The “war on terrorism’ in the name of national security and anxiety extends a discourse on risk that is already prevalent as an organizing principle in our globalizing world. In sociology, “”risk society’ refers to the social precariousness of contemporary institutionalized patterns of existence, in which future possibilities, rather than past lessons, increasingly determine decision-making. The ‘war on terrorism’ has used the idea of risk not merely as a strategy to defend values and institutions, but to bring about social and political transformation. Pre-emptive wars have been launched against failed states or collaborators with terrorists abroad and anti-terrorist legislation has been introduced to acquire emergency powers at home. Michael Ignatieff calls the project of fixing failed states through military intervention “Empire lite,” commenting that “to the extent that human rights justify the humanitarian use of military force, the new empire can claim that it serves the cause of moral universalism” (Ignatieff 2003, 110). In reality, human rights and democracy are being offered under a form of imperial dependency in Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq through ‘nationalist nation-building projects’ that are unlikely to succeed. Democracy entails self-rule and not just getting the right to vote. This paper argues that both the war on terrorism and humanitarian military intervention are shaped by risk, rather than justice, and are, therefore, more about containment than about realizing the aspirations of a moral universalism based upon rights and political participation.