While societal trust is eroding, military power is consolidating itself in the desire to perfect AI-enabled technology with the view towards greater 'trusted' autonomy. Much of the international community agrees that autonomous weapons systems must be trusted, should they satisfy ethical and legal requirements. To this end, numerous AI ethics and legal principles have been drafted to help assure autonomous systems development. However, drawing on assemblage theory and discourse analysis, we shift the focus away from whether trust in autonomous systems is possible vis-a-vis ethical and legal principles. Instead, we examine the performative role that trust plays. Specifically, we confront the discourse of 'trusted' autonomy to question the meaning of so-called trusted autonomous systems, particularly since, as we claim, machine learning algorithms agitate and undermine trust. We argue that trust is underpinned by an under-acknowledged concept deeply tied to militarization: faith. We claim that what is actually meant in the trusted autonomy discourse, and which remains a tacit question to the public in the rhetoric, is not to simply have trust in autonomous systems, but to have faith. Faith commitments to military technology development reveal that belief in trusted autonomy and the drive towards militarization reinforce each other. We aim, therefore, to make explicit the often-implicit power relations that go into the making of trusted autonomous systems discourse.
Over the past decade, the Journal of Critical Military Studies (hereafter JCMS) has employed masculinities as a critical lens for analysing a wide range of issues across different contexts, including conflict and post-conflict periods. However, the concept of masculinities, particularly militarized masculinities, has also faced criticism for becoming 'overly familiar and "comfortable"' (Zalewski 2017, 200). This critique has encouraged efforts to 'keep the concept curious, sceptical, and uncomfortable'. Taking this concern as a point of departure, this article offers a critical review of JCMS scholarship across its first decade and explores the methodological, theoretical, and geographical orientations of articles published in JCMS that employed masculinities. The analysis identifies JCMS's main contributions while also advancing an agenda for future research by highlighting critical gaps, most notably the insufficient integration of intersectionality, the underrepresentation of Majority World1 perspectives, and the neglect of domestic spheres among articles on militarized masculinities. Therefore, this article suggests future research directions and calls for addressing these silences and diversifying theoretical and methodological approaches.
Militaries increasingly experiment with data-driven technologies to enhance readiness and prepare for future warfare. Yet developing these technologies in-house poses significant challenges, particularly given the limited opportunities for real-world experimentation. This paper examines the Land Information Manoeuvre Centre (LIMC), an experimental Dutch army innovation hub active during the COVID-19 pandemic but without a formal legal mandate. The objective is to analyse the motivations and promises that drove this unit, to better understand dilemmas surrounding legitimacy in military experimentation. Through the conceptual lens of experimentation practices (driven by visions and imaginaries of military innovation), legitimacy (as entangled law and ethics), and soldiers' lived experiences, the study shows that experimentation is not only about testing technical functionalities, but also about shaping social, legal, and ethical frameworks. The analysis reveals that military experimentation can challenge legal and moral boundaries, potentially generating dilemmas and moral disorientation among soldiers. These findings contribute to broader studies of experimenting in security contexts by providing a framework that integrates both legal and ethical dimensions of legitimacy. Moreover, by demonstrating how visions and imaginaries inform experimentation practices and lived experiences, the paper shows how such imaginaries can be strategically mobilized to justify actions as moral obligations, allocate resources, and steer investments. Ultimately, we argue that experimentation reshapes how innovation in warfare is legitimized at political and strategic levels, and how soldiers make sense of and justify their actions.
This article examines how everyday performances of militarized masculinities operate within the domestic sphere of Turkish military families residing in military lodgements, residential compounds within army barracks. Centering the perspectives of women married to military officers, the study traces how militarized masculinities are enacted in domestic life through performances of correction, judgemental silence, bodily comportment, and moral suggestion that seek to align women's conduct with the representational demands of the institution. The article conceptualizes the home as a rehearsal stage: a space where militarized norms are not merely received from the institution but actively rehearsed, adjusted, and reproduced in anticipation of civilian-facing visibility, where women's conduct is read as a reflection of their husband's institutional standing. The findings demonstrate that these performances work to militarize women's daily routines, speech, appearance, and even personal beliefs, and that moments of perceived public misalignment are retrospectively carried back into the home, corrected, and folded into anticipatory patterns that constrain women's spaces for contestation. Yet women are not passive recipients; they interpret, negotiate, and at times internalize these performances, and centering their perspectives reveals how private conduct is framed as bearing on institutional standing in ways only visible from the position of the person whose behaviour is being regulated. By showing how militarized masculinities are sustained not only through institutional structures but through the relational fabric of domestic life, the article contributes to critical military studies a conceptual framework for analysing the home as an active site of gendered norm production within militarized settings.
