War Experiences/War Practices/War Theory

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 40, Issue 3, 2012, Pages 483-502

  Sylvester, Christine ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF GOTHENBURG   (Sweden)

Author keywords

Body; Experience; War

Indexed keywords

EID: 84861863869     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0305829812442211     Document Type: Article

References (144)

1. Richard Ned Lebow, Why Nations Fight (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010);
2. Jack Levy and William R. Thompson, Causes of War (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010);
3. John Vasquez, The War Puzzle Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
4. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).
5. Brigitte Holzner, 'Wars, Bodies, and Development', in Experiencing War, ed. Christine Sylvester (London: Routledge, 2011), 42-63.
6. Rita Abramson and Michael C. Williams, Security beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010);
7. Anna Leander, ed., Commercializing Security in Europe: Political Consequences for Peace and Reconciliation Operations (London: Routledge, 2012);
8. Allison Stanger, One Nation under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
9. Rosemary Shinko, 'Ethics after Liberalism: Why (Autonomous) Bodies Matter', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38, no. 3 (2011): 723-745.
10. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The Predictioneer's Game: Using Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2010).
11. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 2000);
12. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002);
13. William Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
14. Mary Caprioli, 'Gender Equality and State Aggression: The Impact of Domestic Gender Equality on State First Use of Force', International Interactions 29, no. 3 (2003): 195-214;
15. Charli Carpenter, 'Women and Children First: Gender, Norms, and Humanitarian Evacuation in the Balkans, 1991-1995', International Organization 57, no. 4 (2003): 661-94.
16. C.A.S.E. Collective, 'Critical Approaches to Security in Europe: A Networked Manifesto', Security Dialogue 37, no. 4 (2006): 443-87;
17. Christine Sylvester, 'Anatomy of a Footnote', Security Dialogue 38, no. 4 (2007): 557-8.
18. James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial Media-Entertainment Network, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge, 2009).
19. The larger project is called Experiencing War. It consists of periodic workshops with an expanding interdisciplinary group of scholars, a book series on War, Politics, Experience (Routledge), and a number of recent and immediately forthcoming publications on aspects of war as experience: Sylvester, Experiencing War;
20. Christine Sylvester, War as Experience: Contributions from International Relations and Feminist Analysis (London: Routledge, 2012);
21. Inger Skjelsbaek, The Political Psychology of Rape: Bosnia and Herzegovina (London: Routledge, 2012);
22. Tina Monaghan, Gender, Agency and War: The Maternalized Body in US Foreign Policy (London: Routledge, 2012);
23. Kevin McSorley, ed., War and the Body: Militarisation, Practice and Experience (London: Routledge, 2012).
24. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, 'The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy', Middle East Policy 13, no. 3 (2006): 29-87;
25. Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era, 2nd edn (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006);
26. Tarak Barkawi and Shane Brighton, 'Powers of War: Fighting, Knowledge, and Critique', International Political Sociology 5, no. 2 (2011): 126-43;
27. Karin Fierke, 'Whereof We Can Speak, Thereof We Must Not Be Silent: Trauma, Political Solipsism and War', Review of International Studies 30 (2004): 471-91;
28. Michael Shapiro, 'The Presence of War: Here and Elsewhere', International Political Sociology 5, no. 2 (2011): 109-25;
29. Megan MacKenzie, 'Securitization and Desecuritization: Female Soldiers and the Reconstruction of Women in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone', Security Studies 18, no. 2 (2009): 241-61;
30. Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern, The Complexity of Violence: A Critical Analysis of Sexual Violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (Stockholm: SIDA, 2010).
