The war on terror is commonly characterized as a fundamentally different kind of war from more traditional armed conflict. Furthermore, it has been argued that, in this new kind of war, different rules, both moral and legal, must apply. In the first part of this paper, three practices endemic to the war on terror -- torture, assassination, and enemy combatancy status -- are identified as exceptions to traditional norms. The second part of the paper uses these examples to (...) motivate a generalized account of exceptionalism; a taxonomy of different exceptionalisms is derived, including temporal, spatial, and group-based exceptionalisms. The third part of the paper considers the ethical status of exceptionalism, paying particular attention to the group-based exceptionalisms that are argued to be prevalent in the war on terror. It is concluded that there is nothing inherently wrong with group-based exceptionalism and, furthermore, that the proper locus of ethical evaluation lies not with the norms that are being excepted, but rather with the groups that are being excepted from them. (shrink)

The War on Terror is an ambiguous term that has been used to circumvent the international laws of warfare. Instead of moving toward peace by way of limited warfare, and instead of preserving the independence of war and peace, War on Terror advances by masking itself in a fog of peace; it proliferates by overlapping the logic of “war-time” and “peace-time” operations. The fog of peace—as it shall herein be called—is a condition wherein the uncertainty qua “fog” of (...) war,2 along with its militarized logic, overlaps with and eventually replaces civilian peace-time-and-spaces. The War on Terror is thus not a limiting of war by way of the conventional modern mechanisms of international law and diplomacy; it is a continuation of war by other means, including the use covert, often black-boxed methods of information-capture and surveillance. Globally, states are expanding the powers of intelligence organs and deploying covert mass surveillance programs in the name of counter-terrorism. In this manner, counter-terrorism policies become instruments enabling states to become predatory, especially in relation to civilians. Under the banner of fighting terrorism, peace-time has unwittingly become colonized by the logic of war. (shrink)

States that the war on terror cannot be truly understood without investigating the legitimacy of modernity, the challenge that religion presents to modernization, and the post-colonial predicament from which Islamist reaction arises. This book illuminates the war on terror in light of these issues.

The movement against enforced disappearances has been exceptionally strong in Pakistan. It has highlighted the extralegal activities of state actors and has prompted the judiciary to question powerful agencies regarding their conduct. With the help of historical analysis, this article argues that the movement has grown out of the reactions generated by War on Terror in Pakistan. The state’s stance to override human rights for combating terrorism is challenged by a movement which is largely anti-War on Terror and (...) which is strengthened by historical and ideological factors as well as by respect for human rights. The movement against enforced disappearances had thus paved the ground for important debates on human rights in Pakistan. (shrink)

Looking back at the "War on Terror" and its policies, actions, and the violence that followed, this book analyzes the resulting changes in international power structures and the relationship between citizens and their representatives. It defines our shortcomings in opposing this type of violence by demonstrating how the notion of legitimate violence has been broadened. -/- The impact of the "War on Terror" on the public view of Liberalism is explored, as well as its effects on the role (...) of state authorities in our lives. Thus, this book names the lessons we ought to learn from the actions taken against terrorist organizations. (shrink)

"These photographs were taken at Oak Park Heights Prison in Minnesota in 2005... do not include any non-American prisoners or any terrorism suspects and have nothing to do with the war on terror"--About the photographs, p. [70].

Though the recent election of American President Barack Obama and his signing of the executive order to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay signals a considerable shift away from the policies of the Bush era, the lessons to be learned from the war on terror will remain relevant and necessary for many years to come. In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States government approved interrogation tactics for enemy combatant detainees that could be defined as torture, which was outlawed (...) in Europe in the eighteenth century as well as prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations Convention Against Torture. In conjunction with these policies, the Bush administration vocally defended torture as a necessary tool in its war on terror. In _Torture and the War on Terror_,_ _Tzvetan_ _Todorov argues that the use of the terms “war” and “terror” dehumanize the enemy and permit treatment that would otherwise be impermissible. He examines the implications and corrupting impact of the attempt to impose “good” through violence and the attempt to spread democratic values by unethical means. Todorov asks: Can violence overcome violence? Does the need to protect one’s own country justify violating human rights? Invalidating one by one the political and ethical arguments in favor of torture, Todorov likens institutional torture to a cancer that is eroding our society and undermining the very fundamental democratic ideas of justice and right. __ _Torture and the War on Terror _is a significant work in ethics, human rights, and political and social history by one of the world’s leading intellectuals, and its arguments will be influential in shaping our policies to come. (shrink)

