Democracy

Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community

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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.

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.

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The Gendered Grammar of Modern States and Why it Matters

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This is the first in a series of posts over the next week on Revisiting Gendered States: Feminist Imaginings of the State in International Relations, released in 2018 as a successor to 1992’s Gendered States. The series combines commentary from contributors to the volume and reflections from others. We at The Disorder are glad to host it. In this first post the book’s editors – Swati Parashar (University of Gothenburg), J. Ann Tickner (American University) and Jacqui True (Monash University) – reflect on the motivations behind the project. The full series may be viewed here.

Revisiting Gendered States

Nearly a decade ago, Jean Elshtain expounded in her International Relations essay, ‘Women, the State and War’ that gendering the state did not alter much, though feminist insights could reveal a thing or two about how the state functions in the Waltzian levels of analysis. As expected, younger generations of feminists did not take too kindly to that (see for e.g. Laura Sjoberg’s response to Elsthain, ‘Gender, the State, and War Redux’). This was neither the first, nor the last time feminists clashed over the merits of ‘gendering’ the state. The debate continues to rage, enabling gendered explorations of the state, its forms and practices.

When we decided to undertake this project, we were aware that the state was a contested zone for feminists. To embrace its many secular ideals and rights-based policy interventions, to reject its policing and violence on non-conforming bodies and its selective bestowing of citizenship privileges, or to remain ambivalent about its future relevance and sovereignty in an era of competitive globalization – these remain the many dilemmas that feminists have explored in their writings about the state. There is no consensus on either the increasing relevance of the state as a principled actors in in global politics or its popular [lacklustre] appeal in a fragmented and broken world where boundaries and sovereignties are hardly stable categories.

The state is back, and yet the state is invisible; the state is violent and yet the state is the hope for many; the state is an end in itself and also the means to achieve political and social objectives; the state is actively opposed and yet it remains an aspirational institution. What marks the appeal of the state? How and why do states embody gendered qualities, emotions and hierarchies? Who becomes/performs/embodies the state? Which persons are citizens of the state and which ones remain the policed subject populations? How can the state be free from the limitations of its own institutional frameworks, to respond to the challenges of the changing times? These were just some of the questions that guided the chapters in Revisiting Gendered States: Feminist Imaginings of the State in International Relations. Continue reading →

The Internationalist Disposition and US Grand Strategy

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img_3010A guest post from Stephen Pampinella, continuing our occasional series on left/progressive foreign policy in the 21st century. Stephenis Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz. His research interests include US state building interventions, hierarchy in international relations, race and postcolonialism, US grand strategy, and national security narratives. He is on leave from SUNY New Paltz during Spring 2019 and is conducting research on the practice of diplomacy in the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry in Quito, Ecuador.

Alex Colás’ “The Internationalist Disposition” provides an excellent framework for evaluating foreign policy debates in the Democratic Party. The failures of the War on Terror combined with the emergence of economic and environmental threats have led many to engage in a far-reaching reappraisal of US foreign relations based on left critiques. This new approach toward foreign affairs is called progressive internationalism. It attempts to resolve the tension between adopting greater military restraint and remaining engaged in global governance.

But in recent weeks, establishment voices have sought to reassert their control over foreign policy debates by arguing for the necessity of US hegemony and classic liberal internationalist forms of cooperation. Colás’ methodological internationalism illustrates why traditional US foreign policy approaches will fail to provide actual security for ordinary Americans. It also suggests (somewhat counterintuitively) what kinds of grand strategies could do so. A great power concert strategy, in which the United States pursues a balance of power among its rivals while committing to more democratic forms of international cooperation, can best resolve the non-state threats to US democracy generated by its own liberal order.

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A Palestinian Perspective on Labour’s Anti-Semitism Row

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Nimer SultanyThis is a guest post from Nimer Sultany. Nimer is is Senior Lecturer in Public Law, SOAS, University of London. His book Law and Revolution: Legitimacy and Constitutionalism After the Arab Spring won the 2018 Book Award of the International Society of Public Law, and is shortlisted for the Society of Legal Scholars’ Peter Birks Prizes for Outstanding Legal Scholarship.  

