Contrasting hegemony and domination, the authors contend that, while US domination has expanded since September 11th, it has not affirmed US hegemony in the global order.  Rather, US power is increasingly faced with resistance movements operating on a network model.  These movements can be divided into two broad groups, ethnoreligious movements and sociopolitical movements.  To suppress both kinds of movements, the US state relies on a binary, repressive mode of identity-construction which divides the world into "them and us".  This approach is guaranteed to escalate rather than resolve conflict. Its effects include the corrosion of civil and human rights and, most importantly, the increasing isolation of the would-be power-holders amid a sea of swarming resistances and uncontrollable spaces and flows.  From "with us or against us", domination therefore evolves into "with or without you". The authors discuss the threat of networked forms of violence and emphasise the potential contained in network forms of organisation as a basis for constructing resistances to repressive apparatuses and to the world system as a system of global control.

WITH OR WITHOUT YOU: US Foreign Policy, Domination, Hegemony and Rhizomes of Resistance.

Athina Karatzogianni (University of Hull) and Andrew Robinson (University of Nottingham), August 2005

'The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your grasp'

(Princess Leia to Imperial Grand Moff Tarkin, Star Wars 4: A New Hope.)

To what extent has the world really "changed" since September 11^th? On the one hand, the actions of the US since 911 follow in a long history of American and western interventions to impose a global economic system in the global periphery. But also, this paper contends, the global context has changed, with network-centric organisational forms becoming increasingly pervasive. In this context, the project of global control gains new significance. It is no longer simply about relations between states, but also becomes a question of relations between organisational forms, with hierarchical world-systemic institutions attempting to impose control in a context where networks are slipping out of their hands.

Theoretically, this paper is informed by Antonio Gramsci, Slavoj Žižek, Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze, using their concepts of hegemony, violence/powerlessness, war/nonwar and closure/openness respectively. We discuss these concepts on the first part of the paper. In the second part, we examine the stages and changes in identity construction, the use of terrorism and axis of evil discourses. Identity construction revolves around issues not simply concerning the enemy, which need to be considered, but more importantly the evident shift in American identity as far as their engagement with the rest of the world is concerned. Shifting from 'carefree' hegemon to a victimised and 'wronged' country, the American Administration then transforms itself into the party that strikes back. The discourse operates as pretext for a generalised closure of space, both within western societies (e.g. attacks on civil liberties) and in the world system (e.g. the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq). However, this is starting to break down, a process exemplified in the spread of what Deleuze terms rhizomatic (network) forms of social organisation. The interest then lies in identifying the transformation of American foreign policy discourse and identity in response to network forms of resistance, both by anti-war coalitions and anti-globalisation movements and 'terrorism', which not surprisingly follows similar lines of development and organisation.

The resistance to the US state and its neo-liberal allies involves several very broad groups of challengers. Firstly, there are ethnoreligious movements, based on the defence of fixed identities against the spread of American power. The network that attacked the Twin Towers on September 11^th is one example of such a movement. Contrary to appearances, changes in the world system since September the 11^th have not empowered the position of the United States in global politics. Far from showing strength, the 'war on terrorism' is in fact a reaction to the breakdown of American global hegemony and a strategy based on partial domination rather than hegemony. Contributing to this challenge of US hegemony, there are also resistance groups mobilised to oppose the US military interventions, to oppose particular instances of oppression or even to oppose neoliberal 'globalisation' itself. In the third part of the paper, we discuss these movements as another demonstration of network forms of organisation and resistance.

Conceived in Gramscian terms, hegemony refers to a relation in which a leading or "directive" group is able to influence others to adopt its conception of the world by means such as cultural influence. In contrast, a relation of domination exists when a ruling group is able to maintain control only by suppressing the intellectual and ethico-political development of subordinates (either through transformist¹ control or through violence).² Admittedly, America's hegemony has always been problematic and fragmentary, with local appropriations of American symbolism creating hybrid forms which undermine official US goals.³ As Robert Tucker comments, the greatest difficulty of contemporary US foreign policy is the 'contradiction between the persisting desire to remain the premier global power and an ever deepening aversion to bear[ing] the costs of this position'.⁴ As a result of this desire, the American state has attempted repeatedly to assert its control by means of direct domination. Paradoxically, such methods have been effective only in further undermining attempts to build hegemony.

