The Biopolitics of Liberal War: Humanity,Temporality and Cosmology

Abstract

What is the relationship between war and liberalism? Over the last two decades, an extensive and influential literature inspired by Michel Foucault’s conception of biopolitics has argued that the ‘war on terror’ is defined by distinctly liberal forms of government. Underpinning this approach is an assumption of the primacy of contingency to the contemporary biopolitical imaginary. Through this governing cosmology, the ‘war on terror’ is said to be motivated by a politics of fear and uncertainty. This article contests this account of liberal war by demonstrating the biopolitical significance of potentiality. By illustrating how a specific configuration of potentiality informs contemporary governing understandings of humanity and temporality, this article argues that liberal war is also waged according to a politics of hope and certainty. Adopting a cosmological approach allows this article to develop the case for a pluriversal conception of biopolitics which better reflects the complex and contradictory character of liberal war in the 21st century. Such a perspective invites us to see how the ‘war on terror’ is not only a reflection of our darkest fears but also of our highest hopes.

Introduction: Locating Liberal War

This great evil, where’s it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What seed, what root did it grow from? ¹

What is the relationship between liberalism and war? International order in the 21st century has been defined by a ‘war on terror’ in which liberal states have engaged in practices of torture, rendition, targeted killing, mass surveillance, militarised border security and armed conflict. This presents a paradox: why do liberal states, seemingly committed to the rights and freedoms of the individual, engage in practices which necessarily entail the harming of individuals? ²

This paradox evokes the tradition of theodicy, a strand of theological thought which seeks to reconcile the occurrence of evil with the existence of God. ³ Through such knowledge, we are invited to situate and comprehend the place of human existence within a divinely ordered universe. At its core, theodicy is a form of cosmological knowledge, it is a means of understanding the character and meaning of the universe we inhabit: the basic elements and features that define it, the forces and laws that govern it, the possibilities of action and the prospects for justice within it. From such a perspective, we are able to produce an account of how certain events or practices emerge and fit within a wider cosmological order.

Much of the scholarship on the ‘war on terror’ can be seen as entailing a secular form of theodicy in which scholars seek to locate the emergence of war within the liberal cosmological order. A prominent strand of such scholarship has been to argue that the ‘war on terror’ marks a departure from liberal norms and practices. Notable variants of this argument include accounts of the ‘war on terror’ as a pathology of neo-conservatism or as marking a ‘return’ of empire. ⁴ Viewed as such, liberal war is not really liberal at all; it is a form of historical discontinuity in which liberal state practices come to be defined as exceptional, excessive or aberrational.

Organised around Michel Foucault’s conception of biopolitics, ⁵ an alternative approach has argued that the ‘war on terror’ marks a continuation and intensification of distinctly liberal forms of government. To speak of liberal war as biopolitical is to view it as a technology of population management; a means of securing ways of life deemed to be productive and desirable locally and globally. This project of promoting the liberal way of life necessitates the eradication of that which is seen as being inimical or obstructive to its emergence. Biopolitical racism is the term given to the calculus which differentiates between desirable and undesirable forms of life: between ‘what must live and what must die’. ⁶ From this perspective, liberal war is part of the repertoire of practices at the disposal of liberal states tasked with securing life through killing; of killing to make life live. ⁷ The biopolitical mandate for liberal war is therefore said to be derived from the imperative to produce life, not death. Lending force to this argument is the observation that it is increasingly hard for liberal states to articulate a case for war that does not derive its mandate in biopolitical terms.

This biopolitical frame of analysis has inspired a series of investigations into the logics, rationalities and practices that have come to define the ‘war on terror’, including: border politics and the government of mobilities; ⁸ critical infrastructure protection, civil contingencies and risk management; ⁹ counter-terrorism and counter-radicalisation strategies; ¹⁰ drone warfare and targeted killing; ¹¹ human security; ¹² international aid, development and state-building; ¹³ population-centric counterinsurgency; ¹⁴ and public health, disease and bioterrorism. ¹⁵ Given its considerable influence on the field of Critical Security Studies and International Relations more generally, it is important to interrogate the terms and implications of how Foucault’s conceptualisation of biopolitics as an emergent mode of power in the 18th and 19th centuries has been reimagined and repurposed to produce the dominant critical account of liberal war during the ‘war on terror’.

This article provides precisely such an analysis. It does so in two stages. In the first stage, this article contests the account of liberal war that is developed by this literature. It does to demonstrate how the existing account of liberal war fails to locate and capture a series of critical organising logics and biopolitical imperatives through which the ‘war on terror’ has been mobilised and made necessary. Developing this critique requires this article to identify the core features of the existing biopolitical framework and how it produces a particular account of the emergence of liberal war. To this end, this article argues that underpinning the current biopolitical approach is an assertion of the ontological and epistemological primacy of contingency. The centrality of this principle to this literature’s understanding of biopolitics is best captured by Michael Dillon’s description of contemporary biopolitics as the ‘government of the contingent, by the contingent, for the contingent’. ¹⁶ It is for this reason that this article will refer to this literature as the biopolitics of contingency. A key feature of this literature is the claim that contingency establishes the basic parameters, character and purpose of contemporary biopolitical forms of government. Central to this analysis is how contingency is said to inform dominant governing understandings of humanity and temporality, two discursive elements that are central to the configuration of biopolitical rule. Through the problematisation of life and time through contingency, liberal war in the 21st century is said to be motivated by the logics of fear and uncertainty. As a result, liberal war has come to be described as a conservative project of restraining and deferring the realisation of the catastrophic potential of both the individual and the future.

In the second stage, this article reframes the existing terms of biopolitical analysis in order to illustrate how we can theorise beyond the explanatory limits of this framework. This analysis proceeds from the observation that there is considerably more to the ‘war on terror’ than the management of fear and uncertainty. Specifically, this article demonstrates how constellations of hope and certainty have tasked liberal war with fulfilling the innately liberal potential of both humanity and the future. This argument is developed by drawing on the emerging literature on ‘cosmology’. ¹⁷ Cosmologies are structuring accounts of how social existence is situated within a particular physical and symbolic universe. It is from such accounts that governing understandings and purposes are derived. Put simply, you cannot govern properties or environments that you cannot account for. By locating liberal war within the context of a liberal cosmological order we can see how the biopolitics of contingency literature omits and obscures central aspects of how the ‘war on terror’ is configured, legitimated and necessitated. To capture these elements, this article proposes and develops an original account of a biopolitics of potentiality. Demonstrating the persistence of earlier liberal understandings of humanity and temporality, specifically that which is captured in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s account of the Enlightenment concept of Bildung, ¹⁸ this account of potentiality as a distinctive logic and rationality of contemporary biopolitics allows for a more comprehensive understanding of liberal war. Specifically, it allows us to read the role of liberal war during the ‘war on terror’ as a Bildungsroman or coming-of-age tale, tasked with drawing out the inner potential of under-developed subjects in order to realise their fuller, liberal form. Contrasting with the biopolitics of contingency’s account of liberal war as a project of restraint, this article provides a framework for interpreting how war in the 21st century is a project of accelerating social development and realising human destiny.

