The Liberal Way of War. Killing to Make Life Live

Global Horizons

by Michael Dillon, Julian Reid

The liberal way of war and the liberal way of rule are correlated; this book traces that correlation to liberalism's original commitment to 'making life live'. Committed to making life live, liberalism is committed to waging war on behalf of life, specifically to promote the biopolitical life of species being; what the book calls 'the biohuman'. Tracking the advent of the age of life-as-information - complex, adaptive and emergent - while contrasting biopolitics with geopolitics, the book details how and why the liberal way of rule wages war on the human in the cause of instituting the biohuman. Contingent and emergent, the biohuman is however continuously also becoming-dangerous to itself. It therefore requires constant surveillance to anticipate the threats it presents to its own flourishing. The book explains how, in making life live, liberal rule finds its expression, today, in making the biohuman live the emergency of its emergence. Thus does liberal peace become the continuation of war by other means. Just as the information and molecular revolutions have combined to transform liberal military-strategic thinking so also has it contributed to the discourse of global danger through which global liberal governance currently legitimates the liberal way of war.

Genres: International Relations, Philosophy

208 pages, Hardcover

First published February 23, 2007

About the author

Michael Dillon is Emeritus Professor of International Politics at the University of Lancaster, UK

Dillon researches the problematisation of politics, security and war from the perspective of continental philosophy. He has been especially interested in what happens to the problematisation of security when security discourses and technologies take life rather than sovereign territoriality as their referent object (www.keele.ac.uk/biopoliticsofsecurity). He has also written extensively on security and war, international political theory, continental philosophy,and cultural research. Since security is foundational to all understandings of the political, he also researches the relation between continental thought and political theory; concentrating increasingly on the philosophy of the event, the politics of encounter and more recently divine violence and political theology drawing on the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Ranciere.

Reviews

[Mathew Davies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dillon and Read deploy new theoretical paradigms to interpret the liberal rationality and therefore exectution of war. They explore genealogical design of what they call the biohuman, a being who has become infomationalized and therefore is in-formation. The securitisation of the biohuman, who is living the emergency of his emergence, can be framed in an era obssed with securing the infrastructures of liberal being.

This is a book which a raeder will do well to have scoped out the works of Foucault, Virilio and other contemporary academics such as Mark Duffield or James der derian. This is a book which is clearly written, yet it does take hard work, concentration and therefore serious engagements to yield its messages, proofs and intrigue.

In summary, a much needed discourse is a suffocating discipline.

spot on!

[Readingbooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

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