**Disclaimer: none of the people displayed in the photos are present in the text and should not be thought of as complicit with the sexual harassment discussed in the text.
Thales and Elbit Systems, DSEI 2023. Credit: Nico Edwards
Global headlines are once again seized by the outbreak of armed conflict, detailing indescribable suffering and destruction. War, it feels, is everywhere and always. To some, this means business. Many of the facilitators and profiteers of armed conflict globally attended the Defence and Security Equipment International (DSEI) in London, September 2023.
What follows is a personal story, but what it tells us about enduring systems of power and harm goes far beyond my person. That weathered feminist truth that the personal is always also political rings true still. What I experienced in the world of “defence men” – the global war elite – attending DSEI as a white woman, was highly demonstrative of the social, political and economic forces that enable and perpetuate armed violence. The personal behaviours of militarised business masculinities hold clues as to why decisionmakers keep hurtling toward global war at the expense of both people and the planet.
Setting the Scene: A Playground for Phallic Force
Happening in London biannually, DSEI is one of the world’s biggest and most important arms fairs. I went there to research military sectors’ pivot toward environmental sustainability and how to “green” warfare – a key emerging feature especially of European and North American propaganda. The event oozed of hubris. Rob, an American war simulations expert and my main interlocutor, confirmed he’d never seen such a galore of impressive weapons tech exhibitions. Indeed, several arms company reps told me affirmingly: business is booming. Spread across 100,000 sqm. Rob and I were among almost 40,000 participants from all over the world. Including the usual array of repressive, human rights abusing regimes or states involved in active warfare.
You don’t have to be a polemicist to catch how DSEI is but one big bonding ritual for predominantly white men in suits enacting their obsession with force. DSEI puts the global war elite’s drastic detachment from the real-world needs of people and planet into sharp relief. Inside the fair, “defence” and “security” materialise as glaring euphemisms for military-industrial might and titillating experiments in how to model the future of warfare in line with Hollywood fantasies of high-tech battles between good and evil. Rather than signal a dedication – however deceptive – to keeping people safe, the event felt like an inferno of white men in suits blatantly driven by that boyish excitement for tech, kinetics, heroism, beauty, sex and money. And yet, there are enough of these men in power across the globe to make it seem as if they are the realists responding to real threats.
To begin, my immense gratitude to Pinar Bilgin, Cian O’Driscoll, Ellen Martin, Mirko Palestrino, and Chris Rossdale for their close reading, sharp observations, and thoughtful engagement with my work. It’s an intimidating pleasure to have scholars whose work I so value, and whose insights to which I’m indebted, discuss the book. They’ve given me a lot to think about which, over ten years into this project, is a real gift.
Much of the perceptive (and generous) commentary offers a push to clarify and (re)consider what the book does or does not do, does or does not include, and how its insights might be extended to related phenomena. Not unlike the intro to the forum, there are (at least) two ways of approaching this discussion.
The first, I think, is fairly formal answer about scope conditions, and the ambitions of the book to empirical and analytic generalizability. As the reviewers, note, the account of the “fracture” of the liberal military contract, and subsequent politics of supporting the troops, isn’t meant to be empirically generalizable beyond the US and UK. Likewise, I attend only to mainstream and elite discourses; I don’t include the perspectives of serving military personnel, or less organized resistance to the obligation to support the troops.
There are also several entailments of my argument the book doesn’t consider because, following its own logic of inquiry, it can’t. This is because, analytically, I’m interested in the problem that “support the troops” discourses work to solve: the legitimation and normalisation of citizens’ participation in collective violence for/by the state. Liberal democracies encounter a particular spin on this problem, as ideological commitments to autonomy, liberty, and equality sit uneasily with the expropriation of citizens’ time, labour, and lives in the form of military service. But all states encounter a version of this quandry; even in liberal democracies, “support for the troops” doesn’t manifest mechanistically or uniformly. And my account of “supporting the troops” is pitched at the level of a broad discursive formation, and the conditioning of social intelligibility, rather than an interrogation of the intentionality and experiences of “support” of specific individuals. (This latter is incredibly interesting; a discourse analytic approach just can’t get there).
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.
Kate Millar’s Support the Troops is one of those books that leads you to look at the world in slightly different way than you did before. It offers a very rich account of how the StT discourse mobilises and sustains a very particular vision of civil-military relations—with implications for how we understand the nature of the modern liberal democratic state. I won’t summarise the book here, however, or even engage it in any direct way. Rather, what I want to do is think with it, extend it, and use it as a generative platform from which to reflect on four matters that are perhaps best described as orthogonal to Millar’s interests.
