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Globalizations
ISSN: 1474-7731 (Print) 1474-774X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rglo20
Connection and constitution: locating war and culture in globalization studies
Tarak Barkawi lecturer in international security
To cite this article: Tarak Barkawi lecturer in international security (2004) Connection and constitution: locating war and culture in globalization studies, Globalizations, 1:2, 155-170, DOI: 10.1080/1474773042000308532
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1474773042000308532
Published online: 17 Aug 2006.
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Connection and Constitution: Locating War and Culture
in Globalization Studies
TARAK BARKAWI
University of Cambridge
ABSTRACT War and the military are neglected in globalization studies, despite the fact that the
worldwide circulation of people, goods and ideas often takes warlike form. This article seeks to
remedy this neglect by conceiving war itself as a form of interconnection between peoples and
locales, and as an occasion for circulation and interchange. The article develops a multi-
dimensional and historical conception of globalization as relations of connection and mutual
constitution, and locates war and culture within them. Cultural approaches to globalization
are used to illuminate the role of war and the military in consciousness of the world as a
whole and to address the significance of military ‘traveling cultures’.
The end of the Cold War saw the rise of globalization as a frame for conceiving world politics,
for scholars, politicians, policy analysts and the public. Alongside the neoliberal ‘globalist’
agenda that framed much discussion in policy and media circles, a diverse and multidisciplinary
scholarly literature developed with extraordinary rapidity. Liberated from the peculiar confines
of the discipline of International Relations (IR), with its obsession for sovereignty and relative
neglect of social relations, a rich and exciting body of thought concerning the ‘international’
broadly conceived has grown around the globalization concept, with economists, sociologists,
anthropologists and historians as well as political scientists making important if sometimes
contradictory contributions. IR took as its central problem the question of war and peace.
By contrast, with some important exceptions, in globalization studies relatively little attention
is paid to war, despite the frequency of armed conflict since 1989.
Where war is considered, it most often is understood as a separate and distinct phenomenon
from globalization. There is for example a debate over whether or not economic globalization
promotes peace or causes war (Schneider et al., 2003). Al Qaeda is sometimes conceived as
Globalizations
December 2004, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 155 – 170
Correspondence Address: T. Barkawi, Centre for International Studies, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK. Email:
1474-7731 Print=1474-774X Online=04=020155 – 16 # 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080=1474773042000308532
resisting Western globalization (Mandelbaum, 2002; see also Black, 2004, pp. 3 – 4 on ‘counter-
globalism’). More promising are efforts to conceive globalization as the worldwide social terrain
of contemporary armed conflict. 1
This essay seeks to theorize war as a pervasive and historically
significant form of international interconnectedness, as a globalizing force. In and through war,
peoples come to intensified awareness of one another, leaderships initiate and react to each
other’s moves, and armed forces and other populations circulate. To be at war is to be intercon-
nected with the enemy. Such connections lead to social processes as well as political and cultural
transformations that are usefully understood through the globalization concept.
The first step is to critique the pacific tendencies of globalization studies. In diverse and sig-
nificant ways, globalization is defined in terms of flows which qualify, or even fatally corrode, a
world of nation-states (Appadurai, 1996; Ohmae, 1994; 1996; Tomlinson, 1999). At the same
time, nation-states are typically conceived, implicitly or explicitly, as the site of the problem
of war in world politics, despite widespread histories of imperial violence in modern times.
In neoliberal formulations in particular, globalization is seen as considerably ameliorating the
problem of war among nation-states (e.g. Weede, 2003). Such economistic readings of globali-
zation are blind to the roles of the state and coercive power in creating and maintaining a free
trading world, a recovery of which is the burden of the discussion immediately following this
introduction.
The pacificity of globalization studies extends well beyond the liberals, who long have been
unable to conceive their own implication in violence. The most sophisticated discussions of glo-
balization are found among social and cultural theorists (e.g. Castells, 2000; Clifford, 1997;
Robertson, 1992; Tomlinson, 1999), but here too there is relatively little explicit attention to
war or even other political violence (although cf. Appadurai, 1996, chaps. 7 – 8; Shaw, 2000).
