{"title":"‘Discipline and punishment’: coercive measures used by the rebels against their troops during the Spanish Civil War","authors":"Francisco J. Leira-Castiñeira","doi":"10.1080/23337486.2021.1913362","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2021.1913362","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article aims to illustrate the measures which were developed by the rebel army in order to maintain control over their troops during the Spanish Civil War. Coercive measures were adopted that became progressively tightened, reaching a peak during the first Francoist government. They were based on integration, propaganda, surveillance and punishment. This article focuses on the idea that surveillance and punishment were applied because troops were not socio-politically homogeneous. Measures were also based on traditional and colonial military ideology, and nationalist in nature, and new tendencies arriving from Europe: such as fascism. This text also serves to portray the context in which the combatants were integrated, as well as how the Francoist ‘New State’ was established during the 1940s and early 1950s.","PeriodicalId":37527,"journal":{"name":"Critical Military Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"100 - 116"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23337486.2021.1913362","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46270813","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Military-Urban Nexus: the political-economy of real-estate, development, and the military in Beer-Sheva metropolis","authors":"Tomer Dekel","doi":"10.1080/23337486.2021.1921371","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2021.1921371","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The paper explores the political-economy of militarization and urbanization in the development of Beer-Sheva metropolis, Israel. The region currently undergoes a wave of governmental and private investments, led by the relocation of army bases, military and cyber industries, and infrastructural development. The prevalent analysis relates this transformation to national-territorial goals. It is argued here that underlying these processes is the neo-liberal economy and the resulting post-2008 inflation of land and housing prices. These highly determine the pace and shape of military projects, what is framed as ‘speculative militarism.’ Further, the defence apparatus is found to be a crucial facilitator of regional development and of the land and labour markets, in the face of the social discontent and the thrust of construction that the inflation generates. These aspects are conceptualized as constituting a ‘Military-Urban Nexus.’","PeriodicalId":37527,"journal":{"name":"Critical Military Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"117 - 137"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23337486.2021.1921371","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46874447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Visualizing liminal military landscape: a small scale study of Armed Forces Day in the United Kingdom","authors":"Ross McGarry","doi":"10.1080/23337486.2020.1826243","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2020.1826243","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Armed Forces Day is a military-centric event in the UK introduced into the public calendar during 2009 following recommendations made from The Report of Inquiry into National Recognition of Our Armed Forces. Despite the significance of these events requiring the situating and performance of military values, personnel, equipment and activities within otherwise civic spaces, academic research and critical commentary into the implementation and development of Armed Forces Day is limited. Influenced by autoethnographic work from critical human geography focussing on the materiality, spatiality and embodied experiences of military airshows, and seeking to extend some insights from the original text Military Geographies, the aim of this paper is to observe the situatedness and performance of Armed Forces Day to be what is defined herein as ‘liminal military landscape’. Through conducting a small-scale study of Armed Forces Day 2017 in Liverpool, employing observational techniques including notetaking and documentary photography, during this event urban space was found to undergo spatial ‘transitions’; have ‘portals’ opened through which temporality and materiality invoked past experience into the present; and create newly established liminal ‘thresholds’ waiting to be crossed between the seemingly contiguous spaces of civic and military.","PeriodicalId":37527,"journal":{"name":"Critical Military Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"273 - 298"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23337486.2020.1826243","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46348274","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"New soldiers on the block: the emergence of disciplined soldier subjects in the Ghana Armed Forces’ transformation process","authors":"H. Agyekum","doi":"10.1080/23337486.2021.1891365","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2021.1891365","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Based on ethnographic engagement with the Ghana Armed Forces, this study examines the creation of new soldier subjectivities in the process of institutional transformation. It does so by foregrounding interpersonal relations as manifestation and mediation of transformation. As a result of the restoration of military order in the barracks after the breakdown of and subsequent reinstallation of discipline in the Ghana Armed Forces since the 1980s, new disciplined soldier subjectivities have emerged. In this paper, I present three sub-categories of the disciplined soldier subject, and how they have been received by representatives of the old military order. The article explores how the emergence of these new types of soldiers is changing the social conventions in the barracks based on their use of technological devices, such as the mobile phones, tablet or computers, but also new types of social and political reach of society into the barracks, especially the so-called ‘protocol-list’ and ‘big man backing’. The article addresses how the new types of soldiers incorporate new forms of