War and the Body Militarisation, Practice and Experience [Paperback]

This edited volume 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 book 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, the book promotes new directions in theorising war and transformations in warfare, via an explicit focus on the body.

This book will be of much interest to students and scholars of war studies, security studies, sociology, anthropology, military studies, politics and IR in general.

1. War and the Body, Kevin McSorley  Part I: Militarizing Bodies  2. Preparing and Resisting the War Body: Training in the British Army, Emma Reilly  3. Steeling the Body for War in Austrofascist Education, Tamara Ehs  4. Too fat to fight? Obesity, Bio-Politics and the Militarization of Childrens Bodies, Joseph Burridge and Kevin McSorley  5. Military Chic: Fashioning Civilian Bodies for War, Jane Tynan  Part II: Embodying War  6. On patrol: The Embodied Phenomenology of Infantry, John Hockey  7. Switching On for Cash: The Private Militarized Security Contractor as Geo-Corporeal Actor, Paul Higate  8. Affectl£!