Militarism and militarization

Drawing on extensive ethnographic field research, this dissertation explores the interaction between the Congolese armed forces (FARDC) and civilians in the eastern DR Congo’s conflict-ridden Kivu provinces. It uncovers the multidimensionality, reciprocity and complexities of this interaction, which arise from and give rise to its fundamentally ambiguous character. This ambiguity is both an outcome and an engine of processes of militarization, which entail structural transformations that generate a dominant position for armed actors and lead to the normalization of their involvement in non-military spheres of social life. Militarization has profoundly blurred the social roles and forms of identification surrounding armed actors in the Kivus, causing the boundaries between categories like military/civilian, coercion/persuasion, victim/perpetrator, public authority/private protector, licit/illicit to be porous and constantly shifting.

The study concludes that the continuing dominance of the FARDC in the Kivus is the cumulative result of both civilians’ and the military’s everyday practices, which reproduce the militarized structures of domination, legitimation and signification that underpin the FARDC’s position of power. An important engine of this reproduction are the dynamics of conflict, insecurity and protection both within the military and within the Kivus’ social order as a whole. These dynamics lead to a short-term focus that causes civilians and soldiers to engage in practices that sustain the military’s dominance in the long term. Another important element in the reproduction of militarization is the routinization of certain forms of civilian-military interaction. As routine actions draw upon ‘practical consciousness’, routinization hampers the development of awareness among civilians of the effects of their individual practices on the social order as a whole. This shows that militarization is a process that is driven by practices that make sense to individual social agents, but that have outcomes that are disadvantageous at the collective level.

Following the neoliberal restructuration of the Turkish welfare and banking systems in the 2000s, many veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish war faced debt enforcement due to failed payments for prosthetic limbs. Veterans responded to debt collection by turning their own bodies into spectacles of debt and sacrifice by publicly removing and showcasing their debt-ridden prostheses. The media interest in these prosthetic spectacles further amplified the visceral threat of dismemberment evoked by veterans’ embodied performances. The public debates surrounding “prosthesis repossession” cases extended well beyond veteran welfare issues, inscribing all sorts of social and political anxieties on the amputee veteran body, such as anxieties around the incommensurability between the value regimes of nationalism and neoliberalism or around the Syrian refugees. Providing a window into larger questions about the interconnections between disability, gender, nationalism, and neoliberal capitalism, prosthesis repossession cases show us how debt and disability coproduce each other at the nexus of consumer debt and nationalist welfare in Turkey. By homing in on the prosthetic re-membering and dismembering of veteran bodies in a rapidly changing health milieu, we see how the political economy of violence and the violence of political economy become complicit in the production of debt, dismemberment, and prosthetic rehabilitation.

América Latina y el Caribe destaca a nivel mundial tanto por los niveles de violencia cuantificables, como por las modalidades que esta comporta. Ante ello, las preocupaciones en torno a la seguridad pública o ciudadana han ofrecido una serie de interpretaciones poniendo énfasis en el comportamiento económico del área, los procesos de urbanización o la polarización generada por los índices de criminalidad y las políticas de mano dura vueltas “consenso”. En este caso, se propone abordar la problemática a través de la incorporación de elementos semánticos y operacionales de la estrategia militar, tomando como ejemplo la ciudad de Río de Janeiro con la experiencia de las Unidades de Policía Pacificadora (UPP) y la militarización de la ciudad en el marco de un ciclo de megaeventos de diez años de duración. En base a la consulta de distintas fuentes documentales, entre ellas escritos de militares que participaron en Operaciones de guerra urbana en la ciudad, se corrobora la hipótesis sobre el empleo de estrategias de guerra en contextos urbanos como alternativa disponible para las elites políticas y económicas con objetivos de control social.

