Atrocity Exhibition. Brad Evans
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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. 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 (see Evans and Duffield). 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. 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, as Derrida points out. 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. 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,” as Duffield writes, 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.” 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 fulfilment — 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 Dillon has termed the “permanent emergency of its own emergence,” 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.
10. Liberal wars are profoundly ontotheological. When Barack Obama reconciled the problem of “evil” with the “imperfections of man” in his Nobel laureate speech, he reaffirmed the Kantian belief that evil is very much part of this world — not that people are born of evil but that unnecessary suffering results from bad or dangerous political judgment. Offering then a humanistic reworking of the story of the fall — one in which life, always assumed to be perpetually guilty of its own (un)making, must continually seek its own recovery from the ashes of its own potential demise — we uncover why sovereignty is not the transcendental frame of reference for liberal power. Kant-inspired liberalism preaches universality but accepts that the universal is beyond the realms of lived experience. It preaches the international virtues of law but accepts that one’s encounter with moral law has to be contingent. It insists on life’s autonomy even