Parades, parties and pests: contradictions of everyday life in peacekeeping economies

Based on research studies conducted in the UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia in 2006, 2012 and 2013, this article argues that peacekeepers’ everyday experiences reflect a series of contradictory identities and performances with regard to nation, work and gender. Peacekeepers straddle paradoxical worlds simultaneously and manage oppositional demands and obligations, although it is often assumed that they inhabit peacekeeping economies in homogenous ways. Importantly, the experiences provide opportunities for peacekeepers to invest in, accumulate and deploy military capital; to consolidate their military identities; and to favourably and tactically position themselves as deserving and useful subjects within the peacekeeping landscape

Language intermediaries and local agency: peacebuilding, translation/interpreting and political disempowerment in 'mature' post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina

The peace negotiations that ended the 1992–95 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina established a constitutional system of ethnic power-sharing that satisfied its signatories (the presidents of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia) enough for war to cease and provided for international military and civilian peacebuilding to play a significant role in post-conflict Bosnia’s governance and economy. This indefinite peacebuilding mission, still ongoing in a downsized form, depended – like any other form of intervention where foreigners work across linguistic boundaries – on interlinguistic mediation by locally-recruited translators/interpreters, an aspect of knowledge production that even current peace and conflict research into peacebuilding’s micropolitics often neglects. On an individual level, locally-recruited interpreters’ frequently-overlooked agency was integral to peacebuilding practice. Yet theorising their agency must also acknowledge the macrosocial level, where the post-war constitutional system has often been argued to have stripped Bosnians of political agency, since it foreclosed political participation as anything but an ethnic subject corresponding to the three institutionalised ethnic identities (Bosniak, Croat or Serb). The entrenched and growing disconnect between political elites and the public, expressed through social protest in 2014, foregrounds the problem of agency and dis/empowerment in Bosnian society more sharply than research on the politics of translation/interpreting and peacebuilding in Bosnia before 2014 took into account, yet reveals further articulations of how international peacebuilding and domestic political contestation were intertwined

Military deployment, masculinity and trauma : reviewing the connections

This article reviews the literature on deployment trauma and examines the limitations of conventional understandings of trauma as they relate to veterans’ experiences. It suggests that the failure to take into account social influences and social relationships limits the usefulness of conventional approaches to trauma. The article considers the role that masculinity plays in male veterans’ experience of and sense making about trauma. It is suggested that while formal recognition of posttraumatic stress disorder in the DSM has provided a helpful language for veterans, it is an incomplete response. A new model of masculinity that better enables the male veteran to speak about trauma and to reconnect with others has implications for counselling practice with veterans

Challenging the negative images of Haiti at a pre-visit stage using visual online learning materials

Post-conflict destinations can struggle to attract visitors because of their negative image. Research addressing this remains limited. The same can be said about the education of tourists. This research paper contributes to the literature in both areas as it examines the proposition that the education of tourists at a pre-visit stage using online, game-based material could be effective in challenging the negative perception of these destinations. From a destination management point of view, this paper offers an alternative to existing promotional material as there is little evidence at the moment that existing strategies are effective. From a conceptual point of view, this paper contributes to the very limited academic research in Gamification by adding the fact that Gamification can be a very efficient tryvertising tool if using subtle and implicit marketing elements

Forces Sauces and Eggs for Soldiers: food, nostalgia, and the rehabilitation of the British military

This article identifies, and considers the political implications of, the association of the contemporary British military and British soldiers with nostalgia. This aspect of the discursive project of rehabilitating the British military post-Iraq has not hitherto been theorized. The article analyses a set of exemplifying texts, four military charity food brands (Eggs for Soldiers, Forces Sauces, Red Lion Foods, and Rare Tea Company Battle of Britain Tea) to ask how nostalgic rehabilitation of the British military unfolds at the intersections of militarization, commemoration, and post-2008 “conscience capitalism”. I outline how military charity food brands are a form of “conscience capitalism” through which the perpetuation of militarized logics are produced as a notionally apolitical social “cause”, rendered intelligible within the terms of existing commoditized discourses of post-2008 vintage nostalgia. I then ask what understandings of British soldiers and the British military are constituted within the discourse of nostalgic rehabilitation, and secondly what forms of commemoration are entailed. I argue that a nostalgic generalization of soldiers and the military nullifies the potential unruliness of individual soldiers and obscures the specifics of recent, controversial, wars. Secondly nostalgic civil–military engagement entails a commemorative logic in which forms of quasi-military service are brought into the most banal spaces of everyday civilian life

Professionalization of a nonstate actor

Can nonstate militants professionalize? That is the core question of this piece. Discussions of professionalism have spread to the state military from civilian professions such as education, medicine, and law. This piece examines whether nonstate actors exhibit the same fundamental processes found within these state-based organizations. These fundamentals are the creation of a recognized internal ethos, which acts as a collective standard for those involved. A commitment to expertise and the punishment of those who do not reach these collective expectations reinforce this ethos. To answer this question, this piece examines the development of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) during the Troubles. It highlights consistencies and inconsistencies with traditional forces and argues that groups like the PIRA can professionalize and increase their effectiveness in doing so. This widens the field of professionalism studies and provides an additional lens through which to examine nonstate groups

Doing military fitness: physical culture, civilian leisure, and militarism

Drawing explicitly upon the bodily techniques of military basic training and the corporeal competencies of ex-military personnel, military-themed fitness classes and physical challenges have become an increasingly popular civilian leisure pursuit in the UK over the last two decades. This paper explores the embodied regimes, experiences, and interactions between civilians and ex-military personnel that occur in these emergent hybrid leisure spaces. Drawing on ethnographic data, I argue that commercial military fitness involves a repurposing and rearticulation of collective military discipline within a late modern physical culture that emphasizes the individual body as a site of self-discovery and personal responsibility. Military fitness is thus a site of a particular biopolitics, of feeling alive in a very specific way. The intensities and feelings of physical achievement and togetherness that are generated emerge filtered through a particular military lens, circulating around and clinging to the totem of the repurposed ex-martial body. In the commercial logic of the fitness market, being ‘military’ and the ex-soldier’s body have thus become particularly trusted and affectively resonant brands

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