31. Mats Utas, 'Victimcy, Girlfriending, Soldiering: Tactic Agency in a Young Woman's Social Navigation of the Liberian War Zone', Anthropological Journal 78, no. 2 (2005): 403-30;
32. Carolyn Nordstrom, A Different Kind of War Story (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997);
33. Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
34. John Mearsheimer, 'The False Promise of International Institutions', International Security 19, no. 3 (1994-95): 9.
35. Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962);
36. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
37. John Herz, 'The Security Dilemma in International Relations: Background and Present Problems', International Relations 17 (2003): 411-16.
38. Mearsheimer and Walt, 'The Israel Lobby'.
39. Stephen Walt, 'Why They Hate Us (II): How Many Muslims Has the US Killed in the Past 30 Years?', Foreign Policy 30 (November 2009), available at: www.foreignpolicy.com.
40. Steve Smith, 'Hegemonic Power, Hegemonic Discipline? The Superpower Status of the American Study of International Relations', in Global Voices: Dialogues in International Relations, ed. James Rosenau (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), 55-82.
41. Kaldor, New and Old Wars.
42. Ibid., 9.
43. Janie Leatherman, Sexual Violence and Armed Conflict (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011);
44. Elizabeth Wood, 'Rape Is Not Inevitable during War', in Women and War: Power and Protection in the 21st Century, eds Kathleen Kuehnast, Chantal de Jonge Oudraat and Helga Hernes (Washington: The United States Institute of Peace Press, 2011), 37-63.
45. P.W. Singer, Children at War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
46. Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 10.
47. Chan and Kwon made these critiques at a New Wars workshop held at Gothenburg University, April 2011, and at a roundtable discussion on the project and the book, Experiencing War, to which both had contributed, sponsored by IDEAS at the London School of Economics, January 2011.
48. Stephen Chan, 'On the Uselessness of New Wars Theory: Lessons from African Conflicts', and Heonik Kwon, 'Experiencing the Cold War', both in Sylvester, Experiencing War, 94-102 and 79-93
49. Tarak Barkawi, 'Connection and Constitution: Locating War in Globalization Studies', Globalizations 1, no. 2 (2004): 155-70.
50. Barkawi and Shane, 'Powers of War'.
51. Shane Brighton, 'Three Propositions on the Phenomenology of War', International Political Sociology 5, no. 1 (2011): 103.
52. I am extending Carolyn Nordstrom's notion of shadows of war cast from off-grid political economies of war to IR's many shadowlands of international relations.
53. Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).
54. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007);
55. Bina D'Costa, 'Marginalized Identity: New Frontiers of Research for IR?', in Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, eds Brooke Ackerly, Maria Stern and Jacqui True (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 129-152;
56. Tami Jacoby, 'From the Trenches: Dilemmas of Feminist IR Fieldwork', in Ackerly et al., Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, 153-173;
57. Miranda Alison, Women and Violence: Female Combatants in Ethno-National Conflict (London: Routledge, 2009);
58. Swati Parashar, 'Feminist International Relations and Militant Women: Case Studies from Sri Lanka and Kashmir', Cambridge Review of International Affairs 22, no. 2 (2009): 235-56;
59. Baaz and Stern, The Complexity of Violence;
60. Megan MacKenzie, 'Securitization and Desecuritization';
61. MacKenzie, 'Ruling Exceptions: Female Soldiers and Everyday Experiences of Civil Conflict', in Sylvester, Experiencing War, 64-78;
62. MacKenzie A, Female Soldiers in Sierra leone: Sex, Security, and Post-Conflict Development (New York: New York University Press, 2012);
63. Skjelsbaek A, The Political Psychology of War Rape;
64. Annica Kronsell, Gender, Sex, and the Postnational Defense: Militarism and Peacekeeping (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012);
65. Cami Rowe, Anti-War Actions and the Performative Construction of the War on Terror (London: Routledge, forthcoming);
66. Sungju Park-Kang, 'Gendered Agency in Contested Truths: The Case of Hyunhee Kim (KAL858)', in Gender, Agency and Political Violence, eds Linda Åhäll and Laura J. Shepherd (London: Palgrave, 2012).
67. MacKenzie, Female Soldiers.
68. Baaz and Stern, The Complexity of Violence, and 'Why Do Soldiers Rape? Masculinity, Violence, and Sexuality in the Armed Forces in the Congo (DRC)', International Studies Quarterly 53 (2009): 495-518.
