Liberal Lawfare and Biopolitics: US Juridical Warfare in the War on Terror

Using courts to build states: The competing spaces of citizenship in transitional justice programmes

“…Oomen (2005: 890) has defined this shift as the "judicialization of international relations" recognising "an increased emphasis on the law (in particular human rights) and legal institutions in nations' dealing with one another." Thus international humanitarian law is not simply the legal backdrop that legitimises military action; law has become a focal point for subsequent attempts to consolidate states and foster economic development (see Morrissey, 2011Morrissey, , 2014. Over the past two decades we can trace a general reformulation of international development objectives towards the promotion of the rule of law, through assistance to human rights NGOs, writing laws and building courts (Mokhiber, 2000;Oomen, 2005).…”

Six Theses on Targeted Killing

“…The challenge is that a credible – though not necessarily convincing – legal defence for the practice can be provided in most cases. At the margins of (il)legality where interpretations of international humanitarian law can be invoked, targeted killing is productive of ‘a selective and suitably enabling set of malleable legal conventions that legitimate the unleashing of military violence’ (Morrissey, 2011, p. 292). Targeted killing thus demonstrates that, contrary to perceptions of the limiting power of the legal realm, the excesses of the national security state are enabled, rather than constrained, through practices of lawfare.…”

Securitizing instability: the US military and full spectrum operations

“…CENTCOM has not deviated from its long-established remit of 'shaping' the political economy of its 'area of responsibility', the energy rich region of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia -enabled by the most extensive overseas basing structure of any nation in history (Morrissey, 2011b). From its inception, CENTCOM has consistently relied upon a common-sense understanding of the use of western interventionary force to guard against threat and political economic instability.…”

“…That said however, in the wider geopolitical and geoeconomic milieu of contemporary US interventionism, the US military sees a combination of both offensive and stability operations as key to the success of what it calls 'full spectrum operations' (US Department of the Army, 2009). In this context, stability operations are part of a broad discursive rationale for an ambitious US global forward presence that promises not only neoliberal correction for some of the world's most volatile yet economically pivotal spaces, but correction too for the forms of illiberal 'underdevelopment' seen as a threat to the 'Western way of life' (Bell and Evans, 2010;Dillon and Reid, 2009;Duffield, 2007 2 The notional legal spectrum: stability operations in the war/law/space nexus US global ambition is projected and facilitated by its military's global forward presence, and this must be enabled by a purposeful legal architecture sanctioning land, sea and air access, troop movement and conduct, rules of engagement and so on (Morrissey, 2011b). This is part of the 'geopolitics and biopolitics' combination that Michael Dillon (2007) Blomley, 1989), and below I interrogate the US military's current 'operational law' to situate how stability operations fit within.…”