4PIRS008W | Seminar Preparation Sheet Week 1

Learning Portfolio Task: People and states

Decolonial Task: researching the geopolitics of your family

Step 1:

· Locate a relic/ artefact of your family or community’s history. (This can be a photograph, a painting, a document like a birth certificate, an old recipe, a ceremonial dress, a religious artefact, a community centre sign/ event). Anything!

· Take a picture of the artefact. (or keep it to show during seminar).

· Find out the story behind this artefact. What does this artefact mean to your family, your community, you?

· You might need to speak with a family member or a community elder (in person or on the phone) to complete this task.

Step 2:

· Research a political event that was taking place around the same time and/ or place as the relic. Think of local, national, regional or global events.

· Explain how your family might have been impact by this event. (You might have to use your imagination or think creatively)

· You can write a paragraph, a narrative or poem. The way you express this story is up to you.

· We will present these items and stories in a shared session on collaborate next week. (Even if you cannot make the seminar, you might enjoy this task).

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International Feminist Journal of Politics

ISSN: 1461-6742 (Print) 1468-4470 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfjp20

Forget “militarization”: race, disability and the
“martial politics” of the police and of the university

Alison Howell

To cite this article: Alison Howell (2018) Forget “militarization”: race, disability and the “martial
politics” of the police and of the university, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 20:2, 117-136,
DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2018.1447310

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2018.1447310

Published online: 05 Apr 2018.

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Forget “militarization”: race, disability and the
“martial politics” of the police and of the university
Alison Howell

Department of Political Science, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, USA

ABSTRACT
This article investigates the limits of the concept of militarization and proposes
an alternative concept: martial politics. It argues that the concept of
militarization falsely presumes a peaceful liberal order that is encroached on
by military values or institutions. Arguing instead that we must grapple with
the ways in which war and politics are mutually shaped, the article proposes
the concept of martial politics as a means for examining how politics is shot-
through with war-like relations. It argues that stark distinctions cannot be
made between war and peace, military and civilian or national and social
security. This argument is made in relation to two empirical sites: the police
and the university. Arguing against the notion that either the police or the
university have been “militarized,” the article provides a historical analysis of
the ways in which these institutions have always already been implicated in
martial politics – that is, of producing White social and economic order
through war-like relations with Indigenous, racialized, disabled, poor and
other communities. It concludes by assessing the political and scholarly
opportunities that are opened up for feminists through the rejection of the
concept of militarization in favor of the concept of martial politics.

KEYWORDS Militarization; martial politics; race; disability; police; university

There is something seemingly intuitive about the concept of “militarization.”
Current events seem to consistently point to some new domain of civilian
life being overtaken by military values, technologies or aesthetics. Indeed
the concept of militarization circulates not only in feminist thought and
wider academic discourse, but in public discourse too. Not only does it
seem to reflect a common sense truth – it is also potentially politically expe-
dient to invoke “militarization.” By claiming that something has been recently
militarized, it becomes possible to call for demilitarization, the arrest or rever-
sal of this apparent introduction of military funding, technologies or cultures
into “civilian” domains. The concept of militarization seems attractive in part
because it holds out the possibility of emancipation from military

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

CONTACT Alison Howell alison.howell@rutgers.edu Department of Political Science, Rutgers
University, 360 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, Newark, NJ 07102, USA

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS, 2018
VOL. 20, NO. 2, 117–136
https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2018.1447310

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mailto:alison.howell@rutgers.edu

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encroachment into civilian life, but what if there was no such “pure” civilian
political space to begin with?

This article argues that the concept of militarization obscures the constitu-
tive nature of war-like relations of force perpetrated against populations
deemed to be a threat to civil order or the health of the population, especially
along lines of race, Indigeneity, disability, gender, sexuality and class.
Embedded in “militarization” is a theorization of “before and after” – of move-
ment from a non-militarized (or less-militarized) state to a militarized one. This
erroneously assumes there ever was a peaceful domain of “normal” or “civi-
lian” politics unsullied by military intrusion: a false and dangerous assumption
that lulls us into faith in the naturally peaceful nature of “normal” politics. This
article challenges the concept of militarization through a feminist, anti-racist
and disability analysis that focuses on the politics of the police and the univer-
sity – two institutions that have ostensibly been “militarized.”

As a novel alternative, the article offers the concept of “martial politics.”
Here, “martial” signals a need to be attentive to war-like relations or technol-
ogies and knowledges that are “of war.” Attaching the word “martial” to “poli-
tics” aids in assessing the indivisibility of war and peace, military and civilian,
and national and social security. “Martial politics” moves beyond the idea that
“militarization” is a new process by which the exception (war) encroaches on
the norm (peace). “Normal politics” is not overtaken by “militarization”;
instead, martial relations inhere in liberal politics as they are enacted on
those who are racialized, Indigenous, disabled, queer or otherwise constituted
as a threat to civil order.

