This Special Section broadens and qualifies the terms through which the relationship between home and militarization has been understood. We do this by joining a vibrant and growing field of transdisciplinary scholars who address the militarization of everyday life by attending to domesticity and practices of domestication. We grapple with how the home naturalizes and becomes a catalyst for militarism: How do ordinary and domestic objects, technologies, spaces, and infrastructures make violence feel at home in the world? We are concerned with the domestic life of militarization as oikos: the household, habitat, and milieu of violent material relationships that are both ongoing and latent. The domestic is not just a discrete, private space; it also extends into public spaces like neighborhoods, local businesses, waste disposal infrastructures, hospices, and crop fields. Developed within an editorial process rooted in a feminist ethos, the articles collected here provide critical and alternative methodologies and disciplinary forms for considering militarism's aesthetics, affects, and modes of appearance. This collection resists conventional spatialities, temporalities, and incarnations of war while calling attention to the obscuring of violence through practices of care and marketing operations.

War; domestication; home; everyday militarism; feminist politics; militarization, affect

Since we envisioned this Special Section and launched the call for papers three years ago (in 2020), there has been an abrasive cascade of global events related in various ways to war, militarization, and deliberate violence. These include the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the Ukrainian counteroffensive with the military aid of the United States and the European Union; the recently passed US PACT Act that provides medical care to post-9/11 veterans suffering from conditions likely caused by toxic airborne exposures and hazards; the latest air strikes by the Israeli armed forces on the Gaza Strip amid US President Joe Biden’s visit to the Middle East in the summer of 2022; the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022 that left nineteen children and two adults dead and seventeen injured; the US withdrawal from Afghanistan after twenty years of occupation and the rapid collapse of the Afghan government and forces at the hands of the Taliban in August 2021; the novel COVID-19 virus that naturalized and reinforced militarized border-crossing infrastructures and regimes of biological surveillance; the Hindu nationalist Modi government’s brutal crackdown on farmers who were mobilizing against laws deregulating the agricultural industry in 2021; the attack on the US Capitol and the attempted insurrection by a mob of Trump supporters and far-right groups on January 6, 2021.

Other war-related situations, but of a more ordinary and less sensational nature, have accompanied these spectacular and dramatic events that have made the news, even if tangentially and as side notes: YouTube videos of Ukrainian grandmothers learning how to make improvised explosives from their kitchens; a record number of Afghans and Iraqis living with physical disabilities and more than two million widows struggling to survive amid war-polluted landscapes and a devastated economy; community vigils and healing spaces organized across the world to honor those who were killed in Gaza and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people; testimonies from politicians, pundits, and laypeople suggesting training and arming public school teachers on campus and relaxing gun control laws and restrictions; academic research reporting that the US has invested more than $2.1 trillion in military contractors since 2021 in Afghanistan compared to $36 billion in development aid; the increase in cases of domestic violence and housing insecurity amid COVID-related “stay-at-home” orders, forced confinement, and strict social distancing; stories of farmers and farm workers committing suicide due to debts, financial hardship, and lack of alternative income; investigations pointing to the involvement of off-duty police officers in the storming of the US Capitol Building.

As we sat down to write this introductory essay, we tried to keep up with this deluge of extra/ordinary events and take stock of all the ways war is continually brought home to us, every day and in many forms. We felt discombobulated and overwhelmed. These bodily responses and sensations were a reminder of war’s sensorial creep, the way it keeps inflaming any sense of spatial or temporal comfort. How are we to find home in these conditions, as subjects of war but as feminist scholars, too? We found refuge in remembering the place where this editorial project emerged and the intellectual and political commitments that have informed it since its inception. It is not creative license to say that “Domestication of War” was conceived around kitchen tables, where we gathered to socialize over food, drinks, and laughter after two stimulating multiday workshops on the theme of “Everyday Militarisms” organized at the University of California, Davis in 2018 and the University of Sydney in 2019. These transnational workshops brought together scholars (across disciplinary boundaries and academic stages), artists, and activists to ruminate on the often-unexamined ways in which militarized logics and legacies of violence are embedded in everyday life. It was in the spaces facilitated by these transnational encounters that several scholarly projects came to be, including an edited special issue, “Everyday Militarisms: Hidden in Plain Sight/Site” (Kaplan, Kirk, and Tess 2020), two conference panels on everyday militarisms (American Studies Association in Honolulu 2019 and the Cultural Studies Association of Australia in Brisbane 2019), and an article discussing walking as a method to deconstruct militarized landscapes (Kirk and Moeller 2020).

