Perfect War and its Contestations

Drawing on Foucault’s notion of ‘regime of truth’ this chapter examines the spaces of contention through which watchdog organizations such as Airwars make counter-claims to the US-led Coalition air-strike campaign against IS in Syria and Iraq. The Coalition’s sanctioning of information, its discursive embracement of watchdog criticism, as well as its adoption of specialist technologies, worked to reinforce a regime of truth in which remote warfare is portrayed as ‘precise’ and ‘caring’: a form of perfect war which saves lives, not just of ‘our own’ but also of ‘civilian others’. We outline how this regime of truth about remote wars promotes violence rather than limits it. This prompts us to look at the ontology of remote war, and its capacity to ward off political questions on how it has transformative effects and (re)produces and sustains regimes of power

Perfect War and its Contestations

Drawing on Foucault’s notion of ‘regime of truth’ this chapter examines the spaces of contention through which watchdog organizations such as Airwars make counter-claims to the US-led Coalition air-strike campaign against IS in Syria and Iraq. The Coalition’s sanctioning of information, its discursive embracement of watchdog criticism, as well as its adoption of specialist technologies, worked to reinforce a regime of truth in which remote warfare is portrayed as ‘precise’ and ‘caring’: a form of perfect war which saves lives, not just of ‘our own’ but also of ‘civilian others’. We outline how this regime of truth about remote wars promotes violence rather than limits it. This prompts us to look at the ontology of remote war, and its capacity to ward off political questions on how it has transformative effects and (re)produces and sustains regimes of power

Proteome-wide dataset supporting the study of ancient metazoan macromolecular complexes.

Our analysis examines the conservation of multiprotein complexes among metazoa through use of high resolution biochemical fractionation and precision mass spectrometry applied to soluble cell extracts from 5 representative model organisms Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster, Mus musculus, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, and Homo sapiens. The interaction network obtained from the data was validated globally in 4 distant species (Xenopus laevis, Nematostella vectensis, Dictyostelium discoideum, Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and locally by targeted affinity-purification experiments. Here we provide details of our massive set of supporting biochemical fractionation data available via ProteomeXchange (PXD002319-PXD002328), PPIs via BioGRID (185267); and interaction network projections via (http://metazoa.med.utoronto.ca) made fully accessible to allow further exploration. The datasets here are related to the research article on metazoan macromolecular complexes in Nature [1]

Panorama of ancient metazoan macromolecular complexes.

Macromolecular complexes are essential to conserved biological processes, but their prevalence across animals is unclear. By combining extensive biochemical fractionation with quantitative mass spectrometry, here we directly examined the composition of soluble multiprotein complexes among diverse metazoan models. Using an integrative approach, we generated a draft conservation map consisting of more than one million putative high-confidence co-complex interactions for species with fully sequenced genomes that encompasses functional modules present broadly across all extant animals. Clustering reveals a spectrum of conservation, ranging from ancient eukaryotic assemblies that have probably served cellular housekeeping roles for at least one billion years, ancestral complexes that have accrued contemporary components, and rarer metazoan innovations linked to multicellularity. We validated these projections by independent co-fractionation experiments in evolutionarily distant species, affinity purification and functional analyses. The comprehensiveness, centrality and modularity of these reconstructed interactomes reflect their fundamental mechanistic importance and adaptive value to animal cell systems