By critically examining cemeteries as both an archival source and ethnographic site, this article offers an expanded understanding of 'deathscapes' beyond their function as resting places for the deceased. Focusing on Gurkha cemeteries that emerged during the decolonization period (late 1940s-1960s), it conceptualizes cemetery spatiality as a dynamic assemblage of texts. Tracing Gurkha graves from Singapore to Sungai Petani against the backdrop of empire and transnational soldiering, this study foregrounds cemeteries as method - revealing how they illuminate the intersections between (a) gender, family, and community; (b) culture and religion; and (c) the politics of historical memory and (non)coloniality. By reading against the grain of gravestones, the article disinters the buried histories and epistemologies surrounding often-overlooked Nepali Gurkha families. In doing so, the article contributes to a deeper understanding of the interplay between soldiering, sociality, and subalternity. Presenting a 'history from below', it seeks to highlight how these cemeteries not only memorialize men, women, and children whose lived experiences are often marginalized but also vividly expose the contradictions and ambivalences of the post/colonial condition.
What should we make of a warplane as a playground feature or war museums hosting children's birthday parties? Intuitively, we might expect that weapons of war would be difficult to reconcile with the dominant social imaginary of childhood as a time of innocence and with the usual view of children as cherished objects of protection. And yet, the repurposing of war materiel for play, the billing of military performances as child-friendly leisure activities, and other mundane encounters with militarized material and performative cultures are recurrent in the lives of children far from zones of conflict - instances of what a growing community of scholarship in International Relations and adjacent specialities investigates as the militarization of childhood. Building from this work, I reverse the analytical standpoint, inquiring into the 'childing' of militarism: a meaning-making process through which the encoded social meaning of childhood contributes to normalizing and naturalizing war and militarism. Beginning from the puzzle of an M113 armoured personnel carrier, seemingly out of place as an object of children's leisure, the article develops conceptual insights into childing as a key modality in the governance of social worlds in which martial practices and our present global political rendition more broadly are intelligible.
Images have become central to how contemporary conflicts are interpreted, but their authority is often overstated. Although visuals are powerful, they may also flatten complex histories, circulate without context, and be mobilized for propaganda or disinformation. These tensions are well-acknowledged in work on visual militarism and surveillance, yet less attention has been paid to what images miss-especially in protracted conflicts where violence unfolds unevenly. Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork in the Kurdish borderlands of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, this Encounters piece examines the limits of visual documentation in spaces shaped by surveillance, violence, displacement, and ongoing militarization. Photographs can show ruins and material destruction, but they rarely convey the slow erosion of everyday life, the emotional labour of endurance, or the memories that shape how violence is felt. At times, taking a photograph felt insufficient-or ethically inappropriate-and it was in these refusals that the limits of visuality became most apparent. Likewise, the personal archives kept by displaced families reveal forms of memory and attachment that exceed what a single image can hold and resist the narratives imposed through state-authorized visibility. By emphasizing the politically situated nature of visual evidence, this piece contributes to debates on visual methods in critical military studies in three ways: it highlights how images can mislead as much as they reveal; it shows how disinformation exploits visual authority; and it calls for approaches that pair visual analysis with listening, witnessing, and attention to what lies beyond the frame.
While military resilience programmes are often presented as tools to enhance soldiers' capacity to withstand psychological stress and improve operational performance, critical scholarship has raised concerns about how these programmes may also stigmatize vulnerability, moralize conduct, and govern subjectivity. As much of this work has focused on discourse, policy, and institutional rationalities, less attention has been paid to how resilience is produced and sustained in everyday practice. Drawing on Michel Foucault's concept of disciplinary power and Judith Butler's theory of performativity, this paper reconceptualizes resilience training as a co-constitutive system of discipline and performance. From this perspective, resilience extends beyond individual capacity to involve ongoing performative acts through which institutional norms are enacted and stabilized. This shift also redirects the focus from programme outcomes to the everyday mechanisms through which subjects are constituted, revealing how these programmes may, paradoxically, heighten the very vulnerability they seek to address while subtly opening possibilities for subversion.
