Description
How has 'critical' been conceptualised and deployed in critical military studies and what are its limits? What implicit understanding of or investments in war, and what possibilities for alternative, are bound within these conceptualisations? Initial founding statements concerning the scope and tenets of CMS (taking Basham, Belkin and Gifkins, 2015 as an initial baseline) were consciously pluralist and caveated that CMS was neither "static or precise". They did, however, clearly reject critique "as a means through which to offer recommendations for military policy", and they endorsed Cynthia Enloe's 'sceptical curiosity' which had its origins in IR's feminist antimilitarism. The other founding principle of CMS was its methodological pluralism and interdisciplinarity where "nothing is taken for granted as natural or inevitable". This ran alongside a willingness to engage with "the politics of positionality" including via " complex and messy" research encounters with "those who articulate and are themselves articulations of military power, including researchers themselves". This was suggested as a route to research that would bring about "social and political change". In this paper I trace how criticality has come to be interpreted and practiced within critical military studies research since 2015 and the extents to which work within CMS questions or is invested in war as an inevitability, and makes space for or consciously imagines alternative geopolitical realities.
