Critical Military Studies Issues 2016

Volume Two, Issues One and Two

Double special issue Embodying Militarism: Exploring the Spaces and Bodies In-between guest edited by Synne L. Dyvik & Lauren Greenwood creates an inter-disciplinary space to explore embodied experiences of militarism, militarization, and war, and some of the challenges of studying the military. It features original articles from Peter Adey, David Denney, Rikke Jensen & Alasdair Pinkerton on the embodied-researcher experience of visiting a Royal Navy warship, from academic Sarah Bulmer and veteran and scholar David Jackson on the need for new ways of generating knowledge about embodied experience,  from Jesse Crane-Seeber on sexuality, sexiness, and militarized bodies, from Synne L. Dyvik on methods for reading and writing embodiment, from Harriet Gray on the embodied experience of attempting to occupy the spaces in between collaboration and disengagement in conducting feminist-informed, critical research on the British military, from Lauren Greenwood on how a specialized and masculinized form of military agency can  get written into the body, and from Kevin McSorley on the intensity, joy and politics of doing British Military Fitness. The special issue also features Encounters pieces from Catherine Baker on how writing about embodiment as an act of compression and translation, from Torika Bolatagici on Fijian military embodiment in artistic and scholarly inquiry, from Susanna Hast on songwriting, dance, performance and international relations, and an extract and commentary from scholar and veteran Pip Thornton on the poetry and prose she wrote in the years following her deployment to Iraq in 2003. 

Volume two, issue three

In this issue Brianne P. Gallagher examines veterans’ experiences on returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the bureaucratic and gendered systems of the military-medical complex they have to navigate. Dan Öberg's article stages an ethnographic encounter with a Namibian monument: Heroes’ Acre analysing it and other memorials by extension as 'a guarantee for war'. Markus Kienscherf analyses western counterinsurgency as a neoliberal assemblage of war, police and government ‘at a distance’ and Wendy M. Christensen explores how the military relies on gender inequality to recruit new enlistees through parents, specifically focusing on mothers. David Mutimer highlights militarization in Canadian popular culture during the war in Afghanistan, Marc von Boemcken examines the value of returning to the Enlightenment’s view of war as unknowable chaos and disorder, and Bryan Mabee invites us pay more attention to the historical institutionalization of military power as central to understanding its durability. In Encounters Federica Caso's review essay examines the aesthetics of militarism in Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca L. Stein's book, Digital militarism: Israel’s occupation in the social media age, Rhys Crilley reviews two recent books suggesting how militarism can be successfully challenged, and Matthew Flintham offers insights into how conflict produces and redefines space through his photo essay focusing on a recently demilitarized zone in Norway.