Introduction
Civilians – as civilians – do not play a prominent role in International Relations (IR) theorising or analysis. Indeed, civilians appear more often in IR as dead bodies – civilian casualties – than as socially embedded, politically relevant subjects.Footnote 1 There are exceptions to this generalisation: analyses of the laws of war and human rights reference civilians as objects of regulation;Footnote 2 the military sociological literature valorises civilians as agents of restraint in the democratic control of armed force;Footnote 3 and liberal democratic peace theory at least partially envisages civilians (though more as citizens) as a potential brake on arbitrary wars.Footnote 4 Feminist and gender analyses have highlighted the ways in which the categories of ‘civilian’ and ‘soldier’, and the purportedly binary distinction between them, reproduce, and are reproduced, by gendered hierarchies of masculinity/femininity, protector/protected, and agency/passivity.Footnote 5 Associated studies examine the empirical effect and political consequences of this powerful gendered discursive formation for the laws of warFootnote 6 and the differential experiences of civilians in personal and professional contact with the military institution.Footnote 7 While crucially important, much of this work has centred on examining the ways in which the gendered Beautiful Soul/Just Warrior binary servesFootnote 8 to shore up the heroic masculinity of the figurative soldier and the corresponding legitimacy of the (nation)state. As a result, this scholarship tends to reify the enduring empirical association of soldier and masculinity and femininity and civilian.
As such, this inattention to politically relevant civilians may be at least partially attributed to the power of the common Western construction of men (and the masculine/ised citizen) as ‘always-already’ soldiers (or potential soldiers).Footnote 9 The ideal-typical ‘soldier’ is frequently figuratively – though far from universally, empirically – linked to the valorised characteristics of Western masculinity, such as autonomy, bravery, self-sacrifice, rationality, and strength.Footnote 10 As observed by Victoria Basham, though there are important differences across national and cultural contexts, military service and sacrifice are closely connected to understandings of masculinity and normative citizenship.Footnote 11 The notion of heroic, masculine military service, however, exists in tension with the contemporary state of a good deal of Western – particularly liberal democratic – civil-military relations.
Of the 88 states qualified as ‘free’ in the 2018 Freedom House reportFootnote 12 (an imperfect approximation of liberal democracy, to be sure),Footnote 13 66 lacked conscription.Footnote 14 The end of the Cold War saw a sharp drop in conscription, particularly within Europe, to the extent that national service remains in only ten European states.Footnote 15 We see a trend where, in an era of professional militaries and geographically distant conflicts, the vast majority of liberal democratic citizens only indirectly interact with the military.Footnote 16 By sheer numbers, the ‘civilian’ experience of wartime is far more common than that of ‘soldier’. The situation is, of course, not limited to liberal democratic and/or Western societies; in wars with conscription there have generally been more people outside the armed forces than in.Footnote 17 But as this model of limited, distant, professionalised, and predominantly Western war proliferates, the possibilities of and for ‘civilianness’ as a meaningful political subjectivity within liberal democracies seems radically under-examined.
So, should we care? Or rather, how does this matter? The focus on soldiers is, in many ways, entirely logical, considering the normative and political stakes of organised violence. It is also, however, a reflection of the overarching, gendered tendency in international relations to regard the activities and subjectivities conventionally associated with men and/or masculinity as the legitimate (and ‘obvious’) objects of academic IR inquiry, while relegating purportedly ‘domestic’, feminised activities and persons to the margins.Footnote 18 This article, in contrast, argues that civilians, as socially embedded and politically relevant subjects, are key to understanding both longstanding assumptions of IR theory and, more importantly, contemporary liberal civil-military relations. It interrogates, informed by Helen Kinsella, the ways in which the ‘reliance [on] negative definition’ of civilian as simply not-a-soldier ‘prohibits consideration of the significance of the concept of civilian itself’.Footnote 19
To open this discussion, I examine an illustrative case study – the gendered dynamics of charitable support for the military in the UK – to think through two key lacunae: (a) the under-theorisation of ‘civilian’ in its own right; and (b) a corresponding inattention to the empirical possibility/ies and performance(s) of explicitly civilian masculinity/ies. Though attentive to the contingent and fluid nature of both gendered/ing norms and the liberal civil-military divide, I foreground the under-examined notion of ‘civilian masculinity/ies’ as a means of teasing out the complexities of enduring Western liberal constructions of violent political agency, and the challenges of identifying and theorising an alternative. In doing so, I draw upon liberal political thought and popular culture to generate a heuristic, conceptual account of military service, citizenship, and gender that exposes broader challenges in untangling normative masculinity and collective violence.
The logic of inquiry is similar to that of studies examining female combatants and their gendered performances within the armed forces. Due to the patriarchal disconnect between feminine/ised bodies and the conduct of violence, analyses of female soldiers are understood to reveal broader dynamics of gender (and sexuality, race, class, etc.), power, and violence within the institution that might otherwise be invisible.Footnote 20 Here, I flip this critical impulse to leverage the seemingly parallel structural and ideological tensionFootnote 21 between masculinity and civilianness to consider the political relationship between civilians and war as a similarly exigent normalised silence. This analytical emphasis on masculine/ised civilian subjects creates space to examine potential counter-performances of patriarchal, frequently militaristic, masculine/soldier feminine/civilian binaries while simultaneously attending to the ways in which these constructions continue to powerfully inform and constrain the possibilities of, and for, meaningful civilianness.
‘Civilian masculinity’, then, refers to the performance of masculinity/ies that are substantively civilian, rather than structurally assigned as such by existing notions about the civil-military divide. It is less a question of the many, many masculinities in a given place and time that are not articulated in military termsFootnote 22 than one of the possibilities and ambiguities of masculinities that engage with civilianness per se as socially intelligible and politically legitimate. The masculinities performed by football supporters,Footnote 23 for instance, are structurally civilian in so far as (typically) those involved are not members of the armed forces or the immediate surrounding community. For the purposes of this study, however, they would not be considered substantively civilian masculinities, as they are not (again, typically) made politically and socially meaningful vis-à-vis collective violence and/or normative public personhood.
The open question as to the possibility of this form of masculinity/ies, conceptually and empirically detached from violence and domination, is a central concern of contemporary politics. In addition to the transformation in civil-military relations described above, the plausibility of positive and substantive masculinity/ies underlies discussions of toxic masculinity,Footnote 24 rape culture,Footnote 25 and the ‘appropriate’ gender performance and temperament of world leaders.Footnote 26 In a more ‘immediately’ IR context, similar concerns regarding ‘good’ public masculinity may be observed in the rise of international ‘gender experts’, and the proliferation of international organisation-sponsored gender ‘training’ and ‘mainstreaming’.Footnote 27 The article thus speaks to contemporary scholarship within critical masculinity studies examining ‘new’, ‘positive’ political masculinities that strive to move away from violence.Footnote 28 Attending to the political possibilities of civilian masculinities animates these debates within, and highlights their essentiality to, international relations.
