Description
This paper examines how everyday militarisation is lived and reproduced in Turkey’s military beach clubs, military-run social facilities for personnel and families. Ordinary in appearance, these resorts become un-common sites where militarised norms and the politics of violence are sustained. What looks like holiday leisure is regulated in ways that reproduce structural, everyday militarisation: access to amenities is rank-based; conduct mirrors military etiquette; and core services are performed by conscripts whose labour is rendered invisible, redistributing rest upwards. Drawing on interviews with military spouses, the paper centres their perspectives to show how relational care is recruited into militarised order under constraint through mundane, gendered routines. Through address, gesture, and peer-policing of ‘proper’ use of shared spaces, they embody rank codes and adjust demeanour to status cues. Invoking care, many find themselves smoothing interactions and prioritising comfort as a practical accommodation to ranked expectations: lowering voices near senior ranks, instructing children to rise, and adjusting pace to avoid overtaking. The analysis traces how patriarchal-militarised structures script care work and distribute accountability upward, situating spouses’ care and navigations within everyday militarisms and institutional hierarchies, beyond voluntarist framings. In these fleeting acts, authority is reasserted and ease becomes a militarised mode of governance. The beach operates as a common, a shared space maintained through etiquette and rank, yet its exclusions make it un-common. Within this order, brief leniencies, such as sharing amenities across ranks or small gestures by conscripts, mark the edges of hierarchy without displacing it. Taken together, these routine practices are violent unravellings of leisure; ease, rather than resisting, functions within the politics of violence. The analysis foregrounds structural capture of care, while attending to spouses’ ambivalence, negotiation, and limited room for manoeuvre, to show how militarised institutions harness women’s care, appearing as nurturance but operating as discipline, to sustain hierarchy.
