Description
In this contribution I discuss how to empirically engage with ‘the boring’ and the banal when
studying war. Part of a wider project that explores the agency within the civil/military
dichotomy, in this paper I discuss how arts-based methods can be brought into conversation
with a political economy perspective. I have been ‘following the objects’ in order to find out
more about ‘the civil’s’ role in the production of the means of violence. The guiding notion in
collating these objects has been “the banal” and “the boring”. While these are inherently
subjective and superficial categories, they have been a useful starting point in
operationalizing ‘the civil’. Boringness is socially constructed, and thus, as Moller argues, in
relation to art, “announcing that certain works are boring is to assume something like that
there is not anything sufficiently interesting in them when that is in fact never true” (Moller
2014: 182). In following the objects, I am tracing how boringness is constructed empirically
explore what work ‘the civil’ is doing, through a multi-sited ethnographic approach.