The aim of the article, then, is not to provide a straightforward and too-simple ‘diagnosis’, reconstruction, or universally applicable reading of civilian masculinity/ies. Instead, the case is used to open and explore a series of theoretical and political questions about the analytical, ideological, and normative relationship(s) between masculinity, violence, and political agency within contemporary, predominantly Western, liberal democratic societies.Footnote 29 I begin with an analysis of the ambiguous political possibilities of (and for) civilian masculinity through an empirical case study of charitable civilian support for the UK military during the ‘global war on terror’ (2001–10). I then use this case to construct a conceptual, heuristic account of the intellectual and popular context within which contemporary liberal civilian masculinity/ies operate. First, I outline the gendered nature of normative citizenship, as productive of, and produced within, the liberal distinction between public and private. I then demonstrate that this normative (masculinised) citizenship is premised not only upon the conduct of politics in the public sphere, but an underlying, foundational expectation of military service: the liberal military contract. Together, these two analytical moves illuminate the broad ideological and empirical conditions of possibility for – and potential elision of – civilian masculinity/ies within the liberal political imaginary. Subsequently, I develop the concept of ‘gendered civilian anxiety’ to capture the disconnect between gendered myths of heroism, military service, and citizenship and the contemporary reliance on a volunteer military. The article concludes by arguing for the essentiality of a research programme oriented around ‘civilianness’, and civilian masculinity/ies.
Seeing civilian masculinity/ies
Methodologically, examining potential performances of civilian masculinity/ies poses an interesting challenge. Civilianness, particularly in societies without conscription, is in one sense, everything/where, as it pertains to nearly everyone. At the same time, civilianness is also nothing, in so far as it has little content/meaning absent a negative contrast with soldiering. Civilianness does not fade into the background of politics and war; it is the background. Similarly, as with soldiering (or gender or any other social category), civilianness is presumably not a static identity or status, but rather a subjectivity produced iteratively in context (albeit one that is challenging to empirically observe due to its sheer banality). Contemporary critical military and militarism scholarship has established the contingency and blurring of the civil-military divide, particularly within liberalism,Footnote 30 understanding the two as intertwined and coproductive.Footnote 31 ‘Civilianness’, and civilian masculinities, as a result, cannot be assigned or assumed a priori. Consequently, though there are surely a proliferation of potential civilian masculinities both globally and within a given society, ‘seeing’ them requires looking for contexts in which these subjectivities have the potential to become politically activated and made relevant to the conduct of collective violence.
As a practical first cut on a potentially enormous research programme, this article examines charitable practices of support for the British Armed Forces to raise questions and identify points of tension surrounding the political intelligibility of civilian masculinity/ies. Several factors recommend UK charitable support for the military as an initial point of departure. In Anglo-American societies, the soldier ‘warrior’ is often posited as the apogee of citizenship and figurative embodiment of heroic masculinity.Footnote 32 Though this is not a universal model of soldiering citizenship, the material and cultural power of Anglosphere militaries both globally and within recent coalition warfare, as observed by Cynthia Enloe,Footnote 33 have led to a transnational diffusion of this ‘warrior’ model across contexts, including Norway and India.Footnote 34 In smaller, less conventionally bellicose states, such as Denmark and Sweden, citizenship and military participation, though with more emphasis on service than war fighting, have also come to be articulated in terms of gendered (masculine) heroism.Footnote 35 Even Germany, long regarded as an anti-militarist exception to the valorisation of soldiers, has begun, post-conscription, to reference militarised notions of masculinity in its recruitment campaigns; recruits are framed as strong, tough, ‘reluctant’ warriors.Footnote 36 The examination of the UK thus hinges the exploration of civilian masculinity/ies around a particularly influential understanding of the masculinity-citizen-soldier nexus within liberal democracies. In doing so, it sidesteps the US-centrism (and exceptionalism) of a good deal of contemporary scholarship on Western civil-military relations.
Similarly, charitable support for the armed forces, as one of the most conventionally recognisable ‘civilian’ practices in wartime, offers a logical site for assessing the political activation and production of civilianness as a positive, substantive subjectivity. As the supportive discourses and activities associated with charitable care align, superficially, with notions of feminised maternal ethics and stereotypical women’s ‘homefront’ activities,Footnote 37 and thus the conventional gendered structure of civil-military relations, they constitute a hard test for civilian masculinity/ies. As a result, examining the gendered/ing construction of charitable activities supporting the military enables me to empirically differentiate between masculine/feminine constructions. This avoids reifying conventional understandings of the gendering of the civil-military binary, as well as the binary itself, while remaining alive to its power and social force. This ‘hard test’, combined with the prominence of the heroic Anglosphere citizen-soldier, makes the UK a strong starting point for thinking through the possibilities, stakes, and meaning of civilianness and masculinity in contemporary liberal democracies.
Concretely, the interpretive interrogation of the case is based on a discourse analysis of publicly produced texts by five anti-war and five pro-military NGO public textual productions from 2001–10.Footnote 38 These texts were sourced from physical archives, individual activists, depository libraries, and the organisations themselves, as well as the Wayback Machine, an online website archive. Specific texts were selected for analysis on the basis of references, directly or indirectly, to the normative relationship between the armed forces and society, initially by keyword search (for example, ‘support the troops’, ‘help for heroes’, etc.) and then by theme. The organisations were selected typologically to balance the inclusion of the most prominent organisations (and thus dominant representations) with capturing variation in the overall discourse (and thus a spectrum of perspectives). The inclusion of anti-war NGOs, such as the Stop the War Coalition, alongside more conventional military charities, such as the Royal British Legion, captures potential dissent, contestation, and variation in the gendered dynamics of charitable support for the armed forces.
These texts are contextualised in broader social discourse via an analysis of the public statements of UK state officials (civilian and military) and the mainstream print media from the same time period. These texts, which include news articles, speeches, press releases, official statements, and legislative records, were, again, identified on the basis of keyword search for ‘support the troops’ or equivalent phrasing in the context of charitable support for the military. The entire corpus was organised with the use of the software programme NVivo and interpreted with references to themes including: (a) the military-society relationship; (b) citizenship and/or the state; and (c) the gendering of civil and military subjectivities. The quotations presented here, drawn from a corpus of 238 paragraph units, and approximately 550 pages of text, should be understood as particularly illuminating and/or explicit illustrations of common, if frequently implicit, representations of the gendered military-society relationship that, in turn, form the context for the articulation of civilian masculinity/ies.
