Administrative Warfare & The End of the Political

If 'security' is all that matters, the distinction between civilian and soldier disappears

{Photo Credit: By Billie Grace Ward from New York, USA - Who’s eyes are these?, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74148660]

The following essay by Nel Bonilla first appeared as a note to her Worldlines Substack page on Dec. 21, 2025. Bonilla’s methodology, both here and in her other writings, is striking for its ability to reveal the multiple layers of meaning — from the sociological to the philosophical — implicit within global geopolitical events. A follow-up interview with Bonilla is presently in the works and will be published by Landmarks soon. We’d also like to thank Pascal Lottaz and his Neutrality Studies podcast for introducing us to Bonilla’s work. – The Editors

Why are administrative instead of legal tools used to sanction people like Jacques Baud, Hüseyin Doğru, Alina Lipp, or Nathalie Yamb?

We are witnessing a fundamental shift in how the state is functioning, and how it is functioning vis-à-vis its citizens. This shift is, of course, accompanied by many more developments (such as infrastructural ones, financial ones, the importance of dual-use technology, monopolization, rhetoric, etc.), yet, let’s just look at this particular example of the attempt to remove dissent in Western states.

In the classical Liberal State (Modernity), the citizen was a “Subject” who had an interior life, private opinions, and rights that pre-existed the state. The state’s job was to protect that private sphere.

In the current, let’s call it Bunker State, the citizen is re-defined, as is their relationship to the state itself: The citizen is an object, a node in the cognitive infrastructure. They are just one part of the security / conflict-preparation infrastructure. Just as the state must secure its energy grid (pipelines) and its transport grid (trains), it must secure its human grid (minds).

Consequently, a “glitch” in the human grid (dissent, “disinformation”) is no longer a valid exercise of freedom but a security vulnerability. It is a crack in the Bunker wall.

Thus, the state sustains you, yes, but now only because you are Human Capital needed for the “Permanent Competition” with the emerging Multipolar World.

Censorship as Hygiene

The current tools of censorship (e.g., sanctions, deportations) are entirely administrative tools used to remove threats. These are not legal tools, and there’s no identification of a crime to be punished.

Hence, it is no longer about debate; there is no effort to sustain the patina of democracy. This is because in a bunker, you need to remove the saboteur. The dissenting viewpoint is neither moral nor immoral, neither true nor false; it is strictly stabilizing or destabilizing.

Therefore, EU sanctions are an administrative “sanitary measure” to prevent “infection” by foreign narratives and dissenting viewpoints. Whereas within the US, the threat to deport students for “ideological reasons” (e.g., protests) means that residency now is effectively a privilege of compliance.

This operates on the Medical, Technocratic, or even Technological Model of war. Call it what you will. In such a framework, disinformation is a virus or a glitch. The censor is the engineer, and removal is mandatory for the system’s stability. Moreover, while punishment and making examples are certainly one aim of these censorship techniques, the goal also seems to be to pre-empt their emergence and spread: to stop their “virality.”

The Shrinking Opinion Corridor

In a siege or within a bunker, the distinction between “Civilian” and “Soldier” vanishes. Everyone is part of the defense. (Think of the “whole-of-society” approach to current high and low intensity conflict preparations).

Here, one could say there is a green corridor: the corridor of opinion that supports the “Manichean Myth” (We are Good, They are Evil). And then there is the red zone, where any thought that humanizes the enemy or questions the siege is part of hybrid warfare. Any dissent that can be framed, however loosely, as aligning with or being useful to a “strategic competitor” (Russia, China, Iran, BRICS) is potentially treason-adjacent. Which again takes us back to the resurrection of the Manichean dichotomy domestically.

But there is also a new quality to this opinion corridor: In essence, it has become a tunnel, since there is only one direction: forward toward confrontation with the “Jungle” if the dynamism persists. You cannot turn back through diplomacy, because that would be appeasement; nor can you stop through neutrality, which would be complicity with the enemy.

Through such processes, the opinion corridor shrinks to the exact width of the Military Necessity (or at least what is perceived to be a “necessity” by transatlantic power elites). The sphere of legitimate controversy (where you can debate) is being eaten by the sphere of consensus (where you must obey) and the sphere of deviance (where you are silenced).

The corridor is exactly as wide as the NATO Strategic Concept (and yes, there is such a thing as long-term plans within NATO). If you step outside (e.g., arguing for a multipolar security architecture), you are de-amplified, demonetized, sanctioned, or deported.

The New Social Contract as a Protection Racket

The classic liberal social contract was a bargain: individuals cede some autonomy to the state in exchange for the protection of rights and the provision of public goods, enabling personal liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In very crude terms, the old social contract between the citizen and the state was: I give up some liberty; you give me order and prosperity.

The Bunker Social Contract is: I give up my freedom, my reality, and my prosperity; the State protects its own existence (and its functional elites) from an enemy (and maybe allows me to survive inside the walls).

Of course, this narrative construction is based on premises developed through the shrinking corridor of opinion and debate in the first place. Indeed, the state admits it cannot give you a “Good Life” or prosperity; it cloaks this narrative by saying “the Garden is dying” while simultaneously promising to keep the newly emerging and threatening “Jungle” out. The citizen’s identity is now defined against a common enemy.

Within this narrative, to be saved, you must align your internal reality with the State’s external threat assessment. You must accept the “Manichean Myth” without question. You need to maintain your productivity, so-called resilience, and ideological alignment without undermining cohesion or strategic narratives.

Now the insidious nature of this, if it wasn’t terrible enough, is that this is built around the logic that the citizen is now a resource, but not just any resource: You are “free” only insofar as your freedom makes the Bunker stronger. You are free to shop (sustain the economy) and free to hate the enemy (sustain the morale). You are not free to open the door, nor to look through any windows that may still be there.

Hence, in the old social contract, dissent was just part of being in the opposition, but you were still part of the polity. Now it is precisely this membership—and thus the contract—that is being destroyed; people sanctioned or deported because of their views are by definition not part of the polity anymore.

Lastly, as Western power elites are constructing a “whole-of-society,” hybrid warfare approach in their own societies, words become data points in the information environment (or information domain) that must remain resilient against adversarial psychological operations.

To prove this point: The EU’s “Defense of Democracy” package and the US “Foreign Malign Influence” concepts explicitly frame opposing narratives as “FIMI” (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference).

The End of Politics as We Knew It

All of these developments identified in the sphere of public debate represent the cancellation of the political in its classical sense. Politics is the arena of legitimate conflict over the distribution of power and the nature of the good life. By defining the overriding good as systemic “security” and branding fundamental dissent as a security threat, the state seeks to foreclose politics itself.

Which means, in practical terms, that the only legitimate political stance is allegiance to the fortress and vigilance against its enemies. And if there is only one political stance allowed, what does that implicate?

Nel Bonilla is a geographer, sociologist, and the author of the publication Worldlines. With a background in Human Geography and Urban Development, she is currently a Ph.D. candidate specializing in the sociology of migration and organized violence. Her work investigates the intersection of geopolitics, transatlantic networks, and the social dynamics of conflict.