Cultures of Militarism: An Introduction to Supplement 19

Abstract

This volume contributes to a new anthropology of militarism that has crystallized since the end of the cold war. Unlike scholars in mainstream security studies and political science, anthropologists treat militarism as a process rather than a reified, measurable quantum acting as an independent variable. Anthropological analysis of militarism focuses on the social construction of security threats; the decentering of the state’s monopoly over legitimate violence in an era where guerillas, paramilitaries, and military contractors hold unprecedented sway; the increasing hybridization of war and peace in the context of a permanent war economy; the capillary colonization of social and imaginative life by military processes thanks to militarized media institutions; and the suffering, both bodily and psychological, of those who are killed, injured, bereaved, or dislocated by military processes. In the context of a global militarized capitalist system, this suffering is transmuted into profit in various centers of accumulation. Whereas folk ideology may portray individual military initiatives as defensive moves against aggression, this analysis reframes militarism as an integrated global system with its own escalatory logic that feeds off actors’ inability to recognize the ways in which each militarized action reinforces the growth of militarism as a transnational exterminist structure.