War is a phenomenon made on bodies. Not only is war's purpose the destruction of bodies, as the phrase ‘making war on bodies’ would generally suggest; the ideologies, discourses and practices of war as a social institution are themselves revealed to be ‘written on the body’, as Synne Dyvik argues, by asking critical questions about how war and the military shape the ways that bodies move and appear. The tools for advancing these questions come from an interdisciplinary, eclectic box: from feminist and postcolonial consciousness of how war and colonial violence permeate society; from historians tracing how social and cultural experiences of war have changed over time; from geographers exploring how the military transforms space and landscape; from sociologists, philosophers and critics theorising the body; from scholars of international politics putting experience and the senses back into how their notoriously bloodless discipline thinks about war. Together, they have made bodies a defining theme in current critical research on war and the military. They have also employed many fresh, insightful methods that make explicit the aesthetics of experiencing and representing war. Yet, even though war is so inherently made by, with or against bodies, it is still rare to see the turn towards aesthetics and the turn towards the body articulated explicitly together as part of understanding the process that Cynthia Enloe has inspired many to call ‘militarisation’ – that is, how ideas about the military and who should (not) belong to it are made normal, natural, attractive and unquestioned.

A few months into editing this volume, my desktop even produced its own unexpected resonance between militarisation, aesthetics and embodiment when I realised I had accidentally named the folder containing the volume's files (abbreviated MAE) after the Hollywood star Mae West – whose own connection with militarised aesthetics of the body became one of World War II's many linguistic curiosities when Royal Air Force (RAF) airmen nicknamed their life-jacket after her because its inflated shape seemed to give wearers a bouncing bust.