Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat : Sovereign Bodies

University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. Users are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. The attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001 aimed at what Al-Qaeda saw as the heart of America's global empire. The subsequent reactions in America and the rest of the world demonstrated that sovereignty and its ultimate expression—the ability and the will to employ overwhelming violence and to decide on life and death—have been re-configured in the last decades of the twentieth century. The " war on terror " and the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrated that underneath the complex structures of power in modern, liberal societies, territorial sovereignty, and the foundational violence that gave birth to it, still remains the hard kernel of modern states—an intrinsically violent " truth " of the modern nation-state that remains its raison d'être in periods of crisis. Jus ad bellum, the possibility of waging war against those one declares as enemies remains a central dimension of how a state performs its " stateness. " At the same time, these reactions also vindicated Hardt and Negri's assertion that " imperial sovereignty " of the twenty-first century differs from earlier forms of imperial power (Hardt and Negri 2000, 161–204). As opposed to earlier eras, today's empire of global network-power has no outside. The enemies, or " deviants, " within this space of moral-political-economic domination are all " within, " and are often former allies of the U.S. government. In the simplified view of the Bush administration, these constitute an " axis of evil " that must be punished and disciplined in preemptive military strikes to secure internal peace in the United States and among its allies. The sovereign prerogative is to declare who is an internal enemy, and the " war on terror " is a war on internal enemies—within nation-states now policed under new stringent security acts, and within the global empire where legality and rights have been suspended for those declared " illegal combatants " and incarcerated in Afghan prisons, Guantanamo Bay, and other " spaces of exception. " The global transformations of politics, economy, and culture have been explored in …