Advances in Critical Military Studies

Explores the militarisation of education and youth in contemporary China

• Uses China Studies, Critical Military Studies, and the Anthropology of Youth and Education to highlight the interaction between macro-level social and political trends and individual perceptions and experiences
• Documents a growing emphasis on military values and techniques in Chinese youth culture and education, highlighting the intersection between this trend and the construction of the national collectivity, masculinities and femininities in contemporary China
• Demonstrates the importance of positioning youth subjectivities in the centre of Critical Military Studies rather than engaging youth only as objects and/or victims of militarisation processes
• Identifies key breaks and continuities in the militarisation of Chinese education since the PRC's establishment in 1949
• Explores key differences and similarities between PRC militarisation processes and the militarisation of youth and education worldwide

Drawing on a wide variety of Chinese-language publications and in-depth interviews with high-school students, Mobilising China's One-Child Generation provides systematic evidence of the spread of martial logic and techniques into Chinese schools. The book explores how China has implemented Patriotic Education and National Defence Education programmes to foster love for the nation and the Party-state, mobilise the population to fight modern wars in the information age, and encourage youth to join the army. It studies how these programmes present the tropes of war and the military to youth, and how they are related to shifting constructions of gender and the national collectivity. It also documents students' varied perceptions–and notably contestations–of this militarised ethos, complicating our understanding of popular nationalism and militarisation processes in this authoritarian global power.

Investigates how the power of stories shapes war’s legacy for veterans and societies

• Critically explores the role veterans’ narratives play in sustaining British militarism
• Examines the power and politics shaping whose stories are heard and whose are side-lined, as veterans’ voices intermingle with those of disparate others
• Offers a detailed conceptual argument about narrative in Critical Military Studies, illustrated through a wide variety of contemporary examples of veteran storytelling
• Includes reflexive analysis of academia’s role in ‘militarising’ research and researchers by privileging certain academic stories about veterans
• Calls for a better social conversation about veterans’ stories, through a commitment to know, engage with, and critique these stories

The Cultural Politics of Veterans’ Narratives investigates the role of veterans’ stories in our collective cultural and political life. Drawing on contemporary narrative theory, it offers a conceptual framework for studying veterans’ narratives, followed by a series of unique empirical chapters dealing with different genres of veteran storytelling, including trauma, transition, culture and identity, and the Afghanistan war memoir. The book questions the British veteran as a political figure, exploring what their stories tell us about the morality and politics of war as well as military life. It also traces how social norms about militarism, nationalism, and patriotism pivot as a result. Caddick considers what the stakes are for veterans as their stories interact with wider cultural narratives, and for society in grappling with the ‘militarist terms of reference’ these stories impart to us.

Analyses the relation between visual culture, militarisation, and liberal governance

• Elaborates on the relationship between militarisation and settler colonialism
• Reads militarisation as a governing rationality
• Focuses on the under-explored case study of Australia’s militarisation
• Contributes to critical military and war studies by centring settler colonial relations and Indigeneity

Settler Military Politics provides a thorough investigation of the relationship between settler colonialism and militarisation drawing from the Australian experience. In this book, Caso develops the concept of settler military politics to identify the relationship between settler colonialism and militarisation. The book argues that militarisation is a rationality for governing the settler polity and consolidates the settler colonial project. It investigates settler military politics through an in-depth analysis of the under explored aesthetics of war commemoration in Australia and the role of the Australian War Memorial.

Explores a new understanding of gender, agency and military power through the lived experiences of army wives

• Based on unprecedented ethnographic access to a British Army regiment as a unit of social and cultural belonging
• Conducted from the perspective of those occupying a complex but frequently over-simplified position in relation to military cohesion, war and militarisation
• Contributes a critical and nuanced empirical discussion to debates on militarisation as a conceptual framework for analysis of the everyday operation of military power
• Provides a feminist analysis of gendered agency and its ambiguities
• Critically engages with the reliance of military–institutional power on heteronormativity simultaneously embedded in hierarchies of rank, class and race

Based on unprecedented ethnographic access to a regimental community in Germany during a period of deployment to Afghanistan, this analysis of the ambiguities of gendered agency focuses not on the front-line experience of soldiers, but on that of the wives ‘left behind’. Alexandra Hyde explores the mobile and contradictory position of civilian women as they navigate British Army culture and its reified production of social belonging. The book considers wives’ exposure to – and implication in – processes of militarisation and, ultimately, war and state-sanctioned violence as they ‘live with’ rather than ‘serve in’ the military.

