Feeling Everyday IR: Embodied, affective, militarising movement as choreography of war

Published date01 June 2019
Date01 June 2019
AuthorLinda Åhäll
DOI10.1177/0010836718807501
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836718807501
Cooperation and Conflict
2019, Vol. 54(2) 149 –166
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0010836718807501
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Feeling Everyday IR:
Embodied, affective,
militarising movement as
choreography of war
Linda Åhäll
Abstract
This article explores affective, embodied encounters between military and civilian bodies in the everyday
as choreography of war. It argues that by paying attention to the intersecting political sphere of bodies,
affect and movement – through the metaphor of ‘dance’ – we are not only able to understand how
security operates as a logic reproducing the militarisation of the everyday, but also able to identify a
representational gap, an aesthetic politics, potentially useful for resistance to such practices normalising
war in the everyday. It draws on two British examples of where military moves disrupt civilian spaces in
the everyday: an arts project commemorating the Battle of the Somme, and a football game taking place
during Remembrance week. Through embodied choreographies of war in the everyday, dance is used
as a metaphor to understand militarisation as an example of feeling Everyday IR. Thus, dance is useful
to ‘see’ the politics of Everyday IR, but also to understand, to feel and possibly to resist the politics of
normalisation of war in the everyday. This is one example of how feeling Everyday IR offers alternative
openings into political puzzles of security logics informing war as practice.
Keywords
Aesthetics, affective-discursive, Everyday IR, feminism, militarisation
On the morning of 1 July 2016, I was, as usual, walking into Manchester Piccadilly train
station to catch my train to Stoke on Trent. But, this morning was different. Already
outside the station I noticed a number of soldiers. They were standing still, spread out
one by one, and their non-movement was noticeable in the midst of commuters rushing
to catch their trains. I recognised their uniforms as belonging to the past. I realised it was
some form of performance. Inside the station many more soldiers were mixing with
civilians. They were sitting, standing, reading a book, waiting. Strikingly they were not
talking. If anyone approached them, they silently handed out a card with the name, regi-
ment, age and – if known – the time of ‘their’ death. They were Ghost Soldiers.
Corresponding author:
Linda Åhäll, Keele University, Keele ST5 5BG, UK.
Email: l.ahall@keele.ac.uk
807501CAC0010.1177/0010836718807501Cooperation and ConflictÅhäll
research-article2018
Article
150 Cooperation and Conflict 54(2)
The project entitled ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here’ was part of the UK art’s pro-
gramme for the First World War centenary. The ‘modern memorial’ I experienced at
Manchester Piccadilly train station that morning involved about 1,500 voluntary partici-
pants appearing in public spaces such as shopping centres, train stations, high streets and
beaches across the UK. The 1,500 men represented 1,500 ‘real’ men who died on that
first day of the Battle of the Somme exactly a hundred years earlier. The British suffered
nearly 60,000 casualties, almost 20,000 British men died on that first day alone. More
than a million were killed and wounded on all sides during the five-month conflict.
The day-long event was organised in secret and not even the volunteers themselves
were aware of the full details of the project. The point was to keep it a surprise for those
who were to experience it. In several places across the UK, the Ghost Soldiers broke into
the tune ‘We’re Here because We’re Here’ that troops sung in the trenches to reflect the
futility of their situation. Describing the event in Glasgow, the Daily Mail Online reported
on the ‘The spine-tingling moment’ when commuters were ‘moved to tears’ as the Ghost
Soldiers ‘sung a poignant WWI song from the trenches at Battle of the Somme’ (Robertson
and Cockroft, 2017). Many who witnessed the scenes said it was a very moving tribute.
The cards handed out by the Ghost Soldiers also included the hash-tag #wearehere and
photos and reactions to the project quickly spread across social media platforms. In this
way, the experiences of the event were shared to many not experiencing it directly.
International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline has historically, as the name
suggests, been preoccupied with global politics as those relations between states in the
international system, that is, of macro-politics. From such a perspective, the concept of
Everyday IR may sound like an oxymoron. However, IR is also the study of war,1 and
crucially, how to avoid war.2 If we think of IR in this more encompassing way, the study
of the everyday is hardly a new phenomenon, especially not if we pay attention to the
legacy of feminist scholarship in IR. Since the early feminist interventions in the late
1980s (see Cohn, 1987; Enloe, 1989), feminist scholars have done much to theorise the
everyday by problematising taken-for-granted dichotomies in Western binary thinking,
such as war/peace; international/domestic; war front/home front; perpetrator/victim;
strong/weak; security/insecurity. By doing so feminist scholars have demonstrated how
the private and personal are not just political, but international, and how the international
always already relies on personal relationships (see Enloe, 1989). Feminist scholars have
persistently emphasised how the domestic/local/everyday cannot be separated out from
the global in our studies of ‘international relations’; that the reiteration of a distinction
between micro- and macro politics is problematic in and of itself.
Another strand of literature in IR that often takes the everyday as its starting point
for analysis is the growing sub-field of ‘popular culture and world politics’ (for over-
views, see Caso and Hamilton, 2015; Grayson et al., 2009; Hamilton and Shepherd,
2016). Empirical sites for analysis may range from social media platforms; science
fiction (Weldes, 2003); videogames (Robinson, 2016); superheroes; children’s stories
(Grayson, 2013); YouTube advertisement (Åhäll, 2015); beer (Saunders and Holland,
2018); and celebrity activism. A focus on popular culture and/or the everyday also
opens up methodological questions as to how to ‘do’ IR differently, such as using art-
based collage as methodology (Särmä, 2015) or exploring war through song writing
(Hast, 2016).

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