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In the UK, people in their millions still tune in to watch ex-soldiers train civilians in an imitation of the SAS selection process in the reality television show SAS: Who Dares Wins. Contestants r...

This paper examines the roots and outcomes of Polish-Libyan military cooperation between 1970 and 1990. From the early 1970s onward, Muammar Gaddafi spent millions of US dollars purchasing military...

Drawing on Debord’s the society of the spectacle and Evans and Giroux’s notion of the spectacle of violence, this paper argues that a discourse on war, organised violence, and global politics has b...

Africa’s security landscape has been experiencing securitised-development practices through counterterrorism activities from donor countries engaged in the ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT). While some...

In 2020 the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) announced it was filing for bankruptcy after haemorrhaging money for years due to insurance and the legal costs associated with sexual abuse lawsuits. This s...

The coup attempt of July 1936 that began the Spanish Civil War differed from its predecessors in that the rebel officers sought to remake both the Spanish state and society. The roots of this new brand of military interventionism have been traced to Spain’s colonial wars in Morocco, but this article argues that they extended further back to the rebel officers’ training at Spain’s Infantry Academy, where, in the wake of defeat in the Spanish-American War, Regenerationist reformers within the academy recast the moral training that cadets received so that they felt it was the army’s duty to lead a transformation of Spanish society to return it to the imagined glories of Spain’s past.1

Most of Charles Mungoshi’s fiction was written within a context of militaristic masculinities pre- and post-independent Zimbabwe, when the strong and healthy male body was valorised in Zimbabwean w...

The purpose of this article is to determine whether the final transformation of the German Conservative Party (Deutschkonservative Partei; DKP) into a right-wing radical organisation, that lost its...

Conflict-related sexual violence has become an increasingly visible issue for feminists as well as various international actors. One of the ways in which global policymakers have tried to tackle th...

How individuals interpret the justifications for historical war can have a large effect on how they see modern warfare (McCorkle, W. 2017; Harris 2008). In the social studies classroom, particularl...

This article details our exploration of the ways in which gender, militarism, and learning intersect in war museums in Canada, England, and Europe. We outline our theoretical framework of feminist ...

The past, present and likely future of “pandemic perspectives” are here briefly examined: as embedded in the contemporary structure of speculative-based production, unsustainable path-dependent dyn...

This article considers the pervasiveness of military themes in the state’s framing of Russianness, and explores the strengths and weaknesses of militaristic means to enhance social consensus. Based...

Using South Korea’s involvement in the Vietnam and Iraq Wars as case studies, we explore transnational militarism as a salient (often neglected) force of globalization that has shaped the construct...

We are in the midst of a global turn to the drone. Responding to the ‘unmanning’ of contemporary warfare, interdisciplinary scholarship has interrogated the human operators and non-human actors underpinning the drone, and their wide-ranging ethical, geopolitical, and legal implications. A key facet of extant drone debates surrounds drone vision – both as it operationally visualizes and is fetishized. While comparatively nascent, scholars have begun to explore how drones are instead visualized across particular media. In this article I identify two lacuna within extant drone scholarship: first a lack of attentiveness to small military drones, which while comprising the majority of global military arsenals remain comparatively absent from scholarly analysis; and second, a need to attend to a greater diversity of visual representations of the drone. In response, this article explores promotional visualizations of small military drones as they are ethnographically-encountered at a key site through which their usage is compelled and their functioning enabled – the defence tradeshow. In so doing, I identify three central frames through which the drone is repeatedly represented therein. I argue that these frames both engage and employ visual conventions associated with ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’ in order to ‘naturalize’ and normalize the drone in as-yet unaccounted ways. Approaching the drone through the current, yet under-examined, visual milieu of the defence environments in which it is promoted, the article contributes to both interdisciplinary drone scholarship, and literatures exploring the visual cultures of militarism more widely.

Hundreds of Israeli reservists fulfilled their military obligations during the Second Lebanon War—and immediately after, voiced their criticism of it.1 The months-long reserve soldiers’ protest, wh...

In this paper, I engage poetically with embodied experiences of Finnish cadets in physical training, bringing the study of body technique, social emotions and militarism together. I focus on the ca...

The average American citizen no longer directly pays, fights or votes for war. The war on terror and the rise of debt fuelled militarism has detached the average American citizen from the use of fo...

