Showing papers in "Critical military studies in 2022"
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors argue that militarization largely ignores those whose lives are disposable in the eyes of the liberal state, and that one of the greatest shortcomings of militarization is its failure to grapple with the histories and present of racism and capitalism, making "militarization" a convenient shorthand, rather than a sustained interrogation of the politics of dispossession and carcerality.
Abstract: In this short intervention I reflect on the limits of the concept of militarization, as well as its appeal. The piece argues that militarization largely ignores those whose lives are disposable in the eyes of the liberal state. It also submits that one of the greatest shortcomings of militarization is its failure to grapple with the histories and present of racism and capitalism, making ‘militarization’ a convenient shorthand, rather than a sustained interrogation of the politics of dispossession and carcerality. Ultimately, militarization promises more than it delivers, and therefore can be expunged from our collective lexicon without any material consequences.
16 citations
TL;DR: In this article , the development of military doctrine on CIMIC within the Brazilian Army and its connections with their increasing engagement in public security, public security and migration management at home and abroad are discussed.
Abstract: As the Brazilian Armed Forces are increasingly deployed outside the realm of defence against external threats (in tasks such as peacekeeping, public security, and migration management), military doctrine on Civil-Military Coordination and Cooperation (CIMIC) has emerged as a body of ‘technical knowledge’ which would support their interactions with various civilian actors. This is expressed in frequent demands by military officers for the development of a ‘Brazilian CIMIC doctrine’ reflecting both the accumulated knowledge of international partners, such as NATO and the UN, and their own experience in the ‘field’, as in their recent engagement in the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). We argue that the progressive institutionalization of CIMIC military doctrine recently observed in the country reinforces a perspective according to which several domains of action traditionally attributed or led by civilian actors are seen as a legitimate part of the so-called ‘mission’ of the Brazilian Armed Forces. As a result, political disputes concerning civil-military relations and the role of military organizations outside the realm of external defence are reduced to technical challenges of coordination and cooperation between military officials, civilian state agencies and the Brazilian society. In this article, we discuss this trend by analysing the development of military doctrine on CIMIC within the Brazilian Army, and its connections with their increasing engagement in peacekeeping, public security, and migration management at home and abroad.
5 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored how domestic labour performed by British military wives is represented in autobiographical accounts written by British women married to their servicemen, and argued that paying attention to how militarism functions not only through fear and suffering but also through love helps to flesh out our analyses of militarism and war as social institutions.
Abstract: The British military institution, like other armed organizations worldwide, relies heavily on the unpaid domestic labour performed by civilian women married to its servicemen. This labour does not often feature in public understandings of how the military functions, and feminists have argued that its invisibility contributes to the naturalization of military power. The silence surrounding military wives’ unpaid labour, however, is not complete, and this article explores how such labour is represented in autobiographical accounts written by British military wives. These texts are often centred around descriptions of domestic labour and, moreover, make overt claims about its importance to the institution itself. In my analysis, however, I explore how the texts simultaneously make claims about the importance of this labour and make it invisible as labour by positioning it, instead, as acts of love. Taken together with the idea that outsiders cannot fully understand life in a military family, I demonstrate how this framing serves to close down space for critique of the military. In addition, I argue that paying attention to how militarism functions not only through fear and suffering but also through love helps to flesh out our analyses of militarism and war as social institutions.
4 citations
TL;DR: The authors conducted an in-depth discourse analysis of key state actor's statements surrounding the start of Operation Michoacán and found that the argument to protect innocent citizens' lives against drug criminality served as a major justification for the use of lethal force by the military.