Much of recent American history was influenced by the events of September 11, 2001. U.S. foreign policy during the two terms of President George W. Bush was shaped by five public texts issued within a few days following the terrorist attacks. This article reviews some of the opinions and critical observations on the president’s rhetoric during that timeframe and attempts to provide a fresh perspective. The analysis seeks to avoid ideological and political considerations and focus on the actual language. It (...) draws conclusions based on statistics, discourse strategy and semantics. A particular interest is reserved for the concept that defined subsequent political developments, which is the war on terror . My intention is to show how this choice was made, the manner in which the phrase evolved into its final form, and why it represented the most appropriate frame in terms of semantic arguments. (shrink)

Taking a cue from the appalling incidents of September 2001, these essays explore the ostensible reasons behind the American war on terrorism, apologize for the pre-emptive nature of the war itself and address the concept of terrorism in the moral discourse of humanity.

This paper presents a review of Masculinity and the War on Terror by Bonnie Mann. It examines Mann's multi-leveled analysis of the ways that gender processes operate to hook us into militarism at deep levels. It examines Mann's analysis of how gender processes organized various forms of torture and violence involved in the so-called war on terror.

Analyzes the reason violence, war and terrorism are evil. Definition of violence; Discussion on the question of higher purposes in the context of war; Description of terrorists' acts as war crimes; Arguments for a humanist approach to violence.

Let me begin with definition. Many observers have pointed out that despite the fact that for over three decades, “terrorism” has been deemed a threat to the civilized world, to democratic values, or to “our way of life,” and despite the fact that our country is now engaged in a “war on terror,” there is no universally agreed upon definition of terrorism—not even the various agencies within the U.S. Government are agreed—and, hence, there is no clarity about what we (...) are warring against. (shrink)

The main argument in this article is that the Australian government in power from 1996 to November 2007 failed women's domestic security by denying the central policy role of women's organizations in the struggle against domestic violence and by successfully expunging public debate on gender issues in Australian governance, while participating in the ‘war on terror’ to guard national security. In bringing together a discussion about the war on terror and the importance of feminism for women's security, key (...) issues about feminism, race and gender are considered. This article also explores the prevalence of violence against women and the social implications of the lack of leadership in public debate about the gendered nature of violence against women. Under the Australian government led by Prime Minister John Howard that gained power in 1996 and was defeated in 2007, women's organizations lost financial support and women's policy infrastructure was decimated. Violence against women, however, continued to increase, reaffirming women's place in Australian society as insecure and dangerous. After more than 30 years of struggle to maintain domestic violence and sexual assault as serious social policy problems, provide services, support and advocacy for women who are victims of violence and assault, women's organizations are coming to terms with a society where there is a blindness to the role of gender in violence against women. (shrink)

United States military medical ethics evolved during its involvement in two recent wars, Gulf War I (1990–1991) and the War on Terror (2001–). Norms of conduct for military clinicians with regard to the treatment of prisoners of war and the administration of non-therapeutic bioactive agents to soldiers were set aside because of the sense of being in a ‘new kind of war’. Concurrently, the use of radioactive metal in weaponry and the ability to measure the health consequences of trade (...) embargos on vulnerable civilians occasioned new concerns about the health effects of war on soldiers, their offspring, and civilians living on battlefields. Civilian medical societies and medical ethicists fitfully engaged the evolving nature of the medical ethics issues and policy changes during these wars. Medical codes of professionalism have not been substantively updated and procedures for accountability for new kinds of abuses of medical ethics are not established. Looking to the future, medicine and medical ethics have not articulated a vision for an ongoing military-civilian dialogue to ensure that standards of medical ethics do not evolve simply in accord with military exigency. (shrink)

