War and Peace, or Governmentality as the Ruin of Democracy

Abstract

We live in deeply troubling times. The so-called war on terror, inaugurated by the United States and Great Britain after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, has brought about the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and, with Iran in its sights, this most inglorious of alliances has reinstalled the imperialist project at the heart of international relations. As Hardt and Negri have persuasively argued, the Iraq conflict pivots on the issue of governmentality, and in particular the exercise of global power, the power of empire, in the name of democracy. What, we might ask, is the purpose of governmental intervention into the affairs of individuals and states? Under what conditions can these forays be justified? And what are the costs as well as the benefits of such actions?³ Terrorism is a notoriously slippery category of action performed for political ends; and one of the most horrifying of many aspects of the war on terror is that it presupposes a literal (and all too often physical) manifestation of ‘terror’ can be isolated and identified even though there is no received consensus at the national or international levels about how to define terrorism, in terms of either the activities involved in committing terrorist acts or the intentions that might motivate them.⁴ A war on terror is, in other words, an ‘uninterrupted conflict’ and a ‘constant war’ because it has no referent — neither a fixed object nor a precise target.

How, when, and in what way did people begin to imagine that it is war that functions in power relations, that an uninterrupted conflict undermines peace, and that the civil order is basically an order of battle?

Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended¹

Empire rules over a global order that is not only fractured by internal divisions and hierarchies but also plagued by perpetual war. The state of war is inevitable in Empire, and war functions as an instrument of rule. Today’s imperial peace, Pax Imperii, like that in the times of ancient Rome, is a false pretence that really presides over a state of constant war.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude²