A new book symposium launches today, in which guest contributors consider Katharine Millar’s Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community (Oxford, 2022). Katharine is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics. Her broad research interests lie in examining the gendered cultural narratives underlying the modern collective use of force. Her on-going research examines gender, race (particularly whiteness), militarism, and contemporary populism(s); gender and cybersecurity; and the politics of hypocrisy. Dr. Millar has also published on female combatants, gendered representations of violent death, military and civilian masculinity, and critical conceptions of militarism. Support the Troops won the 2023 Canadian Political Science Association Prize and received honourable mention in the 2023 LHM Ling First Book Prize from the British International Studies Association.

Commentaries will follow all this week, with a rejoinder from Katharine at the end.

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There are two(ish) stories to tell about my recent book, Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community. Both are true. The first is the fairly classic identification of a social scientific puzzle. A variety of surveys show that in the years following the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, some reasonably large portion of citizens of the invading coalition states regularly thanked military personnel for serving in wars they themselves opposed. On its face, that seems surprising – a new iteration on the social scientific preoccupation with why people act inconsistently (or, if you like, though I wouldn’t put it this way, irrationally).

The second story is about being a teenager in rural Canada at the time of the invasion of Afghanistan. I watched the deployment of enlisted young men and the sudden, accompanying proliferation of yellow ribbons and calls to “support the troops” (StT). Back then, I was upset by the idea that to care for people you knew, you had to sign off on a war against people far away. From the perspective of the present, I see how our social relations were inflected by the war, as love for specific deployed young men, and concern for their families, came to be expressed in the display of symbolism assimilated to support for the military. Those practices arguably provide a fairly simple response to the first puzzle. People support the troops because they feel they should, because they love and care for military personnel, because they live in community. People support the troops because it seems right.

That last bit brings me to another, perhaps less salutary story (story three? story 2.5?) about the framing of my argument. When I began the research that would become the book, academic and policy experts were politely skeptical that “supporting the troops” was interesting or important. As with people in my hometown, it seemed obvious to them that, in the context of a contested war, people would support the troops. In their reading (note how I’m sneaking the alternative explanation in early), supporting the troops was just an epiphenomenon of the unpopularity of the war in Iraq. In hindsight, the iteration of normalized morality of supporting the troops across my Canadian hometown and my professional academic context in the UK speaks to the hegemony and blurry, transnational boundaries of StT, as well as its entanglement with liberal democracy. At the time, though, I was just mad. And a significant motivation for the project became establishing that “supporting the troops” mattered as a distinct socio-political phenomenon in its own right.

That frustration, however, did help me identify what became the deeper puzzle of the book: Why does supporting the troops in the context of unpopular war seem logical and moral? What do “support the troops” discourses and practices tell us about the relationship between the war, military service, and citizenship in liberal democracies? What are the consequences of “supporting the troops” for democratic dissent and the liberal use of force? The book also attempts to think through the question posed explicitly posed by the politely skeptical experts and implicitly by my hometown: what else are people supposed to do?

To run through the basics, I argue that normative citizenship in “Western” liberal democracies is undergoing a transformation away from a masculinized expectation of military service to a corollary, similarly masculinised expectation of military support. Support is the new service.

Empirically, the book examines “supporting the troops” in both the specific context of the US and UK during the early stages (2001-2010) of the so-called “global war on terror” and as a broader reflection of civil-military relations in contemporary liberal democracies. Methodologically, the argument rests upon a thematic discourse analysis of “supporting the troops” across a large volume of texts – approximately 9000 pages, with 3258 paragraph units – that I use to identify broad discursive patterns, within which I then contextualize close reading, interpretive claims. The texts come from print media, government, military officials, peace and anti-war organizations and military support charities (five of each for each country case). (The book has an extensive methodology appendix that I swear is secretly interesting).

Substantively, the book begins from the premise that there is a growing disconnect between enduring cultural narratives of war and contemporary “Western” (taking the term with appropriate caveats and cynicism) civil-military relations. In the past, it was assumed that all good citizens, as good men, would serve in the armed forces in wartime (Sasson-Levy 2003; Elshtain 1987). This obligation was ostensibly accepted in exchange for social and political rights. There is thus what I refer to as a “military contract” underlying “our” typical understanding of the liberal social contract. In the present, however, liberal democratic states increasingly rely on small, volunteer militaries deployed in distant wars of choice (Shaw 2005; Strachan 2013). “Our” cultural myths of “good wars” (Adams 1994) – think of WWII – teach us that everyone ought to serve. But today, “we” don’t.

To that end, I use “support the troops” to examine the paradoxes at the heart of liberalism’s relation to both violence and the military. Offering the concept of the “liberal military contract”, I make another intervention in the substantial body of work arguing that violence is not antithetical but central to liberalism (e.g. Lowe 2015; Losurdo 2014; Jahn 2005; Barkawi and Laffey 2005; Bhambra 2007; Jabri 2006). I re-read the classical liberal concept of “political obligation” through a critical, feminist lens, to demonstrate the centrality of martial violence to the way liberal political community functions and hangs together, thinking with Pateman 1985; Mills 2022; Brown 1998; and Cowen 2008. I theorize political obligation not as a negative duty to obey the law, but rather as a positive duty to engage in collective violence. As previously this obligation pertained to men, and as such is constituted as masculine, its gendered nature is key to understanding its power. Normative expectations of gender (and sexuality and race) – ostensibly “private” identities and considerations – are, in fact, fully public, and serve to obscure and legitimate the ideological discomfort in the liberal state requiring the very citizens it is founded to protect to risk their lives in its service.[i]  

I place “supporting the troops” in historical context, tracking the discourse’s emergence in the US and UK. The upshot is, by the end of the twentieth century, both states had moved from a reasonably long-standing suspicion of standing armies to the valorisation of the ideally masculine, heroic combat soldier in the post-war era, to the articulation of (a)politicised support for a new cultural figure, “the troops”. (As you might expect, Vietnam and mythologized, gendered ideas of civilian “betrayal” of the troops are quite important in the US (see Beamish et al 1995; Small 1988), as are the end of the Troubles and the Malvinas/Falklands war in the UK). I also present what I call the “aggregated” results of my thematic discourse analysis, using graphs to convey major patterns within key themes such as a) who supports the troops; b) why support the troops; c) how to support the troops; and d) the reasons for which the troops need support.

With that historical and empirical groundwork laid, I then argue that “supporting the troops” is an attempt to grapple with the gendered civilian unease regarding “good” citizenship and “good” masculinity in an era characterised by professional armed forces and (for people in the US and UK) distant wars. The military contract underwriting liberal democracy is fracturing. Seemingly-stable understandings of the relationship between military service, citizenship and gender norms – particularly idealised notions of masculinity – are being unsettled by changes in the nature of warfare. In the book, I refer to this disquiet about what it means to be a “good” citizen, “good” person, and, crucially, “good” man in a context where neither war nor military service easily align with existing cultural myths about wartime obligations and collective sacrifice as “gendered civilian anxiety”. (This also, to be honest, is a part of the argument I’d revisit. While I think this is an accurate recounting of what’s going on, the term “gendered anxiety” to me, now, has a potential current of essentialism at odds with how I think about gender and sexuality, and that doesn’t entirely match the other analytical and political investments of the project).

Substantively, “support the troops” discourses articulate several multi-layered, ostensibly apolitical representations of society’s implication in the collective use of force. In doing so, StT shifts the locus of normative citizenship (and, with it, normative public masculinity) from the now un-common experience of military service to the obligatory and easily accessible practice of support for the troops. Within the overarching dynamic, I identify a couple key complications and entailments of how the discourse works in naturalizing a particular configuration of normative gender, citizenship, and violence.

I look, for instance, at the meaning that adheres to “the troops”, as distinct cultural figure of war distinct from, and irreducible to, related martial figures such as the soldier, veteran, or even the institutional military. In contrast to typical understandings of individualized, heroic masculinity, I find that the troops are predominantly characterized by collectivity, passivity, and dependence. They are relationally feminized vis-à-vis supporters, “the soldier”, and even war. In doing so, StT discourse shifts the moral calculus of war from the ethics of killing distant, racialized others abroad to the maintenance of appropriate civil-military relations – of appropriate martial loyalty – within the polity. Supporting the troops is not predominantly about war at all, but rather society’s relationship to itself.

In a parallel move, I also unpack the meaning of “support”. I find that, perhaps unsurprisingly, a great deal of StT discourse is articulated in the contractarian idiom of liberal citizenship – though shifted, slightly, from the liberal military contract – such that instead of masculinised military service being “owed” to the polity, support is now “owed” to the troops. The gendering of this discourse, however, is ambivalent, as it continues to recognize masculinised military heroism, but without a commitment to the war. This is where a lot of “support the troops, but not the war” discourse falls. This form of StT discourse actually suggests that the heroism of “the troops” lies less in warfighting, than in agreeing to take on the burden of military service when others are not. It’s a form of protection from citizens’ own gendered military obligation, and a potential source of gendered guilt (see MacLeish 2013).

Importantly, two other logics of troop support – what I refer to as communitarian and altruistic – are also found in the discursive formation. Each offers an alternative reading of the meaning of support and its gendered relationship to the military: communitarian frames posit support as itself a masculinised form of war participation, while altruistic notions of support construct the troops as, in essence, the dependent and vulnerable, relationally feminized recipients of charity, requiring protection from masculinised, paternalistic benefactors. Now, of course, empirically, those ideal-typical logics don’t exist in neat, hermetically sealed packages; they’re intertwined, and reinforcing, and are often referenced in the same paragraph, if not sentence, by a single actor. The overall point, though, is that together, the three logics offer a means of (re?)masculinizing supportive civilians through gendered logics of contrast and association with the troops and the idealized soldier. The logics of gendered obligation do not so much supplant the mythical, gendered military contract as amend it, preserving its ideological viability. Hence: support is the new service.

This then brings me back to my animating conceptual interest (and, frankly, my favourite part of the argument): How do relations of solidaristic, violent obligation help the political community hang together? And what, if anything, does the “amendment” of the gendered liberal military contract mean for the liberal polity? I argue that StT is implicitly though powerfully produced as the both the foundational premise of the political community and its constitutive principle. To be in the political community is to support the troops. More precisely, I suggest that masculinised/ising martial solidarity has come to a) bound the liberal polity, determining who is “in” and, crucially, b) “redeem” the normative status of the liberal polity in the process, recovering from the dissonance of the fracturing martial contract. This latter, I think, is an important facet of the Orientalist, civilizational politics at work in legitimating the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq post-9/11. In addressing the fracture of the liberal military contract – and, in essence, doing masculinised martial solidarity “right” – the polity (and Western, liberal imperial order) re-establishes itself as worth saving.

It’s important to note, I think, that this idea of StT/gendered martial obligation producing the political community goes beyond the territorial boundaries of the nation-state. Despite the fact (or, more accurately, facilitated by the fact) that support looks voluntary, it can be expressed or projected as a means of recognizing/creating commonality (as in the case of the self-avowed liberal order) or as a means of imposing obligations as a vector of imperialism. More specifically, support was invoked both across publics in NATO and coalition states (e.g. a UK military charity opening an office in the US) and as an idiom for conveying the affective dimensions of inter-state alliance politics. Support operates as a form of gendered, transnational martial obligation, but also as a furtherance of colonial, White solidarity during the “global war on terror”.

This dynamic also, of course, pertains “domestically”, within the US and UK. It’s easily seen, for instance, in racist, Islamophobic demands that Muslim citizens explicitly affirm their loyalty (Youngs 2010; Abu-Bakare 2020)  – often through support for the troops and/or the wars. These demands, however, sit in tension with the oddly empty construction of support as both open and mandatory (i.e. everyone, even non-citizens, must do it) but “the troops” in line with the contemporary, multicultural rendering of liberal citizenship and military service, as open to peoples of all identities, communities, political affiliations, etc. “The troops” are, conceptually at least, able to accommodate substantive difference, while also being embedded in a universalized relation of “support” that remains inflected by racialized projections of enmity and contingent “deservingness”.

This is obvious, for instance, in the US and UK’s treatment of locally-employed civilians – to say nothing of members of the Afghan National Army and Iraqi Armed Forces – during and after the wars. Both states have failed to come through on relatively modest commitments to Afghan and Iraqi civilians who assisted NATO and Coalition forces – actions that went far beyond the civilian support sufficient to fulfill the obligations of political membership “at home”. And yet, predictably, the amended contract is broken: for the vast majority of people, resettlement, protection, and eventual citizenship within the US or UK has been made nearly impossible. Similar, contingent recognition of martial solidarity also characterizes the experiences of non-citizen members of the US and UK armed forces, whose actual military service – the fulfillment of the originary, rather than the amended, liberal military contract – is frequently insufficient for the recognition of political belonging and rights (Ware 2014; Valdez 2016). Put bluntly: “everyone” must support the troops, but whose support – and even service – counts for political membership is constituted via enduring, racialized colonial hierarchies. For all of StT’s affective pretensions, it is “sacrifice, not contract, that is the most accurate way of framing the political relationship as it has been experienced” (Paul Kahn, cited in Taussig-Rubbo 2009, 84).

