Abstract
This paper argues for the continued significance of the text as a source and focus in critical geopolitical inquiry. It establishes the utility of the military memoir in explorations of popular contemporary geopolitical imaginaries, and considers the memoir as a vector of militarism. The paper examines the memoirs written by military personnel about service in Afghanistan with the British armed forces, specifically about deployments to Helmand province between 2006 and 2012. The paper explores how Afghanistan is scripted through these texts, focussing on the explanations for deployment articulated by their authors, on the representations they contain and promote about other combatants and about civilian non-combatants, and the constitution and expression of danger in the spaces and places of military action which these texts construct and convey. The paper then turns to consider how a reading of the military memoir with reference to the genre of testimonio might extend and inform our understanding and use of these texts as a source for exploring popular geopolitics and militarism.
Highlights
This paper is about the continued salience of textual sources in critical geopolitical inquiry, and about the insights brought by one particular type of text e the military memoir e to the exploration of popular geopolitical imaginaries of war and to understanding militarism
We conclude with an argument for the continued salience of the text within critical geopolitical inquiry, drawing on the ideas suggested by the genre of testimonio to indicate how a more nuanced understanding of the military memoir, alert to its communicative intentionality and collectivity in origin and production, might extend our understanding of that key geopolitical actor, the soldier, and of the processes through which militarism operates, takes effect and is potentially countered
These young institutions established by the Karzai government for securitization of the fledgling government, were funded, equipped, trained and deployed by International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) forces, and a number of the Afghanistan war memoirs are essentially accounts of actions undertaken as part of the Operational Mentoring and Liaison Teams (OMLT), or in conjunction with OMLT-mentored units
Summary
'This place isn't worth the left boot of one of our boys': Geopolitics, militarism and memoirs of the Afghanistan war.
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