Demilitarizing Method: Questions of scale in researching militarization, military institutions, and everyday forms of violence

Keywords: militarization, gender, feminist geography, method, scale
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper focuses on questions of method in geographical research on militarization. Researching military institutions and processes of militarization often involves field sites deliberately hidden from view, from carceral spaces of CIA detention to dark budgets (Paglen 2011, Turse 2012). At the same time, feminist geography and feminist interventions in international relations have pointed to the inescapable and pervasive locations of militarization in everyday social, economic, and political formations (Cowen 2008, Enloe 1989). Weaving these threads of knowledge together, I present two examples of recent research on militarization that have charted a path through the methodological politics of visibility and invisibility: (1) the Costs of War project, a collaborative team of scholars, legal experts, human rights practitioners, and physicians that has, since 2011, documented the economic, environmental, political, health, and other costs of the post-9/11 wars; and (2) my own ethnographic observations of US military trainings during the same period of the post-9/11 wars. In examining questions of method in each of these examples, I explore the role of scale and the possibilities and limitations these methods hold to advance critical, feminist, antiracist, queer and decolonial approaches to a geopolitics of demilitarization.