The aim of this analysis is not to replace a focus on contingency with a focus on potentiality. Instead, motivated by the need to more fully account for the proliferation and articulation of liberal forms of violence in the 21st century, this article invites new forms of biopolitical analysis that are more attentive to the historicity, diversity, complexity and incoherence of the liberal cosmological order. Two decades into a global ‘war on terror’ that has been described as both ‘unending’ ¹⁹ and ‘everywhere’, ²⁰ this task remains vital.

This article proceeds in three sections. The first section details how we can approach biopolitics from a cosmological perspective, as well as how this approach helps to foreground and contextualise the discursive elements of humanity and temporality, which is central to the configuration of contemporary biopolitics. The second section reconstructs the biopolitics of contingency literature’s account of contemporary governing understandings of humanity and temporality and, crucially, how these understandings are rendered politically meaningful through logics of fear and uncertainty during the ‘war on terror’. The third section develops an original account of the biopolitics of potentiality which captures crucial elements of the governing understandings of life and time which have animated the ‘war on terror’. Accounting for these elements allows us to describe how the biopolitical logics of hope and certainty informed and defined liberal war during this period. The article concludes by making the case for understanding the liberal cosmological order as a pluriverse comprised of a multiplicity of discursive elements. Such an approach extends and redefines how we might operationalise the concept of biopolitics to better account for the myriad violences that have defined liberal war during the ‘war on terror’. Taken together, this article invites us to see how the ‘war on terror’ is not only a reflection of our darkest fears but also of our highest hopes.

Biopolitics and the Liberal Cosmological Order

A crucial contribution of this article is to argue that the task, form and purpose of biopolitical modes of government are derived cosmologically. What does it mean to take a cosmological approach to biopolitics and how does this framing help locate the emergence of liberal war? With few notable exceptions, ²¹ existing scholarship has not sought to frame biopolitics in cosmological terms. This is a missed opportunity. Situating biopolitical rationalities and practices within the cosmological terrain serves a series of purposes. First and foremost, it encourages us to approach biopolitics as a form of sense-making. It is a way of approaching biopolitics which foregrounds and necessitates an interrogation of the ways of seeing and knowing which animate the biopolitical mandate for liberal war. As this section will demonstrate, a cosmological approach also requires an attentiveness to transformations in these ways of seeing and knowing. While the biopolitics of contingency literature focuses on the impact of various epistemic ruptures and revolutions, a cosmological approach encourages to interrogate the enduring legacies of those forms of sense-making that are seemingly moved beyond as a result of the emergence of new ways of thinking about the world. This latter aspect is crucial for differentiating between the biopolitics of contingency’s analysis of the discursive coherency of liberal war (a biopolitical universe), and this article’s emphasis on the complexity and incoherency of the terrain from which liberal war emerges (a biopolitical pluriverse). In short, the best way of diagnosing, articulating and building the case for approaching the biopolitics of liberal war anew is through an engagement with the cosmological terrain.

This approach is influenced by recent scholarship which has sought to demonstrate the significance of cosmology to the composition and character of international order. The basic premise of this literature is that a range of theological and scientific accounts of the universe have played a crucial role in the configuration and transformation of international order. It is argued that cosmological ideas have been drawn upon to organise, rationalise, legitimate and naturalise international orders and ordering practices. A key emphasis within this literature is foregrounding the centrality of sense-making to the composition and production of international order.

In simple terms, a cosmology refers to a series of discursive elements which allow us to situate and contextualise social existence within an account of the physical and symbolic universe. They are a means through which to comprehend our place and purpose as individuals, societies and a species within the wider universe. For Bentley Allan, a cosmology is comprised of a series of ideas about ‘what exists, what counts as true knowledge, the nature of time, and the place of humanity in the universe’. ²² From this they claim that the core discursive elements of a cosmology are ontology, epistemology, temporality and humanity. Part of the task of a cosmological approach is to interpret how these discursive elements constitute a particular presentation of reality, an ‘order of the real’. ²³

Given their historical constitution, cosmological orders are subject to ‘cosmological shifts’ in which new ideas precipitate a transformation in the discursive construction of reality, from one order of the real to another. These moments occur when ‘a community of practice or discursive tradition produces radically new ways of looking at and explaining the natural and social universe’. ²⁴ Crucially for our purposes, this raises the question of what happens to elements of earlier cosmological orders when a cosmological shift occurs. Allan argues that cosmological shifts often infuse earlier cosmological elements with new purposes, rationalities and logics:

Cosmological shifts do not necessarily replace or eliminate earlier cosmological elements in political discourses. But cosmological shifts do not cumulate in predictable ways either. Instead, cosmological shifts introduce nonlinear ruptures and reconfigurations that disorder and reorder discourses. ²⁵

Cosmological shifts should not therefore be understood as neat and decisive breaks. Instead, they produce moments in which established cosmological discourses are repurposed and reconfigured in often unexpected and disorderly ways. In this sense, there is no unitary cosmology in contemporary global politics. Instead, cosmological orders are always ‘incomplete, fragmented, and multiple’. ²⁶ We must therefore resist providing too singular or coherent an account of the liberal cosmological order from which liberal war emerges. Put simply, what we are seeking to describe is a pluriverse comprised of varied discursive elements, not a consistent and uniformly structured discursive universe.

