Description
Anthropologist Daniel Hoffman observes that "there has been a curious inability, or perhaps unwillingness...to think of violence as literal work, to think of the labour of war as labour". In this paper we make a case for understanding war and military power from the perspective of work and labour, reflect on what this might look like, and consider some implications. Feminist theorists have, of course, demonstrated that forms of feminised labour, namely domestic, informal, and socially reproductive, underpin war and military power. There is also a modest cross-disciplinary literature that centres labour in various ways within the analysis of war, military power, and military institutions (we might cite inter alia Deborah Cowen, Adam Moore, Amanda Chisholm, Radhika Singha, Daniel Hoffman). Drawing on this work and our own research (respectively: labour relations underpinning the civilian manufacture of military and dual use objects, and gendered occupational cultures within the British Army) we explore how we might conceptualise and empirically locate war as a matter of labour, and outline the implications of doing so. For instance, what is revealed when we trace the entanglements of the means of production and the means of violence? What comes into view when we trace the organisation of military labour for specific forms of military violence? What might the lens of work and labour reveal about global configurations and relations of power, economy, and violence?
