ABSTRACT
When President George W. Bush declared his ‘war on terror’ in the wake of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, he made it clear that this was to be a global war. ‘We will fight them over there,’ as he later explained, ‘so that we don’t have to fight them in the United States of America.’ This military project has been wired to neoliberal globalization in many ways: the armature of accumulation by dispossession, visible in the stripping and reappropriation of strategic sectors of the Iraqi economy by foreign capitals; a sort of flexible militarism whose ‘derivative wars’ trace arabesques between the predatory logics of securitization in global battle spaces and global financial markets; and a brutal geographing of the borders between ‘insured life’ and ‘non-insured life’ throughout the planet (Harvey 2003; Martin 2007; Duffield 2008). The project has also seen the world’s most powerful military machine, transformed through a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), forced to engage in so-called ‘new wars’ fought by militias, insurgents, and terrorists in the breaches of former empires and the ruins of postcolonial states. This conjunction has deepened the investments of late modern war in globalization (and vice versa). The RMA was promoted as a means for the United States to project ‘full spectrum dominance’ around the globe, and is in its turn part of a global trade in arms and military technology, while the new wars are fought by para-state, post-national, and transnational forces that are enmeshed in what Nordstrom calls a ‘shadow globalization’ (Bauman 2001; Kaldor 2006; Münkler 2005; Nordstrom 2004).