Given this article’s focus on the liberal cosmological order, how should we understand the relationship between cosmology and order? It is important to recognise that cosmologies are not impartial or disinterested forms of knowledge. To depict a reality is, in part, to commend particular ways of navigating it. ²⁷ Central to the liberal cosmological account of natural order is an associated vision of political order and ordering. An account of what is always invites and prompts an account of how political action should accommodate and shape itself to the contours and properties of the universe. To speak of the cosmological order is therefore to reference both the varied discursive elements underpinning a particular presentation of physical reality and the corollary accounts of the task of government in relation to the challenges and opportunities that define it: an order of the real and an ordering of the real. It is in this way that cosmological order is foundational to the production of governing understandings, that is, an account of the properties of that which is to be governed and the environment through which it must be governed. Subsequently, when our understanding of the universe shifts, so too does our account of the task and purpose of governing within it. It is in this way that Allan invites us to interpret the historical transformation in the organising purpose of state action from the pursuit of religious and dynastic goals – ‘God and glory’ – to the fetishisation of ‘economic growth’ as a consequence of cosmological shifts. ²⁸

While this provides an account of cosmological order in general terms, how should we understand the relationship between liberalism and cosmological order? There are a number of reasons why this article describes a liberal cosmological order. First, this configuration helps to signpost the relationship between cosmological order and existing literatures on liberal war. In this respect, what makes this a liberal cosmological order is that it is the cosmological order which is – implicitly or explicitly – invoked by scholarly accounts of liberal war. Put simply, it is liberal because it underpins our accounts of what we call liberal war. Second, it helps to signpost the relationship between cosmological order and the practices of liberal states. In this sense, what makes this a liberal cosmological order is that it is the cosmological order from which the rationalities and practices of liberal states are derived. Put simply, it is liberal because it is what liberal states do. Finally, it helps to signpost the relationship between cosmological order and distinctly liberal principles, rationalities and values. This aspect is most conspicuous in this article’s account of a biopolitics of potentiality, in which the Enlightenment notion of Bildung is seen as defining and configuring liberal war during the ‘war on terror’. In this instance, it is liberal because it is defined by liberal values. In short, it is a liberal cosmological order because of its relationship to (1) existing scholarship on liberal war, (2) the practices of liberal states and (3) the organising role of certain liberal principles and values.

Returning to the article’s opening question, adopting a cosmological approach requires us to ask: how and from where does war emerge from within the liberal cosmological order? How is war incited and necessitated by understandings of how social existence is situated within the physical and symbolic universe? What cosmological purpose does war serve, what end(s) does it seek?

To speak of biopolitics is to speak of a constellation of discursive elements which render the universe legible and therefore governable in particular ways. These discursive elements produce the rationalities, logics and imperatives for a politics of life to emerge. Within a particular cosmological order, war is ordered – in terms of being both configured in particular ways and made necessary, given social urgency. Approaching biopolitics in cosmological terms allows us to see how the account of liberal war articulated by the biopolitics of contingency literature is premised upon cosmological shifts in governing accounts of humanity and temporality. This literature views the ‘war on terror’ as being informed by the changing rationalities, purposes and imperatives that emerge from new social understandings of life and time. Crucially, these cosmological shifts are described by this literature as neat and decisive epistemic breaks, in which new ideas come to monopolise the liberal cosmological order. The biopolitical task of governing in the 21st century is seen as being driven by the challenge of navigating a novel cosmological terrain.

While offering distinctive contributions to our understanding of the relationship between liberalism and war, existing critiques of the biopolitics of contingency can also be productively re-framed in cosmological terms. The literature on horrorism, for example, invites us to see how violence which does not explicitly serve a biopolitical purpose cannot simply be reduced to some necropolitical excess: a surplus of death in an otherwise rational biopolitical calculus. ²⁹ The dismemberment and desecration of dead bodies by US marines in Afghanistan cannot primarily be understood in instrumental terms, as fulfilling the biopolitical mandate to make life live. Read in cosmological terms, these scholars seek to demonstrate how the liberal cosmological order is not synonymous or co-extensive with biopolitics: this is not all that there is. The universe is, in this sense, more complex and varied than the biopolitics of contingency suggests.

Another strand of criticism has highlighted the biopolitics of contingency literature’s inattentiveness to the complex and enduring significance of colonial and liberal genealogies of race and violence. ³⁰ This form of critique suggests that presenting biopolitical racism as a flat and textureless technique of population management that emerges in Western European states in the 18th and 19th centuries fails to account for the radical significance of the colonial experience in terms of shaping how the politics of life and death has been, and continues to be, distributed in global politics. Read in cosmological terms, these scholars seek to illustrate how the historical emergence and configuration of the discursive elements that compose contemporary biopolitics are more complex and varied than the biopolitics of contingency accounts for.

Viewed as such, both of these critiques highlight crucial elements of the liberal cosmological order that fall outside of the biopolitics of contingency’s field of vision. While describing forms of violence that exceed the specific terms of the biopolitics of contingency as an explanatory framework, these logics and practices must not be understood as the malfunction, excess or exterior of liberal war. ³¹ To do so risks failing to comprehend the plurality and complexity of the liberal cosmological order. If, as Doerthe Rosenow suggests, ‘[g]overnmental reality is multiple and not characterised by one “order of the real”’, ³² then we must seek to describe and explore a more complex and contradictory cosmological order than that described by the biopolitics of contingency literature. This article is an attempt to both pose and address this challenge.

The Biopolitics of Contingency

Humanity: The ‘Catastrophic Individual’

we do not even know what a body can do, this is practically a war cry. ³³

This section reconstructs the biopolitics of contingency literature’s understanding of how the logic and practice of liberal war emerges from a cosmological shift in the discourse of humanity: from mankind to the human species. It will reconstruct the claim that an ontology of life-as-contingency has been rendered politically legible during the ‘war on terror’ through the figure of the ‘catastrophic individual’. ³⁴ This political understanding of the unknown properties and potentialities of human subjects is seen as tasking liberal war with the urgent and paradoxical task of securing against the very subjects it seeks to secure. It is in this sense, that an account of humanity is said to inform and necessitate liberal war.

As has been described, biopolitics is the art of managing and orchestrating life at the level of the population. To exercise a power over life requires a knowledge of life as you cannot hope to effectively govern what you do not understand. ³⁵ The biopolitics of contingency literature argues that new scientific ideas derived from the life and complexity sciences have come to monopolise the contemporary discourse of humanity. Specifically, the argument is made that novel understandings of organic life have been drawn upon to elaborate a political ‘imaginary of life as contingency’. ³⁶ Posited as the very essence and nature of life, contingency has come to saturate the cosmological order, radically reconfiguring the place of humanity within the natural and social universe in accordance with these new understandings of what it means to be alive. ³⁷ This cosmological shift is described by Dillon as occurring towards the end of the 20th century when the principle of contingency ‘graduated from being one intelligible mechanism of government amongst others’ to being the predominant terms through which humanity is understood and governed. ³⁸ The dramatic extent to which this account of life-as-contingency is understood as realigning and reorienting the governing rationalities and practices of contemporary biopolitics is captured by Dillon’s claim that in recent decades we have witnessed the instantiation of

a government of the contingent, by the contingent, for the contingent: government of population (in its very contingency) by the burgeoning new science of contingency (statistics and probability) for the contingent (effects-based) promotion of life. ³⁹

In short, the biopolitics of contingency literature argues that, as a consequence of a cosmological shift in the discourse of humanity, to speak of contemporary biopolitics is to speak of the management of life understood as a contingent property.

