| Sumario: | This article argues that Moez Surani's list poem Operations, a compilation of military operations carried out by United Nations (UN) member states from 1945 to 2006, represents not only the violence of the world system as inscribed in military language but also the arbitrariness of a bureaucracy based on the UN member states. In other words, the agency of individual actors defined as singular and unique nation-states is reflected in the arbitrariness and lack of systemization that inheres in the poem's form, which is at once algorithmic or conceptual and the result of aleatory characteristics and authorial manipulation, as described in Surani's introduction. These aspects of the poem work together to cement the nation-state as, perhaps paradoxically, a force of resistance within globalization.
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