Exercising war: How tactical and operational modelling shape and reify military practice

Öberg, Dan

doi:10.1177/0967010619890196

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 37 publications

(44 reference statements)

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“…The study of recreational games in critical security studies and international relations has proliferated over the last decade (Berents and Keogh, 2018;Brown, 2017;Ciută, 2016;Jarvis and Robinson, 2021;Robinson, 2015Robinson, , 2016Salter, 2011). More recently, scholars have begun to examine the military applications of gaming (Hirst, 2020(Hirst, , 2021(Hirst, , 2022Öberg, 2020;Robinson, 2019), an area of study that had broadly lain dormant since the publication of the second edition of James Der Derian's book Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network in 2009. Outside the field, important work has similarly traced the relationship between the military and entertainment spheres (Lenoir, 2000;Stahl, 2010).…”

Section: Pharmacotic Wargamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pharmacotic wargames: Military play as ritual sacrifice

Hirst,

George

2024

Security Dialogue

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This article argues that the analytic of pharmacotic war can render visible a logic of ritual sacrifice in the US military’s use of games to attract, produce, and recycle war-fighters. Identifying the ancient framing of the pharmakon – a substance or process that functions as at once drug, poison, and cure – it shows how games function paradoxically to draw in, produce, and rehabilitate military life. The article makes this case by tracing the roots of Kenneth MacLeish’s ‘churn of mobilization and demobilization’ beyond the military’s instrumental calculations of institutional self-perpetuation, showing that this churn functions according to a logic of pharmacotic sacrifice that is not incidental to, but rather built into, their routine operation. It argues that (ex-)war-fighters function as a contemporary equivalent of the ancient pharmakoi, scapegoated and sacrificed figures into whom a polis poured its guilt and dysfunction in an act of ritual purification. Though rejecting any linear genealogy or transhistorical Western way of war, it identifies powerful resonances between the ancient pharmakoi and (ex-)war-fighters today. Drawing on extensive interviews with US military gamers and veterans, the article sheds light on the growing influence of games on the attraction, production, and recycling of (ex-)war-fighters in the 21st century. At the same time, by tracing the purificatory expulsion of war-fighters, it contributes a novel theorization of the pharmacotic logic of the US military’s war-making apparatus.

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Section: Pharmacotic Wargamesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pharmacotic wargames: Military play as ritual sacrifice

Hirst,

George

2024

Security Dialogue

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“…Higuchi notes that Japanese pop culture is particularly useful for analyzing Japanese nationalism, and that nationalist manga has helped to popularize right-wing issues and bring them to a wider audience (Higuchi, 2014). In analyzing this material, we strive to understand how activism is defined and represented, as well as how activists act towards the world (Milliken, 1999; see also Johnstone, 2018; Öberg, 2019, 2020). The study of micro-practices represented in popular culture may enable a better understanding of how everyday life contains engagements with political activism (see Rowley & Weldes, 2012).…”

Section: The Micro-practices Of Female Japanese Nationalistsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Female Nationalist Activism in Japan: Truth-Telling Through Everyday Micro-Practices

Öberg

Hagström

2022

Alternatives: Global, Local, Political

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There is an emerging debate about the role and importance of women in right-wing nationalist movements. Drawing on research that highlights the need to study such women as active and complex political agents, this article examines a phenomenon that has previously received little attention—the activism of female Japanese nationalists. We approach the question of how such activism is practiced by analyzing a group interview with female nationalists, a nationalist manga centering on women’s experiences, and autobiographic books on such activism by and for Japanese women. The article contributes by arguing that female nationalist agency in Japan is a complex phenomenon, which is enacted through everyday micro-practices. It outlines how female nationalist activism draws upon and enhances, as well as challenges and transcends, a traditional Japanese “housewife identity.” As such, the female Japanese nationalist is imagined as having access to certain truths. She takes on the role of “truth-teller,” who is playing a strategic role in “waking people up” to the nationalist cause by voicing anger but also making space for a more “joyful,” “cute,” and inconspicuous everyday activism.

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“…Yet, by turning potentially catastrophic threats into vulnerabilities to be mitigated, preparedness makes future uncertainty available to intervention in the present (Lakoff, 2007: 253). As discussed by Dan Öberg (2020: 150) in his work on how military training enables the reproduction of practices of war, a central aim of exercises is to constitute anticipatory practices that involve forecasting and preemption. Here, simulation exercises can activate the experience both of having access to the future and of acting out uncertain future threats (Adey and Anderson, 2012: 102).…”

Section: Everyday Practices Of Policingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing threatening uncertainties: Counterterrorism and everyday practices of preemptive policing in Ghana

Christensen

2022

Security Dialogue

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The preemptive turn in counterterrorism has turned future uncertainties into key objects of contemporary security governance. From an empirically grounded perspective, this article contributes with novel insight into the everyday practices of preemptive politics. Focusing on Ghana as a unique case through which to trace how the mobilization of affect accelerates the transnational proliferation of counterterrorism measures and the commodification of future uncertainty, it shows how the global War on Terror has shaped the emergence of counterterrorism in a context characterized by the absence of terrorist attacks on home soil. Exploring how preemption animates outreach activities, simulation exercises, and nighttime patrols, it shows how police officers attempt to make uncertain futures tangible and actionable through practices of imagination and performance. Aimed at assessing terrorist threats that have not (yet) materialized, the article argues that preemptive policing practices cause a conflation of ordinary crime and extraordinary terror that inflates already existing uncertainties and subverts the institutional security logics of preemption.

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Exercising war: How tactical and operational modelling shape and reify military practice

Cited by 7 publications

References 37 publications

Pharmacotic wargames: Military play as ritual sacrifice

Pharmacotic wargames: Military play as ritual sacrifice

Female Nationalist Activism in Japan: Truth-Telling Through Everyday Micro-Practices

Assessing threatening uncertainties: Counterterrorism and everyday practices of preemptive policing in Ghana

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