Life understood through the prism of contingency is seen as marking a significant departure from the symbolic universe of understandings of humanity, or mankind, grounded in the certainties of political theologies which posit essential properties or trajectories. Life, it is argued, has instead come to be recast as an ambivalent material no longer legible or predictable through the necessities of an essential nature or bending towards the realisation of a historical purpose or destiny. ⁴⁰ Derived from an episteme advanced by the complexity and life sciences, ⁴¹ the argument is made that life has come to be understood as an emergent rather than fixed property. An emergent account of life suggests that humans are defined by an ongoing state of becoming, rather than a fixed or stable state of being. It posits that life is undergoing a continuous process of phase-transition: a movement from one state of being to another. Put simply, within an account of life-as-contingency, to be human is to always be becoming-otherwise through a perpetually unfolding process of transformation and change. This process of becoming is contingent in the sense that it occurs through a series of non-linear interactions and transactions with the wider physical and social environment, or milieu, in which life circulates. Undergoing constant adaptation and change in relation to the pressures of its environment, life is therefore prone to ‘unpredictable shifts, mutations and change’. ⁴² In what is presented as a neat and decisive cosmological shift, understandings of humanity are no longer understood in this literature as being secured through reference to an unchanging nature, divine spark or destiny. Instead, stripped of the residue of these earlier cosmological elements, humanity comes to be defined by pluripotency: the radical potential to take on novel and unpredictable forms.

What matters for our purposes is how this account of humanity is said to have been rendered politically meaningful during the ‘war on terror’. So, how have these new scientific understandings of life been understood as informing, organising and energising liberal war? As we have seen, life has become a site and source of considerable uncertainty. What a life currently is, or has been, is understood as offering few clues as to what it may become. Crucially, the biopolitics of contingency literature argues that this potential of life to become-otherwise has been overwhelmingly interpreted as the potential to become-dangerous. ⁴³ The logic follows that if political subjects are constantly undergoing an unpredictable process of transformation and change then a subject that is trusted in one moment may become untrustworthy in the next. This account of humanity is said to produce a political imaginary in which ‘risk is now everywhere’ ⁴⁴ and the ‘distinction between suspicious and non-suspicious bodies has collapsed’. ⁴⁵ A range of new security practices and technologies, from biometrics to algorithmic forms of mass surveillance, are designed ‘to enlist everybody under the category of suspicion’. ⁴⁶ The figure of the ‘suspect’ is said to have been generalised as the principle of suspicion is severed from specific knowledge of an individual and is instead redistributed across a general population. Suspicion shifts from being biographical to virtual: you are no longer suspicious primarily as a consequence of your past or present actions, you are a suspect as a consequence of what you might become, your potential. ⁴⁷ We are all, in this sense, interpellated as pre-criminal subjects. The political imaginary of life-as-contingency is therefore one haunted by the potential of life to radically harm and disrupt society. This equation of human potential with catastrophe is explicit in Brad Evans’ argument that the ‘war on terror’ is defined by the assumption that ‘all randomness is now potentially evil’. ⁴⁸ It is in this way that life’s protean character comes to be read by Evans through the figure of the ‘catastrophic individual’, a subject defined by their potential to cause catastrophic harm. In sum, the biopolitics of contingency literature asserts that in the ‘war on terror’: ‘the causes of disaster are presumed to incubate within life’. ⁴⁹

Within this configuration of humanity, it is argued that liberal war becomes trapped within what Evans describes as the ‘liberal paradox of potentiality’. ⁵⁰ This paradox refers to a self-antagonising dynamic at the core of contemporary biopolitics. This dynamic emerges as a result of the relationship biopolitical regimes now have with their primary referent object: life. Understood as becoming-dangerous, biopolitical regimes are paradoxically tasked with both securing and securing against life. What traps biopolitical regimes within this formulation is that the catastrophic potential of life is not something that can be transformed, eradicated or ‘lock[ed]-up’. ⁵¹ Rather, it is the core feature of life itself. Biopolitical regimes are therefore tasked with cultivating and nurturing their own terms of endangerment. Threat and catastrophe do not emanate solely from a hostile exterior, they are located within the fabric of social order itself. It is for this reason that Sergei Prozorov argues that contemporary biopolitics is caught in the ‘ceaseless work of. . . immunising itself against its own danger to itself’. ⁵² Viewed as such, Prozorov suggests that ‘global political order becomes indistinguishable from global civil war’. ⁵³ It is upon this account of humanity that we are invited by the biopolitics of contingency literature to reinterpret Deleuze’s remark that when ‘we do not even know what a body can do, this is practically a war cry’. ⁵⁴ In short, liberal war is said to be prompted by a particular political understanding of the contingent properties of human subjects.

Temporality: A ‘Threatening Horizon’

To prevent its becoming, tomorrow or shortly after, eternal, we are going to have to swiftly protect the area around the present against the future, as they once protected the area around the fortified city against barbarians. ⁵⁵

This section reconstructs the biopolitics of contingency literature’s understanding of how the logic and practice of liberal war is defined by a cosmological shift in the discourse of temporality. It will demonstrate how this literature foregrounds the significance of a shift in governing understandings of the ontology of time from a finite to infinite property. This understanding of time’s infinite character is offered as the context within which a particular governing attitude towards the future has emerged during the ‘war on terror’. Specifically, it is argued that liberal war is informed by the construction of the future as a ‘threatening horizon’. ⁵⁶ It is in this way that liberal war is tasked with a conservative project of fortifying the present against a future which must be restrained, inhibited, deferred and safeguarded against.

An attentiveness to the temporal character of war is not unique to the biopolitics of contingency literature. It is increasingly common, as part of the ‘temporal turn’ in International Relations, ⁵⁷ to highlight how social constructions of time are central to the theory and practice of war. ⁵⁸ Appreciating the temporal constitution of liberal war requires us to reject an account of time as the ‘intangible cosmic backcloth against which existence plays out’. ⁵⁹ War does not passively occur in time; rather, its occurrence is constituted by a variety of times, timings and senses of timeliness. It is in this way that Helge Jordheim and Einar Wigen explain how concepts like war ‘cease to be labels for concrete empirical or theoretical phenomena’ and instead emerge through the ‘concept of movement, pointing towards or even anticipating [a] future’. ⁶⁰ Such an understanding is particularly instructive for illustrating how the biopolitics of contingency literature’s account of the temporal constitution of liberal war comes to be defined by a concept of movement: restraint.

