My sincere thanks to Stéfanie von Hlatky for her sharp and generous engagement with my work. It’s been a feminist joy to engage with her in this critical dialogue about civil-military relations, gender, and the politics of war. As alluded to in her review, which incisively unpacks the political stakes and implications of my argument, my work draws upon feminist political and IR theory to interrogate the naturalization of the pervasive societal assumption that support is, “obviously”, owed to those who fight. This assumption sheds light on von Hlatky’s considered observations about the empirical bounds of my analysis and invitation to challenge or extend my argument by considering different cases.
My analysis isn’t intended to be empirically generalizable: even in liberal democracies, supporting the troops is not a mechanistic phenomenon. I do aim, though, for analytical generalizability around the problem I see “support the troops” as addressing—that all states need to have some way of “making right” the terms of participation in state force. This is particularly acute in liberal democracies, with ideals of equality and liberty, and in states without conscription. It’s true that support may not be the “new service” everywhere, nor would I expect it to be. But states everywhere will have some normative reckoning with military service (likely tangled up with gendered ideas of what it means to be a good person).
Which brings us to von Hlatky’s excellent point about Québec and the co-existence of anti-war and anti-military sentiment. Rather prosaically, though I see supporting the troops as a mandatory discourse, it doesn’t materially prevent the articulation of anti-military sentiment, merely its ability to be socially received as intelligible and legitimate political dissent for “good” masculine citizens. I’d be curious, then, to what extent anti-military rhetoric is intersubjectively and contextually legitimated within various communities within Québec and how that dissent in turn relates to political membership within the Canadian state. If membership within this particular political community is contested, we might likewise see the bounds of martial political obligation loosened. Similar questions could be raised about Canada’s status as a “special ally”—a great observation, given the prevalence of “support the troops” discourse within Canada during the Global War on Terror (GWoT) in relation to Afghanistan—as U.S. political discourse did, indeed, frame Canada’s non-participation in Iraq as a betrayal (of the United States? of the liberal imperial international order?).
This relationship between obligation, violence, and political membership also pertains to the push to consider non-war activities during the GWoT. Von Hlatky is right, that despite the recent prevalence of, for instance, “Blue Lives Matter” discourses in the United States, they don’t operate the same way—an important avenue for future work. Here, I think the difference between the normative role of law enforcement within the political community (in idealized liberal understandings) and that of the military is important. Participation in policing is not an idealized component of political belonging and law enforcement is meant to keep the peace, rather than use violence. These differences in relationship to citizenship and sacrifice—as well, of course, as historical and contemporary experiences of racist, sexist, trans- and homophobic state violence—give law enforcement, immigration, and state surveillance a different political inflection.
