The Model of War

Political Theory
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The Model of War

Jeremy Elkins
Political Theory 2010; 38; 214 originally published online Feb 5, 2010;
DOI: 10.1177/0090591709355389
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Political Theory
38(2) 214–242
The Model of War © 2010 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/0090591709355389
http://ptx.sagepub.com
Jeremy Elkins1
Abstract
During the past half-century, the United States has declared war on (among
else) poverty, cancer, crime, drugs, and terrorism. This essay examines, in
the context of these, war as a model for responding to domestic political
problems and focuses on the role that that model has played in representing
the state and its relation to those evils identified as the enemy.
Keywords
War, Poverty, Cancer, Drugs, Crime, Terrorism
During the past half-century, the United States has declared war on a variety
of social ills, most prominently, poverty, cancer, crime, drugs, and terrorism
(or terror1). For each of these, precedents can be found, and at least in some
cases, they can be found outside the United States.2 Still, over the past several
decades there seems to have been a special inclination in the United States,
and particularly on the part of U.S. presidential administrations, to articulate
a response to social problems on the model of war. That tendency has been
noted by both popular and scholarly commentators, and some sustained
attention has been given to the significance of the war language in particular
cases. Yet there has been surprisingly little in the way of a general analysis of
the use of war as a model3 for conceptualizing domestic issues.4 This essay
offers one direction for such an analysis.
The account that follows is in some respects ambitious and in others quite
modest. Its first and most general ambition is to examine these declarations
of “war” (I shall hereafter refer to them as they have been referred to by their
advocates, without scare quotes) as a distinctive kind of political act, one
1
Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, USA
Corresponding Author:
Jeremy Elkins, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010, USA
Email: jelkins@brynmawr.edu

Elkins 215
which asserts the very boundaries of the “true” state—distinguishing “inside”

from “outside,” “domestic” from “foreign,” “friend” from “enemy”—as part
of the formulation of domestic (in the formal sense) public policy; and to
suggest that the trend toward this use of the war model is a significant politi-
cal phenomenon that deserves more attention than it has received. In pursuit
of this general project, a second ambition is to bring together two strands of
thought that have not generally been thought together: certain Freudian ideas
and elements of J. L. Austin’s account of speech acts. I shall want to draw on,
extend, and integrate these in examining these declarations of war as acts
undertaken on behalf of the state conceived as a collective subject. From
Freud, I shall draw on the idea that the subject’s conception of itself involves
a complicated process of mapping relations with the world—of introjection
and projection—that often involves fantasy: in which the distinction between
what the subject wishes to be so and what it regards as being so are not clearly
distinguished; and further that the process of fantasizing can itself, in some
respects (not in others), reconfigure the contours of the subject in actuality.
Drawing on Austin, I shall want to focus (somewhat more so than he himself
did) on some of the ways in which “things” can be “done with words” precisely
through the ambiguity in what those words are meant to do (in his terminol-
ogy, in their “illocutionary” character); specifically—and here the connection
with the Freudian strand will be evident—in the ambiguity between speech
acts that mean to bring into being a state of affairs and those that mean to
ascertain the existence of a state of affairs.
A third ambition of the essay is to connect this line of analysis with the
further question of how far these applications of the war model are meta-
phorical. I have described these declarations of war as representing a
distinctive kind of political act. But within the broad characterization that I
have given of that act, there is a further distinction to be made: while it is
clearly the case that some of these wars could only be metaphorical, this is
not so of all of them; and for the others, the extent to which they are meta-
phorical and the extent to which they take on some literal characteristics is a
matter of how they are actually “fought”—which is to say that for state insti-
tutions, treating some of these as literal wars can pro tanto make them so. My
intent is not to assess how far each of the wars that could be literal has
become so; there is no metric for measuring that sort of thing. It is rather to
suggest that for some of these wars, the extent to which they have “suc-
ceeded” may, in part, be due to their ability to exploit not only the ambiguity
between “making so” and asserting something “to be (already) so,” but also
the ambiguity between the metaphorical and the literal.
However, if in these respects the essay is ambitious, in others it is quite
modest; and in the space available here, any analysis of a phenomenon as

216 Political Theory 38(2)
broad as the application of the “model of war” to domestic issues must be a

very limited one. First, the account here cannot offer more than a perspective
or lens; in exploring these declarations of war as a general phenomenon, I
shall necessarily emphasize some aspects over others and neglect some
entirely. Second, each of the wars that I will discuss obviously has its own
complex history, political context, and distinctive features, and around each
there has grown a substantial literature; in the space here, I shall not be able
to do justice to many of the details of the policies associated with each of
these wars or to those literatures. Indeed, not only are there many aspects of
each of these wars that I shall not be able to discuss, but there are some
important differences even in their character as “wars” that I shall not have
space to pursue. Third, the analysis that I shall offer here is not intended as a
general claim, beyond the particular cases that I shall discuss, about the ways
in which the model of war has been, or may be, used as a response to domes-
tic social problems. For the application of that model to those problems is
obviously a contingent matter on both sides of the relation: on the one, the
notion of war itself differs between cultural and historical contexts, and on
the other, the representation of a particular problem in terms of war may draw
on one or more of any number of aspects of war, however conceived. While
the analysis offered here can surely be extended to some other cases both in
and outside of the United States, the question of how far they carry over and
in what respects would require a specific examination of those other cases.
The scope of the essay is limited in another respect as well. My primary
concern here will be with how the application of the model of war to domes-
tic issues has functioned in representing—and to the extent that it has been
successful, in shaping—the character of the nation; I shall have space to
touch only very briefly on the important historical question of why the model
of war has come to be employed as commonly as it has and in the ways in
which it has. I shall touch on that question at two points: at the beginning of
the essay, with respect to the early adoption of the language of war in relation
to poverty and cancer, and then, and only somewhat more substantially, at the
end of the essay, where I shall suggest that one particular form that the model
of war has taken may in part reflect a development in the nature of the con-
temporary state, the full implications of which have not yet been realized.
Here, as with the essay in general, there is much more that can be said than I
shall be able to say.
I. War and State

The United States emerged from World War II as the dominant military
power in the world, and soon established itself as the leader in the western

Elkins 217
cold war alliance. It is not surprising that at such a moment, the language of
war would be, as it were, turned inward and invoked as a metaphor for a
national commitment to solving domestic problems. Nor is it surprising that
this language should be particularly favored by the executive, whose author-
ity in wartime is at its greatest. After the American role in liberating Europe
and the assertion of American power in Korea, Latin America, Indochina,
and elsewhere, it is easy enough to understand why President Johnson, in
seeking a bold policy initiative to help define his presidency in the wake of
the Kennedy assassination and in attempting (as he later put it) to “rally the
nation, to sound a call to arms that would stir people in the government, in
private industry, and on the campuses to lend their talents to a massive effort
to eliminate the evil”5 of American poverty, would turn to the language of
war. It is similarly understandable why those who desired increased funding
for cancer research and who sought to persuade President Nixon that with an
all-out effort, a cure for cancer was within sight,6 might adopt that language,
and why the President and Congress would do so in turn; for even as the
Vietnam war dragged on with no clear victory in sight, and even as that war
came to divide the nation, the idea of war remained closely associated with
that of a unified and centrally organized national effort and with the kind of
unconditional victory that the United States had demanded and helped to
secure against the Axis powers.
Whether more than this initially prompted the adoption of the language of
war, we cannot know for certain. Nor, of course, was there any necessity that
the use of the war language would come to extend beyond the idea of a uni-
fied national commitment and no necessity as to how it might be used if it
did. Still, the application of the model of war to domestic concerns can easily
suggest a particular conception of the ontological relationship between the
state and those problems identified as the “enemy”; and this conception,
whether or not it was part of the original motivation for using the language of
war, helped to shape the sense of the proper response to those problems and
justify the character of the policies that came to be pursued.
In the modern paradigm of war—which is still war between states—states
are conceived as (to use Hegelian language) abstract unities, “autonomous
[individuals]” standing in a relationship of “externality” or “negativity”
“vis-à-vis . . . other states.”7 Or, more precisely, in a relationship of a double-
negativity: first, in “sharp distinction from others”8 and secondly, in opposition
to them. When this model is carried over to domestic problems, the relation of
the state to that which is identified as the evil will thus similarly tend to be
conceived as one of distinction and opposition: between the state—that is, the
proper state or true state—and an existentially or ontologically “external”

