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War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences
When is wartime? On the surface, it is a period of time in which a society is at war. But we now live in what President Obama has called "an age without surrender ceremonies," as the Administration announced an "end to conflict in Iraq," even though conflict on the ground is ongoing. It is no longer easy to distinguish between wartime and peacetime. In this inventive meditation on war, time, and the law, Mary Dudziak argues that wartime is not as discrete a time period as we like to think. Instead, America has been engaged in some form of ongoing overseas armed conflict for over a century. Meanwhile policy makers and the American public continue to view wars as exceptional events that eventually give way to normal peace times. This has two consequences. First, because war is thought to be exceptional, "wartime" remains a shorthand argument justifying extreme actions like torture and detention without trial. Second, ongoing warfare is enabled by the inattention of the American people. More disconnected than ever from the wars their nation is fighting, public disengagement leaves us without political restraints on the exercise of American war powers.
Visit http://wartimebook.blogspot.com/ to learn more.
Visit http://wartimebook.blogspot.com/ to learn more.
232 pages, Hardcover
First published January 7, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 5, 2022
An interesting little book that looks at the history of US conflict in a new way. Dudziak argues that Americans have traditionally had an idea of war time based on 2 principles. The first is temporariness: wars begin, marking off a new chapter of history, and then they end. The second is what you might call expediency, or the idea that government powers may expand at the expense of individual rights/autonomy during war time but that they should then retract when the war is over.
Dudziak shows that WWII is traditionally the exemplar of this notion of war time, but even it was more complicated. For example, FDR began using federal power to aid the allies and mobilize the country for war well before the US formally entered hostilities. After the fighting ended, the government continued to exercise many emergency powers, including within the court system. She then how the Cold War really threw the concept of war time into confusion, as it was more a state of permanent, semi-military but multi-domain conflict than an ongoing hot war like WWII. Of course, executive power expanded considerably during the Cold War, but so did individual rights overall, mainly because of the legal and social revolutions of the 1960s. I think one contribution of this book is that we should differentiate war time and combat or hostilities, as the former is a much more expansive state of mobilization and empowerment of the state.
Lastly, Dudziak explores the vagueness of the War on Terror as a war. The Bush admin and later presidencies requested expanded executive power because this was a "war" or an "emergency," but there even less of a clear end point for this conflict than there was for the Cold War, which at least had a discrete nation-state as the main enemy. She shows how the Supreme Court at first accepted the arguments for indefinite detention and other exec powers because it was "war time" but as that war seemed increasingly endless and unbounded began to roll back some of those expansions. Dudziak leaves off by saying that we need to acknowledge that war time is not a feature of the natural world but a human construction: we decide whether it applies to a given situation and what that means for the balance between rights and the powers of the state. The obvious implication here is that it's a mistake to keep thinking of the GWOT as war time; it isn't experienced that way by the vast majority of Americans, the terrorist threat has declined, and we have vastly expanded the capacities of the state without thinking a whole lot about whether that's a good idea.
This is a really quick read for people who like USFP, military history, and law and war studies. Definitely compelled me to look at war from a new angle.
Dudziak shows that WWII is traditionally the exemplar of this notion of war time, but even it was more complicated. For example, FDR began using federal power to aid the allies and mobilize the country for war well before the US formally entered hostilities. After the fighting ended, the government continued to exercise many emergency powers, including within the court system. She then how the Cold War really threw the concept of war time into confusion, as it was more a state of permanent, semi-military but multi-domain conflict than an ongoing hot war like WWII. Of course, executive power expanded considerably during the Cold War, but so did individual rights overall, mainly because of the legal and social revolutions of the 1960s. I think one contribution of this book is that we should differentiate war time and combat or hostilities, as the former is a much more expansive state of mobilization and empowerment of the state.
Lastly, Dudziak explores the vagueness of the War on Terror as a war. The Bush admin and later presidencies requested expanded executive power because this was a "war" or an "emergency," but there even less of a clear end point for this conflict than there was for the Cold War, which at least had a discrete nation-state as the main enemy. She shows how the Supreme Court at first accepted the arguments for indefinite detention and other exec powers because it was "war time" but as that war seemed increasingly endless and unbounded began to roll back some of those expansions. Dudziak leaves off by saying that we need to acknowledge that war time is not a feature of the natural world but a human construction: we decide whether it applies to a given situation and what that means for the balance between rights and the powers of the state. The obvious implication here is that it's a mistake to keep thinking of the GWOT as war time; it isn't experienced that way by the vast majority of Americans, the terrorist threat has declined, and we have vastly expanded the capacities of the state without thinking a whole lot about whether that's a good idea.
This is a really quick read for people who like USFP, military history, and law and war studies. Definitely compelled me to look at war from a new angle.
January 5, 2025
Duzdiak’s War Time, drawing on World War II, the Cold War and the War on Terror, ponders the meaning of war in an era where for the last 7 decades, the United States has been in a state of perpetual war. Pondering “war-time” as a socially constructed phenomenon, Dudziak examines the evolution of the American legal system and how the Courts utilized the supposedly “exceptional” nature of war to both expand and limit civil liberties and the powers of the Presidency.
