Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- 1 Connecting Modernities: A Global Update
- Part I Modernity as We Know It: Narratives of Modernity across the Disciplines
- Part II Modernity under Fire: Critiques, Challenges, and Revisions
- Part III In the Shadow of the Pandemic
- Part IV Imagining New Global Frameworks: Democracy and Modernity-to-Come
- Index
8 - Conflicting Modernities: Militarization and Islands
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- Preface
- 1 Connecting Modernities: A Global Update
- Part I Modernity as We Know It: Narratives of Modernity across the Disciplines
- Part II Modernity under Fire: Critiques, Challenges, and Revisions
- Part III In the Shadow of the Pandemic
- Part IV Imagining New Global Frameworks: Democracy and Modernity-to-Come
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter mainly points out how militarization as a bureaucratic and discursive “apparatus” results in a colonial modernization. Furthermore, the chapter establishes a direct link between military settlements – by various occupations – and a narrative of modernization and modernity. Both military protocols and the scope of the military activities contribute to a form of colonization and dependence, economically as well as culturally. Militarization is a wider concept involving at least two dimensions: the economic and political factors sustaining the expansion of military spending; and the social, cultural, and ideological dimension. However, the master narrative of modernization clashes with rising claims to autonomy in the local population that assert an alternative modernity.
Keywords: civil-military relations; military occupation; colonial modernization; autonomy; postcolonial islands; modernity and risk
Despite Mills’ (2010 [1956]) clear-cut examination of “lords of war,” militarism and modernity have been largely neglected in sociology avoiding any investigation of military power and modern industrialization (Giddens 1990, 9). Max Weber, disagreeing with militarism, looked at war and imperialism as suitable instruments of modernity (Mann 2018, 39). Studies on militarism highlighted how it is inherent to modernity, contributing to the consolidation of Western countries and to building post-colonial statehood in the twenty-first century. This chapter addresses some theoretical and empirical aspects of militarization and modernity by considering specifically the militarization of islands as the outcome of a colonization process undertaken by Western countries, culminating in the US and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) policies of geopolitical control of extended territories. Within the limits of our contribution, we aim to problematize the meanings, representations, and effects of the military bases in geographically and economically isolated territories.
In the first section, we address the issue of modernity and the military, how modernity progressed by acquiring the monopoly of violence, and established social control over time, notably and progressively since World War II; thus, in late modernity the spending on technological weaponry became one of the more relevant factors. In the second section we present the case of Sardinia as a case study of the militarization of a peripheral territory, an example of many subjugated islands (Vine 2009) and as reflexivity on modernity.
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- Global Modernity from Coloniality to PandemicA Cross-Disciplinary Perspective, pp. 187 - 206Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022