Focaal

War is changing globally. This collection suggests that the notion of “warfare governance” provides an analytical tool to grapple with a contemporary world where most wars and forms of large-scale or endemic violence unfold in domains, territories, and on scales beyond the format and trope of a war with clear fronts. Crucially, what we argue to be forms of warfare governance has risen in prominence beyond widely disseminated and mass-mediated global theatres of war to become a key mode of governing where in/visibilization is central. Further, by moving away from depictions of war that align with theatre metaphors, we underline the importance of revisiting and rethinking the number of small wars and insurgencies.

This article explores why supporters of the Kurdish Freedom Movement give their offspring to guerillas, despite parents’ knowledge of the likely violent death this can entail. Drawing on extended fieldwork in Iraqi Kurdistan, the article argues that the answer can be found in the lived ideology of the movement, where those who are killed are not seen as tragic figures who shatter social worlds. Instead, remade as martyrs, the dead become figures who perpetuate, renew, and give life to the struggle, and therefore to the people themselves. Accordingly, the ideology provides a means for the movement to create an autonomous revisualization of itself in the face of the surrounding states’ warfare governance. Appreciating such situated understandings of life and death is crucial if researchers do not want to inadvertently circumscribe informants’ revolutionary/utopian projects.

Penetrating the everyday and mundane, social media has become an important political battleground for hybrid warfare and far-right claims. In this visual analysis of the Special Operations Unit of Rio de Janeiro's Military Police Instagram feed, we examine how Rio's favelas are aesthetically produced as warzones, and their inhabitants as enemies to be eliminated and transformed. We argue that the images shared draw on a repertoire of right-wing moralism and cosmology as well as a vernacular influenced by social media logics of engagement that contribute to the algorithmic militarization of everything, everywhere.

The official narrative of Mexico's so-called War on Drugs, often framed within rigid boundaries and clearly defined divisions, obscures the more porous and diffuse forms of war governance that emerge through unpredictable violence. Based on extensive ethnographic research and press documentation of feminicides in the indigenous region of Zongolica, along the Gulf of Mexico, this article investigates how the construction of impunity—rooted in the discursive devaluation of women's lives, bodies, and testimonies—reveals deeper forces of territorial conquest and the expansion of extractivism. It also explores the hidden dynamics shaping the transformation of state sovereignty in indigenous territories, marked by exploitation and systemic violence, alongside the resistance efforts of organized indigenous women.

Diplomacy and the arms trade are no strangers; for many decades, arms have been exchanged as part of the creation of state alliances. The sale of guns, warplanes, knowledge, and, increasingly, (cyber) security technologies is, therefore, a politically embedded endeavor and part of the way states govern themselves. Here, I use the case of Israel and its vast global security industry to study the sale of weapons. I analyze the accompanying diplomatic relations between states as a form of warfare governance. I investigate this “securitized diplomacy” through its security narratives, which are infused with deep racist ideology and which also have a normalizing, legitimizing, and sanitizing effect regarding the industry itself, its weapons and technologies, its violence, and the (international) actors involved.

This afterword to the theme section on in/visibilizing statehood agrees that capitalism in combination with contemporary state processes is integral to the growth of global conflict and war. But it notes that this is particularly so when socioeconomic and political reproduction depends on war as its principal dynamic. This is especially apparent in what may be termed “plunder states,” which have emerged throughout history and prior to the emergence of capitalism. These highlight the society-annihilating potential of societies (state and non-state orders) whose reproductive dynamic is founded on war, a potential most likely thoroughly achievable through capital allied with the creation of technologies especially suitable for the pursuit of war.

This article explores the aftermath of the criminalization of residential squatting in England and Wales in 2012. It draws on ethnography among squatters in South East London, analyzing their strategies for resisting the uncertainty of eviction, and engages critically with the concepts of capitalist time and temporal agency. As the pressure of time-specific laws protecting the interests of the owners of empty properties creates an environment of ever-present uncertainty and insecurity, the squatters perform specific future-oriented activities aiming to resist and overcome the external capitalist timeframes imposed on them. By highlighting certain practices such as decoration, furniture building, information gathering, and waiting, this article explores the future-oriented timescapes of squatting and the manipulation of linear temporal processes embedded in the logics of capitalism.

Tracing processes in which “philanthrocapitalism” generates benefits enables exploration of value-making through hierarchical global relations. Peripheral vision based on fieldwork in Rungwe District shows putative beneficiaries’ ways of valuing support exceed donors’ intentions. The philanthropic intervention model is organized around the concept of a chain of value addition by and for farmers. This is represented by increased income, which remains elusive. Drawing on the work of Nancy Munn, David Graeber, and Elizabeth Ferry, this article explores transformations (in how value is conceived and pursued) through which rural Tanzanians negotiate political-economic constraints. They prioritize cultivating relations with those who have resources rather than following their instructions to maximize milk production. This is a different value chain approach through which people try to build a life.

If universities are committed to intellectual liberation, must they also be committed to liberation from racial oppression? And if they are to be antiracist institutions, to what kind of antiracism must they adhere? Beginning with a reflection on the multiple histories of racism and antiracism at the Vught camp and prison in the Netherlands, and surveying the work of scholars such as Anton de Kom and Frantz Fanon, this article explores the obligations of solidarity that fall upon European and US universities, in the shadow of racially organized police, military, border, and prison violences, from the United States to the Netherlands to Palestine.

Gorbach, Denys. 2024. The Making and unmaking of the Ukrainian working class: Everyday politics and moral economy in a post-soviet city. New York: Berghahn Books.

Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2024. Towards the abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to war. London: Verso.