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The Government of War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2014

Dina Rizk Khoury
Dina Rizk Khoury*
Affiliation:
Department of History, George Washington University, Washington, D.C.; e-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

I write this piece as Iraq, following Syria, descends into a civil war that is undermining the post–World War I state system and reconfiguring regional and transnational networks of mobilization and instrumentalizations of violence and identity formation. That the Middle East has come to this moment is not an inevitable product of the artificiality of national borders and the precariousness of the state system. It is important to avoid this linear narrative of inevitability, with its attendant formulations of the Middle East as a repository of a large number of absences, and instead to locate the current wars in a specific historical time: the late and post–Cold War eras, marked by the agendas of the Washington Consensus and the globalization of neoliberal discourses; the privatization of the developmental and welfare state; the institutional devolution and multiplication of security services; and the entrenchment of new forms of colonial violence and rule in Israel and Palestine and on a global scale. The conveners of this roundtable have asked us to reflect on the technopolitics of war in the context of this particular moment and in light of the pervasiveness of new governmentalities of war. What I will do in this short piece is reflect on the heuristic and methodological possibilities of the study of war as a form of governance, or what I call the “government of war,” in light of my own research and writing on Iraq.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 4: World War I , November 2014 , pp. 791 - 793
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

NOTES

1 For a discussion of some of these approaches, see Neep, Daniel, “War, State Formation, and Culture,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (2013): 795–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Barnett, Michael, Confronting the Costs of War: Military Power, State, and Society in Egypt and Israel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Heydemann, Steven, ed., War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar. For a more systematic engagement with the effects of expertise, bureaucracies, and industries of war on the nature of state power, see Edgerton, David, Warfare State: Britain 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

2 Kalyvas, Stathis, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wood, Elizabeth, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Straus, Scott, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. I thank Julia Choucair Vizoco for recommending these books.

3 Gregory, Derek, “The Everywhere War,” Geographical Journal 177 (2011): 238–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)Google Scholar.

4 See the roundtable “Theorizing Violence,” in International Journal of Middle East Studies 45 (2013): 791–812.

5 Kimmerling, Baruch, The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society and the Military (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Gordon, Neve, Israel's Occupation (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2009)Google Scholar; and Weizman, Eyal, Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (New York: Verso Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

6 Khoury, Dina Rizk, Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am indebted to the work of Foucault, Timothy Mitchell, and their various interlocutors who have attempted to use and reformulate the concept of governmentality to write about war as politics and the politics of war. They are too numerous to list in this short essay.

7 Achille Mbembe has characterized this as “necropolitics,” or the “contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death.” See Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Meinjtes, Libby, Public Culture 15 (2003): 11–40Google Scholar.