolitics/2011/12/08/143376188/obama-in-no-mood-appeasing-mood-as-he-goes-after-republicans.
- 15.
Asaf Zussman and Noam Zussman, “Assassinations: Evaluating the Effectiveness of an Israeli Counterterrorism Policy Using stock Market Data,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 20:2 (Spring 2006) 193–206.
- 16.
David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (USA: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
- 17.
The actual source of this quote is W.B. Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” whose first verse reads in part:Verse
Verse Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
- 18.
These six conferences were the Djibouti Talks (1991), the Addis Ababa National Reconciliation Talks (1993), the Sodere Conference (1996–1997), the Cairo Conference (1997), the Arta Peace Conference (2000), and the Mbagathi Conference (2002–2004).
- 19.
Conciliation Resources. Working Together for Peace. 2010. http://www.c-r.org/our-work/accord/somalia/diplomacy-failed-state.php. Accessed January 31, 2019.
- 20.
Ken Menkhaus, Hassan Sheikh, Ali Joqombe, Pat Johnson, A History of Mediation in Somalia since 1988, Center for Research and Dialogue. 2018. Interpeace. International Organization for Peacebuilding. http://www.interpeace.org/pdfs/A_History_of_Mediation_in_Somalia_0609.pdf. Accessed January 31, 2019.
- 21.
Roland Marchal. February 2007. http://hornofafrica.ssrc.org/marchal/printable.html. Accessed January 31, 2019.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Craig, D. (2020). Exceptions, Exclusions, and Discussion. In: Sovereignty, War, and the Global State. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19886-2_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19886-2_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-19885-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-19886-2
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)