This Special Section adds to these contributions by concentrating on domesticity and practices of domestication. Drawing upon fundamental feminist insights about the all-pervading, lingering, and intense impacts of warfare on bodies, landscapes, and ecological relations, our collective work seeks to extend and qualify the terms through which the relation between home and militarization has been studied and understood.¹ In addition to examining the militarization of ordinary, domestic, and intimate spaces and the ways in which war permeates imaginaries of “normal” life, we grapple with how the home naturalizes and becomes a catalyst for militarism. We are interested in thinking about how ordinary and domestic objects, technologies, spaces, infrastructures, and practices make violence feel at home in the world and, in doing so, reveal that war and military logics are ubiquitous. We are concerned with the domestic life of militarization as oikos: the household, habitat, and milieu of violent material relationships that are both ongoing and latent. Here, home is not simply a discrete, private space but also extends into public spaces of everyday life like neighborhoods, local businesses, waste disposal infrastructures, hospices, and crop fields.

If the original theoretical impetus of this project is salient, so are the conditions of production of the articles that comprise it. While the articles were solicited through a standard open call for papers, as guest editors, we also sought to embed feminist politics and feelings into their development. After receiving the first article drafts, we convened a series of workshops that provided authors with the opportunity to read and engage with each other’s work, not only through written comments but through conversation and Google Jamboard–enabled affect (sticky notes, images, scribbles) and Zoom-enabled happy events (such as unexpected visits from pets strolling around on screen). Conceived as a space to cultivate community across fields and specializations, these workshops allowed us to notice resonances between articles and to encourage cross-pollination among the pieces. It also helped us and the authors to identify and highlight the uniqueness of each essay’s contribution to the conversation about domesticity and the domestication of war. Attentive to the pressures that feminist scholars bear under conditions of a global pandemic, as well as the ableist, racialized, and gendered structures of academic work that long prefigured COVID-19, these workshops, and the whole editorial process, also sought to intervene in the status quo of academic labors and feelings through mobilization of feminist joy, care, pleasure, tender critique, and critical collaboration.

War requires feminist interventions not only in terms of how we understand what it is or where and when it manifests but also in relation to the practices, methodologies, and disciplinary forms we bring to its study. Rather than relying on official state records and dominant historical accounts, many of the essays collected here turn to personally implicated ethnography (Duong; Hodžić; Ihar; Wool) and sociological critique (Richardson and Schnepf; Velasquez-Potts) alongside approaches less common to the study of war, such as arts-based methods (Kelley; Kim), visual cultural studies (Kaplan), and ficto-criticism (Zárate). Inviting us into the sensorium of war, these papers thus ask after militarism’s aesthetics, affects, and modes of appearance in everyday life. Through the articles we discover that war can be made neat, slick, and stylish (Cohler; Sutton; Richardson and Schnepf) to appeal to a tidy, fashion-conscious middle-class consumer (who is also always raced and gendered), and that, like other cultural phenomena, war can be complicit in projects of gentrification (Ihar) and consumerism (Davis). The papers remind us that war is a sensory and cultural phenomenon that participates in the distribution of the sensible—as Jacques Rancière (2004) would say—which acts at the level of bodily feeling and sensation to determine what is see-able, say-able, and feel-able. At the same time a niggling sense of complicity in war’s aesthetic and sensory lures—particularly as these are domesticated in ways that often render them invisible—reverberates through this collection. Rather than despairing over this complicity, however, we discover openings for redistributing the sensible and revealing deeper connections to how we metabolize militarism (Kelley). Methodological attention to affect, embodied knowledges, and sensation, championed within feminist studies, similarly interrupts Western epistemological hegemonies and suggests that we can learn something about war through sensory qualities such as mouthfeel (Kelley) and slipperiness (Davis). The feminist approaches showcased here thus expand the conceptual tools that are usually brought to scholarship on militarization to inquire: How does war feel or taste?

