A War on People. Jarrett Zigon
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does the drug war help us notice this? Responding to these questions will help us understand how it is that the anti–drug war movement is ultimately a political movement seeking to build new worlds open and inclusive “to everybody who walks by” (chapter 3), as one agonist put it to me. No doubt much of the political activity is aimed first and foremost at making the lives of drug users more bearable. But no matter where my research took me, political agonists were clear that ultimately their political vision of an open community, freedom, and care includes everyone. This is so because ultimately they understand the drug war in terms of what I call war as governance, a form of governance that in one manifestation or another affects everyone. They call this contemporary condition a war on people.
“It’s a war on people, it’s a war on communities, it’s a war on entire segments of cities.” This is how a New York City anti–drug war agonist once described the drug war to me and how it is understood and articulated by innumerable other such agonists around the globe. When representatives of governments, states, and international institutions speak of the drug war, they speak as though it is a quasimetaphorical description of the benevolent attempt on their part to protect national and global populations from apparently dangerous substances. This rhetoric suggests that the war is waged on these substances, and this, along with the medicalization of the disease model of addiction and its therapeutic treatment, results in the contemporary dominant discourse of the war on drugs as protective policies more akin to public health initiatives than any actually fought war. When, on occasion, the drug war is articulated as an actual war, the enemy is, for the most part, officially marked as the dealers, the cartels, and the bad guys who threaten communities. Populations, in this narrative, must be protected.11
This is not how the anti–drug war movement understands the drug war, and it is not how innumerable drug users around the globe experience it. For them it is indeed a war on people. This war, as far as they can tell, does not protect a population as much as it creates two populations—one to be “protectively” normalized, the other to be inclusively excluded. For it is only by means of the discursive, structural, and physical violence enacted against certain kinds of people—in this case, drug users—that a normalized and protectable population comes into being. Put another way: a protectable population never exists prior to the enactment of a biopolitical will that creates that population through acts of exclusionary violence against another and covers over that violence with the rhetorical discourse of security.12 Whether as mass incarceration in the United States and elsewhere,13 which is historically intertwined with the drug war and has grown steadily worse as the drug war has escalated; or the dehumanization of drug users that excludes them from such things as jobs, housing, education, and medical treatment, as well as intimate relations of love and care; or both the active and passive state-sponsored physical violence against drug users that results in over two hundred thousand deaths a year globally,14 the biopolitical will enacted through the drug war is indeed best understood as a war on people.
Increasingly, social and political theorists consider our contemporary condition one of war. For example, Giorgio Agamben has characterized our contemporary political paradigm as that of civil war,15 and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri provide perhaps the most sustained theoretical analysis of how this is so.16 Yet the primary example utilized in both cases is the war on terror. I agree with these and other thinkers who argue for the existence of this global condition of war.17 But if we want to understand what war as a form of governance entails, then we must go beyond analyses of the war on terror, counterinsurgency, or other forms of perpetual war between and within nation-states and those groups that seek to overthrow or harass them. As I show in chapter one, the drug war illustrates well that in the contemporary condition of things, war as governance is primarily a war on people fought potentially anywhere and against anyone. If we want to understand this contemporary condition of war, then we must interrogate the ways in which this war is waged against ordinary people right here in the midst of everyday life by means of both active and passive violence, a global carceral system, propaganda, surveillance, and even chemical warfare.18 In this book I will do just that and show how some of those against whom this war is waged fight back.
In his Society Must Be Defended lectures, Michel Foucault famously inverted Clausewitz’s claim that “war is politics by other means,”19 and this has been an influential move for many of those who now study such phenomena as the war on terror or the security state. But Foucault’s inversion—“politics is war by other means”—in fact may have been redundant. For Clausewitz already understood well that war is a form of governance. Thus, Clausewitz writes that
war is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means. We deliberately use the phrase “with the addition of other means” because we also want to make it clear that war in itself does not suspend political intercourse or change it into something entirely different. In essentials that intercourse continues, irrespective of the means it employs . . . Is war not just another expression of [political intercourse], another form of speech or writing? Its grammar, indeed, may be its own, but not its logic.20
War and politics for Clausewitz, then, are essentially the same phenomenon. The Foucauldian inversion is not necessary because as Clausewitz has already made clear, war and politics already share a logic and are merely aspects of the same process. The respective grammar of war and politics may differ; their forms of speech or modes of writing power into the fabric, bodies, and beings in worlds may differ. But what Clausewitz sought to clarify is that war is and never has been separable from politics, just as politics is and never has been separable from war.21 War has always been one of the—if not the primary—instruments of political power,22 whether waged abroad or domestically.
Clausewitz begins his On War with a definition: “War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will.”23 He continues by clarifying this definition. Force is what he calls “the means of war.” The political object of war is what Clausewitz describes as the imposition of “our will on the enemy.” He then goes on to make a distinction between the political object, which he also calls the “original motive” of any war, and what he calls the aim of warfare, which is rendering the enemy powerless.24 Ultimately, however, once the aim of warfare is realized (that is, once the enemy is rendered powerless by means of force), the political objective returns to the fore so that the victor can impose its will on the defeated.25 Thus, while the aim is internal to the grammar of the instrument of war, this instrument is wielded according to the logic of the political object.26 It is this distinction between the aim—rendering the enemy powerless to resist—and the object—the imposition of will—that allows us to begin to see how war has today become a form of governance. For as political objects change—that is, as the will to power of politics changes—so too do the instruments of war. “Thus,” Clausewitz concludes the section on the political object of war in book one, “it follows that without any inconsistency wars can have all degrees of importance and intensity, ranging from a war of extermination down to simple armed observation.”27 As will become clear in this book, particularly in the first two chapters, the drug war as a war on people covers the range of these intensities.
If the political object of war is the imposition of will, it should be no surprise that as biopolitics has become the dominant form of politics on the globe today, war as an instrument of politics has increasingly become a condition of everyday existence. To be clear: I entirely agree with Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose that biopower should not be conceived as an all-encompassing and epochal form of power.28 I also agree with Elizabeth Povinelli that our analytic fascination with biopolitics has partly blinded us to other forms of power and politics and most particularly that which governs the distinction between life and nonlife.29 Still, it is difficult not to acknowledge that despite these caveats, biopower and biopolitics remain dominant today. It is important to recognize, however, that dominance does not entail a universal, all-encompassing power. Rather, similar to how Talal Asad employed the notion of “strong language,”30 the claim that biopolitics is the dominant form of politics on the globe today is simply to recognize that other forms of power and politics,