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Since 9/11 the metaphor of punishment has increasingly being used as part of official discourses on war. The rhetoric of crime and justice gives implicitly the idea that force can be used by some sovereignties outside their national territory to establish order in the international sphere, blurring the borders between the domestic and the international domain. Garland explains that the war metaphor has been used in the criminal justice system to re-affirm sovereignty at the time of its crisis, Simon, on a similar line of thought, suggests that there has been a move from governing through crime to governing through terrorism (Garland, 1996; Simon, 1997; 2007). Criminologists tend to focus on understanding war as a state crime (Jamieson, 1998-2003; Green and Ward 2004; Ruggiero 2005). This paper would like to provide a different narrative of the war on terror as a form of punishment. In doing so it will draw from both some of the sociology of punishmnet litarature and some international relations insights. It would like to attempt answering some of the following questions. Why, after 9/11, have wars come to be defined as a form of punishment? How can the notion of punishment be applied to war? Why are we witnessing the reversal of the phenomenon by which the language of war has been used within the criminal justice system? How can this shift be explained? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]