The plural of soldier is not troops: The politics of groups in legitimating militaristic violence

Abstract

This article identifies ‘the troops’ as a new, radically under-examined figure in the Western canon of war. Utilising discourse analysis of an original corpus of US ‘support the troops’ material from 2001 to 2010, the article argues that ‘the troops’ cannot be read as a simple aggregation of the figurative soldier or literal military personnel. Instead, ‘groupness of the troops’ shifts the politics of the legitimation of violence – and the possibility of meaningful dissent – in two distinct ways. Firstly, ‘the troops’ are figured, counterintuitively, as passive, dependent and at risk of suffering harm. This enables constructions of militaristic, heroic violence to coexist with empirical experiences of vulnerability without ideological contradiction. Secondly, though many accounts of militarism rely upon citizens’ aspirational identification with the ostensibly-universal soldier, the ‘groupness’ of the troops enables them to incorporate, rather than elide, substantive differences (e.g. race, gender or sexual orientation) through an all-encompassing relationship of ‘support’. Consequently, ‘the troops’ may be a more effective avatar of militarism than ‘the soldier’ – and far more important to the legitimation, depoliticization and even perpetuation of conflict than previously realized. What would the politics of military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq have looked like absent the ‘escape valve’ of the figurative troops?

Militarism and the Bedouin: Intersections of colonialism, gender, and race in the Arab Gulf

“…One way of exploring how meanings of security take shape within processes of militarism/militarization is through an examination of the central role played by the figurative soldier in the history and identity of the nation (Cooper and Hurcombe, 2009: 103;Millar, 2019). Millar notes how the meaning of a 'figure' is formed through distillations of shared meanings, background understandings, and normative orientations, through which 'processes of figuration facilitate militarism through two parallel moves: first, the elevation of the soldier as a universalized, normatively ideal individual, and, second, the attribution of those characteristics to the like-wise universal (nation) state' (Millar, 2019: 205).…”

(Re)Producing military mythology at the Canada Army Run

“…McCready and others (e.g., Wegner, 2017) argue that political elites were able to discursively equate support of troops with support of the war, and thus silence critique of war by presenting such critiques as being disrespectful to troops, a group who should be unquestionably supported and venerated. Similar phenomena occurred internationally, in the United States (Millar, 2019;Stahl, 2009;Tate, 2015) and in the United Kingdom (Kelly, 2012). For example, Kelly (2012) critiques the language of heroism used to construct British soldiers as heroes in media coverage about British involvement in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, arguing that such discourses prevent legitimate critical discussion about the 'War on Terror', thus hampering critical opposition to military action.…”

“…While the Harper government's increased militarization of foreign policy was aided by ballooning defence budgets and careful presentation of the Canadian Armed Forces as benevolently militaristic, grassroots discourses of support for soldiers were coopted by political elites in order to further stifle criticism of -and even critical engagement with -Canadian military action in Afghanistan. Scholars have examined how in the United States' and United Kingdom's rhetoric around supporting troops has been used to justify military action and stifle critique of said action (Kelly, 2020b;Millar, 2019;Stahl, 2009;Tate, 2015). In the Canadian context, Wegner (2017) offers the mobilization of 'support the troops' rhetoric as an explanation for the low rates of political mobilization against Canadian military involvement in the war in Afghanistan despite significant rates of public disapproval.…”