Description
War has been, for modern states, the ultimate moral arbiter of who counts as a citizen and what counts as a national purpose.” (Lutz and Millar 2012, 482). But not all wars are fought for a national purpose. Instead of defending own territory, militaries are deployed as part of international intervention forces and soldiers spend considerable parts of their professional life in multinational contexts. Nevertheless, military institutions are still primarily organized within state structures and debates about war reflect societies’ particular political cultures. The paper suggests that the concomitant state-centrism of military studies obscures transnational dynamics of militarisation. Therefore, it proposes methodologies that facilitate studying the politico-economic as well as socio-cultural conditions that enable war efforts. First, it outlines the approach of following the social life of a military object as a way for exploring international military cooperation and the defense industry. Second, it presents the North Atlantic Fella Organization as an example of a transnational collaborative project that interlocks memetic warfare in social media with real-world military violence and which has meanwhile grown into a quasi-military alliance. The aim of the paper is to stimulate fresh thinking about how zooming in on transnational dimensions of militarisation can be achieved.
