To be sure, war has become more violent and more technologically sophisticated. But the biggest problem is its relentless continuity.
War has shed its theatrical instincts—its declarations, its climaxes, its curtain calls—and settled into something closer to a managerial routine. That’s why there is no closure.
It hums along in the background like a server farm, processing threats, updating targets, optimising outcomes. If this sounds less like Carl von Clausewitz and more like a mid-level operations dashboard, that’s because the old Prussian still believed that wars were meant to end.
The shift becomes easier to grasp if we trace a single idea across domains. Start with the drone strike, move through the murk of hybrid warfare, and end up in the fluorescent-lit world of domestic security bureaucracies.
What looks at first like a set of disconnected practices resolves, on closer inspection, into a coherent governing logic: the management of populations through calibrated insecurity. Or, to borrow from Michel Foucault—without dragging in the full apparatus of his lectures at the Collège de France—the quiet triumph of a form of power that prefers to shape conditions rather than issue commands.
The drone is perhaps the most emblematic device of our administrative age.
Officially, the drone is a tool of counterterrorism, a way of eliminating high-value targets while minimising risk to one’s own personnel. Unofficially, it is something stranger: a weapon that behaves less like an instrument of war than like a node in a distributed system of governance.
The drone does not march, occupy, or conquer. It loiters. It observes. It waits for patterns to emerge.
By the time a missile is fired, the decisive moment has already passed through a dozen layers of analysis—signals intelligence, behavioural profiling, legal review, probabilistic assessment. The target is less an enemy combatant than a data point that has crossed a threshold. Killing, in this context, is not an eruption of violence but the final step in a chain of administrative decisions.
The famous “kill list,” with its air of cinematic menace, turns out on inspection to resemble nothing so much as a bureaucratic workflow: names enter, are evaluated, circulate, and eventually exit the system, one way or another.
The effect on a population subject to drone warfare is not limited to those who are actually struck. Life reorganises itself around the possibility of being targeted. People avoid gatherings, alter travel routes, and change communication patterns.
In a way, the drone is a teacher, instructing its pupils in the art of not quite knowing what will trigger its attention. It produces, in other words, a field of managed behaviour. The strike is merely the punctuation mark at the end of a much longer sentence written in the grammar of risk.
If this impact were confined to a handful of remote regions, it might be dismissed as a particularly grim footnote to the war on terror. But the logic does not stay put. It travels, reappearing in mutant form in contexts that, at first glance, seem entirely different.
Consider the prelude to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, when Russia conducted what came to be known, with the weary ingenuity of policy analysts, as “hybrid warfare”.
Here, the drone was replaced by a swarm of less tangible instruments: cyberattacks on infrastructure, disinformation campaigns, covert support for separatist forces, and unmarked soldiers who appear just long enough to complicate attribution, then fade back into the geopolitical wallpaper.
The objective was not to seize territory in the classical sense—at least not yet—but to destabilise, to unsettle, to keep the situation just ambiguous enough that a decisive response became difficult.
This was a conflict conducted in the key of hesitation. Too little disruption, and nothing changes; too much, and the opposing side is forced into a clear, escalatory response. The art lies in maintaining a level of interference that is persistently annoying but never quite definitive. The line between war and peace is not crossed so much as blurred into irrelevance.
For the population caught in the middle, the result is a condition of permanent anticipation.
Is the power outage a technical failure or a cyberattack? Is the news report accurate or manipulated? Are the armed men in the street locals, volunteers, or something else entirely? The questions proliferate faster than the answers, and in their wake a particular kind of subject emerges: cautious, reactive, attuned to signals that may or may not mean anything.
Sovereignty, in the old sense of clear authority over a defined territory, erodes not through conquest but through the steady accumulation of uncertainty.
It’s getting harder and harder to maintain the fiction that these are exceptional practices, confined to the outer edges of the international system. The logic returns home, as these things have a habit of doing, and takes up residence in the mundane apparatuses of domestic security.
The war on terror, never formally concluded, leaves behind a sediment of institutions and techniques that prove too useful to discard: watchlists, no-fly lists, fusion centres, predictive algorithms that promise to identify threats before they materialise.
