As I write this review in the immediate aftermath of the November 13 attacks in Paris and the declaration of states of emergency in France and Belgium, Sidney Tarrow’s book rings eerily pertinent. Tarrow’s purpose is to examine how contentious politics intervenes in logics of war and state building. While the Islamic State (IS) is not part of the book, the shift in perspective Tarrow advances makes it possible to recast the war against IS as intricately intertwined with contentious politics, as a new moment of state-building, and of building new forms of international governance.
Tarrow starts from Charles Tilly’s widely-accepted proposition that not only do states make war, but wars make states: Preparing for war led European states to organize processes of extraction, protection, production, and distribution that established them in their contemporary form. Tarrow finds this argument persuasive but insufficient and inserts another, less elaborated one of Tilly’s propositions, namely that war is related to contentious politics. The book sets out to provide an understanding of the complex and sometimes contradictory effects that such politics has on state building in the context of war. It does so through a sweeping historical comparative study in two parts.
Focused on the building of new states in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, the first part takes the cases of France, the United States, and Italy to illustrate how domestic contention intersects with the onset of war, how states seek to control such contention during war, and how wars influence the shape of contention in their aftermath. Contention produced the French Revolution and with it a “movement-state” that ultimately reined in contention by inventing emergency rule. A stronger state also was the outcome of the U.S. Civil War, which triggered massive infringements on civil liberties with lingering effects beyond the war. The case of Italy shows that wars can generate contention in their aftermath: Destabilization in the wake of World War I allowed Mussolini to rally insecure sectors of the population around fascism and build an authoritarian state.
The second part of the book sets its sights on the “composite conflicts” of the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, which Tarrow argues, differ from earlier wars in that they include both non-state and state actors and often employ illegal means. Moreover, in such conflicts the distinction between international and domestic is blurred and sometimes entirely erased. While he briefly introduces the Irish Troubles as archetypical of this type of war, his eyes are firmly trained on the United States and on the kind of state it has built through repressions of contention during the two World Wars and the Cold War, but more importantly since 9/11. While painting a bleak picture of civil liberties in the “American state of terror” (p. 168), Tarrow also highlights pushback from civil society both in the form of legal contestation and activism, including by whistleblowers like Edward Snowden “on the electronic frontier” (p. 208).
The final part of the book shifts the attention to the international level and interrogates the “dark side of liberal internationalism” (p. 217), the way in which the U.S. state of emergency has been projected into the multilateral system and, indeed, into allied states. International collaboration to fight terrorism thus has become a breeding ground for human rights violations, from extraordinary renditions to placing individuals on lists for sanctions and surveillance without transparency or recourse.
Tarrow takes on large processes and makes huge comparisons, bringing to bear a wide a range of cases. (In addition to the chapter-long case studies, the introduction touches on the Ukraine and the conclusion adds a brief consideration of post-colonial state building in Palestine/Israel, Burma, Indonesia, and Algeria). While introducing a plethora of detail, he skillfully keeps the reader trained to his main argument: paying attention to political contestation enriches our understanding of the connection between state building and war. Suffused into this argument is a passion to make visible the dangers to civil liberties that war poses. In the end, what is the role that contention plays at the intersection of state building and war?
Tarrow insists that his argument is causal (p. 5). But he does not reduce contention, war and state to variables or seek to establish general laws about directions of causality. Instead, Tarrow focuses on processes and identifies several causal mechanisms. First, drawing on work by Kim Lane Schepple, he illustrates how “emergency scripts” are triggered in wars to contain contention, including a move from executive centralization and militarization to various infringements of civil liberties that tend to linger well beyond the ends or wars. Second, he shows “ratchet effects” during and in the aftermath of war, effecting an expansion of statist powers and the migration of illiberal methods across government agencies (including upward to international organizations and downward to police forces), but also sometimes libertarian outcomes, such as the extension of suffrage. Third, borrowing from Michael Mann, he introduces the distinction between hierarchical power and infrastructural power, which allows him to show that states during war are built not simply with instruments of the state of exception, but also through the mobilization of civil society and the private sector by means of tools ranging from defense contracts to pro-war propaganda. Finally, he demonstrates how in the composite conflict with Al Quaeda “rule by law” has replaced the rule of law as different U.S. administrations have gone through pains to argue the legality of torture and other human rights violations.
The book succeeds at multiple levels: First, it identifies several causal mechanisms to explain the kinds of states that are being built at the intersection of war and contention. Second, combining insights from International Relations, comparative-historical analysis, and contentious politics, it shifts our understanding of the meaning of war today: no longer can we distinguish between inter-state, extra-state, and civil wars, but wars have become composites of contention and violence, involving states and movements, on a global scale. Finally, the book displays a virtuosity with empirical and historical evidence that brings these concepts and understandings to life.
Tarrow’s approach helps us to move beyond the idea that wars with Al Quaeda and IS are exceptional. The specificity of these wars may lie in contemporary contexts of globalization and internationalization, but when approached through the lens of state building and contention, they can be understood as in line with wars historically, triggering familiar mechanisms to rein in civil society while re-making states and international governance.