Abstract: ABSTRACT Despite a proclaimed strengthening of international human rights norms on an international level, the fundamental human ‘right to life’ is not always able to act as a barrier against state violence and militarization on national levels. As illustrated by Operation Michoacán, which in retrospective marked the start of the Mexican ‘war’ on drugs, the right to life has been interpreted and implemented by domestic state actors in ambiguous and often very counterproductive ways. Specifically, the argument to protect innocent citizens’ lives against drug criminality served as a major justification for the use of lethal force by the military in Mexico. While norm compliance and so-called norm ‘localisation’ processes have already received considerable scholarly attention, the possibility that state authorities evoke fundamental human rights norms for legitimizing their own violent practices (= norm instrumentalisation) has so far not formed part of the academic debate. This paper bridges this gap by conducting an in-depth discourse analysis of key state actor’s statements surrounding the start of Operation Michoacán.
2 citations
TL;DR: This article explored the presence and articulation of boredom within militarized communities and suggested productive ways in which oral history can address militarized boredom and what, in turn, scholars of boredom might learn from oral history practices.
Abstract: Boredom was an integral part of Cold War experience in western Europe and its manifestations and management were key political, military and social considerations during this long conflict, for militaries in particular. Using over 60 original oral history interviews (both individual and group) with a wide range of former residents of British military bases in West Germany, this article explores the presence and articulation of boredom within militarized communities. Its existence among soldiers was widely acknowledged, expressed and managed, but boredom was also refracted through prevailing gender and social hierarchies, permitting particular forms of boredom to be expressed, while silencing others. Through an examination of both soldierly boredom and the testimonies of military wives, this article suggests not only that boredom needs to be included in social histories of the Cold War – and conflict more broadly – but that we must understand boredom as a social phenomenon embedded within specific historic contexts. Its articulation is deeply affected by cultural and societal norms, particularly for groups with limited ‘agency’, with long-term implications for historical researchers looking for its traces. This article finishes by suggesting productive ways in which oral history can address militarized boredom and what, in turn, scholars of boredom might learn from oral history practices.
1 citations
TL;DR: In this article , the contribution of critical veteran researchers (CVRs) can potentially bring to Critical Military Studies (CMS) on the basis of their military service, post-military life, and the members' knowledge they therefore have.
Abstract: ABSTRACT Drawing on ethnomethodology’s concept of unique adequacy, this paper addresses the contribution that critical veteran researchers (CVRs) can potentially bring to Critical Military Studies (CMS) on the basis of their military service, post-military life, and the members’ knowledge they therefore have. CVR members’ knowledges are framed through ethnomethodology’s arguments about unique adequacy as a requirement of methods. CVR’s unique adequacy is used to explore issues around the contribution that this particular group of researchers can make in critical analysis and research practices associated with critical military studies as an intellectual project. The paper argues against the reification and promotion of veteran exceptionalism regarding descriptions of ‘the reality of war’, militarism or militarization. Rather, it is about seeing CVR’s military participation and post-military lives, their members’ knowledge and unique adequacy, as constituting a positive resource. The paper illustrates this argument by taking the phenomenon of friendly-fire and fratricide as a topic. It identifies problems in the normative literature about it using the examples from two different genres: the formal analysis of combat identification, and experiential accounts from personal memoirs. The paper then critiques a specific campaign account of fratricide from a CVR perspective utilizing the author’s own unique adequacy. The paper concludes with a discussion of the limits of uniquely adequate knowledge generated from embodied veteran researcher experience, its benefits in terms of the identification of new research topics and approaches, and the ultimate necessity for critical analysis research to be underpinned and informed by reference to unique adequacy.
1 citations
TL;DR: The case of the unsolicited rocket was investigated in this article , where a Norwegian research establishment successfully developed a weapon system that no one wanted or had asked for that was later widely adopted.
Abstract: This article investigates the puzzling case of the unsolicited rocket: a Norwegian research establishment successfully developed a weapon system that no one wanted or had asked for that was later widely adopted. We argue that the ‘Terne’ weapon existed not because it was needed based on rational calculations about efficiency, but because of the narratives, coalitions, and competitive dynamics that surrounded it and made it useful. Conventionally, war and technology are often considered distinct ‘things’ with immutable essences, used as variables to explain other phenomena, rather than being examined on their own terms. In this case, we focus empirically on the configuration of sociotechnical imaginaries, and the capacities for action that arise out of it. In foregrounding sociotechnical systems, this is not a case of the ‘militarization’ of civilian society and research in peacetime. Rather, agency lay in competitive networks of narratives and coalitions between technologies, individuals, professions, technological communities, military organizations, and funding bodies, together shaping how ideas and technologies become authoritative and dominant.