The biopolitics of contingency literature argues that the ‘war on terror’ is defined by a political imaginary that is captivated by a particular account of the future. The meaning of the future is determined by the imaginative force of what Paul Virilio describes as the ‘expectation horizon’ of politics. ⁶¹ These horizons provide an account of the future in the present, creating a series of urgencies and allowing for the coordination of various forms of anticipatory political action that seek to make the present ready for the future by working to ensure, mitigate or prevent its realisation. ⁶² The posture that our current politics adopts in relation to the future is a reflection of the expected character of the future that is to come, in terms of the challenges, demands and opportunities it presents. Expectation horizons are often defined by a leitmotif – a recurrent theme – that captures the character of what is to come. This may be organised around a specific event, such as war or revolution, or a more general affective register, such as optimism or pessimism.

It is important to note at this point that expectation horizons are not unique to biopolitical forms of politics. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a form of politics that is not in some way oriented and organised in relation to a sense of what the future holds: what we must prepare for or should work towards. Rather, what is specific to this literature is how a particular conception of the future comes to preoccupy contemporary biopolitical modes of governing. Specifically, the argument of this literature is that the ‘war on terror’ is configured by the expectation of the impending catastrophic event and that this future is experienced in the present through the affective registers of fear, anxiety and uncertainty. In short, during the ‘war on terror’, the future ‘takes place as a threatening horizon’. ⁶³

The proliferation of anticipatory forms of preventive and pre-emptive action over the last two decades is seen as demonstrating the extent to which liberal imaginaries are invested in and animated by an expectation horizon through which ‘the future has become catastrophic’. ⁶⁴ From this perspective, it is no coincidence that the core elements – or four P’s – of the UK counter-terrorism strategy embody fearful dispositions in relation to an imagined, threatening future: Prevent, Pursue, Protect and Prepare. ⁶⁵ In part, the signification of the future as a site of imminent catastrophe is a projection through time of the catastrophic potential of the individual. In this sense, this governing account of time is understood by this literature as being ‘inseparable from a spatio-temporal imaginary of life as contingency’. ⁶⁶ Read this way, catastrophe is the future realisation of life’s potential, a future defined by the continuation of the logics which dictate its contingent present. For society, catastrophe is imminent because it is immanent. It is not, however, sufficient to reduce the account of temporality this literature offers to the temporal implications of its account of humanity.

To understand how temporality is configured within this literature, we must also make sense of Dillon’s claim that our contemporary ‘politics of security derives its warrant to secure and to wage war eschatologically’. ⁶⁷ To speak of eschatology is to speak of an understanding, orientation and alignment of the task and purpose of government in relation to the end-times or ‘eschaton’. In simple terms, the eschaton is the agent or event which brings about the end of a particular social order. ⁶⁸ To understand the role of eschatology in the production of new governing purposes during the ‘war on terror’ we must elaborate upon two traditions of response in relation to the eschaton. These traditions are described by this literature as representative of the governing response to the cosmological shift from a Christian-theological conception of temporality as finite to a secular-modern conception of temporality as infinite. ⁶⁹

The first eschatological tradition is messianic. This tradition is based upon a conviction in the possibility and desirability of the dissolution of the existing social order and the emergence of a new, more just ordering. ⁷⁰ Such a tradition is said to define the Christian-theological cosmological order, in which ‘the end of time was not so much a catastrophe to fear as a promise of radical change and of the revelation of the secrets written in heaven’. ⁷¹ Defined by an expectation horizon in which the end-times carry the promise of a ‘better future’, a messianic response entails ‘taking sides with the eschaton and accelerating or actively bringing about the end of an existing temporal order’. The task of government within a messianic tradition is therefore to seek the dissolution of the current order to allow for the realisation of the promise of a new social order. As Foucault explains, the basic form and purpose of the pastoral power of the Christian church was shaped by a particular interpretation and orientation towards the promise of an expected future. ⁷² The government of the present was organised and legitimised through a notion of finality that this world would end and give way to another. The Christian temporal order was therefore organised around a conception of time as finite, as being marked by a definite – and desirable – end-point.

The second eschatological tradition is katechontic. This tradition is based upon ‘an explicit statement about the status quo as something worth preserving’. ⁷³ The biopolitics of contingency literature argues that liberal war must be understood in the context of an age in which ‘modern government and rule have become a ceaseless katechontic task’. ⁷⁴ This is an age in which the eschaton no longer heralds the coming of a higher order but instead takes on a variety of cataclysmic and apocalyptic forms. The association of the contemporary liberal cosmological order with this eschatological tradition is seen as a consequence of a cosmological shift in the conception of time. The nature of this shift is captured by Prozorov who suggests that contemporary biopolitical practices are characterised by a condition of ‘biopolitical nihilism’. ⁷⁵ Biopolitical nihilism refers to the condition of modernity in which biopolitical regimes must govern in a secular universe devoid of divine meaning, purpose or finality. No longer organised or legitimated in reference to a divine presence, biopolitical regimes must justify their aims and purpose in reference to themselves. ⁷⁶ With salvation no longer deferred until the next world, the notion of salvation in modern politics is redefined in biopolitical terms. For biopolitical regimes, their raison d’etre is expressed through a form of bio-power that seeks to exert ‘a positive influence on life that endeavours to administer, optimise, and multiply it’. ⁷⁷

As a consequence of this broader shift from a Christian-theological to a secular-modern cosmology, the character of time is said to undergo a profound transformation: from finite to infinite. No longer punctuated by a definitive end point, time becomes an open horizon that stretches out in front of government indefinitely. ⁷⁸ As welfare, security and justice are being delivered biopolitically in the present, the meaning of the future is radically reconfigured. Here, the eschaton does not signify Christ’s return; rather, it takes the form of catastrophic social collapse. This is what leads the biopolitics of contingency literature to define the biopolitical management of time as a project of ‘restraint’: of resisting, deferring, delaying and holding back the future. ⁷⁹ It is here that we see, as Jordheim and Widen illustrated earlier, how a concept of time evokes a concept of ‘movement’. Crucially, this movement takes the form of an imperative: a temporal prompt that necessitates a political response. Liberal war is purposed with a conservative task: to conserve the present social order by warding off the potentially catastrophic forces of the future. Situated in the openness of infinite time, for biopolitical regimes ‘persistence in and through. . . time is the challenge’. ⁸⁰ The future is not simply something waiting to happen but becomes something which must be prevented from taking place. It is in this context that we are invited to understand the emergence of resilience as an organising logic and practice of security. ⁸¹ Resilience entails a collapse in the ambition and purpose of security based upon the fatalistic realisation that, within infinite time, the catastrophic event is inevitable. If catastrophe cannot be avoided then security is repurposed to build preparedness, to mitigate and dampen its effects and to promote the ability of individuals and societies to emerge from its aftermath.