enemy. Now, of course, how this distinction and opposition appear is undeter-
mined by the general model itself, and we shall discuss some of the different
forms that it has taken. Yet in all of the cases that we shall examine, the appli-
cation of the war model involves or came to involve (whatever else it involved)
distinguishing the “true” state from an enemy whose nature is other and
opposed to it. Indeed, whereas in the paradigmatic case of war, the existential
distinction between states typically precedes the declaration of a state of hos-
tility between them, in the kinds of cases that we shall discuss, an important
part of the work of the declaration of hostilities by the state against the evil has
been precisely to assert an existential distinction between them.
Insofar as the application of the model of war to domestic problems
involves distinguishing the true state from that which is other-to-it, the use
of the war model can be seen as functioning (in part) as a collective version
of what in the case of individuals are commonly referred to psychoana-
lytically as processes of introjection and projection (or internalization and
externalization)—of deciding what “shall be inside me” and what “shall be
outside me.”9 And if in the case of individuals there is a primitive tendency to
want to “introject . . . everything that is good and to eject . . . everything that
is bad”10 and to over-“ascribe[ ] to the external world things that clearly origi-
nate in [one’s] own self and that ought to be acknowledged by it,”11 we should
hardly be surprised to find that same tendency in those “organized mass[es]”
in which “a number of individuals . . . have put one and the same object in the
place of their ego ideal.”12 Indeed, we should perhaps be least surprised to find
it in that particular form of mass organization conceived as (in Rousseau’s
words) a “collective self” (moi commun) and “moral existence.”13
II. Cancer and Poverty

In the wars on cancer and poverty, there was (as I have already said about the
model of war more generally) no necessity that the language of war would
come to be used for more than an expression of a national commitment. Yet
in both cases, a full-throttled national commitment would have required, in
part, turning inward and confronting the domestic sources of the problem. In
the case of cancer, there was overwhelming scientific evidence already avail-
able that domestically produced sources of cancer had “reached alarming and
pervasive proportions” and that “[w]e are . . . faced with an unparalleled
crisis of our own making.”14 A full national commitment to reduce the mor-
tality rates from cancer would thus have included prominently a strategy for
investigating these sources, and would have required making difficult politi-
cal decisions about how far to go in regulating them.15 Yet the language of

Elkins 219
war as it was used tended precisely to draw attention away from this kind of
internal scrutiny and toward externalizing cancer as though it were an essen-
tially foreign being. From virtually the beginning of the war on cancer, the
model of war helped to present the image of cancer as something standing
outside of the true nation—as if it were a foreign army invading our shores.
Thus, for example, President Nixon’s call for a war on cancer, while never
mentioning the human contribution to it, characterized “this devastating dis-
ease” as though it were entirely a natural phenomenon—“one of mankind’s
deadliest and most elusive enemies.”16 The National Cancer Act (which
began its life as the “National Cancer Attack Act” in the House and the “Con-
quest of Cancer Act” in the Senate) virtually ignored the “chemical causation
of cancer” and focused almost entirely on eradicating cancer through a cure.17
And on the day he signed that act, Nixon reiterated the by-then common
depiction of cancer as a roving invader—whose “long shadow of fear dark-
ens every corner of the earth,” and the “crusade” against which “should be a
cause for new hope among people everywhere.”18 Cancer, which itself has
commonly been used as a metaphor for a pernicious, endogenous growth,
was thus depicted as an exogenous entity,19 while in the striking representa-
tion of the war on cancer as a national struggle, the state was identified both
as a protector of individual victims of cancer and as a victim itself. Having
invaded the nation, cancer, in this representation of it, is (as in the common
conception of cancer in relation to individual victims) in the body of the
nation, but not of it, while the body politic is conceived as a unity precisely
through its opposition to this foreign body.
The war on poverty was more complicated. It is difficult to escape the
conclusion that in wealthy, industrial countries, large-scale poverty is the
consequence of some social (in the broadest sense) forces or conditions, and
any attempt to reduce poverty must thus rely on some account of its
causes.20And in contrast to the war on cancer, the war on poverty was, indeed,
and particularly at its initiation, frequently portrayed explicitly as an attack
on the domestic causes of poverty. In “here and now declar[ing] an uncondi-
tional war on poverty in America,” President Johnson identified those causes
as, at least partly, lying in a collective “failure to give our fellow citizens a
fair chance to develop their own capacities, in a lack of education and train-
ing, in a lack of medical care and housing, in a lack of decent communities in
which to live and bring up children.” The war on poverty was not simply
going to “relieve the symptoms of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to
prevent it.”21
There is no reason to doubt that for Johnson the language of war was
intended primarily to help define the domestic side of his presidency in bold

terms and to mobilize support for a poverty-reduction program.22 Yet even

from the beginning that language easily suggested a different idea as well.
For at the very same time that Johnson spoke of the causes of poverty in a
collective failure of the body politic, he used the language of war to portray
poverty as a force that existed in opposition to the state and nation—as
though it were not really of the body politic at all, but had managed to breach
the nation’s defenses and establish itself among us. In just the same terms in
which Nixon would later portray cancer, Johnson described poverty as
though a natural condition in the world: “the most ancient of mankind’s
enemies,” an invader that had come upon the nation and now had to “be
driven from the land.”23 This could easily be dismissed as mere rhetorical
flourish if it extended no further than a Special Message to Congress. But the
war on poverty as it increasingly came to be fought reinforced the idea that
poverty was a condition essentially external to the true nation.
As with cancer, a true national commitment to eradicating poverty would
have required turning very deeply inwards and confronting (as many of the
most ardent antipoverty warriors advocated) a host of conditions and policies
that contributed to the perpetuation of poverty. Yet despite some initial will-
ingness to confront the deeper causes of poverty, Johnson was acutely
sensitive to the resistance of many in the electorate to the idea that the body
politic needed to be healed and to those segments of the middle class whose
interests would be threatened by reform. As the war on poverty took shape,
Johnson thus insisted that the funding for antipoverty programs not threaten
middle-class tax cuts (which effectively eliminated most proposals for job
creation programs), backed off on plans to tie poverty programs to racial
integration in housing when this was opposed by Southerners and some
Northern big city mayors, pressed to revise the centerpiece Community
Action Program when it threatened local elites and bureaucracies, and refused
to take on a long list of other structural contributors to poverty.24
None of this was, needless to say, a result of the adoption of war language.
But that language helped to justify the limited scope of the antipoverty pro-
gram by reinforcing the notion that poverty was not so much a condition of the
body politic as one lying outside of it, and that, therefore, as one antipoverty
warrior put it, whatever the war on poverty did was a supererogatory effort by
“us” for “them,” a form of noblesse oblige by the nation for others who have
been struck by a tragic condition.25 And while, ironically, the image of the
poor as living outside of the nation was initially employed by members of the
administration in depicting the war on poverty as a kind of economic irreden-
tist movement to extend the national “prosperity . . . [to] those who have been
kept outside.”26 The representation, however, of the problem of poverty as also

Elkins 221
essentially “outside” of the nation meant that the poor had no special claim on
the nation; for while they were in the body politic, they were not quite of it.
This tendency to externalize not only poverty as an abstraction, but along
with it the poor took several other forms as well. In one, the true body politic
was identified as a certain kind of cultural community in relation to which
the poor were outsiders, living, like gypsies, in a “culture of poverty” on the
outskirts of the nation. And for many whites, the conception of the poor as a
kind of domestic alien was further reinforced when the focus of the war
shifted from Appalachian poverty to black ghetto poverty, and all the more
so when the administration responded to ghetto unrest by redirecting the war
on poverty, to a significant degree, as a means of pacifying the ghettoes.
That transformation—from, as it were, a “hot war” on poverty to a cold war
of containment—reached its limiting point in the Nixon administration,
which dropped talk of a war on poverty entirely and focused on keeping the
ghettos under control. But the termination of the war on poverty was in this
respect a progression—by no means, of course, a necessary one—of a ten-
dency encouraged by the idea that poverty itself was not part of the fabric of
the nation but an alien force.
The “war on poverty,” like the “war on cancer,” thus contained an internal
tension: the more “unconditional,” the more like a full-scale war, the more it
would have to focus on domestically produced causes. Yet the language of
war came to represent the problem as though it were constitutionally, essen-
tially, external to the real nation: an army that had invaded the national body
rather than a condition that was the product of it.
III. Declaring War

