Wars, Laws, Rights and the Making of Global Insecurities

This opening chapter explains what it means to undertake a political analysis of global insecurity which foregrounds the ways in which these insecurities are produced and sustained through struggles over war, international law, and human rights. It suggests that this kind of political analysis is a very serious matter because these global insecurities may well result in the end of almost all life on our planet and, as such, ought to prompt some deep reflection on what it means to be human. This chapter situates this political analysis within the politico-cultural project of modernity and its penchant for a reason before introducing the concepts found in the work of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Bruno Latour, which help make sense of these insecurities. It closes by signalling the organisation of the book’s central argument.

The phenomenon of war is a foundational problem for analysts of contemporary world affairs, not in the philosophical sense that it speaks to some theory of knowledge, as foundationalists like René Descartes would have us do, but rather in the sense that it is a condition of possibility that gives rise to the modernist project and continues to shape its key characteristics—namely, the states-based system, capitalism and the widespread use of reason as an end unto itself—as those characteristics, in turn, reshape war. When analysts provide accounts of war, in all its complexity, they encounter significant empirical obstacles and conceptual difficulties. As types of political violence, state aggression and armed conflict eclipse crimes against humanity, genocide and transnational terrorism in terms of human casualties, material destruction and the potential for producing systemic transformation across the international order, though each of these constitutes an enduring and unruly problem for those who seek to govern contemporary world affairs. Yet can war, a much-contested concept, really be problematized in such a way that divorces it from the more mundane practices of everyday political life? In this chapter, I canvass several concepts of war before proposing a novel way of thinking about this phenomenon that differs from those conventional approaches which treat “war” as a synonym for either “state aggression” or “armed conflict,” or both. I draw on Michel Foucault’s notion of silent war to propose that politics is best understood as an extension of the use of armed force before suggesting that the modernist project is the continuation of politico-cultural war. I conclude by warning that those individuals and groups struggling among one another to govern contemporary world affairs keep questions of war separate from the routine politics of international life as means of demonstrating the value of their own roles and responsibilities and of preserving their associated privileges.

International law not only prohibits and, in some cases, criminalizes certain uses of armed force but also authorizes, and imposes limits on, the use of such force by states and state agents. While these laws of political violence are often treated as separate systems or branches of public international law by legal scholars and practitioners, they are, perhaps from a politico-analytical perspective, better understood as artifacts produced by relatively distinct, but at times interconnecting, social fields in the sense meant by Pierre Bourdieu. These fields tend to emerge and evolve through a transversal dynamic that occurs between horizontal interstate conduct and vertical state reach, a dynamic spurred on through the drafting and negotiation of certain instruments of international law, the implementation and administration of those instruments by state parties, and the monitoring and enforcement of state compliance relating to any duties and responsibilities flowing from those instruments. In this chapter, I offer a brief overview of four fields of law that aim to regulate unruly political violence: namely, the general prohibition on the aggressive use of armed force in international affairs; international humanitarian law; international criminal law and transnational criminal law. I warn of the dangers associated with the misuse of various instruments of international law, arguing that the trouble with international law is that the key struggles over them are often determined by configurations of power that are external to those fields.

The rise of human rights is connected to wars of global significance while the value placed on those emergent rights is recognized in international law, especially the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948. In this penultimate chapter, I situate the promotion and protection of human rights within the modernist project before refocusing my discussion at the scale of the human species during the epoch of the Anthropocene, which is defined in large part by the consequences flowing from humanity’s untrammeled and harmful dominion over nature. With an eye to an ever-darkening horizon, I acknowledge that the politico-cultural project of modernity is based on, and sustained by, routines of domination and exploitation, which manifest not only as violence among groups, communities and societies but also as violence used by humans against other non-human species, plant life and the environment more generally. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s critique of political ecology, I argue that the tragedy of human rights unfolds as actions, taken in the name of these rights, place humanity in ever greater peril precisely because such actions are driven by an anthropocentric commitment that crowds out regard of, and care for, other life forms and life systems. It is a tragedy, somewhat reminiscent of the tragedy of the commons, not only because the human suffering accompanying the aggressive use of armed force in the service of these rights is avoidable but also because humanity itself is imperiled by the pursuit of those rights. I end this chapter by pleading for the right to life of non-human species to be taken seriously and more strongly respected in conduct of future world affairs.

This concluding chapter not only summarises the preceding argument but also situates the political analysis at the heart of that argument within the academic discipline of International Relations. The chapter calls for disciplinary IR to broaden its focus beyond its current preoccupation with states, economies, and societies in such a way that transforms itself into the misanthropic study of contemporary world affairs. This transformation would require many practitioners of the discipline to recognise their own callous disregard for the politics of non-human species, which reflects and enacts an entrenched anthropocentricism. It remains to be seen if the widespread extinction of life systems and life forms is a catastrophe sufficiently grave to prompt a radical rethinking of the practices that constitute humanity.