The lived body, everyday and generative powers of war: toward an embodied ontology of war as experience

Abstract

This paper examines the emergence of the corporeal turn in International Relations (IR) research on war. It argues that a lack of a sustained ontological investigation leaves open two theoretical gaps, which impedes the development of an embodied theory of war: (1) the core concept of a body and its linkages with war are underdeveloped, and (2) existing research on the embodiment of war slips into discursivism or empiricism. The paper invites the corporeal turn scholarship to bring ontology to the forefront of IR war research and to expand a pool of theoretical resources for analyzing the corporeality of war by turning to existential phenomenology. With the phenomenological concept of the lived body placed at the heart of war ontology, war is conceived as a complex social institution with the generative powers born out of the capacity of the violent politics of injury to disrupt the lived bodies' sense-making and agential capacities, on the one hand, and the potential of individuals and communities to reclaim their interpretive integrity and agency through embodied everyday practices, on the other.

Breathless war: martial bodies, aerial experiences and the atmospheres of empire

“…Inspired by Scarry's (1985) understanding of war as premised on the injuring of human bodies and the incontestable reality of bodily suffering, the tradition of 'war as experience' (e.g. Dyvik, 2016;McSorley, 2013McSorley, , 2014Narozhna, 2022;Palestrino, 2022;Parashar, 2013;Sylvester, 2011aSylvester, , 2012Sylvester, , 2013aSylvester, , 2013b seems to be importantly informed by the assumption of experience as a fundamental feature of human body-subjects. In Sylvester's words, 'to study war as experience requires that human bodies come into focus as units that have war agency and are also prime targets of war violence and war enthusiasms' (Sylvester, 2012(Sylvester, : 484, 2013b.…”

Bodies Coming Apart and Bodies Becoming Parts: Widening, Deepening, and Embodying Ontological (In)Security in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…To provide an overview of the works inspiring and enabling the embodiment of OSS done through this article, IR as a discipline has recently begun to shine a light on bodies by centering them explicitly entangled in machineries of violent warfare and atrocity (see, e.g., Auchter 2014 ; Fierke 2014 ; Wilcox 2015a ; Fishel 2017 ; Baker 2020 ; Epstein 2021 ; Narozhna 2021 ; Purnell 2021 ). In particular, Wilcox's intervention Bodies of Violence ( Wilcox 2015a ) has interrogated contemporary practices of violent warfare and security as a means to explicitly theorize the subject of violence as embodied, making the central argument that “the bodies that practices of violence take as their object are deeply political bodies, constituted in reference to historical political conditions while at the same time acting upon our world” ( 2015a , 3).…”