Why is this, given the ubiquity of war and political violence since 1989? In contrast to liberal
conceptions of globalization, elsewhere in the academy assumptions about peace and globaliza-
tion are more implicit in nature. They are part and parcel of social and political theories which
rarely reserve for war—one of the most persistent and widespread of human phenomena—a
central role (Shaw, 1988). As Hans Joas argues, modern social theory largely fails to grapple
with the centrality of war for modernity: ‘The major theories that are the subject of general dis-
cussion today—let us take Habermas, Luhmann or the poststructuralists as examples—contain
hardly any mention of war and peace’ (2003, p. 126). Globalization studies largely partook of
this milieu, until confronted with 9/11 and the war on terror. The inattention to violent conflict impoverishes our understanding of the social and cultural dimensions of globalization. Force and
war made possible many of the processes we associate with globalization broadly conceived, for
example by joining up the world during the period of European expansion. As important are the
distinctive social and cultural processes set in train by violent conflict itself.
That said, social and cultural as well as historical approaches to the globalization concept
provide the essential foundations for theorizing war and globalization. They do so by conceiving
globalization as multi-dimensional, as consisting of social and political as well as economic
flows, and by emphasizing the centrality of culture, conceived as structures of meaning.
Before realizing this contribution, the all too common trope of a world of flows corroding a
world of territorial states must be dealt with decisively. In focusing on global flows held to
be corrosive of territorially defined entities, globalization studies lost sight of war. Implicitly,
war here is misconceived as a breakdown of communication and interchange, rather than as
an occasion for circulation. Attention to flows should illuminate the nature of war, for war
works its effects precisely through interconnection. Relatedly, in opposing flows to a world of
territorially defined entities, globalization studies overlooked the role of flows in constituting
156 T. Barkawi
such entities. This is one reason for the presentism of much that has been written on globaliza-
tion—globalization is seen as succeeding a world of nation-states. By contrast, ‘globalization’
can be taken as referring to the ‘thick’ set of mutually constitutive international relations out
of which apparently discrete entities such as nation-states are produced, reproduced and
transformed. War and its related social and cultural processes are significant components of
this field of mutually constitutive relations.
Globalization, Liberalism and Force
Between 1989 and the strikes of 11 September 2001, globalization was very closely associated
with a hegemonic neoliberal ideology known as ‘globalism’ (Steger, 2002). The basic claims
were that the intensification of international trade and investment had reached a point at
which national economies were dissolving into a ‘global economy determined by world
market forces’ and that the only viable public policy was one that continued to deregulate
trade, investment and capital movements while dismantling the social welfare state (Hirst
and Thompson, 1999, p. xii). While the globalists focused on the utilitarian calculus of
increased wealth promised by ‘globalization’, the period after the Cold War also saw the
re-invigoration of other strands of liberal thinking. For classical liberals, free trade abroad as
well as liberal governance at home boded well for another, potentially greater benefit than
wealth: peace.
For Adam Smith, the most important consequence of the rise of commerce and manufacturing
was that they introduced order and good government, which created the conditions for liberty
and security ‘among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived almost in a continual
state of war with their neighbors’ (1993 [1776], p. 260). Agitating for an end to the Corn Laws in
1843, Richard Cobden held that bringing down barriers to trade also brought down barriers
between nations, ‘those barriers behind which nestle the feelings of pride, revenge, hatred
and jealousy . . . feelings which nourish the poison of war and conquest’ (quoted in Howard, 1987, p. 43). A very similar logic is at work in President G.W. Bush’s call for a US – Middle
East free trade zone in the wake of the US conquest of Iraq which, he argued, would ‘drain
the bitterness’ from the region and increase US security. ‘Over time, the expansion of liberty
throughout the world is the best guarantee of security throughout the world. Freedom is the
way to peace.’ 2
A variety of mechanisms were proposed through which liberalism would end war. Ever since
Smith’s critique of mercantilism, it was hoped prospects of increased profit through free trade
would overcome the desire for outright conquest. For Immanuel Kant, peace was to come
about through the territorial spread of republican governance and rule of law (1983 [1796]).
With the end of the Cold War, the pacifying promises of a resurgent liberalism found new
voices. For Francis Fukuyama (1992), liberal democracy met both the material and ideal needs
of humans, and hence promised an end to the history of great ideological struggles and its
wars. Political scientists in the United States constructed a statistical law to the effect that
liberal democracies did not fight wars with other democracies, a proposition used by President
Clinton and others to justify ‘exporting democracy’ (Russett, 1993; cf. Barkawi and Laffey, 1999).