Chapters explore multiple circuits of mobility and migration; women’s productive and reproductive labour; rank and its relationship to class and ethnicity; and women’s pre-emptive management of grief and human vulnerability. What emerges is a critical, feminist exploration of the composite relations of gender, class, sexuality and nation that combine to make and remake military power.

The peacekeeper—impartial, disciplined, helpful and restrained in their lethal capacity—is a powerful trope. This book examines the mythology of international peacekeeping and focuses on Canada as a case study of a "peacekeeper par excellence" (Jockel, 1994) and the ways the peacekeeping myth both challenged and condoned combat activities in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2014. While Afghanistan was explicitly not a peacekeeping mission, peacekeeping mythology circulated throughout discourse about the War. The book examines the salience of the peacekeeping myth throughout twelve years of Canadian combat activities in Afghanistan as a means to illustrate the adaptability and political utility of this (inter)national myth. It examines how gender, militarism, and nationalism operated in political discourse through the War in Afghanistan to justify military force and violence in the name of peace. The book draws on the Canadian case to address a broader set of questions related to how militarism, gender, and national myths are co-constitutive in condoning military violence of so-called "peaceful" liberal nations.

Explores the ways in which affect, colonial histories, and militarism organise global South security workforces within private military and security companies

• Advances the concept of militarism through empirically rich ethnographic insights of militarised communities outside the global North
• Offers feminist political economy insights into how labour is organised and sustained through global security regimes
• Draws upon 180 detailed interviews and 3 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Nepal and Kabul Afghanistan

This book explores the ways in which affect, colonial histories, and militarism organise global security workforces within private military and security companies (PMSCs). It locates its analysis with Gurkhas; a group of militarised men from Nepal with over 200-years of military experience with the British and Indian armies and the Singaporean police, who now participate as security contractors in global markets. These men are celebrated in British popular culture for their heroic martial attributes and their broader military service to the United Kingdom. However, less known, is the fact that many Gurkhas located back in Nepal and their families are drawn into these markets under often exploitative relations. Drawing upon over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork with unprecedented access to these security communities throughout Nepal and in Afghanistan, the book’s motivating questions are how security is made through these market relations and how is this security experienced by Gurkhas and their families.

Examines contemporary online soldier poetry and graphic novel writing in the first book-length study of its kind

• Offers a new perspective on the effect of violence on individual personalities as well as on the ability of veterans to reintegrate into society by addressing the damage done to language as an injury"
• Counters one major narrative in the understanding of soldiers' wartime experiences in terms of political/ideological "disillusionment," by focusing on damage done to the personal ability to communicate and identify as either "alive" or "human"
• Offers an understanding of the ways veterans use writing to create a bridge between their former lives and post-war and post-violence reality
• Questions the ability to neatly "demilitarize" after war, offering instead the metaphor of the prosthesis, that a tool – writing – enables one to hobble back to life after the traumatic encounter with military power and violence

Poetic Prosthetics provides an analytical tool for reading war and trauma literature, focussing on contemporary British and American soldier writing, published online in various forums by the soldiers themselves since the onset of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in some cases, recent writings of veterans of the Falkland War.

The book presents a new perspective on the effect of violence on individual personalities as well as on the ability of veterans to reintegrate into society by addressing the damage done to language as an injury. It highlights that soldiers work through an incompatibility between a former way of life and their new linguistic reality by forming a different mode of speaking, through literature or poetry. The independent nature of these poems sheds light on the process of returning to life through writing, and on the life-giving force of literature for repatriated veterans.

