[Review] Linda Åhäll and Thomas Gregory, ed. (2015) Emotions, politics and war

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‘War Ink’: sense-making and curating war through military tattoos

Veterans have long sought to make sense of and capture their wartime experiences through a variety of aesthetic means such as novels, memoirs, films, poetry and art. Increasingly, scholars of IR are turning to these sources as a means to study war experience. In this article we analyze one such sense-making practice that has, despite its long association with war, largely gone unnoticed: military tattoos. We argue that military tattoos and the experiences they capture can offer a novel entry point into understanding how wars are made sense of and captured on the body. Focusing on a web archive – ‘War Ink’ – curated and collected for and by US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, we analyze how tattoos perform an important ‘sense-making’ function for participating veterans. We focus on three recurring themes – loss and grief, guilt and anger, and transformation and hope – demonstrating how military tattoos offer important insights into how military and wartime experience is traced and narrated on and through the body. The web archive, however, not only enables a space for veterans to make sense of their war experience through their tattoos, the archive also does important political work in curating the broader meaning of war to the wider public

Safeguarding in international development research: evidence review

This evidence review, undertaken in March-April 2019 by a team led by Dr David Orr at the University of Sussex, aims to characterise the nature of safeguarding issues and challenges that may arise in the specific context of international development research, identify existing guidance and review its implementation. This rapid review was guided by two overarching questions: 1.What is known about the prevalence and nature of vulnerability, power imbalances, and safeguarding concerns within international development research? 2.How is safeguarding currently addressed within international development research, what is the evidence on how fit for purpose it is, and what models of good practice can be identified? A draft set of principles and best practice guidance, drawn from the findings of this evidence review, are set out in this 10 page briefing paper

Gendering counterinsurgency: performativity, experience and embodiment in the Afghan 'theatre of war'

This book analyses the various ways counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is gendered. The book examines the US led war in Afghanistan from 2001 onwards, including the invasion, the population-centric counterinsurgency operations and the efforts to train a new Afghan military charged with securing the country when the US and NATO withdrew their combat forces in 2014. Through an analysis of key counterinsurgency texts and military memoirs, the book explores how gender and counterinsurgency are co-constitutive in numerous ways. It discusses the multiple military masculinities that counterinsurgency relies on, the discourse of ‘cultural sensitivity’, and the deployment of Female Engagement Teams (FETs). Gendering Counterinsurgency demonstrates how population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine and practice can be captured within a gendered dynamic of ‘killing and caring’ – reliant on physical violence, albeit mediated through ‘armed social work’. This simultaneously contradictory and complementary dynamic cannot be understood without recognising how the legitimation and the practice of this war relied on multiple gendered embodied performances of masculinities and femininities. Developing the concept of ‘embodied performativity’ this book shows how the clues to understanding counterinsurgency, as well as gendering war more broadly are found in war’s everyday gendered manifestations. This book will be of much interest to students of counterinsurgency warfare, gender politics, governmentality, biopolitics, critical war studies, and critical security studies in general

"Valhalla rising": gender, embodiment and experience in military memoirs

Recent contributions to International Relations (IR) place embodiment, experience, and emotion at the centre of its analysis of war. Recognising that war should be ‘studied up from people and not down from places that sweep blood, tears and laughter away’ (Sylvester, 2012: 484), I extend this aim to analyse embodiment and experience through Norwegian military memoirs from Afghanistan. These are relevant empirically not necessarily because they contest political aims or offer policy recommendations, but because of how these embodied narratives, influenced by particular gendered conceptions of ‘warrior masculinity’ and Viking mythology, trouble Norwegian public narratives. Through focusing on how memoirs construct the sensory experience of combat, I argue that these enable us to push conceptual understandings of embodiment and experience in IR. They show how war is experienced as an assemblage of pleasure and pain, and how this is caught up in complex blurrings of individual and collective militarised bodies. Analysing how the pain and pleasure of war is made sense of through and between bodies, allows us to advance the usage of embodiment as a concept in IR, in turn leaving the discipline better equipped to understand wars complex embodied assemblages and its continued seductions to those who practice it

Counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and gender

This chapter provides an introduction to the relationship between gender and counterinsurgency. It demonstrates how gender dynamics are important to study as a means to fully understand the theory, doctrine and practice of counterinsurgency. It begins by explaining the core tenets of this form of warfare and its underlying colonial logics. Following this, it focuses in particular on recent ‘population-centric’ approaches to counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan, and discusses its various manifestations of military masculinities, emphasising on ‘cultural sensitivity’ and the recent invention of Female Engagement Teams

Introduction: embodying militarism - exploring the spaces and bodies in between

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Introduction - Asking questions of, and about, IR

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What’s the point of international relations

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