The first commentary in our symposium on Katharine Millar’s Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community (Oxford, 2022). After the author’s introduction yesterday, we turn to Dr Mirko Palestrino. Mirko is Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary, University of London. He researches the sociologies and politics of time and temporality, experiences and narratives of war, theories and practices of military victory, and the embodied politics of military training and deployment. His work has appeared in journals such as International Political Sociology and the Journal of Political Ideologies.

This post and all others in the symposium are also collected for easy reference here.

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I walk past Islington Green in North London while on a break from writing this post. My mind is off, wondering, trying to disconnect from work. And yet, I cannot help but notice the multitude of poppy wreaths still adorning the war memorial in the park. Why are poppies still around, eight months past Remembrance Sunday? Why do I run into them now, while writing about Support the Troops? Carelessness of the municipality? Just old, plain serendipity? Perhaps so. Not if we follow Millar’s (2022) argument all the way through though.  

For Millar, poppies, yellow ribbons, bumper stickers, charities’ billboards, military ads, etc. are not simply the expression of heightened militarism or signs of an increasingly militarised society. Rather, they epitomise ‘support the troops’: a recent, yet dominant, discourse marking a transformation in ‘the normative structure of civil-military relations in the US and UK, as well as Western liberal democracies’ (p. 3). Supporting the troops is the new (necessary but not sufficient) condition for political membership and belonging, as well as “good” masculinity and personhood.

While the traditional social contractarian logic underpinning liberalism posited military service as a key condition for good citizenship (and masculinity), in the age of distant and forever wars fought by professional armies, the good liberal subject is “only” asked to support the troops, not to fight alongside them. Support, in a nutshell, ‘is the new service’ (p. 146). Islington Green’s poppy wreaths and other similar artefacts are a tangible reminder of these dynamics. In fact, they are the stuff that makes this shift possible in the first place.

Through a remarkably rigorous discourse analysis of an impressively vast corpus of sources, Millar demonstrates that ‘support the troops’ (StT) is much more than a catchy slogan or political invitation. ‘[S]upporting the troops’, she explains, ‘goes beyond what we might typically think of as militarism… it actively constitutes normative citizenship, the boundaries of the political, and the socially intelligible’ (10). Understood as discourse – or ‘discursive martiality’ (see pp. 35-36) – StT emerges as a thick bundle of social relations that are constitutive of political communities, gender norms, and normative expectations around the use of violence.

For instance, StT discourse produces “the troops” as a distinctive collective subject which is articulated in a vague enough fashion as to be normatively masculine, and yet – upon need – conveniently constructed as feminine and in need of rescuing; “the troops” are not irreducible to “the soldier” – or any specific individual – and also more than just a group of soldiers; they are the key actor involved in the fighting of specific wars, and yet detached, politically from violence and even war itself, etc. As a result, not only do “the troops” – unlike “the soldier” or “the veteran” – now accommodate a plethora of subjectivities and elide substantive differences among them, but they also work towards the general depoliticization of liberal violence (see Chapter 5).

Similarly, “support” is a notion which is flexible enough to reconcile a voluntary ethos to offer support with a normative obligation to do so; it can refer to supporting troops that are engaged in any specific war, or no war at all – i.e., support for the sake of support, to the vague collective subject above, independently of the conflict; it can simultaneously mean support from the government and against the government’s vagaries and negligence. Also in this case, ambiguity and malleability go a long way to explain the politics of StT. For example, it is by positing such a vague notion of support that StT can help placate gendered civilian anxieties arising from the professionalisation of the military. Analogously, support interpellates everybody (no one is exempt from supporting the troops), and yet only a few can reap the benefits of answering this call – in terms of political membership and gender conformity, for instance (see Chapters 4 and 6).

Attending to StT and its discursive construction, Millar explains the centrality of (violent) solidarity to the making of political community beyond traditional accounts centred around inside/outside distinctions, and social relations of enmity and Othering. Solidarity and loyalty make the political community cohere internally – solidifying the unity enacted externally via antagonistic positioning. It follows that we ought to account for both relations of enmity and inclusion if we want to understand how ‘the liberal political community hang[s] together’ (p. 145).  Also in this case, a few, fundamental political implications ensue – such as the obfuscation of violence within the liberal project, and the transnationalisation of support along imperial lines (Chapter 7).

