Description
During the War on Terror, Western states have implemented numerous military interventions in efforts to combat terrorist actors or rogue state benefactors. Foreign policy analysis (FPA) notes an increasing "parliamentarisation" of powers in this context, wherein Western legislatures obtain greater oversight over military actions and are more willing to oppose their executives on questions of implementing them. For the most part however, FPA has not included an awareness of the endurance of colonial legacies of war-making in explanations of parliamentarisation. This paper deepens understanding of those legacies by highlighting the figure of the ghostly in legislative justifications for and against intervention. Using a hauntological lens to illuminate the influence of the ghostly on post-Iraq war-making, this paper undertakes a discourse analysis of legislative debates in the US, UK, and France regarding five interventions in Iraq or Syria between 2013-18. Contra FPA expectations of increasing parliamentarisation, the power of parliaments to scrutinise, prevent, or even support executive war-making fluctuates based on how effectively ghosts are exorcised from public debates. Parliamentarisation does not by itself reduce the frequency of interventions. To explain the latter, we need to understand how the ghostly interacts with the colonial in the War on Terror.