Hopes for a new world politics fostered by the collapse of the Soviet bloc represented a return
to well-worn liberal themes. Unsurprisingly, these hopes betrayed some of the same tensions and
blind spots with respect to war and force that characterize liberal thought. For classical liberal-
ism, wars were essentially atavistic, ‘the relics of a dying age that had not yet been illuminated
by the dawn of the Enlightenment’ (Joas, 2003, p. 30) As ‘Reform’ and ‘Progress’ overcame
Locating War and Culture in Globalization Studies 157
despots and the warrior castes of the aristocracy, and free trade fuelled prosperity, wars civil and
foreign would pass into history. Easily obscured from view in this vision of a pacific liberal mod-
ernity is the role of force in making liberal the illiberal as well as specifically liberal tendencies
to war, that is, those tendencies to war generated in a world being made liberal and modern in
diverse and important ways (on liberal modernity, see Latham, 1997, chap. 1).
In particular, European imperial expansion, which involved widespread use of force, was fun-
damental to the creation of the modern international economy. Imperialism set in train modern-
ization processes which generated, and continue to generate, social and political tensions which
often take violent form. Creating and maintaining a free trading word required repeated and sus-
tained use of force. While most often this took the form of Western military intervention in the
non-European world, Anglo-American victories in the two world wars were vital as well. Geno-
cides of aboriginal peoples were a significant dimension of these processes. These forceful pro-
cesses provide the essential social, political and cultural context of modern globalizations; it is in
and through these processes that the world as a whole was joined together in recognizably
modern form.
While liberalism, in so far as it characterizes world politics, owes important debts to coloni-
alism, genocide and total war, the categories of liberal thought are not well-suited to analysis of
imperialism, force and war. Yet these categories are pervasive in elite, scholarly and popular
discussion of world politics, especially but not only during the period after 1989, and no
where more so than in popular, media and elite discussions of ‘globalization’. In many ways,
particularly as regards the contemporary international economy and the international legitima-
tion of the use of force, liberal categories largely set the terms in which debate is conducted, or at
least they did so prior to the war on terror. Many thinkers have argued in different ways that
liberal thought obscures and elides critical aspects of the operation of power and force in
world politics (e.g. Carr, 1939; Schmitt, 1996 [1932]). To the extent, then, that discourses of
globalization reflect and embody liberal categories, similar obfuscations are likely to occur.
In particular, there is an apparent difficulty, even among staunch critics, to see the forceful foun-
dations that made possible a free trading world; and, second, a long-standing resistance to recog-
nizing the central dependence of capitalist economies, at home and abroad, on state regulation,
ultimately backed up by ‘legitimate’ force. In order to locate war and culture in globalizing
processes, these histories must be recovered.
In discussing aspects of European expansion, two of the earliest critics of economic globali-
zation wrote: ‘The cheap prices of [the bourgeoisie’s] commodities are the heavy artillery with
which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces “the barbarians” intensely obstinate
hatred of foreigners to capitulate.’ It was apparently with metaphorical heavy artillery that the
bourgeoisie created ‘a world after its own image’ (Marx and Engels, 1967 [1888], p. 224). To be
sure, Marx and Engels were acutely cognizant of the ‘structural violence’ associated with capi-
talist development, but force and war have their own logics which must be attended to. They
perhaps had the first Opium War (1839 – 1842) in mind. In the decisive campaign of that conflict,
some 25 Royal Navy ships of the line, 14 steamers and nine transports carrying 10,000 troops
were required, a considerable expeditionary force for the time (Porch, 2001, 73). The defeated
Chinese state was forced to sign a number of unequal treaties with the British and other Euro-
pean powers which sought to facilitate the expansion and deepening of circuits of merchant
capital (Cain and Hopkins, 2002, pp. 362 – 8). In turn, the Europeans sought afterwards to
support a now more pliant Chinese government against internal uprisings generated in part by
the increased presence of the Europeans and their products. Such resistance required repeated
applications of force over the following decades, sometimes directly by the Europeans
158 T. Barkawi
themselves and sometimes by the armies of their Chinese clients, advised and supported by
Europeans, a far different consequence of the growth of manufacturing and commerce than
Adam Smith imagined.
The tendency to see free trade as a kind of non-violent imperialism is nonetheless particularly
strong (Gallagher and Robinson, 1953). In discussing the developing American imperial role,
Reinhold Niebuhr remarked in 1931 in an article entitled ‘Awkward Imperialists’ that ‘we are
the first empire of the world to establish our sway without legions. Our legions are dollars’
(quoted in Reynolds, 2002, p. 245). In 1931, American marines were fighting Augusto
Sandino in Nicaragua and ruling Haiti and US troops were also in the Philippines and China.
