Policing the Globe

Understandings of war — its shape, form, character and content — are conditioned by conceptualisations and narratives of social and political space. As such, the history of writing on war is also a history of spatiality, expressed through a particular circumstance and practice: that of war. Space and spatiality, in other words, contributes significantly to the intellectual scaffolding upon which understandings, narratives and discourses of war rests. In the attempt to explain how and why the discourse of war metaphorically ‘as’ policing has emerged, this chapter accounts for the shift from an early modern spatial imagination and the conception of politics and war promoted by it, to contemporary understandings of space/spatiality, and its bearing on the discourse of war as policing, metaphorically understood.