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The debate on empire is back. This is not surprising, as the United States dominates the world as no state ever has. It emerged from the Cold War the only superpower, and no geopolitical or ideological contenders are in sight. Europe is drawn inward, and Japan is stagnant. A half century after their occupation, the United States still provides security for Japan and Germany-the world's second- and third-largest economies. U.S. military bases and carrier battle groups ring the world. Russia is in a quasi-formal security partnership with the United States, and China has accommodated itself to U.S. dominance, at least for the moment. For the first time in the modern era, the world's most powerful state can operate on the global stage without the constraints of other great powers. We have entered the American unipolar age. The Bush administration's war on terrorism, invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, expanded military budget, and controversial 2002 National Security Strategy have thrust American power into the light of day-and, in doing so, deeply unsettled much of the world. Worry about the implications of American uni polarity is the not-so-hidden subtext of recent U.S.-European tension and has figured prominently in recent presidential elections in Germany, Brazil, and South Korea. The most fundamental questions about the nature of global politics-who commands and who benefits-are now the subject of conversation among long-time allies and adversaries alike. Power is often muted or disguised, but when it is exposed and perceived as domination, it inevitably invites response. One recalls the comment of Georges Clemenceau, who as a young politician said of the settlement ending the Franco Prussian War, "Germany believes that the logic of her victory means domination, while we do not believe that the logic of our defeat is serfdom." At Versailles a half-century later, he would impose just as harsh a peace on a defeated Germany. The current debate over empire is an attempt to make sense of the new uni polar reality. The assertion that the United States is bent on empire is, of course, not new. The British writer and labor politician Harold Laski evoked the looming Amer ican empire in 1947 when he said that "America bestrides the world like a colossus; neither Rome at the height of its power nor Great Britain in the period of economic supremacy enjoyed an influence so direct, so profound, or so pervasive...." And in deed, Dean Acheson and other architects of the postwar order were great admirers of the British Empire. Later, during the Vietnam War, left-wing thinkers and revisionist historians traced the same deep-rooted impulse toward militarism and empire through the history of U.S. foreign policy. The dean of this school, William Appleton Williams, argued in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy that the nation's genuine idealism had been subverted by the imperial pursuit of power and capitalist greed. Today, the "American empire" is a term of approval and optimism for some and disparagement and danger for others. Neoconservatives celebrate the imperial exercise of U.S. power, which, in a modern version of Rudyard Kipling's "white man's burden," is a liberal force that promotes democracy and undercuts tyranny, terrorism, military aggression, and weapons proliferation. Critics who identify an emerging American empire, meanwhile, worry about its unacceptable financial costs, its corrosive effect on democracy, and the threat it poses to the institutions and alliances that have secured U.S. national interests since World War II. THE "E" WORD No one disagrees that U.S. power is extraordinary. It is the character and logic of U.S. domination that is at issue in the debate over empire. The United States is not just a superpower pursuing its interest; it is a producer of world order. Over the decades-with more support than resistance from other nations-it has fashioned a distinctively open and rule-based international order. Its dynamic bundle of oversized capacities, interests, and ideals constitutes an "American project" with unprecedented global reach. For better or worse, other states must come to terms with or work around this protean order. Scholars often characterize international relations as the interaction of sovereign states in an anarchic world. In the classic Westphalian world order, states hold a monopoly on the use of force in their own territory while order at the international level is maintained through the diffusion of power among states. Today's unipolar world turns the Westphalian image on its head. The United States possesses a near-monopoly on the use of force internationally; on the domestic level, meanwhile, the institutions and behaviors of states are increasingly open to global-that is, American-scrutiny. Since September 11th, the Bush administration's assertion of "contingent sovereignty" and the right of preemption have made this transformation abundantly clear. The rise of unipolarity and the simultaneous unbundling of state sovereignty is a new and volatile brew. But is the resulting political formation an empire? And if so, will the American empire suffer the fate of great empires of the past: ravaging the world with its ambitions and excesses until overextension, miscalculation, and mounting opposition hasten its collapse? The term "empire" refers to the political control by a dominant country of the domestic and foreign policies of weaker countries. The European colonial empires of the late nineteenth century were the most direct, formal kind. The Soviet "sphere of influence" in Eastern Europe entailed an equally coercive but less direct form of control. The British Empire included both direct colonial rule and "informal empire." If empire is defined loosely, as a hierarchical system of political relationships in which the most powerful state exercises decisive influence, then the United States today indeed qualifies. If the United States is an empire, how ever, it is like no other before it. To be sure, it has a long tradition of pursuing crude imperial policies, most notably in Latin America and the Middle East. But for most countries, the U.S.-led order is a negotiated system wherein the United States has sought participation by other states on terms that are mutually agreeable. This is true in three respects. First, the United States has provided public goods particularly the extension of security and the support for an open trade regime in exchange for the cooperation of other states. Second, power in the U.S. system is exercised through rules and institutions; power politics still exist, but arbitrary and indiscriminate power is reigned in. Finally, weaker states in the U.S.-led order are given "voice opportunities"-informal access to the policymaking processes of the United States and the intergovernmental institutions that make up the international system. It is these features of the post-194S international order that have led historians such as Charles Maier to talk about a "consensual empire" and Geir Lundestad to talk about an "empire of invitation." The American order is hierarchical and ultimately sustained by economic and military power, but it is put at the service of an expanding system of democracy and capitalism.Fundamentally, then, the debate over the new American empire hinges on how extensive and deeply rooted these characteristics are-and whether its assertion of power since September 11 constitutes a fundamental break with this liberal past. THE GLOBAL RACKET In The Sorrows of Empire, Chalmers Johnson advances the disturbing claim that the United States' Cold War-era military power and far-flung base system have, in the last decade, been consolidated in a new form of global imperial rule. The United States, according to Johnson has become "a military juggernaut intent on world domination." Driven by a triumphalist ideology, an exaggerated sense of threats, and a self serving military-industrial complex, this juggernaut is tightening its grip on much of the world. The Pentagon has replaced the State Department as the primary shaper of foreign policy. Military commanders in regional headquarters are modern-day proconsuls, warrior-diplomats who direct the United States' imperial reach. Johnson fears that this military empire will corrode democracy, bankrupt the nation, spark opposition, and ultimately end in a Soviet-style collapse. In this rendering, the American military empire is a novel form of domination. Johnson describes it as an "international protection racket: mutual defense treaties, military advisory groups, and military forces stationed in foreign countries to 'defend' against often poorly defined, overblown, or nonexistent threats." These arrangements create "satellites"-Ostensibly independent countries whose foreign relations revolve around the imperial state. Johnson argues that this variety of empire was pioneered during the Cold War by the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe and the United States in East Asia. Great empires of the past-the Romans and the Han Dynasty Chinese-ruled their domains with permanent military encampments that garrisoned conquered territory. The American empire is innovative because it is not based on the acquisition of territory; it is an empire of bases. Johnson's previous polemic, Blowback, asserted that post-1945 U.S. spheres of influence in East Asia and Latin America were as coercive and exploitative as their Soviet counterparts. The Sorrows of Empire continues this dubious line. Echoing 1960s revisionism, Johnson asserts that the United States' Cold War security system of alliances and bases was built on manufactured threats and driven by expansionary impulses. The United States was not acting in its own defense; it was exploiting opportunities to build an empire. The Soviet Union and the United States, according to this argument, were more alike than different: both militarized their societies and foreign policies and expanded outward, establishing imperial rule through "hub and spoke" systems of client states and political dependencies. In Johnson's view, the end of the Cold War represented both an opportunity and a crisis for U.S. global rule-an opportunity because the Soviet sphere of influence was now open for imperial expansion, a crisis because the fall of the Soviet Union ended the justification for the global system of naval bases, airfields, army garrisons, espionage listening posts, and strategic enclaves. Only with the terrorist attacks of September 11th was this crisis resolved. Bush suddenly had an excuse to expand U.S. military domination. September 11 also allowed the United States to remove the fig leaf of alliance partnership. Washington could now disentangle itself from international commitments, treaties, and law and launch direct imperial rule. Unfortunately, Johnson offers no coherent theory of why the United States seeks empire. At one point, he suggests that the American military empire is founded on "a vast complex of interests, commitments, and projects." The empire of bases has become institutionalized in the military establishment and has taken on a life of its own. There is no discussion, however, of the forces within U.S. politics that resist or reject empire. As a result, Johnson finds imperialism everywhere and in everything the United States does, in its embrace of open markets and global economic integration as much as in its pursuit of narrow economic gains. Johnson also offers little beyond passing mention about the societies presumed to be under Washington's thumb. Domination and exploitation are, of course, not always self-evident. Military pacts and security partnerships are clearly part of the structure of U.S. global power, and they often rein force fragile and corrupt governments in order to project U.S. influence. But countries can also use security ties with the United States to their own advantage. Japan may be a subordinate security part ner, but the U.S.-Japan alliance also allows Tokyo to forgo a costly buildup of military capacity that would destabilize East Asia. Moreover, countries do have other options: they can, and often do, escape U.S. domination simply by asking the United States to leave. The Philippines did so, and South Korea may be next. The variety and complexity of U.S. security ties with other states makes Johnson's simplistic view of military hegemony misleading. In fact, the U.S. alliance system remarkably intact after half a century-has helped create a stable, open political space. Cooperative security is not just an instrument of U.S. domination; it is also a tool of political architecture. But Johnson neglects the broader complex of U.S.-supported multilateral rules and institutions that give depth and complexity to the international order. Ultimately, it is not clear what the United States could do-short of retreating into its borders or ceasing to exist-that would save it from Johnson's condemnation. PAX AMERICANA In Colossus, Niall Ferguson argues that the United States is indeed an empire and has been for a long time. To Ferguson, however, it is a liberal empire that upholds rules and institutions and underwrites public goods by maintaining peace, ensuring freedom of the seas and skies, and managing a system of international trade and finance. The United States is the imperfect but natural inheritor of the British system of global governance; it is open and integrative and inclined toward informal rule. Accordingly, Ferguson's worry is not that the world will get too much American empire but that it will not get enough. U.S. leaders, for all their benign intent, have unusually short attention spans and tend to go "wobbly." In Ferguson's view, the United States shares many characteristics with past empires. Like Rome, it has remarkably open citizenship. "Purple Hearts and U.S. citizenship were conferred simultaneously on a number of the soldiers serving in Iraq last year, just as service in the legions was once a route to becoming a civis romanus," Ferguson writes. "Indeed, with the classical architecture of its capital and the republican structure of its constitution, the United States is perhaps more like a 'new Rome' than any previous empire-albeit a Rome in which the Senate has thus far retained its grip on would-be emperors." The spread of America's language, ideas, and culture also invites comparison to Rome at its zenith. But Ferguson is even more taken by parallels with the British Empire. U.S. presidents, from Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, have put their power work promoting the great liberal ideals of economic openness, democracy, limited government, human dignity, and the rule of law-a "strategy of openness" that is remarkably similar, Ferguson argues, to the aspirations of the British Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. After all, it was a young Winston Churchill who argued that the aim of British imperialism was to "give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain.... " Most of Colossus retells the familiar story of the rise of U.S. global dominance as an exercise in liberal empire. What is distinctive about American imperialism, according to Ferguson, is that it has been pursued in the name of anti-imperialism. For each phase of U.S. history, Ferguson nicely illuminates the tensions between republican ideals and the exercise of global power and shows how those tensions are often resolved. The Cold War-and George Kennan's doctrine of containment-provides the ultimate example of this fusion of anti-imperialism and hard power. Security, openness, democratic community, political commitment, and the mobilization of U.S. power went together. The core of U.S. global rule involved the enforcement of rules of economic openness, but the United States was also willing to act forcefully to integrate countries into the liberal order. Ferguson's most interesting claim is that the world needs more of this liberal American empire. This argument stems in part from the uncontroversial claim that the current international order needs enlightened leadership and that only Washington can provide it. (Ferguson holds little hope that Europe will ever overcome its preoccupation with the internal contradictions of its enlargement.) It is especially the wider system of sovereign but failed states that needs imperial supervision by Washington. In vast swatches of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East national self determination has led to much grief. Ferguson argues without qualification that "the experiment with political independence-especially in Africa-has been a disaster for most poor countries." To Ferguson, the extension of liberal empire into these regions (even involving some form of colonial rule) is necessary. What precisely these imperial arrangements would look like, however, remains unclear. When Ferguson says that he is "fundamentally in favor of empire," he is to some extent pulling a conceptual sleight of hand. What Ferguson means by "liberal empire" scholars have previously called "liberal hegemony": a hierarchical order that is still very different from traditional forms of empire. By virtue of its power, the liberal hegemon can act on its long-term interests rather than squabble over short-term gains with other states; it can identify its own national interests with the openness and stability of the larger system. The United States thus shapes and dominates the international order while guaranteeing a flow of benefits to other governments that earns their acquiescence. In contrast to empire, this negotiated order depends on agreement over the rules of the system between the leading state and everyone else. In this way, the norms and institutions that have developed around U.S. hegemony both limit the actual coercive exercise of U.S. power and draw other states into the management of the system. Ferguson's case for the virtues of American empire hinges on his claim that in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, the world could have gone one of two ways: international order organized around independent nations or an American imperium. He maintains that a world of decentralized, competing states, many of which are not democracies, would result in chaos. This may be true; he is certainly right that stability and open markets are not easily sustained without the support of powerful states. But the notion of liberal empire conflates very different types of U.S.-led order. One in which Washington coerces other states into obedience is very different from a system of multilateral rules and close partnerships. The challenges of peace and economic development that Ferguson identifies are best pursued by advanced democracies working together. Ultimately, such a cooperative order would require that Washington transcend the atavistic habits of empire rather than pursue a more complete realization of it. In the end, Ferguson finds invoking the image of empire useful for political reasons. Unlike the British, Americans do not believe that they operate an empire. As a result, the United States makes a flighty and impatient imperial power (in contrast to the British, who acquired a cultural mentality for global rule). Ferguson thinks that speaking honestly about the reality of American empire will foster understanding of its duties and obligations. Yet precisely the opposite is true. The United States does not need to view the world as its Raj and deploy a colonial service to the vast periphery; it needs to find ways to exercise its power in sustained, legitimate ways, working with others and developing more complex forms of cooperative international governance. It is also extremely doubtful that the American people would accept such a massive imperial undertaking: last September, as soon as President Bush revealed the price tag for occupying Iraq, public support plummeted immediately.