Provides a socio-legal analysis of cultural norms and the right to conscientious objection in Turkey

• Discusses the international instruments which recognise the right to conscientious objection
• Analyses the compatibility of Turkish domestic law with international law
• Examines the socio-cultural elements behind the non-recognition of the right to conscientious objection in Turkey
• Forges a link between real life and academia
• Provides a socio-legal analysis of the right to conscientious objection

This book provides a socio-legal perspective to critical military studies by asking socio-legal questions about military conscription in Turkey: How do the international and domestic laws approach the conflict between the law and conscience? Why does Turkey insist on the non-recognition of the right to conscientious objection? How are those pursuing their conscience affected by such non-recognition? These questions are important as the law is shaped by the socio-cultural structures in which it operates, and any attempt to create a social change also necessitates understanding and challenging the legal framework. In this light, the book argues that one cannot fully understand and, as a result, resist the militarisation of society without understanding the relationship between the law and social norms.

Analyses the struggles for accountability and the resurgence of militarism in Brazil

• Provides an extensive analysis of Brazilian official documents of the truth commission, including semi-structured interviews with activists and practitioners, still unseen in English
• Opens a pathway for exchange and comparison between representations of militarism and different strategies for resisting military violence, from both the Global North and the Global South
• Reveals non-Eurocentric ways to represent and think about militarism by investigating the work of local scholars and practitioners in Brazil
• Explores links between debates on critical militarism studies and processes of truth and reconciliation
• Focuses on the concept of resistance to militarised violence, an increasingly important topic in the social sciences
• Provides one of the first initial insights into the rise of the far-right in Brazil and the re-emergence of historical revisionism about the military past

Politics of Impunity investigates the failure of the anti-impunity agenda in Brazil, from the release of the truth commission report denouncing the crimes of the military regime (1964-1985) in 2014, to the election of the former-paratrooper and far-Right leader Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. Connecting debates on critical military studies, transitional justice and memory studies, the book moves beyond the conditions of implementation of accountability measures. It examines the conditions of possibility of the global anti-impunity agenda: when, how and why the question of impunity came to dominate debates on large-scale political violence.

Drawing lessons from the Brazilian case, the book provides a new reading of transitional justice, investigating alternative ways of understanding militarism in the absence of warfare. It reveals the ways in which narratives of accountability and the memory of militarism work to demarcate and restrict what counts as unacceptable violence, who counts as victims/perpetrators and what counts as reasonable forms of justice and resistance.

Exploring the physical, embodied landscape of the military-peace complex in Afghanistan

• Based on original research and interviews
• Articulates and explores the notion of a military-peace complex as a framework to understand intervention practices in Afghanistan
• Offers a holistic account of the international project in Afghanistan
• Pays attention to under-studied aspects of the international project in Afghanistan including the everyday, gendered and material dynamics that shape it

This book focuses on the military and statebuilding components of the international project in Afghanistan since 2001. It posits and discusses the military-peace complex as a framework through which to understand the international project in Afghanistan, pointing to the sliding together and collapse between military and peace actors, mandates and ideational frameworks. Arguing that military and peace work in the liberal mode cannot be logically separated, but rather are co-constituted and operate in a dynamic relationship to each other with fluid and shifting boundaries, the book focuses on the role of gender within the logics of the international project in Afghanistan, as well as exploring material and spatial entanglements and cross-cutting logics.

Based on original interviews and wider research the book offers a holistic way of viewing the international project in Afghanistan, drawing attention to its under-noticed elements and providing a new way of understanding its politics.

Examining the sexual crimes committed by German troops in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union during the Second World War

• Covers all types of sexual encounters: from violent and coerced practices to commercial and consensual relations
• Reveals differences and complexities in the responses of the Wehrmacht and SS, ranging from tacit acceptance to regulation or institutionalisation
• Highlights contradictions between Nazi racial ideology and policies on different groups of eastern European women and ‘occupation children’

Sexual violence was a widespread reality during the war and the occupation in the Soviet Union: Wehrmacht soldiers and SS men made women and girls victims of sexual torture, committed rape and sexual enslavement. They also visited both 'secret' prostitutes and official military brothels, and had encounters with women who were forced to trade sex for protection or food. In some areas, they engaged in consensual relations, which sometimes led to applications for marriage permits.