1 citations
TL;DR: In this article , the authors show how concepts of domesticity and futurity can con- tribute to critical understandings of LGBTQ military inclusion, and reveal a hesitancy over how to represent a legibly gay male soldier in the British Army.
Abstract: In 2017, the British Army opened its ‘This is Belonging’ recruitment campaign, aimed at groups of young people who were considered traditionally less likely to join the Army, with marketing at Pride in London aimed at LGBTQ youth. The campaign’s next phase, in 2018, consisted of live-action and animated YouTube videos targeting specific groups including young women, religiously observant youth, emotionally sensitive young men, youth with average fitness levels, and, in the animations, LGBTQ youth again. While every other theme appeared in both sets of videos, the live-action set contained a video depicting homosocial male bonding instead of any LGBTQ theme. The Army’s acknowledgement of LGBTQ identities during recruitment in 2017–18 suggested certain advances from the 2000s position where LGBTQ personnel were expected to keep their sexuality private. A close audiovisual analysis of the LGBTQ-themed video, ‘Can I be Gay in the Army?’, and its intertextual relationship with the other videos nevertheless reveals hesitancy over how to represent a legibly gay male soldier that hints at limits to the institution’s inclusion of sexual difference. Drawing on both ‘LGBT’ and ‘Queer’ scholarship, the paper illustrates how concepts of domesticity and futurity can con- tribute to critical understandings of LGBTQ military inclusion.
1 citations
TL;DR: In this article , the authors explore entanglements between sites of political violence, militarism, and electronic dance music and culture, and argue that attending to these unseen entanglement activates distinctive ways of knowing the politics of war: they reveal alternative narratives of armed conflict mediated through and in between DJ performances, dancing bodies and electronic sounds.
Abstract: What do people do in the face of violence, war, and tragedy? How do those touched by violence survive, live on, keep on going and feeling? What if ‘dance first, think later’ IS the natural order? In this paper, I propose dancing as an everyday, embodied, and multisensorial register of war. Combining new trajectories in war and military studies with ongoing feminist scholarship on war, embodiment, and emotions and interdisciplinary research on dance and electronic music, this paper explores entanglements between sites of political violence, militarism, and electronic dance music and culture. Drawing upon my research in Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina, I argue that attending to these unseen entanglements activates distinctive ways of knowing the politics of war: they reveal alternative narratives of armed conflict mediated through and in between DJ performances, dancing bodies, and electronic sounds. These experiences offer important insights that unsettle taken for granted locations and affective economies of war while also reproducing conflict logics and divisions. I propose dance as a heuristic device that can recalibrate our understanding of the sensuous, affective, and embodied politics of/in war, enabling us to explore fragile possibilities for resistance and escape from its grip.
1 citations
TL;DR: For example, the authors used William Blake's 1793 poem America a Prophecy as a lens to explore the mythic, subconscious and literary constructions of military interventions in the Indo-Pacific for my painting Australia a prophetcy, which explores complex emotions and desires which seem to be driving the masculine messianic archetypal thinking of new global conflicts.
Abstract: ABSTRACT In this article I share my experience of using William Blake’s 1793 poem America a Prophecy as a lens to explore the mythic, subconscious and literary constructions of military interventions in the Indo-Pacific for my painting Australia a Prophecy. For this painting I invited Blake’s 18th century character Orc to travel forward in time to Australia to guide an alternative imaginary lens, rather than the conventional political, military or international intervention analysis that is currently shaping the region where I live. Along the way Blake’s poem also inspired insights into the complex emotions and desires which seem to be driving the masculine messianic archetypal thinking of new global conflicts. Using poetry and literature has been part of my visual art practice throughout my 36-year artistic practice. I have not followed a formal or academic artistic pathway. Instead, I have chosen an experimental and experiential journey of self-learning by collaborating with artists and researchers on topics as I strive to understand the human condition. In my search to identify the hidden narratives that underpin our political and military decisions I have used various metaphors including Broadway and Hollywood musicals, medieval French epic poetry and literary and religious texts. I hope the story behind my painting will help to stimulate conversations between experts from completely different backgrounds to explore the hidden narratives that drive our political and military decisions.
