Cosmopolitanism and the Body

This chapter explores the ways in which the relationships between cosmopolitanism and embodiment have been understood in social theory and analysis

The Fangs Behind the Mask: Everyday Life in Wartime Chechnya

The chapter examines the mundane details of how the war was experienced, felt and negotiated at an individual and interactional level by participants that were affected by it. It aims to illuminate not just the central instability and ontological insecurity of life in Chechnya during wartime, but also how this chaotic situation was experienced and negotiated at the everyday level of the personal politics of survival and coping. At one level, Babchenko and Politkovskaya's writing is an impassioned ethical attempt to try and reveal the metaphorical fangs behind the mask, to expose the wider hidden rationalities and mendacities of the war in Chechnya. Babchenko recounts bewildered conversations that regularly take place in the federal army where his comrades sarcastically discuss the latest performative political utterances and official strategic definitions of the situation. It concludes that the restoration of constitutional order and the counter-terrorist operation are nothing but meaningless words that are cited to justify the murder of thousands of people

Sensate regimes of war: Smell, tracing and violence

This article explores the fabrication of ‘sensate regimes of war’, concentrating on the typically under-analysed sense of smell. Smell is a sensory mode capable of apprehending potential threat and enmity in ways that are orthogonal to other ways of sensing. Accordingly, the organization and interpretation of olfactory sensation occupies a distinctive place in war. The article details a particular genealogy of martial olfaction, exploring the olfactory capacities of soldiers and their augmentation through various non-human and technological means in specific milieus of combat. It notes how the distinctive affordances of smell have underpinned numerous wartime practices, from tracing improvised explosive devices to militarized manhunting. These developments supplement and trouble ocularcentric accounts of martial sensation and power that concentrate on the increasingly abstracted co-production of vision and violence in wartime. They highlight rather the significance of an alternative ontology of the signature or trace of enmity, and emphasize how in particular warscapes to smell is to kill. The article concludes by arguing that critical inquiry into war would benefit from a broader theorization of all its sensate regimes right across a sensorium that is itself being continuously transformed through war

Helmetcams, militarized sensation and 'Somatic War'

In stark contrast to the abstraction and radical disembodiment of hi-tech virtual war, the mediascape of contemporary counter-insurgency is increasingly dominated by material that is lo-fi, intimate, multi-sensory and decisively linked to the embodied experiences and risks of soldiering. In this article, I explore the visual grammar and affective logics of two recent prominent public mediations of the war in Afghanistan, both dominated by the use of video footage recorded from camcorders mounted on soldiers' helmets. Epitomized in this helmetcam footage, I suggest that it is through an emerging aesthetic regime of 'somatic war' – that foregrounds sensory immersion and real feeling, vital living and bodily vulnerability – that the endless war in Afghanistan is currently being made perceptible and palpable

Predatory War, Drones and Torture: Remapping the Body in Pain

Elaine Scarry argues in The Body in Pain that war is a vast and reciprocal swearing on the body, with corporeality key not only to its brutal prosecution but also to the eventual ending of the political ‘crisis of substantiation’ that war entails. However, her work has not been extensively explored with reference to significant transformations in the embodied experiences of contemporary warfare. This article thus analyses a particular articulation of late modern warfare that I term predatory war, whose current signature motif is the drone strike, through the lens of Scarry’s work. Here, the associated modes of embodiment are radically non-reciprocal, the woundscapes of conflict are profoundly asymmetric, and the affective mediation of bodily injury does not substantiate any ending to the conflict. As such, I argue that the ontology and phenomenology of predatory war increasingly resembles what Scarry identifies as the underlying structure of torture

Playing in the End Times: Wargames, Resilience and the Art of Failure

This chapter argues that the political significance and cultural resonance of contemporary video wargames lies not simply in the forms of militarism that such games engender. Rather video wargames are a signature late modern medium through which forms of resilience are entrained through permanent arousal and continuous exposure to contingency and failure. The video wargamer is a subject who ultimately understands and experiences themselves as a resilient subject, a survivor. While inevitable failure may make the player deeply frustrated, such anger is predominantly directed towards a delimited form of self-improvement rather than towards structural critique of the gameworld, which is ruled out of court because the rules of the game cannot be changed. Wargaming thus serves as an activity in which specific models and practices of resilience training are increasingly made manifest. Wargames may be best understood and critiqued not simply in terms of cultural militarisation or pre-training for war, but as a space for playing through continual emergency, as an increasingly prominent cultural form where the player learns emotionally and imaginatively to bear the disaster of living in the end times

Introduction: War and the Body

This chapter places the body at the centre of critical thinking about war and its consequences. War is fundamentally embodied. The reality of war is not just politics by any other means but politics incarnate, politics written on and experienced through the thinking, feeling bodies of men and women. From steeled combatants to abject victims, war occupies innumerable bodies in a multitude of ways, profoundly shaping lives and ways of being human. Giving the body an analytic recognition that it warrants and has often been denied in conventional war studies, this chapter brings together new interdisciplinary scholarship that explores the numerous affective, sensory and embodied practices through which war lives and breeds. It focuses on how war is prepared, enacted and reproduced through embodied action, suffering and memory. As such, it promotes new directions in theorising war and transformations in warfare, via an explicit focus on the body

Combinatorial gene therapy accelerates bone regeneration: non-viral dual delivery of VEGF and BMP2 in a collagen-nanohydroxyapatite scaffold.

Vascularization and bone repair are accelerated by a series of gene-activated scaffolds delivering both an angiogenic and an osteogenic gene. Stem cell-mediated osteogenesis in vitro, in addition to increased vascularization and bone repair by host cells in vivo, is enhanced using all systems while the use of the nanohydroxyapatite vector to deliver both genes markedly enhances bone healing

Towards an Embodied Sociology of War

While sociology has historically not been a good interlocutor of war, this paper argues that the body has always known war, and that it is to the corporeal that we can turn in an attempt to develop a language to better speak of its myriad violences and its socially generative force. It argues that war is a crucible of social change that is prosecuted, lived and reproduced via the occupation and transformation of myriad bodies in numerous ways from exhilaration to mutilation. War and militarism need to be traced and analysed in terms of their fundamental, diverse and often brutal modes of embodied experience and apprehension. This paper thus invites sociology to extend its imaginative horizon to rethink the crucial and enduring social institution of war as a broad array of fundamentally embodied experiences, practices and regimes