Making War on the World

The state bounds politics: it constructs and enforces boundaries that separate what it controls from what lies outside its domain. However, states face a variety of threats that cross and challenge their geographical and conceptual boundaries. Transnational violent actors that transcend these boundaries also defy the state’s claims to political authority and legitimacy.Mark Shirk examines historical and contemporary state responses to transnational violence to develop a new account of the making of global orders. He considers a series of crises that plagued the state system in different eras: golden-age piracy in the eighteenth century, anarchist “propagandists of the deed” at the turn of the twentieth, and al-Qaeda in recent years. Shirk argues that states redraw conceptual boundaries, such as between “international” and “domestic,” to make sense of and defeat transnational threats. In response to forms of political violence that challenged boundaries, states developed creative responses that included new forms of control, surveillance, and rights. As a result, these responses gradually made and transformed the state and global order. Shirk draws on extensive archival research and interviews with policy makers and experts, and he explores the implications for understandings of state formation. Combining rich detail and theoretical insight, Making War on the World reveals the role of pirates, anarchists, and terrorists in shaping global order.

This is an impressive study of the role of violence and boundary-making in the destabilization and subsequent re-inscription of statehood and sovereignty. Drawing on an innovative combination of historical and contemporary cases, it will be of enormous interest to students and scholars of both historical international relations and contemporary non-state violence., Making War on the World offers a thought-provoking interpretive framework and compelling insights to decipher episodes of political violence and their resolution. An important contribution to the literature on the surveillance state and the policing of radical social movements., Violations of the boundaries of established political orders can jar and shock us. Making War on the World vividly shows that transboundary actors like pirates, assassins, and terrorists are not weird aberrations in state-centric orders but reminders that drawing political boundaries always entails the creation of shadowy margins with disruptive potential., Mark Shirk offers a brilliant new analysis of the crucial role violent nonstate actors have played in transforming practices of state sovereignty from the golden age of piracy to the war on terror. This book combines exciting theoretical innovation with fascinating historical empirics, as well as offering timely lessons for the likely future of today’s troubled liberal international order. Written in punchy prose and with a natural storyteller’s flair, Making War on the World is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how transnational predators have so profoundly shaped both the modern state and the modern world.

Mark Shirk is visiting assistant professor of political science at Bucknell University.