Interrogatory case study: the gendered dynamics of charitable support for the British Armed Forces
During military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the contested legitimacy of the wars, calls to ‘help our heroes’ proliferated in the United Kingdom.Footnote 39 The number of charities established to support the military in the UK tripled every year between 2005–11.Footnote 40 This increase in military-related NGOs, charitable giving, and community service was accompanied by a general social practice of displaying or wearing, military-related apparel and symbols, such as bumper stickers, pins, or bracelets. ‘Support for the troops’ has come to form a routinised component of British discussions of Iraq and Afghanistan, with popular pro-military practices, such as an annual Armed Forces Day, military volunteer awards, and recognition at sporting events along the US model now apparent.Footnote 41 ‘The troops’Footnote 42 comprise a key locus for the interpretation of war, gender, and the normative relationship between society and the military in the contemporary UK.Footnote 43
Charitable support and moral constructions of civil-military relations
The most immediately striking characteristic of charitable military discourses is a sense that it is ‘good’, or ‘appropriate’ to support the troops. A 2010 fundraising appeal statement by The UK Soldiers’ Charity is a good example of these constructions:
We support soldiers, former soldiers and their families whatever their age, whatever their rank, whenever they need it. We currently support over 6,000 individuals. Last year they ranged in age from 5 months to 107 years old. Here are just a few of their stories … It is thanks to your generosity that you make our work possible.Footnote 44
Though the charity elsewhere makes frequent reference to the military service of the troops, in this passage the primary identity of those being supported is private persons in need of welfare services. This positioning is brought home by the visuals of the webpage, which links individualised stories of hardship with photos of the recipients. Men in uniform – active service members – are presented alongside women, the elderly, and disabled veterans in civilian clothes as equivalent beneficiaries of the charity. While their ‘militaryness’ is the factor qualifying the troops for support, it is constructed as private social relation, rather than a public obligation or practice of warfare. This paternalistic support works in an affective register, using compassion to ‘draw attention to the social, political and economic needs of military families’Footnote 45 – and with them, military personnel. By virtue of its flat, taken-for-granted presentation, supporting the troops is naturalised as a pro-social, laudable act.Footnote 46
This sense of private, apolitical morality is compounded by the articulation of support in an affective, charitable idiom. A long-time volunteer for the British Legion, for instance, describes her ‘commitment to the cause’ as driven by the recognition that ‘There will always be ex-servicemen and women who need our help … [W]e can encourage the younger generations to continue to support the ex-service community and carry on the good work of so many who went before them.’Footnote 47 The troops are the subject of ‘good work’. The charity BLESMA illustrates this framing, as, in describing to potential donors ‘How you can help’, it notes that while the state makes general policy, the organisation ‘concerns itself with individual cases’. It asks: ‘Will you make them your concern too?’.Footnote 48 This is a moral indictment of the failure to provide support, both by the state and by an implicit audience of private individuals. It (re)produces ‘the troops’ as akin to any other ‘needy’ group, rather than agents of the state/nation.
These brief examples indicate the discourse ‘produces the military as a notionally apolitical social “cause”’.Footnote 49 As causes, though imbued with moral force, have an apparently spontaneous quality,Footnote 50 they have a tendency, as observed by Christine Sylvester in relation to development workers, to construct a normative dynamic wherein the benefactors are in, but not of, the communities they help. Donors may be ‘compassionate and show an admirable sense of urgency – as they hold themselves aloof’.Footnote 51 This articulation of support constitutes it, at least superficially, as ‘a well-intentioned, altruistic and unconditional interaction, wherein one individual or group acts to benefit another without expecting anything in return’.Footnote 52 In so doing, they constitute a highly asymmetric power relationship between the two parties.
These aspects of moral support – the sense of a detached, charitable duty to ‘help’, lack of sense of shared fortune, and affective, interpersonal connection – produce a moral structure of obligation that is not socially recognised as political. In failing to set out a rationale for support, or to construct a sense of shared community, moral support superficially (though often explicitly) relieves supporting the troops of any ‘public’ character, instead relying on the idiom of affective care. This refusal of a political connection between the troops and supporters discursively removes what might, within conventional liberalism, be considered public activities and relationships into an ostensibly ‘private’ realm.Footnote 53 The implications of this apoliticisation of military care for the articulation of substantive, civilian subjectivities, however, are unclear. Examining the gendering of charitable support for the armed forces – and, in particular, the possibilities of and for civilian masculinity/ies – offers an illuminating lever on these dynamics.
Gendered/ing supportive care
Charitable ‘support the troops’ discourses are typified by the refrain that the troops require ‘care’ when they ‘get home’. These constructions, in conjunction with the publication of individual veterans’ struggles as a means of generating supportive compassion and charitable awareness, implicitly extrapolates from beleaguered veterans to the ‘troops’ as a whole.Footnote 54 This logic is extended to military personnel in the battlespace. The Stop the War Coalition, for instance, explicitly positions itself as a defender of the troops, arguing, ‘We want to save lives by bringing them home.’Footnote 55 Moral support is a matter of the troops’ life and death. Similarly, calls to ‘protect’ the troops – from the elements, from the war, from unspecified harm – are ubiquitous. Hansard (UK parliamentary) debates on Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, frequently involved calls to protect the troops through the provision of appropriate equipment and supplies, most infamously with respect to the implications of a 2009 helicopter shortage for force protection and the evacuation of the wounded.Footnote 56
Within this altruistic discourse, the figure of the masculine, agential combat soldier that we might expect in discussions of civil-military relations seems to recede, as the troops are constructed as imperilled victims of conflict.Footnote 57 They are produced as what Lauren Berlant refers to as ‘citizen-victims – pathological, poignant, heroic, and grotesque’,Footnote 58 marrying suffering with worthiness. The consequences of this figuration for the gendering of the civil-military relationship, and thus the possibilities for civilian masculinity/ies, could be understood in (at least) two ways: as reflecting an empowered feminised civilian sphere caring for dependent, masculine troops, or as a structural feminisation of the troops vis-à-vis agential, masculinised civilian patrons. There is a case to be made for both readings – and the references to ‘care’ and ‘love’ are suggestive of a potential maternal dynamic. It would be an essentialist error, however, to ‘conflat[e] … feminization with the absence of war’,Footnote 59 or, conversely, the provision of care. Understanding the gendering dynamics of civil-military relations in the context of moral support requires examining the multifaceted substantive (for example, characteristic-based, such as loving) and relational (e.g. social positioning) gendering of societal supporters vis-à-vis the troops.