I have been focusing thus far on the use of the war model in drawing—or
more precisely fantasizing—the boundaries of the true state. But I have not
yet said anything specifically about the act of declaring war. And as simple
as that act may at first appear—a declaration that brings into being a state of
war—there is an immediate problem that presents itself in relation to this
boundary-drawing function. For the idea that one can simply decide as a
matter of will “to take this into myself and to keep that out”27 is a very primi-
tive fantasy indeed; and while “the original pleasure-ego” may want “to
introject into itself everything that is good and to eject from itself everything
that is bad,” any moderately developed ego must take account of how things
actually are; must, that is, subject its desire that something be so to reality
testing. While there is no necessity that the reality principle will always, as it
were, win out, it is not so easily disposed of. It is one thing to declare that this

“shall be inside me” and this “outside me.” But what might give that declara-
tion any plausibility?
In the paradigm case of declaring war, plausibility is rarely an issue. For
there, the distinction between the combatants is usually already well settled;
a declaration of war merely asserts that there is a state of armed conflict
between them; and if the declaration is properly issued by a person or body
with the authority to do so, it is sufficient to bring into being the condition
that it states. In that respect, the paradigmatic case of declaring war may
resemble a promise or a bet—speech acts of the general kind that J.L. Austin
initially referred to as “performatives,” and in his later, more refined version,
distinguished as various kinds of illocutionary performatives. In its paradig-
matic form, a declaration of war is specifically the kind of illocutionary
performative that Austin termed an “exercitive”: “a decision that something
is to be so, as distinct [for example] from a judgment that it is so.”28 In con-
trast, however, in the case of declarations of war on (for example) cancer or
poverty, the issue of plausibility is immediately raised, for here the declara-
tion does not merely assert a state of hostility, but yet fundamentally offers
(or implies) a “constative” claim of their external character. And such a claim
is subject to reality testing in a way that pure “exercitives,” for example, are
not.
The desire to accept the representation of the state as the good victim of
an alien evil is (for many) powerful; and as is usually the case when the will
to believe is strong, the evidence for its plausibility is likely to be exagger-
ated. And in the case of cancer and poverty, there are facts that the desire to
believe can easily recruit: for example, that cancers do occur naturally, that
poverty has existed since ancient times, and that in most systems of social
organization some persons are less well off than others. But the success in
depicting these existential oppositions is supported as well by an important
ambiguity in the very meaning of “declaring” war.
I have referred to the “exercitive” character of the paradigmatic declara-
tion of war; but even in many traditional, literal wars, the declaration of war
may be somewhat more ambiguous. In World War II, for example, several of
the major declarations of war claimed not to be bringing into being a state of
war, but merely to be recognizing a state of war that existed. In its declaration
of war against the United States, Germany proclaimed that because of American
hostilities toward it, Germany “considers herself as being in a state of war
with the United States of America.”29 Similarly, President Roosevelt—who
had several days before “asked “Congress [to] declare that . . . a state of war
has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire” since the
attack on Pearl Harbor—responded to the German declaration by asking

Elkins 223
Congress to “recognize” an existing “state of war between the United States

and Germany”—and Italy as well—and the Congressional resolutions that
followed began by “formally declar[ing]” that a “state of war” has been
“thrust on the United States” by those countries.30 And yet if in one sense,
these declarations claimed merely to recognize a declaration of war—in
Austin’s terminology, to be “verdictive” declarations, “delivering . . . a
finding . . . upon evidence or reasons . . .”31—in another they were, indeed,
exercitives in that regardless of the validity of their underlying claims, they
succeeded, merely by virtue of their utterance, in establishing the state of war
that they claimed to be recognizing.
In the context of wars between states, this ambiguity may often not be
important; but in the application of the war model to social problems, it can
play a special role. For here it is not a question merely of whether a state of
affairs has been brought into existence by say-so, but whether it can be. At
one moment, the declarations of war on cancer and poverty were expressed
as though the declaration itself were sufficient to bring into being the condi-
tion that it stated: that “here and now” the state would stand opposed to
cancer and poverty. Yet as we have discussed, this opposition also entailed an
ontological distinction between that which is inside the state and that which
is external to it. But how can a mere exercitive declaration make it the case
that the true nation and cancer/poverty are distinct and opposing forces? And
so, in the next breath, the declaration of war assures us that both the war and
this existential opposition are, in fact, not at all a consequence of what we do
or say here and now, but rather that the declaration of war is merely a recog-
nition of a condition that already existed: a war against an enemy that has
existed everywhere (“mankind’s enemy”) and always (one of its “most
ancient” and “elusive enemies.”) The declaration of war thus accommodates
the desire to introject the good and externalize the bad while attending to the
nagging demands of the reality principle by alternatively locating the grounds
for the distinction between inside and outside in a sovereign, exercitive act
and in the condition of the world as it is. Through this ambiguity, the declara-
tion of war finds in the world the very condition that it posits.32
IV. Beyond Metaphor? Crime and Drugs

In the war on cancer and for the most part the war on poverty, the enemy was
represented as an abstract condition. But in the delineation of the true state,
the enemy may come to be conceived not as, or not merely as, an abstract
evil, but in much more corporeal terms: as enemies living among us (but not
of us) who stand opposed to the good nation. Some form of this may have

appeared in the war on poverty—perhaps in some attitudes toward the ghetto

uprisings—but it was more common to treat the poor as such as outsiders to,
or on the margins of, the true nation than as enemies of it. Much more so is
this representation of the enemy to be found in the wars on crime and drugs.
Yet whenever the enemy is conceived in this way, there is the further possi-
bility that the application of the war model will cease to be wholly
metaphorical. And insofar as that occurs, the processes of internalization and
externalization may come to consist not merely in a fantasy about the state
and its relation to the evil, but also in policies and other decisions that distin-
guish insiders from outsiders, true members from those depicted as enemies,
in very real ways.33
To be sure, the wars on crime and drugs34 could be, and often have been,
represented as wars on conditions, and insofar as they have been, the language
of war has once again served in part as a way of fantasizing the true nation:
projecting certain features of social life—street crime and drug abuse—as
existentially external: not a consequence even in part of the character or orga-
nization of the body politic itself, but as something against which the true
body politic is to be identified. Yet in the wars on crime and drugs the fantasy
has taken a somewhat different form from that in the wars on cancer and
poverty. Whereas in those the projection of the evil as an entity outside of the
nation took the form principally of naturalizing it—treating it as though it
were an ancient virus, roaming the world and haunting mankind—the wars
on crime and drugs have relied, in addition and more centrally, on acts of
moral judgment to distinguish inside from outside. In this version, the nation,
through its moral judgments, establishes itself as a kind of pure, Kantian
noumenal self in opposition to the evil from which it is thereby distinguished.
(Once again, there is a familiar analogue with the case of individuals: with
the “man” who, as Freud observed, “when he cannot be satisfied with his self
[Ich] itself, may nevertheless be able to find satisfaction in [identifying with]
the self-ideal.”35 And for good reason does Freud refer to this as a narcissistic
fantasy of self-sufficiency; for identifying with one’s moral ideal means
never having to find oneself lacking.) This is potentially a much more power-
ful exculpatory fantasy. For while the representation of cancer or poverty as
a natural predator and the state as its innocent victim allows at least in prin-
ciple for the possibility of reality testing, identifying the nation with a moral
ideal and the enemy as its violation does not. The identification of the nation
with a noumenal self shields the nation from responsibility for the lived
world that it has helped bring into being, for it is, after all, just the world of
experience that the noumenal-I, the collective superego, transcends.36

