Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War Against the Other

When security is grounded in exclusion and alienation, ethics give license to killing and war, and freedom is a mask for imperial violence, how should we act? "Security, Ethics & Violence "sounds a warning; not only are global patterns of insecurity, violence and conflict getting ever more destructive and out of hand, but the ways we understand and respond to them will only prolong the crisis. In this book Anthony Burke critiques the fundamental categories of global political life, and then lights a path out. - Burke presents a ground-breaking analysis of the historical roots of sovereignty and security, his critique of just war theory, and offers important new essays on strategy, the concept of freedom and US exceptionalism. - This volume pursues searching critical engagements with thinkers such as Agamben, Hardt; Negri, Levinas, Clausewitz, Elshtain, Walzer, Foucault and Connolly. - Combining cutting-edge theoretical critique with analyses of the war on terror, Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Vietnam war, the Indonesian crisis, globalization and the new drive for empire, this is a book that refuses easy answers, or to abandon hope. This new text will be of key interest to students and researchers of Politics and International Relations, Security Studies, Social and Cultural Theory and Philosophy.

Anthony Burke is Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of New South Wales, Sydney