Suchergebnisse

The purpose of this article is to consider what war might look like as an institution of international hierarchy. This might not seem all that challenging because we have a long history of pre-Westphalian warfare to draw on. The first section of the article examines that history to demonstrate how war was gradually transformed from an institution of hierarchy to an institution of international society. The second and third sections of the article are perhaps more challenging because they unsettle English School perspectives on war. This is not simply a reference to the use in the third section of Carl Schmitt to help us understand the evolution of irregular warfare and what that means for normative relationships between combatants. It is also a reference to the argument of the fourth section, which is that the legal regime advanced by the United States in the war on terror in effect globalises the legal hierarchy of civil war. This argument is made with reference to the Military Commissions Act and the case of Omar Khadr and Mohamed Jawad. The article concludes by noting that it is, under Obama, more likely that al Qaeda operatives will be tried in a civilian court and less likely that the detainee will be subjected to aggressive interrogation techniques. Yet to the extent that the 2009 Military Commissions Act holds open the possibility of prosecuting enemy combatants simply for engaging in hostilities, contemporary US practice continues to challenge our understanding of war as an institution of anarchical society.

AbstractThis article examines the US response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks using Carl Schmitt's concept of the exception. It argues that the Bush administration's response is consistent with Schmitt's view, which argued that US policy continued the historical practice of drawing lines that separated 'civilisation' from zones of exception where the normal laws governing warfare did not apply. This suggests that the state of exception declared after 9/11 is not contingent on the rise and fall of the terrorist threat, rather it is the latest manifestation of 'global linear thinking' and therefore a permanent feature of American hegemony. However, the article does not accept this pessimistic conclusion. US policy since 9/11 fits squarely with a Schmittian explanation only because conservative nationalists have used the war on terror to help reconstruct a sense of American 'exceptionalism'. An alternative reading of how American liberalism should respond to terrorism can be found in the manner in which the Bush administration's policy was rejected by the US Supreme Court.