Conclusion

In the aggregate, the myth of militarism supports the policy authority of DCAF as ‘true’ in a variety of ways. The first is to naturalise the ‘regu­lar’ military violence of liberal states through the creation of an illiberal economy which, through the distinction of ‘militaristic’ violence as an inherent social pathology, renders other forms, in simple contrast, nor­mal and unremarkable.

The second function of militarism in supporting DCAF relates to the role of historians and social scientists in its construction as a ‘true’ aca­demic myth. The majority of the highlighted scholarship conceptualises militarism as a social phenomenon that ‘breaks out’ when something is ‘off’ in institutional arrangements, political ideologies, or cultural rep­resentations of the military within society. Militarism, like crime, is pre­sented as an intermittent, cyclical, social force. Its construction as ‘deviant’ therefore does not normalise militarism itself but rather its occurrence as an inevitability to be managed. The academic study of militarism, akin to Foucault’s understanding of criminology, and the creation of a policy and institutional structure to control it (analogous to the prison) simultane­ously create, combat, and, in doing so, reproduce the social ill they are forged to eradicate. In a similar fashion, then, to the way the ‘reality’ of delinquency legitimates the power to punish, militarism naturalises DCAF as the means of governing the use of force while simultaneously obscuring ‘any element of excess or abuse it may entail’ (Foucault 1995, 302).

Correspondingly, the myth of militarism ‘effac[es] what may be vio­lent in one and arbitrary in the other’, understood here as liberality and democracy, and, in doing so, ‘attenuates] the effects of revolt they may arouse’ (Foucault 1995, 303). Through the construction of militarism in such a way as to inadvertently, yet significantly, implicitly elevate DCAF as the logical ‘solution’ to terrible social pathology, the policy comes to constitute a normative imperative in and of itself. As a result, the ‘other’ violence of democratic societies is, to varying degrees, naturalised and depoliticised. Militarism, therefore, as crime to the carceral system, rather than constituting what at first might be understood as a definitive policy failure actually supports the myth of DCAF’s normativity and efficacy. The construction of militarism as pathological yet inevitable simultaneously ‘explains away’ DCAF’s failures to eradicate aggressive foreign policy, nat­uralises the system’s ‘other’ coercive ‘excesses’, and justifies the policy’s continued existence. The academic myth of militarism as an ‘actual’ col­lective social transgression, due to a common intellectual and historical heritage, is a perfect foil to the tenets and assumptions inherent to the DCAF policy myth.

This mutually reinforcing construction of DCAF and militarism thus raises the question as to whether they actually constitute two separate myths or whether policymakers and academics are reproducing the same savoir, or regulative body of knowledge, albeit in the distinctive idioms of their respective practice. The intertwining of the two logics raised here should not be taken as a condemnation of militarism scholarship—or, indeed, even DCAF itself, which, though problematic, contributes to the everyday security of many individuals, peoples, and societies—but rather a reflection of the limitations of critique (and failure of language) within a context of ideological, cultural, and normative hegemony. What this argu­ment suggests, therefore, is that we should perhaps strive, as do many of the critical scholars referenced here, for a greater recognition of and atten­tiveness to the role of academics as myth-makers, even (or particularly) when the connection between scholarship and policy seems remote.

Notes

1. For a notable exception to this point, see Shaw (1991, 12).

2. It must be noted that this criticality operates at differing degrees and, cru­cially, that not all critical studies of the military are necessarily studies of militarism. Many works that fall under the ambit of broader critical war/ military studies, which conceptualise politics and violence as continuous, constitutive aspects of sociality, largely avoid the issues raised here. For this approach, see Barkawi (2011).

3. Such a move also tends to naturalise the militarised yet (superficially and formally) non-military quotidian coercive practices of liberal democracies— such as the use of riot police, the detention of illegal migrants, or torture— through the construction of militarism as a powerful, emotionally resonant social pathology explicitly defined in terms of its association with the insti­tutional military. Critical scholarship may inadvertently naturalise non­military violence either through elision, or, somewhat paradoxically, through its characterisation as military, and thus subsumed within the original pathology.

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