There is a tendency in some strands of international relations scholarship to identify global influence strongly with military power. In fact this has been a constant complaint from various schools of International Relations and, as Ruggie puts it, '[t]he long and short of it is, then, that we are not very good as a discipline at studying the possibility of fundamental discontinuity in the international system; that is, at addressing the question of whether the modern system of states may be yielding in some instances to postmodern forms of configuring political space'.⁵

To conceive a relation of suppression through brute force as if it were a form of substantial influence is mistaken. The resort to brute force signifies the breakdown of communicative power and the replacement of effective subsumption with violent subordination. As Zizek puts it in a similar context, 'recall the logic of paternal authority: the moment a father takes control and displays his full power”¦.we necessarily perceive this display of impotent rage - an index of its very opposite'.⁶ Foucault similarly argues that the moment when a regime becomes merely destructive, when it loses its ability to circulate power as a productive force, is the moment when it ceases to govern, and in a sense, ceases to hold power⁷. Likewise, America displays its "total" power only as an index of its underlying weakness, its inability to control the suppressed groups held down within the system it controls. This makes sense if the state is conceived partly in psychoanalytic terms, as a type of libidinal attachment (an emotional or passionate commitment) which constructs identities in a particular way. Friedrich Nietzsche suggests that one perform a thought-experiment: imagine a state which is so powerful that it does not feel the need to punish — not because it has stamped out all deviance, but because it feels so secure that it can afford to be magnanimous towards those who defy it⁸. If such a state is impossible to imagine, this is because the strength of states as agents of domination is precisely founded on their libidinal/identitarian weakness. States are in a certain sense dependent on their own weakness for their very existence. They conceal their own inability to express the universality they claim by excluding others and performing a ritualistic violence of acting-out.

Perhaps we should clarify a little here. Effective power apparatuses operate through their ability to overcode (Deleuze's term) or subsume (Marx's term) social processes, identities and differentiations occurring in everyday life. A power-holding group which is able to articulate widespread beliefs, desires and identities to its worldview and project is able to establish itself in epochal terms as a leading force. This process of sublimation is often violent — Marx (Capital) discusses the Highland clearances as an example of real subsumption⁹ — and its net effect is to produce a system in which external elements are reduced to the status of elements internal to the system. In this sense, the system can construct itself as all-controlling, through re-constructing external elements as internal moments of its own functioning. The constant reterritorialisation of outside as inside, of an excess tending to escape as a "peripheral" or "marginal" element within the system, is the condition for the system's existence as an overarching totality.

A system of this kind should also be considered in terms of the Lacanian theory of the 'master-signifier'. Although we do not share Lacan's insistence that all meaningful social phenomena necessarily take this form, we recognise the importance of this analysis in understanding the internal operation of hierarchical social forms. The master-signifier has been defined as 'the signifier of symbolic authority founded only in itself -in its own act of enunciation' ¹⁰. This empty symbolic gesture grounds the entire hierarchy in a founding violence which elides the contingency and historicity of its construction, retrospectively reconstructing contingency as necessity and the process of subsumption of elements as an unstoppable unfolding of an internal dynamic. If hierarchic systems are to be conceived on the metaphor of a tree (while keeping in mind that actual trees may not be so hierarchic), then the master-signifier forms the trunk of the tree, with the peripheral and marginal aspects subsumed as the branches, leaves, and roots. Another necessary structural effect of the master-signifier is the construction of at least one element as excluded other, standing for the elided contingency and instability threatening the social order — in Lacanian terms, a repressed "Real" which is unsymbolisable in the framework of the existing system and through which the system's instability "returns". Žižek has coined the term 'social symptom' to refer to those groups excluded by such social processes — refugees, the urban poor, and so on — 'the part which, although inherent to the existing universal order, has no 'proper place' within it'¹¹. Homologous to the psychoanalytic "symptom", these groups express the inherent deadlock of the system in the form of an excluded element "extimate" — external yet simultaneously intimate, supplementary — to it.

