Abstract:
Since 2001, and the US response to international terrorism by launching an ill-defined and
open-ended ‘Global War on Terror’, a striking debate (re)emerged within the discipline of
International Relations (IR) about the global nature of American power, more specifically
about the imperial character of the exercise of that power. In a discipline such as IR, forged
on the heels of colonialism (cf. Schmidt 1998: 123-150, Long & Schmidt 2005), it is
somewhat surprising that for several decades, little work had been produced within its
mainstream on the topic of empires and imperialism1. Whatever the causes of this, two
events were to change that sad state of affairs. One was the publication and unexpected
success of the book Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Hardt & Negri 2000),
which received an unusually broad array of acclaim and critique, and became something of
a global phenomenon in sales, slowly achieving that rare status of a ‘theory’ best-seller.
The other trigger, barely a year apart, was September 11th and its aftermath. The response
of the US government under George W. Bush helped re-launch the debate, and made
empire a political buzzword once again (Eakin 2002, Ricks 2001). This was compounded
by the influence of the so-called neo-conservatives within his administration – some of
them vocal proponents of an imperial set of policies towards the rest of the world (Boot
2001, 2002, 2003a, 2003b, 2003c; Kagan 1998). To borrow Michael Cox's ironic and apt
phrase, the empire was back in town (Cox 2003).