Precariousness and precarity are intersecting concepts. Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed. In some sense, this is a feature of all life, and there is no thinking of life that is not precarious-except, of course, in fantasy, and in military fantasies in particular. Political orders, including economic and social institutions, are designed to address those very needs without which the risk of mortality is heightened. Precarity designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death. Such populations are at heightened risk of disease, poverty, starvation, displacement, and of exposure to violence without protection. Precarity also characterizes that politically induced condition of maximized precariousness for populations exposed to arbitrary state violence who often have no other option than to appeal to the very state from which they need protection. In other words, they appeal to the state for protection, but the state is precisely that from which they require protection. To be protected from violence by the nation-state is to be exposed to the violence wielded by the nation-state, so to rely on the nation-state for protection from violence is precisely to exchange one potential violence for another. There may, indeed, be few other choices. Of course, not all violence issues from the nation-state, but it would be rare to find contemporary instances of violence that bear no relation to that political form. This book considers the "frames" of war-the ways of selectively carving up experience as essential to the conduct of war. Such frames do not merely reflect on the material conditions of war, but are essential to the perpetually crafted animus of that material reality. There are several frames at issue here: the frame of the photograph, the framing of the decision to go to war, the framing of immigration issues as a "war at home," and the framing of sexual and feminist politics in the service of the war effort. I argue that even as the war is framed in certain ways to control and heighten affect in relation to the differential grievability of lives, so war has come to frame ways of thinking multiculturalism and debates on sexual freedom, issues largely considered separate from "foreign affairs." Sexually progressive conceptions of feminist rights or sexual freedoms have been mobilized not only to rationalize wars against predominantly Muslim populations, but also to argue for limits to immigration to Europe from predominantly Muslim countries. In the US, this has led to illegal detentions and imprisonment of those who "appear" to belong to suspect ethnic groupsalthough legal efforts to fight these measures have proven increasingly successful in recent years. 12 For instance, those who accept an "impasse" between sexual rights and immigration rights, especially in Europe, have failed to take into account how ongoing war has structured and fissured the subject of social movements. Understanding the cultural stakes of a war "against Islam" as it assumes a new form in coercive immigration politics challenges the Left to think beyond the established frameworks of multiculturalism and to contextualize its recent divisions in light of state violence, the exercise of war, and the heightening of "legal violence" at the border.

There is now general agreement among scholars, social activists, and many thoughtful political leaders around the world that the US Global Empire is in decline, despite its militarily dominant position. This is the assessment of many realist theorists who argue that America’s relative power position has been slowly, but inexorably eroding for several decades. In attempting to address the problem of the erosion of its relative power, the architects of the US Global Empire have sought to shore up its declining hegemony by placing an even greater reliance on the use of military threat and force. However, by exercising this force, the US Global Empire has intentionally engaged upon a course of action leading to the deterrence of development options for the Global Community. This trend has been coupled with deepening military investments and widening sales in the global arms market. A culture of war and armaments constitutes the predominant thrust of the US Global Empire’s strategy for maintaining its hegemony. The sale of conventional arms and weapons has become an over $900 billion dollar annual plague on humanity. While claiming that it is concerned about nuclear proliferation, the Bush-2 regime did nothing to advance the work of those seeking to strengthen the Non-Proliferation Treaty at a United Nationals NPT Conference in May 2005. At the same time, the Bush administration has continued efforts to upgrade the nuclear capabilities of the US arsenal—including “bunker busters”—to threaten Iran and North Korea. In fact, Bush has actively worked to undermine the NPT when, in early 2006, he agreed to share nuclear technology with India, thereby opening the door to even greater proliferation throughout Asia in an effort to contain China as a rising global power. Despite its attempts to maintain global hegemony it may be that the enterprise will fail. The reasons for the failure are multifaceted, but what can be asserted is that a global culture of violence is not sustainable. The foreign policies of the US Global Empire have contributed dramatically to global violence. For example, it has undermined efforts of Third World nations and social movements throughout the global South to escape the financial domination of the WTO, IMF, and World Bank. In so doing, it has warped trade policies and its potential benefits to such a great degree that civil wars have erupted between the excluded and those who have positioned themselves in elite positions. As a consequence of civil war, coupled inequitable socioeconomic imbalances, and the effects of exclusionary governance, have led to more so-called failed states. Certainly, there have been failed or incomplete democratic transitions. Key examples are Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Peru. In these states, the institutions needed for a successful transition to democracy were weak and democratization remained incomplete. Despite this reality, it did not halt the efforts of the governing elites of the US Global Empire from working through the WTO and IMF to impose economic programs that would contribute to an ever-widening gap between those groups and classes that held elite decision-making positions versus those who were excluded from an equitable sharing or distribution of the nation’s wealth. In the decade of the 1990s, Latin America’s negative growth rates and incomes inequalities worsened. Structural adjustment programs and their costs fell disproportionately on the middle- and low-income groups. Yet, the top 5 percent of the population retained or even increased its standard of living. From this vantage point, the basic thrust of Realist theories is that “relations among the Western states will return to the patterns of the 1930s and early 1940s, in which the problems of anarchy dominated: economic rivalry, security dilemmas, arms races, hyper-nationalism, balancing alliances, and ultimately the threat of war.”5 Many of the predictions contained in Realist theories have already materialized. Europe and China have become economic rivals to the US Global Empire, threatening its role as a twenty-first century superpower that is capable of maintaining an unrivaled hegemony. Part of the reason for this trend transcends pure economics and political maneuvering. It reflects something about the world of ideas and how the idea of another American Century is not acceptable to the Global Community. Yet, with Fukuyama-esque assurance mixed with neoconservative arrogance, Paul Wolfowitz argued that history had in fact ended, and that the world was left with “a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.”6 Despite this imperial assumption, security dilemmas plague the empire’s occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, even as it seeks to buttress its collapsing position in the Middle East under the guise of a democracy crusade to liberate the Arab world from tyrannical regimes.7 Arms races and the development of a nuclear weapons capacity have been accelerating among various Third World states from Iran to North Korea. In the case of Iran as well as North Korea, the rationale for building a nuclear weapons capacity appears to be a reaction to the Bush-2 regime’s proclivity for planning and preparation for aggressive wars—justified by the doctrine of preemption. Hence, it may be argued, that if these two states have engaged in building up their nuclear weapons programs, such a build-up has been undertaken in order to deter the US Global Empire from its apparent willingness to engage in preemptive wars.8 From the Nixon era to the Bush-2 regime, the US Global Empire has continued to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into military technologies that would allow it to deter major socioeconomic and sociopolitical change throughout the Global Community. Believing that the American model should remain supreme, the architects of the US Global Empire have dedicated both national wealth and national security investments into military spending so as to guarantee such an outcome. This phenomenon constitutes the US Global Empire’s actual doctrine of deterrence. The US Global Empire employs its vast military might to preserve this order and enforce its rules.9 It is ultimately designed not to deter potential terrorists, but to deter other countries from pursuing national development options that would reduce the profit margins of US-based corporations. While claiming to pursue its own security and fight terrorism, the empire’s actual strategy has been increasingly premised upon creating and implementing policies that will ensure that change will not occur in the international order that would in any way threaten its current supremacy. In order to maintain this supremacy, interventions by the US Global Empire throughout the global village have made the world a more violent place—ravaged by seemingly endless civil wars and armed conflicts. Even with the end of the Cold War the US Global Empire did not alter the nature of its conventional arms sales that became even more competitive and less accountable.10 In terms of the buyers of these arms, there was no litmus test for whether the regimes that purchased the arms were developing states that supported human rights and democracy or authoritarian regimes that paid attention to neither.11 In this respect, as well as others, the Bush-2 regime’s war on terror has unleashed more terror on the world than it has either eliminated or contained. Between 2003 and 2005, US military forces have inflicted casualties on the Iraqi civilian population that exceed 100,000 people and then call it “collateral damage.” In 2003, various human rights charities noted that on average 500,000 people were killed each year by armed violence—roughly one victim a minute.12 In this global environment approximately 300,000 children are fighting in conflicts around the world. The future of a rising Global Community is seriously compromised with the harsh realities of children placed into conflict as both armed combatants and victims. The new and un-addressed tragedy of the global commons is that the use of children as soldiers and as terrorists is one of the new aspects of twenty-first century warfare.13 The US Global Empire’s logic of deterring global change through the sale of arms and conventional weapons may be seen as just one element in a larger picture of US attempts to engage blocking development options throughout the Global Community in order to retain its current hegemonic position. For example, as civil wars rage across the African continent, from Sudan to Niger, it is in the interest of US oil and mineral companies to support those social forces that are willing to accommodate US corporations by allowing access to and the exploitation of the nation’s resources. At the close of a civil war, those who are the “winners” share in the spoils of war. In this way, a sociopolitical group that captures the state is the beneficiary of the civil war. Once in power, this sociopolitical group constitutes an elite that has succeeded in not only “state capture” but has also been positioned to engage in a course of inequitable development. Those groups that are excluded suffer from human rights abuses and fail to enjoy an equitable share of the nation’s wealth. Exclusionary states (ES) are supported by US business and military interests because they are able to guarantee US access to markets that would otherwise be denied to them. The unsettling reality is that the logic of deterring global change has had a blowback effect within the homeland of the empire. Attempting to deal with this blowback effect also accounts for the spread of hypernationalism in the United States. As a result of foreign wars abroad the Bush-2 regime has defined many persons with a Middle Eastern background as potential enemies of the empire. Racial profiling of persons who are of Middle Eastern origin comes under increased scrutiny by both the FBI and CIA. On this basis, military tribunals have been set up to evade constitutional restrictions. The CIA has been empowered to engage in the techniques of torture. The CIA has also engaged in the kidnap of suspects in a process called renditions, and then taken these suspects to what are referred to as black sites. The Bush-2 regime’s domestic reaction to the events of 9/11 has wound up creating a near-fascist state of affairs. Certainly the passage of the USA Patriot Act offers substantial credence to such a proposition. Also, George W. Bush appointed an attorney general closely associated with the legalization of torture and nominated a UN ambassador who believes that there is no such thing as international law that constrains the United States from acting unilaterally.14 Under Bush, an effort is being made to remake the global order subservient to the US Global Empire’s designs. As a result, internationally, the empire’s hypernationalism has furthered a global trend toward anarchy—as predicted by Realist theories. At the present moment, given this record, there is little hope that there will be a humane management of the US Global Empire’s decline. Rather, it appears that global conflicts will continue to be on the rise because of the empire’s intention to engage in the preemption of development options for the majority of humankind. Threats to both global environmental security and human security grow as the US Global Empire resists the call to engage in multilateral procedures that could strengthen a rising Global Community.

