Description
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine illustrates a newly persistent theme in IR of a return to Great Power politics. The revival of interstate enmity follows two decades of the GWOT characterised primarily by anxiety of ‘the Stranger’. The uncanniness of this recent revision deserves further unpacking. The ‘West’ is unproblematically good again despite decades of post-colonial critique; Nazis are bad despite a rise in populism; threats come from a clearcut outside and not the ambiguous border. This paper explores the return to enmity after—and in light of—an era of practices and doctrine addressing ‘Stranger-danger.’ Revisiting Schmitt’s concept of the political as the distinction ‘friend/enemy’, I foreground the role of ‘the Stranger’ as inhabiting the oblique separating the two subject positions. That in-between-ness is an integral frame for understanding the evolution of the praxis of 21st century war and casts a long shadow in critical security studies regarding how danger is discursively produced and politically practised. Eschewing ambivalence for certainty in the context of the failures of the GWOT not only speaks to an important shift in American identity, but it also effects issues like climate change, pandemics, and gun violence, which continue to inhabit the in-between.
