Liberal Way of War

£52.99

Liberal Way of War

Killing to Make Life Live

Political science and theory International relations Political campaigning and advertising Social and political philosophy

Authors: Michael Dillon, Julian Reid

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Collection: Global Horizons

Language: English

Published by: Routledge

Published on: 20th February 2009

Format: LCP-protected ePub

Size: 372 Kb

ISBN: 9781135926953


Introduction

The liberal way of war and the liberal way of rule are correlated; this book traces that correlation to liberalism's original commitment to making life live. Committed to making life live, liberalism is committed to waging war on behalf of life, specifically to promote the biopolitical life of species being; what the book calls the biohuman.

Biopolitics and the Biohuman

Tracking the advent of the age of life-as-information - complex, adaptive and emergent - while contrasting biopolitics with geopolitics, the book details how and why the liberal way of rule wages war on the human in the cause of instituting the biohuman. Contingent and emergent, the biohuman is however continuously also becoming-dangerous to itself. It therefore requires constant surveillance to anticipate the threats it presents to its own flourishing.

Making Life Live and the Emergence of the Biohuman

The book explains how, in making life live, liberal rule finds its expression, today, in making the biohuman live the emergency of its emergence. Thus does liberal peace become the continuation of war by other means. Just as the information and molecular revolutions have combined to transform liberal military-strategic thinking so also has it contributed to the discourse of global danger through which global liberal governance currently legitimates the liberal way of war.

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