Given these existential stakes, the biopolitical mandate for liberal war is said to ‘require that the catastrophic prospects of the future be avoided at all costs’ in order to ensure the ‘uninterrupted continuity of the present’. ⁸² It is for this reason that François Debrix suggests there is a considerable irony to defining this as a project of ‘restraint’, as the need to restrain the forces of the future produces an unrestrained sense of urgency and set of possibilities for government: ‘the katechontic sovereign can and must employ all available terrestrial and non-terrestrial means to push back this unimaginable finite end’. ⁸³ The biopolitics of contingency literature argues that while liberal war is motivated by the desire to preserve, the intensity of this imperative to restrain produces an appetite and willingness for unrestrained violence. It is in this way that during the ‘war on terror’ a project of restraint comes to unleash a host of new violent possibilities.

In summary, the biopolitics of contingency evokes Virilio’s description of a society under siege. It is in this way that Mark Duffield claims that the present has come to be defined by the literal site and metaphorical politics of the ‘bunker’. ⁸⁴ Within this political imaginary, the notion of fortification is not to be approached in primarily spatial terms, of inside/outside. What must be kept out is no longer a dangerous exterior. Instead, as we have seen, the danger is already inside in spatial terms: society is conceived of as a danger to itself. The ‘bunker’ is therefore constructed in temporal terms; liberal war is tasked with fortifying against the future, it is the future which must be protected against and insured for. Besieged by the myriad catastrophic possibilities and potentialities of the future, liberal war is tasked with building a wall around the present in order to keep the future out. Through its relation to the future, the biopolitical management of time through liberal war has come to be seen as conservative and pessimistic: ‘a reduction of politics to a program of avoiding the worst’. ⁸⁵

The Biopolitics of Potentiality

The arc of the universe may bend towards justice, but it does not bend on its own. ⁸⁶

In this article, we have seen how the biopolitics of contingency literature produces an account of liberal war in the 21st century. While the notion of potential is central to this account, its meaning and significance is derivative of contingency. Potential is described as the future form of contingent dynamics which are rendered politically meaningful through governing logics of fear and uncertainty. According to this literature, it is potential that compels us into the ‘bunker’. By contrast, this section develops an account of a biopolitics of potentiality; a governing logic which mandates liberal war through logics of hope and certainty. It does so by illustrating the enduring significance of the Enlightenment concept of Bildung to the liberal cosmological order. It is in this way that liberal war comes to be tasked with fulfilling rather than inhibiting the potential of humanity and time.

Interestingly, evidence for a biopolitics of potentiality can be found within the biopolitics of contingency literature itself. It is Dillon who suggests that an advertising campaign for Unisys, entitled Security Unleashed, both ‘accurately depict[s]’ and ‘beautifully’ illustrates the logic of the biopolitics of contingency. ⁸⁷ Under the heading Not a Wall. A Catapult, one advert from this campaign argues that ‘Security can no longer be viewed as a means to a defensive end. It has become a catalyst for achievement. Unisys [. . .] don’t simply protect you from obstacles, they propel you over them’. Another asks, ‘What if security wasn’t a cage? What if instead of keeping things out, it let amazing things in? What if security could unleash your full potential?’ Others urge you to ‘upgrade your best-case scenario’ and assert that ‘Security can no longer be viewed as a response to fear’.

These adverts make a series of incitements that exceed or directly contradict the explanatory framework of the biopolitics of contingency literature described in the previous section. Consider the following: if potential is necessarily incomplete or uncertain then what does it mean to talk of ‘full potential’? If potential is risky or catastrophic, then why would we seek to ‘unleash’ it? If our political imaginary emphasises the worst-case scenario, then why is the reader encouraged to ‘upgrade your best-case scenario?’ If liberal war is motivated by fear then what is the basis for a politics of security that ‘can no longer be viewed as a response to fear’? If we are besieged by the future, then why would we abandon ‘the wall’ in favour of ‘a catapult’? If modern government is based upon restraint, then why should security ‘no longer viewed be viewed as a means to a defensive end’? What are these ‘amazing things’ we should seek to let in?

While these incitements remain incomprehensible within the terms of the biopolitics of contingency literature, there are clear parallels with prominent rhetorical framings of the war in Afghanistan, the first major campaign of the ‘war on terror’, by US politicians. The war in Afghanistan was tasked with enabling the Afghan people to ‘realise their potential’. ⁸⁸ This potential was defined by their ‘inner burning for freedom’, ⁸⁹ an essential human quality shared by ‘all freedom loving people around the world’. ⁹⁰ Liberal war in Afghanistan was therefore a means of both realising ‘their quest’ ⁹¹ and expressing ‘our common humanity’. ⁹² This positioned the state-building project in Afghanistan as aligning with ‘their hope for a future, for peace, freedom, and democracy’. ⁹³ Realising this future was simultaneously a means of ‘restoring’ Afghanistan to a prior state of social, political and economic development. ⁹⁴ A series of bio-medical analogies which described the Taliban variously as a cancer, parasite and virus, reflect a political imaginary in which Afghanistan deviated away from its normal growth and function because of the presence of malign and foreign influences. ⁹⁵ It is in this way that the establishment of Radio Free Afghanistan could be described as an ‘opportunity to remind people that the Taliban has hijacked Afghan culture’. ⁹⁶ With Afghanistan restored to its normal trajectory, liberal war is tasked with catapulting Afghan society forwards by letting ‘amazing things’ in. As the Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill told assembled governors of the Central Bank of Afghanistan:

you can start fundamentally at the leading edge, which is a very good thing. It is a privilege for you to have that opportunity, because there are other places that haven’t had such systems or are burdened with systems that are a hundred or two hundred years old. In a way, this is an advantage for Afghanistan to start anew with the best ideas and the best technical knowledge. So I am very positive about what can be done here. ⁹⁷

The war in Afghanistan therefore represents a ‘window of opportunity’ ⁹⁸ to replace the present order with one which holds the promise of a ‘brighter future’. ⁹⁹

This hopeful configuration of liberal war, based upon a certainty regarding Afghanistan’s inherent tendency towards realising liberal forms of subjectivity and government, is not simply a feature of political rhetoric. This alternative configuration of humanity, temporality and potentiality is integral to the strategic culture of the ‘war on terror’. Take, for example, the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS). Published in 2002 and 2006, these documents are regarded ‘as defining fundamental positions of their issuing bodies’. ¹⁰⁰ These positions reflect governing accounts of the character and features of the contemporary security environment, the strategies and practices required to navigate this terrain, and the over-arching principles of national mission or purpose that coordinate this process. While the logics of fear and uncertainty described by the biopolitics of contingency are a central element of these documents, these are not the only, or perhaps even primary, logics of the NSS.