The article proceeds in three sections. The first sets out the problems with
“militarization” and the potential of “martial politics.” The following two sec-
tions explore sites of apparent “militarization” – the police and the university
– demonstrating the limits of the “militarization” concept empirically. The
article concludes by discussing opportunities for scholarly and political
action that are created by dispensing with the expediency of “militarization”
in favor of “martial politics.”

While the terms “militarism” and “militarization” emerged to explain Cold War
military build-up and its social, ideological and international consequences
(Shaw 1991), there has been a significant resurgence of the concept recently
(Stavrianakis and Selby 2013). “Militarization” is now deployed in numerous
disciplines to describe an array of phenomena. The International Feminist
Journal of Politics has been a hub for the publication of feminist “militarization”
research, including on topics such as militarized masculinities (Enloe 2003;
Masters 2005; Eichler 2006; Duncanson 2009; Welland 2015; Tidy 2015); the
militarization of political leadership (Cannen 2014; Athanassiou 2014);

118 A. HOWELL

women’s lives (Shigematsu 2009); spaces such as memorials (Szitanyi 2015),
heritage sites (Demetriou 2012) and border zones (de Lacy 2014); gender
relations (Cockburn 2010); and feminism itself (Wright 2015). Yet with remark-
ably few exceptions (Enloe 2000, 3; Lutz 2002, 723; Stavrianakis and Selby
2013) the concept of “militarization” is infrequently defined or analyzed.
Perhaps it seems self-evident, but “militarization” is a concept. Like any
concept it guides our attention in certain directions, but it also limits our
scope.

Arguably the most influential text on “militarization” in feminist thought is
Cynthia Enloe’s classic book, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing
Women’s Lives (2000). The book opens with a now-famous question: how do
they militarize a can of soup? Enloe describes a can of soup containing pasta
cut into the shape of Star Wars weapons, illustrating her central argument that
“militarization” is a broad social and gendered process:

In the Star Wars soup scenario a lot of people have become militarized – corpor-
ate marketers, dieticians, mothers, and children. They may not run out to enlist in
the army as soon as they have finished their lunch, but militarization is progres-
sing nonetheless. Militarization is never simply about joining a military. It is a far
more subtle process. And it sprawls over far more of the gendered social land-
scape. (Enloe 2000, 2)

In this account, all sorts of things can become “militarized”: people, values, cul-
tures and products. Further, “militarization” is a gendered process best under-
stood by examining women’s experiences of it (Enloe 2000, 3). This analysis
enabled the study of hitherto-unexamined connections, shedding light on
the labor performed by laundresses, sex workers, military wives, nurses,
mothers and other women across the globe. Building on previous work
(Enloe 1983; Enloe [1989] 2014), it highlighted that investment in the military
and military values is not necessary or natural: they can be disinvested from
and resisted. However, the “militarization” concept underestimates the
extent to which we live with war: how marginalized people, those who are
racialized, disabled or poor, are subject to war-like (martial) forms of politics.

Returning to Enloe’s can of soup, in a blog post critiquing the concept of
militarism, Cowen makes this intervention: “If, in one of the most incisive cri-
tiques of militarism, Enloe asks ‘how do they militarize a can of soup?’ and
questions how the pasta within assumes the shape of “star wars satellites,”
then we are also interested in the central fact of the can” (n.d.). Napoleon com-
missioned the design of canning to support the supply of far-flung battle-
fields; “thus, the can of soup was always already ‘militarized’, and bypassing
the can for the noodles hides perhaps more than it reveals” (Cowen n.d.).
Drawing on other scholarship that has dispensed with the concept of “militar-
ization” (Amoore 2009), Cowen’s (2014) later work on logistics illustrates that
global supply chains have not been “militarized” or “securitized”: rather the

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 119

science of logistics emerged from war. Picking up from such interventions, we
can say that the can of soup, as a material object, was always already “of war”
and therefore cannot accurately be said to have been “militarized.” “Militariza-
tion” frameworks cannot adequately account for this imbrication of “war” and
“society” (Kienscherf 2016). This may seem like a counterintuitive statement.
Isn’t the concept of “militarization” precisely about drawing out how social
(gendered) relations are permeated by military values and cultures?
However, by holding the categories of the military and of the social (or, war
and peace) as separate until “militarization” happens, the concept implicitly
presumes a status prior to militarization. It underestimates war-like forms of
politics because it blithely assumes that war is “naturally” separate from the
“social landscape.”

In this sense, the concept is much like that of securitization (Wæver 1995;
Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998), which holds that security forms the excep-
tion to politics. “Politics” (or social relations) is implicitly treated as un-security
or un-military until securitizing or militarizing processes occur, even if they
occur pervasively. From this perspective, a reverse process can take place:
desecuritization (Wæver 1995; Aradau 2004) or demilitarization. What “militar-
ization” holds out is the hope that military encroachment on an otherwise un-
militarized past can be reversed; this drastically underestimates the extent to
which warfare and military strategy are intrinsic to “political” or “social”
relations.