In this article, I explore several of Foucault’s claims in relation to race, biopolitics, and power in order to illuminate some concerns in the wake of the post-9.11.01 political regime of population management. First, what is the relationship between sovereignty and power? Foucault’s writings on the relation between sovereignty and power seem to differ across his writings, such that it is not clear whether he had definitively circumscribed the role of sovereignty in relation to “power.” Second, while central sovereign authority, (...) at least in ”Society Must Be Defended” has been displaced by Foucault’s analysis of power, the question still remains as to what drives or instantiates the exercise of power. I lay out an account of what I will call “ontopolitics,” as one that foregrounds the role of sovereign authority in ascribing racial divisions. Moreover, these divisions are driven by cultural, social, and moral criteria that complement—or circumscribe—biopolitics—and are inscribed at the level of the ontological, or onto-ethical. (shrink)

The U.S.-led military incursion in Iraq and the subsequent occupation has been filled with myriad examples of the Bush Administration using misleading statements in an effort to win the support of American citizens, and in a secondary sense, the international community and the Iraqis. This situation provides many opportunities to analyze the use of sophistry and linguistic sleight of hand. In this paper, I draw upon the insights offered by Hannah Arendt in the earlier context of her critiques of totalitarianism (...) during the 1930s and 1940s, and her later critique of the United States upon the publication of the Pentagon Papers in the midst of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Her insights regarding truth and lying in politics shed light on what is wrong with U.S. approaches today. Similar methods continue to be used today since people have continued to be gullible to these methods. (shrink)

Through examining practices of torture, extra-judicial assassination, and first person accounts of soldiers on the ground, Bonnie Mann develops a new theory of gender.

What is the relationship between Thailand’s human rights crisis during Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra’s leadership and the USA-led post-9/11 war on terror? Why did the human rights situation dramatically deteriorate after the Thaksin regime publicly supported the Bush administration’s war on terror and consequently received US counterterror assistance? This article offers two conceptual arguments that jointly demonstrate a constitutive theoretical explanation, which shows that counterterror and militaristic transnational and national discursive structures enabled the strategy of state repression in (...) Thailand under Thaksin. The first concept refers to strategic localization, which refers to how the Bush administration’s global war on terror—and its consequent overarching emphasis on military security—provided an opportunity for the Thaksin administration to strategically localize the global threat of terrorism in ways that could seem relevant to the local Thai context. The second concept pertains to resource mobilization, which shows how converging US and Thai discourses on military security facilitated Thaksin’s strategy of increased state repression that led to the proliferation of state-led human rights abuses. This research article contributes to the human rights literature in two ways: by highlighting how foreign aid programs and its constitutive political discourses shape recipient countries’ domestic human rights situation and by tracing the macro-political factors that lead to the eventual democratic decay of contemporary Thailand. (shrink)

Although lie detection procedures have been fundamentally criticized since their inception at the beginning of the 20th century, they are still in use around the world. In addition, they have created some remarkable appeal in the context of counterterrorism policies. Thereby, the links between science and fiction in this topic are quite tight and by no means arbitrary: In the progressive narrative of the lie detection devices, there is a promise of changing society for the better, which is entangled in (...) a fictional narrative provided by many cinematic and literary examples. By drawing on the concept of “diegetic technologies” formulated by David Kirby, we want to highlight the role of science fictional narratives in the historical development and current application of lie detection procedures. We therefore aim to use this conceptual frame to analyze the role of prevention-oriented mind reading procedures, which are developed for or already used in the “war on terror” with reference to their fictional predecessors. One virulent factor has to be highlighted in this context: The fictional engagement with possible new lie detection practices is in itself creating a legitimating ground for future security technologies. (shrink)

The article analyses Finland’s and Norway’s female politicians’ war rhetoric with reference to the war in Afghanistan and contrasts it with Laura Bush’s rhetoric and feminism. In the Nordic countries the strong liberal and equity tradition of feminism could open up spaces for thinking differently about war, and yet the co-optation of hegemonic war rhetoric occurs in several ways. The ideograph ‘women-and-children’ is often evoked and added to the hegemonic foreign policy rhetoric without questioning the actual rhetorical work it does. (...) Gender-neutral rhetoric is used to hail into being a collective and unitary western do-gooder identity and to distance Nordic involvement from the US ‘war on terror’. The panegyric of UN Resolution 1325 facilitates the metamorphosis of the militaristic and masculine US-led NATO into a collective peacekeeper capable of saving ‘brown women from brown men’. (shrink)