In January 2001, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 20,000 activists, students, and filmmakers assembled together in order to exchange ideas about confronting the US Global Empire. That was the birth of the now historic World Social Forum.37 At the center of most of the discussions held at that time was the fact that the IMF and World Bank bear the greatest responsibility for the plunder of entire communities. That is also the reason why, throughout this book, I have gone to great lengths to make a connection between the Washington/Wall-Street Alliance of the US Global Empire and its primary financial institutions—the IMF and World Bank. In opposing the empire, an incipient national and international counterhegemonic alliance must find alternatives to these forces. With the articulation of alternatives a global discourse can be accelerated that should lead to projects of emancipation and liberation—an exodus from empire. At Porto Alegre, a general agreement was reached on the need for an alternative system of global governance. Some participants invoked the term deglobalization to describe this alternative. Walden Bello clarified the meaning of the term by noting that: “We are not talking about withdrawing from the international economy. We are speaking about reorienting our economies away from the emphasis on production for export and towards production for the local market.”38 At the top of his list, he suggested: “Drawing most of our financial resources for development from within rather than becoming dependent on foreign investment and foreign financial markets.”39 Following that fundamental principle, he added that it would be necessary to carry out long-postponed measures of income redistribution and land redistribution in order to create a vibrant internal market. Such a path would allow nations throughout the Global Community to de-emphasize growth and work instead toward maximizing equity in order to radically reduce environmental disequilibrium. Another benefit of taking this path would be strategic economic decisions would not be left to the market but make them subject to democratic choice. In furtherance of democratizing nations, the private sector and the state should be subjected to constant monitoring by civil society. Yet, for all this to take place and succeed, it will only be possible if it takes place within an alternative system of global governance. That alternative system is what I am calling Global Community. In the four years since the first World Social Forum, the state of struggle against the US Global Empire has spanned the globe and encompassed the energies of millions of people. Social movements against neoliberal capitalist intrusion have sprung up throughout the Arab world, South Africa, East Africa, Australia, Central Asia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, East and Southeast Asia, rural China, and throughout Latin America.40 Social movements are a central part of a worldwide struggle, helping to accelerate the global process of creating an alternative system. When viewed in combination, these struggles are all part of a dynamic convergence between nations, cultures, and ideas (see: Chapter 4). The World Social Forum served as an important platform for opening the door to the creation of a counter-hegemonic globalization. Other examples of convergence may be cited in the form of a global anti-war movement, the trade union movement, and the struggles of over three billion peasants for a decent life. A global mobilization against neoliberal hegemony has taken many forms, but it has a common objective—the defeat of Global Empire and the establishment of a viable Global Community.41 The extent of this mobilization and the diversity of these struggles have just begun to be documented. Yet, it is undeniable that millions of people have become active in rejecting corporate globalization, the intrusions of Global Empire, and the IMF and World Bank. In all of these efforts, millions of people around the globe are developing alternatives to the current system.42 They are actively engaged in a process that will lay the groundwork for an exodus from empire.

All empires rule by fear. Fear is usually engendered by the possession of immense military power and the power over life and death that are associated with it. Military power exercises a primordial hold over the reptilian part of the brain that is characterized by aggressive behavior without reflection.15 On the other hand, the course of building a Global Community that is committed to the realization of nonviolence charts a path that seeks to create humane forms of governance—demonstrating the power of the higher faculties of the human brain. The movement towards a Global Community is one that is cross-cultural. It does not seek to divide the world into “haves” and “have-nots.” It seeks distributional justice in economics and in the realm of political decision making. The rise of Global Community is an expression of humanity’s collective desire to build a world of shared norms and common understandings within and between peoples. Shared norms and common understandings about what constitutes genuine security will be a critical first step and an ongoing process. In this critical regard, “the way to security lies less in achieving greater technological sophistication than in working toward a transformation of the spirit of our relationship with our potential adversaries.”16 With such a focus, it will be possible for the architects of the rising Global Community to begin their various tasks with the acknowledgement of our mutual vulnerability and common humanity. As the historical path of South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy demonstrates, the rise and eventual realization of Global Community, within a world of progressive national communities, is guided not by fear, but by love, empathy, and a firm commitment to practice inclusionary forms of governance. The rise and eventual realization of Global Community liberates people from their isolated roles, cultures, and political affiliations. Its promise has the capacity to reveal a common citizenship not only with other people in distant lands, but those in close proximity to our own condition.

Under what conditions does this quality of "absolute pastness" counter the forces of melancholy and open up a more explicit form of grieving? Is this quality of "absolute pastness" that is conferred on a living being, one whose life is not past, precisely the quality of grievability? To confirm that a life was, even within the life itself, is to underscore that ~ life is ~ grievable life. In this sense the photograph, through Its relauon to the future anterior, instates grievability. It makes sense to wonder whether this insight is not related to Sontag's imperative: "Let the atrocious images haunt us. "35 Her imperative suggests that there are conditions in which we can refuse to be haunted, or where haunting cannot reach us. If we are not haunted, there is no loss, there has been no life that was lost. But if we are shaken or "haunted" by a photograph, it is because the photograph acts on us in part through outliving the life it documents; it establishes in advance the time in which that loss will be acknowledged as a loss. So the photograph is linked through its "tense" to the grievability of a life, anticipating and performing that grievability. In this way, we can be haunted in advance by the suffering or deaths of others. Or we can be haunted afterwards, when the check against grief becomes undone. It is not only or exclusively at an affective register that the photograph operates, but through instituting a certain mode of acknowledgment. It "argues" for the grievability of a life: its pathos is at once affective and interpretive. If we can be haunted, then we can acknowledge that there has been a loss and hence that there has been a life: this is an initial moment of cognition, an apprehension, but also a potential judgment, and it requires that we conceive of grievability as the precondition of life, one that is discovered retrospectively through the temporality instituted by the photograph itself. "Someone will have lived" is spoken within a present, but it refers to a time and a loss to come. Thus the anticipation of the past underwrites the photograph's distinctive capacity to establish grievability as a precondition of a knowable human life-to be haunted is precisely to apprehend that life before precisely knowing it. Sontag herself makes less ambitious claims. She writes that the photograph can be an "invitation ... to pay attention, reflect ... examine the rationalizations for mass suffering offered by established powers."36 It is my sense that the curated exhibition of the Abu Ghraib photos at the International Center for Photography did precisely that. But what is most interesting to me about the increasing outrage and exasperation Sontag expressed in her writings on 9/11 and in her article "Regarding the Torture of Others" is that it continued to be directed against the photograph not only for making her feel outrage, but for failing to show her how to transform that affect into effective political action. She acknowledges that she has in the past turned against the photograph with moralistic denunciation precisely because it enrages without directing the rage, and so excites our moral sentiments at the same time as it confirms our political paralysis. And even this frustration frustrates her, since it seems a guilty and narcissistic preoccupation with what one can do as a first-world intellectual, and so fails again to attend to the suffering of others. Even at the end of that consideration, it is a museum piece by Jeff Wall that allows Sontag to formulate this problem of responding to the pain of others, and so, we might surmise, involves a certain consolidation of the museum world as the one within which she is most likely to find room for reflection and deliberation. At this moment, we can see her turn both from the photograph and from the political exigencies of war to the museum exhibition that gives her the time and space for the kind of thinking and writing she treasures. She confirms her position as an intellectual, but shows us how this piece might help us to reflect more carefully about war. In this context, Sontag asks whether the tortured can and do look back, and what they see when they look at us. She was faulted for saying that the photographs from Abu Ghraib were photographs of "us," and some critics suggested that this was again a kind of self-preoccupation that paradoxically and painfully took the place of a reflection on the suffering of others. But what she asked was "whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such acts [of torture] likely. Considered in this light, the photographs are us. Perhaps she was saying that in seeing the photos, we see ourselves seeing, that we are those photographers to the extent that we share the norms that provide the frames in which those lives are rendered destitute and abject, and are sometimes clearly beaten to death. In Sontag's vjew, the dead are profoundly uninterested in us-they do not seek our gaze. This rebuff to visual consumerism that comes from the shrouded head, the averted glance, the glazed eyes, this indifference to us performs an auto-critique of the role of the photograph within media consumption. Although we might want to see, the photograph tells us clearly that the dead do not care whether we see or not. For Sontag, this is the ethical force of the photograph, to mirror back the final narcissism of our desire to see and to refuse satisfaction to that narcissistic demand. She may be right, but perhaps it is also our inability to see what we see that is also of critical concern. To learn to see the frame that blinds us to what we see is no easy matter. And if there is a critical role for visual culture during times of war it is precisely to thematize the forcible frame, the one that conducts the dehumanizing norm, that restricts what is perceivable and, indeed, what can be. Although restriction is necessary for focus, and there is no seeing without selection, this restriction we have been asked to live with imposes constraints on what can be heard, read, seen, felt, and known, and so works to undermine both a sensate understanding of war, and the conditions for a sensate opposition to war. This "not seeing" in the midst of seeing, this not seeing that is the condition of seeing, became the visual norm, a norm that has been a national norm, one conducted by the photographic frame in the scene of torture. In this case, the circulation of the image outside the scene of its production has broken up the mechanism of disavowal, scattering grief and outrage in its wake.