 

Imagine the uproar if the leader of the Labour Party Jeremy Corbyn were to cite Mahatma Gandhi on the question of Palestine (November 1938): “But my sympathy [to Jews’ conditions in Europe] does not blind me to the requirements of justice. The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me… Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French.” It is unlikely that Corbyn would cite Gandhi on this, however. According to the controversial IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which the Labour Party is set to adopt in full, “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination” is anti-Semitic.

The timing of this suppression of free speech is troubling. At the very time the Israeli government is implementing ever more extreme policies that solidify Jewish supremacy vis-à-vis Palestinian citizens inside Israel like me, Corbyn’s critics seek to expand the definition of anti-Semitism to the extent that it would stifle criticism of these very racist policies. At the time Israel routinely kills scores of Palestinians with impunity, Corbyn’s critics seek to deny him the ability to express unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom and equality, and deny us Palestinians the means by which we can express our suffering and name our oppression.

Whereas Corbyn’s critics seek to portray him as “palling with terrorists”, they have no qualms about celebrating, as Mark Regev did, Zionist leaders like Menachem Begin who was the leader of a breakaway alt-right group that murdered British officials and Palestinian civilians. Begin’s actions were part of the Zionist movement’s audacious armed robbery of the Palestinian people’s homeland to establish an ethnocracy.

Are Corbyn and his critics equally selective? Are Begin and Arafat both terrorists-turned-to-peacemakers?  This discourse that makes Corbyn on the defensive is one that supports the violence that maintains colonialism and apartheid but condemns violence that seeks to resist it. It sanctions violence that sustains the longest military occupation since World War II. Yet, it is anti-colonial militants who seek to put an end to this systematic violence who are routinely condemned. The context in which violence occurs is eradicated.

Zionists like Andrew Feldman, the former chair of the Conservative Party, reduce Zionism to “Jewish national self-determination” in order to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Yet, the opposition to Zionism is precisely because it is not “a national self-determination” movement, but rather a settler-colonial movement. Continue reading →

A Faustian Special Relationship

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Donald Trump has a thing for rebuking America’s democratic allies and their leaders—his latest target being Australia’s prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull. The UK appears to be an exception to this trend. In his first interview with the British press as president-elect, Trump explained that the UK has a “special place” in his half-Scottish heart and pledged to support a post-Brexit UK-US trade deal. Reportedly a big fan of Winston Churchill—and of Boris Johnson’s Churchill Factor—he also asked the UK government to loan him a Churchill bust that his Republican predecessor George W. Bush kept in the Oval Office.

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Fake Becomes Legit: Disinformation, Social Media and Democracy

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mejias2015-05-225x300In our final post centring on the US presidential inauguration, Ulises Ali Mejias reflects on the phenomenon of ‘fake news’ and the role of social media. Ulises is associate professor at the State University of New York at Oswego. He is the author of Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World (2013, University of Minnesota Press). With Nick Couldry, he is currently writing a book on data as a capitalist social relation.

The previous two inauguration pieces can be found here and here.

While we didn’t exactly predict the rise of ‘fake news’, in 2013 a Russian colleague and I completed an academic article on the disinformation tactics used during the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Like many others, we started to recognize the ways in which citizens generate, consume and distribute false information by interacting with old and new media, contributing to a social order where lies acquire increasing authority. While we focused on the Russia-Ukraine case, we felt it was important to point out that these tactics might serve as a template for future scenarios, including in Western democracies.

The article will not see the light of day until this year, four years after it was finished. Interestingly, part of the reason it has taken so long to get it published is that some reviewers felt our argument should omit references to Western democracies. The sentiment seemed to be that this kind of stuff could not happen here.

That was, of course, before the 2016 US presidential elections.

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Trumped: Beyond the Whitelash

/ Lee Jones / 2 Comments

The election of a manifestly incompetent, billionaire bigot as president of the USA has come as a shock to many people, as indeed it should, and a vigorous debate has emerged over the causes. Many progressives, rightly horrified by the vile, nativist and sexist rhetoric of Trump’s campaign, seem to be concluding that it is this rhetoric that explains his success. Trump’s victory – enabled above all by white men – exposes the appeal of retrograde sentiment on gender – because voters rejected a highly-qualified woman for a self-declared ‘pussy-grabber’ – and race – since his supporters endorsed or at least disregarded his intensely racist rhetoric and policy pledges. Trump’s win thus expresses a ‘whitelash’ – a vile defence of threatened, white, male privilege. However, while sexists and racists undoubtedly supported Trump en masse, this thesis cannot explain how he was able to win. Indeed, it distracts attention from the most glaring cause of the outcome: the rot at the heart of America’s democratic system in general and of the Democratic Party in particular.