As an alternative to this systematising model, Deleuze and Guattari in their work A Thousand Plateaus¹² formulate the concept of the rhizome. A rhizome has the characteristics of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a network of rhizomes can be connected to anything else in the network, and must form such connections. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point and fixes an order. The linguistic tree on the Chomskian model still begins at a point S and proceeds by dichotomy. On the contrary, Deleuze and Guattari assert that not every trait in a rhizome is necessarily linked to a linguistic feature; semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) that bring into play not only different regimes of signs but also states of things of differing status. There the subject is no longer a subject, but a rhizome, a Body without Organs. In other words, what these writers argue is that a rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains and organisations of power.¹³ Multiplicities cease to have any relation to the One as subject or object, natural or spiritual entity; rather, they are rhizomatic, they are flat, a plane of consistency of multiplicities, defined by the outside:

by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities. The line of flight marks: the reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills; the impossibility of a supplementary dimension, unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of flight; the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single place of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of dimensions.¹⁴

In contrast, arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centres of significance and subjectification, controlled by central automata like organised memories. An element only receives information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along preestablished paths. Deleuze and Guattari point to problems in information and computer science, when these sciences grant all power to a memory or central organ. The writers cite Pierre Rosenstiehl and Jean Petitot: 'accepting the primacy of hierarchical structures amounts to giving arborescent structures privileged status”¦In a hierarchical system an individual has only one neighbor, his or her hierarchical superior”¦ The channels of transmission are preestablished: the arborescent system preexists the individual, who is integrated into it at an alloted place'.¹⁵

Thus, in a rhizomatic social field, the hierarchic system's coherence is not the final word. In the system's own construction, all the various instances of desire, identity, belief, etc are constructed as if they were elements within a single totality, "arborescent" in Deleuze's terms, like the branches coming from the main trunk of a tree. However, such an apparatus is necessarily haunted by the possible emergence of "lines of flight" which take its elements outside the framework it constitutes. The elements which escape the structure have a different structure — less hierarchical than rhizomatic, emerging through underground networks connected horizontally and lacking a hierarchic centre. The system's resort to violence is an attempt to crush various rhizomatic and quasi-rhizomatic elements, which tend to escape it.

In contrast to these centred systems, the authors set forth acentred systems, finite networks of automata, in which communication runs from any neighbor to any other, channels do not preexist, and individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment; local operations are coordinated and the final, global result synchronised without a central agency.¹⁶ That is also what happens when 'mass' movements or molecular flows are constantly escaping, inventing connections that jump from tree to tree and uproot them: a whole smoothing of space, which in turn reacts back upon striated space.¹⁷ Or as Hardt and Negri put it, 'a world that knows no outside. It knows only an inside, a vital and ineluctable participation in the set of social structures, with no possibility of transcending them. This inside is the productive cooperation of mass intellectuality and affective networks, the productivity of postmodern biopolitics'.¹⁸

These theoretical discussions have pertinence in understanding the warring factions in the 'war on terror'. When Zizek terms al-Qaeda 'the ultimate rhizomatic machine, omnipresent, yet with no clear territorial base'¹⁹, he exaggerates a little: al-Qaeda is based on rigid categories of identity and exclusion, and also has a formal leadership hierarchy. However, his basic point is valid: its operation is effective largely because it moves outside the framework established by the global power system. Writing in Time Magazine, Phillip Bobbit makes the point very clearly. 'Al-Qaeda is a new and profoundly dangerous kind of organisation — a "virtual state", borderless but global in scope'.²⁰ Arguments like these are not new, having previously been made about social movements more broadly²¹. It may be that al-Qaeda is a special instance of a change in the structures of global power with wide-ranging implications.

This idea has been fundamental in Arquilla and Ronfeldt's works on conflict in the information age. They basically argue that hierarchies have a difficult time fighting networks (e.g. Colombia, Algeria, the Zapatistas). It takes networks to fight networks and whoever masters the network form first and with the most success will gain major advantages.²² What Arquilla and Ronfeldt argue is that terrorists will continue moving from hierarchical to information-age network designs and that within groups 'great man leaderships will give way to flatter decentralised systems. This way more effort will go into building arrays of transnationally internetted groups than into building state-alone groups'.²³ As a result, power seems to be migrating to nonstate actors, who are able to organise into 'sprawling multi-organizational networks', which are more flexible and responsive than hierarchies in reacting to outside developments and are better than hierarchies at using information to improve decision-making.²⁴

This vision emphasises adapting to a major consequence of the information revolution — the rise of network forms of organisation. Especially after 9/11 it has become essential for states to become more flexible, in order to be able to face network-style organisations. Arquilla and Ronfeldt's thesis is that the challenge is

to develop hybrids in which "all channel" networks are fitted to flattened hierarchies. The major benefits may accrue in the areas of interagency and interservice cooperation. Since militaries must retain hierarchical command structures at their core, their hybrids should retain - yet flatten - the residual hierarchy, while allowing dispersed maneuver "nodes" to have direct, all channel contact with each other, and with the higher command.²⁵