This article investigates how gender roles shape, normalize, and reinforce militarism and vice versa. Drawing on in-depth interviews with nineteen conscientious objectors, it explores the impacts o...

This Encounter describes some of the events that led up to the creation of the Chagos Marine Protected Area (MPA) on 1 April 2010. It reflects on the role of social scientists in opposing militaris...

This article explores the principle of due care in war and the myth that improved battlefield technology makes Western warfare inherently more ethical. The discursive construction – which I term vi...

This review article examines Chris Rossdale’s Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion, bringing its critical analysis of British antimilitarism into conversation with my ...

Published online 10 August 2020 This article questions dominant analyses about Libya’s present ‘war economy’ and ‘statelessness’, which are often deployed to explain the country’s ongoing destruction. By reinterpreting the history of the past as the failure of Libya to implement neoliberal reforms, these accounts trivialise its anti-imperialist history. The article reflects on the role that war and militarism play in the US-led imperialist structure, tracing the gradual unmaking of Libya from the progressive revolutionary era, towards its transformation into a comprador state and an outpost for global class war. In doing so, it moves the focus away from Libya’s ‘war economy’ to examine the war and the economy, linking Libya’s fate to the geo-economic and geopolitical forces at the core of US-led imperialism.

Well before the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States might have been described as a country collapsing in on itself, defined by deep chasms in wealth and political ideologies. While divisions and i...

This article examines why the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has been so challenging to implement and argues that the political economy of war and peace, driven by a complex network of powe...

This article uses paradigms developed in the ethics of war debate, primarily jus in bello (just actions in war), and academic theories developed for the study of religion: the dialectic of the sacr...

Facebook meme groups created by Muslim students at American universities are sites of intensive daily productivity, where members post memes they create, or share memes they find elsewhere, joking ...

United States police response to the 2014 Ferguson riots has directed scholarly and public attention towards police militarisation, renewing interest in community policing strategies as a potential...

In 1910 female nurses were allowed to work in Dutch military hospitals. However, it proved difficult to find them. The blame was partly directed at nurses themselves: they didn’t have the right bac...

This article focuses on The Don War Memorial Bar in Stockton-upon-Tees as a themed space. This space ‘made’ through embodied labour, martial images and objects and practices of care and compassion ...

Scholars on “rally ’round the flag” often argue that by invoking the danger of external threats in times of economic hardship, leaders can rally the public around the government in a way that would otherwise be impossible. Alternative streams of literature suggest that a darkening economic reality (“butter”) may weaken the impact of patriotic euphoria (“guns”). I conducted an experimental survey to measure changes in foreign policy preferences among respondents exposed to negative economic priors in Russia. In line with the earlier findings on this topic, my analysis shows that participants who encounter negative economic primes report significantly less support for assertive foreign policy narratives. These results suggest that continuing economic strain may limit the Kremlin’s ability to divert public attention from internal problems through the use of assertive rhetoric.

This paper shows the ways that tales of stoicism during surgery at the Battle of Waterloo came to be a significant part of the ideological framework of Romantic Militarism. Celebrating the killing of enemies clashed with ideals of politeness, but hailing a soldier’s powers of endurance in surgery was an acceptable way of extolling courage, framing lived experience of agony into narratives of exalted pain, masculine fortitude and quasi-religious patriotic feeling. In Britain, an extensive discourse emerged about the supposed Britishness of surgical sangfroid at Waterloo, providing a narrative of national superiority in the decades of imperial expansion that followed.

Israeli strategic culture is offensive and militaristic. However, in the pre-state period the Labor Zionist elites which later dominated the Israeli security establishment formulated a security nar...

In the last 30 years, South American scholars and activists have produced a wealth of knowledge and representations practices concerning militarism and mass atrocities committed by the Armed Forces. Nonetheless, this body of work has been relatively neglected by debates in the field of Critical Military Studies (CMS). This paper attempts to bridge this gap by providing an analysis of the Resistance Memorial of São Paulo (RM-SP), a site inaugurated in 2009 in the former headquarters of the Brazilian political police. The analysis is based on short-term visits to the RM-SP in 2014 and 2018 and informal conversations with members of staff. The paper makes two central arguments: first, as a site of memory situated in the Global South and with strong links to survivors, the RM-SP invites radical accounts of political violence, pushing the boundaries of the concept of militarism beyond what is normally contemplated in CMS. Second, drawing on poststructuralist and post-Marxian critiques, the paper argues that the RM-SP is also a site of struggles; a space in which a radical narrative is held back by a certain language (a system of equivalences) that provides symbolic legitimacy to the present (neo)liberal order. On one hand, the RM-SP offers an intricate analysis of political violence that disturbs traditional liberal accounts of civic-military relations. On the other, its compelling representations of resistance are constantly threatened by the risk of commodification; the confusion between the values of past struggles and that which makes them exchangeable in the eyes of the present.