TL;DR: The authors examined the representation of service personnel in a recently published recruitment brochure produced by the Japanese Self-Defense Forces and found that female and male service members are shown performing roles interchangeably and contradictions are also evident and in some instances clear distinctions are made along gendered lines.
Abstract: Military recruitment strategies continue to evolve in line with developments in broader socio-political contexts. In what can be seen as a fairly recent development, both men and women are now central to recruitment campaigns. Such changes can be viewed as signalling a shift towards equality in military forces. Critics argue, however, that changes in this respect are superficial and serve to mask the prevailing masculine dominance in the military. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, I examine the representation of service personnel in a recently published recruitment brochure produced by the Japanese Self-Defense Forces. The primary focus, however, is on how female personnel are depicted. The findings reveal that the recruitment efforts attempt to convey that the Japanese military promotes equality. Female and male service members are shown performing roles interchangeably. However, contradictions are also evident and in some instances clear distinctions are made along gendered lines. The military is also discursively constructed as an institution of care, which supports female personnel and enables them to achieve personal and career success. The first contribution the study makes is to research on multimodal texts which are used for political communication. Secondly, it enhances critical scholarship on military recruitment strategies.
TL;DR: In this paper , a sociological approach is proposed to examine the extent and character of the social and daily labour that makes state violence possible, to decentre the notion that state violence is almost always legitimate and that it is the only form of legitimate violence, and explore the multiple ways that communities contest the reproduction of militarized violence in their lives.
Abstract: Critiques of militarization have deftly highlighted its limitations as a concept, not least because it too easily implies something done to otherwise benign and peaceful societies by militaries. The guest editors of this special issue however are inviting scholars to rethink militarization through the notion of everyday modalities. This more sociological approach, I argue, enables us to consider how militarization simultaneously produces and is produced through society. This, I argue, enables us to more fully examine the extent and character of the social and daily labour that makes state violence possible, to decentre the notion that state violence is almost always legitimate and that it is the only form of legitimate violence, and explore the multiple ways that communities contest the reproduction of militarized violence in their lives. Treating militarization in terms of everyday modalities therefore can facilitate more nuanced thinking about the social reproduction of violence.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors show how present-day Argentinian military ideals and aspirations change, overlap, and awkwardly sit together while being a ‘beachkeeper’.
Abstract: The chronic absence of combat is central to deployment experience for Argentinian Army personnel, and serves as a lens to explore ethical life from a military perspective, not as a fixed set of military virtues, yet as an evolving moral project grounded in everyday ambiguities around humanitarian militarism. Combining a historical analysis of state repression and institutional reform with ethnographic fieldwork with Argentinian members of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, this article shows how present-day Argentinian military ideals and aspirations change, overlap, and awkwardly sit together while being a ‘beachkeeper’. Due to far-reaching military curtailment and precarious working conditions that are both related to legacies of authoritarianism, even the potential of combat is no longer a possibility for the Argentinian Army. Through the analysis of both ethnographic observations and interviews with mid-career Argentinian officers, this article suggests that because of a chronic inaccessibility to military virtues (such as thrill, manliness, and toughness), participating in humanitarian assistance does not provoke military boredom nor a moral failure to become a competent and virtuous warrior. Being involved in light peacekeeping is rather a form of survival from a social death in a society that has largely turned its back to its armed forces, while at the same time it is an expression of their institutional limitations. This article concludes by suggesting how the ethical turn in anthropology can critically address the absence of combat as a productive force for a non-violent ethic without fixing military virtue in stone.