Apart from this systemic change aiding rhizomatic forms of organisation, the whole system of economic, political and social control is in question. Authors such as Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein use the images of core and periphery or metropolis and satellite to represent a particular arborescent-striated organisation of global economic space. Control by the core states, and by America as the core of the core, produced phenomena of subordination, dependency and underdevelopment in peripheral areas²⁶. It is possible to understand the world system, not simply as homologous to the arborescent apparatuses of Deleuzian theory, but as a specific instantiation of this type of apparatus. More precisely, the world system is an overcoding apparatus, as is clearly demonstrated in the case-studies drawn together by Evan Watkins.²⁷ Everyday economic practices are drawn into and/or excluded from the 'world economy' in such a way as to suck resources into the core and to make incorporation into the world system a precondition for international recognition. And when the economics of a country are good and 'everyday exchanges' with the core are productive, then the country's political credentials are not in question. Survival in a peripheral context often depends, however, on escaping this context of subordination, and the studies of "underdeveloped" countries often demonstrate the existence of elaborate, more or less rhizomatic networks constructed outside official channels²⁸. Consequently, the threat is always present that such rhizomes will operate as the basis for a fundamental challenge to the world system itself, causing the system to fall back on violence in an attempt to destroy what Chomsky calls "the threat of a good example"²⁹: the possibility of an escape from the global system which could trigger the end for this system's illusory inevitability.

The construction of official discourse — for instance, the "axis of evil", the reactive misrepresentation of attacks on civil liberties as the "protection" of liberty — is built around precisely this kind of valuation of closure. The only factor uniting the "axis of evil" (two of which were at war twenty years ago) is the incompletion of their subsumption into the world system. At the same time, one finds in official discourse a process of metonymical slippage between different instances of elements escaping control, linking terrorism, immigration, crime, protest, cultural otherness and the myriad resistances to "globalisation"³⁰. As Deleuze and Guattari (following Virilio) remark, 'this war machine no longer needs a qualified enemy but”¦ operates against the "unspecified enemy", domestic or foreign', and thereby constructs a situation of 'organized insecurity' and 'programmed catastrophe'.³¹ Ideological beliefs and values are a fall back position when there are unresolved problems in social relationships. Ideology need not be an issue when there is a searching analysis of relationship problems.

Against the threats to centralised control, one finds a tendency to seek reassurance from anxiety by pursuing ever-greater closure of space. Openness is seen as space for the enemy, and any open space is indeed a space in which rhizomes can flourish. On the other hand, closure is seen as safety. The system itself does not need openness because its values are taken to be fixed and obvious. In such official discourse one finds the repetition of themes widespread in the various movements Guattari terms "microfascist", and all the core features of a reactionary and liberticidal ideology.³² Closure of space, however, makes the systemic incorporation of particularities problematic, as dissenters and cultural nonconformists find themselves increasingly stripped of the open space needed to flourish, and as entire categories of people (Muslims, environmentalists, peace protesters, people who take photographs”¦) are reconstructed as "other" and as "dangerous". Through such closure, the logic of "with us or against us" gradually transmutes into "with or without you", which, as Slavoj Žižek argues, is a typical gesture of forced choice, the imposition of a master-signifier. 'The logic is thus clearly formulated: even the pretence of neutral international law is abandoned, since, when the USA perceives a potential threat, it formally asks its allies for support, but the allies' agreement is actually optional. The underlying message is always "We will do it with or without you" (in short, you are free to agree with us, but not free to disagree). The old paradox of the forced choice is reproduced here: the freedom to make a choice on condition that one makes the right choice'.³³ This is what Michael Mastanduno was predicting in 1999:

First, we should expect, as the centrepiece of US grand strategy, an effort to prolong the unipolar moment. Second, we should anticipate that the United States will adopt policies of reassurance toward status quo states, policies of confrontation toward revisionist states, and policies of engagement or integration toward undecided states”¦³⁴

Waging war on a noun³⁵

The conflicts between rhizomatic openness and statist closure structure many of the political controversies of the present period, with political commentators faced by the world system itself with the choice of whether to be "with" or "against" the project of control. Most commentators are unrecalcitrant in identifying with the statist side in such conflicts. Bobbit, for instance, makes excuses for the ongoing destruction of what little remains of American democracy as a way to 'protect' civil liberties from external threats.³⁶ This is a classic example of the authoritarianism of a discourse which insists on retaining the master-signifier even when this signifier is collapsing, and which therefore endorses violent acting-out by dominant groups determined to retain their control. It echoes Žižek's analysis of the invasion of Afghanistan as "acting-out": '[t]o succumb to the urge to act now and retaliate means precisely to avoid confronting the true dimensions of what occurred on September 11 - it means an act whose true aim is to lull us into the secure conviction that nothing has REALLY changed'³⁷.

