War in the 21st century as a tool of the imperial control of planetary “periphery”

Abstract

The paper analyses how the (mis)use of the concept of international society in the context of the US and other Western countries` foreign policies legitimises an alleged defensive role of the interventionist imperial policy towards rogue, weak and failed states, as well as towards various non-state actors who contest the universality of liberal order. The starting assumption is that the asymmetric character of armed conflicts in the late 20th and early 21st century - combined with notions of international society, democratic peace, and world division into the ?civilised? (liberal) centre and ?uncivilised? periphery - has conditioned the planning and waging wars as disciplinary tools of the Western imperial control policy which is asserted over planetary periphery. The analysis focuses on several indicators which reveal how the methodology of the policing, the criminal justice system and the penalty system is embedded into the ontology of military interventions pursued by the United States, alone or within ad hoc coalitions with other Western and/or regional powers. The author concludes that war as a social practice lost in the early 21st century its traditional ontological features by assuming the structural characteristics of crime control policy, which caused the disruption of the ethical framework in the discursive and practical treatment of hostile states and their soldiers and non-state actors.