Afterword: war:time
| Author | Lisa Ellen Silvestri |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221134340 |
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221134340
International Relations
2022, Vol. 36(4) 682 –686
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00471178221134340
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Afterword: war:time
Lisa Ellen Silvestri
Penn State University
Abstract
How should we think about war today? This afterword assesses the impact of using a temporal
lens to understand contemporary conflict. Reflecting upon my own work on media and war
alongside wider societal relationships to violence, I consider the ways in which new technologies
and styles of warfighting change both our view of time and our understanding of war itself. In
particular, I show how a shift from space to time helps focus attention on the personal and lived
experience of US war, on the importance of routines both in constituting and obscuring wartime,
on how many issues of contemporary war have become a matter of digitized perspective, and
finally how emergent technologies have unsettled familiar temporal patterns of conflict. War
today is media-drenched but struggles to occupy our attention over sustained periods. It remains
an epochal political force that we tend to approach through deeply individualized, microcosmic
stories. It proceeds at breakneck pace but rarely gets anywhere. These questions and tensions
underline the importance of focusing not only on the resolutely temporal aspects of wartime,
but also on the way in which shifts in time are changing the very nature and politics of war in the
21st century.
Keywords
embodiment, routines, social media, temporality, wartime
Without fail, the best critical scholarship I encounter leaves me thinking: ‘How could we
have missed this?’ The premise of this special issue – that we should think about war
through the lens of time – seems as obvious as it is essential. But somehow very few of
us were doing it and, if we were, we weren’t consciously centering time and temporality
in our analyses of war. Reflecting on my own work, time is everywhere and nowhere. My
book, Friended at the Front: Social Media in the American War Zone,1 considers how
direct, instantaneous connection via social media changes what it’s like to be at war for
Corresponding author:
Lisa Ellen Silvestri, Penn State University, 111 Sparks Building, University Park, PA 16802, USA.
Email: les196@psu.edu
1134340IRE0010.1177/00471178221134340International RelationsSilvestri
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