As one might expect from such a discourse, the core concepts are self-contradictory and disastrously vague. "War on terrorism" is a good example, because terrorism is basically war conducted by asymmetrically situated agents; a "war on terrorism" is then remarkably close to a "war on war". (It is perhaps indicative that it is often abbreviated as "war on terror": the focus of war is not a real enemy but a pervasive emotional state). The concept of terrorism is aptly described by Hardt and Negri as 'a crude conceptual and terminological reduction which is rooted in a police mentality'.³⁸ The "war on terrorism" is built around a classic example of Schmittian "decision": the division of the world into "us and them", friend and enemy, one might say, master-signifier and repressed Real (or social symptom). In this way, the centralised assemblage of American global power reasserts the reactive construction of symbolic and territorial space — the one that on 911 was symbolically lost for a while — around its own master-signifier. However, the very demand for such an assertion demonstrates that the master-signifier does not in fact quilt the field, that it is undermined by rhizomatic flows, which exceed its controls.

A recent analysis by the Midnight Notes collective demonstrates the continuity of the goals of the Iraq war with the extension of a world system as conceived by authors such as Wallerstein and Frank. The idea of weapons of mass destruction (WMD's) falling into the hands of terrorists provides a basis for treating with suspicion any instances of "development" which are not controlled either by western powers or multinational corporations, since industrial facilities could in theory be used to produce WMD's. In addition, the invasion of Iraq served US goals to neutralise the power of OPEC and normalise the position of oil as a commodity extracted through exploitative relations between North and South. Referring to US policy, the authors note:

This argument means that the US government has taken on the role of overseeing and vetoing all forms of industrial development throughout the world in perpetuum. Autonomous industrial development not controlled by an approved MNC by any government is out of order. Hence this "war on terrorism" doctrine becomes a basis for the military control of the economic development policies of any government on the planet. . . What is at stake is the shape of planetary industrial development for decades to come. The combination of the restoration of oil-driven accumulation with the imposition of the Bush doctrine on global industrial development ensures that the "suburban-petroleum" mode of life we are living in the U.S. (and increasingly in Western Europe) will lead to endless war.³⁹

While the goals of the war are in continuity with older aims, the approach taken in this war is of more recent vintage. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan largely follow the model of non-war outlined in Baudrillard's analysis of the first Gulf War andfurther extended by Ignatieff⁴⁰. Non-wars differ from wars in various ways. Rather than being collisions of two powers located symmetrically within a single discourse, they involve the feints and counterfeints of two sides separated by radical discursive difference. America and its allies were in both cases attempting to impose a discourse of control embodying a logic of deterrence. As General Wesley Clark said of the bombing of Yugoslavia, 'this was not, strictly speaking, a war'.⁴¹ America and its allies were in Iraq and Afghanistan attempting to impose a discourse of control embodying a logic of deterrence. This is a logic where everything is already decided and where overwhelming force is the guarantor of ultimate meaning. Their opponents, however, adopted tactics which involved anything but direct confrontation; in this way, they slipped away from the logic of deterrence; the war is over, yet still American troops were being killed. Baudrillard argues that, because media images are now the continuation of war by other means, war, the most concentrated form of violence, has become cinematographic and televisual, just like the mechanically produced image.

The true belligerents are those who thrive on the ideology of the truth of this war, despite the fact that the war itself exerts its ravages on another level, through faking, through hyper reality, the simulacrum, through all these strategies of psychological deterrence that make play with facts and images, with the precession of the virtual over the real, virtual time over real time, and the inexorable confusion between the two⁴².

Deleuze and Guattari make a similar point, while insisting that the "total peace" of deterrence through non-war, 'the peace of Terror or Survival', is every bit as barbaric and authoritarian as the wars it replaces. 'Total war is surpassed, toward a form of peace more terrifying still. The war machine has taken control of the aim, worldwide order, and the States are no more than objects or means adapted to that machine'⁴³. The war machine, taking global order as its aim, comes to reign over the axiomatics of the world system, so that 'the absolute peace of survival succeeded where total war had failed', in constructing the world as a single deterritorialising-reterritorialising space⁴⁴.

