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Cargando... Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century (2008)por Philip Bobbitt
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. Bobbitt is surprising and his book is surprisingly nuanced. From any end of the political spectrum, there's much to agree on in this book. Many of the things you think you'll want to disagree with in this book (e.g., that a war on terror exists and may be a good thing) you may end up finding yourself compelled by, at least a bit. Ultimately it's nice to read a book laced with poetry and drama, relishing in intellectual history, and trying to wrap a temporary dilemma into a larger discourse about changes in the nature of political sovereignty. Best enjoyed as the author himself would have it, with cigars and single malt. ( ) I had an opportunity to hear Philip Bobbitt talk about this book. He mentioned the review below. He said the review author "really gets what I am saying" in the book. -------- Archbishop of Canterbury reviews Philip Bobbitt's new book, 'Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century' in The Daily Telegraph on Saturday 17 May (2008). Armies are always preparing, so the saying goes, to fight the last war rather than the next one. Philip Bobbitt's enormous, courageous new book is basically a long reflection on what it might take to jolt us out of this habit, given that, as he argues with passion and erudition, we are in the middle of a major change in the global constitutional settlement and that this change is also one of the factors making us vulnerable as never before to violent destabilisation. This constitutional change is what he described in an earlier book, The Shield of Achilles, as the shift from the nation-state to the 'market-state'. The legitimacy of a government, its assumed right to be obeyed in its directions, used to rest on its capacity to protect and nurture a fairly closely defined national sovereign unit by the management of economic growth and public welfare internally and secure defence externally. Increasingly, this is changing to a situation where legitimacy rests on government's ability to maximise the choices of its citizens. Centralised welfare is no longer at the heart of such a project, nor is the balancing of a national economy: national economies are inextricably bound up with the global market, citizens will seek the best deal for themselves within the options available both privately and publicly. The state is now a 'porous' reality in all sorts of ways. This is neither a prescription for a desirable future nor a lament for lost values. It is simply an observation about where we are currently headed, on the basis of a candid examination of various social trends. But the importance of the analysis is that it highlights the radically changing nature of war in such a context. Up to the end of the 'Long War' of the twentieth century between democratic and totalitarian states, the assumption was that war was fought between geographically distinct adversaries, by means of large-scale armaments and professional standing forces, and that its conclusion was by means of a peace publicly concluded between the parties. No longer. The information explosion and the globalisation of markets have proved to be the perfect vehicles for a new style of terrorism - a terrorism no longer about localised protest for political ends, but aimed at the dissolution of an entire culture of political consent. Pluralism, negotiation, the rule of law as constantly evolving through public discernment and discussion, are all placed in jeopardy by the terrorist's goal of creating what Bobbitt calls a 'state of terror' - that is, a system of government maintained by unchallengeable authority and enforced by internal violence. Yet the state of terror is itself, bizarrely, a 'market state', arguing its legitimacy by claiming to give its citizens exactly what they both want and need, which is the security of always being able to choose what is guaranteed to be good. And the porous character of the modern state combined with internet technology means that, en route to the creation of states of terror, it is possible for a 'virtual state' to be created, with no centralised bureaucracy, no official armed forces, no geographical heartland - only an endlessly flexible and mobile fighting force, able to construct high-damage, low-cost 'weapons' (including hijacked planes) calculated for maximal civilian damage, and able also to display in the global theatre of electronic communication a series of carefully staged atrocities to individuals. Al Qaeda, Bobbitt claims, is such a virtual state; and the conventions of warfare as they have been learned thus far cannot touch it. He is adamant that, nonetheless, we need still to use the language of war; and the greater part of the book proposes some of the ways in which 'states of consent' should adapt to the new situation. As he cheerfully admits, there is something here to offend practically everyone. The left will be uncomfortable with the robust defence of preventative action and streamlined intelligence gathering; the right will be shocked by his uncompromising critique of current assumptions about national sovereignty and his insistence that enforceable international law, shaped by clear strategic doctrine, must overrule the 'opaque' concept of sovereignty that has prevailed in the last century and more, in which the relation of states to each other is like that of individuals within the nation-state, with non-interference as the bottom line. It is not only global terror that makes the old model increasingly useless, he argues; it is also the transnational impact of natural disaster and epidemic. These can be as destabilising as terror itself (and can be exploited by terrorists); they can destroy infrastructure and civil society and so undermine the possibility of a politics of consent. And so a state that, for example, ignores a major epidemiological or humanitarian crisis becomes, in Bobbitt's view, liable to international police response, just as much as a state that perpetrates systematic human rights abuses. What has been happening in Burma in the last two weeks painfully shows the intersection of these issues; humanitarian crisis within an already repressive political context reinforces the dissolution of ordinary civil society and stability. Those who have read Bobbitt as some sort of apologist for American hegemony because of his early support for intervention in Iraq will be surprised to read his fierce and detailed dissections of the crass failures of coalition policy in respect of