Resisting the conventional spatialities and temporalities of war, these articles also show that the facile separation of “battlefield” and “civilian space” reveals itself to be a structural mirror of the separation of the public sphere from the private—a longstanding feminist concern. The essays engage with these problematic terms and remain curious about how they are deployed, weaponized, and turned into alibis for proliferating militarisms. Just as the place of war is reconfigured, so too is the notion of “the domestic.” In temporal terms, even if we are now in a time of permanent war, this temporality is never straightforward and is always situated. Recognizing that domesticities emerge from specific historical and political contexts, contributors to our Special Section offer empirically and ethically grounded conceptualizations of the material manifestations of militarization in still-active technologies, remnants, residues, and legacies of loss and toxicity. The articles open up the possibility of engaging the intricacies of violent histories that undergird lived experience in this late capitalist but enduringly colonial moment. The time of war is thus replete with repetition, anticipation, relay, and suspension. Instead of pure separation of war and not-war—in time and space—our collection seeks to better understand the ironies, strange convivialities, and troubling commensals (those that share a table, perhaps a kitchen table?) that emerge when war is domesticated; war and care, for example, are revealed to be deeply interconnected. A refusal of the politics of purity is also part of many of these papers' political and ethical undertone—namely, finding ways to build and reconfigure different worlds, even when war is at home.

In another move to interrupt war’s usual modes of scholarship, we offer a cluster of short essays as a roundtable called “The Housewife’s Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA). This is a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek. It reminds readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking, be it pest control for the backyard (Zárate; Stack Whitney) or washing machines and spray starch for clothing care (Grealy and Lea; Cohler). Juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. The banality of these objects acquires a more troubling character as some of them—from bulletproof school backpacks (Sutton) to home security drones (Richardson and Schnepf) to a destroyed window (Pandit)—do little to conceal their connection to war and violence, yet somehow, in ways that might baffle, find themselves equally at home in domestic spaces. In allowing these contributions to rub up against one another, we hope the slipperiness (a quality that Davis identifies in her short piece on Teflon) will give our readers pause for thought. These short pieces are well suited to teaching and seminar discussions. Gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.

In what follows, we showcase this Special Section’s contributions in relation to space, bodies, time, care, and economy. This is just one way in which they might be configured; we hope the readers will both appreciate the efforts of the authors to speak to each other’s work through the collaborative writing and editing processes and make their own connections between the essays and beyond.

The articles we offer here address how domestic spaces are materially reconfigured and inextricably attached to martial logics and apparatuses. They also explore how households and home life become catalysts for militarism and securitization, showing how the dynamics and practices of war are incorporated, intensified, and extended into the physical folds of intimate sites. The infrastructures that make up these living spaces and the people considered their legitimate inhabitants and visitors—those deemed to have the right to enter and enjoy the shelter and comfort they offer—are shaped by military logics that define and distinguish interiors and exteriors, civilian and military, and domestic and foreign. The policing and maintenance of these distinctions demand management, surveillance, and technologies aimed at fortified security. Drawing attention to the built environments of habitation and the sensations of (dis)comfort, (dis)placement, and (in)security through which distinctions around war and its violence are maintained and naturalized, these articles reveal the intricate material expressions and multiscaled experiences of the domesticity of war.

For example, Caren Kaplan’s critical reading of Martha Rosler’s wartime photomontages engages with the deliberate visual collision of battlefields and the domestic realm. Rosler’s work, Kaplan argues, seeks to destabilize fictitious spatial distinctions between the here and elsewhere of political violence. Kaplan contends that by bringing wartime images into structures and appliances of the idealized white American household of the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Rosler’s art reveals the entanglements between US gendered politics of domesticity and the violence of colonial and imperial geopolitics. Indeed, as Zsuzsanna Ihar demonstrates in her analysis of three cases of housing arrangement in urban Azerbaijan, the qualities and values of war seep into the material structures of households amidst and in the aftermath of armed conflict. Touted as forms of state welfare and care, housing projects for disabled veterans, military families, and active service members are profoundly influenced by nationalist technologies of governance that intensify the militarization of everyday life while occluding soldiers’ physical and mental injuries. At the same time, the makeshift homes of internally displaced people underscore homebuilding as a mode of resistance to these logics as well. Lindsay Kelley’s essay on Anzac biscuits alternatively shows how an investment in feminized domesticity, materialized in the baking and shipping of biscuits to soldiers overseas, can also be turned on its head as feminist antiwar protest. These protests, which were meant to bring attention to the forever war of gender-based violence at home, demonstrate that while war is always gendered and domesticity is also implicated, the same ingredients might exist in “snapped” contexts that change the role of women, and the home, in relation to the war machine.