TL;DR: In this article , the reciprocal aspects of the interactions between my embodied war experience and higher education institutions are discussed. But, the primary aim of this paper is to discuss the reciprocal aspect of the interaction between the war experiences of a war veteran and the higher education institution.
Abstract: ABSTRACT What does it mean to be an academic who is also a war veteran? This paper examines that question as I delve into my own identity and positionality as a war veteran and as an academic who critically examines war and militarism. It is broken up into three sections: living war, writing war, and teaching war. Living war refers to what it is like to be a war veteran in academic spaces, from a student perspective to a teaching perspective. Writing war examines some of the ways in which war experiences can be utilized in academic writing, as it examines a few useful methodologies that were helpful and healing in my experience. Finally, teaching war reiterates the importance to centre war in the classroom and provides an example that I often use in the classroom. The primary aim of this paper is to discuss the reciprocal aspects of the interactions between my embodied war experience and higher education institutions.
TL;DR: The authors consider the performative role of pride in both exceptionalizing and legitimizing military actors and the RAF, respectively, and reveal the mundane and unremarkable, yet illustrative experiences of the RAF clerk whose lifeworld as a military actor in a support role differs sharply from how he or she might be imagined by the wider public.
Abstract: ABSTRACT Framed by the author’s status as a former Royal Air Force (RAF) service-person and subsequently as a critical sociologist, this article considers the performative role of pride in both exceptionalizing and legitimizing military actors and the RAF, respectively. In so doing, auto-ethnographic material is included to reveal the mundane and unremarkable, yet illustrative experiences of the RAF clerk whose lifeworld as a military actor in a support role differs sharply from how he or she might be imagined by the wider public. In order to demonstrate this disparity in perception, attention is paid to the relative ease of RAF basic training, tensions between the assumed hardships of active service in a war zone and its reality, and the role of racism and individual agency in the RAF. Rather than pride, these reflections invoke a mix of authorial guilt and shame, the latter of which is rooted in the political role played by an institution whose violence is normalized and its members eulogized. The wider, normative aim of the article is animated by my own modest attempt to demilitarize through revealing the work pride does in canonizing an institution revered by the public.
TL;DR: This article examined the relationship between military spending persistency and the size of the fiscal stimulus packages during the Covid-19 pandemic and found that countries with more persistent military spending had smaller stimulus packages.
Abstract: Using a relatively large time-varying cross-country panel dataset of fiscal policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, this paper examines the relationship between military spending persistency and the size of the fiscal stimulus packages. The results suggest that countries with more persistent military spending have had smaller fiscal-stimulus packages during the Covid-19 pandemic.
TL;DR: The authors explored the process by which institutions attempt to silence feminist researchers and what we can learn about gender, knowledge and power from these affective experiences and how collective storytelling is key to breaking the silence.
Abstract: As a feminist researcher undertaking my PhD field research from 2006 to 2009 with officers in the Irish Defence Forces, I experienced the gender discrimination I was endeavouring to make visible. My PhD study, borne out of UNSCR 1325 and the Women, Peace and Security agenda, was testing claims by the United Nations that the inclusion of women peacekeepers brings important benefits to civilian women populations in mission contexts. The study adopted discourse analysis and included equal numbers of interviews with women and men peacekeepers and observation of Irish troops during the UNMIK/KFOR mission in Kosovo. At each stage of my research journey into the Irish Defence Forces I encountered barriers to continuing my study which had negative impacts on me personally and professionally. The culmination of which was them attempting to publicly discredit my research findings. This paper explores the process by which institutions attempt to silence feminist researchers and what we can learn about gender, knowledge and power from these affective experiences and how collective storytelling is key to breaking the silence.
TL;DR: The authors argued that the term "militarization" may be worth preserving in spite of this because it also does important political and analytical work that needs to be preserved if not strengthen.
