What makes violence martial? Adopt A Sniper and normative imaginaries of violence in the contemporary United States

Abstract

What makes violence martial? Contemporary militarism scholarship, owing to an analytical overdetermination of the role of military institutions, frequently conflates martiality with violence writ large. Drawing upon the illustrative case of Adopt A Sniper, a US military support charity founded by police officers operating during the global war on terror and intended to help supporters ‘directly contribute to the killing of the enemy’, this article interrogates the intuitive ‘line’ between martial and other, particularly colonial, forms of violence. To do so, I develop the concept of ‘normative imaginaries of violence’ – articulations of intersubjective beliefs; political community; spatial geographies; gendered, sexualized, racialized and classed power relations; and logics of legitimation. Through this lens, and informed by the work of Frantz Fanon, the article demonstrates that though coloniality and martiality are deeply intertwined, they are neither reducible to nor epiphenomenal of each other. Through a juxtaposition of the titular sniper with two additional figures invoked by Adopt A Sniper – the militiaman and the vigilante – I outline a novel, genealogical method that enables us to trace the entangled histories of contemporary violences and identify the implicit politics of ordering at work in existing, often fragmented, analyses of political violence.

Martial(ling) peace at the war museum: Emotion, desires and representations of the war-peace dichotomy

“…This violence may be conducted through explicitly military means, but also through policing and with militarized technologies. Howell’s work is part of established scholarship attentive to how liberal violence has been normalized (Basham, 2013) including the ways this happens outside statist wars and within liberal societies (Millar, 2021). As Nivi Manchanda and Chris Rossdale (2021) explain, ‘liberal capitalist society is structured by warlike relations and [also] the strategies through which these relations are concealed, obscured or naturalized’ (p. 8).…”

Racial militarism and civilizational anxiety at the imperial encounter: From metropole to the postcolonial state

“…While I am indebted to this scholarship for laying the groundwork for key ideas in this article, I also acknowledge that the need to address the constitutive role of race in militarism is long overdue. Feminist scholars are increasingly incorporating it into their analyses of militarism (for good examples, see Basham, 2016;Millar, 2021). But, for a long time, race was incorporated within an expanded gender framework, where the conceptual heavy lifting was carried out through a gender analysis, while race was slotted in alongside.…”