This book dispels the myth that military leaders, in adhering to the Nazi ideology of ‘race defilement’, strictly repressed soldiers’ sexuality. Regina Mühlhäuser opens up new perspectives on the complexity of wartime sexual practices beyond the Nazi case by looking at the whole spectrum of heterosexual encounters—forced and consensual, violent and non-violent, commercial and non-commercial. In doing so, she develops a more nuanced understanding of soldiers’ sexual behavior and the ways in which military commands assess soldierly sexuality and integrate it into their strategic thinking.

Combines perspectives on aesthetics and embodiment to understand militarism in international politics

• Illustrates how processes of militarisation operate in the continuum between military institutions and everyday civilian life
• Case studies cover 20th- and 21st-century conflicts on four different continents: from the Middle East and post-socialist Europe to the USA, Britain, Australia and Cuba
• Offers diverse methodological examples including autoethnography, visual analysis, fashion history, and digital media research
• Integrates social identities including race, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability

This vibrant collection of essays reveals the intimate politics of how people with a wide range of relationships to war identify with, and against, the military and its gendered and racialised norms. It synthesises three recent turns in the study of international politics: aesthetics, embodiment and the everyday, into a new conceptual framework. This helps us to understand how militarism permeates society and how far its practices can be re-appropriated or even turned against it.

Contributors

• Catherine Baker, University of Hull, UK.
• Federica Caso, University of Queensland, Australia.
• Dan Evans, independent researcher, support worker and activist.
• Sorana Jude, Newcastle University, UK.
• Jennifer G. Mathers, Aberystwyth University, UK.
• Daniel Møller Ølgaard, Lund University, Sweden.
• Henri Myrttinen, Mauerpark Institute, Germany
• Amy Abugo Ongiri, Lawrence University, USA.
• Jane Tynan, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK.

A feminist interrogation of how terrorism is constructed as a violence that upsets the order of international politics

• Strongly critiques ‘radicalisation’ by looking at UK Prevent and Prevent Tragedies
• Conducts 8 profiles of various terrorist actors, including Andreas Baader, Bernardine Dohrn, Leila Khaled, Dhanu, Anders Breivik, Nidal Hasan and Aafia Siddiqui
• Discusses the mass shooters Elliot Rodger, Dylann Roof and Anders Breivik in relation to misogynistic terrorism
• Provides an intersectional feminist critique of terrorism studies

Disordered Violence looks at how gender, race, and heteronormative expectations of public life shape Western understandings of terrorism as irrational, immoral and illegitimate. Caron Gentry examines the profiles of 8 well-known terrorist actors. Gentry looks for gendered, racial, and sexualised assumptions in how their stories are told. Additionally, she interrogates how the current counterterrorism focus upon radicalisation is another way of constructing terrorists outside of the Western ideal. Finally, the book argues that mainstream Terrorism Studies must contend with the growing misogynist and racialised violence against women.

An intimate study of the imaginative, subversive and often highly mischievous world of British anti-militarism

• Engages with groups including Campaign Against Arms Trade, Stop the Arms Fair, the Space Hijackers. Smash EDO and the Plowshares Movement
• Draws on a range of critical traditions including poststructuralism, feminism, queer theory, postcolonialism and anarchism
• Develops a new account of the nature and limits of militarism, as understood from the perspective of its opponents
• Makes a case for the radical and ethical potential of prefigurative direct action

In the past 15 years, anti-militarist activists in the UK have auctioned off a tank outside an arms fair, superglued themselves to Lockheed Martin’s central London offices and stopped a battleship with a canoe. They have also challenged militarism on an everyday level in many other ways. This book tells the story of their resistance. It explores why anti-militarists take part in such actions, considers the politics of different tactics and examines the tensions and debates within the movement.

As it explores the multifaceted, imaginative and highly subversive world of anti-militarism, the book also makes two overarching arguments. First, that anti-militarists can help us to understand militarism in novel and useful ways. And secondly, that the methods and ideas used by anti-militarists can be a potent force for radical political change.