Paradoxically, the unreasoned schism in our responsiveness makes it impossible to react with the same horror to violence committed against all sorts of populations. In this way, when we take our moral horror to be a sign of our humanity, we fail to note that the humanity in question is, in fact, implicidy divided between those for whom we feel urgent and unreasoned concern and those whose lives and deaths simply do not touch us, or do not appear as lives at all. How are we to understand the regulatory power that creates this differential at the level of affective and moral responsiveness? Perhaps it is important to remember that responsibility requires responsiveness, and that responsiveness is not a merely subjective state, but a way of responding to what is before us with the resources that are available to us. We are already social beings, working within elaborate social interpretations both when we feel horror and when we fail to feel it at all. Our affect is never merely our own: affect is, from the start, communicated from elsewhere. It disposes us to perceive the world in a certain way, to let certain dimensions of the world in and to resist others. But if a response is always a response to a perceived state of the world, what is it that allows some aspect of the world to become perceivable and another not? How do we re-approach this question of affective response and moral evaluation by considering those already operative frameworks within which certain lives are regarded worthy of protection while others are not, precisely because they are not quite "lives" according to prevailing norms of recognizability? Affect depends upon social supports for feeling: we come to feel only in relation to a perceivable loss, one that depends on social structures of perception; and we can only feel and claim affect as our own on the condition that we have already been inscribed in a circuit of social affect. One might, for instance, believe in the sanctity of life or adhere to a general philosophy that opposes violent action of all kinds against sentient beings, and one might invest powerful feelings in such a belief. But if certain lives are not perceivable as lives, and this includes sentient beings who are not human, then the moral prohibition against violence will be only selectively applied (and our own sentience will be only selectively mobilized). The critique of violence must begin with the question of the representability of life itself: what allows a life to become visible in its precariousness and its need for shelter, and what is it that keeps us from seeing or understanding certain lives in this way? The problem concerns the media, at the most general level, since a life can be accorded a value only on the condition that it is perceivable as a life, but it is only on the condition of certain embedded evaluative structures that a life becomes perceivable at all. To perceive a life is not quite the same as encountering a life as precarious. Encountering a life as precarious is not a raw encounter, one in which life is stripped bare of all its usual interpretations, appearing to us outside all relations of power. An ethical attitude does not spontaneously arrive as soon as the usual interpretive frameworks are destroyed, and no pure moral conscience emerges once the shackles of everyday interpretation have been thrown off. On the contrary, it is only by challenging the dominant media that certain kinds of lives may become visible or knowable in their precariousness. It is not only or exclusively the visual apprehension of a life that forms a necessary precondition for an understanding of the precariousness of life. Another life is taken in through all the senses, if it is taken in at all. The tacit interpretive scheme that divides worthy from unworthy lives works fundamentally through the senses, differentiating the cries we can hear from those we cannot, the sights we can see from those we cannot, and likewise at the level of touch and even smell. War sustains its practices through acting on the senses, crafting them to apprehend the world selectively, deadening affect in response to certain images and sounds, and enlivening affective responses to others. This is why war works to undermine a sensate democracy, restricting what we can feel, disposing us to feel shock and outrage in the face of one expression of violence and righteous coldness in the face of another. To encounter the precariousness of another life, the senses have to be operative, which means that a struggle must be waged against those forces that seek to regulate affect in differential ways. The point is not to celebrate a full deregulation of affect, but to query the conditions of responsiveness by offering interpretive matrices for the understanding of war that question and oppose the dominant interpretations-interpretations that not only act upon affect, but take form and become effective as affect itself.

An ethics of the name will insist on the performative character of naming and work to show that the name's seemingly definitive grasp of the reality it names is in fact only a "self-referential, tautological, performative operation" (Zizek 99) and, as such, will be vulnerable to the challenge of other names, other performative variations and interventions. It is with such an ethics in mind that I want to examine a name, a word that has entered our lexicon and our consciousness with great force. The word is, of course, "globalization," a word that has ambi- tions to become a master word that will name the overwhelming processes shaping our contemporary world. The very term "global- ization" presents itself as a universal, all-inclusive theoretical concept that is sufficient unto itself. As I will argue, not only are there theo- retical inconsistencies in the totalizing or universalizing claims of globalization, but there is also the danger that "globalization" as master term or metanarrative may swallow up and encompass even those discourses or narratives opposing it. Such a danger has been noticed, for example, by the political economist J. K. Gibson-Graham who confesses that in her earlier work she had ignored the perform- ative character of conceptual categories and as a result discovered that her critical portrayal of a powerful global capitalism merely confirmed and further entrenched its monolithic, all-encompassing power. In her words:

When theorists depict patriarchy, or racism, or compulsory heterosexuality, or capitalist hegemony they are not only delineating a formation they hope to see destabilized or replaced. They are also generating a representation of the social world endowing it with performative force. To the extent that this representation becomes influential it may con- tribute to the hegemony of a "hegemonic formation." (x)

The case of Abdelfattah reveals the significance of the discourse of the “Muslim terrorist.” In Egypt, this discourse, produced and promoted by US Democrats and Republicans alike, serves as a cover for continuing the punishment, containment, and isolation of anyone who stands in the way of US empire. Thus, every US administration since 1979 (when Egypt and Israel signed the Camp David Accords) has provided Egypt with military, political, and economic support to repress Egyptian people while sustaining Egypt’s status as a partner in advancing US agendas, including Israeli settler colonialism in the region. The United States frames its relationship with Egyptian dictators as an alliance in the “war on terrorism,” a stance that helps rationalize policies such as extraordinary rendition, which outsource the torture as well as the execution of Muslims to places with more lenient torture laws than the United States. At the same time, the United States uses Egypt and other countries as evidence of the need to intervene to “promote democracy.” These contradictions—US alliances with nondemocratic regimes coexisting with the professed goal of promoting democracy—are also apparent in many US leaders’ stances on Israel on the one hand and ending Islamophobia on the other. In early December 2020, UNICEF announced that the Israel Defense Forces killed one Palestinian child and injured four others over a two-week period by shooting them in the chest, eye, and head and that at least 232 children had been injured between January and September 2020.1 Around the same time, Palestinians, Arabs, and US allies around the world heard Kamala Harris’s campaign commitment to unconditionally support Israel, an anti-Arab/anti-Muslim settler colonialist regime, a position that contradicts her own stated condemnation of anti-Muslim domestic policies such as the Muslim ban as racist and discriminatory. While professing to condemn anti-Muslim racism, many Democrats, including Biden and Harris, have supported the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Violent Extremism program, which funds local community institutions to turn their members into spies. Community members are trained to rely upon racial profiling to report anyone perceived to be a practicing Muslim as a potential terrorist.2Indeed, Harris’s close alliance with the US military and Biden’s capitulation to those who support the silencing, killing, and surveillance of Muslims—from Republican Michael Bloomberg who oversaw New York’s racist surveillance of Muslim communities to elected officials who smear critics of Israel as anti-Semitic3—remind us that if we really want to end anti-Muslim racism, we need to be willing to dismantle US-led militarism, warmongering, and empire building. We should therefore be wary of empty rhetoric about ending stereotypes and individual acts of anti-Muslim hatred such as hate crimes and bigotry in the discourse on “tolerance, inclusion, and diversity,” which does nothing to address structural racism.

At the political level, there is a need to achieve what Ndlovu-Gatsheni terms de-imperialisation, a position where no one country dictates to another what to do or not to do. Countries like the USA still dictate how other countries should be governed. Such a situation is not healthy but simply entrenches global coloniality. Epistemologically, we cannot succeed in breaking away from knowledge dependency on the West if we do not come up with new epistemologies whose centres are in Africa. Ndlov-Gatsheni believes that we have an opportune moment now for Africa to produce knowledge. He perceives that an epistemological break in the West has been induced by crisis after crisis, which has seen the waning of confidence in the current theoretical frameworks. The world is still Euro-North American centric despite the rise of the Asian tigers, and this status quo must change.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni also comments on the concept of delinking as a solution proposed by some dependency theorists, particularly Samir Amin. For him, the concept of delinking must not be taken literally. Delinking must be interpreted as a proposal to emphasise the development and expansion of internal economic capacities, as opposed to emphasising economic ties with the West. Expansion and emphasis on internal capacities would enable Africa to engage on equal footing with the rest of the world. The process of internal capacitation should include allowing economies within Africa to connect to the African people and not necessarily the outside world. This is the context within which delinking must be appreciated.

