The gendered politics of researching military policy in the age of the ‘knowledge economy’

This is the final version. Available on open access from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this record. This article explores our experiences of conducting feminist interpretive research on the British Army Reserves. The project, which examined the everyday work-Army-life balance challenges that reservists face, and the roles of their partners/spouses in enabling them to fulfil their military commitments, is an example of a potential contribution to the so-called ‘knowledge economy’, where publicly funded research has come to be seen as ‘functional’ for political, military, economic, and social advancement. As feminist interpretive researchers examining an institution that prizes masculinist and functionalist methodologies, instrumentalised knowledge production, and highly formalised ethics approval processes, we faced multiple challenges to how we were able to conduct our research, who we were able to access, and what we were able to say. We show how military assumptions about what constitutes proper ‘research’, bolstered by knowledge economy logics, reinforces gendered power relationships that keep hidden the significant roles women (in our case, the partners/spouses of reservists) play in state security. Accordingly, we argue that the functionalist and masculinist logics interpretive researchers face in the age of the knowledge economy help more in sustaining orthodox modes of knowledge production about militaries and security, and in reinforcing gendered power relations, than they do in advancing knowledge.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)UK Ministry of DefenceBritish Arm

Reproducing the military and heteropatriarchal normal: Army Reserve service as serious leisure

This is the final version. Available on open access from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this record.The notion that military violence engenders security and that military service is a selfless and necessary act are orthodoxies in political, military and scholarly debate. The UK Reserves’ recent expansion prompts reconsideration of this orthodoxy, particularly as it suggests that reservists serve selflessly. Drawing on fieldwork with British Army reservists and their spouses/partners, we examine how this orthodoxy allows reservists to engage in everyday embodied performances, and occasionally articulations, of the need to serve, to free themselves up from household responsibilities. This supposed necessity of military service necessitates heteropatriarchal divisions of labour, which facilitate participation in military service and the state’s ability to conduct war/war preparations. However, whilst reserve service is represented as sacrificial and necessary it is far more self-serving and is better understood as ‘serious leisure’ (Stebbins, 1982), an activity whose perceived importance engenders deep self-fulfilment. By showing that the performances of sacrifice and necessity reservists rely on are selfish, not selfless, we show how militarism is facilitated by such everyday desires. We conclude by reflecting on how exposing reserve service as serious leisure could contribute to problematising the state’s ability to rely on everyday performances and articulations of militarism and heteropatriarchy to prepare for and wage war.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

Ordering disorder: The making of world politics

This is the final version. Available on open access from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this recordThis article offers insights into the character and composition of world order. It does so by focusing on how world order is made and revealed through seemingly disorderly events. We examine how societies struggle to interpret and respond to disorderly events through three modes of treatment: tragedy, crisis and scandal. These, we argue, are the dominant modes of treatment in world politics, through which an account of disorder is articulated and particular political responses are mobilised. Specifically, we argue that each mode provides a particular way of problematising disorder, locating responsibility, and generating political responses. As we will demonstrate, these modes instigate the ordering of disorder, but they also agitate and reveal the contours of order itself. We argue therefore that an attentiveness to how we make sense of and respond to disorder offers the discipline new opportunities for interrogating the underlying forces, dynamics and structures that define contemporary world politics

‘Mr Rules’: Keir Starmer and the juridification of politics

This is the author accepted manuscriptKeir Starmer’s moniker of ‘Mr Rules’ captures his deep investment in a rules-based form of politics that seeks to uphold established standards of probity and competency in public office. Rather than a mere tactic of opposition politics, we argue that it is symptomatic of the juridification of politics. By this we mean the ceding of the terrain of politics to the seemingly superior and separate domains of law and administration. Drawing upon and extending existing analyses of depoliticisation and unpolitics, the juridification of politics marks the abandonment of consciously values-based politics in favour of a reliance upon legal and quasi-legal (i.e. rules, norms, conventions, procedures) means to address substantive matters of public policy. Crucially, we locate this trend as a consequence of the neoliberal way of politics in which the task of governing in a post-ideological age is reduced to administration. This is significant, we conclude, because such an approach is incapable of responding to the intersecting crises confronting national and international politics

Sexualities in State Militaries

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Palgrave Macmillan via the DOI in this record.The regulation and role of sexuality within state militaries has been a major concern for gender scholars. Militaries remain important national institutions which reproduce and reinforce social norms and hierarchies around gender, race and sexuality and as Paul Higate (2003b: 209) has argued ‘the inscription of heterosexuality into all aspects of culture… is deeply bound up with the… [combat masculine warrior] ethic.’ Moreover the regulation of sexuality within state militaries is not just an issue of equal opportunities for sexual minorities serving within them. Gendered logics shape the politics of war in liberal democratic states and societies because they ‘help to define the objects and subjects of war – who fights, who dies, who or what should be defended, and to what ends’ (Basham 2013: 7). The official regulation and everyday performances of sexuality and sexual identity within state militaries shape, and are shaped by, the need to legitimise state sanctioned violence. [...

Critical Military Studies as Method: An Approach to Studying Gender and the Military

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Palgrave Macmillan via the DOI in this record