Elkins 225
Yet if the wars on crime and drugs have been represented in part as wars
on conditions, they have not merely been so; and the tendency has been to
identify the enemy as a hostile force composed of real and existing persons.
The war on crime becomes a war on (some) criminals; and the war on drugs
a war on both drug sellers and (some) drug users. And just as in the paradigm
case of war, the enemy is not merely a set of distinct individuals, but an orga-
nized force, so in the wars on crime and drugs, the tendency has been to
conceive of the enemy as something like a hostile army in our midst. Thus, at
the same time that arguments concerning the social bases of crime have
tended to be dismissed by the crime warriors as denials of individual respon-
sibility, crime has commonly been represented in the war on crime not as an
individual act at all, but as part of a collective offensive, while the nation is
identified (again) both with victims and as a victim itself. In its 1985 resolu-
tion designating a Crime Victims’ Week, Congress, for example, declared
that it is the “fundamental obligation of government to protect its citizens
from the criminal element,”37 and President Reagan’s first Attorney General,
Edwin Meese, described the nature of the war on crime more starkly yet as:
part of an attempt to protect “Western Civilization” against a “barbarian-type
invasion.”38 On the other side, in proclaiming his own “crime victims’ week,”
President Reagan “urge[d] all citizens . . . to remember that the personal
tragedy of the victim is their own tragedy as well.”39 True citizens are thus
identified with the good society as collective victims of crime, while crimi-
nals are distinguished from citizens and reconceived as an organized enemy,
a foreign “element,” a barbarian horde.
If the war on crime helped press the conception of those who commit (cer-
tain kinds of) crimes as members of a hostile force, it has led as well in the
other direction: to the identification of the enemy with certain social groups. It
was surely no coincidence that it was during the height of the Reagan admin-
istration’s war on crime rhetoric that two prominent criminal justice scholars
resuscitated a physiognomic and racial view of criminal disposition, suggest-
ing that those with mesomorphic body types and blacks as a group were
constitutionally more predisposed to aggressive criminal behavior.40 The war
on crime has notoriously been fought in part as a war against the ghettoes, and
came increasingly to be fought with the use of military-style tactics and weap-
ons. Racial profiling has targeted whole classes of persons as criminally
disposed, while “reality” police shows represent the police as (barely) con-
taining dangerous classes. If the enemy in the war on crime is a “force” or
element, it is necessary to identify it and control it before it advances.
In the war on drugs, as well, the enemy has often been conceived as really
existing groups and classes—although in this case the hostility that marks

their opposition to the true nation need not involve a specific harm to specific
others, for it consists more fundamentally in aggression directly aimed at the
moral fabric of the body politic itself. In the first wave of the war on drugs,
President Nixon variously identified “the whole problem [a]s really the
blacks,” the political left, and the “counter-culture.” (“Homosexuality, dope,
immorality in general,” he told Bob Halderman and John Ehrlichman in May,
1971, “these are the enemies of strong societies. That’s why the Communists
and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff: they’re trying to destroy us.”41) In
the Reagan administration’s escalation on the war on drugs, the primary
focus further shifted from a left counter culture to a racial underclass, repre-
sented again as threatening the moral integrity of the nation.42 If the true
nation is characterized as a sober, self-reliant, self-fulfilled, and prosperous
citizenry—as President H. W. Bush’s first “Drug Czar” William J. Bennett
did in explaining the “moral argument” behind the war on drugs—those
whose lives either are, or are taken to be, more dependent, less fulfilled, lack-
ing in “social currency,” as well as those who do not accept the model of
sober autonomy on which “our nation’s notion of liberty is rooted,” appear
already as undermining the health of that body.43 This latter group can, of
course, include members of the middle class. But because what is at issue is
the social fabric of the nation, those who tend otherwise to be regarded most
solidly as members of the nation—those who contribute by their employ-
ment, participate responsibly in social institutions, improve the health of the
collective body through their upstanding behavior—appear most easily as
relatively benign users whose mind- and mood-altering drugs can be legal-
ized,44 or who appear most purely as victims and can be treated most leniently
in the criminal justice system. In contrast, those who already appear as stand-
ing outside of the body of the true nation, outside of the self-reliant citizenry,
those whose lives appear as already broken—these are the ones who most
easily appear as the unmitigated aggressors, the foot soldiers in the invading
army that is poisoning the nation’s body with drugs.
The idea of a war between the nation and a criminal army runs, of course,
headlong into one of the distinguishing characteristics of a criminal justice
system in a liberal state: that of individuating persons on the basis of their
commission of specific acts. It is thus not at all surprising that the processes
for determining individual guilt should so often come to be denounced as a
hindrance to the war effort. Typical of this was the official ballot argument in
favor of California’s 1982 “Victim Bill of Rights” initiative that limited the
rights of criminal defendants. Disdaining any distinction between criminals
and criminal defendants, it exclaimed that “[w]hile criminals murder, rape,
rob and steal,” “courts and . . . professional politicians . . . have demonstrated

Elkins 227
more concern with the rights of criminals than with the rights of innocent
victims.”45 The federal sentencing statutes, enacted at the height of the Reagan
war on drugs, established penalties for various categories of drug offenses
that reflected less the inherent dangerousness of the drug than the class of
persons with which it was associated; and in then limiting judges’ ability to
consider individual differences, in essence mandated that persons be treated
just as members of those classes.46 And given the laws of some states denying
to ex-felons the right to vote, the war on drugs has resulted in the legal disen-
franchisement of many of those whom it has stamped as moral enemies.47
Insofar as the wars on crime and drugs are treated as wars on conditions,
they, like the wars on cancer and (in general) poverty must, of course, be seen
as wholly metaphorical, for one cannot, of course, declare a literal war on a
condition. But insofar as they come, in part, to be seen as wars on populations
of domestic enemies, there is no inherent reason why they must remain
wholly metaphorical. (There was no metaphor at all in that ancient version of
the war on crime, which rested on the view that “[h]e who breaks the law has
gone to war with the community; in consequence the community goes to war
with him.”48) But if there is, then, no conceptual reason why a war on those
who commit certain kinds of crimes or on those who use or sell certain kinds
of drugs must be metaphorical, the extent to which they are so must be a
matter of how they are actually conducted. No doubt for many—perhaps
because of the influence of the metaphorical wars on cancer and poverty, or
perhaps because of the disposition to see the wars on crime and drugs through
the lens of a commitment to the idea of the modern constitutional Rechtstaat,
which stands opposed to the idea of a literal war of this sort—the inclination
is to treat these wars as though they were wholly metaphorical. And obvi-
ously enough they have not become wholly literal. But as between the
metaphorical and the literal there is no clear demarcation, for the relationship
between those is not of the sort that can be measured: there can be no metric
for determining the point at which prison sentences have become sufficiently
draconian or procedural rights sufficiently constricted that the character of
the war has fallen from the fully metaphorical to the partly literal;49 and how
literal one takes the the wars on crime and drugs to be may well depend in
part on what side of them one finds oneself. During the height of the war on
drugs, Los Angeles Police Chief Darryl Gates testified before Congress that
casual drug users “ought to be taken out and shot” as traitors, and afterwards
he refused to respond to the question whether he intended his words to be
taken literally.50 While this refusal may have been coyness or swagger, there
are surely many who lived under the Gates regime who had good reason to
wonder whether for him the distinction was clear.

The ambiguity between the metaphorical and the literal comes in addi-
tion to that other ambiguity that I earlier discussed, between two senses of
“declaring” war. And each of these ambiguities can play a role in deflecting
attention and responsibility from the implications of a liberal constitutional
state “wag[ing] war on its citizens” (as President’s Clinton’s “Drug Czar” put
it, in expressing his opposition to the idea of a war on drugs).51 Even as the
model of the war on crime and drugs has come to shape in very material ways
the state’s treatment of those convicted and suspected of crime—in the inter-
pretation of constitutional rights, in the use of various police tactics, in the
severity and aims of punishment, and so on—one available response to the
constitutional concerns about declaring war on segments of the population is
to deny it and to take refuge in the claim that the war is merely metaphorical.52
A second response, however, is to suggest, just as with the wars on cancer
and poverty, that the nation has not really “declared” war in the sense of
bringing a war into being, but has merely recognized the existence of such a
state—one created not by the polity, but against it—that as Locke wrote (of
the state of nature), “he who attempts to get another man into his absolute
power does thereby put himself into a state of war with him.”53 Moreover, it
is easy to see how these two kinds of responses can work together. Thus it can
be said (when pressed) that, of course, the declaration of war on crime or
drugs does not literally bring about a war, but that a state of war exists just
by virtue of the attack by criminals on the state. The declaration of a war on
crime can thus claim to be purely metaphorical in the exercitive sense of
establishing a state of war while literally describing an existing state of war.
And what the metaphorical representation of the exercitive declaration of
war and the verdictive version of the declaration of war have in common is
this: that while each can help bring about a change in the relation of the
nation to those represented as the enemy, each can, when necessary, claim to
be changing really nothing at all.
V. Internalizing the War on Terrorism

The U.S. war on terrorism, as it was being constructed during the George W. Bush
administration, differed from the other wars that we have considered in some
obvious and significant respects. Most fundamentally, while those were initi-
ated in response to a perceived evil found within the body of the nation, the
war on terrorism took as its primary target already-organized foreign groups,
and centrally an organization that had itself identified as an enemy of the
United States. With respect to these groups, the war on terrorism did not,
then, need to play the same role in constructing the state or the enemy.

