Biopolitical governance goes hand in hand with liberal wars.

1. Liberal wars are fought over the modalities of life itself. Liberalism is undoubtedly a complex historical phenomenon, but if there is one defining singularity to its war-making efforts, then it is the underlying biopolitical imperative, which justifies its actions in relation to the protection and advancement of modes of existence. Liberals continuously draw reference to life to justify military force.3 War, if there is to be one, must be for the protection and improvement of the species. This humanitarian caveat is by no means out of favor. More recently, for instance, it has underwritten the strategic rethink in contemporary zones of occupation that is seen to offer a more humane and locally sensitive response.4 If liberal peace can therefore be said to imply something more than the mere absence of war, so it is the case that liberal war is immeasurably more complex than the simple presence of military hostilities. With war appearing integral to the logic of peace insofar as it conditions the very possibility of liberal rule, humanity’s most meaningful expression actually appears through the battles fought in its name. It would be incorrect, however, to think that this logic represents a recent departure.5 Life has always been the principal object for liberal political strategies. Hence, while the liberal way of rule is by definition biopolitical, as it revolves around the problems posed by species life, so it is the case that liberal ways of war are inherently biopolitical, as they, too, are waged over the same productive properties that life is said to possess. The reason contemporary forms of conflict are therefore seen to be emergent, complex, nonlinear, and adaptive is not incidental. Mirroring the new social morphology of life, the changing nature of conflict is preceded by the changing ontological account of species being that appears exponentially more powerful precisely because it is said to display post-Newtonian qualities.

2. Liberal wars operate within a global imaginary of threat. Ever since Immanuel Kant imagined the autonomous individual at peace with the wider political surroundings, the liberal subject has always been inserted into a more expansive terrain of productive cohabitation that is potentially free of conflict. While this logic has been manifest through local systems of liberal power throughout its history, during the 1990s a global imaginary of threat appeared that directly correlated liberal forms of governance with less planetary endangerment. This ability to collapse the local into the global resulted in an unrivaled moment of liberal expansionism.6 Such expansion did not, however, result from some self-professed planetary commitment to embrace liberal ideals. Liberal interventionism proceeded instead on the basis that localized emergency and crises demanded response. Modes of incorporation were therefore justified on the grounds that although populations still exist beyond the liberal pale, for their own betterment they should be included. This brings us to the martial face of liberal power. While liberalism is directly fueled by the universal belief in the righteousness of its mission, since there is no universally self-evident allegiance to the project, war is necessarily universalized in its pursuit of peace: “However much liberalism abjures war, indeed finds the instrumental use of war, especially, a scandal, war has always been as instrumental to liberal as to geopolitical thinkers. In that very attempt to instrumentalize, indeed universalize, war in pursuit of its own global project of emancipation, the practice of liberal rule itself becomes profoundly shaped by war. However much it may proclaim liberal peace and freedom, its own allied commitment to war subverts the very peace and freedoms it proclaims.”7

