‘We Are Going to War.’ Narratives of Self-Defence and Responsibility in Afghanistan War Documentaries

Most chapters in this volume focus on diplomatic and scholarly war discourses. In contrast, Axel Heck and Gabi Schlag take a closer look at cultural representations of war: In this chapter, they show how two documentary films about the Afghanistan war—Restrepo (D: Sebastian Junger/Tim Hetherington, 2010) and its sequel Korengal (D: Sebastian Junger, 2014)—craft justification narratives that reproduce the normativity of a global order based on self-defence and responsibility. These documentaries offer rare opportunities to see how the ‘managers of violence’ act in combat and how they reflect upon the normativity of their doings. Heck and Schlag argue that the experience of those who carry out the ethically and emotionally ambivalent business of war and suffer from the traumatic consequences of violence opens up a new perspective on justification as documentaries like Restrepo and Korengal create a publicly shared imaginary of war. By making these soldiers, their bodies, and emotions visible and giving voice to them, documentary films represent a subjective position that is often neglected and marginalized in IR approaches to the justification of war.