After several years living abroad, I returned to Southern California in late 2003. One afternoon, I was stuck in traffic behind a pickup truck and seeing little else from my compact car but the back of the truck, a black and white bumper sticker defiantly asked me, “Got War?” I stared at that bumper sticker modeled after a 90s “Got Milk?” ad for the next 16 miles and thought of little else. Got War? I was curious, what is this bumper sticker trying to tell me? What message is it trying to send? Do we not already have war? Do we need war? The original milk advertisement was silly, grown adults with childish milk mustaches staring into the camera. Is war as frivolous as a milk mustache? Something to be consumed and enjoyed? Something nostalgic even? This bumper sticker was stuck to the back of that pickup truck at the height of the Iraq War, and undoubtedly the USA was a nation at war, but then as it is now, the USA is also a nation of war. Hardt and Negri (2004) argue that we have entered an era of “perpetual war” where militarized aggression and war are no longer the exception, but rather the “normal state of affairs” (21). The USA has engaged in some type of military action for over 80% of its total history (Torreon 2015). The USA is not only the largest global arms exporter (SIPRI 2016), but it also leads the world in military expenditures ($596 billion in 2015); is responsible for 36% of the total world military spending (Perlo-Freeman et al. 2016); and spends almost three times more than the next biggest spender China ($215 billion) B. Johnson (*) Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, IL, USA 66 and more than the next top seven countries combined (Perlo-Freeman et al. 2016). The US military employs 3.5 million people and is the single largest employer of US youth (Dickinson 2012) and the single largest general employer in the USA (Department of Defense 2014) and astoundingly the world (Taylor 2015). Such statistics are easy to point out, clear examples of the influence and power of the US military globally and domestically, but what about the subtler, quieter hum of the military machine? Camouflage popping up in children’s clothing? Boot camp fitness classes at the gym? Humvees on grocery runs in the suburbs? Retired military personnel running schools? Flyovers at football games? “Got War?” bumper stickers? The reach of military influence is vast and varied, quietly infiltrating the minutia of our everyday lives. In fact, the culture of militarism seeps into so many different aspects of our lives that it is taken for granted and largely unnoticed (Finley 2012; Lutz 2012). The “step-by-step process by which a person or a thinking gradually comes to be controlled by the military or comes to depend for its well-being on militaristic ideas” is militarization (Enloe 2000, 3). It is a process of aligning cultural, institutional, economic, and social processes with militaristic values, beliefs, and practices. The more inline a society is with militaristic values and practices, the more accepted military action and the process of militarization itself becomes to the point where militarization is ordinary and even blandly normal (Enloe 2000). Militarization becomes as normal as a milk mustache and as easy as attaching a “Got War?” tagline. In a militarized society, a solution to any number of social problems is militarized including inner-city crime and violence, troubled youth, national security, and even struggling public schools. Military personnel are viewed as wielding the smart weapons of discipline and leadership to right any tilting ship. High-ranking military personnel are sent to negotiate international alliances in place of seasoned diplomats. Bravery is not diplomacy, compromise, or compassion, but martial aggression. Video games, children’s toys, films, and television programs glorify the military and martial ideals, and militaristic violence is another form of Friday night entertainment (Lenoir and Lowood 2000; Stahl 2010; Vavrus 2013). Military recruiters freely roam the halls of public schools argued to be important role models for “at risk” youth (read working class or poor kids of color). For example, The Troops to Teachers program pushes military personnel through the teacher credentialing process placing these teachers in “high need” schools. Military personnel are placed atop corporations and large organizations regardless of experience or expertise.1 B. Johnson 67 Militarization is more than just the dominance of military values across different aspects of civil society; it is also nestled within social inequalities. Domestic militarization is found in the violence focused on and against people of color, such as militarized policing (Gilmore 2000). It is “seen in the rise of the prison-industrial complex, the passing of retrograde legislation that targets immigrants, the appearance of gated communities, the widespread use of racial profiling by the police and the ongoing attacks on the welfare state” (Giroux 2003, 39). Militarization is situational and bound by social context. The militarization of children is normalized within the USA (JROTC and Boy and Girl Scout programs), but criticized heavily when it occurs abroad, especially in non-Western countries such as Somalia or Uganda (Macmillan 2011). The organized violence of military service by young people is respected, valued, and constructed in direct opposition to the disorganized violence of youth gangs or social justice groups—viewed as dangerous especially if these groups comprise poor and working-class youth of color (Basham 2011). But the militarization of public education is complicated. On the one hand, schools in the USA are locations of intense militarization pushing uncritical nationalism and blind obedience, both of which buttress militarization and permanent war (Elmore 2012). Schools are also one of the most important institutional sites for resistance of militarization and the simultaneous fostering of democracy as schools can provide the necessary skills for a critically conscious citizenry. It is important then to understand how public education is militarized as well as how militarization can be and is resisted. This chapter focuses on the justifications and implications of the militarization of public education in the USA, specifically in the Kindergarten to 12th-grade levels. There are two major periods of intensification of militarization in public education. Militarization increased dramatically beginning in the 1970s alongside the growing influence of neoliberalism and again after the events of 9/11 as fear and disdain for critical inquiry and dissent took hold of national subjectivity. This chapter illustrates how militarization works in tandem with neoliberalism and a culture of fear to discipline, control, and produce militarized consent through education policies, programs, and institutions.

We must begin to question the choices that an imperial plutocracy has made with regard to the pursuit of not only American security, but the security of the world as well. In that regard, some scholars have developed a set of alternative concepts that rearrange the hierarchy of values exhibited within the traditional definition. New scholarship has produced a more inclusive set of values that they call, world order values. These world order values include the following: “(1) peace without national military arsenals, (2) economic well-being for all inhabitants on the earth, (3) the universal human rights and social justice, and (4) ecological balance.”8 One need only imagine how radically such a revolution in values could easily change the course of the world’s history. I would argue that the correspondence between “world order values” and action in accordance with the dictates of those values is the ultimate corrective to the occupations, vulnerabilities, and abuses that characterizes empire building. These world order values envision the rise of “Global Community.” By giving primacy to the health of the global commons, the environment would no longer be at the mercy of a narrowly driven corporate agenda “for profit.” By giving primacy to the pursuit of peace, the hypocritical equation of pursuing war in the name of peace would become obsolete. By giving primacy to human rights and social justice, the supportive structures and motivations for terrorists and terrorism would be curtailed if not entirely eliminated. By giving primacy to the realization of economic well-being for all inhabitants on the earth, there would no longer be a situation where over 2 billion people live on less than a dollar a day. Therefore, the closer that we move toward the untraditional category of world order values the closer we will move toward the rise of “Global Community.” Clearly, what separates the traditional definition of the national interest from the alternative vision of the human interest provides us with two dramatically contrasting sets of values, priorities, and policies. Let us take the example of what has happened in the early twentieth century as a result of decisions made with respect to the destabilizing impact of oil production itself. In the Middle East, the risk of disorder and conflict is heightened as ruling elites work to monopolize the distribution of oil revenues. With the rest of the population mired in poverty, the divide between the privileged and the disadvantaged can easily coincide with tribal or religious differences. As a result of this division, violence is a likely outcome. Yet, the predictability of this outcome has not, in any fundamental way, altered the decision-making processes that affect the future of American energy behavior or the policies of America’s client regimes in the Middle East.

Divine examination, evaluation, calculation and choice operate thus within a complex economy in which good and bad could be transferred and exchanged. Because in this economy all bad things necessarily appear at their minimum possible level, the world as lived is always necessarily the best of all possible worlds. 'If a lesser evil is relatively good,' Leibniz reasoned, 'so a lesser good is relatively evil ... to show that an architect could have done better is to find faults in his work. ' If this description of the economy of divine government is already reminiscent of the logic of contemporary wars, with its own scales of risk and proportionality used to evaluate the desired and undesired consequences of military acts, it is hardly surprising to find in it an early reflection on the concept of 'collateral damage'. Earlier Christian theology has indeed already described all bad things that take place as 'the collateral effects of the good'. In this immanent order of human and divine life, the destructive result of floods are nothing but the collateral effect of necessary rain. In both their theological and military contexts, as Giorgio Agamben observed, the collateral effects are structural rather than accidental. It is through the collateral - flood or blood - that a government -divine or human- can demonstrate, indeed exercise, its power. Unlike the calculations of a God, seen by the philosophers and the theologians of the eighteenth century as a perfect mathematician who could undertake instantaneous calculations and immediately arrive at a precise result, mere humans must of course guess, speculate and hedge their risks as they proceed towards the future as the blind leading the blind. It is for this reason that they ceaselessly seek to develop and perfect all sorts of technologies and techniques that might allow them to calculate the effects of violence and might harness its consequences. It is these techniques and technologies, apparatuses and spatial arrangements, that are at the heart of this book. Through them, Pangloss's Leibnizian scheme- or is it Leibniz's Panglossian scheme?-of the 'best of all possible worlds' re-emerges in the progressive tradition of liberalism. Here, in its secularized form, political rather than metaphysical, a similar structure of the argument sets up the sphere of morality as a set of calculations aimed to approximate the optimum proportion between common goods and necessary evils? But as the general outlook of liberalism shifted from Voltaire's and indeed Jeremy Bentham's later focus on the 'greater good' and the responsibility of government to increase happiness to the greatest number of people, to the liberal canards of 'just wars', and their increasingly sophisticated technologies for minimizing the number of 'necessary' corpses, the search for 'the best of all possible worlds' started giving ground to the present neo-Panglossian pessimism of the 'least of all possible evils'. This book engages with the problem of violence in its moderation and minimization, mostly with state violence that is managed according to a similar economy of calculations and justified as the least possible means. The fundamental point of this book is that the moderation of violence is part of the very logic of violence. Humanitarianism, human rights and international humanitarian law (IHL), when abused by state, supra-state and military action, have become the crucial means by which the economy of violence is calculated and managed. A dose reading of a series of case studies will show how, at present, spatial organizations and physical instruments, technical standards, procedures and systems of monitoring - the complex humanitarian assemblage that philosopher Adi Ophir called ‘moral technologies' - have become the means for exercising contemporary violence and for governing the displaced, the enemy and the unwanted. The condition of collusion of these technologies of humanitarianism, human rights and humanitarian law with military and political powers is referred to in this book as 'the humanitarian present'. Within this present condition, all political oppositions are replaced by the elasticity of degrees, negotiations, proportions and balances.