3. Liberal wars take place by “other” means. Liberalism declares otherness to be the problem to be solved. The theory of race dates back to canonical figures like Kant, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose progressive account of life originally conceived of noble savagery. While this desire to subjugate “the other” is a permanent feature of liberal biopolitics, the idea of human security that emerged in the early 1990s instilled it directly into policies that sought to pacify the global borderland.8 Directly challenging the conventional notion of state-based security, human security discourses found a remedial solution to the problem of maladjustment in sustainable development. This led to the effective “capitalization of peace,” since conflict and instability became fully aligned with the dangers of underdevelopment. Inverting then Carl von Clausewitz’s formula that war represents a continuation of politics by other means, war-making efforts were increasingly tasked with providing lasting capacities for social cohesion and peace. Liberal ways of war and development thus became part of the same global strategic continuum. While it could be argued that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 concern with sovereign recovery unsettled this narrative by giving sure primacy to military force, the contemporary postinterventionary phase of liberal occupation signals its effective reawakening. The veritable displacement of the figuration of the terrorist by the body of the insurgent is fully revealing of this strategic reprioritization.9 Unlike the problem of terrorism that is a problem of (dis)order, insurgents are a problem of population whose violence is the product of causal resentment. Their resistance pertains from unfortunate locally regressive conditions that can be manipulated to resuscitate the vitality of local life systems. Since insurgencies then are open to remedy and demand engagement, like the savages of the colonial encounter, they are otherwise redeemable. 4. Liberal wars take place at a distance. The Clausewitzean inversion identified above does not simply incorporate every aspect of civic governance into the global war effort. Since the unity of life incorporates every political strategy into a planetwide battle, the destiny of the species as a whole is wagered on the success (or failure) of its own political strategies. As recent liberal incursions make clear, however, global war cannot be sustained by relying on interventionary forces. Not only do such interventions lead to localized resistance, but the relationships to violence they expose are politically unsustainable. Waging war at a distance is the favored policy choice. This policy of getting savages to fight barbarians in the global borderlands involves a broad range of interconnected strategies.10 These include the abandonment of political neutralities; arming and training of local militias; instilling the correct political architecture to prevent credible political opposition; funding development projects that have a distinct liberal agenda; and marginalizing any community that has the temerity to support political alternatives. This distancing does not simply reveal the microphysics of liberal biopolitical rule. Creating conditions wherein the active production of all compliant life-sustaining flows (biopoliticized circulations) does not jeopardize the veritable containment of others, liberal war makes possible the global partitioning of life. This is not simply about security understood in the conventional sovereign sense of upholding territorial integrities. It is about deciding what must be made to live and what must be allowed to perish in the global space of flows. 5. Liberal wars have a distinct relationship to territory insomuch as spatiality is firmly bound to active living space. Liberal power triangulates security, populations, and territory in a way that binds geostrategic concerns to the active production of ways of life.11 Through the capitalization of peace, this triangulation has gone global as the management of local resources has become a planetary security concern. The development-security nexus tied the dramatic materialization of life to conditions of social cohesion. More recently, it has widened its security ambit to include protection of the environment and climate adaptation strategies. Leading to the generalization of liberal biopolitical rule, the development-environment-security nexus (DESNEX) is now part of a mobilization for war on all fronts—from human to biospheric.12 As the security apparatus of a new liberal environmentalism, DESNEX is no longer satisfied with policing and maintaining the life chances between the globally enriched and the globally denied. This is a highly politicized maneuver predicated on the geographical containment of the poor and dispossessed. It is forging a new global settlement around the control and management of the biosphere. A new speciation of global life is therefore taking place according to its ability to properly manage and care for the environment and, at the same time, maintain capitalist accumulation. For DESNEX, containment is now not enough—a locked-in global poor must be made fit for such stewardship. 6. Liberal wars are wars of law. One of liberal power’s foundational myths is its commitment to law. Constitutional law is presented as being the natural foundation for any civilized society. Without this arrangement, the concept of “a people”—understood to be a legally binding community of political beings—appears to hold no meaning. A people, however, is never made by laws. Neither are laws politically neutral. Whatever the jurisdiction, laws are enacted in a highly tactical way largely in response to crises that are never value free. This brings us to the problem of the norm. Advocates of liberal war reconcile their commitment to law by relating juridical safeguards to agreed normative standards. Norms as such appear to be the logical outcome of reasoned political settlement. Our discourse of battle, however, appreciates that power defines the norm such that those who deviate from it pose a threat to the biological heritage of life. The norm is another way of suppressing political differences. There are then no universal, all-embracing, value-neutral, timeless, or eternal a priori norms that inhibit some purified and objective existential space where they await access by the learned justices of the peace. There is no absolute convergence point to human reason. Every norm is simply the outcome of a particular power struggle. Its inscription always follows the contingency of the crisis event. That is why no universalizing system of law can ever account for or suppress the particular calls for justice that directly challenge moral authority. When Philip Bobbitt advocates for a more tactical and strategic approach to law, he is not calling for some neorealist revival.13 He is simply asking for liberal market states to be more efficient and effective in response to those problems than they now are. 7. Liberal wars move beyond states of exception to take place within a condition of unending emergency. Walter Benjamin warned that while exceptional moments of crisis were politically dangerous, the effective normalization of rule could be far more sinister. With order finally restored, what previously shattered the boundaries of acceptability now begins to reside in the undetected fabric of the everyday. Ours is no longer a time of exception. What marks the contemporary period is terrifyingly normal. While there is no law without enforcement, no enforceability exists without intimate relation to crisis.14 Every law and every decision respond to an exceptional moment. It brings force to bear on what breaks from the norm to rework the basis of normality anew. There is therefore no pure theory of the exception, no absolute break from law. Law reserves the right to transgress its own foundations, where it encounters continuously emerging crises, untimely moments that require varying degrees of intensity in the subsequent deployment of force. It is no surprise, then, to find that states of exception are all too frequent once the broad sweep of liberal history is considered. Not only do crises permit the reworking of the boundaries of existence, but the fluctuating shift from (dis)ordered sovereign recovery (external modes of capture) to progressive security governance (internal modes of interventionism) defines the liberal encounter.

