The ArgumentThis paper is divided into four parts. Part I is a conventional, if necessarily very brief description of the way in which military technology and armed force reinforced each other from about 1500 until 1945. Part II examines the period between 1945 and the present; it argues that what most people saw as unprece-dentedly rapid military-technological progress did in fact constitute the onset of overkill and degeneration. Part III explains how, obscured and in part protected by military-technological progress, low-intensity (...) warfare was allowed to develop from about 1660 on until it represented almost the only form of armed conflict still left on this planet. Finally, part IV pulls the threads together, pointing to the way in which war, and with it the military technology on which it depends, can be expected to go in the future. (shrink)

Political sociologists have paid closer attention of late to the territoriality of political communities, and have even begun theorizing the theme of territoriality’s legitimation. To date, however, the field has mostly overlooked the topic of maps, the quintessential territorial tool. Thus, we know little regarding maps’ crucial role in shaping modern subjects’ relationship to territory. This article argues that “map-mindedness”—i.e., the effects of map imagery on how subjects experience territory—can be productively theorized by working through the social-scientific concept of “place.” (...) Using a range of modern and contemporary examples, I illustrate how maps can draw on and manipulate political subjects’ experience of place. Maps, I submit, allow political communities to render themselves more place-like, thus bridging the phenomenological distance between these abstract, territorially vast units and their “emplaced” subjects. More specifically, maps solve this “problem of distance” through three ideal-typical processes: 1) they render the political community as a proximate “object in the world”; 2) they present the political community as a body-like target for cathexis and identification; and 3) they mediate the traffic of meaning between the local and the national to produce a multi-scalar sense of place that can be harnessed in the service of the political community. Maps are a potent means of “re-personalizing” politics; their study suggests that territoriality is not only a form of “impersonal rule,” as recent works have observed, but always also implicated in the production of political subjects. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Since World War II, American presidents have consistently advanced a world free‐trade agenda, despite the fierce opposition of domestic interests threatened by free trade, and despite these interests’ ability to mobilize local pressure and nationalist sentiment against free trade in Congress. A theoretical resolution of these paradoxes would consider both the countervailing pressure of domestic interests that benefit from free trade and an international factor: namely, America’s dominance of world trade. This global dominance gives the United States “superpower” status (...) not only economically, but politically, enabling American presidents to get most of what they want in international trade negotiations. Consequently, they can afford to make tactical concessions to American mercantilist interests—defanging congressional opposition to free trade—because in international negotiations, these concessions can be turned into powerful levers against the barriers to free trade that are erected by countries desiring access to the immense American market. (shrink)