War in the 21st Century

Introductions: Introduce yourself by telling about time when were you most personally threatened or afraid. Please do not sharing anything that you are not comfortable with.

Did you react in ways that surprised you? Do you make any connections between your experience and the experience of other people in violent conflict elsewhere? How do you think the role of personal experience should influence the way people study and think about peace?

What would peace look like with each of these enemies? Avishai Margalit: Three Enemies Iraq/Weapons of Mass Destruction World Terrorism Militant Fundamentalism What would peace look like with each of these enemies?

First lecture: “You can’t talk about peace by talking about war in a loud voice.” But , what can you learn about peace from looking at war?

Why do wars break out? There are groups that find the current political situation intolerable. These groups also have contending visions of what the political situation should look like in the future.

There are increasingly war that are not political. Lack political objective Absence of political ideology Lack of a political center or focal point

Important and debatable claims : Iraq represents a political entity that cannot be deterred and constrained and thus fundamentally undermines international order. World terrorism poses a new and dangerous threat. Militant fundamentalism offers a serious countervailing challenge to human rights, democracy, and free markets.

The Concept of Empire Empire is not old style imperialism: extension of the nation-state into other territories. Empire is the new emerging structure of international order.

Decline of nation-state as the bounded locale of freedom, prosperity, and stability Rise of human rights, free markets, democracy Decline of centered and territorialized authority Rise of global markets, global finance, global modes of production Declining legitimacy of national sovereign, non-intervention, and self-defense Rise of a new sense of legitimacy Sovereignty as responsibility to the international order Intervention as a function of the exception War as police action

Empire as a concept is an emerging form of political international order. Empire dissolves boundaries. Empire is an order that establishes the world as it ought to be. Empire operates on all social registers. Empire is an expression of perpetual and universal peace although it is bathed in blood.

World Terrorism Terrorism does not make military sense. War is not waged by armies but by social networks of terrorists, guerrillas, bandits, and robbers that are often internal. Terrorism seems to be everywhere. War is a low-intensity feud because there is things are so intermingled that you can’t really fight the enemy. Terrorism is nowhere. War is not with a foe, but with terror and violence as a form of political struggle.

What is the language of peace? Human Rights, Democracy, Free Markets OR What?

The question of empire is not whose empire, but what kind of empire.

Nature of Empire Locke  State of nature: war of all against all Hobbes  State of nature: war of all against all  Solution: Leviathan  Militarized approach Locke  State of nature: superabundance, but spoilage  Solution: money and the need to enter into civil society to protect possessions  Global constitutionalism