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June 7, 2004
Hardt and Negri draw a link between the prevention and repression involved in intervention.They say:
"The relationship between prevention and repression is particularly clear in the case of intervention in ethnic conflicts. The conflicts among ethnic groups and the consequent reenforcement of new and/or resurrected ethnic identities effectively disrupt the old aggregations based on national political lines. These conflicts make the fabric of global relations more fluid and, by affirming new identities and new localities, present a more malleable material for control. In such cases repression can be articulated through preventive action that constructs new relationships (which will eventually be consolidated in peace but only after new wars) and new territorial and political formations that are functional (or rather more functional, better adaptable) to the constitution of Empire.<33> A second example of repression prepared through preventive action is the campaigns against corporative business groups or "mafias," particularly those involved in the drug trade. The actual repression of these groups may not be as important as criminalizing their activities and managing social alarm at their very existence in order to facilitate their control. Even though controlling "ethnic terrorists" and "drug mafias" may represent the center of the wide spectrum of police control on the part of the imperial power, this activity is nonetheless normal, that is, systemic. The "just war" is effectively supported by the "moral police," just as the validity of imperial right and its legitimate functioning is supported by the necessary and continuous exercise of police power."
For instance, the US involvement in the war on drugs in Latin America provides a cover for intervention in another country.
hard and Negri say:
"This kind of continual intervention, then, which is both moral and military, is really the logical form of the exercise of force that follows from a paradigm of legitimation based on a state of permanent exception and police action. Interventions are always exceptional even though they arise continually; they take the form of police actions because they are aimed at maintaining an internal order. In this way intervention is an effective mechanism that through police deployments contributes directly to the construction of the moral, normative, and institutional order of Empire."
Colombia is a good example.
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