The above construction of civilian supporters as ‘protecting’ the troops and ‘saving their lives’ is crucial to arbitrating this gender dynamic. Protection positions supporters in a relationship of hierarchical superiority over the dependent troops – a situation more akin to the operation of the patriarchal welfare state, or masculine head of household, than a maternal logic of care. This is evident, for instance, in the 2010 statement of a Conservative MP that:
The help that charitable and voluntary organisations and – dare I say it? – the Big Society have given to people returning from warfare goes back a long way. It is not for the state to do everything, and the state is not necessarily best placed to do that. We all have social responsibilities, and service charities are an excellent example of the big society in action.Footnote 60
This statement, referencing a 2010 Conservative plan to encourage the provision of social services and supports by non-state entities,Footnote 61 explicitly highlights the paternalistic dynamic between the ‘big society’ of private supporters and the dependent servicemembers returning from war. Charitable support is constructed as a community good. It is morally superior, here, to care provided by the state, as it exemplifies a logic of individualistic and agential voluntary contribution. Crucially, the monetary transfers that typically accompany such charitable support have been observed by critical gender and organisational scholars to be ‘key for accomplishing masculinity’.Footnote 62 This exemplar of charitable discourse subtly attributes characteristics associated with stereotypical hegemonic Western masculinity, such as rationality, independence, and civic-mindedness,Footnote 63 to supporters, rather than ‘the troops’.
The clearest demonstration of these constructions is the discourse(s) surrounding the increasingly common recognition of supporters, either in the press or through formal awards, for their service to military personnel. Though the campaign has subsequently been criticised for producing mixed results,Footnote 64 the portrayal of actor Joanna Lumley during her involvement in the 2009 campaign for UK settlement rights for Nepali Gurkha veterans provides a striking illustration of these masculinist constructions. In a 2009 Telegraph opinion piece, Lumley was characterised as having ‘fought a brilliant campaign’ that involved the ‘conquest’ of Westminster through a canny and honourable application of ‘the patriotic instincts and good manners of middle England’.Footnote 65 The explicit framing of her actions in military terms flips the conventional relationship between a masculine military and feminised society while attaching conventional attributes of hegemonic masculinity – public action on behalf of others, rationality, integrity, and speaking truth to power – to Lumley, the civilian supporter.Footnote 66 Similarly, support for the military – particularly disabled veterans participating in the Invictus Games – is framed as a crucial part of the personal maturation and redemption narrative of Prince Harry, a member of the British royal family. The CEO of the Invictus Games has commented upon Prince Harry’s ‘real sense of humility’, observing that ‘This is not somebody who is doing this because he needs attention.’Footnote 67 At the same time, public discourse also frequently references his active involvement in the cause, noting that ‘He weighs in. He’s got good questions and he’s very thoughtful’, and ‘detail-oriented’ in his efforts to support military families.Footnote 68 Paternalistic, benevolent support, rationally measured and conducted without personal stake, is constituted as a central component of normative, implicitly masculine, public virtue.
Support for the troops – particularly that cast in the masculine idiom of contribution to the community – is central to social recognition as not only a good citizen, but also as a good person. The Sun tabloid newspaper, in conjunction with the UK Ministry of Defence, hosts the ‘Military Awards’, or ‘Millies’, which honour not only service people but also single out individuals and organisations for their exceptional ‘Support to the Forces’.Footnote 69 In 2008, the civilian founders of Help for Heroes were awarded a Millie to recognise their ‘invaluable help to the Armed Forces’.Footnote 70 In 2009, the Millie for best support was awarded to the town of (now Royal) Wootton Bassett, which held spontaneous commemorations and ceremonies as the repatriated bodies of deceased servicemembers were transported through the town centre.Footnote 71 Prince William, in presenting the award, highlighted the town’s sense of honour and stoicism, noting: ‘One of the most remarkable things is that the people are so modest, they refuse to accept any praise.’Footnote 72 Perhaps most significantly, the awards themselves have become a high-profile formal event, frequently attended by prominent citizens and celebrities. These attendees are photographed distributing awards and in the company of armed forces personnel, further reinforcing both the laudability of charitable support and the hierarchical imbalance of status (and capital) between the supporters and the troops.Footnote 73 This is in line with Kevin Alexander Boon’s observation that philanthropy is frequently constructed as commensurate with socially valorised masculinity, ‘as controlled sacrifice for human well-being, render[s] the man who donates to the public good a heroic figure’.Footnote 74
This connection of support with good public personhood and the generation of social capital is also evident in efforts of military-related charities to generate corporate sponsorship. Help for Heroes, for instance, frames its sponsorship opportunities as offering ‘a message resonating with consumers’,Footnote 75 driving sales, ‘building brand engagement’, promoting PR opportunities, staff team-building, ‘and, of course, rais[ing] funds that will help [H4H] rebuild lives’.Footnote 76 Such charitable opportunities to ‘demonstrate company values, and your commitment to your customers, employees, and local community’Footnote 77 also underscore outreach efforts of the UK state under the Armed Forces Covenant. Businesses are also asked to sign the covenant and ‘promot[e] the fact that [they] are an armed forces-friendly organisation … by publicising our Armed Forces Covenant on your website and displaying the Armed Forces Covenant logo’.Footnote 78 Reinforcing this message, the Ministry of Defence has also, as of 2014, begun issuing Defence Employer Recognition Scheme awards (at Bronze, Silver, and Gold levels) to recognise private sector businesses that support military personnel.Footnote 79
As a means of demonstrating civic engagement, community mindedness, and moral principles, support for the troops is constituted in the idiom of protective (and, here, conservative capitalist, interestingly) masculinity, in keeping with the public performance of benevolent philanthropy. In this way, the (re)masculinisation of the ‘private’ sphere and supporters operates analogously to a dynamic observed to characterise the fundraising interactions of Israeli and American Jews. In these interactions, philanthropic activities ‘allowed American Jews not so much to replace their model of masculinity with a (slacker) version of the Israeli model’ against which they would fall short, as they did not engage in military fighting themselves, but rather ‘hold onto theirs while associating themselves more closely’ with the nationalistic and militarised masculinity of their Israeli counterparts.Footnote 80 In both instances, paternalistic support reflects a need to address, albeit through a denial of its legitimacy, the figure of the combat soldier as an exemplar of normative masculinity.
