humanitarianism. Indeed, as you suggest, if we accept that this changing political terrain demanded a rewriting of war itself — away from geopolitical territorial struggles that once monopolized the strategic field, towards biopolitical life struggles whose unrelenting wars were now to be consciously fought for the politics of all life itself — then the political stakes could not be higher. For not only does a biopolitical ascendency force a reconceptualization of the war effort — to include those forces which are less militaristic and more developmental (one can see this best reflected today in the now familiar security mantra: “war by other means”) — but also, through this process, a new paradigm appears that makes it possible to envisage, for the first time in human history, a global state of war or a civil war on a planetary scale.
While it was rather easy to find support for this non-State paradigm during the 1990s — especially when the indigenous started writing of the onset of a fourth world war that was enveloping the planet and consuming everybody within — some have argued that the picture became more clouded with the invasion of Iraq, which was simply geo-politics as usual. The familiar language that has been routinely deployed here would be of US exceptionalism. My concern is not really to attend to this revival of an outdated theoretical persuasion. I agree with your sentiments in Multitude that this account can be convincingly challenged with relative ease. Foucault has done enough himself to show that liberal war does not demand a strategic trade-off between geopolitical and biopolitical aspirations. They can be mutually re-enforcing, even, or perhaps more to the point, especially within a global liberal imaginary. And what is more, we should not lose sight of the fact that it was when major combat operations were effectively declared over, that is when the borderlands truly ignited. My concerns today are more attuned to the post-Bush era, which, going back to the original War on Terror’s life-centric remit, is once again calling for the need to step up the humanitarian war effort in order to secure the global peace. Indeed, perhaps more worrying still, given that the return of the Kantian-inspired humanitarian sensibility can now be presented in an altogether more globally enlightened fashion, offering a marked and much needed departure from the destructive but ultimately powerless (in the positive sense of the word) self-serving neo-con. What do you feel have been the most important changes in the paradigm since you first proposed the idea? Is it possible to detect a more intellectually vociferous shift taking place, which is rendering all forms of political difference to be truly dangerous on a planetary scale? Would you argue that war is still the permanent social relation of global rule?
MICHAEL HARDT: The notion of a global civil war starts from the question of sovereignty. Traditionally, war is conceived (in the field of international relations, for instance, or in international 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