Displacing neat boundaries of the domestic and commercial, the photo essay by Joshua Kim resulted from the author’s somewhat chance encounter with the largest pit mine in Germany. The mine, as the site of massively extractive capitalist plunder that fueled war, is now the unremarked backdrop for children’s play, intergenerational family picnics, and leisurely strolling. War, and its toxicity and debris, haunt the space. Amnesia enables leisure, but at a great cost. At the same time, the suggestive rather than declarative medium of this essay admits that a wound might also be the site of ongoingness. Through an evocative engagement with a broken window, Niharika Pandit’s entry in the HSA on the everyday occupation in the Kashmir Valley also addresses the unstable experiences and geographies of home, illustrating how the house is not an inherent space of safety, as well as how it is inflected by the spectacular and ordinary unfolding of militarization. In turn, Salvador Zárate’s personal, interpellating, and rich analysis of the chemical exposures of Latinx gardeners in the suburban landscape of Southern California draws attention to the militarized spatial logics of the US-Mexico border and the regimes of gendered labor and toxicity that maintain the lasting fiction of white American domesticity.

The boundaries that the domestic space evokes and embodies are not only national, as Richardson and Schnepf’s critical engagement with the promotional video for the Ring Always Home Camera poignantly illustrates. Designed to go unnoticed within the contemporary home, the Ring drone encapsulates the American suburban home’s racial, gender, and class anxieties that fuel and extend demands for the “militarized securitization of domestic perimeters, interiors, and atmospheres.”

While these articles critically address the conventional space and material politics of warfare, they also examine the enduring forms of war and its pernicious aftermaths. In times of “permanent war” (Lutz 2009), the beginning and end of such conditions are blurred, if not utterly indecipherable and violent. Attending to specific historical, geographical, and political contexts and building on diverse conceptual frameworks to make sense of such temporal intricacy, these essays explore how war and its remnants waste and weaken lives for decades and generations and across organisms and ecosystems. Toxic and explosive military legacies are often experienced as daily and continuous conditions of violence rather than as a series of extraordinary events punctuating social realities. These conditions are evocatively captured by Pandit’s description of the constant loops of violence and repair of a house window in occupied Kashmir.

Saida Hodžić’s article on Konjic, a post-industrial city in Bosnia, illustrates how “toxic gifts” of a socialist-era munitions factory persist over time and continue to structure everyday life years after the war. In an increasingly precarious economy and changing global military market, the factory allows people to stay in their town while exposing them and their surroundings to longstanding hazardous waste. As authors grapple with nuanced desires and aspirations and relationships of complicity and responsibility, they also strive to illustrate how war’s explosive and chemical infrastructures do not simply injure or negate life but are also invested in reproducing, physically and metaphorically, life forms and social orders in the future. Anchored in feminist politics, several of our authors show us that such circumstances can also push us to imagine and gestate new ones. For us, living in already and forever realities altered by militarism and militarization opens up a critical question: Is it possible to inherit war and its remains differently? To craft peaceful ways of being in the world? To transform swords into ploughshares?

Several articles in this collection also enhance the growing scholarly attention to the bodily entanglement between disability and war (see Cohen 2012; Wool 2015; Aciksoz 2019; Pinto-García 2019). They point out the irony that bodily injury created by war, once codified as disability, is seen to benefit from the advances in biomedical, infrastructural, and institutional resources in turn funded by the military in the name of rehabilitation, restitution, and redress. Caring for bodies needs to account for the diverging ways they are hurt by war. Studying aging detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Michelle Velasquez-Potts asks, “What does it mean to think hospice care in a torture facility?” Hospice and torture may seem like unlikely bedfellows, but the examples discussed by several of our contributors purposefully bring together jarring embodied juxtapositions between the maintenance of life and the ever-present threats to it. These juxtapositions are not an unintended consequence of war but a necessary attribute of its domestication. Deborah Cohler and Barbara Sutton write of sartorial technological innovations that extend the militarized reach over the body. Cohler notes how the training of military personnel to produce a perfectly ironed seam—as guaranteed by aerosolized household starch—represents “safety, success, order, discipline, and technology,” and for Sutton, investments in bulletproof clothing are marketed as necessary—but also aestheticized and stylized—protections for children in an increasingly violent world.