Ambivalent civilian masculinity/ies
The discourse, as a consequence, appears to proffer ambivalent civilian masculinity/ies. The explicit contrasting of the supporters with the supported troops indicates it is fair to read these expressions of masculinity as ‘not military’ within the conventional understanding of a liberal civil-military distinction. In that sense, the construction of supporters as benevolent, hegemonically masculine subjects opens the door to the expression of meaningful and socially valorised non-military masculinity. At the same time, however, charitable ‘support the troops’ discourse indicates that hegemonic masculinity continues to derive from associations with the military as a proving ground for good public personhood. To paraphrase Joanna Tidy, the normalisation of the troops as a form of social cause subtly reifies an underlying assumption that ‘military objectives are socially valuable’.Footnote 81 The performance of hegemonic masculinity, though demonstrated (or accrued) through the public performance of protective and beneficent patronage rather than war participation or military service, still refers to ‘militaryness’.
The discourse thus demonstrates a tension wherein the reading of supporters as non-military relies upon and reproduces the conventional liberal understanding of discrete civil and military spheres, while the performance of hegemonic Western masculinity by supporters blurs this divide through continual implicit association with militaryness. This double movement suggests a severing of any political relationship between the troops and civilian supporters through the idiom of paternalistic charity. The discourse demonstrates a folding of purportedly distinct civil and military spheres into the apolitical realm of affect – and simultaneous failure to explicitly construct supporters as civilians. This troubles a straightforward reading of non-military masculinity as simultaneously one of politically relevant civility. The relationship between patron/beneficiary maps onto the civil-military divide without substantively engaging with its relationship to military service or conflict.
Outside an explicitly political community, the status of supporters as substantively rather than descriptively ‘civilian’ appears analytically and discursively ambiguous. This raises a series of interesting questions regarding meaningful civilianness. If support is cast as a matter of charity rather than war support/participation, is it fair to read it as ‘civilian’? Absent a meaningful engagement with notions of common political membership, can we read these discourses as offering a positive and substantive subjectivity? What, in other words, is the (gendered) relationship between politics, civilianness, and normative citizenship?
Conditioning civilian masculinity/ies: the liberal military contract
To address these questions, this section works through the various binaries the case study suggests are relevant to the possibilities of civilian masculinity/ies: civil/military, masculinity/femininity, and public/private. Existing gender scholarship and critical militarism/military studies have demonstrated these dichotomies are not timeless universals, or objective facts, but rather contingent effects of power.Footnote 82 As indicated by the ambivalence of charitable UK civilian masculinity/ies, these binaries are often blurred and contradictory, even as they are ideologically and discursively reinforced as structural effects. Here, I draw upon a critical, historically contextualised reading of liberal political thought to examine the ways in which, despite many critical analyses and empirical performances to the contrary, these associations may yet inform social relations and subjectivities. Consequently, the use of ‘liberalism’ here reflects its contemporary interpretation both popularly and within International Relations scholarship, rather than the specific minutiae of any particular theorist.Footnote 83
Masculinised citizenship
As alluded to by the case, the question of politically viable civilian masculinities is largely one of the relationship between gender, violence, and normative public personhood. Liberal political thought, however, has seldom directly engaged with the question of civilianness (or soldiering, for that matter).Footnote 84 Normative public behaviours of the individual vis-à-vis the polity are collapsed into the broader category of citizenship. ‘Citizenship-as-membership’ is typically understood with regard to ‘status, rights, political engagement, responsibilities, and identity/solidarity’.Footnote 85 It references the total public person beyond the use of collective force highlighted by civilianness. The ambiguous relationship between charitable support, civilianness, and political membership evidenced in the case, however, suggests that ‘civilian’ and ‘citizen’ are not synonyms. Citizen is a political category in a way in which ‘civilian’, despite its historical genealogy, is not.Footnote 86 Unpacking the uneasy coexistence of civilianness and citizenship thus offers a point of entry for thinking through, and about, the possibilities of civilian masculinity/ies.
Broadly, within liberal thought, the spectre of force – the threat of physical harm and/or the desire to preserve property – spurs the creation of political community.Footnote 87 Citizens give up their sovereignty to the state in return for its protection from internal violence and the anarchic international. They accept the political obligation that accompanies being in community, notably the duty to follow the law.Footnote 88 Importantly, as argued by feminist political theorists, within classical liberal theory, as well as the general trajectory of Western political thought, the nature and purpose of politics were bound to an ‘ethos of manhood’.Footnote 89 The universal, contracting liberal citizen is constituted in accordance with Western masculinist ideals of autonomy, rationality, agency, and the (latent) potential for violence.Footnote 90
The universalism of the liberal citizen, as an abstract ideal that theoretically pertains to all subjects, is thus observed by feminist scholars to obscure its masculinist underpinnings. The implicitly masculine citizen mirrors the reliance of the political and ideological coherence of the liberal state upon the now-familiar division of society into gendered (as well as classed, racialised, and sexualised) public and private spheres.Footnote 91 Carole Pateman argues that the ‘liberation’ of the citizen through the liberal social contract required the subjugation of women (and the feminine) via rigid and essentialist gender roles, and corresponding social relations of exploitation and dependence: the ‘sexual contract’.Footnote 92 Though poor women, for instance, have long worked outside the home, the constitution of the individual citizen as masculine furthered an overarching discursive construction of the ‘public’ economic and political sphere as masculine, and the private domestic sphere as feminine.Footnote 93
Correspondingly, Wendy Brown observes that while the extension – both empirically and within evolving liberal political thought – of individual rights to women (and minoritised groups) may have decoupled citizenship from a particular male (white, cisgender, heterosexual, property-owning) body, a universalised masculine ‘public’ subjectivity remains the hallmark of normative citizenship.Footnote 94 Liberal political thought produces an ideal-typical polity as pacific, rational, and a ‘means to individual ends’: a way of ensuring physical safety such that masculine citizens may pursue their own betterment.Footnote 95
As critical scholars observe, however, the rational, coordinated pursuit of individual liberty is not the entire story. Despite the liberal state’s ideological dependence upon claims to pacify the polity,
The formal political power of the liberal state is expressed in its assertion of the ‘national interest’, … [enabling it to] pursue concerns higher than life. It is for ‘national security’ and ‘national honor’ that the state sacrifices its youth in foreign military interventions.Footnote 96
The realization of the state’s monopoly on force requires that ‘citizen soldiers be prepared to kill and die’ for the state.Footnote 97 The metaphorical social contract is underwritten by a corollary bargain wherein individuals accept that ‘to be protected from violence by the nation-state is to be exposed to the violence wielded by the nation-state’.Footnote 98 Membership is also premised upon a mythical ‘military contract’, which makes potential involvement in collective violence a condition – or political obligation – of belonging. As a result, normative citizenship is ‘construed as risking life … [wherein] a real man lays his life on the line’.Footnote 99 ‘Good’ citizens are constituted as (at least potentially) liable for military service. Though rarely explicitly stated, liberal political thought provides a subtle, yet significant, normative connection between liberal citizenship, masculinity, and military service: a ‘liberal military contract’.
