"In June 2008, Reading's 'The Liberal Way of War: strategy, ideology, representations' was successful in a national competition for a large-scale Leverhulme Programme Award to study 'Security and Liberty'. From 2008-13 fourteen scholars from four Schools (Politics, Law, History, and Modern Languages) will study the ways in which liberal states have reconciled themselves to fighting wars. Such states can only sustain the will to fight if they are able to portray their military actions as being consistent with their liberalism. One way of achieving this difficult objective is to treat the zone of conflict as a kind of privileged space in which the usual rules do not apply. But technological developments (instantaneous communication) and ideological shifts (the spread of belief in a global rights-based order) are making it hard to preserve the old distinction between the zone of conflict and the home society. The Programme brings together military strategists, political and cultural historians, political scientists and theorists, and international lawyers to study this development. From 2009-12, the team will be joined by nine Associates who will undertake Leverhulme–funded PhDs." Below is the research proposal I submitted for one of these Associate positions as part of my "Warrant for War" research project.


Recent technology advances have created smaller, faster, cheaper means to gather and transmit information and connect people within and across boundaries. As these means have become widely available, the monopoly enjoyed by nation-states over information and communication as an element of power has been rapidly lost. Constantly increasing speed and connectivity have empowered a broad range of individual and collective actors to create and disseminate near-real time or real time information with the ability to affect a broad audience. The unfolding Information and Media Revolution is having a profound, cascading impact on the social, political, strategic and structural networks of power spanning our world by simultaneously accelerating and magnifying both the centrifugal and the centripetal forces affecting the current Constitutional Structure of Global Order. This highly fluid and volatile transitional “conjoncture” points to the possibility of “Catagenesis” –that is, of both the breakdown of our global society due to the synchronic failure of its tightly interlinked economic, social, political and environmental foundations, and of the possible emergence of a more sustainable and resilient world order.

What impact is this Information and Media Revolution having on the legitimate use of force across international boundaries, as part of the international community’s emerging legal duty to protect individuals and groups confronting natural and man-made humanitarian disasters across the globe? Although various aspects of this “problématique” have been explored by political, legal, international relations, and strategic studies scholars, as well as by philosophers, historians and even network science specialists, no systematic and comprehensive inquiry has been undertaken connecting these disparate fields, seeking to offer a coherent analysis of their cumulative effect and possible consequences at the micro, mezzo and macro levels of social organization.

My working hypothesis draws upon a conception of legitimacy based on the Habermasian theory of communicative action and distinguishing between strategic and deliberative communication. It posits that the symbiotic relationship between the Information and Media Revolution and evolving notions of legitimacy reaching beyond the traditional institutions of our state-centric, Westphalian international system has triggered the emergence of a global civil society composed of individuals, groups and social networks increasingly capable of influencing political decision-making and implementation structures within and across national boundaries, thus affecting both the military effectiveness of the use of force and the degree of political support which condition their ultimate success.

In order to investigate the validity of the hypothesis claiming that only deliberative communication with citizens at both national and international levels will enable military operations to effectively attain their strategic objectives and maintain the necessary levels of popular support to accomplish their political objectives, I will focus on the most significant uses of force of various global and regional hegemonic, multilateral, non-state and post-Westphalian actors within one specific region –the Greater Middle East, since the end of the Cold War. I will attempt to evaluate the military effectiveness and political support achieved by these interventions as a function of both the internal legitimacy of the actors using such force and the external, global legitimacy of the intervention itself. I expect to find that only those actors possessing both internal and external legitimacy based on deliberative communication with citizens and collective stakeholders have ultimately achieved to a substantial degree their strategic objectives at both the military and political levels.

If validated, my hypothesis will constitute an important step in our quest to conceptualize the on-going metamorphosis of the Constitutional Structure of Global Order from a state-centric to an individual-based view of its basic unit of action. Such a configurative transformation would entail a paradigmatic shift in the organizing principle governing the distribution of authority between states from the liberal sovereignty of equal nation-states to the deliberative polycracy of non-hierarchical, functional, democratic levels of government constituting a highly adaptive, creative, efficient and legitimate global network of governance.