War on!

Abstract

'War on' is the leading form of anti-policy in the United States. Since the late 1950s we have seen wars on cancer, poverty, drugs and terror. Thus far, the most far-reaching of these, the war on crime, has transformed American democracy since the 1960s. The deformation of our population and institutions now requires not simply an end to that war and its extension (the 'War on Terror'), but the deployment of a new 'war on' to stimulate change in the governmentalities which have been established by the war on crime. A renewed 'war on cancer' offers great promise in this regard when analyzed in terms of the history of disease as a stimulus to change in governmentality, and specifically to the rise of biological citizenship.