The production and consumption of the ‘means of violence’: Implications of the reconfiguration of the state, economic internationalisation, and the End of the cold war

Melting the Cold War Permafrost: Restructuring Military Industry in Scotland

“…On the contrary, the fact that military industry seems to provide an anomalous case for treating capital and state as discrete sociospatial forms necessitates a substantive approach. Military industry connects the global to the local in ways that are problematic for sweeping theories of globalization and internationalization and for models of epochal transition, such as post-Fordism (Tickell and Peck, 1992;Lovering, 1994aLovering, , 1994b. Too often, such perspectives make unwarranted assumptions about the "two separate logics" of politics and economicsthat is, social forms under capitalism appear as if cleaved from empirical social content (Taylor, 1988;Rees, 1998).…”

“…These varied approaches conceive of the distinctive activities around production for military purposes in terms of empirically identifiable stable properties. 5 This ahistorical reification of military industrial structures has come under sustained critique (MacKenzie, 1983;Lovering, 1987aLovering, , 1990aLovering, , 1994a. Notions of seemingly autonomous, permanent social forms and inexorable technological trajectories, immune from wider processes of change, serve limited use in understanding the current restructuring of the military industry.…”

“…As the terms of the national congruence of state and capital military industrial structures came up against national limits to military spending (Harman, 1984;Williams, 1989;Lovering, 1990aLovering, , 1993Lovering, , 1994a, it became increasingly apparent to government that this remarkable institutional stability could not be sustained. Across-the-board specialized capacity, constrained by national boundaries, brought with it cost penalties that the British state's fiscal crisis found increasingly difficult to endure.…”

“…Unlike autarchic Cold War structures, the emerging arms industry is gradually becoming internationalized as a result of mergers, takeovers, amalgamations, and transnational collaborations (Lovering, 1994a(Lovering, , 1994b. Capital is increasingly concentrated within and across national boundaries, although there may be varying national limits to this process, making the prospects for an integrated European MIC particularly baleful.…”

Defense economic restructuring and conversion in South Africa

“…Over the last decade a growing body of inter-disciplinary writings has focussed on the question of the 'military builddown' or cutbacks on military-industrial economies (Lovering 1994;Markusen and Weida 1995). The changing global strategic environment since the close of the 1980s, most importantly the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, has forced a major re-appraisal of military spending and significant reductions in the defence budgets of many countries (Richards 1991a(Richards , 1991bRenner 1992).…”