ABSTRACT
Having developed a novel way of looking at the debate over aggression in previous chapters, this chapter describes the debate with fresh eyes and provides new insights into processes that reach above the state to the international community and below the state to the individual in the name of humanity. It is a genealogy tracing the notion of aggression leading up to and immediately after the Second World War and as reflected by debate around the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The argument presented is that the legality or illegality of the use of force presumes a legal order as a way of life to be protected by lawful force deployed, if required, against unlawful violence. This order foregrounds a right to peace (and concomitant duty to keep the peace) by backgrounding a ‘right to war’ which inheres in the nation state through individuals by the operation of law. In other words, the Foucauldian notion that the government’s function in modernity is ‘to make live’ is currently achieved through legal intervention by way of correction, punishment and death deployed violently against life on behalf of life (Dillon 2007: 7, 11).
