Critiques of Militarization and Ethnic Studies

Thinking against Militarism

This special issue is inspired by and dedicated to the generative energy of these renewed commitments to antiracist, antimilitarist work. It serves as a dossier of the present, offering critiques that emerge from long traditions of thinking about militarization, imperialism, authoritarianism, and racial capitalism, and also the new directions that have formed in relation to emergent challenges. For example, studies of geography remind us that the history of logistics is an imperial one, and thus also the history of militarization. Scholars like Deborah Cowen, Manu Karuka, Charmaine Chua, and Wesley Attewell recast histories of trade routes and logistics infrastructures, stitching the histories of imperial conquest, capitalist dispossession and expansion, and extractivism back into the map.11 Put differently, the infrastructural underscores how war and militarization are foundational to—not merely extractive effects of—the white supremacist, patriarchal, and capitalist architecture of racial capitalism.

To this point: in speaking about Palestine in conversation with geographers Cindi Katz and Neil Smith, Edward Said remarked, “Geography, in a funny way, is the only way that I can coherently express my history. The expression of history for me is always through geography and not the other way around.”12 In this instance, Said is reflecting on the necessity to think spatially about the colonial occupation of Palestine. History exists in, and is fought over and through, space. Consequently, the far-reaching tentacles of militarization cannot be summed up as lingering aftereffects of state invasion or occupation or disentangled from land and material. Rather, the overwhelming ubiquity of war in all facets of governance and daily life—from how legal citizenship and territorial boundaries are defined and drawn, to the design of national budgets and the allocation of public resources, to the logistic ways that consumer goods are distributed, to the construction of roadways, airways, and waterways—are telling signs of how integral militarization has been and continues to be to the day-to-day operationalization of an imperial capitalist world order. In the same vein, feminist and queer interdisciplinary scholars including Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Cynthia Enloe, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Caren Kaplan, and Inderpal Grewal (among many others) have long reminded us that the so-called boundary between militarized and civilian life is farcical, given how the former (through the social indices of race, gender, sexuality, and class) constitutes the latter in the most fundamental ways.13

Conversing with these insights, we approach militarization as a long-standing concern of radical scholarship that has enduring significance for a critical ethnic studies project to examine the entwined forms of violence that constitute life-and-death worlds in profoundly uneven ways. We recognize that war and its aftermath—and, by extension, securitization and its subjects—are inextricable from so much of the critical theory and scholarly work we already draw upon. An intentional return to these bodies of scholarship, as cited and shared throughout this introduction, signals a critical approach to ethnic studies by foregrounding the entrenched imperialist roots of militarization while refusing the rhetoric of liberal multiculturalism—the latter of which too often frames war as a contained conflict untethered from longer histories of colonialism, conquest, and occupation.14 We draw, here, from the insights of feminist scholars of militarization who, in the wake of September 11, 2001, reinvigorated the field of gender and sexuality studies around these questions and the generations of scholars mentored through these networks.15 Indeed, a conference and collaboratory organized by Caren Kaplan and Javier Arbona, “Everyday Militarisms: Lethal Entanglements” (September 2018), was and has been a touchstone for us as collaborators who were invited to present together in a space designed to facilitate feminist and antiracist thinking about militarism.

Even as we draw from the legacies of critical scholarship on militarization, we are also constantly in awe of how much canonical work can be reintroduced through this lens. That is, some of the most well-known scholarship in our fields is from, if not explicitly about, militarization, though not always recognized as such. For instance, the history of British cultural studies is inextricable from the involvement of scholars like Stuart Hall, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and others in the antinuclear movement. The urtext of cultural studies, Keywords, was written only in the aftermath of World War II. Recall that Williams, in his opening paragraph of the introduction, recounts returning back to university in Cambridge as a veteran of war. Meeting an old army friend, he recalls, “we talked eagerly, but not about the past. We were too much preoccupied with this new and strange world around us. Then we both said, in effect simultaneously: ‘the fact is, they just don’t speak the same language.’”16 In Williams’s telling, Keywords began as an attempt to track, analyze, and understand the multifarious, dissonant, and changing meanings of language that were palpable to him as Europe lay in the ruins of its war. An intellectual history of the New Left and the formation of cultural studies, then, is entangled with the force of the antinuclear movement and the disarmament politics of the day with which many intellectuals were actively involved.17

To further this point, the anticolonial theorists we draw from, like Frantz Fanon, were often literally writing about decolonizing wars and the wars to decolonize (in the case of Fanon, the Algerian revolution against French imperialism). From armed revolutionary struggle against colonial power to countermapping an imperial warmaking state, these contours have been crucial to the development of critical ethnic studies. Likewise, Ruth Wilson Gilmore continually insists on the centrality of the militarized economy in any critique of the United States’ political repression of those experiencing poverty, the working class, and communities of color. Specifically, Gilmore observes that the transition from the military-supported welfare economy (“military Keynesianism”) to a postwelfare state defined by crises and war (“post-Keynesian militarism”) enabled the growth of the prison industrial complex. That is, the carceral state is also the state of permanent war.18 Throughout her work, whether in narratives of Los Angeles’s policing models or accounts of her own intellectual biography, American warmaking, defense spending, and army-building underscore how, in her words, “the warfare state is also the gendered racial state.”19 Yet, while Gilmore has long foregrounded militarism’s structuring relation to policing and prisons—and, more broadly, the fatal couplings of power and difference—we as editors of this special issue humbly observe that this thread of her thinking has rarely been taken up and wrestled with, and it is less commented on than it should be given its centrality to her work.