If, as a friend recently suggested, we ought to construct a monument to our present political culture as a homage to the principle of the 'lesser evil', it should be made in the form of the digits 6-6-5 built of concrete blocks, and installed like the Hollywood sign on hillsides or other high points overlooking city centres. This number, one less than the number of the beast -that of the devil and of total evil- might capture the essence of our humanitarian present obsessed -with the calculations and calibrations that seek to moderate, ever so slightly, the evils that it has largely caused itself. The principle of the lesser evil is often presented as a dilemma between two or more bad choices in situations where available options are, or seem to be, limited. The choice made justifies the pursuit of harmful actions that would be otherwise deemed unacceptable in the hope of averting even greater suffering. Sometimes the principle is presented as the optimal result of a general field of calculations that seeks to compare, measure and evaluate different bad consequences in relation to necessary acts, and then to minimize those consequences. Both aspects of the principle are understood as taking place within a dosed system in which those posing the dilemma, the options available for choice, the factors to be calculated and the very parameters of calculation are unchallenged. Each calculation is undertaken anew, as if the previous accumulation of events has not taken place, and the future implications are out of bounds. Those who seek to justify necessary evils as 'lesser' ones, especially when searching for a rationale to explain recent wars and military expeditions, like to appeal to the work of the fourth-century North African philosopher-theologian St Augustine. Augustine's rejection of the principle of Manichaeism- a world divided into equally powerful good and evil - meant that he no longer saw evil as the perfect mirror image of the good; rather, in platonic terms, as a measure of its absence. Since evil, unlike good, is not perfect and absolute, it is forever measured and calibrated on a differential scale of more and less, greater and lesser. Augustine taught that it is not permissible to practise lesser evils, because to do so violates the Pauline principle 'do no evil that good may come'. But- and here lies its appeal -lesser evils might be tolerated when they are deemed necessary and unavoidable, or when perpetrating an evil results in the reduction of the overall amount of evil in the world. One of the examples Augustine gives for such an economy of lesser and greater evils is a robbery on a crossroads. It is to this crossroads that other theologists, philosophers and political theorists will return, to this day, when discussing the dilemma. In Augustine's logic of pre-emption, it is better to kill the would-be assailant before he kills an innocent traveler. A millennium later and the armies of Western Christendom passed through this ethicotheological needle-eye-sized loophole on their way to the catalogue of pillage and destruction that constituted the crusades. More recently, Pope Benedict has appealed to the lesser evil principle in a decree permitting the use of condoms in places inflicted -with high rates of HIV. Similar to the latter logic of contraception, some in the Vatican thought that implicit support of the government of Silvio Berlusconi, albeit plagued by sin, ridicule and corruption, might after all be considered as the lesser evil in protecting Christian values. In cases such as these, the economy of the lesser ev-il is always cited as a justification for breaching rigid rules and entrenched dogma; indeed, it is often used by those in power as the primary justification for the very notion of 'exception'. In fact, Augustine's discourse of the lesser evil developed at a time when the church had started to participate in the political government of its subjects and had acquired considerable financial and military power. Through the ages, the Christian church increasingly saw its task as keeping human evil to its minimum level. It pastorally ruled over a vast and complex intrapersonal economy of merits and faults -of sin, vice and virtue- operating according to specific rules of circulation and transfer, with procedures, analyzes, calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of a specific interplay between conflicting goods and degrees of evil. In his lectures on the origins of governmentality, Michel Foucault argued that, on the basis of this 'economical theology', the modern, secular form of governmental power has itself taken on the form of an economy.10 Lesser Evildoers The theological origins of the lesser evil argument still cast a long shadow on the present. In fact the idiom has become so deeply ingrained, and is invoked in such a staggeringly diverse set of contexts - from individual situational ethics and international relations, to attempts to govern the economics of violence in the context of the 'war on terror' and the efforts of human rights and humanitarian activists to manoeuvre through the paradoxes of aid- that it seems to have altogether taken the place previously reserved for the term 'good'. Moreover, the very evocation of the 'good' seems to everywhere invoke the utopian tragedies of modernity, in which evil seemed lurking in a horrible manichaeistic inversion. If no hope is offered in the future, all that remains is to insure ourselves against the risks that it poses, to moderate and lessen the collateral effects of necessary acts, and tend to those who have suffered as a result. In relation to the 'war on terror', the terms of the lesser evil were most clearly and prominently articulated by former human rights scholar and leader of Canada's Liberal Party Michael lgnatieff. In his book The Lesser Evil, Ignatieff suggested that in 'balancing liberty against security' liberal states establish mechanisms to regulate the breach of some human rights and legal norms, and allow their security services to engage in forms of extrajuridical violence - which he saw as lesser evils - in order to fend off or minimize potential greater evils, such as terror attacks on civilians of western states. If governments need to violate rights in a terrorist emergency, this should be done, he thought, only as an exception and according to a process of adversarial scrutiny. 'Exceptions', Ignatieff states, 'do not destroy the rule but save it, provided that they are temporary, publicly justified, and deployed as a last resort. '12 The lesser evil emerges here as a pragmatic compromise, a 'tolerated sin' that functions as the very justification for the notion of exception. State violence in this model takes part in a necro-economy in which various types of destructive measure are weighed in a utilitarian fashion, not only in relation to the damage they produce, but to the harm they purportedly prevent and even in relation to the more brutal measures they may help restrain. In this logic, the problem of contemporary state violence resembles indeed an all-too-human version of the mathematical minimum problem of the divine calculations previously mentioned, one tasked with determining the smallest level of violence necessary to avert the greatest harm. For the architects of contemporary war this balance is trapped between two poles: keeping violence at a low enough level to limit civilian suffering, and at a level high enough to bring a decisive end to the war and bring peace. Niore recent works by legal scholars and legal advisers to states and militaries have sought to extend the inherent elasticity of the system of legal exception proposed by lgnatieff into ways of rewriting the laws of armed conflict themselves. Lesser evil arguments are now used to defend anything from targeted assassinations and mercy killings, house demolitions, deportation, torture, to the use of (sometimes) non-lethal chemical weapons, the use of human shields, and even 'the intentional targeting of some civilians if it could save more innocent lives than they cost’. In one of its more macabre moments it was suggested that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima might also be tolerated under the defence of the lesser evil. Faced with a humanitarian A-bomb, one might wonder what, in fact, might come under the definition of a greater evil. Perhaps it is time for the differential accounting of the lesser evil to replace the mechanical bureaucy of the 'banality of evil' as the idiom to describe the most extreme manifestations of violence. Indeed, it is through this use of the lesser evil that societies that see themselves as democratic can maintain regimes of occupation and neo-colonization. Beyond state agents, those practitioners of lesser evils, as this book claims, must also include the members of independent nongovernmental organizations that make up the ecology of contemporary war and crisis zones. The lesser evil is the argument of the humanitarian agent that seeks military permission to provide medicines and aid in places where it is in fact the duty of the occupying military power to do so, thus saving the military limited resources. The lesser evil is often the justification of the military officer who attempts to administer life (and death) in an 'enlightened' manner; it is sometimes, too, the brief of the security contractor who introduces new and more efficient weapons and spatia-technological means of domination, and advertises them as 'humanitarian technology'. In these cases the logic of the lesser evil opens up a thick political field of participation bringing together otherwise opposing fields of action, to the extent that it might obscure the fundamental moral differences between these various groups. But, even according to the terms of an economy of losses and gains, the concept of the lesser evil risks becoming counterproductive: less brutal measures are also those that may be more easily naturalized, accepted and tolerated - and hence more frequently used, with the result that a greater evil may be reached cumulatively.

We read about lives lost and are often given the numbers, but these stories are repeated every day, and the repetition appears endless, irremediable. And so, we have to ask, what would it take not only to apprehend the precarious character oflives lost in war, but to have that apprehension coincide with an ethical and political opposition to the losses war entails? Among the questions that follow from this situation are: How is affect produced by this structure of the frame? And what is the relation of affect to ethical and political judgment and practice? To say that a life is precarious requires not only that a life be apprehended as a life, but also that precariousness be an aspect of what is apprehended in what is living. Normatively construed, I am arguing that there ought to be a more inclusive and egalitarian way of recognizing precariousness, and that this should take form as concrete social policy regarding such issues as shelter, work, food, medical care, and legal status. And yet, I am also insisting, in a way that might seem initially paradoxical, that precariousness itself cannot be properly recognized. It can be apprehended, taken in, encountered, and it can be presupposed by certain norms of recognition just as it can be refused by such norms. Indeed, there ought to be recognition of precariousness as a shared condition of human life (indeed, as a condition that links human and non-human animals), but we ought not to think that the recognition of precariousness masters or captures or even fully cognizes what it recognizes. So although I would (and will) argue that norms of recognition ought to be based on an apprehension of precariousness, I do not think that precariousness is a function or effect of recognition, nor that recognition is the only or the best way to register precariousness. To say that a life is injurable, for instance, or that it can be lost, destroyed, or systematically neglected to the point of death, is to underscore not only the finitude of a life (that death is certain) but also its precariousness (that life requires various social and economic conditions to be met in order to be sustained as a life). Precariousness implies living socially, that is, the fact that one's life is always in some sense in the hands of the other. It implies exposure both to those we know and to those we do not know; a dependency on people we know, or barely know, or know not at all. Reciprocally, it implies being impinged upon by the exposure and dependency of others, most of whom remain anonymous. These are not necessarily relations of love or even of care, but constitute obligations toward others, most of whom we cannot name and do not know, and who may or may not bear traits of familiarity to an established sense of who "we" are. In the interest of speaking in common parlance, we could say that "we" have such obligations to "others" and presume that we know who "we" are in such an instance. The social implication of this view, however, is precisely that the "we" does not, and cannot, recognize itself, that it is riven from the start, interrupted by alterity, as Levinas has said, and the obligations "we" have are precisely those that disrupt any established notion of the "we." Over and against an existential concept of finitude that singularizes our relation to death and to life, precariousness underscores our radical substitutability and anonymity in relation both to certain socially facilitated modes of dying and death and to other socially conditioned modes of persisting and flourishing. It is not that we are born and then later become precarious, but rather that precariousness is coextensive with birth itself (birth is, by definition, precarious), which means that it matters whether or not this infant being survives, and that its survival is dependent on what we might call a social network of hands. Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live. Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear. Thus, grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters. For the most part, we imagine that an infant comes into the world, is sustained in and by that world through to adulthood and old age, and finally dies. We imagine that when the child is wanted, there is celebration at the beginning of life. But there can be no celebration without an implicit understanding that the life is grievable, that it would be grieved if it were lost, and that this future anterior is installed as the condition of its life. In ordinary language, grief attends the life that has already been lived, and presupposes that life as having ended. But, according to the future anterior (which is also part of ordinary language), grievability is a condition of a life's emergence and sustenance. 7 The future anterior, "a life has been lived," is presupposed at the beginning of a life that has only begun to be lived. In other words, "this will be a life that will have been lived" is the presupposition of a grievable life, which means that this will be a life that can be regarded as a life, and be sustained by that regard. Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life. Instead, "there is a life that will never have been lived," sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost. The apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious life. Grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being as living, exposed to non-life from the start.

