This is a book which completely overturns existing understandings of the origins and futures of the War on Terror for the purposes of International Relations theory. As the author shows, this is not a war in defence of the integrity of human life against an enemy defined simply by a contradictory will for the destruction of human life as commonly supposed by its liberal advocates. It is a war over the political constitution of life in which the limitations of liberal accounts of humanity are being put to the test if not rejected outright. Seeking a way out of this conflict must in turn mean learning to question the limits of existing understandings of what constitutes human life and its political potentialities. The pursuit of such a line of questioning is integral to the biopolitical analysis developed in this book.

Julian Reid is Lecturer in International Relations at King's College London

Preface
1. War and liberal modernity: a biopolitical critique
2. Logistical life: war, discipline, and the martial origins of liberal societies
3. Nomadic life: war, sovereignty, and resistance to the biopolitical imperium
4. Defiant life: the seductions of Terror amid the tyranny of the human
5. Circulatory life: 9/11 as architectural catastrophe and the hypermodernity of Terror
6. Biopolitical life: the 'war against war' of the multitude
Epilogue