Overview

This book asks why US service members, veterans and military families continue to affectively invest in militarism both as a structure of global politics and in their everyday lives when they have experienced first-hand, its physical and emotional costs? Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with military communities and ethnographic insights from a range of military sites, the book examines how those service members, veterans and military families who have been physically and emotionally depleted through their intimate relations to US militarism are the same individuals who have simultaneously experienced its concomitant pleasures, joys, and have built lives and worlds through their attachment to it. Ultimately, the book argues these dual and contradictory experiences are central to militarism's endurance in global politics; both through individuals continued affective investment in a militarised pathway and through the incremental and incomplete ways that militarism is reproduced in their everyday lives.

Full Product Details

9781399530743

Table of Contents

Reviews

Sites matter. Julia Welland draws us into three distinct sites of contemporary militarization, none in a war zone. Each site is deeply gendered, usually patriarchally; each is potent in its affective impacts on both military personnel and diverse civilians. Ever eschewing stereotypes, through her careful listening and astute observation, Welland reveals how militarism nurtures and excites, while it also hurts and drains. -- Cynthia Enloe, author of Twelve Feminist Lessons of War

Author Information

Julia Welland is Associate Professor of War Studies at University of Warwick, UK.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available