Open grieving is bound up with outrage, and outrage in the face of injustice or indeed of unbearable loss has enormous political potential. It is, after all, one of the reasons Plato wanted to ban the poets from the Republic. He thought that if the citizens went too often to watch tragedy, they would weep over the losses they saw, and that such open and public mourning, in disrupting the order and hierarchy of the soul, would disrupt the order and hierarchy of political authority as well. Whether we are speaking about open grief or outrage, we are talking about affective responses that are highly regulated by regimes of power and sometimes subject to explicit censorship. In the contemporary wars in which the US is directly engaged, those in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can see how affect is regulated to support both the war effort and, more specifically, nationalist belonging. When the photos of Abu Ghraib were first released in the US, conservative television pundits argued that it would be unAmerican to show them. We were not supposed to have graphic evidence of the acts of torture US personnel had committed. We were not supposed to know that the US had violated internationally recognized human rights. It was un-American to show these photos and un-American to glean information from them as to how the war was being conducted. The conservative political commentator Bill O'Reilly thought that the photos would create a negative image of the US and that we had an obligation to defend a positive image. 5 Donald Rumsfeld said something similar, suggesting that it was anti-American to display the photos. 6 Of course, neither considered that the American public might have a right to know about the activities of its military, or that the public's right to judge the war on the basis of full evidence is part of the democratic tradition of participation and deliberation. So what was really being said? It seems to me that those who sought to limit the power of the image in this instance also sought to limit the power of affect, of outrage, knowing full well that it could and would turn public opinion against the war in Iraq, as indeed it did. The question, though, of whose lives are to be regarded as grievable, as worthy of protection, as belonging to subjects with rights that ought to be honored, returns us to the question of how affect is regulated and of what we mean by the regulation of affect at all. The anthropologist Talal Asad recently wrote a book about suicide bombing in which the first question he poses is: Why do we feel horror and moral repulsion in the face of suicide bombing when we do not always feel the same way in the face of statesponsored violence?7 He asks the question not in order to say that these forms of violence are the same, or even to say that we ought to feel the same moral outrage in relation to both. But he finds it curious, and I follow him here, that our moral -responses that first take form as affect-are tacitly regulated by certain kinds of interpretive frameworks. His thesis is that we feel more horror and moral revulsion in the face of lives lost under certain conditions than under certain others. If, for instance, someone kills or is killed in war, and the war is state-sponsored, and we invest the state with legitimacy, then we consider the death lamentable, sad, and unfortunate, but not radically unjust. And yet if the violence is perpetrated by insurgency groups regarded as illegitimate, then our affect invariably changes, or so Asad assumes. Although Asad asks us to think about suicide bombingsomething I won't do right now-it is also clear that he is saying something important about the politics of moral responsiveness; namely, that what we feel is in part conditioned by how we interpret the world around us; that how we interpret what we feel actually can and does alter the feeling itself. If we accept that affect is structured by interpretive schemes that we do not fully understand, can this help us understand why it is we might feel horror in the face of certain losses but indifference or even righteousness in light of others? In contemporary conditions of war and heightened nationalism, we imagine that our existence is bound up with others with whom we can find national affinity, who are recognizable to us, and who conform to certain culturally specific notions about what the culturally recognizable human is. This interpretative framework functions by tacitly differentiating between those populations on whom my life and existence depend, and those populations who represent a direct threat to my life and existence. When a population appears as a direct threat to my life, they do not appear as "lives," but as the threat to life (a living figure that figures the threat to life). Consider how this is compounded under those conditions in which Islam is seen as barbaric or pre-modem, as not yet having conformed to those norms that make the human recognizable. Those we kill are not quite human, and not quite alive, which means that we do not feel the same horror and outrage over the loss of their lives as we do over the loss of those lives that bear national or religious similarity to our own.

“To refer to “ontology” in this regard is not to lay claim to a description of fundamental structures of being that are distinct from any and all social and political organization. On the contrary, none of these terms exist outside of their political organization and interpretation. The “being” of the body to which this ontology refers is one that is always given over to others, to norms, to social and political organizations that have developed historically in order to maximize precariousness for some and minimize precariousness for others. It is not possible first to define the ontology of the body and then to refer to the social significations the body assumes. Rather, to be a body is to be ”exposed to social crafting and form, and that is what makes the ontology of the body a social ontology. In other words, the body is exposed to socially and politically articulated forces as well as to claims of sociality—including language, work, and desire—that make possible the body’s persisting and flourishing. The more or less existential conception of “precariousness” is thus linked with a more specifically political notion of “precarity.” And it is the differential allocation of precarity that in my view, forms the point of departure for both a rethinking of bodily ontology and for progressive or left politics in ways that continue to exceed and traverse the categories of identity.1 The epistemological capacity to apprehend a life is partially dependent on that life being produced according to norms that qualify it as a life or, indeed, as part of life. In this way, the normative production of ontology thus produces the epistemological problem of apprehending a life, and this in turn gives rise to the ethical problem of what it is to acknowledge or, indeed, to guard against injury and violence. Of course, we are talking about different modalities of “violence” at each level of this analysis, but that does not mean that they are all equivalent or that no distinctions between them need to be made. The “frames” that work to differentiate the lives we can apprehend from those we cannot (or that produce lives across a continuum of life) not only organize visual experience but also generate specific ontologies of the subject. Subjects are constituted through norms which, in their reiteration, produce and shift the terms through which subjects are recognized. These normative conditions for the production of the subject produce an historically contingent ontology, such that our very capacity to discern and name the “being” of the subject is dependent on norms that facilitate that recognition. At the same time, it would be a mistake to understand the operation of norms as deterministic. Normative schemes are interrupted by one another, they emerge and fade depending on broader operations of power, and very often come up against spectral versions of what it is they claim to know: thus, there are “subjects” who are not quite recognizable as subjects, and there are “lives” that are not quite—or, indeed, are never—recognized as lives. In what sense does life, then, always exceed the normative conditions of its recognizability? To claim that it does so is not to say that “life” has as its essence a resistance to normativity, but only that each and every construction of life requires time to do its job, and that no job it does can overcome time itself. In other words, the job is never done “once and for all.” This is a limit internal to normative construction itself, a function of its iterability and heterogeneity, without which it cannot exercise its crafting power, and which limits the finality of any of its effects.” “Perhaps, then, as a consequence, it is necessary to consider how we might distinguish between “apprehending” and “recognizing” a life. “Recognition” is the stronger term, one that has been derived from Hegelian texts and subject to revisions and criticisms for many years.2 “Apprehension” is less precise, since it can imply marking, registering, acknowledging without full cognition. If it is a form of knowing, it is bound up with sensing and perceiving, but in ways that are not always—or not yet—conceptual forms of knowledge. What we are able to apprehend is surely facilitated by norms of recognition, but it would be a mistake to say that we are utterly limited by existing norms of recognition when we apprehend a life.” “We can apprehend, for instance, that something is not recognized by recognition. Indeed, that apprehension can become the basis for a critique of norms of recognition. The fact is we do not simply have recourse to single and discrete norms of recognition, but to more general conditions, historically articulated and enforced, of “recognizability.” If we ask how recognizability is constituted, we have through the very question taken up a perspective suggesting that these fields are variably and historically constituted, no matter how a priori their function as conditions of appearance. If recognition characterizes an act or a practice or even a scene between subjects, then “recognizability” characterizes the more general conditions that prepare or shape a subject for recognition”—The“general terms, conventions, and norms “act” in their own way, crafting a living being into a recognizable subject, though not without errancy or, indeed, unanticipated results. These categories, conventions, and norms that prepare or establish a subject for recognition, that induce a subject of this kind, precede and make possible the act of recognition itself. In this sense, recognizability precedes recognition.”

(Elizabeth, ‘Geography and Ethics I: Waiting and Urgency,’ Progress in Human Geography, vol. 39 no. 4, pp. 517-526) *Bodies Refers to groups of people, not meant to be discriminatory – thanks Leo :)