Seeing Both Sides
The first is the story of Willie Dunne. We don’t really meet anyone like Willie Dunne in Support The Troops, primarily because he’s fictional, after a fashion, but also because he doesn’t (straightforwardly) come from the US or the UK, which are the main sites for Kate’s analysis. Dunne, you see, is a character in Sebastian Barry’s celebrated novel about Irish soldiers serving in the British Army in World War One, A Long Long Way.
Though fictional, Dunne’s story is rooted in the history. Dunne was one of 200,000 Irishmen—many of them of green, nationalist background—who responded to the call made in August 1914 by John Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster, for the men of Ireland to fight for the British Army in Europe. “I say to the government that they may withdraw every one of their troops from Ireland,” Redmond had declared. “I say that the coast of Ireland will be defended from foreign invasion by her armed sons, and for this purpose armed nationalist Catholics in the south will be only too glad to join arms with the armed Protestant Ulstermen in the North.”[i] Over 30,000 Irishmen would subsequently die on the Western Front in the service of the British Army. Dunne would not die in Flanders; a different fate awaited him. He would be among the soldiers who happened to be home on furlough in Dublin in April 1916—a significant date in Irish history. In the wrong place, at the wrong time, he found his leave terminated early, as he was redirected by the Crown to Dublin City centre to put down by force what would later come to be known as the Easter Rising.
“Support” has emerged as “the new service” following a moment of disconnect with the troops in the UK and the US, we learn from Kate Millar’s book, Support the Troops. How about other parts of the world that apparently experienced no such disconnect? Support the Troops makes no claim to explain what happens outside the US and UK cases. But I wonder if, by missing aspects of the international, we’re missing a part of the condition of possibility of all this? In what follows, I will consider the international that has allowed for “support” to emerge “as the new service” in some parts of the world, even as others continue to serve and support in some other parts of the world.
Millar acknowledges that “StT discourses—almost uniformly—fail to engage with the international” in that Iraqi, Pakistani, and Afghan civilians killed by the wars are rarely mentioned” (175). But then, inter-state wars do not exhaust the international. The author also considers the colonial background. “These states— the US, UK, and others with pervasive support the troops practices, notably Canada and Australia—are also unified by their status as colonial states”, she notes (177). Indeed, following Tarak Barkawi’s argument in Soldiers of Empire, colonial military relations have shaped post-colonial military relations. Yet again, post-/colonial relations do not exhaust the international.
The international in Support the Troops can also be located in post-World War II relations between ‘Europe’ and ‘non-Europe’. When I write ‘Europe’, I refer to Western Europe and North America as the geographies that are put at the centre by those who are carriers of this particular way of relating to the world (Bilgin). Support theTroops underscores the self/other dimension of relations between the ‘Europe’ that left militarism behind and ‘non-Europe’, which seems to fail to do that, when it remarks that
The good story of liberalism is reinforced by the “bad story” of militarism, which align in their understanding of a stark differentiation between violence and formal politics: militarism occurs when something goes wrong with the institutional and normative separation of the civil from the military” (24).
But then, how did militarism come about in ‘non-Europe’?
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.
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 themselvesopposed. 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.
I read the contributions from Anna Stavrianakis, Erica Chenoweth, Rachel Zhou and Elena Loizidou with joy and fascination. Each has seen things in the book that have entirely eluded me until now, and all have challenged me to think again about the political, strategic, ontological and ethical arguments at play. It’s a rare privilege to have one’s work read with such generosity, clarity, and thoughtful critical attention. So, to begin, I’d like to extend my heartfelt thanks to these four brilliant scholars, and to Pablo for his wonderful work in bringing us together for this symposium.
In this spirit, I’d like to take the opportunity to think with the other contributors about how we are situated and might situate ourselves in relation to the shifting but sticky constellations of martial power that structure our world. To do so, I want to focus on the themes of pessimism, failure, prefiguration, success and violence, and think about the registers by which we have each engaged with these ideas differently. My hope is that through this we can think about the challenges we face as scholars and activists committed to resisting militarism.
Failure and Prefiguration
A theme that runs through all four responses, albeit in quite different registers, is attention to Resisting Militarism’s pessimism, manifested in my scepticism that we can ever situate ourselves outside of militarism, and accompanying critiques of anti-militarist politics that proceed with this aspiration. Loizidou appreciates the caution that this attitude brings to reflecting on movement politics, but is concerned that refusing to imagine a world beyond militarism is itself a trap. Chenoweth too laments the lack of a vision of a world beyond militarism, while also calling for a standard by which we might be able to measure the success of anti-militarist politics. Contrarily Zhou appreciates the attention given in the book not only to how anti-militarist resistance is shaped by military power, but also to the processes by which anti-militarism reproduces militarism. All three are naming a refusal in the book to locate anti-militarism outside of militarism.
