Vasja Badalič presented a paper at the annual conference of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control, held in Vilnius, Lithuania, between 27 and 29 August 2024.
The paper, titled “Liberal ‘Defensive’ Imperialism: The Normalization of Preventive War,” explored the new preventive war doctrine, one of the key components of liberal “defensive” imperialism. The paper was divided into three parts. The first part examined how successive US administrations – from Bush to the Trump administration – adopted a new concept of “imminent threat” to create a new doctrine of preventive national “self-defense.” That part showed how the US redefined “imminent threat” by excluding two of its key traditional elements – that is, the immediacy and certainty of the threat. The second part examined which states – both US allies (e.g., the UK, Israel, Australia, Canada, India, Turkey) and non-allies (e.g., Russia) – embraced a similar doctrine of preventive “self-defense.” It provided an overview of the political discourses and state practices to determine which states adopted the new rules on preventive war. The final part examined how the new preventive war doctrine legitimized a specific type of imperial violence, that is, permanent violence, everywhere violence, and disproportionate violence.