As with the can of soup, when we dig, we usually find that those “civilian”
things that are claimed to be in danger of “militarization” have much deeper
roots in warfare, and that the peaceful “domestic” political order for which we
yearn has been fundamentally shaped from the outset by warfare and colonial
violence. The concept of militarization ironically elides the fundamentally war-
like history of liberal politics precisely through its critique of (supposedly
exceptional) military encroachment or trespass on them.

Relatedly, research conducted through the lens of “militarization” has
tended to foreground gender analysis, for example, through the concept of
“militarized masculinities,” or emulation of Enloe’s focus on women’s lives.
Even if we are attentive to how this may play out differently for racialized
or poor women, the analytical foregrounding of “women’s lives” positions
systems of gender as primary in understanding “militarization.” Gathering
considerations of race, disability, poverty and Indigeneity under gender by
pursuing a methodology focused in the first instance on the lives of
women (or on masculinities) risks subsuming varied systems of power,
leaving us unable to capture how they might work differently than gender.
When we also center race, Indigeneity and disability it immediately
becomes clear that there is no natural peaceful order, and that the concept
of “militarization” is pallid and half-hearted in its ignorance of the war-like

120 A. HOWELL

relations that permeate “peaceful” domestic civil order (James 1996; Davis
2002, 2003).

In IR, the work of |Richter-Montpetit (2007, 2014) is central to understand-
ing race and the production of liberal violence. She argues that torture is not
an aberration from liberal order but forms part of a lineage of anti-Black vio-
lence, from the institution of chattel slavery through contemporary law and
criminal justice, demonstrating that violence against racialized bodies and
the law have existed in mutual relation throughout US history. Thus, “racia-
lized taxonomies and the larger racial formation they gave rise to were not
simply manufactured by law. Rather, law was shaped by, and simultaneously
enabled a wider set of processes and technologies of race-making” (Richter-
Montpetit 2014, 52). The concept of “militarization” cannot take stock of
these histories because it assumes a peaceful order that has been breached
by militarism. Only by eschewing forms of analysis that assume a (breached)
separation between military and civilian spheres can we avoid this kind of
dangerous oversight.

For this reason I propose an alternate concept: “martial politics.” “Martial”
denotes that a thing is war-like, or that it derives from battle, war, or the mili-
tary – that it is “of war.” It describes the process by which war and peace are
imbricated. Assessing “martial politics” involves evaluating the historical roots
and present expressions of this imbrication. “Martial politics” dispenses with
the before/after temporality of “militarization” and the assumed separation
between military and civilian, war and peace. It denies any innocent
domain of “normal” politics by pointing to the martial nature of contemporary
and historical political formations. “Martial politics” is the liberal norm, not the
exception.

Illustrating the potential value of this concept, the following sections of this
article apply it to two key empirical sites of supposed “militarization”: the
police and the university. The empirical material in this article focuses pri-
marily on the US as an avowedly liberal state, and on matters that traditional
IR scholars would relegate to “domestic politics” (i.e., the study of race, disabil-
ity, policing, education and universities). Contrary to such traditions, the article
views the US as a site of ongoing settler colonialism, founded in and continu-
ally produced through the legacy of chattel slavery, and thus very much a
“global” space. From this perspective, I argue that neither the police nor the
university have been “militarized” and instead illustrate how contemporary
forms of policing and knowledge production are vested in longer trajectories
of martial politics.

In June 2014, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a report
entitled, War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 121

(ACLU 2014). The report’s launch received initial press attention, focused on
accounts of police forces’ possession of military equipment such as tanks
and mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles (MRAPs). Then, in August
2014, White police officer Darren Wilson killed unarmed African American
teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The shooting was one
amongst many across the US, becoming emblematic of the racism of policing.
It sparked ongoing protests and the Black Lives Matter movement, which
builds on existing civil rights, Black liberation, anti-racist, queer, women’s
and prison abolition activism. Suddenly, the ACLU report seemed prescient.
Images of armored vehicles and police wearing camouflage fatigues circu-
lated widely. Media outlets across the political spectrum framed Ferguson
in terms of the “militarization” of police forces sent to restore social order. I
focus here on the ACLU report not only because of its influence on journalistic
reporting, but because it stands as an example of the best kind of analysis that
can be conducted via the (faulty) concept of “militarization,” which it adopts
from scholarly work on policing (see Kraska 2007). My aim is to take seriously
what the report offers but also to reveal what it obscures.

The ACLU report provides excellent reporting on the changing tactics,
training methods and uses of technology of contemporary US police forces.
Following the before-and-after logic of “militarization,” the report identifies
the origin point of the problem as the 1980s, drawing our attention to the
racial inequities of the War on Drugs, and the increasing post-9/11 use of
SWAT teams to conduct search warrants. It exposes federal government pro-
grams that have transferred military equipment to police forces, including
bomb suits, drones, facial recognition technology, armored vehicles and per-
sonal protective armor. Finally, it examines the training of police officers into a
“warrior mentality.”