In conjunction, the systems of control erected in Iraq and Afghanistan involve an uneasy tension between arborescent and rhizomatic structures which attest to severe weaknesses in American control. In both areas, local control is largely held by rulers who are sometimes termed "warlords", "tribal chiefs" and "local dignitaries" in official discourse. Such rulers are ambiguous figures, because they represent American imperialism only by locating themselves in fragmentary local discourses. Both their control and their loyalty are frequently doubtful. Meanwhile, American troops have established symbolic control by occupying key urban centres and economic resources such as oilfields. This symbolic control reasserts the primacy of the American master-signifier, but even then it is ambiguous: witness the haste with which American flags were removed from Iraqi monuments after being raised by the invading forces in Iraq. It is an open secret that American control in Afghanistan does not extend beyond the borders of Kabul, and that the Taleban are still in control of large areas of the countryside. A similar situation is now coming into being in Iraq, with entire cities periodically established as no-go areas for American troops, and a new offensive every few months to retake Najaf, Fallujah, Ramadi, al-Qaim, or some other city — often one which has already been "liberated" several times before. In other words, American occupation perpetuates the situation of indeterminacy: America's opponents may not (yet) be able to expel its forces militarily, but by maintaining the situation of uncertainty, they prevent American "victory" and the re-establishment of hegemony and of stable subsumption. Rather, one sees American forces bogged down in situations which confirm Arquilla and Ronfeldt's analysis, as Bruce Hoffman makes clear.

The Iraqi insurgency today appears to have no clear leader (or leadership), no ambition to seize and actually hold territory (except ephemerally, as in the recent cases of Fallujah and Najaf), no unifying ideology, and, most important, no identifiable organization. Rather, what we find in Iraq is the closest manifestation yet of "netwar," a concept defined in 1992 by the RAND analysts John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt as unconventional warfare involving flat, segmented networks instead of the pyramidal hierarchies and command-and-control systems (no matter how primitive) that have governed traditional insurgent organizations.⁴⁵

The importance of ethnic allegiances in the structure of societies under US domination (both the indirect means of US rule and the paradigmatic structures of resistance movements) make the issue of ethnicity important for this discussion. Ethnicity is an ambiguous category because, while emerging as "other" to centralised nation-state identity, and while being structured in relation to everyday patronage networks and localised, often kinship-linked, forms of micropower, it is also in many respects an arborescent kind of identity, and therefore malleable by US forces and other agents of control.

On the one hand, ethnicity emerges as a decentring force in relation to centralised nation-state-based forms of control. In the context of the growing reliance of US power, and of resistance to US power, on local ethnic and religious allegiances, it is crucial to recall Partha Chatterjee's remarks on the discursive exclusions constructed by the imposition of nationalism and development discourse in India (the Indian variety of the process of hegemony and subsumption discussed above). According to Chatterjee, the construction of the nation occurred alongside the emergence of various "others", which in various ways exceeded national identity and could not be subsumed into it. Identities constructed around class, caste, ethnicity, gender, local identities, and so on, became the focus of loyalties, which could not be controlled by the official system⁴⁶.

On the other hand, however, ethnicity cannot be understood as a primarily rhizomatic phenomenon, because of its unusual quasi-permanence and its rigid and exlusionary implications. Ethnic affiliation provides a sense of security in a divided society, reciprocal help, and protection against neglect of one's interests by strangers. As Horowitz argues,

Because ethnicity tops cultural and symbolic issues - basic notions of identity and the self, of individual and group worth and entitlement - the conflicts it generates are intrinsically less amenable to compromise than those revolving around material issues”¦. In deeply divided societies ethnicity - in contrast to other lines of cleavage, such as class or occupation - appears permanent and all encompassing, predetermining who will be granted and denied access to power and resources.⁴⁷

Some interesting questions then inevitably should be asked. As Vievienne Jabri discusses in her work Discourses on Violence, these involve the processes which constitute the individual identity, how identity comes to be framed in exclusionist terms and how the inclusion-exclusion dichotomy results in the emergence of and support for violent human conflict.⁴⁸ Ali Khan similarly argues that the construction of exclusionary walls and boundaries satisfies a long-standing, apparently primordial human inclination to maintain self-identity by continually creating an "other", a process sustained through patronage networks⁴⁹. Deleuze and Guattari would challenge the primordiality of such forms of discourse, but their pervasiveness today is undeniable. The world system has become increasingly dependent on loyalties based on identities and boundaries, in order to construct patronage networks and thereby exercise control. In contexts such as Afghanistan and Iraq, such networks are the only means whereby arborescent structures can be erected atop a diffusion of rhizomatic forces. Such themes are also pervasive in making "global war" a possibility. The discourse of war aims at the construction of a mythology based on inclusion and exclusion. This categorisation sharply contrasts the insider from the outsider/s who are the "others" or the deserving enemy.

