DCAF and Militarism

The policy intervention(s) intended to forestall militarism both reflect and inform the prescriptive logics and normative assumptions of DCAF. The mainstream academic militarism literature may be divided into two broad schools of thought roughly reflecting the institutional vs.

As a means of framing the discussion, it should be clarified that it is not the intention of this chapter to suggest that militarism scholarship either purposively works in concert with DCAF or has been directly drafted into service as a means of explicit justification/validation of liberalism’s occa­sional violent lapses. Militarism, while important, is not the sole source of DCAF’s policy authority, nor was it created as an active excuse for its failures. The point made here is rather more subtle, and rests on demon­strating the degree to which militarism scholarship—much of which was consciously written against the violent tendencies and cultural valorisa­tion of the military in liberal democracies—is, in essence, drawing from the same ideological well and foundational assumptions as DCAF, thus limiting the bounds of effective critique. What is at stake is not the way in which particular academics or specific definitions of militarism construct the relationship between violence and politics in liberal democracies, as all presented here are necessarily archetypes, but rather the way in which the creation of militarism as real (and pathological) inadvertently serves to normalise the violence of liberal democracies, preserving the normative validity and technical efficacy of DCAF.

Institutions and Civil-Military Relations

The first such approach to the phenomenon of militarism, the civil-military relations (CMR) school, is typified by a strict focus on the military insti­tution.

With respect to DCAF, this portrayal of militarism illustrates two important findings. The first is that, in its unambiguous diagnosis of mili­tarism as the result of a structural/institutional pathology that enables the military to participate in politics, this literature, akin to the prescriptive, outcome-oriented nature of DCAF, and its persistent promotion by the West as a means of coping with developing and transitional states, is clearly ‘problem-solving’ in nature. Not only does this reify militarism as a social pathology but, due to the historical entanglement of such scholarship with the development of policy towards the Cold War ‘Third World’, it mirrors the normative tenets and policy assumptions of DCAF; the bodies of work were co-produced.

Perhaps more significant, however, is the second, subtler way in which structural approaches to militarism legitimate DCAF. CMR scholars take great pains to differentiate between what are considered to be normal, acceptable activities of the military, such as defensively preparing for war, and the development of militarism. In endorsing the foundational assumptions of the normative validity and functional efficacy of an ide­alised model of DCAF, the militarism literature implicitly naturalises the ‘regular’ use of force by the military. As argued by Foucault with respect to crime, the penal system is concerned, despite its rhetoric, less with the eradication of crime than with ‘handling illegalities...differentialing] them.and provid[ing] them with a general “economy”’ (Foucault 1995, 272). The labelling and policy ‘treatment’ of deviant social behaviour is not about abolishing objectively ‘bad’ acts but about creating an implicit ordering in which some acts are considered pathological while others are not. The militarism literature constructs an ordering of violence wherein militarism is carved out from the broader ambit of military-related force as a ‘deviant’ case, thus rendering the state-authorised use of force norma­tively unremarkable. Through this process of naturalisation, this particular conception of militarism helps resolve a tension within DCAF between the obvious use of force by liberal democracies, on the one hand, and DCAF’s apparent ‘success’ in promoting peace, on the other hand.

Critical Militarism Scholarship

The critical school of militarism scholarship, while still concerned with the military as a socially embedded institution, emphasises primarily socio­logical but also cultural, material, and ideological/ideational factors in its analysis of the military as ‘a major arena for social exchanges’ (Barak and Sheffer 2010, 19, fn3). Associated scholars focus on broad patterns of social interaction, examining the military as a banal, pervasive, and every­day influence upon liberal society. Correspondingly, critical militarism scholars aim to problematise the taken-for-granted state of liberal affairs.²

For the purposes of this discussion, this diverse work is parsed by the degree to which the criticism challenges the normativity of liberalism. At one end of the spectrum is a literature which employs ‘militarism’ explic­itly diagnostically, to suggest something is ‘off’ in the typical/desirable ordering of liberal society. In contrast to the institutional anxiety exhib­ited by CMR scholars, the normative concern of these narrowly critical scholars lies in their perception of an excessive military influence upon society. The many studies, polemics, and popular commentaries in this category indicate an underlying anxiety that military values, symbols, or attitudes are ‘leaking’ from their institutional container into a broader society which, without militarism, would be fully democratic and liberal (Bacevich 2005; Dixon 2012).

Though, like the CMR scholars, this work demonstrates a DCAF- inflected desire to detach the military from politics, it is distinguished by its understanding of politics as either (a) all activities taking place within the public sphere; or (b) pervasive to broader social life, rather than simply formal democratic processes.

The majority of critical militarism scholarship, however, works to prob- lematize this ‘spherical’ conceptualization, suggesting that militarism is not antithetical to the workings of liberalism (Stavrianakis and Selby 2012, 6). Examples of this perspective include analyses which, generally, consider militarism to be diffuse throughout various cultural productions, such as film and video games, which promote military values, masculinities, and rationales as both normatively exemplar and geopolitically exigent (Stahl 2010, 48; see also O Tuathail 2005; Dalby 2008). From a more sociological perspective, the many studies investigating specific institutional-cultural- ideational configurations of militarism—militarism with adjectives—rang­ing from British ‘nostalgia militarism’ (Shaw 1991, 118), to ‘militarized socialism’, (Mann 1987, 46) to even civilian-targeting ‘terror-militarism’ (Shaw 2005, 132) fall within this rubric. This school also encompasses the many feminist investigations of the relationship between militarism and patriarchy—a process of militarization deeply implicated in subject forma­tion (Enloe 2004, 2007; Stavrianakis and Selby 2012, 14).

Despite this school’s explicitly critical engagement with liberalism, how­ever—as well as its exposition of the arbitrariness of state violence—from the meta-perspective of myth-making and truth production, it subtly repro­duces the distinction between liberalism and militarism, and violence and politics.

Overall, in contrast to CMR scholars who maintain the social pres­tige of the military, the critical/sociological school, in its general concern regarding the undue influence of the military over society, implicitly con­structs association with the military as a normative ill. As a result, though not exhibited in each piece by each associated scholar, in the aggregate, the school tends to conceptually collapse violence more generally with the military, implying that the ‘containment’ of violence to the military will succeed in protecting democracy and pacific civil life. This has the effect of suggesting that in the absence of contamination by ‘military values’, liberal society would be, for the narrowly critical scholars, generally pacific, or, for the others, at least significantly improved. Militaristic outbursts may be understood as inherently pathological and ‘blamed’ on either the mili­tary directly, or the entanglement and mutual reinforcement of aggressive and patriarchal military values and ideals with liberalism itself. While mili­tarism may co-occur, it is not constructed as a normal, constitutive aspect of liberal democracy. This thus, at a deeper level than the simple reification of the ‘spherical’ understanding of society, bolsters DCAF’s normative claims. It does so through negative definition. In other words, liberalism’s empirical failures to live up to its own values are conceptually excluded from being instances of liberalism in the first place. Through this move to discount illiberality, the ideological coherence of DCAF’s underlying liberalism is preserved.