Description
Arms manufacturing has become politically speakable. In the UK, ‘Defence manufacturing’ and ‘the defence industrial base’ has gone from being often obscured within political discourse (opaquely packaged as ‘advanced manufacturing’ or ‘dual use technology’) to now being explicitly named, framed, and developed as a solution not just to global and national insecurities but to local social, political and economic problems. How has this come to be and with what effect? Tracing how civilian labour is organised for defence manufacturing in South Yorkshire, UK, the paper illuminates how the possibility and the speakability of ‘rearmament’ is an outcome of the enmeshing of economic logics, relations and mechanisms with social and political imaginaries and formations. From the financial crisis in its universities, to post industrial under-investment, under-employment and perceived political alienation in locations previously defined by steel and coal industries, in South Yorkshire ‘defence manufacturing’ has emerged as a politically speakable solution to intersecting political, economic, and social problems. Placing the concept of labour regimes into conversation with understandings of the liberal state and liberal military power, the resulting analysis has implications for what we know about the politics and the political economies of contemporary liberal military power.