The dance of militarisation: a feminist security studies take on ‘the political’

Åhäll, Linda

doi:10.1080/21624887.2016.1153933

Cited by 63 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Furthermore, I use the notion of militarism to indicate the larger context in which identity work takes place. My use of this concept is more in line with feminist thought that takes into account how ‘things military’ find their way into the everyday ( Åhäll, 2016 ). While some frame militarism as an ideology (see Eastwood, this issue ), I focus on its sociological features ( Stavrianakis and Selby, 2013 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 81%

Between security and military identities: The case of Israeli security experts

Grassiani

2018

Security Dialogue

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The relationship between private security professionals and the military in Israel is complex. While there is growing attention to the fact that security and military actors and their activities are becoming increasingly blurred, the Israeli case shows something different. In this ground-up analysis of the relationship between private security practices and the military, I investigate its constant negotiation by private security professionals through their identification with and differentiation from the military, whereby they reconfigure the meaning of military capital. This identity work should be understood, I propose, within the strongly militarist context of Israeli society, where military capital is highly valued. I argue that actors who exit the military system feel the need to demonstrate the added value of their work in the private sector in order for it to gain value in the light of the symbolic capital given to the military. I analyse these processes as leading to a new kind of militarism, which includes security skills and ideas about professionalism. Such an approach sheds new light on the ways in which security actors can actively reconfigure the workings of military capital in and outside the nation-state and produce a different kind of militarism.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 81%

Between security and military identities: The case of Israeli security experts

Grassiani

2018

Security Dialogue

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“…Militarism and militarization are paradoxical, though; for example, alongside popular support for the UK armed forces, we see ongoing recruitment difficulties and waning support for the idea of overseas military intervention. A wealth of recent scholarship seeking to define and explain the causes and consequences of militarism and militarization has burgeoned across disciplines as diverse as international relations (Stavrianakis and Selby 2012), human geography (Woodward 2005;Rech et al 2015), feminist studies (Enloe 2000;Stern and Zalewski 2009;Mohanty 2011;Åhäll 2016;Wibben 2018) criminology (Kraska 2007;Salter 2014;Evans 2017), sociology (Shaw 1991;Martino 2012;McSorley 2012) and, of most relevance to the current article, CMS (Enloe 2015;Agathangelou 2017;Massé, Lunstrum, and Holterman 2017). Broadening and deepening formulations of militarism derived from earlier literatures (Liebknecht and Sirnis 1972), allied work has identified the spatially and temporally diffuse character of militarization (Hyde 2016) that can play out at the level of everyday commodities (Turse 2008;Jackson 2017) and assume both subtle and hidden forms (Giroux 2004;Kallender and Hughes 2018).…”

Section: Context and Concepts: Militarism And Militarizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Militarization, stigma, and resistance: negotiating military reservist identity in the civilian workplace

Higate

Dawes

Edmunds

et al. 2019

Critical Military Studies

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Set against the backdrop of the British Government's Future Reserves 2020 (FR2020) programme, this article addresses military reservists' experiences of how they are perceived by civilian colleagues in the workplace. Drawing on qualitative interviews with reservists, it analyses their understandings of civilian co-workers' qualified and sometimes reluctant acceptance in light of FR2020's implicit aim to use reservists to help realign civil-military relationships. While it appears that civilian work colleagues' social distancing of reservists helps consolidate the wider public's perceived lack of understanding of the British armed forces, a more critical view sees reservists' largely unchallenged presence in the workplace as an exemplary, yet subtle instance of militarization. This is because reservists' simultaneous (physical) inclusion and (social) distancing or stigmatization constitutes, and is constitutive of, their need to pass as civilian. In conclusion, we argue that a key implication of their passing as civilian is to neutralize debate of the legitimacyor otherwiseof the armed forces as an institution tasked with violence on behalf of the state.

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“…While, as documented above, military doctrine expected the combat soldier to take a more visible and exposed role in counterinsurgency operations, at home in Britain the counterinsurgent’s soldiering body emerged as hypervisible through an abundance of representations of soldiers and soldiering. In this ‘new order of excessive visibility’ (Pidduck, 2011: 9, emphasis in original), the British public were flooded with images and narratives about the (mostly) men who fought via print and television media, numerous documentaries and films, 4 museum and art exhibitions, 5 and the proliferation of soldier memoirs (see Duncanson, 2013), as well as in Armistice Day and Armed Forces Day events (see Åhäll, 2016; Basham, 2016).…”

Section: The (In)visibility Of Soldiering Bodies In Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this article, visuality and ‘seeing’ are understood as socially constructed and culturally located, with the ‘conditions of visibility’ (Teresa de Lauretis, cited in Pidduck, 2011: 12) producing not just who is represented and excluded but also spectatorship. In respect to British soldiering bodies during the war in Afghanistan, the ‘conditions of their (hyper)visibility’ in which they were (and continue to be) represented and ‘seen’ across a range of mediums is a contemporary British society marked by an ever-increasing degree of militarization (see Åhäll, 2016; Tidy, 2015).…”

Section: The (In)visibility Of Soldiering Bodies In Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

Violence and the contemporary soldiering body

Welland

2017

Security Dialogue

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This article asks what is the significance of making the soldiering body (hyper)visible in war. In contrast to the techno-fetishistic portrayals of Western warfare in the 1990s, the recent counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan witnessed a re-centring of British soldiering bodies to the visual grammars of war. In the visibility of this body, violences once obscured were rendered viscerally visible on the bodies of British soldiers. Locating the analysis in the War Story exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, London, the article details two moments of wartime violence experienced and enacted by British soldiers, tracking how violence was mediated in, on and through these hypervisible soldiering bodies and attending invisibility of 'other' bodies. The article argues that during the Afghanistan campaign, soldiers' bodies became not just enactors of military power, but crucial representational figures in the continuance of violent projects abroad and their acceptance back home. Unlike the high-technology wars waged by Western nations during the latter years of the twentieth century, for the British public at home watching the recent Afghanistan conflict unfold via a range of mediums, British soldiering bodies, as well as the violences inflicted on them, was central to the war's depiction. In this article I use the concept of hypervisibility to describe this heightened 'seen-ness' of British soldiering bodies during the conflict 1 (and attending invisibility of other bodies), and argue this was crucial both for how wartime violences were mediated and understood, and for putting in place the conditions of possibility for their continuation.

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The dance of militarisation: a feminist security studies take on ‘the political’

Cited by 63 publications

References 33 publications

Between security and military identities: The case of Israeli security experts

Between security and military identities: The case of Israeli security experts

Militarization, stigma, and resistance: negotiating military reservist identity in the civilian workplace

Violence and the contemporary soldiering body

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