Here, the language shifts, as it always does when power wishes to appear benign. We are no longer talking about enemies but about risks, not about combatants but about individuals of concern. The emphasis is on prevention, on staying one step ahead, on ensuring that bad things do not happen. It is hard to argue with such goals. Who, after all, is in favour of preventable disasters?
And yet the underlying structure is unmistakable. Individuals are sorted into categories based on patterns of behaviour, associations, and increasingly opaque algorithmic judgments. Intervention occurs not in response to a crime but in anticipation of one. The legal subject, with its presumption of innocence and its demand for evidence, quietly gives way to the risk profile, which requires only a sufficient probability to justify action.
If the drone strike is violence at a distance, predictive policing is suspicion at a distance. Both operate on the same basic principle: identify a pattern, assign a risk level, and intervene before the event.
The difference is one of degree, not of kind. What appears as a targeted killing in one context reappears as a targeted life in another, shaped, nudged, and occasionally constrained by a system that claims only to be managing uncertainty.
The connection among these cases is not difficult to discern once we stop looking for dramatic breaks. In each instance, the objective is not to eliminate conflict but to render it governable. The enemy is not defeated so much as distributed across a field of probabilities.
War does not end; it is absorbed into the ongoing management of populations.
This is where the old conceptual vocabulary begins to falter. Carl Schmitt famously defined the political in terms of the distinction between friend and enemy, a distinction that, in his view, demanded clarity and ultimately decision. Someone, somewhere, had to say: this is the enemy, and we will act accordingly.
The contemporary landscape offers a quieter, more evasive alternative. The enemy is no longer a figure to be confronted but a variable to be tracked. Decision is replaced by calibration, the dramatic gesture by the incremental adjustment.
It would be comforting to treat this as a degeneration, a falling away from some earlier, more honest form of politics. It is more accurate—and less consoling—to see it as an adaptation.
The large-scale, decisive wars of the twentieth century proved both too destructive and too unpredictable for a system that increasingly values stability above all else. The solution was not to abolish conflict but to miniaturise it, to break it down into manageable units that could be distributed across time and space.
The result is a world in which nothing definitely happens, yet everything is in motion. There are no clear victories, but there are also no definitive defeats. There is only the ongoing work of keeping things within acceptable limits, of ensuring that threats remain threats and do not harden into crises that would demand something as crude as a resolution.
For the citizen, this translates into a peculiar experience of politics. On the surface, the familiar rituals persist: elections are held, debates are staged, opinions are loudly expressed and just as loudly ignored. Underneath, however, runs a more consequential process in which the parameters of action are set in advance, shaped by systems that operate largely out of view. The space for genuine transformation narrows, even as the machinery of management expands.
Here is an opportunity to indulge in some apocalyptic rhetoric. The end of politics, the rise of total administration, the triumph of the algorithm—pick your preferred nightmare. But we rarely experience this transformation in such dramatic terms.
Unless someone has been specifically targeted—like Mexican-Americans in cities targeted by ICE—these developments feel ordinary. Without jackboots or midnight knocks, the only thing to register is a steady accumulation of small adjustments, each justified in its own terms, each too minor to provoke a decisive response.
Foucault would surely have appreciated the irony. Power, he insisted, was most effective when it operated not through spectacular displays but through the subtle shaping of conduct. What he did not quite anticipate was the extent to which conflict itself would be folded into this process, turned from a disruptive force into a medium of governance.
As for Clausewitz, one imagines him staring at the contemporary geopolitical landscape with a mixture of recognition and dismay. War remains the continuation of policy. It is just that policy itself continues indefinitely, dispensing with the inconvenient business of ending anything at all.
Today, we find ourselves in a condition that resists naming.
It is not peace, though it borrows some of peace’s outward forms. It is not war, though it deploys many of war’s techniques. Rather, it is something in between, a managed threshold in which the aim is not victory but equilibrium at the edge of disorder. The sentries are still at their posts, but the alarm never quite sounds.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