Support the Troops is not only a highly sophisticated theoretical account of martiality and attendant discursive formations but also a compelling analysis of contemporary issues of political importance and urgency.First, the claim that the ‘liberal military contract’ is undergoing a deep transformation from service to support sheds light on a stark, seemingly common-sensical empirical fact: all around us – from yellow ribbons and similar paraphernalia in public spaces to repeated invocations in newspapers and public discourse, etc. – we are constantly reminded that we need to support “our” troops. Second, Millar strikes right at the heart of current concerns affecting liberal democratic politics – including who does and does not count as a worthy (or “good”) citizen, how the political community holds together, and the increasing scepticism towards governments and elites normally associated with the rise of populism and far-right politics. Finally, Support the Troops offers a formal explanation for the continued reproduction of a painfully well-known ‘binary, cisnormative heteropatriarchal sex/gender order’ (p. 199), especially at a time when even militaries – alongside other conservative institutions – claim to be as inclusive as ever.

Read alongside recent interventions in Critical War and Military Studies, Millar’s book offers another tangible instance of war’s generative power (Barkawi and Brighton, 2011), as well as the centrality of violence to the constitution of seemingly peaceful social practices, relations, and realities (see Brighton, 2011). For instance, Millar demonstrates that StT pre-dates and outlives warfighting, taking on some of its political functions in the making of political community and liberal orders – such as the normalisation and depoliticization of violence, or the reproduction of raced, classed, sexed, and gendered hierarchies. Accordingly, Support the Troops offers convincing supplementary evidence as to the inadequacy of temporal distinctions between wartime and peacetime – or what I referred to elsewhere as a war/peace-time binary (Palestrino, 2022). Here, however, a subtle tension arises within the economy of Support the Troops. In line with Howell (2018), Millar carefully distances herself from traditional accounts of militarism and militarisation to avoid neglecting ‘the important role the concept of militarism… plays in the ideological legitimation of liberal violence(s)’ (p. 27) – for example, by reifying ideas of a ‘peaceful’ state before militarisation. And yet, wartime and peacetime are key categories structuring the analysis (especially in Chapters 2 to 4), as are traditional chronologies of conflicts (Chapter 3). To what extent, then, are we to be careful in the deployment of these analytics and temporal categories if we want to expose the politics of concepts and their complicity to the normalisation of violence?

Homing in on temporal practices and assumptions also holds the potential to further illuminate the material politics of StT. Consider the poppies, themed bumper stickers, and analogous artefacts that opened this contribution. The use of imperishable, enduring materials in the production of these objects is a striking, recurrent choice. Arguably, it is also one that is not left to chance. Rather, long-lasting construction media enable specific narratives associated with these artefacts to also drag on in time (see Neumann, 2018). Here, an examination of the physical characteristics of the stuff that signifies support for the troops could supplement Millar’s analysis of the politics of StT, with an explanation of its popularity or political success. After all, encountering poppies and yellow ribbons is far more common than tuning in to parliamentary debates or read newspapers.

Obviously, this is not to say that the temporal qualities of enduring materials are automatically passed on to any given discourse connected to them. Quite the contrary. These associations are also often discursive in nature and take time to establish. They can also travel, extend, and change over time – such as the case of the red poppy and its shift in signification from remembrance of the First World War to all following conflicts. In and with time,they can be challenged, contested, and subverted – think about the white poppy, for instance. All the more reason, then, to undertake such an enquiry. Could we – or perhaps should we – re-appropriate and re-narrate the political value of these (violent) objects? Are we better off re-purposing them? Shall we, instead, destroy, or dispose of them?

I am out again walking, and the poppy wreaths are still there. A friend sends over the picture of ‘For the Fallen’ – a British locomotive unveiled to mark the centenary of the First World War that can still be found passing through London King’s Cross. Pictures of poppies, Union Jacks, and soldiers adorn the train, asking bystanders ‘to remember those lost during wartime’. Are the poppies and the train also asking us to support the troops?

Bibliography

Barkawi, T. and Brighton, S. (2011). ‘Powers of War: Fighting, Knowledge, and Critique’. International Political Sociology, 5(2): 126-143.

Brighton, S. (2011). ‘Three Propositions on the Phenomenology of War’. International Political Sociology, 5(1): 101-105.

Howell, A. (2018). ‘Forget “militarization”: race, disability and the “martial politics” of the police and of the university’. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 20(2): 117-136.

Millar, M. K. (2022). Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Neumann, I. B. (2018). ‘Halting Time: Monuments to Alterity’. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 46(3): 331-351.

Palestrino, M. (2022). ‘Inking Wartime: Military Tattoos and the Temporalities of the War Experience’. International Political Sociology, 16 (3): 1-20.