Pleasure and Depletion in Contemporary Militarism

Why do so many US service members, veterans and military families continue to affectively invest in militarism when the physical and emotional costs are so high?

This book asks why US service members, veterans and military families continue to affectively invest in militarism – both as a structure of global politics and in their everyday lives – when they have experienced first-hand, its physical and emotional costs? Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with military communities and ethnographic insights from a range of military sites, the book examines how those service members, veterans and military families who have been physically and emotionally depleted through their intimate relations to US militarism are the same individuals who have simultaneously experienced its concomitant pleasures, joys, and have built lives and worlds through their attachment to it. Ultimately, the book argues these dual and contradictory experiences are central to militarism’s endurance in global politics; both through individuals continued affective investment in a militarised pathway and through the incremental and incomplete ways that militarism is reproduced in their everyday lives.