War, Police and Assemblages of Intervention

Abstract

This is a vital and timely collection. These essays work superbly well together to unpack one of the deadliest terms of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries -'security forces' -and they do so with that rarest of combinations, intellectual creativity and substantive depth.

War/Law/Space Notes toward a legal geography of war

“…Beyond the terror war, and the formal inter-state conflicts that long served as the template for Western concepts of war and its associated legalities, there are many different kinds of war, including civil wars, cold wars, undeclared wars, metaphorical wars, even "military operations other than war" (MOOTW). Mark Neocleous and others have urged us to see the 'war on terror' as the current incarnation of a broader, and longstanding, project of liberal order-building that unites the international and domestic spheres and fuses war with police powers (Bachmann et al, 2014;Neocleous, 2014). Even in the post-9/11 period, there are numerous conflicts that are not readily reducible to the terror war, as in Darfur and the Congo; Russia's incursions into Georgia and now in Ukraine; the Cold War hangover on the Korean peninsula; or the low-intensity wars of Colombia and Mexico against FARC and los narcos, respectively.…”