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To speak of empire today is to speak about a global dispensation of power predicated on, and furthering, the aims of capitalist accumulation in an era when the familiar components and dynamics of the international order of sovereign states, by means of which such accumulation took place, seem to have been dramatically, perhaps irrevocably, reorganized. To understand empire's workings is hence to try to grasp an order of common ideals, sensibilities, and practices that no longer simply entail the protocols of proper belonging defined by the nation-state, or, protocols of full citizenship, that defined the rights of peoples in the age of national sovereignty. Certainly, as identitarian codes for understanding and regulating human differences cut against the measure of Man, race, gender, and sexuality have long served to organize the social divisions of economic production and political power within and across nationstates-perhaps exemplarily so during the age of decolonization (the true and obverse content of the age of freedom)-and continue to do so in the present. Yet over the last several decades, these codes have operated beyond a normative cultural logic of social identities (where they act as means of specification, disciplining and representation of individuals, groups, and nations as integral units of modern sovereignty). These codes now also operate within numerous calculative procedures of attribution, where they act as variables for partitioning and bundling organic and inorganic masses, matters, and potentials in new modes of value production and life extraction, which have resulted in both a proliferation of social differences (in shifting scales) and a staggeringly profound breach in the fates of human beings.
Beyond the protocols and ideals of political community established by a still expanding Euro-American humanism and rule of democratic sovereignty, which defined an older world order, today's imperial order entails protocols for the enhancement and furtherance of life of an already recognized humanity,1 whose guaranteed rights to such life of the "already human" can be extended, but only to deserving candidates: those "becoming-human," who aspire to the protocols of living that obtain under a transnational free market economy and expanding liberal-democratic "rule of law," and those periodically expelled from humanity who petition for asylum from the ravages of that existence beyond the pale of empire. Seeing in the latter...