Iraq. He notes the confusion of intelligence gathering and analysis that has bedevilled US planning, including the shared US and UK fiasco over weapons of mass destruction; he pinpoints the weakness of a military strategy almost wholly oblivious to what would be required to rebuild civil society in Iraq, observing that, when victory is won, the primary need is for a policing function in a disintegrating society. He is still, on balance, convinced that the overthrow of Saddam was desirable for strategic reasons (at some point the regime would have obtained WMDs), but grants that there is an argument to be had about this. And he is insistent that the cavalier treatment of the processes of law by the Bush administration has done almost irreparable damage to the moral credibility of the struggle against Al Qaeda. Once a 'state of consent' abandons legality, as in Guantanamo, it is fatally compromised. Hence the need to address any arguably necessary restrictions on civil freedoms in the face of terror strictly through a transparent process of argument and a clear demonstration of how law and strategy can work together without either being sacrificed. This is anything but an uncontroversial book, but it is one of the most important works you are likely to read this year. Bobbitt's painstaking rebuttal of Dershowitz's argument for some limited legitimation of torture is excellent; his spelling out of what would be needed for the reconstruction of a wrecked society ought to be required reading in the British and American corridors of power; and his argument for rethinking sovereignty, or at least redefining it in what he calls 'transparent' terms, is one of the very, very few clear statements I have seen of what might be demanded by the growing number of issues to which national boundaries are completely irrelevant - disease as well as terror. There are loose ends, even in a book of this size. Government is bound to be concerned with public strategy and, even in the market state, with some measure of corporate security; how then does it work with actors for whom these things are not priorities? I wanted more about how governments and transnational business could work together coherently in the climate Bobbitt describes. And I wondered what if any restriction his models might entail for a world of global newsgathering and communication that is almost inevitably indifferent to the delicacies of strategy as he understands it. I suspect too that his list (pp 420-421) of countries where US intervention has been decisive for the triumph of democracy (Nicaragua? South Korea? Lebanon?) will read as a bit Panglossian to some. But the thrust of the book, for all its express commitment to the primacy of the US as a global gatekeeper for political 'consent', is an immensely powerful argument for a new regime of international law and an effective system of democratic alliances, for the sharing of intelligence and of peacekeeping and reconstructive resources. It is also, like his earlier book, written with remarkable literary grace (occasionally one sees the frustrated novelist peeping through in the vividness of the scenarios for possible future crises). And behind its pragmatic and unsparing struggles with how we are to manage all this frighteningly rapid change in how we understand our political possibilities, there lies, not too surprisingly, and very lightly sketched, an Augustinian Christian sense of the tragic obligation to achieve even a temporary and flawed good in the face of endemic untruthfulness and evil, within as well as without. We may fail, in other words, but we shall not have let ourselves be quite captured by illusion and selfishness. Whether the reader agrees or not, this is a quality that puts Bobbitt's work in a class rather apart from most essays on international affairs; the level clarity of its exposition allows us to look through into a depth that is neither consoling nor despairing but patiently hopeful. Fundamentally, Bobbitt believes that in the soundness of the morality that underlay the strategy of the bourgeois Western alliance and that defeated fascism and communism in what he considers the “wars of the nation state” while preserving fundamental freedoms of speech and association, and he aspires to lay the groundwork for preserving core values during what he considers the “wars of the market state” (which many readers on the left will disupte). In both cases, he believes that the key is “the interposition of law . . . but not law that is interposed to block the demands of strategy, but rather law that is integrated with strategy.” However, Bobbitt neglects evidence of the Bush administration’s bad faith in hijacking the intelligence to accomplish neoconservative ends, ignoring evidence such as the Downing Street Memo and such elements as the Project for a New American Century, the role of oil and oil companies (Bobbitt rebuts this charge on pp. 492-93), the role of Israel and the Israel Lobby (briefly acknowledged on pp. 525-26), the complicity of corporate-owned media, and the facilitation of this through media concentration. (Perhaps this is because he does not wish to contribute to delegitimizing the state?) Also, Bobbitt’s “market state” concept implicitly legitimates a number of these influences—making their omission all the more striking. Na de Koude Oorlog was er even het idee dat we in een vreedzame, nieuwe wereld terecht zouden komen, waar democratie en kapitalisme zich als vanzelf verder zouden verspreiden. In ieder geval sinds elf september weten we beter. Maar wat weten we eigenlijk, behalve dan dat er nieuwe bedreigingen zijn? De politieke filosoof Philip Bobbitt doet een poging dat uit te leggen in een veelomvattend boek. Met zeer uitgesproken opvattingen en een niet mis te verstane boodschap trekt hij ten strijde tegen allen die de oorlog tegen terrorisme niet serieus nemen, maar ook tegen diegenen die denken dat nu alles geoorloofd is. Lees verder.... sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Distinciones
A study of the new face of modern-day warfare integrates historical, legal, and strategic analyses to look at the concept of a "war on terror" from the perspective of governance, liberty, violence, and globalization, while examining its impact on public policy. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)363.320973Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Other social problems and services Other Public Safety Concerns Terrorism and security Biography; History By Place North America United StatesClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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