A very short work, Dudziak concludes that WWII led to the reinterpretation of the idea of an “attack” itself, allowing the Roosevelt Presidency to pursue military build-up and war preparations while restrained by a populace and Congress largely in favour of isolationism (40-52). The Cold War, an inherently ambiguous merging of peace and wartime, did not led to significant change in terms of civil liberties or the courts. Instead, “rights restrictions during [the Cold War] were driven more by domestic developments” than anything else (81).
The War on Terror, linked by George W. Bush as a war on ideology like that of the Cold War, “laid the basis for invoking [presidential] war powers,” legimitized by Congressional accomplices in the AUMF and the PATRIOT Act (100-112). Legal scholarship in the 2000s became dominated by the Nazi scholar Carl Schmitt, whose work legitimized the concepts of exceptional emergency powers (115-119). Finally, in a series of decisions allowing torture and detention of non-US citizens at the occupied Cuban shores of Guantanamo Bay, “...the Supreme Court appeared to accede to a security crisis with no visible end-point…a peaceless era,” the legal structure of the United States itself bending before the pursuit of endless war (120-127).
A very short work, Dudziak concludes that WWII led to the reinterpretation of the idea of an “attack” itself, allowing the Roosevelt Presidency to pursue military build-up and war preparations while restrained by a populace and Congress largely in favour of isolationism (40-52). The Cold War, an inherently ambiguous merging of peace and wartime, did not led to significant change in terms of civil liberties or the courts. Instead, “rights restrictions during [the Cold War] were driven more by domestic developments” than anything else (81).
The War on Terror, linked by George W. Bush as a war on ideology like that of the Cold War, “laid the basis for invoking [presidential] war powers,” legimitized by Congressional accomplices in the AUMF and the PATRIOT Act (100-112). Legal scholarship in the 2000s became dominated by the Nazi scholar Carl Schmitt, whose work legitimized the concepts of exceptional emergency powers (115-119). Finally, in a series of decisions allowing torture and detention of non-US citizens at the occupied Cuban shores of Guantanamo Bay, “...the Supreme Court appeared to accede to a security crisis with no visible end-point…a peaceless era,” the legal structure of the United States itself bending before the pursuit of endless war (120-127).
December 22, 2015
Perhaps original in the idea, but gets lost in US Supreme Court legalese
March 12, 2018
Initially, it would seem like an easy thing to define what war time is. It is the opposite of peace time, duh. However, the author manages to demonstrate that war time is a decidedly contentious subject and that as long as the term and concept have existed there has been considerable ambiguity in its use. It is considered a truism that in war time rights decrease, but there have been cases where the need to improve one's reputation in the face of international attention have increased rights and freedoms, as was the case for blacks during the early part of the Cold War. War time and its implications are complicated [1], and this book explores those complications, especially in the 20th century. The author shows a distinct willingness to look at time from all kinds of perspectives, far more than most people would think of, and she manages to do so in a way that manages to strike this reader as pretty nonpartisan, although not in a way that makes presidents in general look good in American history and a way that demonstrates that in American history it is peace and not war that is the exception based on the military record of campaign badges.
This book is a short one, with under 140 pages of core written material before the book shows an appendix with every single military badge offered by the military. The author begins with an introduction that seeks to frame her discussion properly about war time and to point out that while she believes war time has a variety of effects on civilian life, it clearly has effects. After that the author seeks to define wartime as a concept, looking at the ways that it even affects the Daylight Savings Time we use today. The author then asks what seems to be a straightforward question: namely, when was World War II, but that proves to be more complicated than thought even when looking at America's involvement in World War II and not, say, Japan's involvement or Germany's. Part of this was because of the disconnect between presidential powers and the perceived need for legitimacy in the face of a far more isolationist American public. The author turns to the Cold War and examines what kind of war it was and then uses that as a way of judging the contemporary war on terror and what exactly that means, and how exactly that war is supposed to be temporary enough to assure the restoration of peacetime.
Why does this matter? Well, during wartime, however it is defined, the government seeks additional power and behaves in ways that seek to serve its interests abroad. Also, there can be great disconnects between the way that ordinary people view time as opposed to the way that the military views time. This happens when small wars that are always going on for imperial glory or the expansion of territory demand little in the way of sacrifice on the part of ordinary people who view the situation as "peacetime" while soldiers themselves are subject to high degrees of control by authorities in dangerous combat that is simply not understood or acknowledged by the larger population, which is under the belief that their nation is a peaceful one. This applies powerfully to the United States and also plenty of other countries as well, and is a way that civilians and their militaries are out of phase with each other and simply do not understand the way life is for the other. This author gives plenty of food for thought when it comes to questions of war and peace in 20th century American history.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2010...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
This book is a short one, with under 140 pages of core written material before the book shows an appendix with every single military badge offered by the military. The author begins with an introduction that seeks to frame her discussion properly about war time and to point out that while she believes war time has a variety of effects on civilian life, it clearly has effects. After that the author seeks to define wartime as a concept, looking at the ways that it even affects the Daylight Savings Time we use today. The author then asks what seems to be a straightforward question: namely, when was World War II, but that proves to be more complicated than thought even when looking at America's involvement in World War II and not, say, Japan's involvement or Germany's. Part of this was because of the disconnect between presidential powers and the perceived need for legitimacy in the face of a far more isolationist American public. The author turns to the Cold War and examines what kind of war it was and then uses that as a way of judging the contemporary war on terror and what exactly that means, and how exactly that war is supposed to be temporary enough to assure the restoration of peacetime.