Elkins 229
Yet the representation of the enemy was never limited to these groups; and
the Bush administration and its congressional allies not only claimed a much
broader scope for the war overseas but also sought to open up as well a
domestic front in that war, expansively conceived. In doing so, it extended
yet further that tendency that we noted in the war on crime and drugs: toward
modeling certain areas of criminal law on a war between the true body politic
and its domestic enemies. It is this internalization of the war of terrorism with
which I shall be concerned here.
After the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration attempted to obtain
from Congress a resolution giving the President expansive authority to “deter
and pre-empt future acts of terrorism.”54 Although the Authorization for the
Use of Military Force that Congress (AUMF) adopted restricted the use of
force to those who had “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist
attacks” of 9/11 or “harbored such organizations or persons,”55 the admin-
istration promptly recharacterized it as a declaration of an abstract “war on
terror.” In his statement accompanying the signing of the resolution, for
example, President Bush described the enemy in broad terms: as the “scourge
of terrorism directed against the United States and its interests.”56 And in his
Military Order two months later, which relied for its authority in part on the
AUMF, the President established a system of military tribunals for the
“Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War Against
Terrorism”57with broad authority to detain and try any noncitizen whom the
President determined it would be “in the interest of the United States . . . [to
make] subject to this order.”
From the beginning, the administration’s representation of the war was
somewhat ambiguous with respect to whether it was metaphorical or literal.
Literally, of course, (as has been pointed out commonly enough) one cannot
declare war against a tactic. Moreover, the Bush administration would at
times find it advantageous, particularly in seeking to expand the scope of the
“global war on terror,” to stress its metaphorical character: describing it, for
instance, not merely as a war against certain groups, but more broadly as “a
war of ideas”58 and a general struggle against “violent extremism”59 or even
just “extremism.”60 At the same time, the assertion by the administration of
broad executive war powers to hold indefinitely any person it claimed to be
an “international terrorist” or to “support such terrorists”61 (and the broad
statutory grants that were ultimately given to the executive to detain and try
through military commissions a broad category of “enemy combatants”62)
depended on treating the war very much as a literal one. Yet the notion that
the President has unilateral authority to decide to (for example) detain anyone
he classifies as an enemy combatant in a war for which the “battlefield” (as

one senior administration official put it) “is everywhere”63 is extraordinary;

and it is therefore not surprising that when required to justify the scope of its
authority in court, the Bush administration frequently equivocated on whether
the literal war for which it claimed war powers was a global war on terrorism
or a more narrowly circumscribed and (somewhat) more conventional war in
Afghanistan, Iraq, or against al Qaeda.64
If this continuing and intentional ambiguity between the metaphorical and
the literal helped to evade serious consideration of the implications of a
modern, liberal state (and further the executive of a constitutional state)
declaring a literal war on terrorism, global in scope and permanent in dura-
tion, the evasion of that question was aided as well though the second kind of
ambiguity that we have discussed, concerning the nature of the “declaration”
of the war itself. While on the one hand, then, the administration claimed
authority derived from the AUMF as a declaration that put the United States
in a stance of war against various enemies, including “terrorism” in general,
the administration and its supporters also suggested that it was not the United
States that (exercitively) declared war on “terrorism,” but that “[j]ust as . . .
[it was] the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor” that established “a state of war
. . . between the United States and the Empire of Japan . . . so, too,” the war
on terrorism existed “immediately following the 9/11 attacks upon the United
States”—65 or even that before then, “terrorists were at war with us”66—and
that Congress’s resolution was nothing more than its “official recognition of
a state of war”67 already in existence. If the war against terrorism is not a war
that the nation has initiated, but a condition in which the country finds itself,
it is easier to avoid the question of what it would mean to declare a literal war
against such an enemy. And here again we see the synergy of the two ambi-
guities that I have identified. In the very slippage between the exercitive act
of establishing a condition of war and the verdictive act of recognizing an
existing condition, the idea of a war of terrorism slides more easily toward
the literal.
In asserting broad powers to fight “terrorism” wherever it existed, the
administration and its supporters did not distinguish in principle between
foreign and domestic exercises of that power or between citizens and aliens.
The administration thus asserted a right to “capture” and detain those whom
it called unlawful enemy combatants equally on American soil and overseas.
And the Military Commissions Act of 2006, though it did distinguish between
aliens and citizens, authorized the administration to try in a military tribunal
any alien engaged in what it broadly termed “hostilities against the United
States” for a wide range of what would otherwise be simple crimes, including
what it called (without further definition) “attacks” on civilian property.68

Elkins 231
But if on the one hand, the war on terrorism was used as justification for
removing certain persons and acts from the criminal justice system, on the
other, the war on terrorism was incorporated into the criminal law. The USA
PATRIOT Act, for example, gave the FBI the authority to obtain, without a
warrant or the need to provide any supporting evidence to a court, “any tan-
gible things” as part of an investigation of either citizens or noncitizens,
merely by asserting that it was acting to “protect against international terror-
ism or clandestine intelligence activities.”69 The term “clandestine intelligence
activity” was left undefined, while the definition of “international terrorism”
was expanded (by removing the existing requirement that it involve “assas-
sination or kidnapping”) to include any action that “transcends national
boundaries” or is committed by a person “operat[ing]” across international
lines if it “appear[s] to be intended” to “influence the policy of a government
by intimidation or coercion,” if it could be “dangerous” to human life, and if
it violates any “of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State.”70
(There is no requirement that the violation of law be for the purpose of
“intimidation or coercion,” that there be an intent to endanger human life, or
that any person be actually harmed.) The same definition, without the inter-
national requirement, was then employed in establishing a new category of
“domestic terrorism,” which, along with “international terrorism,” became
the basis for a number of other new legal penalties and liabilities, including
asset forfeiture.71
We cannot know how expansively this category of terrorism, with its spe-
cial procedures and penalties, will be treated in the future. But on a broad
reading of such terms as “coercion” and “dangerous,” it could easily end up
including, for example, civil disobedience and other forms of protest that
directly or incidentally involve violation of some federal or state crime. (Had
this definition of domestic terrorism been in place during the civil rights
movement, it is difficult to believe that it would not have been construed by
the FBI to include the use of what Martin Luther King referred to as “direct
action” intended “to . . . create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a
community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront
the issue.”72) The FBI’s counterterrorism division has already moved very
much in this direction, adopting, for example, a broad definition of “eco-
terrorism” as any “use or threatened use of violence of a criminal nature
against innocent victims or property by an environmentally oriented subna-
tional group for environmental–political reasons, or aimed at an audience
beyond the target, often of a symbolic nature”—such as Greenpeace’s cutting
of drift nets used by commercial fishing operations.73 In the broadest version
of it, and the version toward which the Bush administration was increasingly

moving, the domestic war on terrorism tended toward identifying the nation
with the entirety of the existing structure of state power, policy, and law,
while including as enemies of the nation those who commit any violations of
the law as part of a political or social movement to pressure a government or
a private entity to change policy. To the extent that the war on terrorism is
treated as a literal war, the implications of defining the nation and its enemies
in this way are daunting.74
VI. State and Boundaries

