Description
This paper is about how military families shape and are shaped by Canadian foreign policy. It challenges the notion that what happens in families and households is “private” and disconnected from national and international politics. By drawing on interviews with military family members, and analyses of military policies as well as official political narratives, I show how the everyday lives of women and men in military families—their practices and relationships and the stories we tell about them—are a crucial component of Canada’s ability to engage in and wage war. That is, I contend that foreign policy, specifically Canada’s defence policy, starts right at home. This paper draws on feminist International Relations (IR) and Critical Military Studies (CMS) scholarship to challenge the conceptual and theoretical silences around women’s everyday activities and experiences, and how they sustain global politics and militarism. In so doing, this work contributes to a more wholistic theorising of world politics.
