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

Abstract

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.