Extending feminist engagements with environmental toxicity, several authors attend to how bodies—human and more-than-human—are brought into relation with war-tainted environments and landscapes (see Alaimo 2010; Chen 2011; Murphy 2017; Liboiron 2021). Hodžić proposes “furtive critique” as a helpful concept through which the suspicions of enduring toxicity from a weapons factory are mediated in a Bosnian village. For Natalie Duong and Zoë Wool, the chemical aftermaths of war linger and persist in the bodies and landscapes of refugees and veterans of war, respectively. In Duong’s case, the toxin Agent Orange was always at home in Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, where it was developed and tested. Duong traces how Agent Orange continued to haunt the experience of the Vietnamese refugees (escaping that very toxin) who, on arrival in the United States, were provided temporary accommodations in close proximity to the same contaminated base where Agent Orange originated. Wool traces how the lungs of US veterans of the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan carried the toxicity of open-air waste burning pits back home. In these cases, appeals to care and recognition of harm are refused by the state, as to acknowledge the transit of war harms from “out there” to “back home” would force recognition of war as suicidal.

The war machine can only endure because of the state’s willingness to harm some bodies and not others in the name of peace and order—a logic that is reinforced as war makes itself at home. Kaitlin Stack Whitney and Salvador Zárate lead with ladybugs and business cards, respectively, but at the heart of their papers are poignant questions about whose bodies we are willing to toxify, harm, and kill in the name of maintaining domestic order.

Imperial militaries, especially in modern times, deploy the pretense of care and beneficence in their efforts to legitimate their violent incursions. This is to say that wars waged in the name of care are a hallmark of twenty-first-century superpowers. Looking at the multiple dimensions of domesticated war and the culturally saturating processes of militarization reveals the paradox of deliberate violence deeply entangled with deliberate modes of biopolitical interventions rationalized as benevolent advancements. We see, in other words, an ongoing modality in which Total War Societies (Park 1941)—societies whose primary institutions (law, markets, education, healthcare, transportation, food provision, etc.) are geared mainly toward preparedness for war—carry out violence against bodies, territories, seas, and infrastructures through a logic of destroy-and-build, claiming biomedical salvationism as that which justifies the use of force (Terry 2017). War is hell, as the phrase goes, but it allows us to advance our knowledge of how life works. In this salvationist way of thinking, war expands our understanding of how to treat injuries and control diseases, how to build stronger structures and more powerful weaponry, how to repel future enemies, how to enhance human ability, and maybe even achieve eternal life.

Cycles of destruction, repair, and remediation are characteristic of this moral paradigm. They are also the political and economic interests of disaster capitalism (Klein 2007; Loewenstein 2015). These essays shed light on practices and pretenses of care as they shape the domestication of war not only at home and in daily life (Kaplan; Grealy and Lea; Ihar; Kelley; Pandit; Richardson and Schnepf) but also in the treatment of damaged bodies (Wool; Velasquez-Potts) and vulnerable ecosystems (Duong; Hodžić; Stack Whitney), and in the production/consumption of tourist sites (Kim). But to say that militarization and care are entangled with one another is not to assume that they are one and the same or fundamentally inseparable. Indeed, some of these essays analyze alternative modes of care and repair that resist or challenge the deadly cycles of militarization and destruction (Grealy and Lea; Zárate; Pandit).

War is a money-making operation, and so is militarization. The common language of war profiteering takes specific forms when considered within the domestication of war and the modalities of everyday militarisms. Authors in this issue trace the commodification of specific products that were developed in the name of national security and the enhancement of military power but also enlisted as lifestyle improvements—modern conveniences, usually—that domesticate militarization in seemingly benign ways toward putatively happy futures. Thus, war is sold to consumers not only as defense but also as life enhancement (Terry 2017; Enloe 2000). Violence is obscured through these marketing practices. This trend accelerated in the second half of the twentieth century and reached warp speed in the context of neoliberal state abandonment of social care in favor of massively expanded arms sales and booming markets full of surveillance technologies.

Following the homicide/suicide events of September 11, 2001, “homeland security” in the US ascended as a rallying cry for a proliferating array of security technologies, from home surveillance systems (Richardson and Schnepf) to personal ID tracking devices, to clothing claiming to fortify its wearers against imminent terrorist attacks (Sutton). Well before 9/11, household commodities derived from twentieth-century military research on plastics, chemicals, and other novel substances had already become incorporated into residential households and civilian settings globally in the form of fabric starches (Cohler), Teflon (Davis), pest control (Duong; Stack Whitney; Zárate), and bulletproof fashion (Sutton). War is domesticated through a cornucopia of consumer products.