interactions and engagements with technology, society and the military institution, thus translating the goals of its transformation process into everyday military practice.","PeriodicalId":37527,"journal":{"name":"Critical Military Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"81 - 99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23337486.2021.1891365","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45782226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Deeply odd’: women veterans as critical feminist scholars","authors":"Hannah West, Sophy Antrobus","doi":"10.1080/23337486.2021.1907020","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2021.1907020","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT A series of conversations between two women veterans triggered a realization that our military service had been ‘deeply odd’. Jointly authored by a historian and a social scientist, both have served in different services, through different conflicts, for different lengths and left for different reasons. Nonetheless, they have been fascinated by the parallels in their experiences of transition from military service to the academic researcher. This paper considers how their gendered military identity was constructed and negotiated such that they could not see their gendered experiences as ‘deeply odd’ when serving and can only see this now because their studies have challenged them to reflect critically. Women veterans are largely invisible in academia in contrast to the prominence of male veterans, particularly in military history and mainstream defence studies. Yet, the field of Critical Military Studies places women veteran researchers in a unique position of insider-outsider; still stained by our past compliance with the military institution – still outsiders – yet endeavouring now to find a new home as an ‘insider’, as critical feminist researchers. They find their identity as critical feminist scholars distances themselves from the military they want to remain engaged with and yet they are also viewed as ‘deeply odd’ themselves in the eyes of the critical feminist scholar community. Drawing on their personal experience, this paper argues that using the concept of the ‘deeply odd’ helps explore the dynamics of women veterans as critical feminist scholars with their insider-outsider status.","PeriodicalId":37527,"journal":{"name":"Critical Military Studies","volume":"9 1","pages":"24 - 39"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23337486.2021.1907020","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45054222","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Battlefield monuments and popular historicism: a hermeneutic study of the aesthetic encounter with ‘Waterloo’","authors":"Mark Gilks","doi":"10.1080/23337486.2021.1888015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2021.1888015","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Focusing on the case of the tourist visiting battlefield monuments at Waterloo, this article explores how war is historicized in the public imagination through the monumentalization of objects. The argument is two-fold. Firstly, drawing on Gadamer’s hermeneutics, it is argued that ‘tradition’ is constituted in the aesthetic encounter between tourist and monument (as subject and object); such encounters are therefore understood as the genesis of historical meaning. Secondly, through a critique of Gadamer’s notion of ontological structures of meaning, it is argued that the tourist is phenomenologically implicated in the constitution of historical meaning, emphasizing the agency of the historical observer more than Gadamer allows for: Objects become monuments through the monumentalizing gaze of the tourist. To empirically illustrate these processes, the author ethnographically explores the experience of battlefield tourist and presents his own dialogue with war-tradition at Waterloo. As such, this study contributes a theoretical account of how war is historicized at the phenomenological level, which has broader sociological implications for understanding how war discourses originate and are sustained in the public imagination.","PeriodicalId":37527,"journal":{"name":"Critical Military Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"443 - 462"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23337486.2021.1888015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47259105","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Resilience before PTSD: or, Robert Vas vs The Bomb","authors":"P. Leese","doi":"10.1080/23337486.2021.1885597","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2021.1885597","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Resilience today is a highly instrumentalized weapon of the neoliberal state. Its purpose is the reduction and privatization of responsibility for emotions that conflict with the institutional interests of the western armed forces. This development dates back to the recognition of PTSD as an official diagnostic category in 1980, and to notions of civilian resilience developed in the 1990s and 2000s. This article seeks to historicize and relativize modern-day conceptions of resilience by exploring an earlier mid-twentieth century iteration which is anti-militaristic, non-institutional, and profoundly humanist. This version of resilience is rooted in the experiences of the Second World War and early Cold War generations as they attempted to cope retrospectively with their own traumatic memories. To develop this argument the article draws on recent critiques of resilience by Brett T Litz and Anne Boyar, on Jens Brockmeier’s notion of ‘subjunctive thinking’, and on a case study of the Anglo-Hungarian documentarist Robert Vas (1931–78). Of particular interest is To Die – To Live: The Survivors of Hiroshima (1975), Vas’s film collaboration with Robert and Mary Lifton, in which the director speaks with some of the hibakusha – survivors of the 1945 nuclear explosions – to better understand how they survived and continued to live.","PeriodicalId":37527,"journal":{"name":"Critical Military Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"428 - 442"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23337486.2021.1885597","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47202071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On