If you’re with me so far, the implications of my argument are unnervingly straightforward. “Support the troops” discourses make liberal wars easier and democratic dissent and war opposition more difficult. In addition to the shifting of ethical considerations of the war away from actual violence and harms visited on peoples in Iraq and Afghanistan, StT discourse also morphs the relationship between “politics” and war within public discourse. Unsurprisingly, at this point, StT is actively represented as “apolitical” or “beyond politics”, while criticisms of the wars – or even discussions of the wars at all – are constructed as inappropriately political (especially, of course, while “the troops” are deployed). Dissent is not only highly constrained, but its absence is actively lauded as an obligation of normative, gendered membership in the political community. In a slightly odd inversion, we can read StT as transferring the masculinised soldier’s obligation to refrain from politics to the masculinised supportive citizen.

This creates some pretty obvious problems for protest, resistance, and the peace/anti-war movement. I’m arguably quite tough on the post-9/11 anti-war movement in the book, though very much coming from a place of wanting, badly, it to succeed. In my reading, the main pitfall is that while, for instance, the pragmatic, anti-war slogan “support the troops, bring them home” is alive to the conditionally of legitimate political speech upon StT, (see Coy et al 2008) it also then reifies the idea that the troops must be supported. (This concession would, of course, be fine if the strategy worked, but at this juncture, I think it’s safe to say it didn’t). The result, then, is an oddly tautological politics wherein war can be supported, or opposed, but only on behalf of the troops, suddenly the implicit arbiter of martial (and, often, personal) morality. Though there are instances of anti-war interventions that avoid this trap – the phrase “Troops Out!”, for instance, though rhyming with StT discourse, is sufficiently indeterminate as to invite other, more subversive interpretations – overt challenges to the obligation to support the troops are rarely seen as political, instead cast as offensive instances of (individual, private) bad taste (and implicit normative failure).

Which brings us back to the question of “what else are people supposed to do”? It’s a question I knew the book needed to at least consider, but avoided addressing for most of the writing process. I was at least partially afraid my analysis could be used to argue for the reinstatement of conscription. (Don’t worry, it can’t, not convincingly). For a while, I wanted to move from my critique of StT to a case for pacifism, but became concerned that overly simplistic, or absolutist, accounts of pacifism can be used to uphold the same unequal, racialized and colonial foundations of liberal international order that vivify supporting the troops. (I’ve since, following conversations with colleagues, come to think this was a bit harsh, and treated a highly heterogenous political and ethical tradition too monolithically. The promise of anti-racist, anti-colonial pacifisms in resisting StT, or even setting out an alternative vision for normative identity, (non)violence, and political membership, is worth interrogating, and something I’m continuing to think through). I suppose I’ll also note that fascism would, technically, “fix” the fracture of the liberal military contract. Having watched what happened to US and UK politics in the 20 years since the invasion of Iraq, that’s probably a good warning.

So, what do I think is actually to be done? We have to stop supporting the troops, to start refusing its projection as a mandatory component of citizenship, morality, and various dimensions of normative identity. To detangle the conflation of masculinity, political agency, and violence within “Western” politics and thought, we need to detach being a “good person” from presumptive support for the troops. It means placing resistance to war, and the military, back into conversation with broader struggles for social justice, including anti-colonial resistance, anti-racism, queer and trans liberation, labour rights, and movements towards police and border abolition. It also, I think, in the long-term requires the abolition of the military, a political vision I stake out in the book without (yet) significant specificity, but with a commitment to future work.

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[i] In this analysis, I write alongside Howell 2018 and others who, while recognizing the importance of existing critical war, military, and feminist scholarship on militarism, are walking away from the concept’s normative and ideological loading, noting its tendency to inadvertently exonerate the violences of liberalism. Instead, I offer the analytic of discursive martiality, which connects the contestations about liberal violence within politics (e.g. discussions of civil-military relations, who should serve in the military, etc) with the way the collective violence produces the liberal “political” (Edkins 1999, 2) – the terrain upon which the “commonsense” of liberalism and liberal democracy operates. I therefore attempt to track the mutual constitution of a) the military as a “real” thing; b) the reification of the civil-military divide; and c) the, importantly, their intertwined reproduction of a naturalized, binary, sex/order, itself associated with citizenship. I work towards an account of martiality that sees collective violence as internally productive of the liberal political community, complementing existing accounts that emphasize enmity, exclusion, and Self/Other distinctions (e.g. Walker 1990; Campbell 1992). I draw attention to how relations of solidarity, loyalty, and violent gendered (sexualized, racialized, colonial) obligation are also crucial to constituting the political community. This, I think, helps us understand both the political significance, and the stakes, of the seemingly banal, bumper-sticker call to “support the troops”.