Evidence of the domestication of war also manifests in decayed and abandoned structures, whose contents are strewn around and left to haunt spaces with now-mostly-silent violence. Liam Grealy and Tess Lea’s piece on the purgatory of discarded and decrepit washing machines left behind by uninvited settlers/occupiers on land that is not theirs serves as an allegory for how the commodity of the washing machine was central to the militarized disciplining regime imposed upon Aboriginal girls and women as part of their forced “domestication.” Subjected to militarized logics of cleaning and hygiene, Anangu girls and women endured a slow and ongoing war waged on their bodies, lives, and community/lands. But the washing machines are revitalized and made to work again for the community, thanks to the ingenuity of a local activist handyman. Similarly, Hodžić’s furtive critique of postwar Bosnia opens a key line of sight for recognizing how toxicity paradoxically takes the form of a gift in the afterlives of war. Like Grealy and Lea’s abandoned white goods, abandoned factories and hollowed out villages signify violence that is both past and ongoing. Once the source of local prosperity, the flourishing arms industry generated revenue for socialist Yugoslavia after World War II and bonded workers as patriots. Now, amongst the ruins, militarized industrialization remains a lifeline, allowing people to remain in Bosnia “at the same time as it imperils life,” Hodžić notes. Money, violence, vitality, and survival are entangled in the lives of those living in towns like Konjic and working in arms production.

Monetization of militarism also takes form in domestic architecture, as Kaplan’s close reading of the picture window and post–World War II suburban residential design reveals. The House Beautiful aesthetic that made home ownership enticing to proxy beneficiaries of the GI Bill (aka “housewives”) is subverted through Martha Rosler’s disturbing collages that highlight how the Cold War middle-class home, though defined as inherently safe and comforting, was built upon white supremacist exclusionary practices and the blood and pillage of small nations in Southeast Asia attacked in the name of freedom by the expanding and highly armed US empire of the late twentieth century. Ihar’s account of the Azerbaijan state’s compensating of veterans by housing them reveals the literal ways in which domestic spaces of the home are linked to war memorializations and narratives of patriotic sacrifice through a market economy of real estate.

The exorbitant and compounding costs of war and military occupation are tied to markets fueled by private defense contractors. We see this in Wool’s account of the devastating effects of military burn pits, where soon-to-be-abandoned equipment and detritus that emits petrochemical toxins literalize the foreverness of war’s deadly capabilities. What is burned up in these dumps cost billions of dollars. The subsequent costs of remediating land and treating debilitated bodies adds an extraordinary financial burden, to say nothing of the moral atrocities that could not possibly be offset even through trillions of dollars in war reparation funds—funds that appear not to be forthcoming. Private contractors lurch toward the feeding trough of First World departments of defense and other government agencies, promising that they and they alone can fix “it.”

Researching and writing about war can be demoralizing, to say the least, given the unrelenting pain that comes with taking seriously how violence is embedded in and entangled with what we have been calling “the everyday” in spaces marked as “domestic.” Our hope is that these essays, alive with their authors’ care and attention, can also provide diverse affirmative ways of thinking about war and militarization that may loosen the bonds these processes have on us at scales both large/global and small/local. Rebecca Solnit reminds us that “hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away” (2016, xi). Even as the cascading news of violent conflict, war, catastrophic displacement, and scaled-up authoritarian security operations will continue past this issue’s publication date, we are committed to cultivating forms of intellectual solidarity that use the skills of thinking and feeling deeply to question war, as our authors in this collection have so skillfully done. Welcome to the sensorium of hope in the dark.

¹ Feminist research at the intersection of anthropology, science and technology studies, and environmental humanities has brought attention to the material legacies of warfare and militarized logics. Adopting an intersectional approach, this scholarship has reflected on multilayered impacts of war technologies and practices on socionatural arrangements including bodies (Cohen 2012; Wool 2015; Aciksoz 2019; Pinto-García 2019), lands (Coates 2016; Kim 2016; Touhouliotis 2018; Henig 2019), environments (Sloterdijk 2009; Nixon 2011; Neimanis 2018), ecopolitical relations (Navaro-Yashin 2009; Krupar 2013), and biomedical knowledge production (Terry 2017; Brandt 2013). These studies have also shown that the creations and remnants of militarization infuse our everyday life, even when “war is (viewed) at a distance” (Kaplan 2018), we are in peacetime, or post-conflict scenarios (Nelson 2019; McAllister and Nelson 2013; Berman‐Arévalo and Ojeda 2020). Interested in critical media studies, other scholars have drawn our attention to the proliferation of military virtual worlds, simulation systems, and unmanned technologies (see also Feature Section “Digital Militarism,” in Catalyst vol. 2, issue 1, 2016).

