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.

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