Much of this research is valuable, but the report relies throughout on two
false assumptions: first, that if police forces are militaristic, this is an aberration
that can be dated to the 1980s, and thus that there is a latent, more positive
form of policing to which we can retreat; second, and relatedly, that the raison
d’être of American police forces is itself not worthy of questioning. The critical
point is not that “war comes home” as the title of the report would have it: war
has always been at home in America. The concept of “martial politics” can
capture what the “militarization” framework elides: the historical context
out of which the use of MRAPs against Black activism develops.

To claim an origin point for “militarization” in the 1980s is to ignore the
ways that warfare against Indigenous people and chattel slavery were founda-
tional to the American criminal justice system (Grenier 2008; Dunbar-Ortiz
2014; Davis 2003). As Black studies scholars and anti-racist activists have illus-
trated, American law and practices of policing can be traced from slave patrols
and Indian War militias, through the Jim Crow era, to contemporary mass
incarceration (Davis 2002, 2003; Muhammad 2010; Alexander 2010; Hinton

122 A. HOWELL

2016). Disability scholars and activists have drawn out a parallel history of dis-
ability incarceration (Ben-Moshe, Chapman, and Carey 2014; Erevelles 2014).
For instance, psychiatric incarceration has moved from a system of forced
institutionalization to one of compulsory chemical incarceration through
enforced medicating in community treatment orders (Fabris 2011). Just as
emancipation from slavery gave way to renewed forms of racism perpetrated
through law, so has deinstitutionalization given way to renewed forms of
ableism perpetrated through medicine and law. These are not separate pro-
cesses: policing systemically criminalizes racialized, Indigenous, disabled
and queer people (Mogul, Ritchie, and Whitlock 2011, 45–68; Amar 2013,
73–78, 209–210; Steele 2016, 331, 340–341).

Understanding this history requires acknowledgement that police are not a
natural fact. Organized police forces are relatively recent inventions, develop-
ing especially in the nineteenth century. They emerged as (and remain) a
means of imposing social order. Their precise nature differs in important
ways across national contexts and forms of government, depending on
which populations were perceived to be threats to social order. For
example, British police were formed to quell Irish nationalism and Chartist
demonstrations in the interests of wealthy Victorians, fearful that London
was growing rapidly in size and impoverishment. The London Metropolitan
Police was modelled both on the Bow Street Runners, originators of the
concept of regular uniformed police patrols, and on the London Marine
Police Force, initially funded by the West India Merchants and the West
India Planters Committee for the purposes of securing cargo from the colo-
nies. Techniques of policing were also derived from colonial governance
(Brogden 1987). Through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
British police forces increasingly took on the role of ensuring public order
against the threat of rioting (Harris 2004). In nineteenth-century Canada
and Australia, national “mounted” police forces were established to control
Indigenous populations, serving as security forces for settler colonialism (Net-
telbeck and Smandych 2010; Monaghan 2013).

These histories are important for understanding not only the criminaliza-
tion of Indigeneity (Ross 1998), and the continued regularity of the murder
of Indigenous people in police custody (Razack 2015), but also the ways
that war and police have been inextricably entwined for centuries
(Bachman, Bell, and Holmqvist 2014). Policing is not a matter of “domestic”
politics that can be shuttered from IR inquiry: it is precisely a matter of
martial politics, of war-like relations within so-called “domestic” and “inter-
national” politics alike.

Likewise, in the US, describing police as “militarized” ignores that the estab-
lishment of police forces was tied directly to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and
in particular the institution of slave patrols. While in northern US cities like
Boston and New York, as in London, policing developed mainly as a means

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 123

for the social control of the poor and immigrants, in the US south, it emerged
precisely as a means for ensuring White social and economic order in relation
to (freed) slaves – dynamics that migrated northward alongside those same
freed slaves.

In the antebellum South, Blacks outnumbered Whites, and slave-owners
lived in fear not only of slave rebellions, but also of the enticement of
slaves to join opposing Spanish forces (Hadden 2001). First germinated in
the colonial Caribbean, slave patrols were created in the early eighteenth
century to enforce slave law (a separate code of law governing slaves).
Intended to replace the system of private bounties, slave patrols complemen-
ted militias that protected colonists from “external” threats (Indigenous and
Spanish). The idea that policing is different from warfare (and requires differ-
ent forces) is based on the positioning of threats as either internal (slaves) or
external (“Indians” and Spanish), but both served the same purpose: securing
a White supremacist social and economic order. To this end, slave patrols not
only tracked down runaways, but also broke up slave meetings to quash
rebellions. They were officially appointed and indemnified by courts of law,
operating not only in rural areas but also in cities (Hadden 2001). After the
Civil War, and the official abandonment of the slavery system, police forces
filled the role previously played by slave patrols (Reichel 1988; Hadden
2001; Davis 2003).

