Against a surprising level of agreement between Clausewitz, contemporary military doctrines and critical war studies on an ontology of war as fighting, we suggest that the study of contemporary warfare needs to focus more on war as processing. Through Jean Baudrillard we argue that at least some of what is referred to as 'war' is no longer characterised by encounters through fighting. We exemplify our argument by how the repetitive battle-rhythm of military targeting strives for perfect war. What remains is not war as an object in itself, but a reified 'war' that obscures the disappearance of that very object. The debate on war contributes to the reification of such a war, as an imperative telling us: 'we have a concept, you must learn to think through it'.

This article argues that the politics of contemporary Western warfare finds an important reference point in discourses on military design. In the 2010s, military design has become a trending topic in military discourses on command and planning methodology. Since Clausewitz, warfare has been considered a phenomenon characterized by a tension between creativity and linear planning, and the ideal commander as someone with the vision to overcome this. By mapping and analyzing tactical, operational, and strategic narratives and practices, the article illustrates how they emphasize a warfare based both on experimentation and artistry and on traditional operational planning. In so doing, military design relies on reductive military concepts to push the tension identified by Clausewitz towards its extreme end-point, idealizing creativity as an objective of warfare. The article ends by asking to what extent military design risks spilling over into other dimensions of social and political life. It concludes that in pushing creativity as part of war, military design builds on and justifies transgressive political practices with the risk of becoming a vital aspect of future governing.

This article analyzes how contemporary military training and exercises shape and reify specific modalities of war. Historically, military training has shifted from being individual- and experience-oriented, towards becoming modelled into exercise environments and practices. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with military officers, exercise controllers, and war-game designers, the article distinguishes between tactical training, characterized by military functions embodied through weapon platforms in a demarcated battlespace, and operational training, characterized by administrative and organizational processes embodied through self-referential staff routines. As military exercises integrate the tactical and operational dimensions into a model for warfare, they serve as blueprints for today’s battles at the same time as they perpetuate a martial viewpoint of the world. As a result, preparations for potential future conflicts constitute a fertile ground for apprehending the becoming of war.

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Maja Zehfuss' book War and the politics of ethics makes the claim that Western practices of war are constituted by debates and ideas of ethics, illustrated in particular through the Western wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Herein, this claim is assessed by drawing on Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brightons argument that in contemporary research, war tends to be conceived through secondary phenomena. The paper argues that research focusing on how war is shaped by secondary phenomena often falls back on a reductive understanding, in which war is represented as violent destruction. Moreover, that by seeing war as a multifaceted form shaped by military imaginaries centring on military theory, tactics, and operational art, we may gain a more comprehensive understanding of its ontology and practices.

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The existing research on Japanese security focuses mainly on the nation state and conceives of male elites as the key bearers of relevant knowledge about the phenomenon. This article problematizes these biases by zeroing in on women’s everyday-oriented perspectives, which fall outside the scope of security politics as traditionally conceived. More specifically, it analyzes the rich material provided by a survey of the members of three major Japanese women’s organizations, using a mixed-method approach premised on statistical methods and qualitative content analysis. The results show that the Japanese women in our sample accommodate and reproduce content from dominant elite views about security and insecurity. However, they also challenge and at times ignore these perspectives by identifying a host of other insecurities as more pressing in their daily lives, notably those related to environmental degradation and Japan’s political development.

There is an emerging debate about the role and importance of women in right-wing nationalist movements. Drawing on research that highlights the need to study such women as active and complex political agents, this article examines a phenomenon that has previously received little attention—the activism of female Japanese nationalists. We approach the question of how such activism is practiced by analyzing a group interview with female nationalists, a nationalist manga centering on women’s experiences, and autobiographic books on such activism by and for Japanese women. The article contributes by arguing that female nationalist agency in Japan is a complex phenomenon, which is enacted through everyday micro-practices. It outlines how female nationalist activism draws upon and enhances, as well as challenges and transcends, a traditional Japanese “housewife identity.” As such, the female Japanese nationalist is imagined as having access to certain truths. She takes on the role of “truth-teller,” who is playing a strategic role in “waking people up” to the nationalist cause by voicing anger but also making space for a more “joyful,” “cute,” and inconspicuous everyday activism.