The last but not least in our commentaries on Katharine Millar’s Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community (with a reply by Katharine to follow tomorrow). Ellen Martin is a PhD candidate in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) at the University of Bristol. Her research is critiquing military power in Britain, with a particular focus on the ways in which the British public diversely perform militarism in their everyday spaces. She is interrogating the discourses employed by military charities to question how these organisations contribute to making war and violence possible. She is also exploring how the British public engages with these discourses, and militarism more broadly, because the ways in which militarism manifests as normal and desirable to British people is central to its operation. With the aim of interrogating and destabilising military power, her research contributes to ongoing conversations in feminist IR and Critical Military Studies. Chris Rossdale is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Bristol. They write about social movements, rebellious politics, and militarism and state violence, including in Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion. They are interested in the relationship between political struggle and critical theory, and their current research considers the arms trade within the context of police power and abolition and explores the contested political status of ‘rebellion’ in the contemporary era.

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Support the Troops opens with an anecdote about the small town in Canada where Katharine Millar grew up. In 2001 Canada deployed forces to Afghanistan, and a number of enlisted young men from the town found themselves unexpectedly sent to war. Their families gave out yellow ‘support the troops’ ribbon magnets for local people to put on their cars. Millar recalls her parents, sceptical of the intervention, navigating the expectations accompanying the ribbon and its awkward invocation. They displayed the ribbon out of some sense of obligation and genuine care for the local boys overseas, while being uncomfortable with its implications, and seemingly content to let the ribbon disappear once the temperature had fallen.

The book does the impressive job of taking these quotidian gestures of solidarity and tying them to the imperial violence at the heart of the liberal social order. Taking a particular but persistent social discourse, it traces the historical emergence of an imperative that has become central, even foundational, to liberal politics. Elegantly and incisively, Millar shows the workings of the discourse as it has diffused through and become a standard of legitimate speech within contemporary political life. ‘Support the troops’ emerges as a “gendered, racialized logic of violent political obligation” (167) that is ideally positioned to manage civilian anxieties following the end of conscription, while carefully transferring questions of complicity and empire into expressions of care and solidarity within the state. The discourse conceals the harms of war while awkwardly reproducing the liberal community. Making its argument with clarity and force, and showcasing the power of rigorous feminist poststructural analysis, the book is a landmark intervention in scholarship on liberalism, war and violence.

Millar lays a particularly important challenge for anti-war politics. While many expressions of the imperative to ‘support the troops’ are delivered with a clear desire to promote wars, the book shows that the discourse is also central to anti-war politics. As demonstrated by their calls to ‘support the troops: bring them home’ and ‘support the troops, not the war’, opponents of contemporary wars are compelled to frame their opposition in terms of support for the troops. Drawing on her extensive study of discourse from newspapers, state documents and NGO websites, Millar argues that almost half of the incidences of the support the troops discourse in the UK and US come from an anti-war position. It emerges as an apparently necessary element of attempts to criticise wars, in a manner that reveals the discourse as a condition of intelligible political speech and reasonable dissent. If you want to speak politically, you must support the troops; if you don’t support the troops, you’re not a meaningful part of the political community. The problem here is that ‘support the troops’ is an inherently martial discourse. It reproduces the troops as the ideal citizen, solidifies the martiality of the liberal order, and reproduces the hierarchy between ‘our’ troops and others suffering in war (often at the hands of ‘our’ troops). In this respect, anti-war politics faces a trap: frame opposition to wars through support for the troops, and so reproduce the liberal martial order even in the midst of opposing a particular war; or don’t, and be expelled from the terrain of reasonable political speech.

As well as setting out a powerful challenge to anti-war politics, this line of analysis also demonstrates how effective the ‘support the troops’ discourse is at consuming opposition to itself. In contrast to The Soldier, a heroic masculinised figure, The Troops are constructed as a more vulnerable, feminised subject, in need of society’s support and protection. A public refusal to support the troops – whether by dangerous anti-militarist anarchists or the Westboro Baptist Church – is turned into an example of the enemy in the face of whom the vulnerable troops must be supported. As such, resistance to or refusal of the discourse can swiftly be framed as re-establishing the necessity of supporting the troops. The elegance and relentlessness of this inversion is powerful and unsettling, and while Millar does show that there are ways of subverting or resisting the discourse, they are both difficult and tenuous.

This account of ‘support the troops’ as self-reinforcing grounds Millar’s argument that the discourse is near-hegemonic within the UK and US. While this argument is convincing with respect to the “more conventionally authoritative actors and organizations” (71) Millar engages, we wonder if the situation is quite as straightforward at the level of the general public (at whom those official discourses are ultimately targeted).  Does the grim picture of ‘support the troops’ as such a hegemonic and constitutive discourse apply when we shift our attention beyond official sources? Ellen’s research on public discourse in the UK, which focuses on opinions expressed on online forums such as Reddit and The Student Room, demonstrates more variance in support for the troops. Although a section of the public ardently supports the troops, many subscribe to a diluted version of the discourse by rendering their support conditional on the wars being fought, while others are willing to contest or refuse the discourse altogether.