In Africa, elephant populations on the whole are in decline and the illicit killing of rhinos has escalated sharply over recent years. The actors involved in poaching these animals include armed militias, rogue military officers, commercial poachers, and bush meat and subsistence hunters. Poachers are making widespread use of military-style weapons and high-calibre hunting rifles in their pursuit of elephants and rhinos, complicating the efforts of wildlife rangers to stop them. This chapter draws on interviews with leading wildlife conservation experts and open-source material to examine the challenges facing and strategies adopted by anti-poaching forces and wildlife management agencies in African range states with elephant and rhino populations. Based on original field research conducted in Kenya, the chapter also offers insight provided by rangers, conservationists, and others affected by poaching in the country. The main findings are that: • Poachers use multiple means to kill ...

In the 1970s, the Park Chung Hee administration (1961-79) leveraged all defense-related civilian industries to build an independent system of weapons production. In keeping with Park's advancement of military modernization driven by strong private-sector growth, an agenda that he promoted with his banner slogan “rich nation, strong military,” large Korean companies known as chaebŏl (재벌) were transformed to serve as government contractors that drove both national economic development and military modernization. A case study of one such company, Hanwha, illustrates how the state's hyper-militarization of Korean industries determined the distinct course and character of South Korea's national development. The study highlights the dynamic interplay that occurred between state actors and private-sector CEOs, managers, and laborers in shaping the chaebŏl-centered economic and defense industrialization.

This paper begins by identifying a tendency in the mass media to represent military robotics in a manner that endows the devices with a degree of automation and agency that is actually beyond the technology. Underlying these descriptions of the capacities of military robots, it is argued, is a kind of fetishization. Military robot fetishism is not simply based upon an irrational or mistaken belief about the real capacities of the robots but, instead, following Baudrillard, their fetish value stems from their positive valuation according to a code of functionality that rests upon the risk-transfer labour of the robot. Acting as (western) soldier surrogates, the promise of the military robot is one of casualty reduction but asymmetrically so. As such, military robot fetishism arises, much as Mulvey proposes, out of the difficulty of representing reality – namely that waging war has not become a scientifically guided rational-antiseptic enterprise but continues to be a gruesome and violent activity. In this way, the fetishization of military robots can be attributed to the need to ameliorate a particular reality that is less politically difficult for western governments and their militaries. In this way, military robotics becomes a science of imaginary technical solutions to the problem of war legitimation. Thus the promotion of military robot fetishism in the mass media means that the military robot as fetish comes to circulate within both martial and civilian lifeworlds, re-legitimizing warfare and affording further the militarization of civic life.

Tesis para obtener el grado de Maestra en Asuntos Internacionales.

El objetivo general de esta investigación es explicar cómo la élite militar de los países del TNCA después de los Acuerdos de Paz y las reformas constitucionales lograron influir en el diseño de las estrategias de seguridad militarizando las funciones de seguridad pública.

This article seeks to construct a comparative investigation of the role and application of militaristic metaphors in three contested areas of science-society discourse (invasive species, foot-and-mouth disease, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome). It examines differences in the uses of metaphors and the role played by the emergence or neglect of critical linguistic engagement in these areas of public concern. It contributes to debates about the relationship between language use, policy, and the public understanding of science and technology. It demonstrates that militaristic metaphors are still part of a pervasive, but by no means inevitable, mode of science and policy communication.

Jennifer Goett's ethnography examines the race and gender politics of activism for autonomous rights in an Afrodescedant Creole community in Nicaragua. Weaving together fifteen years of research, Black Autonomy follows this community-based movement from its inception in the late 1990s to its realization as an autonomous territory in 2009 and beyond. Goett argues that despite significant gains in multicultural recognition, Afro-Nicaraguan Creoles continue to grapple with the day-to-day violence of capitalist intensification, racialized policing, and drug war militarization in their territories. Activists have responded by adopting a politics of autonomy based on race pride, territoriality, self-determination, and self-defense. Black Autonomy shows how this political radicalism is rooted in African diasporic identification and gendered cultural practices that women and men use to assert control over their bodies, labor, and spaces in an atmosphere of violence.