The coup attempt on 15 July 2016 and the incidents which took place in its aftermath were unprecedented in the history of modern Turkey. The civilian resistance following President Erdogan’s call a...

The events that led to the loss of the last colonies in Spain during the Restauracion (1874–1930) have been widely studied in the most recent historiography. The search for solutions, taking as a s...

In 2005, American artist Seward Johnson first exhibited The Unconditional Surrender, a sculpture modelled after Life Magazine’s iconic photograph of a sailor kissing a white-clad woman on 14 August...

Communication scholars have examined how colonialism is rhetorically maintained, and how discourse excludes Indigenous perspectives. Yet, seldom has the field addressed rhetorical phenomena from Oc...

The future of Critical Cultural Studies depends on the questions we have asked, are asking, and will ask. I hope that central to the present and future of critical cultural studies is the question:...

The culture of political conformity and arbitrary sociopolitical contracts within Sudan and South Sudan were influenced by colonialist-engineered politics of divide and rule, which were later adopt...

The purpose of this article is to unpack the racialised, gendered and classed policing of communities in Brazil and South Africa, two useful analytical cases for the study of the militarisation of ...

With the collapse of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, international governments are scrambling to understand the process of leaving violent networks as large numbers of former fighters return to their home countries. Studies of foreign fighters have tended to emphasize the importance of ideology or trans-national identity in explaining the desire to travel across borders to participate in war. This paper looks to move beyond these accounts and investigates how embodied attachments to militarism shapes foreign fighters enduring involvement in jihadi networks. Feminist studies of militarism and armed violence have emphasized the importance of gendered forms of attachment and desire in making war possible. While this research has paid increasing attention to attachment and embodiment in shaping military personnel’s identities, far less attention has been paid to those involved in foreign fighter networks. Based on life-history research with three generations of former foreign fighters from Java (Afghanistan 1980s, Philippines 2000s, Syria/Iraq 2014-ongoing) this paper explores the complex and contradictory forms of attachment that shape their attempted transition to in civilian life. Focusing on the embodied practices of these former fighters, the article highlights the role of structural factors play in recrafting attachment and belonging.

Feminist scholars have long explored the relationships between masculinities, femininities, and war, yet men are rarely named in Women, Peace and Security (WPS) policies, and masculinities even less commonly. Some activists in favor of bringing analysis of masculinities into WPS policies propose that a focus on reshaping masculinities and femininities as a strategy for resisting militarism is necessary to return the agenda to what they perceive as its “original” purpose of preventing war. Drawing on my personal experiences as an NGO advocate, and on participant observation and interviews with UK government officials, this article explores what we can learn from efforts to integrate a “masculinities perspective” into WPS policies. I argue that, while some language concerning men and boys and, to a lesser degree, masculinity/ies has been incorporated into these policies, this is usually done in ways that subvert the intentions of civil society actors who have advocated for this shift. As a result, these concepts have been assimilated in ways that do not challenge militarism, and indeed at times serve to normalize it. I argue that this demonstrates the limitations of WPS policies as a vehicle for pursuing feminist anti-militarist goals.

The article interrogates the analytical purchase of the concept of militarism in the case of Libya, and its relationship to securitisation. While Libya is often associated with widely securitised t...

This Special Issue asks: what is the current place of militarism in relation to security where Africa is concerned? It aims to contribute to emerging debates interested in critical inquiry ...

Drawing on international political sociology, this article shows how the merger of development and security has become part of the ideational architecture that facilitates a new ‘feel-good’...

This article examines the socio-historical factors that underpin the political sociology of militarism in Nigeria. In spite of subscribing to a democratic constitution and several regional ...

The article explores how stabilisation missions reproduce the patterns that constituted colonial states. Following African historiography, the article argues that stabilisation’s militarise...