As Felix Berenskoetter observes, US grand strategy in this period is also ‘driven by idealistic or utopian thinking’. ¹⁰¹ Tellingly, the first strategic goal of the 2002 and 2006 NSS is to ‘champion aspirations for human dignity’. Of course, any account of human dignity requires an account of humanity. The NSS documents operate on the basis of a universal account of humanity defined by values that are cross-cultural, not parochial. The task of championing human dignity entails meeting a series of ‘non-negotiable demands’ which include ‘the rule of law; limits on the absolute power of the state; free speech; freedom of worship; equal justice; respect for women; religious and ethnic tolerance; and respect for private property’. ¹⁰² These demands are simultaneously American and universal, they reflect ‘our values because we believe the desire for freedom lives in every human heart and the imperative of human dignity transcends all nations and cultures’. ¹⁰³ Central to the fulfilment of human dignity are a series of political institutions and processes which are seen as the natural culmination of social organisation through their correspondence to the inner truth of individuals everywhere:

The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom – and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. In the twenty-first century, only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing political and economic freedom will be able to unleash the potential of their people and assure their future prosperity. . . . These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society. ¹⁰⁴

This illustrates how liberal war is tasked with unleashing potential, described as an inherent human quality. Here, the human is a site of political certainty, not uncertainty. The NSS claims to know what all humans tend and seek to become and liberal war is purposed with achieving this natural process of becoming. Through the equation of liberalism with nature and humanity, liberal war is removed from the realm of politics and history and is invested with an ‘ultra-political’ resolve ¹⁰⁵ : to realise, not inhibit potential; to move towards the end of history, not defer the end-times. Significantly, the war in Afghanistan is described in the 2006 NSS as the first ‘success’ of this mission to ‘champion aspirations for human dignity’. ¹⁰⁶

The authority of these claims is not derived from appeals to the scientific account of humanity or the secular-modern account of temporality described by the biopolitics of contingency literature. Rather, they are asserted as articles of faith. Through faith, a political conviction in certainties that lack (a scientific) epistemological justification is produced. What we see here is a discourse of humanity in which individuals are defined by an inherent and shared essence, an essence that leads individuals to inherently tend towards the realisation of certain universal characteristics and traits. It is a discourse of temporality in which the future is defined by hope and the promise of improvement, of the replacement of an unjust social order with a new, more just ordering. These alternative discursive elements reflect aspects of the liberal cosmological order that mobilise liberal war according to logics of hope and certainty.

It is not a coincidence, but rather an illustration of the enduring legacy of discursive forms, that the most concise articulation of this alternative configuration of humanity and temporality is to be found within Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. In the scene in question, the film’s protagonist is confronted by a superior officer who provides the following account of the relationship between humanity, temporality and the war in Vietnam:

[POGUE COLONEL]: We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every [word redacted] ¹⁰⁷ there is an American trying to get out.

Informing the purpose and legitimation of liberal war by the Pogue Colonel is an understanding of humanity and temporality that exceeds the explanatory framework of the biopolitics of contingency. From where are we to turn to make sense of its basic form and character? As we have already seen, the tendency within the biopolitics of contingency is to turn to the life sciences to capture and elaborate upon the logics and rationalities that define contemporary biopolitics. This is, in part, a reflection of their claim that these ways of seeing and knowing hold a monopoly of epistemic authority and have therefore come to saturate the cosmological terrain. By contrast, to understand how this quote captures the biopolitics of potentiality requires us to turn to literary theory. This is, in part, a reminder of how the configuration and operation of biopolitics rests upon narrative and sense-making. Specifically, at the heart of biopolitics is a story about the physical and symbolic universe that we inhabit and how the project of liberal war (an ordering of the real) emerges from this order of the real.

In simple terms, what the Pogue Colonel is describing is a Bildungsroman, or coming-of-age tale. In Truth and Method, Gadamer unpacks this literary tradition through an extended account of the concept of Bildung, which they describe as ‘perhaps the greatest idea of the eighteenth century, and [the] concept which is the atmosphere breathed by the human sciences of the nineteenth century, even if they are unable to offer any epistemological justification for it’. In this sense, Bildung was a central element of an earlier liberal cosmological order. Its cosmological role reflects how it situates humanity in relation to an account of temporality and destiny. In general terms, Bildung is a ‘concept of self-formation, education, or cultivation’. ¹⁰⁸ These processes of becoming-otherwise must, however, be understood in a precise way. According to Gadamer, Bildung is not simply the process of ‘developing one’s capacities or talents’. ¹⁰⁹ Rather, it ‘evokes the ancient mystical tradition according to which man carries in his soul the image of God, after whom he is fashioned, and which man must cultivate in himself’. The notion of Bildung is therefore premised upon the existence of an ideal human form which resides, in an unrealised form, within every individual. It is in this way that Bildung relates to an ‘inner process of formation and cultivation’ that is simultaneously a ‘rising to the universal’. ¹¹⁰

The concept of Bildung evokes a theological cosmology; one in which the form and purpose of humanity and temporality are dictated by laws which exceed the limits of purely scientific and rational forms of explanation. Through this concept, individuals are positioned in relation to a regulative ideal in which human potential is deemed to be fulfilled or unfulfilled in relation to this final, universal form. Crucially, Bildung does not imply a deterministic destiny. Rather, those who fail to fulfil this ideal form are understood as ungebildet or unformed, their being is defined by a lack, an absence, a failure to become. In this sense, Bildung is not simply a state of being, of correct purpose ¹¹¹ ; it is a project, an imperative, a movement. Hence, Gadamer describes Bildung as a project of ‘rising to the universal, [it] is a task for man. It requires sacrificing particularity for the sake of the universal’. ¹¹² It is in this way that the concept of Bildung implies the Bildungsroman, the coming-of-age tale.

