The Liberal Way of War ─ Killing to Make Life Live

The liberal way of war and the liberal way of rule are correlated; this book traces that correlation to liberalism's original commitment to 'making life live'. Committed to making life live, liberalism is committed to waging war on behalf of life, specifically to promote the biopolitical life of species being; what the book calls 'the biohuman'.
Tracking the advent of the age of life-as-information - complex, adaptive and emergent - while contrasting biopolitics with geopolitics, the book details how and why the liberal way of rule wages war on the human in the cause of instituting the biohuman. Contingent and emergent, the biohuman is however continuously also becoming-dangerous to itself. It therefore requires constant surveillance to anticipate the threats it presents to its own flourishing.
The book explains how, in making life live, liberal rule finds its expression, today, in making the biohuman live the emergency of its emergence. Thus does liberal peace become the continuation of war by other means. Just as the information and molecular revolutions have combined to transform liberal military-strategic thinking so also has it contributed to the discourse of global danger through which global liberal governance currently legitimates the liberal way of war.

Michael Dillon is Professor of Politics at the University of Lancaster, UK. He publishes widely in political theory, cultural theory and security studies and is the author of Politics of Security (1996).

Julian Reid is Lecturer in International Relations at Kings College London, UK, and Professor of International Relations at the University of Lapland, Finland.

1. Introduction: From Liberal Conscience to Liberal Rule Part 1 2. From the Liberal Subject to the Biohuman 3. War in the Age of Biohumanity 4. Informationalising Life Part 2 5. Global Triage: Threat Perception in the 21st Century 6. Military Transformation in the Age of Life as Information 7. Biohumanity and its Rogues: Securing the Infrastructures of Liberal Living 8. Conclusion: Good for Nothing