The objective of the present article is to explore the image of the 'war on terror' in US popular culture through soldiers' battlefield experience. The main argument is that the 'living' (or 'embarked') narration of front lines creates an effect of power that gives the soldier a legitimate authority to take part in the representation of war. As such, the 'view from the battlefield' can be conceptualized as a political gesture as it involves the production of shared representations of war. The article focuses on the American Sniper legend, which is a heroic narration of the experience in Iraq of a former Navy SEAL, Chris Kyle. I propose to understand the conditions that made possible the collective normalization of a soldier considered 'the most lethal sniper in the US military history'. The study of this case brings to the fore two main conclusions. First, the political dimension of American Sniper paradoxically emerges from an apolitical discourse that claims to tell the 'real story' of a soldier on front lines. Second, war appears at the same time as an agonistic struggle for life where killing is the condition for survival and as a banal and trans-historical reality embodied into 'ordinary' human emotions.

This article explores NATO's support mission to the African Union's peacekeeping operation in Darfur, Sudan between 2005 and 2007. NATO policies are commonly presented as functional responses to events, but how did a conflict on the African continent become the Atlantic Alliance's business? In this essay, a poststructuralist practice-oriented approach is used to understand the way in which discursive practices progressively establish a policy option as 'natural' in a given situation. It is argued that the normalization of NATO's support mission to the African Union in Darfur and the integration of this operation in NATO's security identity were the result of complex and conflict-ridden social interactions between different discursive practices supported by different actors.

How do scenarios of dangerous futures imagined in the framework of the post-9/11 counterterrorism shape security institutions? Critical Security Studies (CSS)'s dominant answer is that state apparatus are significantly transformed by the use of new technologies of prediction that are very prolific in imagining potential risks. The present article questions this technologically determinist thesis. Introducing the notion of weak field in the study of pre-emption, it argues that the political sociology of transnational fields of power can help us in historicise and assess more precisely the impact of imagination over power and control in the pre-emptive era. The article analyses NATO's reaction to 9/11 as a case study. It shows how the fabrication of potential terrorist threats by NATO's practitioners, that served to justify the pre-emptive use of the collective self-defence clause of the Washington Treaty (Article 5), evolved into an ambiguous support for NATO's military policing of the Mediterranean basin and into its involvement in migration control.

How is the notion of success rearticulated in the contemporary context of endless counterinsurgencies (COIN)? To answer, the paper engages the thesis that the recent COIN campaigns were founded on a dysfunctional disconnect between the "hearts and minds" principles and the reality of the indefinite use of force. I show that this tension (called the "tactical trap") is not a pathology of COIN, but one of its productive sites. The tactical trap is an assemblage of violence that brings together the endless use of force and the population-centric narrative through the principle of futurity, i.e. an indeterminate horizon of "progress." Taking inspiration from the Critical War Studies and the Afghan warfare as a case study, I highlight the paradoxical nature of populationcentric war: it is founded on a violence that makes COIN both a permanent state of failure and a probable success. The indeterminacy of violence is then analyzed as a new ordering of riskmanagement warfare, based on the everyday (re)invention of the potentiality of "progress."

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