£20 administration fee?! The cost of altering a booking on @eastmidsrailway.bsky.social is more than the price of my original ticket.

Alex Adams has done it again. Strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in the intersections of war and popular culture.

Dare I say there might be more to this current moment than this?

Labour have relentlessly pushed a muscular miserablisit aesthetic since taking office.

Thanks again to the editorial team and the anonymous reviewers. The final manuscript benefited considerably from their insight and judgement.

I've been working on this manuscript for over a decade in one form of another. I am indebted to many, none more so than Mick Dillon...

Doing so allows us to understand how liberal war is a reflection not only of our darkest fears but also of our highest hopes

As such, I offer what I describe as a pluriversal conception of biopolitics, i.e. one that is more attuned to the sometimes reinforcing, sometimes contradictory elements that comprise contemporary liberal war

While the World Bank defines civil war as 'development in reverse', the war in Afghanistan was conceived as a form of accelerated development

This account of liberal war exceeds the explanatory framework of much of the existing IR literature on biopolitics...

It does so by developing what I call a 'biopolitics of potentiality' in which biopolitical practices seek to empower human properties and futures that we claim to know and desire

This allows us to understand how liberal war was framed as a Bildungsroman or 'coming of age tale'

Taken together, what I call a 'biopolitics of contingency' argues that the GWoT is motivated primarily by logics of fear and uncertainty

By contrast, this article highlights the centrality of certainty and hope to the production of contemporary liberal war

On Temporality: the future is said to be rendered politically intelligible as a 'threatening horizon', as something which must be worked against

This disposition is evidenced by an anticipatory security politics organised around notions of prevention, pre-emption & resilience

On Humanity: This literature suggests that life has been rendered politically intelligible during the GWoT through the figure of the 'catastrophic individual'

What life is and what it may become is said to be saturated by a politics of suspicion and pre-criminality

The core claim of this literature is that contingency is the central organising principle of contemporary biopolitical rationalities and practices

Derived from the life sciences, liberal war is said to be informed and organised by a contingent account of humanity & temporality

Many accounts of the GWoT argue that it marks a departure from liberal norms and practices: it's a 'return of Empire' or pathology of neoconservatism

By contrast, the IR literature on biopolitics has sought to demonstrate the distinctly liberal origins and character of the GWoT

The article brings together literatures on biopolitics and cosmology in an attempt to provide a fuller account of how liberal war was legitimated and necessitated during the Global War on Terror.

🙋‍♂️I've got an article in the new issue of Millennium: Journal of International Studies.

It's about the intimate relationship between liberalism and war and you can find it published open access through the link below.