Description
From training to deployment, soldiers are subjected to rigidly timetabled forms of communal living that seek to bind them into functional and cohesive collective subjects apt for fighting. Military drills, for instance, exercise synchronisation, pushing individual soldiers to act as one with their teammates and to develop quasi-symbiotic relationships with their weapons. Drills, alongside sanitary, dietary, and sleeping imposed routines are some of the contemporary military rituals that seem to be central to military life, and yet stay partially marginalised in extant accounts of war. Indeed, while scholars of of militarism, militarisation, and martial politics have started to grapple with these phenomena, their ritualistic, and especially temporal dimensions remain understudied – the burgeoning literature on time and temporality in IR notwithstanding. This paper addresses this neglect by offering some initial thoughts on the temporal politics of martial ritualistic actions. It mobilises the example of basic training in the UK army to show that underlying drills and other martial rituals are institutionally led effort to mould soldiers’ sense of time. The paper argues for the importance of taking rituals and routines seriously in the study of war and other security practices, and sketches the contours of a time-centered sociological framework to do so.