While the American Civil War is traditionally cast as a victory for emancipa-
tion, the Jim Crow system of local and state laws soon arose to enforce racial
segregation and ensure inequality in everything from housing to public trans-
portation, education and voting rights. Vagrancy laws punishing unemploy-
ment were selectively applied, criminalizing freed slaves but not
unemployed Whites, resulting in the imprisonment of African Americans
who were then put to hard labor – reproducing White supremacism
through criminal law (Davis 2003; Alexander 2010). This state of affairs was
produced not just by the apparatus of the state. For example, scientific
thought also supported White supremacy by creating bogus “proof” of the
propensity for criminality in African Americans (Muhammad 2010, 2).

The mid-twentieth century Civil Rights era, like the Civil War before it, is
often cast as a triumph of liberal emancipation from Jim Crow – but just as
slavery gave way to Jim Crow, segregation gave way to new forms of racist
civil order. Much as slave owners feared Black organizing in the antebellum
South, so did White urbanites in the Civil Rights era. So-called “riots” in Bir-
mingham, Newark, Detroit and other cities – uprisings against police brutality
and inequality – as well as organized resistance movements like the Black
Panthers became a “problem” of social order like the slave rebellions of a
prior period. The relationship between the military and the police is
perhaps clearest in the subjugation of Black organizing in this period: not
only was the National Guard called in to “restore order” in Watts, Newark

124 A. HOWELL

and elsewhere (much as it has recently been activated in Ferguson), but the
FBI also created its own counterinsurgency campaign, COINTELPRO, which
surveilled, infiltrated and disrupted anti-war and Black power organizations
(Browne 2015). This illustrates the martial nature of political formations
aimed at suppressing anti-racist activism, from slave patrols through
COINTELPRO.

The War on Drugs was then-President Richard Nixon’s own innovation for
quashing Black resistance in the name of “law and order.” The ongoing War on
Drugs involves strict penalties for drug crimes, which are enforced and pun-
ished disproportionately in Black communities. It produced the mass convic-
tion of African Americans, leading not only to imprisonment and forced labor,
but also to a substantial diminishment of rights including access to employ-
ment, education and voting through the status of so many African Americans
as felons (Provine 2007). If the War on Drugs has failed in its stated aim of
reducing the drug trade, it has succeeded in enforcing a new racial order
based on mass incarceration.

A lineage persists here: police forces, whether antebellum slave patrols, or
enforcers of Jim Crow segregation or the War on Drugs, have been central to a
form of “martial politics” waged for the purposes of maintaining renewed
forms of White social and economic order. Contemporary policing and mass
incarceration can thus best be understood not in terms of “militarization,”
as the ACLU and others suggest, but as a new expression of the “martial poli-
tics” of policing. Through an analysis grounded in “martial politics” we can
grasp the presence of military vehicles and uniforms in Ferguson as a
matter of continuity in the US state’s war-like relations with slaves and their
descendants. This does not mean that modern policing is entirely the same
as, for instance, slave patrols. Racism is highly adaptable (Bonilla-Silva 2006).
“Martial politics” denotes a continuous framework of war-like relations with
people of color, and allows for tracing different systems of racism within it.

It is not that “war” happens elsewhere and is then brought home through
“militarization.” This idea relies on a false distinction between what kinds of
politics happen at “home” versus in “war.” It positions “domestic” violence
as an aberration or inward leakiness of war. On the contrary, like the can of
soup, policing does not merely now contain obvious military symbols – it is
always already “of war” and war-like in its very form. Policing cannot be
said to have been “militarized,” but rather forms part of a broader “martial
politics” directed against racialized, Indigenous, disabled and queer people
with the aim of reproducing liberal order.

Just as “militarization” has guided inquiry into contemporary police violence, it
has also been used to call attention to worrying connections between the

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 125

university and the US national security apparatus. One prominent example is
the series of Vice News reports exposing the “100 Most Militarized Universities
in America” (Arkin and O’Brien 2015a, 2015b). The authors of the study note
that initially they were reluctant to use the term “militarization,” which

was not meant to simply evoke … ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps] drills
held on a campus quad. It was also a measure of university labs funded by US
intelligence agencies, administrators with strong ties to those same agencies,
and, most importantly, the educational backgrounds of the approximately 1.4
million people who hold Top Secret clearance. (Arkin and O’Brien 2015a)

But “militarization” leads us to underestimate the depth and extent of national
security ties to the university, past and present, and to assume that univer-
sities can revert to some non-militarized past. This limitation is also evident
in scholarly literature.

One of the central scholarly texts on the so-called “militarization” of the uni-
versity is Giroux’s The University in Chains (2007). Cited hundreds of times, and
reported on in popular media, it argues that the post-9/11 period saw a sig-
nificant acceleration of the corporatization and militarization of the university
(Giroux 2007, 2008). Giroux goes so far as to say that while corporatization had
previously taken root in the university, “it is only in the aftermath of 9/11 that
the university has also become an intense site of militarization” (Giroux 2008,
58). Furthermore, “militarization” of the university begins for Giroux only after
World War II (see also Chomsky et al. 1998).

