The traditional debate impulse to rely on body counts for impact calc is an example of our impact---it relies on the continual imagination of external threats to the social order and teaches students to be constantly searching for the best way to describe those threats, instead of examining the structural conditions that enable violence. This enables a system of governance that elides the endless war present in incarceration, global policing, and more by insisting on narrow chains of causality and the most catastrophic impacts possible

Among the most significant Of these changes are transformations in forms Of social and political violence, the kinds Of violence recently described by the philosopher Charles Taylor as 'categorial', directed towards people whom the protagonists do not personally know (2011). Often such violence is contrasted to the violence that takes place within personal relationships, but as we will see as this book develops, this distinction is not as clear as it once may have been. The chapters that follow attempt to explore a con- text that has become increasingly evident, as violence that once appeared to be 'contained' by key dimensions of modern society is now much more fluid, increasingly part of the flows making up a global world (Urry 2005). But such violence is not a 'thing' or an object. It is a form of agency, an embodied relationship and human experience. As such, it is a critical lens through which to explore wider transformations of social life. On the Other hand, to separate violence from such transformations profoundly limits our capacity to understand, and respond to, one of the most urgent questions shaping the twenty-first century. ¶ The Surveillance Society ¶ Most of us are aware of changing forms or potentials of violence through the growth of security and surveillance (Crelinsten 2009). Some developments are obvious, such as airport security. Others are less so, such as passport tracking systems, internment camps, control orders and detention without trial, or erosion of the distinction between immigration policy and security policy (Connolly 2005: 54). Some receive extensive debate in the press and social media, while Other developments are less discussed. Over recent years, for example, states as different as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the United States have been engaged in the construction Of thousands Of kilometres Of walls along national bor- ders, a development that the political scientist Wendy Brown calls 'walling', something she contends is driven by 'waning sovereignty' (2010). Global military expenditure, which had declined in the years following the end of the Cold War in 1989, expanded rapidly over the first decade of the new century, increasing by some 49 per cent to reach US$1.53 tril- lion in 2009 (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute 2011). New types of public surveillance involve pervasive but ambiguous categories Of 'pre-crime' as public policy seeks to identify groups and individuals 'at risk' of committing criminal acts (Zedner 2007). The changing role of the criminal justice system has become evident in the relentless increase in the number of people imprisoned in the world, a figure that reached some 10.65 million in 2009 (Walmsley 2010). ¶ Political theorists in particular have been aware of the ways these transformations 'resonate', mutually amplifying each other (Connolly 2005: 54). Brian Massumi (2007) argues that we are witnessing the emergence of a new type of governance in complex societies, one shaped by a shift from a model Of prevention, which operates in an 'objectively knowable world', to a model of pre-emption, which involves the attempt to wield power in a world based on uncertainty. Brad Evans (2010) points to the rise of 'consequentialist ethics' involved in this development, where forms of moral judgement framed in terms of 'right' and 'wrong' are becoming redefined as calculations to determine whether a situation is to be judged better or worse as a result of a course of action. These are not minor trans- formations. The OECD argues that 'security' has become a major area Of economic activity, a driver Of modern economies (OECD 2004), while the sociologist David Lyon traces the contours of a surveillance society increasingly based on digital technologies (Lyon 2004). The political philosopher William Connolly argues that this new social and political model involves an increasing mobilization of the population against 'unspecified enemies' (2005: 54). ¶ The Blurring of War and Peace ¶ One Way to think about this transformation is in terms Of a changing relationship between peace and war. The historical sociologist Charles Tilly argues that the emergence Of modern societies from the seventeenth century to the Second World War Saw violence moving in two directions: increasingly deadly inter-state confrontations and increasingly peaceful domestic societies, evident in the disarming Of populations and the rise Of peaceful forms Of protest and conflict (Tilly 2002, 2003). This constituted an increasingly clear separation between zones of war and zones of peace, a separation that for the philosopher Immanuel Kant constituted the very basis Of modern society (Kleingold 2006: ix). This account of the birth Of modernity locates violence beyond the borders of increasingly peaceful societies, and to a significant extent has established itself as a structure of thought preventing any significant exploration of the violence at the heart of modern societies, in particular the violence present in colonial expansion, or in the extent of atrocities and extreme violence undertaken by the colonizers in the process Of decolonization (Bennett 2011). Within this modern self-understanding, the capacity for extreme violence has always been associated with 'the Other with modern society, by definition, understood as being inherently peaceful. ¶ The securitization we have referred to above signals two related transformations: the separation between war and peace is becoming less and less clear, while the state's monopoly of violence is becoming less and less certain. Rather than war being an external event, the cultural geographer Nigel Thrift argues that contemporary, globalizing societies have entered an 'era of permanent and pervasive war' (2011: 11), with war no longer understood as taking place beyond borders, but across all areas of social life. This shift seems particularly evident when we 100k at urban design, where we encounter not simply the increasing integration of blast proofing and other defensive systems into buildings, but the actual militarization of urban space, evident in particular in contemporary military theory where older conceptions of 'battlefield' are giving way to new models of 'battle space' (see Graham 2012) where the space of warfare becomes 'cotermi- nus with the space of civil society itself' (Dillon and Reid 2009: 128). This pattern is evident in the extent that conceptions of urban security devel- oped in a warzone such as post-2003 Baghdad have established themselves as paradigms for policing and security in the cities Of North American and Europe (Graham 2010). ¶ War, from this perspective, rather than being an activity beyond the borders Of modern society, becomes instead a lens with which to conceive of the core organization of such societies. The rise of war as a lens to frame social life has been particularly evident in military theory. William Lind, for example, argues that the world has entered an age of 'fourth generation war', characterized by the loss Of the state's monopoly over the exercise Of War. Today states find themselves at war with non-state opponents, wars he argues that states are losing. Writing in a respected journal, Lind argues 'invasion by immigration can be at least as dangerous as invasion by a state army' (2004: 14). We do not need to embrace this type Of argument to rec- ognize that the twenty-first century has been shaped by an awareness of a new vulnerability.