By Josh Gregory
David Keen, an academic at the London School of Economics and Political Science, has written an intriguing new book: Endless War? Hidden Functions of the 'War on Terror' (Pluto Press, 2006). The book seeks to uncover the hidden reasons behind the 'war on terror': why it is being waged, and why it is being waged in the particular way that we see today. He takes as a starting point the question 'who benefits', and comes to some surprising, though at root basically Chomskyan, conclusions.
The book launch took place in Bookmarks, a socialist bookshop in the heart of central London, It is probably not a coincidence that Bookmarks is a stone's throw from the British Museum, where both Marx and Lenin spent a great deal of time writing the key texts of communism. The room was packed with students and professionals, sitting on garden chairs and sipping glasses of red wine. Mr Keen spoke for about twenty minutes before answering a few questions. Although his writing is confident and direct, Mr Keen is a mild and self-effacing speaker, which contributed to the intimate atmosphere in the room.
In his previous work, Mr Keen has tried to root out the functions of civil wars in Sierra Leone and in the Sudan. Like Mark Duffield, instead of simply condemning war as 'bad' and peace as 'good', he has asked why do civil wars occur? More importantly, why do they continue? And who benefits? In his previous work, he has applied a contrarian, Foucaultian analysis: one cannot simply condemn a phenomenon, one must ask what function it serves.
In his new book, Mr Keen locates three broad areas of justification – economic, political, and psychological – for continued pursuit of the 'war on terror'. An economic justification is that various industrial and military complexes in coalition countries stand to gain from continued military action. Then there are several political justifications: the existence of a nebulous and ill-defined enemy means that countries are able to characterise a range of domestic dissent as supporting terrorism or as terrorism itself, and can receive international support for punitive measures against such dissent. Relatedly, with a nebulous enemy, it is easier to narrow the permissible range of criticisms of the government – 'you're either with us or against us'. Finally, utilizing the work of Hannah Arendt, Mr Keen explores psychological justifications for the 'war on terror', tying in consumer psychology and guilt/punishment theory. He concludes that to some extent, we are all to blame. However, here he is on slightly more shaky territory, not being a specialist in this area of analysis.
To conclude, the book is lucidly written and the thesis convincing. Mr Keen sheds valuable light on the motives behind the Iraq War, the invasion of Afghanistan, and US policies towards North Korea. Crucially, by showing that the hidden functions of the 'war on terror' are located in many different fields, Mr Keen makes it clear that trans-national terrorism and international responses to it are best understood in the form of networks of networks, and that views that pinpoint the current US administration, or possibly Osama bin Laden, as the root of all evil, are both simplistic and misguided.
See also in openDemocracy: "The sense that war makes" (5 October 2006) and "The myth of progressive war" (12 October 2006).