Militarization on the US–Mexico border has intensified in America's post-9/11 War on Terror, while America's War on Drugs has escalated militarization in America's urban core. This infusion of military weapons and tactics along the border and within America's urban core produces devastating effects on communities of color. Yet, to date, few critical race scholars attend to the Wars on Terror and on Drugs as two sides of the same coin. This article serves as a bridge between US–Mexico border studies and critical race studies vis-à-vis a theorization of a thickening military-police assemblage birthed by the War on Drugs, and intensified by the War on Terror. To delineate this assemblage, we respond to two key questions: how and to what degree has the US–Mexico border served as a staging ground for US (para)military and surveillance strategies at home and abroad? and how do discourses on America's urban core compare and contrast with those on its southern border? We draw upon the cases of Esequiel Hernández, Jr. and Michael Brown, two teenagers whose lives were taken by this assemblage, to frame these questions. Our analysis reveals material, symbolic, and affective links between America's militarization on the southwest border and within its urban core.

Renewed violence in Nicaragua in the aftermath of the 1980s Contra War is tied to the drug trade, drug war militarization, and the rise of the postwar security state. State sexual violence in an Afro-Nicaraguan community under counternarcotics military occupation vividly demonstrates this linkage. I argue that state sexual violence in this case has served as a mechanism for asserting mestizo state sovereignty in a minoritized security zone. The forms of racial and patriarchal power that enabled the violence permeate the social body and structure political life in Nicaragua, and their diffuse nature has made it difficult for local people to find political redress for the abuses of state power that occurred in their community. Politically engaged feminist ethnography can illuminate the relationship between state security projects, preexisting social hierarchies, and endemic forms of insecurity and violence that remain difficult to politicize in postwar Central America.

This essay analyzes the interconnected regimes of US settler colonialism and militarization in Hawai‘i by examining the expansion of public health programs under martial law during World War II. I explore the biopolitics of wartime public health programs that targeted health and hygiene practices as a means of military surveillance, territorial organization, and population control. The mandatory immunization program vaccinated individuals in order to maintain an uncontaminated military base in Hawai‘i and produce able “Americanized” bodies that could contribute to the US military project. The Honolulu Blood Bank collected donations from these bodies as supplements to military strength and promoted blood donation through racialized tropes of patriotism and loyalty. I explore how the US military government employed a provisional wartime “racial liberalism” in Hawai‘i in order to incorporate all peoples in these programs regardless of race, yet these projects simultaneously intensified the classification and regulation of racially differentiated groups and erased Hawaiian indigeneity. As Hawai‘i became a biopolitical center of the Pacific War, the coercive conditions of martial law and wartime racial discourse compelled all peoples in Hawai‘i to cultivate biological health, only to then surrender it for the extraction of biomedical resources—all in the name of military security.

The subject of this article is the military institution, with particular reference to the training and the military culture. The approach to the subject is through the results of micro-sociological research, which mostly refer to the conceptual instruments of symbolic interactionism, and through the first results of a long ethnographic research. 
The present study shows a correlation between the training model of the military and episodes of sadistic and uncontrolled violence and torture, perpetrated by social actors trained on the basis of that model.

Does international law regulate the economic activities that sustain war? States have long guarded against international interference in their war economies. But today there is an increasing tendency to impose rules on the economic activity connected to war. Acting collectively or on their own, states have sought to sharpen the focus of multilateral sanctions, strangle terrorist finances, constrain the flows of small arms and light weapons, and exclude minerals mined in war zones from the supply chains of global commerce. A steady trickle of litigation has seen courts of different jurisdictions prosecute pillage and slavery in war and pursue business people and companies for committing or enabling crimes in situations of armed conflict.

The paper is an introduction to the doctoral dissertation in law (defended in December 2017, University of Oslo) which examines how international law regulates the economies that help sustain today’s wars. The dissertation focuses on the international legal norms that have arisen to regulate phenomena that arise at the nexus of commerce and conflict. Drawing on advances in our understanding of the social and economic dynamics in situations of irregular warfare, the dissertation discusses developments in international humanitarian law, international criminal law, international human rights law and the law of international peace and security. The dissertation maps the global regulatory system that has arisen to respond to the nexus of commerce and conflict and resolves a principal uncertainty for international lawyers, namely the nature of the problem to be regulated and the normative content of the applicable rules of international law.

