ABSTRACT
The ‘global war against terrorism’ is the overarching rationale, if not the main motivation, of two major, international, but US-led, military interventions in Afghanistan since 2001, and in Iraq since 2003. These antiterrorist interventions, although they both have been justified discursively or legally by ‘exceptional circumstances’, have in many ways challenged and changed our common understanding of the place of interventionist behaviour in international politics. But what is less frequently underscored, is that these interventions have seen major developments in military practices on the ground. The shift from ‘wars between states’ to ‘wars within states’ has highlighted the importance of the relation between intervening forces and local populations: the relational dimension of the political seems to prevail over the purely strategic relation of interstate war. One could have asked whether we are talking about wars at all (in the historical sense of the term), if it were not for the justification of these interventions by a ‘global war’, the long-term implications of which are still difficult to assess. Therefore any political analysis of these interventions would have to start with the concept of war. There are two ways of grasping the relation between the political and war.
