Current revelations about the secret US‐NSA program, PRISM, have confirmed the large‐scale mass surveillance of the telecommunication and electronic messages of governments, companies, and citizens, including the United States' closest allies in Europe and Latin America. The transnational ramifications of surveillance call for a re‐evaluation of contemporary world politics' practices. The debate cannot be limited to the United States versus the rest of the world or to surveillance versus privacy; much more is at stake. This collective article briefly describes the specificities of cyber mass surveillance, including its mix of the practices of intelligence services and those of private companies providing services around the world. It then investigates the impact of these practices on national security, diplomacy, human rights, democracy, subjectivity, and obedience.

War in late modern politics is a technology of control. While its violent manifestations -for example, the invasion and occupation of Iraq -are directly felt by the population targeted, the practices associated with that war and the wider so-called war against terrorism have a far wider span of operations that encompasses spaces across the globe. This article provides an understanding of global war as a distinctly late modern form of control. It shows that the practices constitutive of global war are best understood in terms of a matrix, incorporating states and their bureaucracies, as well as non-state agents, and targeting at once states, particular communities and individuals. The matrix of war operates in the name of humanity; however, it is ultimately this humanity as a whole that comes to be the subject of its operations of global control. The implications, as the article argues, are monumental for democratic government and the spaces available for scrutiny and dissent. L ATE MODERN TRANSFORMATIONS are often conceived in terms of the sociopolitical and economic manifestations of change emergent from a globalized arena. What is less apparent is how late modernity as a distinct era has impacted upon our conceptions of the social sphere, our lived experience, and our reflections upon the discourses and institutions that form the taken-for-granted backdrop of the known and the knowable. The paradigmatic certainties of modernity -the state, citizenship, democratic space, humanity's infinite capacity for progress, the defeat of dogma and the culmination of modernity's apotheosis in the free-wheeling market placehave in the late modern era come face to face with uncertainty, unpredictability and the gradual erosion of the modern belief that we could indeed simply move on, assisted by science and technology, towards a condition where instrumental rationality would become the linchpin of government and human interaction irrespective of difference. Progress came to be associated with peace, and both were constitutively linked to the universal, the global, the human, and therefore the cosmopolitan. What shatters such

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The absence of the international as a distinct socio‐political sphere in Michel Foucault's work forms a major part of the postcolonial critique of his writings. The absence of the international has a number of consequences for any critical engagement with Foucault in the context of global politics. The significance of these consequences becomes apparent when we consider Foucault's analytics of war and power, situate these in relation to the particularity of the international, consider the very pertinent critiques of Foucault emanating from postcolonial writings, and finally re‐locate Foucault in the international not, as is the predominant approach in International Relations, through the application of Foucaultian concepts, but through Foucault's own political writings on the non‐western arena, specifically his engagement with the Iranian Revolution. While limited in their scope, an evaluation of these writings appears to vindicate postcolonial critiques of Foucault, though with some revealing qualifications.