External wars are waged partly to keep the domestic population pliant.

Evidence

But there is also another domestic element at work. War or its threat elsewhere makes governing at home easier, keeps the population more or less united, pliant, even domestically docile. “Fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here,” President Bush’s mantra for the “war on terror,” can also be decoded as “fighting them there to keep folks in line here.” — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 278

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to threatened-privilege mechanism: ruling elites manage a restive domestic majority by manufacturing an external racialized threat that consolidates the in-group against an out-group. — connects to: Externalizing the human cost of war makes wars more frequent and bloodier. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 583; War abroad functions as domestic social control; War machines govern populations by immobilizing or scattering them beyond state borders. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 139 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• War abroad functions as domestic social control #expands (0.95)
• A shared external enemy can suspend internal conflicts among rival groups. #corroborates (0.85) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 690
• Externalizing the human cost of war makes wars more frequent and bloodier. #expands (0.82) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 583
• A government can manufacture crisis to construct its own people as enemy #complicates (0.75) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 111
• War machines govern populations by immobilizing or scattering them beyond state borders. #complicates (0.72) — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 139