War is back and seemingly forever. In recent years the pacific neoliberal Patrick Deer rhetoric of globalization has been replaced by the Hobbesian imaginary of endless war. The pervasive metaphorization of war blurs the boundaries between military and civilian, combatant and noncombatant, state and war machine, wartime and peacetime. But war discourse also operates as a strategy that partitions, separates, and compartmentalizes knowledge, offering a highly seductive, militarized grid through which to interpret the world. Like a virus, it seems, war tropes have spread throughout the body politic and global economy. What are the ends of war? This special issue of Social Text engages this critical question by challenging narratives of endless conflict, by confronting the seductions of metaphorization and militarization, and by analyzing the historical and material interests that they serve. “The Ends of War” insists on the contingent and instrumental nature of war discourse and on the need to think beyond its global reach.