In response to civil unrest, many U.S. police forces in the 1960s and 1970s adopted more aggressive postures, including "militarized" uniforms and tactics. A few, however, directed reform efforts toward "demilitarization." This article focuses on the Menlo Park Police Department, in California, led by the maverick reformer Victor Cizanckas. It analyzes his attempts to change relations between the police and the public in his municipality, especially by decreasing incidents of abuse in one predominantly poor, black neighborhood. He instituted, for example, new uniforms and a nonhierarchical bureaucracy in the department. The article details how Cizanckas used emerging networks of law-enforcement professionalization to disseminate his ideas. It also analyzes the failures and challenges of these reform efforts. The article concludes that even radical police reform efforts in the period could not overcome racial inequality or a right-wing backlash against progressive ideas in policing.

What if war is not simply a destructive force? What if war might also
offer possibilities of regeneration? What if war harbours potential for
self-becoming, for realizing one’s dreams, and for fulfilling one’s
desires? The inquiry at hand suggests that Danish warriorhood has
been revived with Denmark’s military engagements in Iraq and
Afghanistan. Addressing this fundamental transformation of the
Danish soldier’s operational role and social identity, this article argues
that there are Danish troops who seek out war in Afghanistan as an
existential window of opportunity for following their desires to
become ‘truewarriors’ and thereby regenerate themselves as ‘authentic
individuals’. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with some of the
very last Danish combat soldiers deployed with the International
Security Assistance Force (ISAF), this study explores ethnographically
how these Danish ISAF troops give voice to and act upon their warrior
dreams over time – before, during, and after a tour of duty in the
Afghan Helmand Province. The article shows that there are Danish
soldiers who become disillusioned by war – not because of any
barbarity, but because of the virtual absence of any real acts of
combat. As such, the inquiry bears witness, on the one hand, to
how some Danish soldiers have their warrior dreams shattered by
what turned out in their case to be a relatively uneventful war and, on
the other hand, to how a few of these troops attempt to mend their
broken warrior dreams by returning to war for a second chance.

This article examines the blunt conceptual instrument of dehumanizing American military terms for the enemy in the context of the Vietnam War and the Global War on Terror. I examine language that dehumanizes American service members themselves, who are semiotically framed as expendable. Next, I explore the essentialist, semi-propositional qualities of derogatory epithets for the enemy and the affectively charged, deadly stances they encourage. I examine how generic references to the enemy during training make totalizing claims that risk encompassing civilians in their typifications. And I show that, in the context of war, the instability of derogatory epithets can manifest itself when the servicemember is confronted with the behavioral idiosyncrasies and personal vulnerabilities of actual 'enemies' on the ground. The putative folk wisdom found in generic references to the enemy can thus fall apart when confronted with countervailing experience; in such cases, service members may shift stance by renouncing military epithets.

Winner of  the 2019 Nikki Keddie Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association, and the 2019 Anthony Leeds Prize from American Anthropological Association’s Society for Urban, National, and Transnational / Global Anthropology (SUNTA) section.

Beirut is a city divided. Following the Green Line of the civil war, dividing the Christian east and the Muslim west, today hundreds of such lines dissect the city. For the residents of Beirut, urban planning could hold promise: a new spatial order could bring a peaceful future. But with unclear state structures and outsourced public processes, urban planning has instead become a contest between religious-political organizations and profit-seeking developers. Neighborhoods reproduce poverty, displacement, and urban violence.

For the War Yet to Come examines urban planning in three neighborhoods of Beirut's southeastern peripheries, revealing how these areas have been developed into frontiers of a continuing sectarian order. Hiba Bou Akar argues these neighborhoods are arranged, not in the expectation of a bright future, but according to the logic of "the war yet to come": urban planning plays on fears and differences, rumors of war, and paramilitary strategies to organize everyday life. As she shows, war in times of peace is not fought with tanks, artillery, and rifles, but involves a more mundane territorial contest for land and apartment sales, zoning and planning regulations, and infrastructure projects.

