Text and the Separation of Powers

The text of the Constitution points to the separation of powers in its first three articles, which outlines the three branches of government, but how we understand the nature of the different types of power and how they check one another turns on unwritten ideas and not on the constitutional text. This chapter turns to debates about executive power with regard to the president’s ability to remove officers within the executive branch, and how executive power is constructed in relation to legislative and judicial power based on unwritten ideas. The chapter then turns to the allocation of constitutional power regarding issues of war and peace within the separation of powers to illustrate that disputes about the war power, just like disputes about “the executive power,” turn on unwritten ideas. These debates have been with us since the founding, with remarkably little disagreement about constitutional text but profound disagreement on the unwritten concepts that underlie it.

War, Police, and the Production of Global Social Order

The year 2020 saw police militarization again thrust into debates regarding the nature and extent of police violence. Critics of police militarization suggest that as departments have assumed military weaponry and tactics, the institution has drifted from its original mandate of crime control and public service, portending lethal consequences for the most vulnerable. While these critics trace its origins to the advent of SWAT, No Knock raids and other tactics born of the war on drugs, what is misread as the “blurring” of military and police is in fact symptomatic of a much older process of pacification, whereby both the war power and the police power are enlisted to discipline surplus populations and establish market conditions in the interests of capital. From this position, policing has not been poisoned by the practices of war, nor have the boundaries between foreign and domestic muddied, but rather military and police are mutually constitutive and parts of a continuum of state violence. Here the “iron fist” of open violence and repression and the velvet glove of “community policing” work in conjunction to facilitate the conditions of liberal social order.

Symposium on Middle East and North African (MENA) conflict. Part 1: An introduction

Since their independence, countries across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have witnessed subsequent waves of social and political conflicts. Armed and non-armed conflicts have almost become a defining feature of a region that has been struggling to find its own identity and a system that best represents its diverse communities and guarantees stability. Calibrated post-war power-sharing formulas of governance have produced authoritarianism, clientelism, elitism and a political post-war economy, where corruption, nepotism, injustice, and crony capitalism are rampant.

Completing the Executive

This chapter examines the convention that proceeded to debate the Committee of Detail draft clause by clause, as a great dissensus remained over the mode of selection of the president. It details the basic structure of the powers of the presidency as set forth by the Committee of Detail, which went unquestioned but there was disagreement about involving peace and war, and administrative organization. It also cites that the Committee of Detail gave Congress the power to make war and the Senate the power to make treaties and appoint ambassadors. The chapter discusses how the Convention narrowed Congress's war power by substituting “to declare war” for “to make war.” It explains that the purpose of reducing the scope of congressional war powers was to increase the scope of presidential war powers to repel sudden attacks.

Is War an Instrument of Policy?

One of Carl Clausewitz's most famous dictums is that “war is an instrument of policy.” Yet, few writers over the past two centuries have attempted to define what is meant by the term “policy.” Indeed, when doing so, most posit a definition that is so broad as to include virtually any type of motive for war: power politics, domestic politics, economics, irredentism, religion, etc. This is far too broad and tends to make the dictum meaningless. Moreover, many nations do not always wage war for such concrete reasons; rather, sometimes it is waged for cultural reasons such as pride, honor, revenge, fear, love, hate, or prestige.