Abstract
The violence that preoccupies as I write this covers so wide a span of the global arena that it is difficult to imagine peaceful spaces, though these exist and define, in some incalculable sense, the vast array of human interactions. Nevertheless violent conflict preoccupies precisely because of its seeming persistence irrespective of the very modern idea that we have the capacity to eradicate it. The defining certainties of modernity — the state, citizenship, democratic space, scientific and technological advancement, rationality over tradition — have, in the late modern era come face to face with uncertainty, unpredictability and the reemergence of the parochial and the particular. There is both a disenchantment, a loss of faith, in rationality’s capacity to “legislate for peace” as well as a resilience borne of the project of modernity itself, a resilience that has temporal and spatial expression, universalising in its remit to contain the unpredictable and the particular.
So they left no stone unturned, Put fingers in every pie, Left no darkness unwormed, Let no sleeping dogs lie.
Simon Armitage1
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Chapter 2 The Politics of Global War
Simon Armitage, Killing Time (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 4.
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
This reluctance to intervene in Africa’s wars was especially illustrated in the case of the Rwanda genocide. See Michael Barnett, Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002).
A triumphalism that finds its most consistent articulation in Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin, 1993).
David Held, et al (eds), Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999).
Hay, C. and D. Marsh (eds), Demystifying Globalisation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).
Paul Hirst and Graham Thompson, Globalisation in Question (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 15.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 167.
Zygmunt Bauman, Globalisation: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 18.
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990)
Ulrich Beck, The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).
Rob Walker, “Lines of Insecurity: International, Imperial, Exceptional”, Security Dialogue, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2006), p. 67.
For the view that “sovereignty” acts as a framing device for understanding the social and political world, see Neil Walker, “Late Sovereignty in the European Union”, in Neil Walker (ed.), Sovereignty in Transition (Oxford: Hart, 2003), pp. 3–32.
That the state can no longer be conceived as holding the monopoly over the provision of security is illustrated by the workings of international security firms. See, for example, Anna Leander, “Privatizing the Politics of Protection: Military Companies and the Definition of Security Concerns”, in Jef Huysmans, et al (eds), The Politics of Protection (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
For this understanding of globalisation, see Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).
See Jurgen Habermas, The Past as Future, interviewed by Michael Haller, translated and edited by Max Pensky (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), pp. 5–32.
Mary Kaldor, “Beyond Militarism, Arms Races, and Arms Control”, in Craig Calhoun et al (eds), Understanding September 11 (New York: The New Press, 2002), p. 164.
That Jihadi violence can be read as emergent from conflicting Islamic identities in a globalised context, see Olivier Roy, Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (London: Hurst, 2004).
James Der Derian, “9/11: Before, After and In Between”, in Craig Calhoun, et al (eds), Understanding September 11 (New York: The New Press, 2002), p. 180.
Kenneth Waltz, “The Continuity of International Politics”, Chapter 31 in Ken Booth and Tim Dunne (eds) Worlds in Collision (London: Palgrave, 2002).
Barnett and Duvall, “Power in International Politics”, International Organisation, Vol. 59, Winter 2005, p. 40.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005), p. 3.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Raozen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).
For an understanding of the global matrix of war from which this Foucaultian analysis is drawn, see Vivienne Jabri, “War, Security and the Liberal State”, Security Dialogue, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2006), pp. 47–64.
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, trans. David Macey (London: Allen Lane, 2003), pp. 49–62.
Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1978), p. 137.
Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 47.
Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 7.
Rob Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 78.
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© 2007 Vivienne Jabri
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Jabri, V. (2007). The Politics of Global War. In: War and the Transformation of Global Politics. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230626393_2
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