Conclusion

Investigating the preoccupation in the first decade of the twenty-first century with actors depicted as ‘criminal’ in war — the ‘terrorists’, ‘warlords’ and ‘insurgents’ of this world — was one of the original impetuses for this book. When scholars like Michael Howard or John Mueller asserted that war ‘no longer existed’, that all that remained was ‘criminal activity’ that the liberal world had a duty to ‘police’, in what context were they making those claims? ‘Policing’ does not make sense on the international level: there is no clear authority — no Leviathan — whose laws can be enacted or policed, yet some general climate of opinion appeared to allow Howard, Mueller and others to invoke the language of policing. Their language was mirrored by leaders who championed the vision of a ‘post-political’ world, where liberal internationalism was seen as unchallenged, other than by ‘fundamentalist’ opponents. Throughout this book, it has been argued that the policing referred to both in the mainstream academic literature and by key liberal leaders, notably in the US and the UK but also in a wider liberal elite, is a metaphorical kind of policing — the imagination of the use of military force not as a coercive, destructive force, but as order-creating, directed against those who create ‘disorder’, whose action is not deemed ‘political’ but obstructive of a general ‘progression’ towards a liberal world order.