The liturgy of triumph: victory culture, popular rituals, and the US way of wartiming
| Author | Andrew R Hom,Luke Campbell |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221135097 |
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178221135097
International Relations
2022, Vol. 36(4) 591 –615
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00471178221135097
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The liturgy of triumph: victory
culture, popular rituals, and
the US way of wartiming
Andrew R Hom
University of Edinburgh
Luke Campbell
Northwest Missouri State University
Abstract
Wartime is fundamentally important to the study of international politics but not especially
well understood. In this paper, we use timing theory and the concept of liturgy to unpack the
contemporary dynamics of US wartime. A theory of political timing posits that all temporalities
derive from and symbolize underlying social processes, and that these timing efforts unfold according
to a master organizing standard. Liturgy highlights the way that ritualized acts help participants
commune with the sacred – whether this be God or the nation-state. Scrutinizing contemporary
US culture practices, we combine these ideas to argue that the notion of victory, as enacted
through a widespread set of performative routines, acts as an organizing standard that embeds and
reifies wartime in US security policy and daily life. Prevalent ideals of winning wars gather together
a stylized past, explicate present problems, and generate expectations about future problems and
conflicts. We tabulate several highly influential examples of this liturgy of triumph from national
calendars, commemorative sites and events, and cultural practices like spectator sports. In addition
to normalizing a view of wartime as having clear beginnings and uniquely successful endings, the
US liturgy of triumph highlights a growing gap in the country’s relationship to the use of force.
Most of what performative war liturgies commemorate is ‘finished’; it has been seen, known,
and ostensibly won. Yet, much of what defines 21st century conflict is anything but certain or
victorious. Moreover, US victory culture has only grown more acute the longer the concrete
victories fail to materialize, suggesting a tragic code at the heart of US security politics.
Keywords
liturgy, ritual, timing, US way of war, victory, wartime
Corresponding author:
Andrew R Hom, University of Edinburgh, Chrystal Macmillan Building, 15a George Square, Edinburgh EH8
9LD, UK.
Email: Andrew.Hom@ed.ac.uk
1135097IRE0010.1177/00471178221135097International RelationsHom and Campbell
research-article2022
Article
592 International Relations 36(4)
Introduction
Times of war are fundamentally important to global politics and the discipline of
International Relations but not especially well understood. Convention states that the
20th century’s two world wars ended with clear settlements that ended hostilities and
produced welcome results. Yet World War One (WWI) generated 11,000 casualties after
its armistice was agreed, and the settlement was so punitive and contentious that it
birthed mostly resentment, conflict, and a second global conflagration.1 World War Two
(WWII) formally ‘ended’ on the deck of the USS Missouri in 1945 yet US military per-
sonnel still faced trials by wartime courts martial as late as 1949, by which point the
defeat of the Axis powers had morphed into a nuclearized Cold War.2 That conflict ended
with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the implosion of the USSR 2 years later, yet
for much of his 21st century tenures as Russian President, Vladimir Putin pursued poli-
cies and initiatives whose purpose many take to be re-adjudicating or avenging the Cold
War settlement along Russia’s frontier. In early 2022, even as the rest of the world began
to acknowledge that war had returned to the European continent on an era-defining scale,
Russia refused to call its attack on Ukraine an invasion, insisting that it was a ‘special
military operation’ with specific, discrete goals that evoked the idea of wartime as a con-
crete and delimited parcel of political time. Since 1991, the US has become mired in
bedeviling conflict after conflict, from the humanitarian interventions of the ‘90s to the
Global War on Terror that has inflected much of the current century. The US seemed
poised to end two decades of ‘forever wars’ with its withdrawal from Afghanistan in
2021, yet conflict continues in that country and op-eds and think pieces are already call-
ing for renewed intervention.3 Civil wars in Yemen and Syria drag on before they peter
out, but do not decisively end in any tangible way. Drone surveillance and strikes against
extremists, terrorists, and insurgents have become a permanent tool of the industrialized
national security state.4 And while many of these practices may fall under the formal
auspices of ‘operations short of war’, the US and its allies increasingly embrace a stance
of ‘permanent wartime footing’ and heightened preparedness.5
In IR, conflict research, strategic studies, and normative literatures tend to take the
boundaries of warfare mostly for granted. We hear about conflict duration as if war’s
end presents few coding problems.6 Strategic studies speculate about how to bring a war
to a successful close but not on the meaning or political consequences of various ques-
tions surrounding the conclusion of hostilities.7 Just war literature compartmentalizes
normative reflection in three tidy temporal niches – ad, in, and post bello – but does not
pay sufficient attention to how we might know when one category ends and another
pertains.8
The practical and theoretical problems interconnect. Notions of wartime, and espe-
cially the way that wartime opens with formal declaration of hostilities and ends in
clear-cut victory and defeat seem increasingly anachronistic and unable to gather all the
messy aspects of war together in a coherent whole9 – which is the necessary condition
of wartime’s promise to mark an exceptional but discrete temporal duration between
‘normal’ times of peace. As interstate wars declined and intrastate and non-state con-
flicts increased, as legal and normative restrictions grew, as technology cheapened and
extended the means of killing, and as globalization made targets everywhere more
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