From ‘liberal war’ to ‘liberal militarism’: United States security policy as the promotion of military modernity

Abstract

The connection between liberalism and war has been a persistent recent focus in security studies. A large critical literature on liberal war has developed, ranging from viewing such wars as predicated on expanding spaces of capitalist accumulation to seeing them as techniques of a global liberal governmentality. However, this critical literature needs to be complemented by an institutional approach to militarism that links liberal war with broader societal dynamics of warfare. The article argues that the concept of 'liberal militarism' provides a means to better historicize and institutionalize liberal war beyond the sharp edge of military interventions, connecting liberal war to broader institutional manifestations of war preparations and war making, which are also fundamentally linked to liberal approaches to modernization. The article uses the example of the United States during the Cold War and after to demonstrate that liberal approaches to modernization were explicitly formulated as key to US foreign and security policy, a form of 'military modernity'. The article further analyses US foreign policy in terms of the military modernity of 'security assistance' in the Obama administration. Seeing liberal militarism through the lens of US-led modernization efforts draws on important insights from the critical literature on liberalism and war, but emphasizes the historical institutionalization of military power as central to understanding its durability. ARTICLE HISTORY

What do we do now? Examining civilian masculinity/ies in contemporary liberal civil-military relations

“…Similarly, as with soldiering (or gender or any other social category), civilianness is presumably not a static identity or status, but rather a subjectivity produced iteratively in context (albeit one that is challenging to empirically observe due to its sheer banality). Contemporary critical military and militarism scholarship have established the contingency and blurring of the civil-military divide, particularly within liberalism, 31 understanding the two as intertwined and coproductive. 32 "Civilianness", and civilian masculinities, as a result, cannot be assigned or assumed a priori.…”

Robot Wars: US Empire and geopolitics in the robotic age

“…Yet the robotic revolution must be placed within a longer trajectory of capital-intensive warfare (see Edgerton, 1991 ). This liberal form of violence aims to use technological superiority to ‘solve’ the problem of ‘uncivilized’ states and actors ( Mabee, 2016 ). Accordingly, the US military continues to project peace through capital, security through technics.…”

Liberal militarism as insecurity, desire and ambivalence: Gender, race and the everyday geopolitics of war

“…In liberal societies comprised of ‘free’ individuals who must consent to ceding some degree of their freedom to the state in exchange for the provision of security in their lives, livelihoods and ways of life (Jahn, 2007), militarism is organized, made intelligible and legitimated in ways that differ from related processes in non-liberal states, though its effects and characteristics are often similar (Mabee, 2016; Stavrianakis and Selby, 2013). Furthermore, peculiarly liberal beliefs in freedom, and in certain modes of political economy that are assumed to deliver it, have normalized the maintenance of military power and its expansionist, interventionist uses – what I, and others, would call ‘liberal militarism’ – to ‘solve the “problem” of illiberal (and “uncivilized”) states’ (Mabee, 2016: 243; see also Edgerton, 1991).…”

“…Such a stance, however, risks presupposing that militarism is somehow antithetical to the ‘norm’; that it is the outcome of a distinctly military sphere exerting itself over a beleaguered civilian one. This civil/military distinction has limited utility for analysing liberal militarism, however, because while liberal states have tended towards maintaining this strict separation (Mabee, 2016), they have done so in an attempt to divorce violence from politics, characterizing violence as only ever and ‘regrettably … an instrument for the pursuit of political goals’ (Frazer and Hutchings, 2011: 56). This distinction underlies the notion that ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’, which casts violence and warfare as exceptional.…”

“…Basham, 2013, 2016; Dyvik, 2016; Lutz, 2009; McSorley, 2014; Rech et al, 2015). Critical military studies also prompts consideration of militarism as a historically embedded phenomenon, allowing us to better account for continuity and change (Mabee, 2016). Similarly, while many classic accounts of militarism – exhibited, for example, in the works of Mills and Mann – tend to characterize militarism as an outcome of specific attitudes, beliefs or ideologies, critical military studies scholars have highlighted that ‘people rarely articulate militarist beliefs in any great detail or as a clearly thought through set of rational principles concerning the necessity of war readiness and the legitimacy of the state having vast military force’ (McSorley, 2014: 119; see also Lutz, 2009).…”