Governing Military Sacrifice

Governing Military Sacrifice examines the deterioration of the relationship between citizen-soldiering and military sacrifice. As a key historical archetype, the citizen-soldier has come to represent the highest expression of devotion for the nation in cultural imaginings of war. However, this book asks if bloodshed today even requires this offering of the self. This work explores the social, ethical, and political implications of the desire to enact violence in a post-sacrificial world. Following the Vietnam War, casualty-aversion and a political intolerance for wartime deaths and injuries turned military sacrifice from a simple assumption to an increasingly contested idea. As a result, military sacrifice became governed. Sociologist and international relations scholar Bianca Baggiarini argues that military privatization and the usage of drones in warfare emerged as related or parallel measures to exercise control over martyrdom. Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis and interview data with drone pilots, soldiers, veterans, and defence professionals, the book traces the decay of the sacrificial cults and idioms surrounding the citizen-soldier. When military sacrifice is no longer an assumed feature of war, it radically transforms the social and political meaning of bodies-in-war. Altering how we understand and witness war, technological transformations create an “anti-social” version of conflict which constrains our ability to critique and prevent its outbreak. Governing Military Sacrifice thus inquires whether the future of war may be found in a return to the past.