The discourse of the construction of unity through identity and sameness has dangers for those who resist the world system. To be a dissenting voice is to be an outsider, who is often branded as a traitor to the cause and therefore, deserving of sacrifice at the mythical altar of solidarity. What would previously have been blurred social boundaries become sharpened primarily through a discursive focus upon features both symbolic and material, which divide communities to the extent that the desire for destruction of the enemy is perceived to be the only legitimate or honorable course to follow. As Bloom puts it, 'The mass national public will always react against policies that can be perceived to be a threat to national identity. The mass national public will always react favorably to policies which protect or enhance national identity”¦ national chauvinism is commercially successful'⁵⁰. But the centralization and restriction of information is necessary in order to sustain this dynamic. 'The restriction on complete disclosure is precisely to avoid the possible triggering of the national identity dynamic which would take decision making out of the hands of the 'responsible' and informed few'.⁵¹

The people involved in the groups blamed for the September 11^th attacks, the Bali, Istanbul, Madrid and London bombings and other such attacks are probably attacking the US and in some cases "the west" for a variety of reasons, such as the US's support for the Shah in Iran, unconditional US support for Israel, the first Gulf War, threats to Islamic sites in Saudi Arabia and so on. In terms of foreign policy, it is unlikely that they have in mind bringing down capitalism or a way of life. Indeed, political Islamists are not alone in disliking America's role in the world. American direct and indirect interventions in Chile, Panama, Guatemala, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, the Phillipines, Cuba, the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere, support for dictatorships in Indonesia, Greece, Congo-Kinshasa and today in Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and inaction in cases such as the Rwanda genocide and the South African apartheid regime have created a basis for global hostility to US power. However, the challenge posed by political Islam is particularly strong and militant, leading today to direct military confrontations with American forces and attacks on American targets which are almost unknown elsewhere. So why do groups such as al-Qaeda occupy this unusual historical position? Perhaps the explanation lies in a peculiar intersection of factors which brought Islamic traditionalism into contact with global capitalism, producing hybrid formations.

In any case, such movements should be understood as an exceptionally anti-western variant on the theme of ethno-religious identity. Although they adopt rhizomatic forms of organisation to outflank hierarchical adversaries, they are based on a type of identity which pursues fixity through closure, and which is just as hostile to the other (in the form of 'infidels', 'traitors', secularists, unveiled women, Jews, gay men, and so on) as the global system they fight. Nevertheless, such ethnoreligious movements break down western power because they focus on a different set of identity categories, counterposing a different structure of inclusion and exclusion to the dominant western model.

Between the global resistance movements and the ethno-religious movements, it is clear that very little of the periphery is subsumed into the world system in a stable and hegemonic way: 'rich and poor, hemispherically from N to S, regionally between peripheral and core nationally across class and ethnic boundaries', the world seems to be on a line of flight from the world system. This 'line of flight' could also be described in terms of parallel lines, as a parallelogram of forces as Graeme Chesters argues.⁵²

In practice what we get when we abstract the ethnoreligious movements or groups, we are left with antiwar and other social protest groups; anticapitalist/antiglobalisation movements involved in summit protests against the World Trade Organisation, the IMF and the World Bank, as well as their offshoots such as People's Global Action, the World Social Forum and so on; and lifestyle-issue movements (the latter not quite relevant to our discussion). Namely then, movements of a generally more sociopolitical nature. In contrast to the ethnoreligious movements, some of the sociopolitical opposition groups are rhizomatic in identity as well as organisational terms. Anti-capitalist and other rhizomatic groups have constructed many new forms of political action, and also new forms of communication. In contrast to the closure of space, the violence and identity divide found in ethnoreligious discourses, these movements seem to rely more on networking and grassroots organising, to a greater extent than the hierarchical structures states and their followers. Several metaphors have been used to describe a large number of groups being brought together under a common cause, groups that disperse as easily as they come together: a parallelogram of forces following a swarm logic like ants in an ant colony — the whole of singularities The ecology of such action indicates a web of horizontal social solidarities to which power might be devolved, or even dissolved. It may be argued that because many people do not believe in power through conventional politics, they are increasingly sympathetic to direct action. This gives rise to network-based, non-hierarchical organisational forms.