These popular and scholarly works identify important changes in the
nature of military involvement in universities. For example, the Vice report
notes that funding now flows to intelligence-gathering disciplines (e.g., com-
puter science) rather than solely weapons-oriented ones (e.g., physics). Yet
research guided by the concept of “militarization” falls into the trap of imagin-
ing military encroachment on previously civil institutions: “the idea of the uni-
versity as a site of critical thinking, public service and socially responsible
research appears to have been usurped” (Giroux 2008, 63).

This is a fantasy. The university was never such a pure site. Many American
universities were built with slave labor or its proceeds (Brown University Com-
mittee on Slavery and Justice n.d.), and from the outset have contributed
vitally to colonization and White supremacy. By positing a purely civilian
“before” to a military “after,” “militarization” accounts wrongfully elide this
history. In the American university no such “before” exists.

This is not to say nothing has changed. Seeing the university as a site of
“martial politics” allows us to provide a historical account attuned to the
ways in which politics is shaped by the precise forms warfare takes. Most aca-
demic disciplines – the very categories by which we organize knowledge –
were fundamentally shaped by conquest, warfare and military funding. This
is not only true for IR, a discipline born out of colonialism and war (Vitalis

126 A. HOWELL

2015), but for any number of other disciplines from physics (Gusterson 1998,
2011) to business (Cowen 2014) to neuroscience (Howell 2017). Excavating
these histories gives us a sense of how thoroughly we live with “martial
politics.”

Several disciplines were said to have been “militarized” after 9/11. Most
controversially, medicine, psychiatry, psychology and anthropology all had
major debates about involvement in torture and warfare in their professional
associations. In anthropology, for example, this debate concerned the 2008
establishment of Project Minerva (which provided $50 million in defense
funding to social sciences) and the recruitment of anthropologists in counter-
insurgency warfare through the Human Terrain Program (Gusterson 2009). To
describe this as the “militarization” of anthropology, however, is to ignore that
anthropology is foundationally a colonial discipline set up to catalog “primi-
tive” subject peoples, with a long history of entanglement with the security
state, not least in Cold War-era counterinsurgency operations in Latin
America and Asia (Gusterson 2009).

The concept of “martial politics” allows us to pose new questions about the
historical relationship between formal knowledge production and forms of
warfare, rather than just relations between the university and the military. It
allows us to ask how certain forms of warfare are produced by, and produce,
academic disciplines. The nature of this mutual production will differ depend-
ing on the particular military strategy undertaken at any historical moment.

The case of psychology is instructive here. After psychologists were impli-
cated in devising, administering and overseeing torture at the US naval base
at Guantánamo Bay (Howell 2007), concern was raised about the “militariza-
tion” of psychology (Ariggo, Eidelson, and Bennett 2012). Again, this
concern assumes that the discipline was once free from involvement in war
or colonialism, and that an unusual trespass occurred after 9/11. Not so.
Since almost its very foundation, psychology has been tied to forms of military
strategy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, psychology was
a fledgling discipline and was understood as a humanistic form of knowledge.
That changed drastically in World War I. At that time Robert Yerkes, a eugenics
proponent and professor of psychology, was President of the American
Psychological Association. Convinced that psychologists could be of service
in the war, and that war could be useful to psychologists, Yerkes approached
the US Army with a proposition: he could help the Army with its personnel
problem (of appropriately placing the massive number of new recruits) in
return for funding and access to an unprecedented number of subjects on
which to experiment: soldiers. World War I enabled the first mass scientific
experiment in psychology in the form of intelligence testing. The data accu-
mulated provided fodder for a generation of psychologists, establishing the
experiment as the primary methodology of psychology and massively

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 127

reshaping the discipline from a philosophical/humanistic one into an (Amer-
ican) science.

This constitutes a symbiotic relationship: psychology was not “militarized”
in World War I. Rather, it propelled a particular kind of warfare: industrial
warfare conducted on frontlines, involving mass mobilization and requiring
new personnel management techniques. Wartime support, in return,
worked to reshape psychology into a science. The academy is not the
victim of military breach but has foundationally been produced and
formed, in its specificities, through warfare – and has formed warfare in
return as a technology of security (Howell 2011). Psychology was already
well steeped in the racist and ableist science of eugenics prior to World
War I (Mitchell and Snyder 2003; Carey 2009; Thomson 2010), but through
military funding it was able to systematize its eugenicism as a science of
“intelligence.”

This martial entanglement did not end with the war and the return of psy-
chology to “domestic” applications. Intelligence data not only established psy-
chology as a science but went on to practical applications in war-like relations
of disability and race both within the US and other colonial settings. Three
examples follow that demonstrate this move.