This paper identifies a global trend towards hardened, militarised borders through the use of military technologies, hardware and personnel. In contrast to claims of waning state sovereignty, drawing on detailed case studies from the United States and European Union, we argue the militarisation of borders represents a re-articulation and expansion of state sovereignty into new spaces and arenas. We argue that the nexus of military-security contractors, dramatically increased security budgets, and the discourse of threats from terrorism and immigration is resulting in a profound shift in border security. The construction of barriers, deployment of more personnel and the investment in a wide range of military and security technologies from drones to smart border technologies that attempt to monitor, identify and prevent unauthorised movements are emblematic of this shift. We link this increasing militarisation to dehumanisation of migrant others and to the increasing mortality in border spaces. By documenting this trend and identifying a range of different practices that are included under the rubric of militarisation, this paper is both a call for nuanced interpretation and more sustained investigation of the expansion of the military into the policing of borders.

Despite being central to the development of Saharan regional connectivity, northern Chad has been closed to researchers since the late 1960s and thus remains virtually unknown to scholarship. Based on long-term fieldwork, The Value of Disorder is an original and in-depth account of the area and its Tubu majority inhabitants. Julien Brachet and Judith Scheele examine trans-border connectivity and trade; civil war and rebellion; wealth creation and dispersal; labour and gender relations; and aspirations to moral autonomy in northern Chad from an internal point of view – a point of view that in turn participates in a dynamic process of regional interdependence. Vividly ethnographic, the book gives precedence to local categories of value, while asking broader questions about the nature of non-state regional political organisation, questions that inform current political developments in the Sahara more widely and have the potential to challenge key concepts in Saharan studies and the social sciences.

The relationship between the US State’s military propaganda agencies, the entertainment industries, media products, and public opinion is of interest to researchers, and the alliance of the military and the entertainment industries is often conceptualized as a “military-entertainment complex” (MEC). This entry focuses on some relevant concepts for studying the MEC (the military-industrial complex, the military-industrial-communications complex, the military-industrial-media-entertainment network, the media war/virtuous war, and interactive militainment), identifies the political and economic institutions that make up the MEC (the Department of Defense’s public affairs office and US media and entertainment corporations), and highlights synergies between the DoD and specific sectors of the entertainment industries that underlie the production of militainment (the DoD-news complex; the DoD-Hollywood complex; the DoD-sports complex; the DoD-digital games complex; and the DoD-social media complex).

This chapter describes the evolution of the Italian maritime border control policies in the last twenty years, analyzing the process that has led to the creation of a complex and integrated border control apparatus. Integrated here refers to the facts that border control policies increasingly involve the action of many institutional actors and that the geopolitics of border control produces a wide frontier zone extending from third countries' territorial waters up to the archipelago of first reception and detention centres located on Italy's southern shores. The chapter starts with a preliminary examination of the wider context in which the control of irregular migration by sea takes place in the Mediterranean scenario, focusing then on the description of the Italian border control apparatus. In particular, it will describe the legal basis and the complex institutional framework that shaped maritime border surveillance policies in the last twenty years. These policies will be analysed by describing their evolution up to the latest operational activities launched in the Strait of Sicily with the aim to tackle the refugee crisis. The analysis will highlight the leading role played by Italy in the increasing militarization of border control policies taking place also at the EU level, by illustrating how this is due not so much to the humanitarian need to provide greater search and rescue capacity on the high sea, as to the political will to strengthen the external governance of internal security by using the fight against smuggling and trafficking in human beings as a cover for legitimizing an increased presence of EU security forces in crisis contexts.

This work examines the blurring distinctions between the police and military institutions and between war and law enforcement. In this article, the author asserts that understanding this blur, and the associated organizing concepts militarization and militarism, are essential for accurately analyzing the changing nature of security, and the activity of policing, in the late-modern era of the 21st century.