As I indicated at the outset, my primary concern has been with how the model
of war has functioned in representing the state in relation to various social
ills. In the course of this essay, however, I have touched as well on the ques-
tion of why such a model should have come to be called on. I began by noting
the coincidence between the use of the war rhetoric on the one hand and, on
the other, the dominance of the American military after World War II (and the
expansion of executive power that went with it). While inferring causal rela-
tions of this sort is necessarily speculative, it is not unreasonable to suppose
that a country that had become confident, even hubristic, about its capacity to
project military power would naturally enough be drawn to war as a meta-
phor for a unified response to social ills. I have touched on the “why” question
in another respect as well in noting the advantages, psychological and politi-
cal, of the war model in representing the state as existentially external to both
certain abstract conditions and to certain populations. Yet with respect to the
latter of these, there is an obvious tension with the original historical expla-
nation for the attraction of the war model. For whatever might be said for the
ability of that model to conjure up the unity of the territorial state, in the case
of the wars on crime, drugs, and domestic terrorism, that language has func-
tioned in significant respects in the opposite direction: precisely to describe
divisions within the territorial state, and to refigure the true state or nation as
a particular moral–cultural subcommunity within the larger territorial one.75
It is not unusual for language originally employed for one purpose to evolve
to others uses; and so we could be content to leave this with the thought that
while the declarations of wars on poverty and cancer may originally have
borrowed from the international arena the image of the United States as a
powerful, unified state, that language subsequently came to be used, and in
some cases was strategically reappropriated, for different purposes. At the
same time, we ought not to overlook—particularly if we are concerned with
the future life of the model of war—the fact that the use of the war model in
the last decades of the twentieth century to rearticulate what is “inside” and

Elkins 233
“outside” of the state corresponded almost precisely in time and in character

to a development at the international level that was reshaping the notion of
“inside” and “outside”—not only for the United States, but for states in gen-
eral: the rapid acceleration of those processes of reconfiguring “inside” and
“outside” that are commonly referred to as globalization. This reconfigura-
tion has been occurring at a number of levels. Central and most dramatic has
been the increasing transformation of markets from domestically focused to
international; and civil society more broadly is becoming increasingly glo-
balized. And along with this has come the establishment or expansion of
political and legal authority beyond state boundaries—through the delega-
tion of authority to transnational bodies, but also importantly through the
increasing assertion by states and regional associations of extraterritorial
jurisdiction.76
These processes of globalization can, in one sense, be seen as the oppo-
site of the domestic application of the war model, for if the latter involves
the internalization of the model of foreign relations, the former involves an
expansion or externalization of traditionally “internal” institutions. But these
may also plausibly be understood as two aspects of the same process, oppo-
site sides of the same coin, and in reconfiguring “inside” and “outside,” each
may provide a further impetus for the other. The less that civil society is cir-
cumscribed by territorial boundaries, the less that formal citizenship (much
less residency) may be conceived as the sufficient basis for a claim of true
social membership. (The war on poverty was declared still on the presump-
tion that the fact that American prosperity had not reached some of “our fellow
citizens” was an obvious reason for collective action.) And the more that the
exercise of state authority becomes independent of membership—the less,
that is, that membership and state jurisdiction are conceived, as in the tradi-
tional model of the Rechtsstaat, as correlative—the less that full membership
in the nation or state will be seen as flowing simply from the fact of formal
citizenship, rather than as a matter to be decided in accordance with a delin-
eation of the “true” state or nation on other criteria.
This, of course, is not to suggest that the character assumed by the wars on
crime, drugs, and domestic terrorism is simply and directly a consequence of
globalization. The treatment of certain groups within the domestic population
as outsiders is not a new phenomenon, and we hardly need to be reminded
that whenever there have been states or nation–states, there have been some
who, even if formally members, have been treated as outsiders, aliens, or
enemies; that even when economies were more circumscribed territorially,
there have often been “surplus populations” that were economically, politi-
cally, and legally marginalized; and that ever since the rise of the nation-state,
there have been various claims of one exclusionary sort or another

concerning membership in the “true nation.” (In the United States, we need
only refer to the history of African Americans to be reminded that formal citi-
zenship has never been a guarantee of genuine membership.) But each of
these forms of exclusion arises within its own particular set of historical con-
ditions, and the only suggestion here is that the contemporary developments
in globalization may well prompt new forms of exclusion as well as inclu-
sion: that as territorial boundaries become increasingly less significant, the
character of the state or nation, and of what is to be regarded as inside and
outside of it, is likely to be increasingly redefined.
It is not necessary that that reconfiguration employ the model of war.
Although we have been concerned here with some of the roles that that model
has played in representing, and to the extent that it has been successful in
shaping, the state, I have obviously not claimed that those roles could be
played only by that model; and in other states attempts to represent a true state
against domestic outsiders has taken other forms. But if there is any validity
to the thought that the processes of globalization are likely to press toward
reconfiguring the idea of membership in the state, we would have good reason
to expect that either the model of war or a functional analogue to it will have
a considerable future.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Mary Dietz, Alan Keenan, Andrew Norris, two anonymous review-
ers, and members of the Haverford Faculty Working Group in American Studies for
their comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Declaration of Conflict of Interest

The author declared that he had no conflicts of interest with respect to his authorship
or the publication of this article.
Financial Disclosure/Funding
The author declared that he received no financial support for his research and/or
authorship of this article.
Notes
1. The Bush administration often preferred to characterize the enemy as “terror”—
primarily, it seems, as a means of subsuming what it referred to as (Islamic and
other varieties of) “fascism,” “radicalism,” “extremism,” and “totalitarianism.”
However, because my focus here will be the domestic arena, where the language
of “terrorism” is more common, I shall for shorthand refer to the “war on terrorism.”
2. See, e.g., Kansas City Star, “A War on Poverty,” Nov. 15, 1908, 6; Oklahoma
World Herald, “War on Cancer,” Nov. 21, 1901, 4; The Daily Inter Ocean, “The

Elkins 235
Inter Ocean Crusade,” March 4, 1882, 13 [“war on crime”]; Grand Forks Herald,
“Revolutionize Administration of Schools under Proposed Plans,” Oct. 26, 1912,
1 [“war on drugs”]; New York Times, “The War on Terrorism,” Apr. 2, 1881, 1
[referring to the European response to anarchism].
3. I shall use the term “model” in the sense of “a type or design” for which the
Oxford English Dictionary offers the following illustration: “1874 J. R. GREEN
Short Hist. Eng. People viii. §5. 508 The new faith. borrowed from Calvin its
model of Church government.” (“Model,” III, 13a.) This is roughly the sense in
which Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed., University
of Chicago Press, 1996) used the term “paradigm,” which I might equally have
used, although the model of war to conceive of social evils is obviously less fixed
by practice than are the engrained paradigms of normal science.
I do not refer to these “wars” generically as metaphors because, as I shall
suggest, for some of them their metaphorical character is part of what is at issue.
4. Even in the case of terrorism, my focus will be on the domestic side of that war.
5. Quoted by David Zarefsky, President Johnson’s War on Poverty (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 1986), 20.
6. Samuel S. Epstein, The Politics of Cancer (New York: Anchor Press, 1979), 325.
7. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. Knox (Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1967), ¶322.
8. Ibid., my emphasis.
9. Sigmund Freud, “Negation,” in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1943-1974),
XIX:237.
10. Ibid. As the so-called “object relations” school emphasized, early introjection
involves both “good” and “bad” objects. But even for Melanie Klein, “[a]s the
ego becomes more fully organized,” the tendency is to “identify itself more fully
with ‘good’ objects.” Melanie Klein, Contributions to Pscyho-Analysis, 1921-45
(London: Hogarth Press, 1968) 284.
11. Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents,” XXI:66.
12. Freud, “Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,” XVIII:70, 116 (transla-
tion slightly modified).
13. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat Social (Amsterdam: Chez Marc-Michel Rey,
1762), I :6, II :7, my translation.
14. Samuel S. Epstein, “Reversing the Cancer Epidemic,” Tikkun 17:3 (May/June,
2002), 57; Epstein, “Losing the War Against Cancer,” Extension of Remarks
(inserted into the record by Congressman Henry Waxman),” Congressional
Record (Extension of Remarks), 100th Cong., 1st sess, September 9, 1987, 133
Cong. Rec. E3449-01
15. Among these contributions were chemical pesticides, industrial discharges, haz-
ardous waste disposal, and occupational carcinogens, the last of which alone,

