Abstract
We live in an age of forever wars, in which the boundaries between war and peace are increasingly blurred. Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield: Outside Wartime homes in on these boundaries to offer a novel understanding of military victory that centres the intuitive, yet underexplored, relation between victory and time. Indeed, military victory remains central to the practice and theory of war, and yet is still commonly understood as an outcome of battles: an event that brings war to cessation and restores peace. Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield: Outside Wartime finds, instead, that victory is a temporal, sense-making device. It argues that victory is produced just as much outside the battlefield as on it, during both wartime and peacetime . Drawing on four years of extensive research into exhibitions of military tattoos, war memorials, old and new commemoration practices, doctrine manuals, history textbooks and videogames, this book demonstrates that as soon as we stop looking for victory in the usual places, a plurality of wartimes comes to the surface and the assumption that victory brings war to an end is cast into doubt. Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield: Outside Wartime offers an innovative account of what victory means, explains victory’s conceptual, affective and international politics, and sheds light on understudied victory practices that straddle the lines between war and peace, kinetic and non-kinetic combat, narratives and materiality.
Mirko Palestrino is Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. His research focuses on the sociologies and politics of time and temporality, experiences and narratives of war, theories and practices of military victory, and the embodied politics of military training and deployment. His work has appeared in International Political Sociology and the Journal of Political Ideologies among others. His first monograph, Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield: Outside Wartime is under contract with Oxford University Press.