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America’s Electoral Apartheid: 30-40 million US residents excluded from voting

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This is a guest post by Konstantin Kilibarda, originally blogged on the Abolition Journal blog and reproduced here. Konstantin is a PhD candidate at York University. His dissertation, Making Montenegro Work: Refashioning Labour After Socialism, addresses neoliberal restructuring in Montenegro and its impact on working lives and notions of citizenship in the newly independent state. His research interests include post-socialist transitions; processes of neoliberalization; labor market reforms; globalization; precarious work; gendered and racialized labour market segmentation, and more.

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[Photo: ‘Supreme Injustice’ by Joe Brusky via Flickr]

 

A key component of an apartheid system is the ability to disenfranchise those populations that may tip the political scales. Currently in the United States there are between 30-40 million residents (including millions of US citizens) who remain systematically disenfranchised. The fact that the disenfranchised are primarily racialized or poor, underlines Charles W. Mills’ contention that America’s democracy continues to be premised on a hierarchically structured ‘racial contract.’ Below I’ve compiled a short list of groups in the US who can’t vote, despite living, loving, caring, participating, and working everyday in communities and neighborhoods throughout the country.

If those feeling perplexed by Trump’s rise to power want to build a strong (and lasting) coalition against the Republican politics of hate (and the accommodation of such a politics by some wings of the Democratic party), efforts to expand voting rights, narrow voter suppression, and fundamentally transform the electoral system will play an important role. Racialized communities most directly impacted by these policies have been at the forefront of these struggles since the beginning; it’s now time for those just recognizing these facts to also get involved. The following is a quick breakdown of some of the major groups who live under the US system – some with citizenship, some without – but are nevertheless barred from having a say in the choice of President. Any one of these groups if enfranchised could have made a decisive impact in the 2016 election. Taken together they represent a formidable group that could radically transform American politics. It is perhaps no wonder that Republicans (and some Democrats) are committed to sustaining and even expanding the scope of their disenfranchisement.

(1) 13.3 million permanent residents

Many countries allow permanent residents to vote, yet in the United States those who have attained this status are barred from exercising their franchise. In the rhetoric of the Republican Party, ‘legal’ immigrants are often compared favorably to ‘illegal’ (i.e. undocumented) immigrants. Nevertheless, the Republican Party and some Democrats continue to ensure that all non-citizens (regardless of status) are unable to participate in elections. It’s worth remembering that the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996, which was pushed forward by a Republican controlled Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, expanded the grounds on which people can be deported, including explicit prohibitions against and harsh penalties for non-citizen voting.

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America’s moral crisis

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America’s moral crisis

Luke Cooper is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Anglia Ruskin University. He is currently writing a book on the historical sociology of the long nineteenth century.

 

Parallels of Trumpism to some of the darkest moments in America’s past affirm Barak Obama’s recent claim that the ‘fate of the world is at stake’, argues Luke Cooper

It was springtime in America, but the thoughts of citizens were more preoccupied with the fallout from a distant war and an economic recession at home, than they were the change of seasons. Europeans may have looked on anxiously at how the pressures of a brutalised capitalism and great power politics appeared to have toxified a deeply polarised American public debate. But with their own countries facing similar, if not even more egregious, rise in racial populism, they were hardly in a position to judge.

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So much to say, so much to say… A Reply

/ Joe / 1 Comment

I want to begin by thanking Karen, Anthony, Kirsten and Elke for their comments on the book–and a special thanks to Elke for organising. It is a rare treat to have so much attention paid to one’s work, especially by such thoughtful and insightful colleagues. My profound thanks to you all. I also need to offer some explanations for my much delayed post – first I was starting a new job and time ran out, then I was ill, and then my iCloud account somehow ate my draft. So, I’ve had to start from scratch, which has forced me to be direct and straightforward to save time. Any curtness of tone is a reflection of circumstances rather than my appreciation of my critics.

I learned a great deal from all the posts—about the gaps, limitations and possibilities of my book. Therefore, in my response I want to reflect upon what I have learned through this forum. What I have to say here is only a brief continuation of the collective intellectual journey taken through this forum. You have all given me much to think about it the future. Continue reading →