8. Liberal wars depoliticize within the remit of humanitarian discourses and practices. Even when some epiphenomenal tension exists, the inclusive image of thought invoked by liberals immediately internalizes the order of battle. This is no mere sovereign affair. Liberal war has always been immeasurably greater than the juridical problem of order.15 It has always pertained to the life and death of the species. Since what is at stake in contemporary theaters of war is the “West’s ability to contain and manage international poverty while maintaining the ability of mass society to live and consume beyond its means,” each crisis of global circulation marks out a terrain of “global civil war, or rather a tableau of wars, which is fought on and between the modalities of life itself.”16 With depoliticization therefore occurring when life is primed for its own betterment—that is, within humanitarian discourses and practices—it is possible to offer an alternative reflection on Giorgio Agamben’s bare life. Agamben’s notion of bare life draws on sovereign terms of engagement. Life becomes exposed on account of its abandonment from law. The biopolitical encounter in contrast denies political quality, as the “bare essentials” for species survival take precedence. No longer reduced bare in a juridical sense of the term, life is stripped bare since its maladjusted qualities impede productive salvation. Hence, while this life is equally assumed to be without meaningful political quality— though in this instance because of some dangerous lack of fulfillment— allowing the body’s restitution displaces exceptional politics by the no less imperial and no less politically charged bare activity of species survival.

9. Liberal wars are intimately bound to the active production of political subjectivities. Security discourses have always had a particular affinity with political authenticity, which sets out who we are as people and defines what we are to become. It places limits around what it means to think and act politically. The liberal approach to security implies that political authenticity is not simply tied to those identity formations defined by epiphenomenal tension. It breaks free of such static demarcations. The liberal subject instead is constructed by living freely through contingent threats to insecurities around its existence. Within a broader and more positive continuum of endangerment, liberal subjectivity has never been in crises, if we understand those to be the disruptions to fixed modes of being. Born of the paradoxically anxious conditions of its ongoing emergence, the liberal subject is the subject of crises. It lives and breathes through the continual disruption to its own static modes of recovery. While this subject has gone through many key changes, the disrupted subject is made real today on account of its need to be resilient. Again this does not infer a static state of ontological affairs. Resilient life must uphold the principles of adaptation and change held true by our radically interconnected age. Since what is dangerous today is seen as integral to the very life processes that sustain liberal life, danger is directly related to the radically contingent outcomes on which the vitality of existence is said to depend. With liberal societies having to endure what has been termed the “permanent emergency of its own emergence,”17 our predisposition to the unknowable contingency of every new encounter—the event of contemporary life itself—appears at the same time to be the source of our potential richness and the beginning of all our despairs.