Aciksoz, Salih Can. 2019. Sacrificial Limbs: Masculinity, Disability, and Political Violence in Turkey. Oakland: University of California Press.

Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Berman‐Arévalo, Eloísa, and Diana Ojeda. 2020. “Ordinary Geographies: Care, Violence, and Agrarian Extractivism in ‘Post‐Conflict’ Colombia.” Antipode 52 (6): 1583–1602. https://doi.org/10/gh7bzv.

Brandt, Marisa Renee. 2013. “War, Trauma, and Technologies of the Self: The Making of Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy.” PhD diss., UC San Diego.

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Chen, Mel Y. 2011. “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17 (2–3): 265–86. https://doi.org/10/cwkbqp.

Cohen, Emily. 2012. “From Phantoms to Prostheses.” Disability Studies Quarterly 32 (3). https://doi.org/10/gg3q2w.

Enloe, Cynthia. 2000. Maneuvers. The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives. Oakland: University of California Press.

Henig, David. 2019. “Living on the Frontline: Indeterminacy, Value, and Military Waste in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Anthropological Quarterly 92 (1): 85–110. https://doi.org/10/ggsqd6.

Kaplan, Caren. 2018. Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Kim, Eleana. 2016. “Toward an Anthropology of Landmines: Rogue Infrastructure and Military Waste in the Korean DMZ.” Cultural Anthropology 31 (2). https://doi.org/10/f8sdcs.

Kirk, Gabi, and Robert Moeller. 2020. “Campus ‘Tours of Duty’: Unsettling Everyday Militarisms through Walking.” Historical Geography 48 (1): 40–74. https://doi.org/10.1353/hgo.2020.0001.

Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt.

Krupar, Shiloh R. 2013. Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Liboiron, Max. 2021. Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Loewenstein, Antony. 2015. Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe. New York: Verso Books.

McAllister, Carlota, and Diane Nelson, eds. 2013. War by Other Means: Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Murphy, Michelle. 2017. The Economization of Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2009. “Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (1): 1–18. https://doi.org/10/c282sg.

Neimanis, Astrida. 2018. “Queer Times and Chemical Weapons, Suspended in the Gotland Deep.” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 5 (1): 66–78. https://doi.org/10/gd8783.

Nelson, Diane M. 2019. “Low Intensities.” Current Anthropology 60 (S19): S122–33. https://doi.org/10.1086/701040.

Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Park, Robert E. 1941. “Morale and the News.” American Journal of Sociology 47 (3): 360–77. https://doi.org/10/djdm8z.

Pinto-García, Lina. 2019. “Disentangling War and Disease in ~~Post~~-Conflict Colombia beyond Technoscientific Peacemaking.” Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, February, 1–18. https://doi.org/10/gg3q4r.

Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum.

Solnit, Rebecca. 2016. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. 3rd ed. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Terry, Jennifer. 2017. Attachments to War: Biomedical Logics and Violence in Twenty-First-Century America. Durham, NC: Duke Press University.

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Wool, Zoë H. 2015. After War: The Weight of Life at Walter Reed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Diana Pardo Pedraza is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University. Her ethnographic research in rural Colombia focuses on improvised landmines and humanitarian demining to consider (de)militarized landscapes, post-conflict environmental politics, and multispecies relations of aid and care from a feminist affective approach.

Xan Chacko is Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies of Science, Technology, and Society at Brown University. She studies the history and practices of natural science through visual culture, speculative fiction, and rhetoric. She is the co-editor of Invisible Labour in Modern Science (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2022).

Jennifer Terry is Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies at UC Irvine, with affiliations in the departments of Comparative Literature and Anthropology. She has published books and articles on reproductive politics, the history of sexual science, gender and technology, contemporary scientific approaches to the sex lives of animals, queer love of objects, signature injuries of war, the relationship between war-making practices and entertainment, and biomedical salvationism in the context of war and everyday militarism.

Astrida Neimanis is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities at UBC Okanagan, on unceded syilx territory in Kelowna, BC. She writes mostly about water, weather and multibeing embodiment from feminist perspectives.