First, the data from the Army experiment produced results that “proved”
that the average American had the intelligence level of a 13-year-old, just
above the level of “moron” (an ableist construct). This contributed to a
moral panic about the degeneration of the “stock” of the American nation
due to Southern European immigrants, and led to some of the first sweeping
US immigration restrictions. It also bolstered mental hygiene and eugenics
movements, promoting the sterilization of disabled, racialized, Indigenous
or “promiscuous” women who were labeled feeble-minded (Carey 2003).
This form of martial politics perpetrates violence especially on women’s
bodies, managing their sexuality and reproductive capacities for the purposes
of extirpating “dangerous” or degenerate populations.

Second, since they were constructed by White men who saw “intelligence”
in their own image, the Army tests unsurprisingly placed the “negro” at the
bottom of a racist (and sexist) hierarchy of intelligence (Mensh and Mensh
1991; Gould 1999). With their sheen of objective science, these very same
Army tests were administered in South Africa and other colonies, justifying
colonial rule and later Apartheid.

Finally, Carl Brigham, who was part of the Army experiment team, and later
a Princeton University professor and member of the advisory council of the
American Eugenics Society, went on to create the high school Scholastic Apti-
tude Tests (SATs). The SATs remain the cornerstone of one of the most perni-
cious and racist aspects of the Army tests’ afterlife: standardized testing. This
regime, to this day, outrageously ranks African American students as having

128 A. HOWELL

lower intelligence, or aptitude, significantly reducing access to higher edu-
cation and thus economic mobility.

All this history, all these contributions of the discipline of psychology to
unjust dynamics surrounding race, disability, poverty and gender, are shut-
tered by a “militarization” framework because it assumes that when psychol-
ogy is used in war (e.g., in torture) that this is an aberration rather than part of
a broad history of violence done to marginalized people, citizens and enemies
alike. In thinking through the “martial politics” of the university, any number of
disciplines could be subjected to this kind of analysis.

Returning to Maneuvers, consider the case of nursing, to which Enloe (2000)
directs her attention in assessing the “militarization” of women’s lives. The
chapter in question perceptively begins with Florence Nightingale, who is
widely considered to be the “mother” of nursing, a pioneer in statistical visu-
alization and a major figure in the reform of public health and medical care in
both the Crimean War and Victorian workhouses. Yet Nightingale sits uneasily
in a framework that inquires into the “militarization” of women’s lives because,
as Enloe (2000, 204) shows, as a patriotic upper-class White English woman,
she herself was active in propelling “militarization.” Because of its “militariza-
tion” framework, Enloe’s account misses the fact that warfare and nursing
were both modernized and professionalized through their mutual encounter.
Nightingale’s innovations transformed siege warfare, helping ensure British
victory in the Crimea, and laid the foundations for World War I industrial
warfare. After Nightingale returned from the war she was instrumental in
creating nursing as a profession and discipline of study, using techniques
developed for military purposes in “domestic” settings such as workhouses.
The story here is not one of military encroachment on nursing; rather,
nursing became a discipline and profession initially through war, and sub-
sequently through war-like relations with the poor.

This symbiosis between war and academic disciplines such as nursing, psy-
chology and – for that matter – IR should make it unsurprising when war-like
relations are propelled through knowledge created in these disciplines. When
we view academic disciplines, or indeed the university as a whole, through the
lens of “martial politics” it becomes clear they are not innocent domains
sullied by military values. Rather, like the can of soup, their form and function
are embedded in how they emerge out of and simultaneously shape warfare.

Even when “militarization” accounts are historical, they lead us to miscon-
strue the importance and nature of that history. When there is violence in
domestic political life – whether the outright violence of killer cops or the
structural violence of the SATs – it is not that “war” is encroaching on
“peace,” and it is not that “the military” is trespassing on the “civilian.”
Rather, “martial politics” are fundamental to the constitution and continued
production of liberal democracies such as the US. This is not directed

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 129

equally at all parts of the population but targets those who are constituted as
a threat to the nation’s strength or civil order.

The concept of “martial politics,” which refuses an assumed military encroach-
ment on civilian life in favor of a more robust understanding of the indivisibil-
ity of war and peace, could be extended to other areas of inquiry now
dominated by the “militarization” approach. In most cases, curious scholars
will find much longer histories of military imbrication, or rootedness in
warfare and conquest. There are many topics that seem ready for this kind
of analysis. Take fitness: is it true that fitness has been recently “militarized”
through boot-camp style fitness programs, or is it that systems of discipline
and mastery over the body are rooted in the history of military organization
in ways that have shaped notions of able-bodiedness? There are numerous
such possibilities for rethinking the nature of liberal violence through the
concept of martial politics.

Yet “martial politics” is not intended as a total concept: even as it points to
fundamental ways in which we live with war and in which politics proceeds
through war-like modes of action against racialized, Indigenous, poor, dis-
abled, queer and other populations, it is not meant to describe the totality
of politics. This is not to say that outside of “martial politics” exists “normal
politics,” but rather that there is the potential to specify how “martial politics”
might be situated in relation to feminist and post-colonial analyses of, for
instance, biopolitics and necropolitics (Puar 2015). My aim then is to give
space to myriad forms of politics, while also assessing war-like and “of war”
political formations past and present. Such analyses must acknowledge, as
the concept of militarization fails to do, that there is no “good” liberal civilian
past to which we can retreat.