This article examines why U.S. healthcare professionals became involved in “enhanced interrogation,” or torture, during the War on Terror. A number of factors are identified including a desire on the part of these professionals to defend their country and fellow citizens from future attack; having their activities approved and authorized by legitimate command structures; financial incentives; and wanting to prevent serious harm from occurring to prisoners/detainees. The factors outlined here suggest that psychosocial factors can influence health professionals’ ethical decision-making.

The War on Terror is reconfiguring the practices that constitute whiteness through its definition of the West as endangered by the hatred and violence of its Islamist Other. Critical race and feminist theorists have long defined `whiteness' as a form of subjectivity that is socially constructed, historically contextual, and inherently unstable. The equation of whiteness as a social identity with the socio-political category of the West has been seen as particularly problematic for its implication in colonial and imperialist projects. (...) These theorists have also noted that the economic and political power of the West has enabled white subjects to exalt themselves even as they have sought to define the nature of the Other. This paper examines how three feminist texts engage with the hegemonic discourse of the War on Terror and its (re)constitution of whiteness. (shrink)

It is often argued that suspected terrorists captured in the war on terror can be detained just the same way captured enemy soldiers can: until the relevant war is over. But there is a deep disanalogy between suspected terrorists and captured enemy soldiers. Soldiers cannot be held accountable for the use of force , whereas terrorists normally can. Detaining people who can be held accountable as if they cannot is crossing an important moral line, sacrificing the rights of the (...) individual for the welfare of the whole. (shrink)

What is the appropriate legal response to terrorist threats? This question is discussed by politician Tony McWalter, The Philosophers' Magazine editor Julian Baggini, and philosophers Catherine Audard, Saladin Meckled-Garcia, and Alex Voorhoeve.

Radical environmental groups engaged in ecotage—or economic sabotage of inanimate objects thought to be complicit in environmental destruction—have been identified as the leading domestic terrorist threat in the post-9/11 “war on terror.” This article examines the case for extending the conventional definition of terrorism to include attacks not only against noncombatants, but also against inanimate objects, and surveys proposed moral limits suggested by proponents of ecotage. Rejecting the mistaken association between genuine acts of terrorism and ecotage, it considers the (...) proper moral constraints upon ecotage through an examination of just war theory and nonviolent civil disobedience. (shrink)

The decade-long search for Osama bin Laden—in which a manhunt was conducted as part of a full-scale war—was a watershed moment for US foreign policy in the twenty-first Century. Bin Laden was not simply elusive, but ephemerally ghost-like. Similar Militarized Interstate Manhunts (MIMs) are also deeply ingrained in the security politics of the US at its Southwestern border. Specifically, the militarized cross-border pursuits of Pancho Villa in the 1910s and The Apache Kid in the 1890s, serve as analogs to the (...) “War on Terror,” especially regarding the allegedly-novel chasing of “ghostly” targets. Building on Jacques Derrida, we explore the role of an “absent/presence” by analyzing the claims of the ghostliness of the target in the context of concurrent claims about the unprecedented nature of events. These cases highlight the importance of the “absent/presence” in making military manhunts thinkable, and explain how the pursuit of “spectral” bodies authorizes exceptional military acts that would otherwise be violations of state sovereignty. (shrink)

The authors argue that the 'war on terror' marks the ultimate convergence of war with politics, and the virtual collapse of any meaningful distinction between them. Not only does it signify the breakdown of international relations norms but also the militarization of internal life and political discourse. They explore the 'genealogy' of this situation firstly through the notion of the 'state of exception'—in which sovereign violence becomes indistinct from the law that is supposed to curtail it—and secondly through Foucault's (...) idea that politics is essentially a form of warfare. They suggest that these two ways of approaching the question of violence can only be understood through a racist dimension, which forms the hidden underside of the 'war on terrorism'. In other words, our contemporary situation is characterized by the mobilization not only of fundamentalist and conservative ideologies, but, increasingly, racial antagonisms and prejudices directed towards the Muslim other. (shrink)

This essay focuses on how the global war on terror was constructed and how it has set down deep institutional roots both in government and popular culture. The war on terror represents an "extraordinarily powerful narrative," which must be rewritten in order to change policy dynamics.

