Introduction: War and the Body

McSorley, Kevin (2015). Introduction: War and the Body. In: Mcsorley, Kevin ed. War and the Body: Militarisation, Practice and Experience. War, Politics and Experience. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 1–31.

URL: https://www.routledge.com/War-and-the-Body-Militar...

Abstract

This chapter places the body at the centre of critical thinking about war and its consequences.

War is fundamentally embodied. The reality of war is not just politics by any other means but politics incarnate, politics written on and experienced through the thinking, feeling bodies of men and women. From steeled combatants to abject victims, war occupies innumerable bodies in a multitude of ways, profoundly shaping lives and ways of being human.

Giving the body an analytic recognition that it warrants and has often been denied in conventional war studies, this chapter brings together new interdisciplinary scholarship that explores the numerous affective, sensory and embodied practices through which war lives and breeds. It focuses on how war is prepared, enacted and reproduced through embodied action, suffering and memory. As such, it promotes new directions in theorising war and transformations in warfare, via an explicit focus on the body.

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