predicted a blue ribbon governmental commission summarizing the scientific

evidence seven years after the war on cancer was declared, would account for
“38% of all cancers in coming decades.” Hearings before the House Subcommit-
tee on Health and the Environment, 100th Cong. (September 9, 1987) (testimony
of Samuel Epstein, Extended Remarks). Yet “of the 80,000-100,000 chemicals
registered for use in the United States, only a relatively few” have ever “been
evaluated . . . for carcinogenic effects. (James Huff and Ronald Melnick, “Mis-
conceptions about the Causes of Cancer,” International Journal of Occupational
and Environmental Health 12 (Jan.-March, 2006): 81-86) On the evidence con-
cerning human contributions to cancer, see, e.g., Samuel S. Epstein, The Politics
of Cancer (New York: Anchor Press, 1979) and The Politics of Cancer Revisited
(East Ridge Press, 1998). On the politics of the war on cancer, see, e.g., Devra
Lee Davis, The Secret History of the War on Cancer (New York: Basic Books,
2007), especially chap. 8; Robert N. Proctor, Cancer Wars (New York: Basic
Books, 1995); and Richard A. Rettig, Cancer Crusade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1977), especially chap. 5.
16. Public Papers of Richard Nixon, Document 163, “Remarks about a Proposed
National Cancer Program,” (May 11, 1971). Retrieved from http://www
.nixonfoundation.org/Research_Center/1971_pdf_files/1971_0163.pdf
17. Epstein, Politics of Cancer, xi, 326; see also Davis, The Secret History.
18. Public Papers of Richard Nixon, Document 409 (December 23, 1971). Retrieved
from http://www.nixonlibraryfoundation.org/clientuploads/directory/archive/1971
_pdf_files/1971_0409.pdf
19. This portrayal of cancer as an invasion came full circle in the not infrequent rep-
resentation of cancer as though it were a foreign pathogen invading the human
body; and, indeed, the declaration of a war on cancer saw an increase of interest
in the theory of the viral etiology of cancer. Guy B. Faguet, The War on Cancer
(Netherlands: Springer, 2005), 66.
20. Not surprisingly, the conservative opposition to the war on poverty thus often
simply denied the existence of significant poverty in the United States.
21. State of the Union Address, January 8, 1964, Public Papers of U.S. Presidents,
Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963-1964 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1965), I:112-118.
22. On these and other motivations for the use of the war language, see, e.g., Zarefsky,
President Johnson’s War on Poverty, especially chapter 2.
23. Special Message to Congress, Public Papers (March 16, 1964), I:375-80.
24. To name just a few: the relocation of manufacturing from cities to outlying areas,
the development of suburbs (approved and subsidized by public authorities) in
which low-cost housing was limited or prohibited, and the use of local prop-
erty taxes to fund public education and social services. See, e.g., Daniel S. Shah,

Elkins 237
“Lawyering for Empowerment: Community Development and Social Change.”

Clinical Law Review, 6 (1999): 217-257.
25. Michael B. Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on
Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), 85, quoting Adam Yarmolinsky.
26. Johnson, “Special Message to Congress.”
27. Freud, “Negation,” 237.
28. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, eds. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà,
2d ed., (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 155-56.
29. Reprinted at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/gerdec41.asp, emphases mine.
30. Retrieved from http://www.law.ou.edu/ushistory/germwar.shtml, http://www
.law.ou.edu/ushistory/japwar.shtml, emphases mine
31. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 153.
32. In a similar vein, Derrida noted the ambiguity in the grounding of declarations
of independence—for example, in the meaning of “holding these truths to be
self-evident.” Jacques Derrida, “Declarations of Independence,” New Political
Science, 7, 1 (1986): 7-15.
33. A simple, and extreme, example of this was the Nazi war on cancer which some-
times moved from the metaphorical aim of “eliminat[ing] sickness” from the
Volkskörper (“people’s body”) to the very literal one of “eliminating the sick”
from that body. Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1989), 114.
34. The wars on crime and drugs have, of course, been aimed only at certain kinds of
crimes and drugs. But again I use these terms without quotes to refer to the move-
ments so named.
I shall refer to the wars on crime and drugs as still ongoing, for while that
language has been dropped by the current presidential administration, it continues
to be used by public officials at other levels of government.
35. Freud, “Group Psychology,” 110 (translation slightly modified).
36. The particular character of the moral judgment, however, has differed in the war
on crime and the war on drugs. In the former, it has been articulated largely in
terms of respect for the moral rights of others: specifically, the integrity of their
bodies and property. But the war on drugs included in the enemy camp nonvio-
lent drug users. In an attempt to subsume drug use under the same conception of
moral wrong, illegal drug use was associated with violence and property crimes.
But particularly in light of empirical evidence that undermines that association,
the moral good against which narcotics stand as an enemy has alternatively been
portrayed in broader terms of individual responsibility, integrity, and clean liv-
ing, all of which were said to be essential components of cultural strength.
See, e.g., William J. Bennett, “Should Drugs Be Legalized?” reprinted in Drugs:
Should We Legalize, Decriminalize, or Deregulate? ed. J. A. Schaler (New York:
Prometheus Books, 1998) 63-67.

37. S.J. Res. 109, 99th Cong. (April 19, 1985). Pub. L. No. 99-27, 99 Stat. 53 (emphasis
added).
38. Jim McGee, “War on Crime Expands U.S. Prosecutors’ Powers,” Washington
Post, Jan. 10, 1993, A1.
39. Proclamation 4929—Crime Victims Week, 1982 (April 14, 1982). Public Papers
of the President: Ronald Reagan, 1981-1988.
40. James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1985).
41. Oval Office Tape, May 13, 1971 (transcript retrieved from http://www.csdp.org/
news/news/nixon.htm). More recently, a state court of appeals judge concluded
that national drug policy on marijuana was pursued “not for any medical or physi-
ological reason, but for cultural and ethnic reasons: we dislike the lifestyles of
those who use it.” Rudolph J. Gerber, “On Dispensing Injustice,” Arizona Law
Review 43 (Spring, 2001): 153.
42. Since the Reagan escalation of the war on drugs, African Americans have been
arrested on drug charges from two to eleven times more often than whites, despite
similar rates of drug use. Human Rights Watch, “Targeting Blacks” (retrieved from
http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/us0508_1.pdf); “Decades of Disparity”
(retrieved from http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/us0309web_1.pdf).
43. Bennett, “Should Drugs Be Legalized?”
44. Richard Posner, who as a federal appellate judge has witnessed first-hand the war
on drugs, has criticized the “arbitrariness in the choice of the subset of . . . mind-
altering substances . . . to prohibit,” relative to those made legal by prescription.
“The Becker-Posner Blog.” Retrieved from http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
archives/2005/03/the_war_on_drug.html
45. Retrieved from http://library.uchastings.edu/library/california-research/ca-ballot-
measures.html#ballotprops
46. One notorious example of this is the 100:1 equivalence established in the 1986
Drug Abuse Act between powder cocaine (used disproportionately by African
Americans) and crack cocaine (used disproportionately by whites). When the
U.S. Sentencing Commission moved to change this, and to disaggregate the fac-
tors responsible for the somewhat greater harms correlated with crack cocaine
use, Congress, for the first time in the commission’s history, overturned its rec-
ommendation.
One consequence of these statutes was a dramatic increase in the overrepresenta-
tion of African Americans in jails and prisons relative not only to their percentage
of the general population, but to their percentage of narcotics users. Marc Mauer,
Race to Incarcerate (New York: The New Press, 1999), 125-26; Human Rights
Watch; “Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs”
(retrieved from www.hrw.org/reports/2000/usa/Rcedrg00-04.htm).

