Their “liberal warfare” impact is so abstract that it’s useless and doesn’t provide any accurate method to understand war

This is a book about the ‘liberal way of war’. But the liberal referred to in the title remains under theorized. On several occasions the authors highlight the distinction between the liberal way of war and the general framing of war in the modern liberal era as a geo-strategic contestation, taking the territorial state as its referent object. For Dillon and Reid, ‘liberalism never fitted this model of modern politics and the modern problematization of war very well’（p.83). They therefore seek to define liberalism and the liberal way of war as distinct from war in the liberal era. The liberal way of war refers not to real wars and conflicts but to an abstract model of conflict, defined as a desire to‘remove war from the life of humanity’which‘derives from the way in which liberalism takes the life of the species as its referent object of politics ─ biopolitics’（p.84）. In this framing, the liberal nature of war very much depends on the self-description of the conflict by its proponents: these range from Gladstone’s occupation of Egypt in the cause of‘suffering humanity’, to US liberal ideological constructions of the cause of‘freedom’in the Cold War struggle against the Soviet Union up to Bush and Blair’s war on Iraq in the cause of humanity（p.6）. As the authors state, of course, wars may be fought on other grounds than universal humanity: ‘liberal states may…also act as geopolitical sovereign actors as well…and may also have geopolitical motives for the wars they wage’（p.84）.¶ It is clear from the beginning that the distinctiveness of ‘the liberal way of war’ which they seek to explore cannot be more than a fool’s quest. They assert that they will critically uncover the paradox of liberal war: why it is that Realist or geostrategic war accepts the necessity of war but attempts to limit it, while liberals wish to end war but, to do so, are willing to fight unlimited wars. Yet, they admit that this starting point is already an ideological dead end ─ the wars of the twentieth century give the lie to the idea that there is some distinction between ‘unending crusades’ and ‘limited jousts between rationally calculative political subjects’: war has its own dynamic（p.7). Nevertheless, Dillon and Reid press on and seek to go beyond a Schmittian critique to ground this paradox in the biopolitical‘driver’of the liberal way of rule ─ biopolitics: wars waged under the banner of the human（against humans）are liberal and, allegedly biopolitical, as human life is declared to be the referent in need of being secured. These wars are alleged to be fought differently to geo-political wars for territory, because the ‘drivers’ of war are not territorialized interests but the biopolitical framings of the needs of the human, how human life can and should be lived. Inevitably there are insuperable methodological hurdles to this Sisyphusian task. Already, there occurs the first fundamental aporia: how do we tell the difference between a liberal and non-liberal war? There appears to be no way of preventing the category of liberal war from becoming a lifeless and descriptive one: wars are liberal and fought biopolitically only if we are told that these are the motives by those fighting them.¶ This separation of liberal ways of war from territorialised framings of geostrategic contestation makes little sense as a framework for understanding either liberal rule or liberal ways of war. In fact, in defining liberal war in this way the connection between liberal rule and war is entirely severed. ‘Liberal war may on occasions also be geopolitical; which is to say that war may be simultaneously geopolitical as well as biopolitically driven since the imperatives behind war are never uniform or simple; but what distinguishes the liberal way of war as liberal are the biopolitical imperatives which have consistently driven its violent peace-making.’（p.85）Liberal rule has also resulted in wars for territory or in defence of territories; nevertheless, a story, of course, could have been told about how views of the human fitted those of struggles to command territory. This is acknowledged, but sits uneasily with the narrow view of liberal war for species life. If the racial doctrines of European empires, up to and including the genocidal racism of the Nazi regime, were also biopolitically driven ─ and the authors, indeed, write of race as part of the‘liberal biopolitics of the seventeenth century’─ then it seems difficult to separate a liberal way of war from allegedly ‘non-liberal’ wars of territorial control.¶ It seems clear that Dillon and Reid do not seek to take the logical step of arguing that the view of the human reflects, and is reflected by, how the human is ruled and how wars are both thought and fought. Why? Because for them there is something suprahistorically unique and distinct about the liberal way of war: a distinctly liberal view which foregrounds the human as the referent of security. Therefore, a second aporia arises: on what basis is this specifically ‘liberal’? It would appear that every form of rule and of war has at least an implicit view of the ‘human’ and through this view of the human the form of rule and the way of war are rationalized. There is not and cannot be anything specifically ‘liberal’ about this. The humanity in need of securing, through war on other humans, could be formed by Alexander the Great’s stoic cosmopolitan vision, or could be‘God’s chosen people’, ‘the master race’, or ‘the gains of the proletarian revolution’: there is little doubt that beliefs of what the human is, or could become, were a vital part of many non-Liberal dispositifs ─ the discourses and practices - of both rule and war. ¶ The key starting assumption, that the liberal way of war can be isolated from any other - and its alleged specific form, of ‘unending violence’, explained by its referent of the human - appears to be a particularly unproductive one. At the level of abstraction at which Dillon and Reid choose to work, there is very little here that would help to distinguish between a liberal and a non-liberal way of war（the asserted purpose of the book）. Of course, what matters is what this view of the human is. Here Dillon and Reid appear to recognise the limits of their essentializing approach: …just as the liberal way of rule is constantly adapting and changing so also is the liberal way of war. There is, in that sense, no one liberal way of rule or one liberal way of war. But there is a fundamental continuity which justifies us referring to the singular…the fact that each takes the properties of species existence as its referent object…finding its expression historically in many changing formations of rule according…to the changing exigencies and understanding of species being…（p.84）¶ Rather than understand our forms of post-political rule and post-territorial war today on their own terms and then consider to what extent this way of rule and war can be theorized, and to what extent, if any, Foucault’s conception of biopolitics may be of assistance, Dillon and Reid start out from the assumption that we live in a liberal world of rule and war and that therefore both can be critiqued through the framework developed by Foucault in his engagement with understanding the rise and transformation of liberal forms of rule. In transposing Foucault’s critical engagement with liberal ways of rule to an understanding of liberal ways of war, Dillon and Reid take a body of historical work about the changing political nature of liberal rule and transpose it into an essentialised and under theorized understanding of liberal war. This is no mean feat; how they manage this accomplishment will be discussed in the next two sections.