This is an Open Access document downloaded from ORCA, Cardiff University's institutional
repository: http://orca.cf.ac.uk/105804/
This is the author’s version of a work that was submitted to / accepted for publication.
Citation for final published version:
Basham, Victoria M. 2018. Liberal militarism as insecurity, desire and ambivalence: gender, race
and the everyday geopolitics of war. Security Dialogue 49 (1-2) , pp. 32-43.
10.1177/0967010617744977 file
Publishers page: https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010617744977
<https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010617744977>
Please note:
Changes made as a result of publishing processes such as copy-editing, formatting and page
numbers may not be reflected in this version. For the definitive version of this publication, please
refer to the published source. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite
this paper.
This version is being made available in accordance with publisher policies. See
http://orca.cf.ac.uk/policies.html for usage policies. Copyright and moral rights for publications
made available in ORCA are retained by the copyright holders.
Liberal Militarism as Insecurity, Desire, and Ambivalence: Gender, Race, and
the Everyday Geopolitics of War
Victoria M Basham, Cardiff University
Abstract
The use and maintenance of military force as a means of achieving security makes
the identity and continued existence of states as legitimate protectors of populations
intelligible. In liberal democracies, where individual freedom is the condition of
existence, citizens, have to be motivated to cede some of that freedom in exchange
for security, however. Accordingly, liberal militarism becomes possible only when
military action and preparedness become meaningful responses to threats posed to
the social body, not just the state, meaning that it relies on co-constitutive practices
of the geopolitical and the everyday. Through a feminist discursive analysis of British
airstrikes in Syria, and attendant debates on Syrian refugees, I examine how liberal
militarism is animated through these co-constitutive sites, with differential effects.
Paying particular attention to gender and race, I argue that militarism is an outcome
of social practices characterized as much by everyday desires and ambivalence as
fear and bellicosity. Moreover, I aim to show how the diffuse and often uneven
effects liberal militarism produces actually make many liberal subjects less secure. I
suggest therefore that despite the claims of liberal states that military power provides
security, for many, militarism is insecurity.
Keywords
Liberal Militarism; insecurity; desire and ambivalence; gender and race; everyday;
critical military studies
Introduction
The legitimacy and very existence of all states relies, in part, on their ability to
develop and use military force to secure their populations. Over the past few
decades, the growth of critical security studies (CSS) has illustrated that military
power is by no means the only tool that states and other actors draw on to ‘secure’.
Indeed, CSS has drawn attention to the co-constitution of militarism and security,
focusing particular attention on how securitisation has extended military power into
new realms (Mabee and Vucetic, 2018, this issue; see also Buzan et al., 1998; Wyn
Jones, 1999). However, despite the ongoing significance of how states facilitate and
justify war and war preparedness, military power has been somewhat left behind by
CSS in its pursuit of broadening security.
In liberal societies comprised of ‘free’ individuals who must consent to ceding some
degree of their freedom to the state in exchange for the provision of security for their
lives, livelihoods, and ways of life (Jahn, 2007), militarism, whilst often similar in its
effects and characteristics to that of non-liberal states, is nonetheless necessarily
organized, made intelligible and legitimated differently (Mabee, 2016; Stavrianakis &
Selby, 2013). Furthermore, peculiarly liberal beliefs in freedom, and in certain modes
of political economy assumed to deliver it, have normalized the maintenance of
military power and its expansionist, interventionist uses - what I, and others, would
call ‘liberal militarism’ – to “solve the ‘problem’ of illiberal (and ‘uncivilized’) states”
(Mabee, 2016: 243; Edgerton, 1991).
Modern liberal democratic states and societies are thus made and shaped by their
commitment to war and their constant preparedness for its eventuality in pursuit of
securing freedom (Dillon & Reid, 2009). At the same time, this security pact between
consenting, ‘free’ individuals and the state must be sustained and reproduced.
Threats must be constituted as making the social body less secure, not just the
state; as putting lives and livelihoods, not just the state or the economy, in jeopardy;
and as making everyday life, not just the imaginary of ‘the nation’ insecure. As
Waever et al (1993) have argued, ‘societal security’ matters; just as threats to a
state’s sovereignty challenge its existence, threats to its identity undermine the
survival of society. Accordingly, war and its attendant industries must be squared
with normative commitments to extolling liberal values of democracy, human rights,
and humanitarianism globally (Stavrianakis, 2016). The facilitation of liberal
militarism - that is, the commitment by liberal democratic states and societies to
maintain and use military force – is necessarily diffuse, therefore.