69. Dubravka Zarkov, The Body of War: Media, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Break-Up of Yugoslavia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
70. Baaz and Stern, The Complexity of Violence, 57.
71. Annick Wibben, Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach (London: Routledge, 2010);
72. Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry, Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics (London: Zed, 2007);
73. Anna Agathangelou, 'Bodies of Desire, Terror and the War in Eurasia: Impolite Disruptions of (Neo) Liberal Internationalism, Neoconservatism and the "New" Imperium', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38, no. 3 (2010): 693-722.
74. Maria Stern, Naming Security - Constructing Identity: 'Mayan Women' in Guatemala on the Eve of 'Peace' (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
75. Zarkov, The Body of War.
76. Jill Gibbon, 'Dilemmas of Drawing War', in Sylvester, Experiencing War, 103-117.
77. P.W. Singer, Children at War (Berkeley: University of California, 2006).
78. Kwon A, The Other Cold War.
79. Erin Manning, Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2007).
80. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313.
81. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 67, emphasis added.
82. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic Books, 1987).
83. MacKenzie, Loving your Enemy.
84. Jean Bethke Elshtain, 'Against the New Utopianism', Ethics and International Affairs 19, no. 2 (2005): 91-95.
85. Kimberly Hutchings, 'Gendered Humanitarianism: Reconsidering the Ethics of War', in Sylvester, Experiencing War, 28-41.
86. Stern and Baaz have observed a gap in the DRC between the good intentions of UN agencies in emphasising counselling for raped women and the types of assistance many raped women there say they actually need, such as financial support for their children (personal conversations).
87. Utas A, 'Victimcy'.
88. Baaz and Stern, The Complexity of Violence.
89. Shapiro, 'The Presence of War';
90. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
91. Another anti-war group of women, Code Pink, purposely conflates the private and the public realms of femininity' into a powerful public anti-war strategy. For a participant-observational study of Code Pink.
92. Rowe, Anti-War Actions.
93. Shapiro, 'The Presence of War', 112.
94. Ibid.
95. Fierke, 'Whereof We Can Speak'.
96. Ibid., 479.
97. Christine Sylvester, 'Whither the International at the End of IR?', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 35, no. 3 (2007): 551-73.
98. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
99. Concerning the latter, and on a personal note only, the dailiness of living and working in three European countries since 2000 (the Netherlands, the UK and Sweden) has taught me how omnipresent Europe's experiences with past wars can be.
100. I have heard football (soccer) fans make loud nasty sounds when German teams come onto the pitch, and have noted what seems an extraordinary interest in revisiting World War II via BBC programming. I am increasingly convinced that wars do not end. They settle into the bodies of ordinary and elite people who keep the replay at airport security screenings everywhere, everyday.
101. War as a social institution is also pertinent, but space constraints preclude that discussion. An elaboration of all the points made in this article can be found in Sylvester, War as Experience.
102. Judith Grant, Fundamental Feminisms: Contesting the Core Concepts of Feminist Theory (New York: Routledge, 1993), 30.
103. Sociologist Cynthia Cockburn has recently summarised feminist standpoint thinking as "an account of the world constituted by (and constitutive of) a collective subject, a group. It is derived from life activities and achieved in struggle.' The group-identified nature of standpoint thinking makes it somewhat less useful for studies of war and experience, unless one turns an empirical question about common experiences of war into an assumption.
104. 'Gender Relations as Causal in Militarization and War: A Feminist Standpoint', in Making Gender, Making War: Violence, Military and Peacekeeping Practices, eds Annica Kronsell and Erika Svedberg (London: Routlege, 2012), 20.
105. Parashar A, 'Feminist International Relations'; Paul Higate, ed., Military Masculinities (New York: Praeger, 2002);
