Everyday Soldiering, Emotions, and the Iraq War: A Visual International Relations Analysis

IF 2.6 2区社会学 Q1 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

International Political Sociology Pub Date : 2025-09-02 DOI:10.1093/ips/olaf030

Matthias Humer

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Abstract

Images play a key role in shaping public perceptions of war and offer a unique window into the politics of the everyday. This article addresses the underexplored engagement with images of soldiering in visual International Relations (IR), centering the everyday practices of military personnel during the Iraq War (2003-2012). Engaging a collection of photographs taken on US army bases, it develops an analysis grounded in the interpretative potential of images and informed by the critical military studies literature. Using the concept of emotional bundling, the article explores how emotions such as love, grief, care, and desire circulate within the institutional semi-public, semi-private spaces of barracks. It traces how these emotions shape relational dynamics, including the interplay between intimacy and institutional control, the navigation of boredom and desire, and the tensions between institutionalized rituals of grief and personal mourning. By foregrounding the everyday, the article contributes to visual IR an analysis that emphasizes the emotional and embodied dimensions of militarism and its broader political and societal consequences.

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日常士兵，情感和伊拉克战争：视觉国际关系分析

图像在塑造公众对战争的看法方面发挥着关键作用，并为了解日常政治提供了一个独特的窗口。本文以伊拉克战争（2003-2012）期间军事人员的日常实践为中心，探讨了在视觉国际关系（IR）中未被充分探索的士兵图像的参与。在美国军事基地拍摄的一系列照片中，它发展了一种基于图像解释潜力的分析，并由重要的军事研究文献提供信息。利用情感捆绑的概念，文章探讨了诸如爱、悲伤、关心和欲望等情感如何在军营的半公共、半私人空间中循环。它追溯了这些情绪是如何塑造关系动态的，包括亲密和制度控制之间的相互作用，无聊和欲望之间的导航，以及制度化的悲伤仪式和个人哀悼之间的紧张关系。通过对日常生活的展望，文章有助于视觉IR分析，强调军国主义的情感和体现维度及其更广泛的政治和社会后果。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

International Political Sociology Multiple-

CiteScore

4.80

自引率

12.50%

发文量

期刊介绍： International Political Sociology (IPS), responds to the need for more productive collaboration among political sociologists, international relations specialists and sociopolitical theorists. It is especially concerned with challenges arising from contemporary transformations of social, political, and global orders given the statist forms of traditional sociologies and the marginalization of social processes in many approaches to international relations. IPS is committed to theoretical innovation, new modes of empirical research and the geographical and cultural diversification of research beyond the usual circuits of European and North-American scholarship.