Wartime in the 21st century
| Author | Andrew R Hom,Luke Campbell |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221134341 |
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221134341
International Relations
2022, Vol. 36(4) 525 –546
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00471178221134341
journals.sagepub.com/home/ire
Wartime in the 21st century
Andrew R Hom
University of Edinburgh
Luke Campbell
Northwest Missouri State University
Abstract
Wartime dominates the 21st century. The term is ubiquitous in contemporary politics, providing
an intuitive trope for narrating foreign relations, grappling with intractable policy problems,
and responding to shocking events. Such pervasion makes it easy to forget that wartime
is a relatively recent political invention. It began as an instrumental and somewhat stylized
concept that authorized exceptional violence by promising to contain it within strict temporal
boundaries. Yet in the same era that wartime achieved international prominence, war itself
became an increasingly ordinary and extended dimension of politics. Today, ‘wartime’ refers
to a number of unconstrained and often self-perpetuating violent practices that have changed
global politics and national security policies in deep and enduring ways – nowhere more so than
in the United States. To introduce the special issue, this article presents wartime as a neglected
and paradoxical topic at the heart of International Relations. It sketches the concept’s historical
emergence, from innovative Presidential discourse through expansion in World War II and the
Cold War, to 21st century entrenchment in daily life and habits of foreign relations. We also
make the case for why US wartime marks an especially apt example of a global phenomenon,
and one worthy of increased scrutiny within International Relations (IR). Finally, we provide
synoptic summaries of the articles that comprise the special issue, showing how they work
together to interrogate key aspects of 21st century wartime. We conclude with reflections on
how the study of wartime may be extended to better understand its impact on historical and
contemporary global politics.
Keywords
international relations, security, time, United States, war, wartime
Corresponding author:
Andrew R Hom, University of Edinburgh, Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15a George Square, Edinburgh EH8
9LD, UK.
Email: Andrew.Hom@ed.ac.uk
1134341IRE0010.1177/00471178221134341International RelationsHom and Campbell
research-article2022
Article
526 International Relations 36(4)
Over the horizon, two ways
In late July 2022, a United States drone strike killed the long-time al Qaeda leader,
Ayman al-Zawahiri, on a balcony in downtown Kabul, Afghanistan. While reporting the
event, the United States President, Joe Biden, followed tradition in noting the fastidious-
ness of the attack, claiming that none of Zawahiri’s family were physically harmed by
the ‘precision’ strike.1 As the news story continued to emerge, Biden and his spokespeo-
ple also commented at length on the temporal details of the operation. These included its
exact date and time, marking the almost breathless culmination of a tick tock-like chro-
nology of developments and ‘painstaking’ intelligence efforts.2 From this, we learned
that the strike occurred on Saturday, about an hour after sunrise (06:18 local time or
01:38 GMT to be exact)3; that the United States (US) had been ‘relentlessly seeking
Zawahiri for years’; had located him ‘earlier this year’ after he moved into central Kabul;
and had developed the mission plan ‘one week ago after being advised that the condi-
tions were optimal’.4 These elements of the announcement will be entirely familiar and
unremarkable to most audiences, for they have come to feature as standard forms of
executive ‘time discipline’,5 those voluntary practices and references by which actors
coordinate key processes and demonstrate mastery of a situation.
Yet in announcing the decapitation strike President Biden went far beyond the imme-
diate minutes, hours, and days of the operation. In his first scripted remarks from the
White House’s Blue Room Balcony, he took pains to frame it as a signature moment in
two decades of counterterror.6 Biden reminded his audience: ‘For decades, [al-Zawahiri]
was a mastermind behind attacks against Americans’, all the way back to the USS Cole
bombing in 2000. He noted that Zawahiri assumed leadership of al Qaeda after ‘the
United States delivered justice to [Osama] bin Laden 11 years ago’, but had just ‘in recent
weeks’ made videos calling for attacks on the US and its allies. He placed Zawahiri’s
assassination in a chain of ‘daring mission[s]’ against terrorists, which included bin
Laden but also ‘[i]n February, . . . the emir of ISIS’ as well as ‘[l]ast month, . . . another
key ISIS leader’. He described Zawahiri’s death as honoring his pledge, made every year
‘on September 11th’, to ‘never forget’ the terror attacks ‘on that searing September day’
some 20 years past. This reflected US ‘principles and resolve that have shaped us for
generation upon generation to protect the innocent, defend liberty, and . . . keep the light
of freedom burning’. And Biden closed with a temporal crescendo, promising that
‘today’, as ‘every day’, the US would remember those lost on 9/11 while securing and
defending itself against terrorism long into the future.
Some analysts lauded the strike as a model of Biden’s new approach to counterterror-
ism, which trades boots on the ground in for a lean and mean, drone-driven, ‘over the
horizon’ strategy that deters bad guys while keeping American servicepeople safer by
leveraging superior technology to launch precision attacks from afar.7 But others
lamented an expressly temporal thread running through two decades of military interven-
tion in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and other locales.8 Following what many deemed a dis-
astrous US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Zawahiri strike was something of
a chimera. For although Biden pitched it as a symbol of the end of the US’ ‘forever wars’,
he also reaffirmed that the policy of counterterror as a matter of warmaking would con-
tinue. Far from capping the forever wars, then, killing Zawahiri showed how the US
would continue them, indefinitely.9 Biden made this abundantly clear when he held up
To continue reading
Request your trial