This article is focused on “Political Orthodoxy”, an ideological trend and sociocultural phenomenon with regard to its impact to militarization and justification of war from religious point of view. The author pays his attention to elaboration the idea of “Orthodox civilization” by the part of Orthodox nationalist teoreticians striving to transform Orthodoxy into “political religion”, he scrutinizes development of eschatological ideologems and war apologia that appeared alongside this process.
He examines the models of mythological outlook connected with Political Orthodoxy as manifested throughout the last decade, in particular with reference to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Through the lens of the latter the author gives examples of practical embodiment of religiously influenced militaristic discourse, shows some epiphenomena (side effects), in particular, hate, aggravation of the conflicts, separation
into ‘friends’ and so on.

The Breastfeeding in Combat Boots book and website provide a wealth of
information for mothers in the military who wish to breastfeed while working. Although
the Breastfeeding in Combat Boots organization positions itself as a source for women
advocating for their right to breastfeed in the workplace, the texts also focus on
how military service often brings the private acts of motherhood into the public. By
publicizing the act of breastfeeding through language and metaphors of militarism,
Breastfeeding in Combat Boots demonstrates that the military accepts motherhood
but avoids meaningful, structural change. This article highlights how the intersections
of militarism and women’s bodies offers another lens for understanding reproductive
politics.

Masculinities, militarisation and the End Conscription Campaign explores the
gendered dynamics of apartheid-era South Africa’s militarisation, analysing
the defiance of compulsory military service by individual white men and the
anti-apartheid activism of the white men and women in the End Conscription
Campaign (ECC). The ECC was the most significant white anti-apartheid
social movement in South Africa. Military conscription and objection to it are
conceptualised as gendered acts of citizenship and premised on and constitutive of masculinities.

Analysing the interconnections between militarisation, sexuality, race,
homophobia and political authoritarianism, Conway draws upon a range of
materials and disciplines to produce this socio-political study. Sources include
interviews with white men who objected to military service in the South African
Defence Force (SADF), archival material including military intelligence surveillance of the ECC, ECC campaigning material, press reports and pro-state propaganda.The analysis is informed by perspectives in sociology, international relations, history and from analysis of contemporary militarised societies such as Israel and Turkey.

The new designs for the US Paper Money between 1914 and 1918: Federal Reserve Notes and Federal Reserve Bank Notes during the Word War I. Contents:
BEFORE THE FED, THE FED, THE NEW NOTES, 12 BANK SEALS, THE NEW TRADITION, 2 TREASURY SEALS, DATES, FIVE-DOLLAR BILL, TEN-DOLLAR BILL, TWENTY-DOLLAR BILL, FIFTY-DOLLAR BILL, ONE HUNDRED-DOLLAR BILL, ONE-DOLLAR BILL, TWO-DOLLAR BILL, $500 BILL, $1,000 BILL, $5,000 BILL, $10,000 BILL, 4 AUTHORIZATIONS ON THE “FED” PAPER MONEY (1914-1918), FINAL WORDS.

Solar geoengineering technologies intended to slow climate change by injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere are gaining traction in climate policy. Solar geoengineering is considered "fast, cheap, and imperfect" in that it could rapidly reduce planetary temperatures with low cost technology, but potentially generate catastrophic consequences for climate, weather, and biodiversity. Governance has therefore been central to solar geoengineering debates, particularly the question of unilateral deployment, whereby a state or group of states could deploy the technology against the wishes of the international community. In this context, recent, influential scenarios posit that-given technological and political complexities-solar geoengineering deployment will likely be guided by a "logic of multilateralism." I challenge this assertion by arguing that solar geoengineering is defined by equally compelling 'logics of militarization.' I detail recent involvement in solar geoengineering development on the part of U.S. defense, intelligence, and foreign policy institutions, geoengineering scenarios that adopt militarized logics and expertise, and Realist international relations theories that undergird leading governance scenarios. I then demonstrate that the U.S. military has a strategic interest in solar geoengineering, as U.S. hegemony is predicated on expanding fossil fuels, but the military deems climate change a threat to national security. The unique spatio-temporal qualities of solar geoengineering can bridge the gap between these contradictory positions. In examining the militarization of solar geoengineering, I aim to ground recent conceptions of "planetary sovereignty" in the emergent field of "geopolitical ecology" through the latter's more granular approach to the world-making powers of key geopolitical-ecological actors.