War Experiences/War Practices/War Theory

Abstract

This article challenges International Relations to turn its view of war around and start not with states, militaries, strategies, conventional security issues or weapons, and not with the common main aim of establishing causes of war. The challenge is to conceptualise war as a subset of social relations of experience, on the grounds that war cannot be fully apprehended unless it is studied up from people who experience it in myriad ways and not only down from abstract places of International Relations theory. To study war as experience requires that the body come into focus as a unit that has war agency and is also a prime target of war violence. It also requires exploration of the concept of experience. Using an exemplary texts approach, the article briefly reminds us where the field is in its war concerns, before noting work on contemporary wars conducted under the flag of feminist International Relations, where experience and bodies have always been front and centre, and where a social war studies emphasis is developing. The discussion then raises definitional complexities that must be addressed and suggests areas where various International Relations traditions could collaborate with feminist International Relations and fields like anthropology to study the social relations of war. Keywords body, experience, warWhat if International Relations (IR) were to turn its usual view of war around and start not with states, fundamentalist organisations, strategies, conventional security issues and a weapons system, and not with the aim of establishing the causes of war, as has so often been the case? What if we think of war as experience, as something ordinary people observe and suffer physically and emotionally depending on their locations? To date, much of IR has been operating comfortably in a world of theoretical abstractions -states, systems, power,

Of bats and bodies: methods for reading and writing embodiment

“…Critical war studies teaches us that war is 'generative' and that 'we cannot take for granted the identities of the entities which engage in it, nor define its geographic and temporal scope solely in terms of sovereign territorial states and their battle casualties' (Barkawi, 2011: 710; see also Brighton, 2011;Sylvester, 2012). A recognition of this should also compel us to see how war, and in my case how embodied selves and stories write war, can be unpacked through exploring the connectivity between these bodies, lives, and stories.…”

Experiencing the end and afterlives of International Relations/theory

“…I argue there that camp myopias and embedded abstractionism keep IR remote from the world of people and their international relations (Sylvester, 2012). Chris Reus-Smit argues there against that type of view.…”

The Gender Politics of “Ground Truth” in the Military Dissent Movement: The Power and Limits of Authenticity Claims Regarding War

“…7 Implicit in any claim to authenticity is the existence of a fake opposite (Johnson 2003: 3). Ground truth, itself part of a lexicon of war-fighting, becomes refigured as a mode of dissent which works by revealing the uneven relationship between war as it is known in established 'narratives concerning armed force and war' (Barkawi and Brighton 2011: 140) (often presented in the discourse of military dissent as false, the product of lies or otherwise detached from reality) and war as it is authentically experienced, known and lived by those tasked with fighting (Sylvester 2012;Parashar 2013).…”

“…Secondly, recent work has foregrounded war not as (solely) a state concern but as something experienced by -and more richly understood through -people (Sylvester 2012;McSorely 2012aMcSorely , 2012bParashar 2013;Holmqvist 2013). Focusing on war as experience entails turning attention to those people who 'fight/suffer/ [and] live inside wars' (Parashar 2013: 617).…”