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War Without End(s): Grounding the Discourse of `Global War'

Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster, UK, D.Chandler{at}Westminster.ac.uk

This article seeks to explain the limits of critical discourses of `global war' and biopolitical framings of `global conflict' that have arisen in response to the globalization of security discourses in the post-Cold War era. The central theoretical insight offered is that `global war' should not be understood in the framework of contested struggles to reproduce and extend the power of regulatory control. `Global war' appears `unlimited' and unconstrained precisely because it lacks the instrumental, strategic framework of `war' understood as a political-military technique. For this reason, critical analytical framings of global conflict, which tend to rely on the `scaling up' of Michel Foucault's critique of biopolitics and upon Carl Schmitt's critique of universal claims to protect the `human', elide the specificity of the international today. Today's `wars of choice', fought under the banner of the `values' of humanitarian intervention or the `global war on terror', are distinguished precisely by the fact that they cannot be grasped as strategically framed political conflicts.

Key Words: global war • deterritorialized struggle • Carl Schmitt • biopolitics

Security Dialogue, Vol. 40, No. 3, 243-262 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0967010609336204


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