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Reauthorising the Patriot Act on March 9, 2006, President George W Bush said that this “law allows our intelligence and law enforcement officials . . . to continue to use tools against terrorists that they used against — that they use against drug dealers and other criminals”¹. The difference between national hostility and social disobedience collapses in the face of the deployment of common techniques and even agencies to fight both. This loss of difference resorts to a logic of displaced justification. What was acceptable as policing becomes by simple translation justified as warfare. Dealing with the enemy becomes a mere extension of police work. In return, the domestic street is notionally militarized. This slippage allows both war and policing to be justified as mere analogies to one another: how can you contest the war against terror when it is really just a version of the police work that makes you feel safe in your home? And inversely, how can you possibly doubt the legitimacy of policing when it is really a version of the war fought against those who despise liberty and threaten innocence?

It is a truism to say that each war redefines the nature of war itself, due to changes in arms technology, military organisation or geo-strategic history. The long war of terror is no exception, but what is most new about it, and what makes it most fit its age, is that it promises the erasure of the difference between war and peace, and concomitantly between war and civil society: terrorists and criminals swap identity, emerge anywhere at any time and are imputed to share a hostility to the whole Western way of life. This rhetorical slippage, however, confirms what many theorists of war have been proposing in different ways for a long time. We will no longer have war and peace in the future, but ever more complex entanglements of one in the other, where social policy, diplomatic manipulation and military strategy exchange characteristics, contriving enemies at home, representing political antagonists abroad as criminals, and abolishing not only the idea of a military frontier, but of warfare itself as simply a matter of literal or possible armed conflict. In the future, the question will be not “Why did we choose war instead of peace?” but “What configuration of the peace-war complex embroils us now? “

Discussing what is new about the “new wars,” Herfried Munkler argues that in the wars that have developed in the decolonised world: “military force and organised crime go increasingly together.”²He goes on: “The new wars know no distinction between combatants and non-combatants, nor are they fought for any definite goals or purposes; they involve no temporal or spatial limits on the use of violence.”³In the low intensity, asymmetrical conflicts Munkler sees as typical of contemporary war, war is without limits, and has no identifiable outside, either in space or time.

The inverse of this argument is Martin Shaw’s identification of one of the key attributes of “the new Western way of war”: “The key understanding, therefore, is that warfighting must be carried on simultaneously with ‘normal’ economics, politics and social life in the West. It is imperative it doesnot impact negatively on these.”⁴Western publics only tolerate a war that can be co-ordinated seamlessly with peace. This is not an alienation of war from social life, but its absolute co-ordination with it. It is not here a question of war being kept hidden behind a screen of peaceful social advancement from one day to the next. Instead, war under this dispensation becomes completely compatible with what we conventionally understand as peace. In the end, this is what allows the complete saturation of society by war: the ability to represent the normal unfolding of social life as relatively undisturbed.

In their discussion of the paradoxes of global political governance, Dillon and Reid present a more complex account of the inter-relationship between war and peace. Here liberal governance both provokes and repudiates war. They write: “It . . . seems obvious that the radical and continuous transformation of societies that global liberal governance so assiduously...