Stavrianakis’ account of the same draws on a shared experience between the two of us, which I’d like to extend as a route into this. We did indeed share a delightful sunny afternoon in Brighton in the summer of 2019, during which we discussed the previous week’s Court of Appeal judgment, which – whatever else is to be said about it – did have the effect of temporarily stopping the UK government from granting export licences for arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The judgment was unprecedented, the result of years of careful and tenacious work by Campaign Against Arms Trade and others, and for all its complexities was deserving of celebration. I was there to celebrate outside the Royal Courts of Justice on the morning of the verdict. When the target of your political work is the international arms trade, there are few real opportunities to mark a win. And when there is a glimpse of possibility of limiting some of the relentless assault visited on Yemen by the UK-backed Saudi coalition, that must be taken seriously.
Chris Rossdale’s Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion is a beautifully written book and one of those very rare academic books where the concrete (ethnographic) and the theoretical critique each other and reveal the complexity of socio-political phenomena such as anti-militarist actions. The contributions to knowledge that this book offers is immense: (a) it provides us with an ethnography of anti-militarist groups in Britain including, Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT), Stop the Arms Fair (STAF); Smash EDO; Plowshares (or Ploughshares) and Space Hijackers emanating either from Rossdale participating or study over the last 12 years; (b) it widens our understandings of concepts such as (but not only) militarism (through linkage of war, conflict, state violence “to more intimate relations of power, authority domination” (p. 4), anti-militarism (through questioning the prefigurative claims of the groups he has studied) and disobedience (by drawing our attention to its attachment to obedience); and (c) it expands the methodological teachings of ethnographical studies by relating them to theoretical claims. Indeed Rossdale should be congratulated for his ability to navigate effortlessly between the concrete and the theoretical and challenge our perceived notions of concepts and politics. His method of study will guide and should guide ethnographic studies in the future.
Anyone that studies social movements, whether it is the anti-militarist, anti-capitalist or anarchist movements (as I do), tends to present such movement in radical and pure ways. More specifically we tend to present such movements them as being diametrically opposite to what the social/political order that it is contesting. Resisting Militarism presents us with a delicate and nuanced reading of the anti-militarist movement. In doing so it exposes that there is a much more intimate relationship between the anti-militarist movement and militarism, or as Rossdale puts it anti-militarist actions and militarism are ‘mutually constitutive’ of each other (p. 12). I will go a step further and suggest that as the book reveals they are not only ‘mutually constitutive’ but rather they depend upon each other in the way in which Judith Butler interpreted Hegel’s ‘masterand servant dialectic’ in Subjects of Desire (1999); the existence of both parties (master (militarism) and servant (anti-militarism) ) somewhat paradoxically– as the former produces and sustains war, domination, authority and the latter contests them – depends on the non-destruction of each other. If the servant for example annihilates the master their existence – as it is inextricably link to the master’s recognition, will cease to be. Rossdale very carefully tracks down how our protesting, direct actions, blockades, and other activist actions at times resemble the very master that we may want to undo, and how prefigurative politics (politics associated with anti-militarist movements) at times fall short of their very aspirations, namely not reproducing the violence associated with militarism. Rossdale for example, shows how gender hierarchies may permeate such groups and how such a hierarchy works against the anti-hierarchical structures and aspirations of anti-militarist groups. Nevertheless, the intention of the book is not to suggest that anti-military resistance should be abandoned. On the contrary, by demonstrating the distance between word (e.g. anti-hierarchy aspiration in the structure and organisation of resistance) and the practice Rossdale, is asking us to cultivate a more mindful ‘ethic of resistance’. It is possible as he suggests that if we become more reflective of our actions that we stop from reproducing militarism – racism, sexism, homophobia and authority, the very things that anti-militarist actions desire to challenge and change. Put differently the book teaches how we are all implicated in the production of violence despite our desires or best intentions and how we can attend to this problematic.
A third commentary in our symposium on Chris Rossdale’s Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion (Edinburgh, 2019), from Rachel Zhou. Rachel is a Phd candidate in the Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science. Her doctoral research focuses on the making of female soldiers in the post-WWII era. Rather than taking the “existence” of female soldiers for granted, she examines “female soldiers” as historically constructed subjects which are constitutive of the politics of war. In particular, she looks at how “small” wars in the post-1945 era as transnational and imperial encounters render thinkable and possible the emergence of female soldiers and shape the subjectivities/experiences of (different) female soldiers. She takes a multidisciplinary approach that encompasses the fields of military/war history, poststructuralist feminist, critical race and postcolonial theories. She is the review article editor of Millennium: Journal of International Studies. Rossdale’s Resisting Militarism is currently discounted with use of the code NEW30 at the EUP site, and the last reply and a rejoinder will follow in the next days; all posts will be collected for future perusal here.