Elkins 239
47. According to one study, 13 percent of African Americans nationwide and 25 percent
in seven states have been disenfranchised as a result of felony convictions. “Los-
ing the Vote” (1998). Retrieved from www.sentencingproject.org/tmp/File/FVR/
fd_losingthevote.pdf
48. Frederick Pollock and Frederic William Maitland, The History of English Law
before the Time of Edward I, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1899), II:449.
See also Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of the Roman figure of homo sacer.
Homo Sacer (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 35.
49. This is so as well of certain foreign “wars.” (Was the “cold war,” for example,
a kind of literal war, a metaphorical war, or something of each?) Moreover,
even with respect to war in the wholly literal sense, there is no absolute demar-
cation between war and not-war. (When, for example, does confiscation of
goods on the high seas—or espionage or sabotage or economic embargoes or
blockades— constitute an act of war?)
50. Ruth Marcus, “History of Mistrust May Have Contributed to Riots,” Washington
Post, May 2, 1992, A18.
51. Barry McCaffrey, “Dealing with Addiction” Global Issues 2, 3 (June, 1997): 5-9.
Retrieved from http://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/soc/ijge0697.pdf
52. Donald Davidson offers the analogous case of a “man who says ‘Lattimore’s a
Communist’ and means to lie,” but when confronted with it, “can always try to
beg off by pleading a metaphor.” “What Metaphors Mean,” Inquiries into Truth
and Interpretation (Oxford University Press, 1986), 258.
53. John Locke, “Second Treatise of Civil Government” §17, emphasis added. This
view ignores Locke’s further and crucial claim that “To avoid this state of war
. . . is one great reason of men’s putting themselves into society, and quitting the
state of nature: for where there is an authority . . . from which relief can be had by
appeal, there the continuance of the state of war is excluded.” Id., §21.
54. 147 Cong. Rec. S9949-S9951 (daily ed. Oct. 1, 2001). 107th U.S. Congress.
55. Pub. L. No. 107-40, 115 Stat. 224 (Sept. 18, 2001). 107th U.S. Congress.
56. 37 WCPD [Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents] 1333 (September 24,
2001).
57. 66 Fed. Reg. 57,833 (Nov. 13, 2001);, 2001 WL 1435652 (Pres.) In Rasul v.
Bush, the government similarly characterized the AUMF as authorizing “force to
deter and prevent acts of terrorism against the United States.” 2004 WL 425739, p. 2.
58. Josh Gerstein, “Bush Backs Off of Talk of War, Echoing Kerry,” The New York
Sun, August 1, 2005, p. 1, quoting a National Security Council spokesman.
59. Dana Milbank, “Reprising a War with Words,” Washington Post, Aug. 17, 2004,
A13; Homeland Security Council, “National Strategy for Homeland Security,”
October, 2007 (retrieved from http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/
infocus/homeland/nshs/NSHS.pdf).

60. Gerstein, “Bush Backs Off of Talk of War,” 1.

61. Interview with Charles Allen, Deputy General Counsel for International Affairs at
the Department of Defense. Retrieved from http://www.crimesofwar.org/onnews/
news-pentagon.html
62. Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, H.R. 2863, Title X; Military Commissions Act,
Pub. L. No. 109-366, 120 Stat. 2600 (Oct. 17, 2006).
63. Douglas Jehl and Neil A. Lewis, “U.S. Said to Hold More Foreigners in Iraq
Fighting.” New York Times, January 8, 2005, A1, quoting “a senior administration
official.”
64. For example, in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, while claiming the authority to hold for the
duration of the “hostilities” an American citizen who had been apprehended in
Afghanistan and classified as an enemy combatant, the administration simply
refused to answer the District Court’s question of whether the relevant hostilities
were the conflict in Afghanistan or the “war on terror,” and what would deter-
mine their conclusion. Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 316 F.3d. 450, 461 (4th Cir. 2003).
Similarly, in claiming the authority to hold indefinitely an American citizen “cap-
tured” in Chicago on the allegation of “engag[ing] in . . . hostile and war-like
acts,” the administration remained vague for most of the course of the litigation
as to whether the President’s putative authority was based on the campaign to
“subdue the al Qaida terrorist network” or the general “war against terrorists.”
(Concerned about its prospects in the Supreme Court, the government finally
asserted for the first time that the relevant conflict was against al Qaeda.
Rumsfeld v. Padilla, Brief of Petitioners, 2004 WL 542777, p. 4.) The idea of
declaring war against an organization raises important questions that I shall not
take up here.
While the Bush administration remained strategically ambiguous about the
war for which it was asserting war powers, a number of judges have explicitly
treated the war on terror as a literal war that could justify those powers. See, for
example, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 316
F.3d. 450, 476 (4th Cir. 2003) and Justice Thomas’s dissent in the United States
Supreme Court opinion in that case. 542 U.S. 507, 587, 595 (2004).
65. Amicus brief, American Center for Law & Justice in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 2004
WL 608886, fn. 6. The administration’s brief suggested the same, describing, for
example, the United States as defending against al Qaeda’s “terrorist holy war,”
(2004 WL 724020), but, consistent with the administration’s equivocation on
the nature of the war, it was not as explicit in claiming in court what Rice and
others would say in public comments: that attacks by “terrorists” initiated a “war
against terrorism.”
66. Condoleeza Rice, “Opening Remarks to Commission on Terrorist Attacks,” April
8, 2004 (retrieved from http://www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing9/

Elkins 241
rice_statement.pdf). See also “Interview with Charles Allen”; Brief for Senators
Cornyn and Craig in Support of Respondents in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 2004 WL
553641, p. 9 fn. 2.
67. Ibid., p. 7.
68. Pub. L. No. 109-366, § 3.
69. Pub. L. No. 107-56, § 215. The 2006 modifications to the USA PATRIOT Act
required the FBI to provide to the court a statement of the relevance of the “tan-
gible things” to an “authorized investigation,” but denied courts the authority to
review those grounds. Pub. L. No. 109-177, § 106(b).
70. Pub. L. No. 107-56, § 802.
71. Id., §§802, 806. The 2006 changes to the USA PATRIOT Act limited civil for-
feitures to a narrow set of “Federal crime[s] of terrorism.” Pub. L. No. 109-177,
§ 121(i).
72. King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
73. Jarboe, “Threat of Eco-Terrorism,” Testimony before House Resources Commit-
tee, Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health, Feb. 12, 2002. Retrieved from
http://www.fbi.gov/congress/congress02/jarboe021202.htm
74. There is good reason to believe that the Bush administration intended for the war
on terrorism to play a role similar to that once played by the war on communism
in subsuming undesired insurgencies abroad and undesired political and social
activities at home. For an explicit statement of the parallel of the “war on terror”
with the war on communism, see, e.g., President Bush’s speech at the National
Endowment for Democracy. Retrieved from http://georgewbush-whitehouse.
archives.gov/news/releases/2005/10/20051006-3.html
75. In 1932, Carl Schmitt asserted the “ever-present possibility of” war not only
between states, but “in the context of the primacy of internal politics.” The Con-
cept of the Political, trans. G. Schwab (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1996), 32. But that claim must also be understood as arising in a particular
historical context—the late Weimar Republic in which fundamental “internal”
divisions over the character of the state (particularly with respect to communism)
were connected to international conflicts.
76. It is a crucial feature of contemporary globalization that the extraterritorial appli-
cation of domestic law is inconsistent. From the perspective of capital, much of
the attraction of globalization is precisely in the ability to escape domestic regu-
lation and to choose a more advantageous regulatory jurisdiction. On the exter-
nalization of legal authority, see Jeremy Elkins, “Beyond ‘Beyond the State’:
Re-thinking Law and Globalization” in Law without Nations, eds. A. Sarat, L.
Douglas, and M. M. Umphrey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, forth-
coming), which can be read as a companion piece to—and the other side of—the
present essay.

Bio
Jeremy Elkins is an associate professor of political science at Bryn Mawr College.

He is the author, most recently, of “Beyond ‘Beyond the State’: Re-thinking Law and
Globalization,” in Law without Nations, eds. A. Sarat, L. Douglas, and M. M. Umphrey
(Stanford University Press, forthcoming), and “Law and Sacrifice,” in Law, Culture
and the Humanities (forthcoming), and is co-editor (with Andrew Norris) of Truth
and Democratic Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).

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The Model of War

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Political Theory

The Model of War

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which asserts the very boundaries of the “true” state—distinguishing “inside”

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broad as the application of the “model of war” to domestic issues must be a

I. War and State

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II. Cancer and Poverty

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terms and to mobilize support for a poverty-reduction program.22 Yet even

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III. Declaring War

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Congress to “recognize” an existing “state of war between the United States

IV. Beyond Metaphor? Crime and Drugs

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appeared in the war on poverty—perhaps in some attitudes toward the ghetto

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V. Internalizing the War on Terrorism

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one senior administration official put it) “is everywhere”63 is extraordinary;

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VI. State and Boundaries

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“outside” of the state corresponded almost precisely in time and in character

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Declaration of Conflict of Interest

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predicted a blue ribbon governmental commission summarizing the scientific

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“Lawyering for Empowerment: Community Development and Social Change.”

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60. Gerstein, “Bush Backs Off of Talk of War,” 1.

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Jeremy Elkins is an associate professor of political science at Bryn Mawr College.

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