Making War on Bodies: Militarisation, Aesthetics and Embodiment in International Politics

Abstract

This introduction reviews debates about ‘militarisation’ in the disciplines which have contributed to Critical Military Studies (including history, geography, sociology and International Relations) and explains the ‘aesthetic’ and ‘embodied’ turns that this volume shows how to synthesise. To study militarisation, aesthetics and embodiment together, it argues, involves studying combinations of how things are sensed and how bodies experience them, across contexts related to the military and its place in wider society: the complex and contradictory affective interplay of aesthetics and embodiment, which feminist approaches have been particularly fruitful for theorising, informs what we know about militarisation today. However, the very concept of ‘militarisation’ makes assumptions about normal relationships between the state, the public and violence which may not be transhistorically or even globally applicable, especially where state violence has been inherent to enforcing systems of racial oppression.