Radical War: Data, Attention and Control in the 21st Century
Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins
Hurst £20

THERE is no doubt that digital technology with all its open-ended potential is changing war — but less acknowledgement that it is changing the meaning of war.

That matters, because wars as classically understood were prosecuted with purpose, never in a vacuum, by tradition-bound military institutions of nation-states, reinforced by mass-media sappers to ensure public legitimacy around an assembled consensus.
 
The smartphone, however, has changed everything. Mass connectivity, led not by states but corporations leveraging globalisation, is creating combatants of us all, at least in terms of how wars are understood and represented, and leaving the military behind.
 
This is the underlying argument of Radical War, a complex and at times dense set of reflections on the undeniably disturbing interactions between technological change and political violence.

Authors Matthew Ford and Andrew Hoskins have an axe to grind. Both academics, they seek to redefine war for the 21st century by challenging the dominant paradigm of warfare originating with Clausewitz in order to locate a novel informational battleground—the “new war ecology.”

Radical War is their gambit. It seeks to move beyond state-centric interpretations of warfare as military conflict to account for interactions between technology, society and the politics of violence. War is no longer about defeating enemies but managing the attention of populations using data in order to control them.

It is participative — we are all potentially combatants by dint of our digital access: the smartphone replaces the rifle to mobilise the masses. It disrupts official narratives by creating gaps and divisions in discourse that adversaries can exploit.

States must co-operate with tech entrepreneurs, the “virtual classes” of Silicon Valley. Outdated military hierarchies are in disarray. Enemies are potentially everyone.
 
Its vocabulary is sometimes academically heavy, but the book will certainly resonate among a wider public recalling the cascading crises enabled by connective technologies we have been living through since 9/11.

Written before Russia’s full-blown invasion of Ukraine, it presciently identifies how Moscow uses social media to shape narratives. The latter’s refusal to call the conflict a “war” — and the way British politicians swallow its disinformation — are examples of what is at stake.

Nonetheless, this book is concerned with how war is represented: it does not situate its shifting definition within an abundantly clear framework of history to explain why that change is occurring.
 
Technology is undoubtedly transforming the representation of political violence, but the real question is surely the extent to which it is changing the factors generating that violence.
 
The answer is probably less radical than an emphasis on white-hot digitisation might offer. Clausewitz’s most celebrated aphorism was that war is the “continuation of policy by other means.” War was endemic in Europe at the time he was writing, because it was an inevitable consequence of capitalism. Class interests lie at the heart of all political violence.
 
Applying such a lens to the birth in 2001 of what Ford and Hoskins call the “post-Clausewitzian age” — with 9/11 and then the “global war on terror” — only serves to underline this. In a brilliant essay on the origins of Islamic State, Nafeez Ahmed shows that behind the theocratic extremism, ultimately Isis is a cancer of modern industrial capitalism in meltdown.

To Marx, military conflicts were capitalist squabbles: the only war that mattered was class war. While the bourgeoisie uses violence to conquer markets, seize raw materials and control spheres of influence, it uses it mainly to preserve its dominant class position.
 
How it does so — through military institutions, smartphones, social media or otherwise — is one thing; why it does so, and why we enable this, is quite another.

Radical war may, indeed, be the sum of all our fears. For Marxists, radical peace must be the sum of all our hopes.