temporality and morality: negotiating POW survival in current protracted wars","authors":"Nitzan Rothem","doi":"10.1080/23337486.2021.1879492","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2021.1879492","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article juxtaposes the procedures and narratives by which US and Israeli political cultures mediate situations of prisoners of war (POWs) during protracted wars. In protracted wars, repatriation is independent of reconciliation processes, with no international contracts governing the ethics of asymmetric prisoner exchange. Empirically, this article examines political cultures by analyzing news reports of Bowe Bergdahl (USA) and Gilad Shalit (Israel), who were imprisoned and repatriated during the US war in Afghanistan, and the Israel/Palestine conflict, respectively. Theoretically, this article (1) Situates POW affairs as highlighting a contradiction between two ideals: casualty aversion and self-sacrifice. (2) Relates POW affairs to scholarship on military-to-civilian transitions, and harnesses van Gennep’s phases of separation, liminality and reintegration, to analyze transitions as experiences of collectives, and not of soldiers. The analysis shows that US media accounts depict both the war in Afghanistan and the three phases of transition as controlled by individuals’ actions. Israeli accounts, by contrast, employ passive terminology when mediating both conflicts and POW affairs. Both political cultures develop temporal pattens to regulate the mutual obligations pertaining to soldiers, publics and states: a lingering military trial in the USA, and a new conceptualization of abduction in Israel. Arguing that temporality and morality are interlinked due to the open duration of current conflicts, this article suggests a definition of protracted wars that highlights this reciprocity between open-endedness, disrupted ceremonies, and moral changes: from rescuing soldiers to questioning the convention of obligatory rescue.","PeriodicalId":37527,"journal":{"name":"Critical Military Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"365 - 384"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23337486.2021.1879492","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47366805","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Transnational militarism and ethnic nationalism: South Korean involvements in the Vietnam and Iraq wars","authors":"N. Kim, Seungsook Moon","doi":"10.1080/23337486.2021.1875110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2021.1875110","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Using South Korea’s involvement in the Vietnam and Iraq Wars as case studies, we explore transnational militarism as a salient (often neglected) force of globalization that has shaped the construction and modification of national identity. Building on the theoretical framework of ‘militarized modernity’ and insights from critical studies of militarism, we examine the effect of two features of transnational militarism on the construction of South Korea’s sense of a national ‘we’: discursive representation of national interest in participating in these wars and actual and imagined encounters with ‘Others’ mediated by transnational militarism. We argue that while the Vietnam War participation was instrumental to the construction of the anticommunist, capitalist, and militarized nation in the context of the Cold War, the Iraq War participation a generation later contributed to the emergence of a cosmopolitan nationalism that challenged the views from the Cold War era. We identify South Korea’s citizen-led democratization as a major contributing factor for different modes of engagements with transnational wars, in association with shifting geopolitics.","PeriodicalId":37527,"journal":{"name":"Critical Military Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"409 - 427"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23337486.2021.1875110","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42068686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Visualizations of the small military drone: normalization through ‘naturalization’","authors":"Anna Jackman","doi":"10.1080/23337486.2020.1846955","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2020.1846955","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT We are in the midst of a global turn to the drone. Responding to the ‘unmanning’ of contemporary warfare, interdisciplinary scholarship has interrogated the human operators and non-human actors underpinning the drone, and their wide-ranging ethical, geopolitical, and legal implications. A key facet of extant drone debates surrounds drone vision – both as it operationally visualizes and is fetishized. While comparatively nascent, scholars have begun to explore how drones are instead visualized across particular media. In this article I identify two lacuna within extant drone scholarship: first a lack of attentiveness to small military drones, which while comprising the majority of global military arsenals remain comparatively absent from scholarly analysis; and second, a need to attend to a greater diversity of visual representations of the drone. In response, this article explores promotional visualizations of small military drones as they are ethnographically-encountered at a key site through which their usage is compelled and their functioning enabled – the defence tradeshow. In so doing, I identify three central frames through which the drone is repeatedly represented therein. I argue that these frames both engage and employ visual conventions associated with ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’ in order to ‘naturalize’ and normalize the drone in as-yet unaccounted ways. Approaching the drone through the current, yet under-examined, visual milieu of the defence environments in which it is promoted, the article contributes to both interdisciplinary drone scholarship, and literatures exploring the visual cultures of militarism more widely.","PeriodicalId":37527,"journal":{"name":"Critical Military Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":"339 - 364"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/23337486.2020.1846955","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48758125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}