The movements in question are able to take action without the need for a leader and without any individual having a privileged insight, or even being able to conceptualise the characteristics of the whole. There is an emphasis upon participation, antipathy to hierarchy, alternative processes of decision-making such as consensus decision-making and direct democracy, respect for difference and an assertion of unity in diversity. The project which unites these movements is less the capture of the state apparatus and more the construction of an open and transnational public sphere and a rhizomatic extension of struggles which are linked through weak ties. These groups are able to utilise new technologies such as the Internet very effectively because of the structural similarities between such new media and the organisational forms of the groups themselves.

The network forms of these groups can be characterised as rhizomatic, netwar, or SPIN.⁵³ Global activist networks have many centres or hubs, but unlike their predecessors, those hubs are less likely to be defined around prominent leaders. Movement integration has shifted from ideological integration towards more personal and fluids forms of association based on weak ties and informal connective structures. This leads to a rhizomatic style of politics whish fully realises the organisational and mobilisational potential of internet network structures. Particularly relevant is how the structure of the internet itself (a global network with no central authority) has offered another experience of governance (no governance), time and space (compression), ideology (freedom of information and access to it), identity (multiplicity) and fundamentally an opposition to surveillance and control, boundaries and hierarchic apparatuses. In the final analysis, new information-age ideologies could be easily arguing for a transfer of virtual social and political structures to the real-life world, reversing for once the existing process of imitating real life in cyberspace. The form of the internet itself is a message, a symbolic challenge to dominant patterns of hierarchical structures of governance. The Internet for instance is a typical rhizomatic structure and the groups using it are rhizomatic in character because they seem to have no leader, coming together for an event (for example anti-globalisation protests or hacking enemy websites) and dissolving again back to their own ceaselessly changing line of flight into the adventitious underground stems and aerial roots of the rhizome.⁵⁴ It is important to stress the impact of new communication technologies on these movements, because in several instances the internet has been responsible for the rapid cross-border diffusion of movement ideas and organisation of protest and even the globality of protest itself.

The challenge of the present epoch, therefore, is the challenge of a global split between a dominant world system and a proliferating rhizomatic resistance (sometimes mediated by the forms of ethnoreligious identity through which the former can entrap the latter). As Kox and Schechter argue, '[w]ithin societies across the world, in the West as well as the non-West, opposition has been mobilizing in increasingly demonstrative confrontations against the economic and military manifestations of this concentrated power. These evidences of resistance express rejection of the Western version of a unitary political and economic global governance'⁵⁵. Against this proliferating resistance, the world system responds with an ever-tightening grip, seeking to re-establish control by means of brute force in the service of a discourse of deterrence and control. A choice is therefore posed for all of those engaged with this situation — not so much whether we are "with Bush or with the terrorists", as whether the continued attempt to impose global domination is to proceed "with or without" each of us as contributors to it.

This paper has discussed the problems facing US foreign policy in relation to emerging network/rhizomatic forms of organisation and resistance. The efforts made by the US to respond to ethnoreligious movements such as al-Qaeda, and sociopolitical movements such as the antiwar or antiglobalisation movements has relied on violence, closure of space and fixity of identities. This is a strategy which is probably doomed to failure for technological reasons. The information revolution is favoring and strengthening networked organisational designs, often at the expense of hierarchies. The US needs to realise that networks can be fought effectively only by flexible network-style responses. The survival of the world system will depend on its ability to develop network forms of its own — such as the capitalist biopower discussed by Hardt and Negri — in order to recuperate, control, and draw on the energies of rhizomatic movements.

The question is not, however, limited to the question of how the world system can rearrange its global power. The question is also about whether the world system — and more generally, the logic of hierarchies based on fixed identities — is a necessary or valuable feature of the social world. The development of new technologies and new rhizomatic organisational forms creates new opportunities for lines of flight from the current social arrangement, which are not reducible to the recurrence of fixed ethnoreligious categories or the continued dominance of the world system. There are also unprecedented opportunities for sociopolitical movements to set in motion centripetal forces which could ultimately render the world system non-viable. The collision between "with you" and "without you" — between those who remain incorporated into the system and those whose peripherality and marginality slips over into lines of flight — is the epochal issue of the current era, and on its results depends the future of international relations in an increasingly networked world.