Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century

With Philip Bobbitt, Herbert Wechsler Professor of Federal Jurisprudence and director of the Centre for National Security at Columbia University.

Chair: Simon Jenkins, author and journalist

The threat of terrorism is now part of the landscape of daily lives all over the world, yet we have hardly begun to think properly about it. In his new book Terror and Consent, Philip Bobbit argues that we are fighting these wars with weapons and concepts which though useful to us in previous conflicts have now been superseded.

Bobbitt aims to provide a fundamental rethinking of most generally accepted ideas about terror in the modern world. Considering what it is and how it operates, he shows that we need to reforge the links between law and strategy to realize how the evolution of modern states, which have always produced terrorists in their own image, has now produced a globally networked terrorism. To combine humanitarian interests with strategies of intervention and above all to rethink what victory in such a war, if it is a war, might look like - no occupied capitals, no treaties, no victory parades, but the preservation, protection and defence of human rights and of states of consent.