Historically, this account of the military-masculinity-citizenship nexus reflects and (re)produces a series of interlocking normative structures dating to (at least) the mass ‘nation in arms’ of the French Revolution. Marked by the Lévee en masse (‘national’ conscription), the Revolution saw a devolution of the burdens of warfare from professional long-service armies to society as a whole.Footnote 100 This societal mobilisation was based on nationalistic ideals and membership in the patrie;Footnote 101 military service was exchanged for democratic citizenship and civil and political rights. The institutional structure of the mass army expanded across Europe throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bringing with it the ideology of nationalism and concessions of citizenship required to legitimise mass conscription.Footnote 102 By the Second World War, military service had been firmly entrenched as a normative obligation of democratic citizenship, while the onset of industrial-age ‘total war’ involved all of society, through preparation, supply, or participation in battle.Footnote 103 It is this overall Western imaginary, wherein liberal thought, democracy, and mass war participation ‘grew up together’ – the specifics vary from state to state – that facilitates and is captured by the notion of the liberal military contract. My claim is not that the contract represents an actual moment/outcome of democratic decision-making or consolidation, nor that it was/is enacted in ideal-typical form. Instead, for the purposes of examining the politics of civilian masculinity/ies, I understand it as a cultural myth, a powerful sociocultural narrative that imbues impressionist recollections of history and normative beliefs with affective valence – and projects them forward into the present.Footnote 104
Gendered civil-military relations
Importantly, the (ostensibly) universal citizen-soldier does not describe any given member of the polity. Masculine normative citizenship, and the gendered, spatialised binary between public and private upon which it rests, also typifies the structure of civil-military relations. The universalised citizen subject liable for military service was, historically, male, and, in classical and contemporary political thought, is masculine. The development of the mass army ensured that the majority of the male population engaged in state-sanctioned violence (or, in the case of volunteer militaries, as in pre-First World War Great Britain, were potentially liable for military service). The ability and willingness to perpetrate violence became a requirement of masculine citizenship, wherein ‘the ultimate test of men’s political obligation is his willingness to give up his life in defence of the state’.Footnote 105 Women were empirically and ideologically assigned ‘support’ roles, such as caretaking, reproduction of ‘the nation’, symbolic potential victimhood, etc., which constitute a feminine ‘other’ to militarised masculinity.Footnote 106
Significantly, through the performance of violence and symbolic association with the state, soldiers are constructed as protecting non-serving civilians. This gendered structure of warfare is writ large to the relationship, often cast in terms of heterosexual kinship, between a masculinised, protective military and a feminised society (or nation) vulnerable to harm.Footnote 107 The best known formulation of this dynamic is Jean Bethke Elshtain’s contrast of the masculine ‘Just Warrior’, charged with defending ‘home and hearth’, with the feminine (or societal) ‘Beautiful Soul’ whose virtue and innocent domesticity require protection.Footnote 108 This gendered association of women (and children) with civilian status is present in the writings of early modern international legal theorists and,Footnote 109 as observed by Kinsella, was internationally affirmed with the post-Second World War drafting of the Geneva Conventions.Footnote 110 Conceptually, but also to a large degree empirically, a gendered division of ‘political’ space underlies the social facticity of the liberal state. In its ideal-typical form, this spatiality relies upon and reproduces a gendered ‘civil-military gap’, separating feminised, dependent society from the protective, autonomous military.Footnote 111 It is this gendered divide, as both normative ideological structure and an historical empirical regularity, that forms the key context for the analysis and articulation of politically viable, socially meaningful civilian masculinity/ies.
Civilian+masculinity/ies=citizen?
The competing normative imperatives, and uneasy associations, of the binaries raised by the case (masculine/feminine, soldier/civilian, military/civil, and public/private) are crystallised in ideals of normative citizenship. The above analysis suggests the figurative, or ideal-typical, universal citizen may be considered doubly masculine. The political aspect of citizenship is conducted in a public sphere constituted in accordance with stereotypically masculine characteristics – particularly rationality and autonomy. The very possibility of this rational liberal politics relies, in turn, upon the underlying constitution of the citizen as a potential soldier, typified by masculine virtues of protection, sacrifice, and honour. Normative citizenship is defined by the willingness to ‘die for something’, namely the state, rather than being ‘willing to live for or through something’.Footnote 112
This conceptual schema illuminates the tensions and challenges that conditioned the articulation of intelligible civilian citizenship within the case. Civilian status has been produced within a strongly ideologically delineated (if empirically blurred) gendered civil-military divide as structurally feminine. Citizenship itself is constituted as not only normatively masculine, but dependent upon military service. The ambivalence of civilian masculinity/ies within UK discourse is thus reflective of, and politically conditioned by, an ideological/cultural context wherein femininity and civilianness are readily commensurate, but masculine civiliannessFootnote 113 – though, as seen in the case, not performatively impossible – challenges gendered expectations of normative citizenship. The ambivalent political chances of/for ‘civilian masculinity/ies’ indicate a form of liminality, wherein it remains difficult to be read as, simultaneously, a civilian, a political subject and, bridging the two positions, normatively masculine.
Gendered civilian anxiety
There is a final twist on this heuristic, narrative account of the liberal military contract that is central to understanding the contemporary politics of liberal civilian masculinity/ies. Bluntly, there is nothing particularly liberal, nor necessarily democratic, about the normative structure of the ‘military contract’. It exists in tension with liberal ideas of civic rights against arbitrary violence, non-violent conflict resolution, and individual autonomy. Though the recourse to volunteer militaries has been posited by contemporary liberal thinkers – perhaps paired with a conscript lottery – as alleviating immediate problem of state coercion of individuals,Footnote 114 it does not address the underlying normative obligation of service.Footnote 115 The confluence of gendered cultural affects, narratives, and ethics regarding (at least potential) military service and citizenship suggests that in a time of war, all ‘good’ masculine citizens ought to serve. But, as raised in the introduction, in a context of declining conscription across Western democracies,Footnote 116 most people are civilians. We may therefore see the differential distribution of risk and obligation (which is gendered, classed, sexualised, and racialised) of volunteer militaries as accentuating the illiberality of the ‘military contract’. It violates the democratic principle of equalityFootnote 117 without extinguishing the gendered expectation that posits all citizens as liable to defend the whole. It raises the possibility that civilians may be failing to act appropriately.