For some, militarism occurs through aggressive practices that promote and extol war
and the military in society (Jenkings et al., 2012). This stance risks presupposing that
militarism is somehow antithetical to the ‘norm’ however; that it is the outcome of a
distinctly military sphere exerting itself over a beleaguered civilian one. This
civil/military distinction has limited utility for analysing liberal militarism however,
because whilst liberal states have tended towards maintaining this strict separation
(Mabee, 2016), they have done so in an attempt to divorce violence from politics,
characterizing violence as only ever and “regrettably…an instrument for the pursuit
of political goals” (Frazer & Hutchings, 2011: 56). This distinction underlies the notion
that ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’, which casts violence and
warfare as exceptional. However, in inverting Clausewitz’s famous dictum, Foucault
(2004:15) has alerted us how liberal war is “continually re-inscribed in and through
society’s institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even the bodies of
individuals”. By characterising militarism as unidirectional and top-down, as imposed
on the ‘civilian’ by the ‘military’, many multiple and diffuse ways that war, and
preparing for it, are normalized and legitimated are obscured.
In contrast, feminist scholars have been more attentive to the emergence of
militarism from multiple sites and its diffuse effects (Hyndman, 2003; Whitworth,
2004; Woodward, 2004; Enloe, 2007; Sylvester, 2010). Feminist CSS scholars have
also challenged ‘traditional’ and critical scholars for overlooking security as a lived
experienced shaped by, among other things, gendered and everyday structures
(Hansen, 2000; Hoogensen & Rottem, 2004; Hoogensen & Stuvøy, 2006; Wibben,
2011). These agendas have been furthered by recent work in critical military studies
(CMS) which urges us to turn our critical gaze back towards military power to
consider militarism as an outcome of social and political contestation (Basham et al,
2015), and pay closer attention to actors and practices at multiple scales, from the
embodied to the global, and how they normalize militarism (inter alia Lutz, 2009,
Basham, 2013, 2016; Rech et al., 2015; Dyvik, 2016; McSorley, 2014). CMS also
prompts consideration of militarism as a historically embedded phenomenon,
allowing us to better account for continuity and change (Mabee, 2016). Similarly,
whilst many classic accounts of militarism - exhibited for example, in the works of
Mills and Mann – tend to characterize militarism as an outcome of specific attitudes,
beliefs or ideologies, CMS scholars have highlighted that “people rarely articulate
militarist beliefs in any great detail or as a clearly thought through set of rational
principles concerning the necessity of war readiness and the legitimacy of the state
having vast military force” (McSorley, 2014: 119; Lutz, 2009). Rather than taking the
ideological production of militarism as a given, CMS has alerted us to some of the
more mundane, as well as bellicose, ways in which war and war preparedness are
animated and sustained.
Building on feminist and CMS work, I explore how contemporary liberal militarism
might be better understood through a focus on multiple social and political struggles
around insecurity, co-constituted by seemingly coherent discursive state practices
and more inconsistent facets of everyday lived experience. Taking recent British
airstrikes in Syria, and attendant debates on the resettlement of Syrian refugees as
an empirical case study, and paying particular attention to its gendered and
racialized aspects, I advocate for an analytical approach to understanding how war
comes about that sees military power as the outcome of multiple, diffuse and
competing forms of insecurity. Moreover, I suggest that liberal militarism, contrary to
the claims of liberal states, is something which in turn facilitates greater insecurity,
often in particularly gendered and racialized ways. I suggest that it is only by paying
attention to the interlockings of both the geopolitical and the everyday that we can
fully make sense of how liberal militarism is facilitated and sustained, with uneven
effects.
I begin by examining how the British liberal state has characterized the Syrian
conflict as necessitating military action in two interconnected ways. The first draws
on gendered and racialized logics that the reluctant but militarily powerful liberal
state must reassert itself militarily to remain at the forefront of global politics. The
second involves a conflation of security and military power which relies on racialized,
biopolitical, and masculinist logics that make airstrikes and the further displacement
of Syrians the ‘rational’ course of action. Together these state articulations of
insecurity reveal one way that liberal militarism can shore up the liberal state’s role
as the primary and legitimate provider of security for a population.
In the second section of the article, I turn to tracing the reproduction, contestation,
and reconfiguration of these state narratives in the social and political struggles that
make up the stuff of everyday life. I suggest that in the wider social body, British
military involvement in Syria is characterized less by certainty about the