Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield: Interview with Author Mirko Palestrino
Mirko Palestino is a senior lecturer in International Policy Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Politics and International Relations. His new book, Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield: Outside Wartime, has just been published with Oxford University Press.
Q: Tell us about your book. How does it rethink the idea of ‘victory’?
A: So, the book is born out of a seemingly straightforward yet deeply intricate question: ‘What does victory mean’ - a question that I first encountered when I was a master’s student. We all tend to think we know ‘victory’ when we see it – or, to put it differently, there is a commonsensical understanding of victory, which sees it as the outcome of war. It happens when one of the parties involved in a war proves superior on the battlefield. The fighting stops, war ends, and peace starts. Yet when we think about how victory actually plays out in global politics, the reality is often different and much more complicated than this. The US has been simultaneously at war and enjoying peaceful day-to-day existence on US soil for about 20+ years, as the ‘War on Terror’ unfolded across the Middle East. The Cold War was notoriously ‘hot’ in numerous countries. The two World Wars did not really end in 1918 and 1945 respectively when you see them from the perspective of Eastern Europe or other countries that were not “superpowers”.
The book rethinks the idea of victory in the sense that it suggests that victory has little to do with fighting, and everything to do with other processes that successfully communicate to different audiences that a given conflict is over. Victory, I argue, is not the outcome of armed conflict but a temporal marker that is made inside and outside the battlefield, during both wartime and peacetime. If we want to understand victory and how it works, we have to stop looking for it in the usual places - the ‘theatre of operations’, or ‘the negotiations table’ - and look much more closely at mundane, everyday processes that give it the meaning we intuitively think about when we hear the word.
Q: Your book looks at a range of ‘artefacts,’ from military tattoos to war memorials to history textbooks to videogames. Tell us more about how you approach these as ‘victory practices’.
A: Yes! So, the book conceptualises everyday social processes that give victory its meaning as ‘victory practices’. Why do fighting or peace treaties come to mind when we think about victory? Well, because we’re taught to think about these things in school. Or that’s what we are exposed to when we visit war museums. Why are we under the impression that World War One ended on the 11th of November, 1918, at exactly 11am? Well, because we still observe the two-minute silence in the UK, or because we play video games that overwhelm us with that message. Think about it: to win a campaign in Call of Duty, all you have to do is kill enemies. Victory is reduced to the act of fighting.
The book takes a close look at these victory practices, many of which are, precisely, ‘artefacts’. One of the key examples in the book, for instance, is victory monuments. Statues, victory arches, and other war memorials do not just commemorate a given conflict, but also silently reproduce the idea that victory is an event - that it is achieved on a specific day and brings war to a conclusion. But when you start looking up-close at these practices and how they shape the meaning of victory, you notice some inconsistencies, or metaphorical ‘cracks’. If we think that victory brings about peace, then we overlook all the suffering that ensues when the ‘fighting’ officially stops. Many veterans carry tattoos on their bodies, which relate a very different understanding of war: war is something that doesn’t necessarily end as it might change you forever - and the most common example, here, is PTSD.
In short, when we venture into victory practices beyond fighting and diplomacy, we learn a great deal about how victory works, how it brings war to an end, and with what sociopolitical consequences.
Q: We increasingly hear that one of the features of contemporary global politics is that the boundary between war and peace is slowly fading away. How does your book help us understand the current global moment?
A: I think one immediate way that the book helps us read our current global moment is by inviting us to take seriously seemingly peaceful, daily occurrences that are actually violent in a number of different ways. Trump is a paradigmatic example. Think about how he renamed ‘Veterans Day’ to ‘Victory Day’; how he has claimed over and over again that he has ended numerous wars; or his ideas of ‘Peace Talks’ and ‘Peace Plans’, which we hear about in the news every day. These invocations work towards the normalisation of, among other things, the idea that war and peace are distinct, separate phases. We get overexposed to the idea that war is a temporary business, and we can accept its exceptionality precisely because it will end. But we know that that’s not true, that there’s a lot of violence involved in what we call ‘peace’ - think about life under occupation, in Palestine. So, we ought to be sceptical of these claims, and constantly ask about the political work that they do - for example, by asking ‘peace for whom’, or ‘how’?
Q: What’s next for you?
A: The million-dollar question. In the very short term, I’m rounding up this victory project with an article on the emotional and affective dimension of these types of ‘victory practices’, and by discussing the book in a number of different settings - the first of which will be a book launch event at Queen Mary, on 3 March (all invited!)
I am also doing some of the groundwork for my next longer-term project. Of course, this is the very early stages so things are still a bit blurry, but I would like to keep thinking about the links between time, temporality and the military, looking specifically at how time is used as a tool for militarisation. There’s a very recent Netflix TV series called Boots, which I think gives a good idea of the type of work that I have in mind – and, if you haven’t watched it, please do; it’s good fun! The series is based on a military memoir called The Pink Marine by Greg Cope White, and lets the viewer in on the ‘basic training’ of US Marines. In the show, we see how a large part of boot camps is going through repetitive, routinary practices: military drills, cleaning one’s equipment over and over again, or chanting specific slogans on command. These are the type of things that I’d like to look at in my next project: how military institutions act on time and temporality through communal life and repetitive actions, transforming civilians into soldiers.