Assemblages of conflict termination: popular culture, global politics and the end of wars
| Published date | 01 December 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00471178211052813 |
| Author | Cahir O’Doherty |
| Date | 01 December 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178211052813
International Relations
2023, Vol. 37(4) 567 –588
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/00471178211052813
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Assemblages of conflict
termination: popular
culture, global politics
and the end of wars
Cahir O’Doherty
University of Groningen
Abstract
The question of how wars end is of continued importance, especially in the context of the ongoing
War on Terror. This question has traditionally been approached within International Relations
through rational choice theories, logical modelling and game theory. Such approaches have become
increasingly ill-suited to capturing the complexity and ambiguity of contemporary warfare and the
War on Terror in particular. These battlefield ambiguities are often at odds with political and
public desires to see decisive victory in wars. This article builds on recent critical work within War
Termination Studies in order to re-conceptualise the end of war as assemblages. By paying greater
attention to the affects inculcated by political rhetoric surrounding war and utilising the concepts
of affect and emergence, this article presents a novel approach to the study of contemporary war
termination. Utilising popular culture, increasingly seen as a crucial site of global politics, the case
study analysed here advances the argument that sacrifice emerges from cinema and presidential
rhetoric as a trope that allows leaders to claim victory in war despite indecisive conditions of the
ground. Through affective cinematic encounters, conceptualised here through the end of wars
assemblages, audiences can become more accepting of such political claims.
Keywords
affect, assemblage, cinema, popular culture, war termination
Introduction
How do we know when a war is over? Without the traditional trappings of surrender
ceremonies or ticker-tape parades, how do we determine the end of armed hostilities?
Corresponding author:
Cahir O’Doherty, International Relations and International Organisation (IRIO), University of Groningen,
Oude Kijk in’t Jatstraat 26, Groningen, 9712 EK, the Netherlands
Email: c.f.odoherty@rug.nl
1052813IRE0010.1177/00471178211052813International RelationsO’Doherty
research-article2021
Article
568 International Relations 37(4)
More pressingly, how do political leaders make claims that armed conflicts have ended or
will end, and how are those claims legitimised and accepted? How, for instance, could
President Trump claim that ‘Now we’ve won, it’s time to come back. . .they’ve [US
troops] killed ISIS. . .and they’re [US troops] up there looking down on us. . .We won,
and that’s the way we want it, and that’s the way they [gesturing skywards] want it’ despite
all rational evidence to the contrary.1 In the context of the decline of decisive battles and
the growth of ambiguous battlefield conditions, this article seeks to provide an answer to
these questions by investigating the processes that work to construct a sense of ending for
US-led conflicts in the War on Terror, arguably one of the most ambiguous conflicts in
history.2 Given that the traditional modalities of war have altered in the past 30 years,
traditional dyadic cost-benefit analyses and rational actor modelling can only provide a
partial and limited account of how wars end. To improve our understanding of how con-
flicts end, this article advances the idea that we can better conceptualise war termination
as assemblages. Assemblages can address this increased complexity by bringing analyti-
cal light to bear on questions of emotions, discourses, affects, material and embodied
processes and therefore build on already existing analyses of battlefield conditions, politi-
cal calculations and strategic concerns.3 Such an approach can help to not just address the
limitations of traditional war termination studies, but can serve to bring a more compre-
hensive understanding of all the processes and forces that shape and influence how these
US-led violent episodes are understood to be waged and conclude.
Drawing on the literature of popular culture and world politics, this article engages with
contemporary Hollywood action movies and presidential speech as sites of meaning mak-
ing for the endings of post-9/11 US-led wars. While not seeking to present a generalisable
model of how all wars end, this article examines one aspect of the end of wars assemblages
thereby demonstrating an approach that develops our understanding of how political lead-
ers make claims about the end of wars and how these claims are legitimised.
Specifically, this article argues that affective encounters that are induced by cinema
allow for the emergence of conditions of success including, among others, sacrifice and
determination. When politically operationalised, these conditions of success carry the
affective power and weight necessary to make a claim to truth that a war has ended, or
will end, with victory. This power comes from audiences’ pre-primed patterns of thought
that are cinematically produced through the embodied encounters of intense cinematic
moments.
The article proceeds in three parts. Firstly, I explore the existing literature on popular
culture as well as war termination to make the point that utilising cultural artefacts can
help researchers move beyond traditional explanatory patterns to come to a more com-
plete understanding of how wars end. Following this, I argue that thinking of wars and
their endings as assemblages allows us to analyse their complexity through multiple
dimensions and identify the cultural and affective processes that make the termination of
war possible. As popular culture is a site through which geopolitical imaginaries are
constructed,4 it is logical to argue that it is also a site where ideas about victory in war are
shaped. Having established both the limitations of rational choice models and the utility
of an assemblage and popular culture led approach, I discuss the end of wars assem-
blages as theoretical tool and orientation and explore how thinking with and through
assemblages can help us unpick some of the processes and artefacts that contribute to
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