Description
IR scholarship on the relationship between new forms of information/communication technologies and militarism is in its infancy and little attention has been paid to how social media users participate in processes of militarism. Contributing to this emergent body of work, this paper examines how the legitimation and normalization of political violence was constituted through the activity of Indian Twitter users during Israel’s May 2021 assault on Gaza and the events immediately preceding it. It examines how an ideological affinity and mutual legitimation of militaristic, supremacist nationalisms has been apparent in the ways online Hindu nationalists have been vociferous in supporting violent Israeli state practices and policies. This is evident through liking, sharing, commenting on, and/or producing content which reproduces several identifiable, overarching narrative tropes concerning ‘terrorism’ and ‘national defence’. Drawing on the work of other scholars, we emphasize how militarism is best understood as a sociological phenomenon with deep and far-reaching embeddedness in social relations, fusing the ‘everyday’ and the international, and as constituted through social practices involving, but not limited to, the state. We suggest that to account for the enduring and pervasive reach of militarism in world politics, greater attention should be directed towards the digital, participatory, transnational dimensions of militarism.