This article investigates the perspectives of people working at the intersection of Green politics and the military in Germany, a country currently redefining its approach to security policy as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It takes as a starting point the tension between the conventional security paradigm, i.e. the idea that security is something militaries provide for the nation-state, and the need to mitigate the environmental and climate crisis given the multiple socio-environmental problems militarism creates. We examine how members of BundeswehrGr & uuml;n, an association that aims at fostering a dialogue between the Greens and the military, make sense of the relationship between these worlds and engage in boundary work to further these aims in practice. This article reveals boundary work to be a fruitful conceptual lens to sketch how the uncomfortable trade-offs posited by the dual threats of conventional war and the climate catastrophe might be negotiated. We find that a well-integrated boundary subject is important for the effectiveness of this work. To that end, the BundeswehrGr & uuml;n advocate for the importance of military work without resorting to nationalism, and instead argues that increased Green governance is congruent with the military's own aversion to conflict. Finally, we also find embodiment to be particularly important for this boundary work.
Conscientious objection remains underexplored in scholarship on the intersections of war, militarism, and masculinities, despite its potential to unsettle dominant gendered logics of militarization. This article addresses this gap by examining how militarized masculinity operates within the Finnish context - a nation often perceived as peaceful and committed to gender equality, yet where male conscription remains tied to Finnish manhood and entangled with gendered expectations. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 10 Finnish conscientious objectors, the article investigates how these individuals position themselves both within and in resistance to hegemonic masculine norms. The objectors' accounts demonstrate the way militarized masculinity asserts its hegemony through gendered stigma, particularly via homophobic taunts directed at their refusal. Concurrently, their reflections on the potential heroic connotations imbued in their refusal highlight how their anti-militarist narratives not only destabilize the dominance of militarized masculinity but also point to the emergence of alternative masculinities oriented towards gender justice. By illuminating how their ambivalent positionality - whose masculinities are subordinated yet occupy male privilege - engage with the military and militarism, this article contributes to an understanding of masculinities beyond traditional associations with violence, offering a nuanced perspective on gendered militarism and resistance to it.
This article addresses the problems of uncertainty of information when conducting research on countries currently at war. During the spring of 2024, we conducted interviews with social sciences researchers from Sweden, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania studying Ukraine after Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. We asked what challenges they experienced during their research, and how they coped with research quality and reliability of sources in their work. Our findings suggest that researchers struggle with geographical and chronological distance to the research subject, cultural knowledge, language barriers, their positionality, and unreliability of sources. Most of these problems are practical in nature, yet they have negative consequences on the quality of analysis of the research. To overcome these uncertainties, the researchers used various coping strategies: lowering expectations, avoiding unreliable information, and reshaping research questions. Nevertheless, researchers reported that unreliable information is often used informally anyway, which is a problem for the quality of results. Although there is no panacea for handling uncertainty of research during wartime, we suggest a possible way to move forward: to apply the method of source criticism from historical sciences to social science research on current conflicts. We adapt historical source criticism methodology to this purpose and present a matrix to guide researchers who study contemporary wars.
This essay reflects on an intimate encounter with the German state: the compulsory medical examination that all male teenagers underwent as part of military conscription until its suspension in 2011. Central to this was the dreaded Eierkontrollgriff, a haptic testicle check of dubious medical value performed by military medics. As Europe remilitarizes after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Germany reintroduced a soft form of military service in January 2026. While service remains voluntary, all 18-year-olds must again undergo medical exams, and the Bundeswehr has confirmed the return of the Eierkontrollgriff. Drawing on feminist and Foucauldian insights, this essay argues that such practices are more than bureaucratic relics. They enact the state's corporeal authority over young men, reproduce gendered notions of militarized citizenship, and reinforce sovereign logics of obedience and vulnerability. The essay calls for renewed attention to the embodied and mundane bureaucracies of militarization often overshadowed by debates on budgets and weaponry.
Why did Russia launch cyberwarfare against Ukraine well before the ground invasion, thereby abandoning the advantage of a surprise cyber-kinetic strike? Using ontological security theory, I argue that through this decision, the Kremlin sought to reaffirm Russia's imperialist self-identity by demonstrating Ukraine's alleged lack of sovereignty. The premature cyberattacks forced Kyiv to rely heavily on Western state and non-state actors and adopt radical technical and legal measures limiting its cyber-sovereignty. From the Kremlin's perspective, these moves could illustrate in practice Russia's imperialist claims about a weak and externally dependent Ukraine and ease the West and other actors into recognizing Russia's historical justification for the impending attack and its resurgence as a great power. Doing so was crucial before the kinetic strike, to assuage the Kremlin's anxiety regarding the invasion's potential to secure Russia in its great power identity and ensure its external recognition as such. This ultimately explains the earlier timing of the Russian cyberaggression.