Peter Beinart's new book offers the Democratic Party a "new liberalism," a vision he bases on the party's history of moral leadership and success in combating totalitarianism in the post–World War II era.

The War on Terror has exposed deep problems within contemporary political practice. It has demonstrated the moral fragility of liberal democracy. Much critical literature on the topic is devoted to uncovering the sources of this fragility. In this paper, we accept the general thrust of much of this literature, but turn our attention to the practical upshot of the criticism. A common feature of the literature is that, when it comes to offering remedies of the problems it identifies, what (...) is offered is ‘diagnosis without treatment’. The negation of a problem is regarded as a solution. For example, if the problem is that the USA is not acting as a good international citizen, the solution is that it begins to act as such. This is like a doctor diagnosing gout and recommending to the patient that they reduce the level of uric acid in their big toe. We argue that diagnosis without treatment is endemic in literature on the War on Terror and the ills of liberal democracy. We divide this literature into five categories and examine representative works in each. At the end of the paper, we describe what is required to avoid offering yet more diagnosis without treatment. (shrink)

Kasher and Yadlin make significant contributions to the literature on counter-terrorism, (1) in their fine-tuned distinctions among degrees of individual involvement in terrorist activities, and (2) in weighing (a) obligations to minimize harm to one's own noncombatants and combatants against (b) the duty to limit harm to non-citizen noncombatants. But the authors? analysis is hampered by some ambiguous definitions, some unwieldy terms, and some questionable moral assumptions and arguments.

Contemporary international law. Methodology -- The origin of sovereignty in Roman and medieval law -- The transformation of sovereignty and international law in late modernity -- The transformation of international law by human rights -- The UN convention system and US foreign policy -- IR realism and the positivity of international law -- Containment and disengagement -- Assassination and international law -- Humanitarian intervention and international law -- Lawfare, Wikileaks, and the rule of law.

This 2007 article (based around an invited conference talk at Wayne State in early 2007) addresses risk assessment and cost benefit analysis as mechanisms in counterterrorism policy. It argues that although policy is often best pursued by agreeing to set aside deep foundational differences, in order to obtain a strategic plan for an activity such as counterterrorism, foundational differences must be addressed in order that policy not merely devolve into a policy minimalism that is always and damagingly tactical, never strategic, (...) in order to avoid domestic democratic political conflict. The article takes risk assessment in counterterrorism, using cost benefit analysis, as an example of a foundational disagreement that cannot easily be elided. Examining an extreme, indeed crude, recent example of cost benefit analysis applied to the risks of terror and the costs of counterterrorism - John Mueller's widely noticed Overblown - the article suggests that cost benefit analysis, at least applied in this way, runs roughshod over other important values in counterterrorism policy, such as justice, but in addition, makes radical yet unstated assumptions about what cost benefit analysis seeks to compare in establishing counterterrorism policy or estimating the risks and costs of terrorism - unstated assumptions that, in fact, assume the conclusion. The article notes that cost benefit analysis tends to promote a policy-minimalizing "event specific catastrophism" - seeking above all to prevent simply the next, serial terrorist attack, with however no greater strategic vision. Indeed, the article says in conclusion (as Philip Bobbitt has noted) cost benefit analysis is "relentlessly tactical," not strategic; it also tends toward serial 'event specific catastrophism' as its analytic frame; and it is a method of evaluating proposed courses of action, not generating them, and hence promotes a strategically questionable tendency to reaction as a response to terrorism. This article presents these ideas in brief fashion, however, as the first draft in a larger project on cost benefit analysis and counterterrorism, and it does so by reference to a book that is unabashedly crude in its approach to both cost benefit analysis and terrorism/counterterrorism. The critical project will extend beyond this particular article, which is in effective a a first pass at developing a critique. It is also an article that does not extend beyond events of early 2007 (when the original address was given) and should be read in that light. (shrink)