States of war

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 36, 2005, Pages 5-32

  Balakrishnan, Gopal ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 29144446853     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (33)

1. Retort [Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts], Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, London and New York 2005; hereafter AP.
2. The Shield of Achilles, London 2002; for reflections on this ambitious work, see my 'Algorithms of War', NLR 23, September-October 2003, pp. 5-33.
3. AP, p. 52.
4. The Accumulation of Capital, London 1951, p. 453.
5. Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital p. 446.
6. See, in particular, Völkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung, mit Interventionsverbot für raumfremde Mächte, Berlin and Vienna 1939.
7. Peter Gowan, 'A Calculus of Power', NLR 16, July-August 2002, p. 64.
8. John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New York 2001, p. 34. The great merit of Mearsheimer's conception of realism is that it provides a framework for analysing the strategic logic of high-risk Great Power geopolitics. The anomalies that its basic assumptions generate when applied to contemporary US foreign policy are therefore especially noteworthy, as they point to a crisis in the realist problematic itself. While the author of this theory of 'offensive realism' has no trouble reconstructing, in these terms, the strategic calculations that went into the enormously risky Japanese decision to bomb Pearl Harbour, his assessment of the post-Cold War scene often falters: while the theory predicts that underdog powers will take a chance to enhance their security through bold aggression, it follows that the most powerful - thus most secure - state in the world should stick to the status quo.
9. AP, p. 81.
10. AP, p. 15.
11. See Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, The Global Political Economy of Israel, London 2002.
12. AP, p. 122.
13. Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, London 1990, p. 24.
14. AP, pp. 137-8.
15. AP, p. 172.
16. AP, p. 184.
17. Sayyid Qutb, Ma'alim fil-Tariq [Signposts Along the Road] (1964), as cited in AP, p. 132.
18. What is to be Done?, Peking 1975, p. 10.
19. AP, p. 185.
20. AP, p. 175.
21. Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Stanford 2003, p. 2.
22. AP, p. 21.
23. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Detroit 1970, Chapter 1, XVII.
24. Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, p. 7.
25. Debord, Comments, p. 20.
26. AP, p. 37.
27. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Chicago 1996, pp. 135-38.
28. Michael Mann, States, War and Capitalism: Studies in Political Sociology, Oxford 1988 p. 152.
29. Stephen Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle, Princeton 2004, p. 8.
30. Biddle, Military Power, p. 4.
31. Biddle, Military Power, p. 14.
32. 'Traffic lights on the blink? Capital markets are hindering, not helping, global economic adjustment', Economist, 18 August 2005.
33. Cited in Alan Krueger and David Laitin, '"Misunderestimating" Terrorism', Foreign Affairs, vol. 83, no. 5 (2004), p. 13.