Consequently, I suggest ‘gendered civilian anxiety’ is an entailment of the military-citizenship-masculinity nexus within liberal thought and polities – and a means of thinking through the ambiguous politics of civilian masculinity/ies. ‘Anxiety’ is understood in the psychoanalytic/existentialist sense of the transgressive potential of choice, or free will,Footnote 118 rather than an individual psychological or (necessarily) affective experience. As outlined by Kierkegaard, anxiety stems from the relationship between the subject (or individual) and a prohibition – generally understood as law – and the recognition that the subject has the potential to break the law.Footnote 119 It comes less from actual acts of transgression than the realisation of a temptation, or desire, to break the rules, while still abiding by them.Footnote 120 This notion of anxiety maps well onto our conventional understanding of the social contract. To live in community, citizens agree to abide by the rule of law – the authority and prohibition – but retain the ability (and desire) to break the law, which results in anxiety. As put by Slavoj Žižek, ‘the more rigorously we OBEY the law, the more we bear witness to the fact that … we feel the pressure of the desire to indulge in [transgression]’.Footnote 121
Gendered civilian anxiety, following this logic, does not arise from the negative prohibition of law, but instead the positive obligation of military service/sacrifice: the liberal military contract. It derives from the possibility of ignoring, or shirking, an unwritten expectation of soldiering – and, further, the recognition of a desire to do so. Substantively, the concept draws upon Tina Managhan’s diagnosis of US civil-military relations as characterised by a ‘cultural legacy of gendered guilt’.Footnote 122 Managhan refers to a dual, gendered bind facing (not exclusively, but particularly) women’s anti-war activism. At one level, war opposition is easily constructed as a treacherous undermining of Just Warriors by the ungrateful Beautiful Souls. The impulse of the post-9/11 anti-war movement to ‘support the troops’ may thus be construed as a ‘redemption’ of the gendered betrayal of ‘our boys’ during Vietnam. It is an anxious forestalling of the temptation to do so again in the future.Footnote 123 At another level, we can also see ‘gendered guilt’ in the normative (liberal) division of violent labour wherein, until recently, the burden of military service was not open to women – a potential (if involuntary) shirking of the responsibilities of citizenship. ‘Gendered civilian anxiety’ therefore incorporates the parallel normative expectations of feminine ‘home front’ loyalty and masculine military service – and the unease that stems from the dual possibility of contravening intertwined gender and citizenship norms. It encompasses all those who are/understand themselves to be civilians in wartime, as well as the anxiety pertaining to what it means to be a civilian in wartime, and attempts to account for the complicated, shifting gendering of the subject-position.
In the past, the citizens to whom this expectation pertained were men, and the expectation today remains a component of the implicitly masculine citizen subject-position. Throughout the twentieth century, however, military service became a crucial means for marginalised and minoritised groups to demonstrate belonging in the political community and demand recognition as citizens.Footnote 124 The shifting roles of men and women mean that the sex/gender correspondence of the masculine, protective military and the feminine, protected society common to Western lay and philosophical understandings of civil-military relations no longer holds – if it ever did. Consequently, this anxiety is available and applicable to all those who might seek to self-identify with the performance of ‘good’ liberal citizenship and/or hegemonic masculinity/ies. Accepting, for the moment, the gendered civil-military divide as contingent yet socially meaningful, non-serving civilians are structurally associated with (purportedly feminine) society during wartime. There is a sense in which they are left without ‘an ontologically secure sense of military masculine identity’,Footnote 125 and, under the liberal military contract, without an ontologically secure citizen identity.
This is not unique to the post-9/11 ‘global war on terror’, nor, necessarily, liberal societies. Joshua Goldstein observes that across cultures, past and present, gender norms connect ‘bravery and discipline in war to manhood – with shame as enforcement’.Footnote 126 Women pelted soldiers with corn as ‘chickens’ before the 1973 Chilean military coup,Footnote 127 and military service in Russia today is frequently framed as a key characteristic of a desirable (male) partner and prerequisite for marriage.Footnote 128 Particularly pertinent is the now-infamous presentation of white feathers by young women to non-serving men in the UK during the First World War. These campaigns, along with state recruitment posters, drew on gendered logics of masculine shame and feminine vulnerability to encourage men to join the military.Footnote 129 Gendered anxiety regarding the collective use of force is a perennial political problem. What this article argues is that the empirical shift away from mass military participation and large-scale existential conflict, paired with the ideologically required incorporation of women as formally equal citizens into the liberal military contract, represents a qualitative shift in the scope of this disconnect – and is thus particularly helpful for thinking through the ambiguous politics of contemporary civilian masculinity/ies.
Gendered anxiety and charitable support
To come full circle, we can read charitable UK ‘support the troops’ discourses as exhibiting traces of anxiety. The best example of this uneasiness is the Royal British Legion’s 2009 ‘Time to Do Your Bit’ campaign.Footnote 130 It called on MPs, electoral candidates, and the general public to ‘take the pledge’ for the armed forces. Though the Legion suggested that ‘How you do that is up to you’, the charity lobbied MPs to sign explicit declarations that ‘I, First Name Surname, pledge to do my bit for the whole armed forces family.’Footnote 131 The framing of this charitable campaign in the idiom of an oath implicitly reproduces the expectation that, again, in times of war, good people and good citizens should contribute. The gendered undertones of this call are clear, as the references to ‘Doing one’s bit’ evoke the First World War image of the small child asking their father, ‘Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?’,Footnote 132 as an expectation of both good citizenship and masculinity. The sense of anxiety stems less from the content of the campaign than the process of asking for the pledge itself. The very necessity of soliciting the pledge acknowledges the possibility that civilians might not be doing their bit and, without prodding, might be tempted not to help, not to participate.
