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.

Sir Michael Howard traces the pattern in the attitudes of liberal-minded men and women in the face of war, from Erasmus to the Americans after Vietnam, and concludes that peacemaking is a task which has to be tackled afresh every day of our lives.

Examining some of the huge challenges that liberal States faced in the decade after 11 September 2001, the chapters in this book address three aspects of the impact of more than a decade of military action.This book begins by considering four different expressions of universalist moral aspirations, including the prohibition of torture, and discusses migration and ’responsibility to protect,’ as well as the United Nations Human Rights Committee's Concluding Observations about security and liberty in the last decade. International humanitarian law and the problems posed by the territorial character of war and the effects of new technologies and child soldiers are also analysed. Finally, Islamic law and its interface with international law is considered from a new perspective, and contributions in this final part offer a different way of thinking about an authentically Islamic modernisation that would be compatible with Western models of political order. With contributions from international lawyers from diverse backgrounds, this book fills an important gap in the literature on the themes of international human rights law, international humanitarian law and Islamic law.

Examines political philosophies of the classic theorists as a means to understand international dilemmas in the post-Cold War world

Founded and rooted in Enlightenment values, the United States is caught between two conflicting imperatives when it comes to war: achieving perfect security through the annihilation of threats; and a requirement to conduct itself in a liberal and humane manner. In order to reconcile these often clashing requirements, the US has often turned to its scientists and laboratories to find strategies and weapons that are both decisive and humane. In effect, a modern faith in science and technology to overcome life's problems has been utilized to create a distinctly 'American Way of Warfare'. Carvin and Williams provide a framework to understand the successes and failures of the US in the wars it has fought since the days of the early Republic through to the War on Terror. It is the first book of its kind to combine a study of technology, law and liberalism in American warfare.

Explains how to use Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to track government activities, discussing the Act's history and purpose while demonstrating how to use the "tradecraft" method to identify otherwise anonymous politicians involved in questionable acts.

This book critically examines the significance of gender, race and sexuality to wars waged by liberal states. Drawing on original field-research with British soldiers, it offers insights into how their everyday experiences are shaped by, and shape, a politics of gender, race and sexuality that not only underpins power relations in the military, but the geopolitics of wars waged by liberal states. Linking the politics of daily life to the international is an intervention into international relations (IR) and security studies because instead of overlooking the politics of the everyday, this book insists that it is vital to explore how geopolitical events and practices are co-constituted, reinforced and contested by it. By utilising insights from Michel Foucault, the book explores how shared and collectively mediated knowledge on gender, race and sexuality facilitates certain claims about the nature of governing in liberal states and about why and how such states wage war against ‘illiberal’ ones in pursuit of global peace and security. The book also develops post-structural work in international relations by urging scholars interested in the linguistic construction of geopolitics to consider the ways in which bodies, objects and architectures also reinforce particular ideas about war, identity and statehood.