The innocuousness of state lethality in an age of national security

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 107, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 459-483

  Wagner Pacifici, Robin ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 62449189951     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2008-002     Document Type: Review

References (42)

1. Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 77; hereafter cited parenthetically by page number
2. The White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html
3. National Security Council, National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, November 2005, www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/iraq-strategy-nov2005.html
4. The White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, March 2006, www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/
5. 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, authorized ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), available at www.9-11commission.gov (accessed October 23, 2007). Hereafter these documents are cited parenthetically by page number
6. Fredric Jameson, "The Vanishing Mediator: Narrative Structure in Max Weber," New German Critique, no. 1 (Winter 1974): 52-89, 61
7. Jens Bartleson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21; hereafter cited parenthetically by page number
8. For a useful review of some recent writings about these dilemmas, see Daniel Philpott, "Usurping the Sovereignty of Sovereignty," World Politics 53 (January 2001): 297-324
9. World Politics, Ibid., 316
10. Michael Ross Fowler and Julie Marie Bunck, Law, Power, and the Sovereign State: The Evolution and Application of the Concept of Sovereignty (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 124
11. Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression, Article, url www.un.org/aboutun/charter, 1945-2007, v 51, June 26, (accessed December 19).
12. Catherine Lutz, "Empire Is in the Details," American Ethnologist 33.4 (2006): 593-611
13. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol. 2, Power and Civility, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 235
14. Randall Collins, "Weber and the Sociology of Revolution," Journal of Classical Sociology 1.2 (2001): 171-94,174
15. Don M. Snider and John A. Nagl, "The National Security Strategy: Documenting Strategic Vision," in U.S. Army War College Guide to Strategy, ed. Joseph Cerami and James F. Holcomb Jr. (Carlisle, PA: Army War College, Institute of Strategic Studies, 2001), 127-42, 127
16. Carol Greenhouse, "Lear and Law's Doubles: Identity and Meaning in a Time of Crisis," Law, Culture, and the Humanities 2.2 (2006): 239-58, 242
17. Alan M. Dershowitz, Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006)
18. Kim Lane Scheppele, "The International State of Emergency: The Challenge for Constitutionalism after September n" (paper presented at the annual meeting for the American Sociological Association, August 12, 2006, in Montreal)
19. Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks, "War Everywhere: Rights, National Security Law, and the Law of Armed Conflict in the Age of Terror," University of Pennsylvania Law Review 153.2 (December 2004): 675-761
20. Endy Zemenides, "The Doctrine of Preemption: Precedents and Problems," Officer 80.3 (2004): 31-33
21. Franklin Eric Wester, "Preemption and Just War: Considering the Case of Iraq," Parameters 34.4 (2004-2005): 20-40
22. Miriam Sapiro, "Iraq: The Shifting Sands of Preemptive Self-Defense," American Journal of International Law 97.3 (2003): 599-605
23. Michael Walzer, Arguing about War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004)
24. and Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (New York: Basic Books, 1992)
25. Snider and Nagl, "National Security Strategy," 130
26. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 101
27. Max Weber, quoted in Collins, "Weber and the Sociology of Revolution," 174
28. Gordon C. Chang and Hugh B. Mehan, "Discourse in a Religious Mode: The Bush Administration's Discourse in the War on Terrorism and its Challenges," Pragmatics 16.1 (March 2006): 1-23, 7
29. Stephen John Hartnett and Laura Ann Stengrim, "War Rhetorics: The National Security Strategy of the United States and President Bush's Globalization-through-Benevolent-Empire," SAQ105.1 (Winter 2006): 175-205. While I agree with Hartnett and Stengrim about the presence of this theme, the analytical perspective taken here seeks to problematize this kind of thematic individuation. In fact. Hartnett and Stengrim discern five overarching themes in the NSSUSA, themes that this essay is arguing actually resist differentiation
30. S J Hartnett, L A Stengrim, War Rhetorics: The National Security Strategy of the United States and President Bush's Globalization-through-Benevolent- Empire, First, the NSSUS offers a doctrine of preemption, by which the United States claims the right to strike against foes wherever and whenever it feels threatened. Second, the NSSUS proposes a millennial military state where waging war is the chief and perpetual function of the federal government. Third, the NSSUS wraps points 1 and 2 in a promise of benign universalism, an apparently generous offer to spread U.S. goods, capital, institutions, and values far and wide. Fourth, . . . the NSSUS links U.S. national security, global economic growth, and the fate of foreign governments to their enthusiasm for evangelical capitalism. Fifth, the NSSUS makes broad claims about rogue states in a world of evil that... hint at a form of conflict observers from both Left and Right have called a dash of civilizations. (Ibid., 176)
31. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 91
32. The United Nations Charter includes sanctions against aggressive war. Specifically, Article 2 states: "All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United States." United Nations Charter, Article 2
33. Susan E. Rice, The New National Security Strategy: Focus on Failed States, Policy Brief 116 (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 2003)
34. Derrida, Rogues
35. Noam Chomsky, Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000)
36. Robert Litwak, Rogue States and U.S. Foreign Policy: Containment after the Cold War (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000)
37. Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (London: Verso, 2003)
38. Ernest May, the historian recruited by Zelikow to help shape the report, formulated a principle of objectivity in writing it, a principle he sought to operationalize through the excision of adjectives and adverbs: "It was also possible to strip away interpretive language, even adjectives and adverbs, so as to assure the reader that we were just reciting the historical facts." Ernest May, "A Memoir of the 9/11 Commission: When Government Writes History," New Republic, May 16, 2005, 3-9, 8
39. Brooks, "War Everywhere," 9
40. Karin Knorr Cetina, "Complex Global Microstructures: The New Terrorist Societies," Theory, Culture, and Society 22.5 (2005): 213-34
41. Jeffrey P. Bussolini, "Living with the Bomb: Technological Existence in Los Alamos" (paper presented at the meeting for the American Sociological Association, August 2006, in Montreal)
42. Bartleson, Genealogy of Sovereignty, 180