This book critically examines the significance of gender, race and sexuality to wars waged by liberal states. Drawing on original field-research with British soldiers, it offers insights into how ...their everyday experiences are shaped by, and shape, a politics of gender, race and sexuality that not only underpins power relations in the military, but the geopolitics of wars waged by liberal states. Linking the politics of daily life to the international is an intervention into international relations (IR) and security studies because instead of overlooking the politics of the everyday, this book insists that it is vital to explore how geopolitical events and practices are co-constituted, reinforced and contested by it. By utilising insights from Michel Foucault, the book explores how shared and collectively mediated knowledge on gender, race and sexuality facilitates certain claims about the nature of governing in liberal states and about why and how such states wage war against 'illiberal' ones in pursuit of global peace and security. The book also develops post-structural work in international relations by urging scholars interested in the linguistic construction of geopolitics to consider the ways in which bodies, objects and architectures also reinforce particular ideas about war, identity and statehood.
Vasilij Subbotin's We Stormed the Reichstag is a typical specimen of the wave of non-fiction prose about World War II which sprang up in the wake of the 20th Congress. The search for the unjustly ...forgotten war hero, one of the major themes of this kind of literature, is represented here by the story of Petr Pjatnickij, a soldier who fell on the steps of the Reichstag entrance with a red flag in his hand and was then forgotten. If, hypothetically, this story was false, it would echo the (probably false) story of the 28 'panfilovcy' who purportedly fell at Dubosekovo during the battle for Moscow. In that case, Subbotin's text would embody a characteristically literary device: giving a name to an anonymous character, the anonymous figure, for example, carrying the flag in Vladimir Bogatkin's well-known painting, as a way to give life and credibility to the image. The Dubosekovo story, as developed by journalist Aleksandr Krivickij, appears to employ the same mechanism for achieving credibility. In this case the operation was twofold: Krivickij gave his heroes first a number, and only later names. The second move was the most hazardous. A story that pretends to be true must be verifiable in real life; this is where Krivickij failed and where Subbotin may have succeeded. Stalinist culture fundamentally refused to separate fact from fiction. The non-fiction literature from the Thaw is exactly the opposite: an attempt at reinstating the separation. Keywords Vasilij Subbotin; Aleksandr Krivickij; War Literature; Non-Fiction.
Writing War Moore, Aaron William
2013, 2013-06-03, 2013-07-01
eBook
Writing War examines over two hundred diaries, and many more letters, postcards, and memoirs, written by Chinese, Japanese, and American servicemen in the Pacific from 1937 to 1945. As he describes ...conflicts that have often been overlooked by historians, Aaron William Moore reflects on diaries as tools in the construction of modern identity.