Atrocity Exhibition. Brad Evans
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of their enlightened praxis on the basis that they enjoy a monopoly on the terms “global security,” “peace,” and “prosperity.” While liberals take this for granted, for Howard therein lay the dilemma: despite being shrouded in universalist and pacifist discourse, liberal practice has actually been marked historically by war and violence. Howard’s concern, not unlike criticisms of Carl Schmitt’s, was clear. Michael Dillon and Julian Reid summarize:
[Howard’s] target was the way in which the liberal universalization of war in pursuit of perpetual peace impacted on the heterogeneous and adversarial character of international politics, translating war into crusades with only one of two outcomes: endless war or the transformation of other societies and cultures into liberal societies and cultures.
Despite the importance of Howard’s initial provocation, he nevertheless failed to come to terms with the exact nature of liberal war-making efforts. He merely chided liberals for their naive faith in the human spirit, which, although admirable, was at best idealistic and at worst dangerous. Liberalism is not simply a set of ideals; neither is it some conscience of the political spirit. Liberalism is a regime of power that wages the destiny of the species on the success of its own political strategies. Before we map the implications of this for our understanding of war, an important point of clarification should be made. Unlike reified attempts in international relations thinking to offer definitive truths about war, what I present here as the liberal war thesis does not pretend to explain every single conflict. It does not deny the existence of geostrategic battles, and neither does it deny the fact that any single war can reveal a number of competing motivations. Like security, war can be written and strategically waged in many different ways depending on the key strategic referent. Wars can be multiple.
So, what then makes a war liberal? Here I offer ten fundamental tenets that set liberal war apart from conventional political struggles:
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 (cf. Ignatieff). 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, by David Kilcullen and Rupert Smith, for instance, to offer a more humane and locally sensitive response. 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. 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 unrivalled moment of liberal expansionism (see The Human Security Report 2005). 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 fuelled 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: As Dillon and Reid put it:
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.
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, as Duffield demonstrates. 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 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, giving sure primacy to military force, the contemporary post-interventionary phase of liberal occupation signals its effective reawakening. The veritable displacement of the figuration of the terrorist by the body of the insurgent fully reveals this strategic reprioritization. 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 Clausewitzian inversion 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 planet-wide 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. 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