At the same time, the Roosevelt administration was putting in place the system in Central
America by which US influence was exercised through authoritarian clients and their security
forces, trained, supplied and advised by the United States, a system whose long and violent
history lasted to the 1980s (La Feber, 1984, pp. 78 – 83). The repression of leftists and other
popular forces made possible the neoliberal Central America of the 1990s. Even so, despite
70 more years of widespread military intervention since Niebuhr’s remarks, much of it designed
to establish and defend regimes considered friendly to the ‘free world’ and open to the inter-
national economy, Prime Minister Mahathir was still telling his compatriots at the first South
Summit in April 2000 that ‘capital is the new gunship of the rich’ (quoted in Harper, 2002,
p. 141). These remarks were made in Cuba, the site of repeated US military and covert interven-
tions. More recently, the six aircraft-carrier battlegroups used in the invasion of Iraq are a remin-
der that as important as finance capital is, warships still play a role in attempts to export
‘democracy’ and maintain the capitalist world economy.
This brief discussion of liberalism, imperialism and force is intended only to provide an idea
of the foundational role and long and on-going history of military intervention in processes of
capitalist expansion, as well as some of the ways in which this history has been obfuscated.
What points can be drawn from this discussion in respect of much of the literature on contem-
porary economic globalization, the ideology of globalism and the location of war and culture in
globalizing processes? First, it draws attention to the historically variable, international politi-
cal – military structures required to expand and maintain ‘free trade’. These structures involve
state regulation, with both local and international elements, and historically have depended
on repeated use of force (again, both local and international) to crush resistances. Economic
globalization, it turns out, is a political project, one that makes use of force as well as other
instrumentalities (Gray, 2002).
Coercive power is only one, albeit essential, element of processes of political globalization
through which economic globalization is made possible. As Leo Panitch (1996), William
Robinson (1996) and Martin Shaw (2000) have argued in different ways, the state is not under-
mined or overwhelmed by globalization, but transformed by it, and as such becomes a critical
agent of globalization, a formulation which applies as much to the Chinese state after 1842 as it
does to the Canadian state after signing NAFTA. Local states are re-fashioned to facilitate
capital and, in the contemporary world, an overarching ‘international state’—a messy agglom-
eration of state-like institutions such as the WTO—regulates the system as a whole. The
concepts and history needed to assess these political and military dimensions of contemporary
globalization are simply absent in neoliberal readings, which focuses on the undermining or
curtailing of the role of the state. Locating war and related cultural phenomena in processes
of globalization requires attending to these political-military structures.
The second point to be made from the discussion of imperialism relates to specifically liberal
and modern tendencies to war. China’s troubled history after the Opium War is evidence that
Locating War and Culture in Globalization Studies 159
opening markets, and the modernization processes set in train by European expansion, are gene-
rative of social and political tensions which frequently issue in violent rebellion and war. A
‘national history’ of these events in China might dwell on the long series of rebellions against
the Manchu dynasty, its successors and the European presence which ultimately culminated
in the victory of the Communist Party. Such a national history could well miss the fact that
from the Opium War, there was an intensified intertwining of Chinese, European and later
American histories (e.g. Cohen, 1985; cf. Duara, 1997; Karl, 2002). Elements of this complex
and multifaceted process are easily grasped, such as the ways in which exporting Indian
opium to China righted a balance of payments problem that resulted from European imports
of Chinese tea and spices.
More relevant here are the ways in which this intertwined history continued to be generative
of violent conflict and its related cultural processes for China and the metropole. The People’s
Republic of China played a major role in the Asian land wars of the Cold War, wars that
involved Britain, France and the United States and which had more or less major domestic poli-
tical, social and cultural ramifications in each of those countries. The ‘loss of China’ holds a
special place in the domestic US political and social history of the Cold War, helping to
spawn McCarthyism. With Chinese intervention in the Korean War, the media fracas surround-
ing the US POWs from that war who voluntarily remained in the PRC afterwards, and the film
The Manchurian Candidate (dir. John Frankenheimer 1962) among others, China came to play a
role in US Cold War popular culture as well (Carruthers, 1998a; 1998b).
These examples begin to suggest just where war and culture might be found in processes of
globalization. Crucially, any solely national history of one or another country would likely miss
the interactive, interconnected worldwide dynamics through which violent conflict is generated
and its effects proliferated. Attending to the political – military not only enriches understandings
of globalizing processes but also enables new perspectives on the relations between war, society
and international relations. Equally, the interconnections between strategic and cultural histories
apparent in the consequences of the PRC’s Cold War role for American society, or in the effects
of the Vietnam conflict on American culture, suggests that the academic separation of cultural
and strategic studies is misconceived, and that the globalization concept offers one way to over-
come it (Barkawi, 2004).
