Description
A Soldier/Mercenary dichotomy lies at the heart of state formation accounts, as states only established a true monopoly on the use of physical force when mercenaries were replaced by armies composed of national soldiers after the French Revolution. (Tilly 1991; Avant 2000; Percy 2006) This paper revisits this claim by subjecting it to queer intellectual curiosity. (Weber 2015) By investigating 19th century discourses on the formation of the social, I expose how the Soldier/Mercenary binary was constructed upon notions of masculinity, effeminacy, and sex. Specifically, I show how the adjective ‘mercenary’ became constituted as a noun to construct the hierarchical dichotomy between the masculine ‘soldier’ as the normative ideal and the queer ‘mercenary’ as its deviant, foreign and perverse conceptual opposite. This dichotomy served an important function in the constitution of the international, as it created a clear dividing line between the spaces of peace and development inside, patrolled by the soldier, and the unruly and warlike outside from which the ‘mercenary’ supposedly originates. Exposing the queer categories at play in, but hidden from, the war-machines origin myth thus reveals how conventional accounts of state formation in IR arrest ambiguity and stabilize heteronormative hierarchies and orders.