This tenor of forestalled transgression is similarly apparent in the post-9/11 tendency of UK anti-war NGOs to qualify their opposition to Iraq and, later, Afghanistan, with declarations of support for the troops. A 2003 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament statement upon the deaths of British military personnel in a helicopter crash illustrates this framing: ‘All life lost in this conflict, either by accident or design, is a tragedy. As some of the placards on the anti-war protests have said, “Support our troops, bring them home”.’Footnote 133 As seen previously, the troops are framed as dependent and vulnerable, even feminised, through their connection to foreign civilian casualties – and are used to justify the group’s opposition to war. Protests and materials organised by the umbrella Stop the War Coalition were typified by similar frames. A 2005 protest, for instance, marched under the slogan ‘Stop the Bombings, Stop the War, Bring the Troops Home, Defend Civil Liberties and Defend the Muslim Community’.Footnote 134 Once again, the troops are framed as a social cause like any other, emphasising that the vulnerable troops are not betrayed, or undermined, as in Managhan’s account of gendered guilt, but paternalistically protected. This discourse is, at one level, a strategic way to get a fair hearing for war opposition.Footnote 135 The specific idiom selected to do so – the causification of the troops – however, suggests an anxious engagement with the possibility, as with the Legion’s campaign, of not helping – of refusing the liberal military contract.
War opposition may thus be paradoxically read as premised upon the anxious refusal of a desire to avoid the masculinist obligation of war participation and military sacrifice. In this context, the implicit allusions by the Legion to the First World War, a time in which citizens might have been tempted to shirk their gendered obligation of military service itself – raises the spectre that charitable support per se might not be the appropriate form of normative citizenship at all … but a means of evasion. Gendered civilian anxiety may be read as stemming from both the temptation to transgress the obligations of the military contract (and corresponding expectations of hegemonic masculinity/ies) and the uneasy suspicion that this might already be taking place.
This reading of UK charitable military support as demonstrating gendered civilian anxiety helps us to understand the ambiguous political possibilities of, and for, civilian masculinities. Casting military support as a private matter between individuals avoids (if not entirely successfully) the question of public political obligation. Instead, it ‘downsize[s]’ citizenship to ‘a mode of voluntarism’.Footnote 136 This enables a shift in the dominant tropes of Western hegemonic masculinity from the heroic (citizen-)soldier that undergirds the liberal military contract to the empowered, beneficent charitable patron. This sidestepping of citizenship facilitates a flip in the conventional, liberal gendering of the civil-military divide, addressing the gendered aspect of anxiety by resignifying structurally feminised ‘society’ as itself masculine. At the same time, however, the superficial ‘resolution’ of this anxiety is premised upon military association, and militarised masculinity, through troop support. The elision of citizenship does little to address the underlying, constitutive connection between masculinity, military service, and citizenship. The ambivalence of the masculinity/ies articulated within this discourse – as structurally/descriptively civilian, yet of ambiguous substantive, political civility – remain contextualised by an anxious refusal of a potential desire to shirk the masculinist obligation of political violence.
Conclusion
This article argues for the analytical utility and political essentiality in theorising the conditions of possibility of ‘civilianness’, and civilian masculinity/ies, as the foundation of a new civil-military research programme within international politics. The case study of charitable support for the military in the UK reveals a series of contingent yet socially and politically powerful (purported) dichotomies – civil/military, feminine/masculine, public/private, and to some degree, violence/politics – that are bound up in contemporary understandings of normative, particularly Western, liberal citizenship. It demonstrates the ways in which the intertwining of longstanding conceptual associations within liberal political theory and popular Western cultural myths as to war and military service places a conceptual and experiential ‘squeeze’ on the articulation of legitimate, positive, and substantive civilian masculinity/ies during wartime. The ambivalent ‘civilianness’ of the charitable performances of masculinity – as socially valued, non-military, and (at least immediately) non-violent, yet continuing to draw meaning and political legitimacy from implicit military associations – illustrates both the tenuousness and the mutable durability of the normative nexus of citizenship, military service, and masculinity.
What is a fairly specific empirical case points us towards the broader stakes of the political possibilities of, and for, civilian masculinities. The ambiguous ‘civilianness’ of these charitable masculinities reflect and reproduce what Wendy Brown reads as a broader breakdown in Western political discourse, deriving not from ‘maleness but institutionalised ideals of manhood … not politics, but [the] politics of estranged men’.Footnote 137 By this, she refers to a ‘crisis’ of the modern Western ‘politics-manhood relation’, wherein the masculinised subject of modern Western societies (who, in an era of formal equality, may be anyone) is no longer able, through the glorious and transcendent collective use of force, to eschew and overcome the indignities and banality of ‘mere’, feminine, life.Footnote 138 Ambivalent civilian masculinity/ies – and its anxious relationship to unmet (and potentially un/desired) obligations of collective violence – gesture towards this larger politics wherein previously hegemonic, socially valorised models of masculinity and political subjectivity (the citizen-soldier) are revealed to be untenable without (yet?) being firmly supplanted by politically meaningful and legitimate alternative(s).
Civilian masculinity/ies, as a concept, analytic, lever on contemporary civil-military relations, and empirical phenomenon thus offers an important and under-theorised point of entry into the gendered/ing dynamics of contemporary conflict. The anxiety pertaining to the liberal military contract, and its potential disconnect from contemporary civil-military relations, does not suggest ‘that this rupture will necessarily produce social and political chances worthy of celebration’.Footnote 139 But the ‘exhaustion of existing modes and practices’ opens the possibility for an alternative politics of civility, citizenship, and new relationship to the use of force – and highlights the urgency in seeking them out.Footnote 140 The open question as to the possibility of this form of masculinity/ies (as well as empowered citizen-civilian femininities),Footnote 141 explicitly detached from socially valorised violence, haunts a range of pressing, contemporary political questions which, though superficially disparate, may be unified into a coherent research programme.
The ambivalence of ‘civilian masculinity’ – at least with regard to those within the community, rather than in relation to distant others – is indicative of the substantial empirical and theoretical promise of the topic, which ought to be placed alongside existing examinations of, for instance, militant femininity, veteran masculinity, queer martiality, and/or the gendering of conscientious objection.Footnote 142 It highlights the conceptual and political difficulty – but also urgency – in unthinking easy associations between masculinity, political agency, and force. By providing an account of the liberal theoretico-ideological difficulty in accounting for civilian masculinity/ies, its elision in popular Western myths of military service/war, and an example of how such a politics may be assessed empirically, this article has laid the groundwork for cultivating a far better specified understanding of the ways in which this trinity – masculinity, political agency, and violence – intersects.
Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this article were presented at the International Studies Association Annual conference (2017); European International Studies Association Annual conference (2017), and the International Relations colloquium at Leiden University. I would like to thank the RIS reviewers for their discerning comments. Thanks are also due to Yuna Han, Aiko Holvikivi, Meg Millar, Sharri Plonski, Mike Sampson, and particularly Chris Rossdale for their insightful engagements with various iterations of this article.
