Atrocity Exhibition. Brad Evans
law) as armed conflict between two sovereign powers, whereas civil war designates conflict within a single territory in which one or both of the parties is not sovereign. War designates, in other words, a conflict in some sense external to the structures of sovereignty and civil war a conflict internal to them. It is clear that few, if any, of the instances of armed conflict around the world today fit the classic model of war between sovereign states. And perhaps even the great conflicts of the cold war, from Korea and Vietnam to countries throughout Latin America, already undermined the distinction, draping the conflict between sovereign states in the guise of local civil wars. Toni Negri and I thus claimed that, in our era, there is no more war but only civil wars, or, really, a global civil war. It is probably more precise to say, instead, that the distinction between war and civil war has been undermined in the same way that one might say, in more metaphorical terms, not that there is no more outside but, rather, that the division between inside and outside has been eroded.
This claim is also widely recognized, it seems to me, among military and security theorists. The change from the framework of war to that of civil war, for instance, corresponds closely to thinking of armed conflicts as not military campaigns but police actions, and thus a shift from the external to the internal use of force. The general rhetorical move from war to security marks in more general terms a similar shift. The security mantra that you cite — “war by other means” — also indicates how the confusion between inside and outside implies the mixture of a series of fields that are traditionally separate: war and politics, for example, but also killing and generating forms of social life. This opens a complicated question about the ways in which contemporary military actions have become biopolitical and what that conception helps us understand about them.
Rather than pursuing that biopolitical question directly, though, I want first to understand better how the shift in the relationship between war and sovereignty that Toni and I propose relates to your notion of liberal and humanitarian war. In a war conventionally conceived, it is sufficient for the two sovereign powers to justify their actions primarily on the basis of national interest as long as they remain within the confines of international law. Whereas those inside are, at least in principle, privilege to the liberal framework of rights and representation, those outside are not. When the relationship of sovereignty shifts, however, and the distinction between inside and outside erodes, then there are no such limits of the liberal ideological and political structures. This might be a way of understanding why contemporary military actions have to be justified in terms of discourses of human rights and liberal values. In turn, this same relationship relates to what many political theorists, like Wendy Brown, for instance, analyze as the decline of liberal values in the US political sphere at the hands of neoliberal and neoconservative logics. In other words, perhaps when the division declines between the inside and outside of sovereignty, liberal logic must be deployed (however inadequately) to justify the use of violence over what was formerly the outside on the one hand, while on the other, liberal logics are increasingly diluted or suppressed in what was formerly the inside.
BRAD EVANS: What I am proposing with “The Liberal War Thesis” borrows from some pioneering works, which have already started to cover the main theoretical ground (Mark Duffield, Michael Dillon, Julian Reid). Central to this approach is an attempt to critically evaluate global liberal governance (which includes both productive and non-productive elements) by questioning its will to rule. Liberal peace is thus challenged, not on the basis of its abstract claims to universality — juridical or otherwise — but precisely because its global imaginary shows a remarkable capacity to wage war (by whatever means) in order to govern all species of life. This behavior is not to be confused with some militaristic appropriation of the democratic body politic — a situation in which liberal value systems have been completely undermined by the onslaught of the military mind. Rather, this undermining exposes the intricate workings of a liberal rationality whose ultimate pursuit is global political dominance. Traces of such an account can be found in Michael Ignatieff’s book Empire Lite, which notes how the gradual confluence between the humanitarian and the military has resulted in the onset of an ostensibly humanitarian empire that is less concerned with territory (although the State no doubt still figures) than it is with governing life itself for its own protection and betterment. Liberalism as such is considered here (à la Foucault) to be a technology of government to strategize power, which necessarily takes life as its object. As a technological implement, it is compelled to wager the destiny of humanity against its own political strategy. Liberalism can therefore be said to betray a particularly novel strategic field, in which the writing of threat assumes both planetary (macro-specific) and human (micro-specific) ascriptions. Although it should be noted that it is only through giving the utmost priority to life itself — working to secure life from each and every threat posed to an otherwise progressive existence — that its global imaginary could ever hold sway. It is no coincidence, then, that the dominant strategic paradigm for liberals is global human security. What could therefore be termed the liberal problematic of security naturally registers as a liberal biopolitics of security, which, in the process of promoting certain forms of life, equally demands a reconceptualization of war. Ultimately, not every life lives up to productive expectations let alone shows its compliance.
In a number of crucial ways, this approach offers both a theoretical and empirical challenge to the familiar international relations scripts, which have tended to either valorize liberalism’s visionary potential or simply castigate its misguided idealism. Perhaps the most important of these is to insist upon a rewriting of the history of liberalism from the perspective of war. Admittedly, there is much work to be done here. Not least, there is a need to show with greater historical depth, critical purpose, and intellectual rigor how liberal war (both externally and internally) has subsequently informed its juridical commitments and not vice versa. Here I am invariably provoking the well-rehearsed “Laws of War” sermon, which I believe more accurately should be rephrased as the “Wars of Law.” Nevertheless, despite this pressing need to rewrite the liberal encounter in language whose familiarity would be capable of penetrating the rather conservative but equally esoteric specialist field of International Relations, sufficient contemporary grounds already exist which enable us to provide a challenging account of global civil war from the perspective of liberal biopolitical rule. Michael Dillon and Julian Reid’s The Liberal Way of War encapsulates these sentiments, with the following abridged passage worth quoting:
A biopolitical discourse of species existence is also a biopolitical discourse of species endangerment. As a form of rule whose referent object is that of species existence, the liberal way of rule is simultaneously also a problematization of fear and danger involving threats to the peace and prosperity of the species. Hence its allied need, in pursuing the peace and prosperity of the species, to make war on whatever threatens it. That is the reason why liberal peacemaking is lethal. Its violence is a necessary corollary of the aporetic character of its mission to foster the peace and prosperity of the species ... There is, then, a martial face to liberal peace. The liberal way of rule is contoured by the liberal way of war ... Liberalism is therefore obliged to exercise a strategic calculus of necessary killing, in the course of which calculus ought to be able to say how much killing is enough ... [However] it has no better way of saying how much killing is enough, once it starts killing to make life live, than does the geopolitical strategic calculus of necessary killing.
This brings me to the problem of inside/outside. It is possible to account for the conflation of the two by acknowledging the onset of a global political imaginary that no longer permits any relationship with the outside. One could then support the kind of hypothesis you mention, which, rather than affirming the best of the enlightened liberal tradition, actually correlates the hollowing out of liberal values to the inability to carve out any meaningful distinctions between inside/outside, peace/war, friend/enemy, good/evil, truth/falsehood, and so forth. But this approach would no doubt either re-enforce the militaristic paradigm or raise further critical doubts about the postmodern/post-structural turn in political thought, and it is misleading. The collapse of these meaningful distinctions is not inimical to liberal rationality. To the contrary, the erosion of these great dialectical interplays now actually provides liberalism with its very generative principles of formation. I felt that you began to explore this in Empire by noting how Foucault’s idea of biopolitics was inadequate to our complex, adaptive, and emergent times. To rectify this, Deleuze’s notion of “societies of control” was