Bodies of Desire, Terror and the War in Eurasia: Impolite Disruptions of (Neo) Liberal Internationalism, Neoconservatism and the ‘New’ Imperium

Abstract

The leaders of the neoliberal world order are now intensifying their interventions by unleashing force with impunity while slaughtering people in the name of liberal internationalism’s peace, freedom, democracy and security. Their calls, interventions of imperial violence, push us to ask: how do we disrupt these dominant processes guided by ontological antagonisms and existential wars whose ultimate goal becomes ‘bringing life back’? In this article, I draw on Foucault’s biopolitics and articulate beyond his theorisations that imperial processes such as liberal internationalisms, neoliberal entrepreneurships and neoconservative politics are intimately converging and diverging in the reassembling and reconstructing of international life. More concretely, an analysis of the CPA planners and forces in Iraq points to those processes and terrains of antagonism that are foundational to the reassembling and reconstructing of this order: the direct use of force and the racial and gendered corporeal reconstructions (i.e. which bodies are deemed structurally impossible and ontologically dead) to engineer this universal/global order.