In the ‘war on terror’, the project of liberal war has been defined by the narrative arc of the Bildungsroman. Its mission, as described through its rhetorical framing and strategic culture, is the task of Bildung zum Menschen, or ‘cultivating the human’. ¹¹³ While the World Bank defines civil war as ‘development in reverse’, ¹¹⁴ liberal war in the 21st century is understood as a form of accelerated development. Specifically, it seeks to cultivate and nurture the emergence of a universal, ideal form that is already located immanently within the social fabric of spaces like Afghanistan. In short, liberal war is motivated by the desire to realise human destiny: the full potential to be unleashed is that of the properly human form, the expectation horizon of this project is a better future that is both known and hoped for. In Afghanistan, for example, the potential of life and the future was a known property, and we did not fear its realisation.

We must be careful not to mistake this alternative configuration of humanity, temporality and war as a more positive form of politics: who, after all, would not rather live in a world defined by hope and certainty, rather than fear and uncertainty? The purpose of this article is to show how these alternative configurations of humanity and temporality produce their own violent urgencies, imperatives and necessities. As President Barack Obama would state in their Address to the Nation on the Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the war in Afghanistan is inspired by a vision of the ‘future that represents not the deepest of fears but the highest of hopes’. ¹¹⁵ Making the case for ‘just war’ whilst accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama argued that liberal war is an integral part of an enlightened foreign policy that seeks to ‘reach for the world that ought to be – that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls’. ¹¹⁶ In summary, to understand the ‘war on terror’ solely as a moment in which liberal regimes are captured by their darkest fears ignores the ways in which their highest hopes have inspired the ending of lives and the re-making of worlds.

Conclusion: The Biopolitical Pluriverse

Configurations of humanity and temporality are central to the liberal cosmological order. The form, legitimation, purpose and necessity of liberal war emerges through its location within this cosmological terrain. This article has sought to demonstrate how the biopolitics of contingency literature elaborates a limited vision of the cosmological ordering of liberal war. Put simply, there is more to the ‘war on terror’ than this literature allows us to see.

The biopolitics of contingency literature describes a biopolitical universe, a cosmology comprised of discursive elements that are singular, coherent and align with one another to produce consistent governing understandings and purposes. This universe is understood as emerging through neat and decisive shifts in our understanding of its constitutive discursive elements. The first shift is to the discourse of humanity. Influenced by new scientific ideas derived from the life and complexity sciences, life has come to be understood as a contingent property. Consequently, humanity has been rendered politically legible through the figure of the ‘catastrophic individual’, an individual whose future potential is defined by the capacity to cause catastrophic harm. The second shift is to the discourse of temporality. As a result of a devaluation of a Christian-theological conception of time as finite, a secular-modern temporal order has emerged which reconfigures time as infinite. It is argued that the seemingly open character of the future is made politically meaningful as a ‘threatening horizon’. As has been described, these shifts are intimately tied to one another and produce a particular set of biopolitical urgencies, rationalities and practices. Trapped in a state of fear and uncertainty, the argument of this literature is that in the 21st century, the purpose of liberal war is to perform the conservative task of deferring, delaying and inhibiting the future realisation of life’s catastrophic potential.

By contrast, this article seeks to describe a biopolitical pluriverse, a cosmology comprised of multiple sometimes reinforcing, sometimes contradictory discursive elements. The argument of this article is that the biopolitics of contingency literature ‘enacts a universe by repressing the pluriverse that lurks at its edges’. ¹¹⁷ To properly locate the ‘war on terror’ within the liberal cosmological order requires a messier account of the rationalities, logics and practices that define the biopolitics of liberal war. ¹¹⁸ The practice of liberal war is beset by contradictions and tensions. The war in Afghanistan, for example, cannot simply be reduced to the politics of managing fear and uncertainty; the politics of hope and certainty also play a crucial role in giving licence to this conflict. It is not entirely clear why there should be an expectation for liberal war to make coherent sense, to be consistent, as if violence can only emerge from a tidily ordered discourse. This is, in part, the problem of the biopolitics of contingency literature: it is too neat, too contained, too limited, too focused, too decisive, too closed. Maintaining this coherence requires acts of cosmological erasure: of eliding, obscuring and neglecting crucial dynamics that incite and configure liberal war.

This article has elaborated one such dynamic: a biopolitics of potentiality. The logic of potentiality that this article has described is not simply an excess or a minor omission. It is integral to the location of war within the liberal cosmological order. This article provides a way of understanding how potentiality emerges as a distinctive and independent referent object of contemporary biopolitics. Here, potential is something to be understood and nurtured on its own terms. Tracing the biopolitical management of potential, read through the logic of Bildung, allows us to understand how liberal war is conceived of as a form of accelerated development, in which the inherent potential of, for example, the Afghan people is not to be feared and inhibited, but rather unleashed and fully realised. In short, we fight not because we are uncertain what they might become, we fight out of a conviction in what they are destined to become.

The contribution of this article is two-fold. First, it highlights the significant influence of an alternative configuration of humanity and temporality in the legitimation and organisation of the ‘war on terror’. Highlighting the political significance of this alternative configuration invites us to approach the concept of biopolitics anew. Subsequently, the second contribution of this article is to call for a pluriversal conception of biopolitics. The universe we inhibit is filled with colliding, contradicting, resonating and energising forces and elements. While understood as carrying a ‘spark of the divine’, the bodies of others are also read through racialised markers of suspicion and threat. The violent consequences of these discordant bodily associations play out at military checkpoints ¹¹⁹ and through computer screens. ¹²⁰ Liberal war in sites like Afghanistan is configured by violently conflicting feelings towards the bodies of others. Our hopes and fears place Afghans into a chokehold: violently enforcing compliance with our desire for their sameness, whilst persistently interpreting mundane aspects of their being as indicators of deviance and hostile intent. Accounting for these logics of violence requires us to navigate a more disorderly cosmological terrain than the biopolitics of contingency allows for.

Two decades into a global ‘war on terror’, liberal war continues to demand our attention and engagement. The violence of liberal war does not end when we lose interest in it. Nor does it end when troops withdraw. Violence eschews the logic of neat temporalities. Instead, the consequences and legacies of these violences persist, endure and find new forms and articulations. It is therefore imperative that we understand the complex and contradictory character of liberal war. In the 21st century liberal war is a reflection not only of our darkest fears but also of our highest hopes.