Why does this matter? Well, during wartime, however it is defined, the government seeks additional power and behaves in ways that seek to serve its interests abroad. Also, there can be great disconnects between the way that ordinary people view time as opposed to the way that the military views time. This happens when small wars that are always going on for imperial glory or the expansion of territory demand little in the way of sacrifice on the part of ordinary people who view the situation as "peacetime" while soldiers themselves are subject to high degrees of control by authorities in dangerous combat that is simply not understood or acknowledged by the larger population, which is under the belief that their nation is a peaceful one. This applies powerfully to the United States and also plenty of other countries as well, and is a way that civilians and their militaries are out of phase with each other and simply do not understand the way life is for the other. This author gives plenty of food for thought when it comes to questions of war and peace in 20th century American history.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2010...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...
January 17, 2018
Dudziak argues the establishment of war time is a political act in domestic U.S. politics, not merely a domestic response to foreign affairs. She briefly traces the major 20th Century wars the U.S. was involved in to highlight the political contentions necessary to establish a time of war. She then argues the post 9/11 era is one of normalized war which carries the repeal of civil liberties accustomed during declared war times, but lacks the political recognition and public attention brought during previous wars. This book is a good introduction to thinking critically about war, but lacks sufficient engagement with domestic politics and culture, weighing too heavily upon legal cases. It would have been nice to see her bring in the politics of the press following 9/11.
December 20, 2023
A very brief treatise on the legal implications of "times" of war and peace, and how the concept has ceased to be meaningful.
For such a short book (136p + 50pp of notes), the prose is repetitious and sometimes unnecessary (e.g., 5 pages of personal anecdotes about 9/11). I don't disagree with the author's premise, but she's in her wheelhouse describing court decisions related to "war time". I wish there was more depth to support her arguments.
For such a short book (136p + 50pp of notes), the prose is repetitious and sometimes unnecessary (e.g., 5 pages of personal anecdotes about 9/11). I don't disagree with the author's premise, but she's in her wheelhouse describing court decisions related to "war time". I wish there was more depth to support her arguments.
August 25, 2019
A quick and fascinating read about how the concepts of war and time are less concrete than we might imagine. Because the author is a legal scholar, the book focuses more on court cases and legislative interpretations than I might have preferred, but that doesn't take away from the book's thesis. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to come to terms with American war culture.
October 1, 2023
I enjoyed more Dudziak's research into the burial and medal-award practices and what they say about which conflicts are recognized as such by the military than the philosophical questions about the blurring between peace time and war time. However, I think there is still something valuable in adding the time perspective to the problem of distinguishing between war and peace.
March 14, 2018
Introduction is promising, but the book doesn't live up to its aspirations. Needed to be much longer, with more analysis.
Read
March 27, 2024For class, chill
December 5, 2025
Dudziak argues that the temporal boundaries of war are more fluid than we imagine.
November 19, 2018
At one point I worked as a librarian in the same department as the author, and she was a pretty sizable pain in the ass; so it's nice to read this excellent book and feel like it was worth it after all. Her research covers so much ground that her overly broad requests make more sense to me in retrospect.
This book examines both the social construction of time and the legal distinction between "wartime" and "peacetime" rights. It's a delicate balancing act that Professor Dudziak mostly pulls off. This is a short, accessible read that opens up a lot of research paths if you feel looking more deeply into any of the subject matter. I found it to be a good companion piece to State of Exception.
This book examines both the social construction of time and the legal distinction between "wartime" and "peacetime" rights. It's a delicate balancing act that Professor Dudziak mostly pulls off. This is a short, accessible read that opens up a lot of research paths if you feel looking more deeply into any of the subject matter. I found it to be a good companion piece to State of Exception.
February 5, 2013
A clear and smart discussion of "war time" in American history. Dudziak explores the construction of "time" in relation to American wars of the twentieth century. Largely ignored or assumed as natural, time is a cultural construction informed by place, people, and politics. Dudziak points out that the separation of "war time" and "peace time," the implication that "war time" is temporary, the assumption that "war time" actions are fated, are used to justify "extraordinary" measures like torture, curbing of civil liberties, etc. Dudziak complicates the idea of peace/war time separation and demonstrates (convincingly) that America has been in a perpetual state of war in the twentieth century. Wartime has become the norm, she argues. War hasn't stopped -- we've just stopped paying attention to (or feeling the effects of) war.
February 18, 2014
Pulled this off the shelf today to look for a quote and realized I'd only read half of it last year, so I finished it off. Quick read. An interesting and original approach, but I'm not sure there's a great deal to it in the end. Probably worth reading if only for the uniqueness of its conception.
April 6, 2016
A compelling book that falls a bit short but is nevertheless thought provoking.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews