Overview
Infrastructural Warfare is Agre's framework for understanding the post-9/11 world, developed in two major essays written within days of the September 11 attacks: 'Imagining the Next War: Infrastructural Warfare and the Conditions of Democracy' (September 14, 2001, 4300 words) and the expanded 'Some Notes on War in a World Without Boundaries' (September 21, 2001, 9500 words).
The central argument is that modern warfare has lost all its traditional boundaries — between military and civilian, front and rear, wartime and peacetime, soldier and citizen — and that this 'boundaryless war' is conceptually identical to conservatism. Both subordinate democracy to authority and have no natural endpoint.
Key arguments:
War without boundaries is incompatible with democracy: If war is total, permanent, and all-encompassing (as defense intellectuals propose), then declaring war means permanently destroying the conditions of democracy — censorship, curtailed civil liberties, suppressed dissent, and deference to authority.Protection vs. redesign: There are two approaches to infrastructural vulnerability. The 'protection' approach (armor, surveillance, police) treats existing infrastructure as given and surrounds it with security — but this approach is both unworkable (existing infrastructure is too profoundly insecure) and harmful to civil liberties. The 'redesign' approach builds security into infrastructure from the ground up, and can serve both security and civil liberties simultaneously.The false trade-off between security and liberty: Agre forcefully argued that the automatic association between 'more security' and 'less freedom' is simplistic and largely fallacious. Many security improvements (martial arts training for flight attendants, fixing identification systems, replacing insecure software) have no effect on civil liberties. The real design challenge is to achieve both.War as conservatism: The conditions of war — hierarchy, deference to authority, suppression of dissent, polarized us-vs-them thinking — are 'almost identical with the social vision of conservatism.' Conservatives are eloquent in wartime because wartime IS their preferred social order.The war/crime conflation: Bush's mixing of military language ('war') and police language ('bringing evildoers to justice') created dangerous conceptual confusion about what rules apply — the laws of war, or the laws of criminal justice.Ideological work and the Internet: The assumption that the Internet makes everyone 'modern' and liberal is wrong. The Internet amplifies existing processes of ideological self-transformation — including fundamentalist ones. The jihadis' use of technology for self-radicalization was entirely consistent with Agre's selective amplification framework.Significance
This is arguably Agre's most important political writing, because it synthesizes his entire intellectual framework — institutional analysis, democratic design, conservative movement analysis, selective amplification, the capture model, and surveillance critique — into a unified response to the defining political event of the early 21st century. Written with extraordinary speed and clarity in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it anticipated by years the broader debates about permanent war, the surveillance state, and the erosion of democratic norms.
Connection to Other Concepts
The essay connects directly to nearly every major Agre concept: democratic design (infrastructure must be designed for both security and liberty), selective amplification (the Internet amplifies ideological work), conservative movement analysis (war without boundaries IS conservatism), institutional legitimacy (wartime authority undermines democratic legitimacy), and the capture model (surveillance infrastructure captures and restructures social life).