106. Jane Parpart and Marysia Zalewski, eds, Rethinking the Man Question: Sex, Gender, and Violence in International Relations (London: Zed Books, 2008).
107. Vivienne Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics, 2nd edn (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
108. Brighton A, 'Three Propositions'.
109. Ibid., 102.
110. Utas A, 'Victimcy'.
111. Brighton A, 'Three Propositions', 104.
112. Utas A, 'Victimcy', 426.
113. Brighton A, 'Three Propositions', 101.
114. Yuval Noah Harari, 'Combat Flow: Military, Political, and Ethical Dimensions of Subjective Well-Being in War', Review of General Psychology 12 (2008): 253.
115. For example Jeanne Nakamura and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 'The Concept of Flow', in Handbook of Positive Psychology, eds C.R. Snyder and S.J. Lopez (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 89-105.
116. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex' (New York: Routledge, 1993), 2.
117. Rosi Braidotti, 'The Politics of Ontological Difference', in Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Teresa Brennan (London: Routledge, 1989), 93.
118. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 288.
119. Noted again in her recent book: Cynthia Enloe, Nimo's War, Emma's War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010).
120. Joshua Goldstein, War and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 2.
121. Shannon Winnubst, 'Vampires, Anxieties and Dreams: Race and Sex in the Contemporary United States', Hypatia 18, no. 3 (2003): 6.
122. Brian Massumi, 'The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat', in The Affect Theory Reader, eds Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 54.
123. Mearsheimer A and Walt A, 'The Israel Lobby';
124. Bueno de Mesquita, The Predictioneer's Game;
125. Jonathan Mercer, 'Rationality and Psychology in International Politics', International Organization 59, no. 1 (2005): 77-106.
126. For example Mick Dillon and Julian Reid, 'Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security, and War', Millennium: Journal of International Studies 30, no. 1 (2001): 41-66.
127. Neta Crawford, 'The Passion of World Politics: Propositions on Emotion and Emotional Relationships', International Security 24, no. 4 (2000): 116-56.
128. Ibid., 125.
129. Christine Sylvester, ed., 'The Forum: Emotion and the Feminist IR Researcher', International Studies Review 13, no. 4 (2011): 687-708.
130. Sandra Marshall, 'Super-Human Researchers in Feminist IR Narratives', 688-690;
131. MacKenzie, 'Ruling Exceptions'.
132. Swati Parashar, 'Embodied Otherness" and Negotiations of Difference', 696-699;
133. Shirin Saeidi and Heather Turcotte, 'Politicizing Emotions: Historicizing Affective Exchanges and Feminist Gatherings', 693-695 (all in Sylvester, 'The Forum: Emotion and the Feminist IR Researcher').
134. Connolly, Neuropolitics, 13.
135. Donna Haraway, 'A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s', Australian Feminist Studies 2, no. 4 (1987): 1-42.
136. P.W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Penguin, 2009).
137. Daniel Drezner, Theories of International Politics and Zombies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011).
138. Pop singer Lady Gaga calls her fans monsters and encourages everyone to welcome diversity; her video for "Born that Way' shows her being born as a composite, genderless creature. Pink's lyrics advocate inclusiveness, non-discrimination and acceptance of outcasts ("too school for cool') in her song "Raise your Glass'.
139. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
140. Recent workshops on Experiencing War held at the University of Gothenburg (2011) and Lund University (2012) have focused on experienced-based critiques of the "new wars' writings and on various masquerades of war.
141. Some American constructivists note a bias in constructivist research towards studying the nice norms of international relations, like human rights.
142. Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, 'Taking Stock: The Constructivist Research Program in International Relations and Comparative Politics', Annual Review of Political Science 4 (2001): 404.
143. Across Europe, constructivist approaches to security issues can also resonate with the nicer norms foregrounded in peace research.
144. Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen, The Evolution of International Security Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 191.