Abstract: “Militarization is not the problem” was the title of a recent conference contribution by Mark Neocleous. Many scholars in critical security studies share its message. Researchers on their account should shun a concept that does more harm than good. They should ‘forget militarization’ as Alison Howell puts it. While sharing the concern that the term might direct attention away from police-violence and epistemic racism underpinning such conclusions, this article argues that the term militarization may be worth preserving in spite of this because it also does important political and analytical work that needs to be preserved if not strengthen. Recovering what Frazer and Hutchings term ‘rhetorical resonance’, I suggest that the term ‘militarization’ resonates with debates, discursive classifications and atmospheres, giving us a better grasp of contemporary, capillary, market militarism in its many morphing guises. Jettisoning militarization is to relinquish analytical openings and political attunement. I unpack this argument focusing on the resonances of militarization with market processes diffusing and deepening the grip of military concerns and de-mobilizing resistance. The resonances of militarization make managing, marketing, and materializing security into infrastructures less innocuous and hence trouble the de-mobilizing of resistance that ease them. The resonances of ‘militarization’ break the silence surrounding market militarism, the processes generating it and the imbrication of knowledge practices (including the academic and scholarly) with them. Militarization therefore matters even when it stands in tension with epistemic racism and police violence. Therefore, deepening the engagement with militarization, to transform it, is important analytically and politically.
TL;DR: The authors argue that the use of military force advocated for in national security discourse is legitimized as acts of justifiable violence by being "on brand" for necropolitical structures that ascribe a redemptive quality to any future uses of military forces.
Abstract: When we talk about the use of military force, the wars we fight, and the justifications we have for fighting them, we reproduce affective structures that inform the communities we build. Discursive practices surrounding the use of military force, like those identifying the protagonists and antagonists constructed by foreign policy, which deaths are deemed worthy of mourning, among others, reinforce frameworks that delineate the meaning of violence and its proper application. In the United States, these discourses typically weave through narratives of redemption that portray the use of military force as necessary, justified, and for the cause of good. In this paper, I argue that the pre-emptive use of military force advocated for in national security discourse is legitimized as acts of justifiable violence by being ‘on brand’ for necropolitical structures that ascribe a redemptive quality to any future uses of military force. Nuancing analyses of war legitimation discourse, this study is an interrogation of the ways in which a necropolitical branding markets the pre-emptive use of military force as a means of achieving peace and security. Ultimately, such an interrogation is an investigation into a source of influence and authority for security discourses to construct the future. Interrogating militarized violence as a consumer brand is valuable for critical analysis because it allows us to engage discourses that inform the communities we build, illuminating the ways in which such violence is reproduced and, in this way, facilitates understandings of how to disrupt and challenge its reproduction.
TL;DR: In this paper , a study of 46 retired and serving officers of the Irish Defence Forces has been carried out to analyse how they discussed their career and the military officer's experience of civilian higher education, concluding that the use of "gift language" is a type of "resanctification" of the military profession by individual officers.
Abstract: Officers of the Irish Defence Forces have studied at civilian university since 1969, with the introduction of a policy referred to as the University Service Academic Complement (USAC) scheme. In attending university through USAC, officers are obliged to sign a contract stipulating that they will repay the full costs of their time at university. This paper draws on a study of 46 retired and serving officers, to analyse how they discussed their career and the military officer’s experience of civilian higher education. While the agreement officers are obliged to sign is a legal contract, interviewees consistently characterised their experience of the USAC scheme in terms that omitted this economic reality of the financial implications of attending higher education. Instead, they favoured terms that almost exclusively excluded such a perspective, and instead made the USAC scheme appear to be a ‘gift’ in Marcel Mauss’s terms. This paper illustrates how and why this is the case, in that the use of ‘gift language’ is a type of ‘resanctification’ of the military profession by individual officers in the face of the threat to cohesion and their symbolic universe. Beyond and at the societal level, resanctification through gift language also implies a political 'double-bind' for officers in terms of their relationship with civilian military authorities and the military organisation itself. This paper concludes with an overview of some of the implications of a gift analysis for militaries and their surrounding societies.