War and the body: militarisation, practice and experience

This edited volume book places the body at the centre of critical thinking about war and its consequences. Giving embodiment and bodily issues an analytic recognition they warrant and have been denied to date, this book shows that the reality of war is not just politics by other means but politics incarnate - politics written on and experienced through the bodies of countless men and women. It brings together new interdisciplinary scholarship that explores how war is fundamentally enacted and reproduced through embodied action, suffering and memory. As such, the book inventively thinks through a range of issues in the history of war and recent transformations in warfare via a focus on the body. It addresses three core and interlinked concerns - militarisation, the practice of war, and corporeal aftermaths: -Section I focuses on militarised bodies and the militarisation of human sensation. -Section II is concerned with the embodied practice and sensory experience of warfighting. -Section III focuses on the social, political and ethical dimensions of various post-war bodies and traumas. War and the Body promotes new directions in thinking about war through the lens of the body, challenging the ontology of conventional war scholarship. Theoretically informed, methodologically diverse and empirically rich, this book offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary engagement with a broad range of themes and war experiences that are addressed by thinking through the body. This book will be of much interestst to students of critical war studies, critical security studies, sociology, anthropology, military studies and IR in general.