Le droit de la sécurité internationale

In the classic days of empire, countries at the core of power and influence in the world conquered and managed territories directly. To day long-distance manipulation of substantial resources and populations has not diminished, however. It is being handled in new ways. Since 9/11, the "global war on terror" (GWOT) has created new needs for the centers of "civilization" to control the peripheries from which the threat come. Powerful states - the US lead among them - have used transnational institutions to direct local policy around the world by leaning on less powerful states to do the most repressive things to themselves. The GWOT is being fought centrally through a series of UN Security Council resolutions, where peripheral states have little representation. These UN resolutions result in a series of policies and directives that less powerful states ignore at their peril. These new orders require peripheral states to take radical steps to curb terrorist threats at home and act as barriers to the transnational flows of people and money. Not surprisingly, these domestic actions have had repressive effects on particular populations, on the expression of political dissent, and on the budding constitutional structures of rights protection in many less-powerful states. Because the GWOT is fought as a series of battles within states more than it is fought as a war among states, the legal framework for the GWOT is not the law of war, but rather the law of emergency. The new imperial formation can be seen, then, as an international state of emergency.