Teresa Degenhardt

Crime, justice and the legitimacy of military power in the international sphere

This article examines how a discourse of crime and justice is beginning to play a significant role in justifying international military operations. It suggests that although the coupling of war with crime and justice is not a new phenomenon, its present manifestations invite careful consideration of the connection between crime and political theory. It starts by reviewing the notion of sovereignty to look then at the history of the criminalisation of war and the emergence of new norms to constrain sovereign states. In this context, it examines the three ways in which military force has recently been authorised: in Iraq, in Libya and through drones in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. It argues the contemporary coupling of military technology with notions of crime and justice allows the reiteration of the perpetration of crimes by the powerful and the representation of violence as pertaining to specific dangerous populations in the space of the international. It further suggests that this authorises new architectures of authority, fundamentally based on military power as a source of social power.

An Analysis of the War-Policing Assemblage: The Case of Iraq (2003–2015)

The chapter proceeds in the following manner. I first analyse how classical sovereign theorists have systematised the use of violence in relation to its stated objective of protecting the population against a threat. I go on to show how policing can be understood as the way the sovereign function is performed on the ground and how sovereign violence is exercised as law, while going beyond the law in discretionary and rational ways. Finally, I discuss the case of the military intervention in Iraq as emblematic of how military operations and policing are intertwined in producing (in)security.