Though toileting might be thought of as a special case of bodily urgency, geographic research suggests that the body is increasingly set at odds with larger scale ethical concerns, especially large-scale future events of forecasted suffering. Emergency planning is a particularly good example in which the large-scale threats of future suffering can distort moral reasoning. Žižek (2006) lightly develops this point in the context of the war on terror, where in the presence of fictitious and real ticking clocks and warning systems, the urgent body must be bypassed because there are bigger scales to worry about:¶ What does this all-pervasive sense of urgency mean ethically? The pressure of events is so overbearing, the stakes are so high, that they nec essitate a suspension of ordinary ethical concerns. After all, displaying moral qualms when the lives of millions are at stake plays into the hands of the enemy. (Žižek, 2006)¶ In the presence of large-scale future emergency, the urgency to secure the state, the citizenry, the economy, or the climate creates new scales and new temporal orders of response (see Anderson, 2010; Baldwin, 2012; Dalby, 2013; Morrissey, 2012), many of which treat the urgent body as impulsive and thus requiring management. McDonald’s (2013) analysis of three interconnected discourses of ‘climate security’ illustrates how bodily urgency in climate change is also recast as a menacing impulse that might require exclusion from moral reckoning. The logics of climate security, especially those related to national security, ‘can encourage perverse political responses that not only fail to respond effectively to climate change but may present victims of it as a threat’ (McDonald, 2013: 49). Bodies that are currently suffering cannot be urgent, because they are excluded from the potential collectivity that could be suffering everywhere in some future time. Similar bypassing of existing bodily urgency is echoed in writing about violent securitization, such as drone warfare (Shaw and Akhter, 2012), and also in intimate scales like the street and the school, especially in relation to race (Mitchell, 2009; Young et al., 2014).¶ As large-scale urgent concerns are institutionalized, the urgent body is increasingly obscured through technical planning and coordination (Anderson and Adey, 2012). The predominant characteristic of this institutionalization of large-scale emergency is a ‘built-in bias for action’ (Wuthnow, 2010: 212) that circumvents contingencies. The urgent body is at best an assumed eventuality, one that will likely require another state of waiting, such as triage (e.g. Greatbach et al., 2005). Amin (2013) cautions that in much of the West, governmental need to provide evidence of laissez-faire governing on the one hand, and assurance of strength in facing a threatening future on the other, produces ‘just-in-case preparedness’ (Amin, 2013: 151) of neoliberal risk management policies. In the US, ‘personal ingenuity’ is built into emergency response at the expense of the poor and vulnerable for whom ‘[t]he difference between abjection and bearable survival’ (Amin, 2013: 153) will not be determined by emergency planning, but in the material infrastructure of the city.¶ In short, the urgencies of the body provide justifications for social exclusion of the most marginalized based on impulse and perceived threat, while large-scale future emergencies effectively absorb the deliberative power of urgency into the institutions of preparedness and risk avoidance. Žižek references Arendt’s (2006) analysis of the banality of evil to explain the current state of ethical reasoning under the war on terror, noting that people who perform morally reprehensible actions under the conditions of urgency assume a ‘tragic-ethic grandeur’ (Žižek, 2006) by sacrificing their own morality for the good of the state. But his analysis fails to note that bodies are today so rarely legitimate sites for claiming urgency. In the context of the assumed priority of the large-scale future emergency, the urgent body becomes literally nonsense, a non sequitur within societies, states and worlds that will always be more urgent.¶ If the important ethical work of urgency has been to identify that which must not wait, then the capture of the power and persuasiveness of urgency by large-scale future emergencies has consequences for the kinds of normative arguments we can raise on behalf of urgent bodies. How, then, might waiting compare as a normative description and critique in our own urgent time? Waiting can be categorized according to its purpose or outcome (see Corbridge, 2004; Gray, 2011), but it also modifies the place of the individual in society and her importance. As Ramdas (2012: 834) writes, ‘waiting … produces hierarchies which segregate people and places into those which matter and those which do not’. The segregation of waiting might produce effects that counteract suffering, however, and Jeffery (2008: 957) explains that though the ‘politics of waiting’ can be repressive, it can also engender creative political engagement. In his research with educated unemployed Jat youth who spend days and years waiting for desired employment, Jeffery finds that ‘the temporal suffering and sense of ambivalence experienced by young men can generate cultural and political experiments that, in turn, have marked social and spatial effects’ (Jeffery, 2010: 186). Though this is not the same as claiming normative neutrality for waiting, it does suggest that waiting is more ethically ambivalent and open than urgency.¶ In other contexts, however, our descriptions of waiting indicate a strong condemnation of its effects upon the subjects of study. Waiting can demobilize radical reform, depoliticizing ‘the insurrectionary possibilities of the present by delaying the revolutionary imperative to a future moment that is forever drifting towards infinity’ (Springer, 2014: 407). Yonucu’s (2011) analysis of the self-destructive activities of disrespected working-class youth in Istanbul suggests that this sense of infinite waiting can lead not only to depoliticization, but also to a disbelief in the possibility of a future self of any value. Waiting, like urgency, can undermine the possibility of self-care two-fold, first by making people wait for essential needs, and again by reinforcing that waiting is ‘[s]omething to be ashamed of because it may be noted or taken as evidence of indolence or low status, seen as a symptom of rejection or a signal to exclude’ (Bauman, 2004: 109). This is why Auyero (2012) suggests that waiting creates an ideal state subject, providing ‘temporal processes in and through which political subordination is produced’ (Auyero, 2012: loc. 90; see also Secor, 2007). Furthermore, Auyero notes, it is not only political subordination, but the subjective effect of waiting that secures domination, as citizens and non-citizens find themselves ‘waiting hopefully and then frustratedly for others to make decisions, and in effect surrendering to the authority of others’ (Auyero, 2012: loc. 123).¶ Waiting can therefore function as a potentially important spatial technology of the elite and powerful, mobilized not only for the purpose of governing individuals, but also to retain claims over moral urgency. But there is growing resistance to the capture of claims of urgency by the elite, and it is important to note that even in cases where the material conditions of containment are currently impenetrable, arguments based on human value are at the forefront of reclaiming urgency for the body. In detention centers, clandestine prisons, state borders and refugee camps, geographers point to ongoing struggles against the ethical impossibility of bodily urgency and a rejection of states of waiting (see Conlon, 2011; Darling, 2009, 2011; Garmany, 2012; Mountz et al., 2013; Schuster, 2011). Ramakrishnan’s (2014) analysis of a Delhi resettlement colony and Shewly’s (2013) discussion of the enclave between India and Bangladesh describe people who refuse to give up their own status as legitimately urgent, even in the context of larger scale politics. Similarly, Tyler’s (2013) account of desperate female detainees stripping off their clothes to expose their humanness and suffering in the Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre in the UK suggests that demands for recognition are not just about politics, but also about the acknowledgement of humanness and the irrevocable possibility of being that which cannot wait. The continued existence of places like Yarl’s Wood and similar institutions in the USA nonetheless points to the challenge of exposing the urgent body as a moral priority when it is so easily hidden from view, and also reminds us that our research can help to explain the relationships between normative dimensions and the political and social conditions of struggle.¶ In closing, geographic depictions of waiting do seem to evocatively describe otherwise obscured suffering (e.g. Bennett, 2011), but it is striking how rarely these descriptions also use the language of urgency. Given the discussion above, what might be accomplished – and risked – by incorporating urgency more overtly and deliberately into our discussions of waiting, surplus and abandoned bodies? Urgency can clarify the implicit but understated ethical consequences and normativity associated with waiting, and encourage explicit discussion about harmful suffering. Waiting can be productive or unproductive for radical praxis, but urgency compels and requires response. Geographers could be instrumental in reclaiming the ethical work of urgency in ways that leave it open for critique, clarifying common spatial misunderstandings and representations. There is good reason to be thoughtful in this process, since moral outrage towards inhumanity can itself obscure differentiated experiences of being human, dividing up ‘those for whom we feel urgent unreasoned concern and those whose lives and deaths simply do not touch us, or do not appear as lives at all’ (Butler, 2009: 50). But when the urgent body is rendered as only waiting, both materially and discursively, it is just as easily cast as impulsive, disgusting, animalistic (see also McKittrick, 2006). Feminist theory insists that the urgent body, whose encounters of violence are ‘usually framed as private, apolitical and mundane’ (Pain, 2014: 8), are as deeply political, public, and exceptional as other forms of violence (Phillips, 2008; Pratt, 2005). Insisting that a suffering body, now, is that which cannot wait, has the ethical effect of drawing it into consideration alongside the political, public and exceptional scope of large-scale futures. It may help us insist on the body, both as a single unit and a plurality, as a legitimate scale of normative priority and social care.¶ In this report, I have explored old and new reflections on the ethical work of urgency and waiting. Geographic research suggests a contemporary popular bias towards the urgency of large-scale futures, institutionalized in ways that further obscure and discredit the urgencies of the body. This bias also justifies the production of new waiting places in our material landscape, places like the detention center and the waiting room. In some cases, waiting is normatively neutral, even providing opportunities for alternative politics. In others, the technologies of waiting serve to manage potentially problematic bodies, leading to suspended suffering and even to extermination (e.g. Wright, 2013). One of my aims has been to suggest that moral reasoning is important both because it exposes normative biases against subjugated people, and because it potentially provides routes toward struggle where claims to urgency seem to foreclose the possibilities of alleviation of suffering. Saving the world still should require a debate about whose world is being saved, when, and at what cost – and this requires a debate about what really cannot wait. My next report will extend some of these concerns by reviewing how feelings of urgency, as well as hope, fear, and other emotions, have played a role in geography and ethical reasoning.¶ I conclude, however, by pulling together past and present. In 1972, Gilbert White asked why geographers were not engaging ‘the truly urgent questions’ (1972: 101) such as racial repression, decaying cities, economic inequality, and global environmental destruction. His question highlights just how much the discipline has changed, but it is also unnerving in its echoes of our contemporary problems. Since White’s writing, our moral reasoning has been stretched to consider the future body and the more-than-human, alongside the presently urgent body – topics and concerns that I have not taken up in this review but which will provide their own new possibilities for urgent concerns. My own hope presently is drawn from an acknowledgement that the temporal characteristics of contemporary capitalism can be interrupted in creative ways (Sharma, 2014), with the possibility of squaring the urgent body with our large-scale future concerns. Temporal alternatives already exist in ongoing and emerging revolutions and the disruption of claims of cycles and circular political processes (e.g. Lombard, 2013; Reyes, 2012). Though calls for urgency will certainly be used to obscure evasion of responsibility (e.g. Gilmore, 2008: 56, fn 6), they may also serve as fertile ground for radical critique, a truly fierce urgency for now.

Today, the problems and contradictions involved in creating a truly global economy threaten to undermine the project in its entirety, as happened already in the 1930s. Inequality, both globally and within nations, is at levels not seen since the 1930s, when the first market-based globalization came to an end and led to the Great Depression, the Second World War and genocide (Milanovic 2016; Ruggie 1982). Financial crises have increased in number, severity, and geographical scope, with the 2008 financial crisis nearly threatening the survival of the global economy itself (Tooze 2018). Despite progress in terms of poverty reduction and other measures through the United Nations’ Millennium Goals, there is now evidence of backsliding, with extreme forms of poverty increasing again. The high or even increasing number of fragile and failing states has led to an increase in migration, especially refugee migration; and there are still about 800 million starving people worldwide. In the developed world, the increase in inequality has been accompanied by wage stagnation since the 1970s and a rise in household debt, leaving many people poor despite working full-time. Suicides among older white men and mental health problems are on the rise while life expectancy in the United States is declining—symptoms of inequality and its consequences (Wilkinson and Picket 2011). In addition, the climate emergency, the extinction crisis, and the job crisis created by the fourth industrial revolution which will also increase inequality, add several additional layers of complications (OECD 2014, p. 18). Global governance mechanisms have not developed to deal with these complex issues and at the national level, the political processes have been captured by the power elites and democratic processes are under threat (Shipman et al. 2018; Engelen et al. 2012; Moore 2011). Since the 1980s, these dysfunctions in the global economy have led to the creation of left- and right-wing populist movements. The left populists were first to protest against global economic restructuring; their protests culminated in the creation of the World Social Forum (WSF) in 2001 in a challenge to the Davos World Economic Forum (Ayres 2004). The latter is a meeting place of the global power elite (Carroll 2007). The creation of the WSF came after a decade of realization among activists that economic globalization creates problems for all new social movements and is an obstacle to women’s rights, the peace movement, the environmental movement, and the civil rights movement (Lynch 1998). These movements consequently demanded that the rules governing the economy be reformed with regard to trade, debt, investment, and the environment. Their protests led to the creation of debt forgiveness programs by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, but otherwise were largely ineffective. The 2008 financial crisis led to a revival of the progressive movement in the Occupy Wall Street protests, which pushed the idea of a wealth tax onto the larger agenda. In addition, the Green New Deal may be sign of things to come. Today, even defenders of the globalization project question whether it might have gone too far (Rodrik 2011; Soros 1997). Economists from the IMF have admitted that neoliberal policies contributed to financial instability and increasing inequality, which lowered growth (Ostry et al. 2016). Fractions of the ruling elite are now openly criticizing capitalism (Chapter 9). According to the latest power elite research, this means that one precondition for system transformation—intra-elite struggle—is now in place (Shipman et al. 2018).

Illiberal imperialism is that aspect of US foreign economic policy most directly connected to US foreign military action, both threatened and actual. What are the economic channels through which this type of imperialism affects workers? Using the framework of Eqs. (1)–(6) (reproduced above) and as we describe in more detail below, the main hypothesised channels are the following: on the ‘positive side’ (from the material perspective of US workers), US military might protects the availability of raw materials, and especially oil, thereby improving the terms of trade (ρ); US military power also helps to underpin the reserve currency role of the US dollar, and, as a related matter, strengthens the political security of US financial markets; it thereby helps the United States run a large current account deficit (CAD); military expenditure for domestic use and export also expands aggregate demand, and through Eq. (6), it may increase employment and capacity utilisation (though some have argued that it makes production less labour intensive). On the negative side, for US workers, military spending costs tax money; therefore, either the taxes that workers must pay are raised (reducing tf in Eq. [5]), expenditures on public services of use to workers reduced (reduce ps in Eq. [5]) or both.6 Velvet glove (neoliberal) imperialism The impacts of illiberal imperialism are difficult to measure, and the ‘imperial accounting’ for neoliberal imperialism may be even more Did US workers gain? 177 difficult.7 On the possible benefits side, neoliberalism plausibly leads to more exports for US firms, thereby increasing aggregate demand and leading to more employment (a lower CAD); neoliberal imperialism, by increasing the supply of inexpensive imports for the United States, might improve the US terms of trade.8 On the negative side, making the world safe for US foreign investment might increase outsourcing, jobs costing foreign investment and threat effects;9 this might reduce the wage rate, employment rate and, therefore, labour share accruing to workers. Moreover, there are additional expenditures in terms of military spending, diplomacy and foreign aid tied to the neoliberal project. These add costs to workers to the extent that they lead to higher taxes or cut-backs in social spending.