Description
Military reality TV enables militaries to invite civilian audiences into an interactive, ‘entertaining’, and first-person relationship with war. What does it mean to “see through soldier eyes”? This article contributes with novel insights on the subtle forms of audience participation in militarism through a video analysis of three Swedish military reality TV shows: “Peace Force”, “War for Peace” and “Peace Soldier”, which depict Swedish soldiers on deployment in Afghanistan and Mali. The first two are about the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (ISAF) and the third one shows Swedish peacekeepers in the United Nations mission in Mali, MINUSMA. The viewer gets to see how the soldiers handle death, love, conflict and being away from home. Drawing from Critical Military Studies and Visual International Relations scholarship, we argue that the soldiers’ storylines and the visual representation of their service conveys a specific racialised, classed, gendered vision of Swedishness – portraying Sweden as peaceful, gender-equal, humanitarian, and secular. Through these shows’ aesthetic registers, choice of music and color, the Swedish military involvement in these missions is rendered ‘palatable’ (Jester, 2023) and accessible for a Swedish audience through familiar binaries of peace/war, home/away, boredom/excitement, enemy/ally and progressive/backwards.