Is resistance possible? How could resistance be carried out? Is resistance outside or external to power it resists? Is a radical escape from power possible? These questions are perennial but now further ignited by movements taking place during a global pandemic which accentuates and exposes systems of power. Chris Rossdale’s Resisting Militarism: Direct Action and the Politics of Subversion offers answers but poses more questions.
This book is rooted in an intimate and careful interrogation of “the performances, negotiations, and debates which surround” anti-militarist direct action in UK, but transcends the ethnography with its major contributions to debates on the politics of resistance and the relations between power and resistance. Treating direct action practices as “a fruitful site through which to read the politics of both militarism and resistance” (p. 6), it successfully and provocatively unpacks how anti-militarist politics resist, subvert, are shaped by, and reproduce militarism. The intimacy between militarism and anti-militarism is critically reflected on through meticulous accounts of the “internal” politics of antimilitarist resistance, which are read in relation to, not apart from, what it is against. Sherry Ortner points out there is an “impulse to sanitize the internal politics” of resistance in studies of resistance so that “the ambivalent complexity” of resistance is usually rendered invisible, which contributes to an inadequate analysis (1995, pp. 176-180). Resisting Militarism does not repeat this pitfall and also moves beyond just taking the “internal” politics of anti-militarist practices seriously. Instead, it would challenge the very binary between “internal” and “external”. The “internal” politics identified by Ortner is “within all the local categories of friction and tension” (p. 177). But Rossdale reads these frictions and tensions among anti-militarists, including those surrounding how an anti-militarist group is organised, whether focusing on the spectacular, how to approach security, illegality, pacifism and nonviolence, and the gendered and racialised politics of the movement”, not as “internal” politics per se. In Resisting Militarism they are interrogated in relation to “external” politics not only because how “internal” politics matters to its engagements with militarism, but more importantly as attempts to determine the particular nature and micro-politics of militarism and the imperatives of resistance as well as the relationship between militarism and anti-militarism (pp. 6-7). With a particular understanding of power and the concept of prefiguration, the book provocatively disrupts the boundaries between means and ends and between resistance and power.
Thus, Resisting Militarism brilliantly demonstrates how militarism and anti-militarism are antagonistic and co-constitutive (or antagonism is always already co-constitutive) and that while power relations can be revealed by examining attempts to uproot them, spaces and practices of resistance are always already produced by and, “potentially, reproductive of precisely that which is resisted” (p. 139). This move is rare even among the works situating power and resistance in the same analytical framework and taking their intimate relationships seriously. Usually they only focus on how a certain form of resistance is produced by a form of power but not on how resistance is complicit and reproduces what it is against. Thus, they still tend to eschew a deconstructive approach to resistance taken by Resisting Militarism, as if being critical of resistance could give more ground and energy to power. Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons by Banu Bargu (2016) is another example which places power and resistance in one framework. Similarly, it also successfully demonstrates how resistance is shaped by power. However, its analysis might be criticised for overlooking how necroresistance could reproduce the logics of a “biosovereign assemblage” (Bargu, p. 53) that it is against. Rendering resistance innocent could simplify the operations of power as well as the complex relationships between power and resistance, and create spaces for imaginations of easy and straightforward resistance and thus a clean escape from power. Resisting Militarism is more cautious and actively seeks to be self-reflective. Not only (some) antimilitarist practices take a deconstructive approach to militarism. Resisting Militarism also seeks to deconstruct anti-militarism and calls for keeping antagonistic contestation in play as well as “a ceaseless openness to deconstruct that contestation” (p. 270). Remaining open to deconstruction and affirmative gestures in resistance could be the best hopes for resisting in a world where the subject, freedom and resistance are shaped and fundamentally entangled with power.
The brilliant book thus has made significant contributions to debates on the politics of resistance. My review should stop here. Also, to offer any critique is difficult because of its constant self-reflections. However, no critique could be exactly against what this book calls for — “antagonistic contestation and a ceaseless openness to deconstruct that contestation” (p. 270). The critiques may not be antagonistic since they follow the approach Resisting Militarism takes but seeks to make some implications more explicit, ask what could be further elaborated on and whether it reproduces what it critiques, and thus they are immanent critiques.
The Disorder Of Things 