This article analyses the recent military ‘turn to reflexivity’ in relation to current reflexive commitments in critical studies of the military. With reflexivity, military organizations have begun to inquire into its own role as a producer and user of knowledge, and into the constitutive effects of knowledge in and on the world. A reflexive concern with the conditions and effects of knowledge has thus made militaries sensitive to the epistemic dimensions of military force. The broader socio-political implications of the military’s attention to epistemics, in terms of how knowledge may constitute and bring into being novel socio-political orderings, make it an urgent task to explore this development in relation to the reflexive state of critical research on the military. The first argument that I make in the article is that existing reflexive commitments in critical military studies are conceptually able to target scholarly-military epistemic interactions and the constitutive effects thereof, but less able to address epistemic distinctions in terms of how knowledge is produced and how different conditions shape the content of knowledge. This, however, is what is needed to critically address the military reflexive development. Based on this, I argue secondly that a fruitful broadening and enriching of the reflexive gaze may be achieved by further taking reflexivity in a Bourdieusian direction – a move that ultimately works complementary to existing reflexive commitments in critical military studies.
This article contributes to the literature theorizing military social order, embodiment, and resistance in IR. The military institution is known to resist change, and much research have been devoted to challenges to the gendered order of the military. One area that has received little attention, however, is the reluctance of many militaries in the West to facilitate veganism during service in spite of the increasing demand for vegan food options, diversity, and sustainability. Drawing on research on the military social order and gender theory, I conduct an unpacking of conflicting elements and representations of military and vegan bodies, and theorize this reluctance as institutional resistance. Typically, the military does not offer motivations for its stance – which makes it difficult to detect and counter. As a consequence, vegans are silenced and excluded, not facilitated to enter the military. This is a challenge to increasing attempts at governing sustainability and diversity in the military.
This article contributes to literature in IR and critical military studies on embodied experiences, military geographies, and research on rangers. Despite being a common feature of military training, little research exists on how the military uses outdoor training to shape soldiers’ identities, emotions, and embodied dispositions. In contrast to existing scholarship’s emphasis on using and constructing outdoor environments in military training to transmit values and skills to make soldiers tough, I argue that outdoor training should be examined from its wealth of embodied experiences and the becoming it gives rise to. Exploring written memoirs by Swedish Norrland Rangers in annual ranger journals on their embodied experiences of extensive outdoor training in north Sweden, the article traces how these rangers represent outdoor training as an assemblage of challenging and pleasurable experiences of being entangled with the northern geographies. The findings indicate that Norrland rangers actively nurture an affirmative orientation to the outdoors and Arctic geographies through their representations of outdoor training, making the challenging ranger formation a rewarding becoming. By developing how rangers constitute and foster this affirmative orientation through their writings, the article provides a better understanding of how pleasurable feelings and experiences of the outdoors are nurtured and drawn upon to socialize rangers.
This paper examines the relationship between state and war in defence policy. To do so it develops a hauntological vocabulary of spectrality, conjuring, and the messianic in close conversation with Derrida’s Specters of Marx. This allows for paying attention to the tensions of statehood and state–war relations, and to how they are determined. Specifically, the paper identifies three aporias signalled in Max Weber’s definition of the state—legitimate violence, community, and territory—and traces how they are addressed in two post-Cold War defence policy paradigms—expeditionary force and territorial deterrence—through two Swedish Defence Bills (2009 and 2020). The main claim concerns how these paradigms, despite their differences, disjointed the state from war by transposing questions of force and violence to the limits of the international order and by subordinating defence to instrumentalism. Traditional spectres of society, state, and the international were dislocated to domains outside statist conceptions of politics. Thus, the paper complements conventional understandings of security and defence as central to statehood by indicating a different function of defence policy and what is at stake in inheriting received political imaginations.
The present article advances a conceptual framework for the critical study of the representation of war and military violence. Essentially, it offers a conceptualization of dis/appearances of violence in public discourse, which combines the concepts of in/visibilization, de/naturalization, and dis/identification. Though they overlap and interweave in terms of what they capture, all three are considered relevant to fully elaborate how violence may dis/appear in narratives on war-like operations. Furthermore, the article exemplifies how one may make use of the conceptual framework, by exploring the representation of violence in Swedish public political debate at the time of active engagement in peace-enforcement and offensive military operations. More specifically, the empirical illustration critically examines the parliamentary debates on ONUC in Congo 1960-1964 and ISAF in Afghanistan 2002-2014. The analysis reveals and details how violence continuously tends to disappear as a reality, as a dilemma and/or as Sweden's own practice and choice. At present, the scholarly debate mainly focuses on the US or the UK. To advance our understanding of the ways in which violence is normalized and made possible, we need refined conceptual tools that allow us to explore the complexity and political work of representations of war and violence in various contexts.
War memorials are a common and often controversial part of the commemoration of past wars. In order to better grasp their importance for the way war endures below the surface of peace, this article stages an ethnographic encounter with a Namibian monument: Heroes’ Acre. The memorial embodies the official Namibian narrative on past wars by emphasizing a nationalist and quasi-religious symbolism, a framing that has been challenged by a number of writers pointing to the need for going beyond the state discourse. This article complements and complicates the way Heroes’ Acre appears in discourse by focusing on the interstices and absences at the site. By drawing upon my own visit to the monument as well as theoretical engagements, most notably Georgio Agamben’s discussion of ‘the empty throne’, I read Heroes’ Acre as a place where political power functions through emptiness, as it allows the future of war to endure in the present. Engaging particularly with the empty graveyard at the site, I argue that its emptiness needs to be understood as a guarantee for war – not in case it occurs – but as a ready-made symbol of glory, always virtually there, waiting to be fulfilled.