Feminist praxis can benefit from questioning the concept of “militarization”
so as to more fully excavate the violence of liberal order. In particular, the
methodological primacy of examining “women’s lives” (or militarized mascu-
linities) risks subsuming analyses of race, Indigeneity, disability and coloniality
under gender. The result is an incomplete accounting of the ways in which
war-like relations and systems that are “of war” are symbiotically and
thoroughly part of liberal order, and not an exceptional aberration from it.
To capture these dynamics, I have proposed an alternate concept, “martial
politics,” which seeks to illuminate the histories of our present imbrication
with war – a move made possible by shifting to an analysis that foregrounds
historical relations of race, Indigeneity and disability alongside sexuality and
gender.

Yet what is at stake here is not only feminist methodology and theory, but
also our activism. So, what of expediency? Do we lose too much if we can no

130 A. HOWELL

longer demand demilitarization? In the 1980s when sex-negative radical fem-
inists engaged in anti-porn activism, they found themselves with strange bed-
fellows in the Christian right. This should have served as ample evidence that
it was time to reconsider their perspective, and it is a lesson for the present
day. Feminist scholars and activists should be similarly concerned that the
concept of “militarization” is popular amongst small-state, right-wing libertar-
ians associated, for example, with the Cato Institute (see Balko 2013). With this
lesson in mind, I argue the concept of (de)militarization guides us in asking for
too little of the wrong things. From the perspective of “demilitarization,”
Obama’s 2015 cancellation of the federal government program of granting
local police forces military equipment seems like a significant victory, but to
be satisfied with this fails to address how policing imposes order through
laws that criminalize Blackness, Indigeneity, disability and gender deviance
or queerness. We must demand more. By recognizing that we are steeped
in martial forms of politics, feminist anti-war praxis could work not (just)
towards demilitarization; it could also more consistently align with anti-
racist and disability organizing for prison abolition and deinstitutionalization
by recognizing these institutions as central to “martial politics” – that is,
because they are war-like and “of war.”

This kind of resistance is already robust, not only in Black Lives Matter and
prison abolition activism in relation to policing, but also in relation to the colo-
nial foundations of universities. Recent student movements from South Africa
to the UK, from India to the US and beyond, have been calling into question
the Whiteness of universities and their founding in, and continuing celebra-
tion of, (settler) colonialism. For instance, students have contested the contin-
ued celebration of brutal colonist Cecil Rhodes on the University of Cape Town
and Oxford University’s campuses, and slave owner Isaac Royall Jr.’s family
crest at Harvard, tying these histories into contemporary racial inequalities
in admissions and campus life. They have demonstrated that diversity is insuf-
ficient, and that the university must be decolonized. Similarly, disability and
anti-racist student activists have drawn attention to the continued legacies
of eugenics in universities. If we are to understand the martial politics of
the university, the police, or of any other institution, we would do well to
pay attention to this activism.

The concept of “militarization” is, at this point, an easy out. In a time when
academics are under increasing pressure to produce articles and books at
breakneck speed, it may seem expedient to apply the framework of “militar-
ization,” especially when the concept is reduced to the surface analysis of mili-
tary aesthetics in so-called civilian life. The careful historical work for which I
am calling in order to specify expressions of “martial politics” is not fast or
easy, but what is at stake is too important. If we are to grapple with the vio-
lence of liberal orders in a more robust way, if we are to attend not only to the

INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 131

gendered dynamics of military power but also to race, ableism, (settler) colo-
nialism and other forms of injustice, we need to do better and do more.

This article was greatly improved through the rigorous peer review process at IFjP. I am
grateful to the journal’s editors and peer reviewers, and for feedback and critical
engagement from valued colleagues including Tarak Barkawi, Marieke de Goede,
Catherine Fitzpatrick, Thomas Gregory, Melanie Richter-Montpetit, Kyla Schuller,
fellow members of the at Rutgers University Institute for Research on Women (IRW)
seminar on Feminist In/Security organized by Arlene Stein and Sarah Tobias, and col-
leagues in the School of Law and Politics at Cardiff University.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Alison Howell is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, Newark.
She is a co-founding editor of Critical Military Studies, and an editorial board
member of Critical Studies on Security and International Political Sociology. She has
held a Fulbright Distinguished Chair and an SSHRC Research Fellowship. Her research
examines the international relations of medicine, security and warfare, with a particular
interest in the intersections of science and technology with systems of race, disability,
sexuality and gender. She is the author of Madness in International Relations: Psychol-
ogy, Security and the Global Governance of Mental Health (2011).

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136 A. HOWELL

• Abstract

From “militarization” to “martial politics”
The “martial politics” of police
The “martial politics” of the university
Conclusion: the feminist politics of “martial politics”
Acknowledgements
Disclosure statement
Notes on contributor
References

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