Millar’s analysis of official discourse finds that support for the troops endures despite the unpopularity of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, because the troops are positioned as separate from war. In contrast, certain members of the public translate their critique of particular military interventions into a refusal to support the troops. They argue that the soldiers fighting in these wars are not deserving of support because they are not defending the state and its people. This is exemplified by one Digital Spy user’s comment that “they’re not fighting for their country at the moment. If they were fighting for their country, I’d support them”. These individuals dilute the support the troops discourse by stating that they will support the troops only where they believe they are protecting the nation. In contrast to officials, who Millar finds routinely underplay or fail to mention war, the British public are much more willing to ask questions about and critique particular interventions.

Going further, some members of the public reject the support the troops discourse altogether. Shielded from the “compulsive hegemony” (185) of the discourse in public life, the anonymity of online forums appears to create a space in which the public feel more able to express critique. For instance, many contest the centralisation of attention on British soldiers in society, arguing that this ignores those targeted by British military intervention abroad. Some construct soldiering as a job like any other, which does not deserve special support, whilst others critique the troops’ choice to enlist and thus their partial responsibility for controversial wars. As one Student Room user states, “I don’t think they deserve any kind of sympathy or respect…they sign up…they know they may be put in the position where they have to take the life of another human”. Others go further still by acknowledging that the support the troops discourse normalises and legitimates war and violence and restricts avenues for critique. For instance, one user of the Digital Spy forum expresses that “glorifying people purely on the basis of their willingness to kill (and be killed) isn’t really my thing”. Another declares on Reddit that “I can’t seem to broach any criticism of our foreign policy without cries of ‘You’re disrespecting our troops’”. These findings show that contestation of the support the troops discourse is apparent among certain members of the public. It is of course true that such views are often met by fierce responses, which explains some of why they are not more common in official discourse. Nevertheless, the fact that ‘support the troops’ is not as hegemonic at the level of everyday discussion reveals tensions between official and public discourse. Given Millar’s underlying argument that “a politics committed to opposing liberal wars abroad – and martial forms of liberal violence ‘at home’ – must refuse to support the troops” (18), we wonder to what extent that tension might be a productive one for a politics of resistance?

The book also asks how identity shapes support for the troops. Millar argues that “though ‘everyone’ in the UK supports the troops, it is safe to infer that the experience of military deployments and troop support is highly classed, as well as racialized and regional” (86). Whilst, as she acknowledges, a deeper investigation of these disparities lies outside the remit of the book, it prompts reflection on how factors such as race, nationality, and class (as well as others such as political leanings and gender) impact support for the troops. For instance, Ellen’s analysis of public discourse suggests that the support the troops discourse places particular pressure on certain individuals, namely racialised groups and those considered to be non-English, to pledge their allegiance. For example, one individual starts a discussion on the Student Room to ask Asian people in Britain whether they “wear the poppy” on the basis that they “find a lot of Asian people who are against wearing the poppy”. This implies that race influences support for the troops and, as such, that racialised groups are compelled to make particular efforts to demonstrate their commitment. These questions are avenues for further research, with Support the Troops serving as a fundamental foundation.

As the book reflects on the nature of support for the troops, an open question remains about the role of desire for the troops. The ‘support the troops’ discourse is positioned in the book as a series of gestures that helps to manage a gendered civilian anxiety that emerges following the end of conscription. Men are less likely to fulfil the liberal social contract or prove their masculinity by enlisting, but can go some way towards redressing this by supporting the troops. This is a convincing argument, but notably one about how ‘support the troops’ fills an absence, solves a problem. We wonder what place is left in the analysis for a more active and desiring relationship for and with the troops. What status the erotic, the fetishistic? This is a dynamic that is very apparent with respect to the soldier. The soldier is often situated as a sexy, desirable figure, with desire for the soldier integral to their construction as a heroic figure. To what extent does that eroticized desire survive the gendered inversion of the shift from soldier to troops? What happens to desire when we go from the individual (masculinised) soldier to the plural (feminised) troops? If it survives, what role does the erotics of the troops have in the analysis? And if it doesn’t, what is excised or lost or shifted with that dropping out of the erotic?

In her conclusion, Millar calls for a critique – and for a moment, thrillingly, the abolition – of the military, alongside other institutions of state violence. The deeper political argument driving the book calls for a wholesale rejection of state violence, which must extend beyond militaries, folding in police forces, border forces and more. It is notable, but understandable, that those other institutions of state violence are absent in the book – they play no apparent role in the ‘support the troops’ discourse. The public is not compelled in the same manner to support the UK border agency as an agent of state violence, for example, because the border agency does not have the same kind of foundational role in narratives of liberal citizenship as the troops. But this does raise the question about the different forms of obligation to, recognition of, and support for these other agents of state violence. The police are an especially important case here, both because the lines between police and military are so blurred, and because the role of the police force within liberal orders has on balance been less scrutinised than the military. It is, for example, notable that during his tenure as leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn was willing to take a range of political positions that allowed his opponents to frame him as non-supportive of the military, while doing far less to recognise the violence of the British police (even pledging to put an additional 10,000 officers on the street). Nevertheless, recent years have witnessed an intensification of calls for the abolition of the police. These have been met by the circulation of emerging discourses intended to shore up support for the police. Of these, ‘Blue Lives Matter’ has been the most prominent. We wonder what, if any, connection Millar sees between ‘support the troops’ and other discourses which seek to reinforce obligation towards agents of state violence.