Conclusion: Hegemonic Violence in the Age of Preventive Warfare

This chapter explores how the new rules on preventive warfare created a new hegemonic order that enabled the US military to significantly increase the scope of the use of armed force. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first part examines how the US established the new order by unilaterally redefining key legal concepts to alter the meaning of the existing rules on the use of armed force. Those redefinitions changed the existing rules to such an extent that, in effect, new rules emerged. The second part explores how the rules on preventive warfare legitimized a specific type of hegemonic violence—that is, temporally and geographically unlimited violence, indiscriminate violence, and disproportionate violence—that ignored key principles of international humanitarian law and human rights law. This part shows that the shift to preventive warfare against vague future threats functions as a justificatory cover for hegemonic violence and expansion. The final part of the chapter examines how the new rules on preventive warfare, understood as “exceptional” hegemonic rules, created the conditions for a permanent war of all against all.