This turn to the idea of worldwide dynamics, multi-dimensional in nature—economic, politi-
cal, military, cultural, social—requires refiguring our understanding of ‘globalization’. Neolib-
eral readings of globalization cannot conceive either the political and military dimensions of
contemporary economic globalization or its imperial foundations. The histories of worldwide
‘free trade’ are nonetheless an essential context for locating war and culture in processes of glo-
balization. But in order to adequately analyze such processes, a more multi-dimensional concept
of globalization is necessary.
Globalization, Constitutive Circuits and War
A critical grasp of contemporary neoliberal globalization involves the history of European
imperialism and the multi-dimensionality of the forms of interconnection between core and
periphery that resulted. Moving beyond economic globalization, scholars developed
approaches which capture relations of transregional interconnectedness in all their diversity.
Specific formulations vary with author and discipline but broadly speaking this literature
deploys a notion of globalization as interconnection across borders, ‘a stretching of social, poli-
tical and economic activities across frontiers such that events, decisions and activities in one
160 T. Barkawi
region of the world can come to have significance for individuals and communities in distant
regions of the globe’ (Held et al., 1999, p. 15). These approaches make possible the analysis of
globalizing processes in different historical eras as well as of non-Eurocentric globalizations
(Hopkins, 2002).
Nonetheless most efforts along these lines retain a strongly presentist focus. In particular, they
rely explicitly or implicitly on a narrative which associates globalization with developments in
modern communications technologies and the compression of time and space (e.g. Appadurai,
1996; Castells, 2000). It is the relatively recent intensification of the circulation of people, goods
and ideas around the world that produces ‘globalization’. Globalization is something that hap-
pened to a world composed of relatively discrete, separate entities, or at the least to a world of
entities not previously connected in equivalent ways.
It is beyond question that recent developments in communications technologies have given
contemporary globalizing processes a velocity and character different from those of other
eras. However, it is important not to conflate the attributes of globalizing processes at one
point in history with the concept of globalization as such. Globalization is often used to refer
to relations of interconnection, as in ‘complex connectivity’. These relations are seen, in
diverse ways, as profoundly transformative of the societies involved. This idea of interconnec-
tion is frequently bound up, more or less immediately, with an additional thesis, concerning the
dependence of these processes on modern communications. So for example, John Tomlinson
writes: ‘globalization [is] an empirical condition of the modern world: what I shall call
complex connectivity. By this I mean that globalization refers to the rapidly developing and
ever-densening network of interconnections and interdependencies that characterize modern
social life’ (1999, pp. 1 – 2). Interconnection is articulated, via ‘rapidly developing’ and ‘ever-
densening’, to modern communications technologies.
The approach to globalization favored here takes the first aspect of these definitions—inter-
connections—and goes one step further. If globalization is transformative, it is also constitutive.
However, the second aspect, the dependence of globalization on modern communications, is
called into question. This is not to deny that modern communications are crucial to the nature
of contemporary globalization. Rather, what is challenged is the idea that globalization as
such is dependent upon these technologies. If globalization is about constitutive interconnection
between peoples, locales and political entities in world politics, does such connection require jet
travel and satellite TV?
Consider C.L.R. James’ account of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo revolution,
The Black Jacobins (1994 [1938]). James lays out the complex inter-relations between the
Haitian and French Revolutions: ‘James was interested in the political, economic and intellec-
tual aspects of this cross-over: how events in both locations affected each other, shaped what
happened and defined what was possible’ (Hall, 2002, p. 9). The title of James’s study alone
is indicative of the intertwined developments and hybrid identity constructions involved. This
‘stretching’ of social relations occurred by means of sailing vessels, matching in form Held
et al.’s definition of the metaphor. Following in James’ footsteps, there is now a very large lit-
erature tracing out the mutual constitution of metropole and colony in the era of European
imperialism (e.g. Cooper and Stoler, 1997; Hall, 2000; Wolf, 1997). While much of this litera-
ture does not explicitly invoke the globalization concept, its themes of multi-dimensional trans-
regional interconnectedness, hybrid cultures and common histories are very similar to the claims
made for contemporary globalizing processes by cultural theorists. The hybrid identities of
the denizens of Paul Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic’ (1993) were in process long before near-
instantaneous inter-continental electronic communications.
Locating War and Culture in Globalization Studies 161
The literature on imperial interconnections can conceptually clarify that on contemporary
globalization. The key claim is that metropole and colony cannot be understood one without
the other, they comprise a ‘single analytic field’ (Cooper and Stoler, 1997, p. 4). ‘What we
now call Europe, Africa, the …
,
The Sociology of New Wars? Assessing the Causes and Objectives of Contemporary
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