‘They need our help’: Non-governmental organizations and the subjectifying dynamics of the military as social cause

Abstract

Abstract:The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan spurred a range of popular activity -from anti-war protests to war boosterism to veterans' advocacy -purporting to "support the troops". Nongovernmental organizations, from veterans' welfare organizations to anti-war groups, are crucial to this transformation of "the troops" into a social cause and matter of collective concern. As such, this article proposes an initial qualification of NGO representative practices as a form of media genre, characterized by striking similarity in presentation, structure, and particularly explicitly normative tone. A poststructural discursive approach is utilized to examine the implications of this genre for the production of subjectivities and power relations inherent to "supporting the troops" via a structured analysis of the public-produced texts of a selection of typologically-identified NGOs in the United States and United Kingdom. The article goes on to highlight the ways in which NGO representations counterintuitively objectify those they seek to support, while simultaneously limiting the political possibilities of supporters. Overall, it is argued that within the context of the liberal state, the representations of support produced across the advocacy spectrum work to not only depoliticize conflict but to "apoliticize" support for the troops as a matter of morality. * Katharine M Millar is a DPhil Candidate at Somerville College, University of Oxford. Her doctoral dissertation examines popular discursive constructions of the military in the United States and the United Kingdom, and the way they both challenge and inform processes of collective subjectformation.

“Hero-Worship” or “Manipulative and Oversimplifying”: How America’s Current and Former Military Service Members Perceive Military-Related News Reporting

“…In other instances, veterans and service members are framed quite differently (McCartney, 2010), and coverage sometimes portrays them as being damaged, disillusioned (McClancy, 2013), charity cases, victimized, broken, disabled, traumatized (Chrisinger, 2016;Huebner, 2011;Parrott et al, 2018;Pitchford-Hyde, 2017;Schuman et al, 2016), part of an "at-risk population" (Kleykamp & Hipes, 2015, p. 349;Millar, 2016;Parrott et al, 2018), suicidal (Schuman et al, 2016;Sisask & Värnik, 2012), or even, at times, dangerous (Chrisinger, 2016;Hoit, 2012).…”

On ‘moral injury’

“…As Allsopp convincingly argues, the configuration of this self as ‘injured’ – increasingly common across any number of idioms of psychic distress, not only moral injury – raises both the stakes and the seemingly self-evident necessity of management and care of the self by medicalized categories and therapeutic experts. Collective and moralized demands of ‘support’ for American servicemembers and veterans materialize this dynamic in an especially acute way, with every special claim of veteran suffering both elevating their status and slotting them into a regime of institutional control and scripted cultural expectation (Millar, 2015; cf. MacLeish, 2013; Stahl, 2009; Wool, 2015).…”

Help for Heroes: From organizational discourse to a new orthodoxy

“…Both documentaries claimed the government was breaching the Military Covenant between the nation and the soldiers, which was being used by veteran welfare campaigners ‘against the government and the MOD in a partisan and highly politicised way’ (Foster, 2012: 277). As a result, veteran advocacy, which had been ‘minimally present’ in the United Kingdom swiftly became a ‘routinised component of British public discussion’ in relation to Afghanistan (Millar, 2016: 10) as a new type of veteran culture emerged from around 2006 onwards. This activity was nuanced in that it differentiated between support for military personnel and the operations they were undertaking.…”