In our present unhinged moment of heightened if not surreal contradiction, we—as comrades, writers, and thinkers fiercely committed to the entwined projects of liberation and imagination—draw on this special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies as a shared opportunity to slow down, pause, and rigorously inquire alongside our readers: Why critical ethnic studies and militarization? Why now? In sitting with these questions, it is not our intention to approach this lived moment as inevitable or exceptional. Yet, we are acutely aware of how the convergence of multiple forms of broad-scale collapse—spanning from a global pandemic and climate catastrophe to the resurgence of fascisms and the heightened criminalized surveillance of migrants—demands a sustained study of the intensified forms of social and economic precarity that so many have experienced (and continue to experience) these past several years. Our goal in this special issue is modest and connected to emergent conversations that have been explored in previous recent issues of Critical Ethnic Studies, including “Borderland Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective” (Fall 2020); “Fascisms” (Spring 2021); and “Center-to-Center Relationalities: At the Nexus of Pacific Islands Studies and Trans-Pacific Studies” (Fall 2021). More specifically, this special issue theorizes and reiterates the primacy of militarization in rigorous studies of power, as the muscle of capitalist accumulation, the structuring conditions for critical thought, and the condition that spurs histories of social movements. Critiques of militarization, war, and securitization are and have been integral to and always present in the intellectual legacies we continually draw upon as scholars working to advance a critical ethnic studies project.

Militarization and the Hunger of Racial Capitalism

As scholars dedicated to studying and writing about the escalating costs of war, it is imperative to approach militarization as an ever-pervasive set of entrenched processes that protects and reproduces ravenous forms of accumulation under racial capitalism—no matter the cost. This particular framing foregrounds the centrality of material analysis in our work and scholarship as we examine the rippling dynamics of militarization in conjunction with the stealing and redistribution of land as property, labor, and resources that make life livable for some and unsurvivable for many others.

To begin with, we find Sarita Echavez See’s work as a compelling example that reiterates with clarity the inner workings of imperialism, forged through the intimate relations between militarization and the hunger of racial capitalism. In her reading of U.S. settler colonial knowledge production and acquisition in the Philippines, See highlights racial capitalism’s innately colonial quality by observing how it seeks to go “farther and farther beyond itself.”20 Building on Rosa Luxemburg’s insights on accumulation, See continues to describe racial capitalism’s insatiable appetite as one that “‘requires inevitably free access to ever new areas of raw materials in case of need, both when imports from old sources fail or when social demand suddenly increases.’”21 We can understand racial capitalism as a rapacious form of devouring, since the concentrated hoarding of power in the hands of a few is contingent on the extractive consumption and starvation of places and peoples—or “new areas of raw materials”—racialized as primitive, feminine, and disposable.

This unquelled desire to take, consolidate, and exponentially expand far beyond itself—that is, the underlying logic of imperialism—is only possible through the sustained enactment of large-scale violence. While diverse and diffuse, these modes of violence include, though are not limited to, the waging of war and genocide; border fortification and security; the surveillance of racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies; systemic sexual violence perpetrated against enslaved and occupied populations; and a maintenance of power asymmetries through policing. Again, we emphasize that the all-consuming force of racial capitalism commands war and militarization as neither isolated events nor insular phenomena. Rather, they are embedded in, distributed across, and inherent to imperial capitalist systems of rule.

Overview of Contributions in This Issue

The Critical Ethnic Studies journal includes both peer-reviewed articles and several nontraditional genres of academic writing. This innovative structure has lent itself to rich and, at times, unexpected conversations around militarization and ethnic studies throughout and between these varying sections: from the thoughtful, well-researched, peer-reviewed essays grappling with militarization in myriad sites to the political education documents from Dissenters; from the excellent forum on Laleh Khalili’s magisterial book Sinews of War and Trade to the interview, a robust conversation between Kenan Emini from the Roma Antidiscrimination Network and scholar Vanessa E. Thompson, from a beautiful and haunting syllabus by Diana Pardo Pedraza titled “Ordinary Warfare and Militarized Landscapes” to Alborz Ghandehari’s translation of canonical Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou for the Work-in-Translation section. Situated across locations and social geographies, these contributors attend to the infrastructural dimensions of militarization and fierce contestations to them. That is, even while reinforcing militarization as a conceptual anchoring point in critical ethnic studies, each of these works does not singularly focus on the destructive manifestations that disproportionately affect working-class communities of color experiencing poverty—and, more specifically, Indigenous peoples, women of color, disabled people, undocumented communities, and queer and trans people. Instead, the interlocutors of this special issue make crystal clear the life-affirming, radical forms of solidarity and writing that flourish even under the terrifying thumb of militarized rule. They also make evident the dire political stakes tied to our writing about and shared struggles against the insidious role that militarization plays in the crucible of everyday life.

In her article “The World Upside-Down: Zionist Institutions, Civil Rights Talk, and the New Cold War on Ethnic Studies,” Emmaia Gelman focuses on how the K–12 ethnic studies curriculum adopted by the State of California ironically was weaponized against Arab Americans and specifically cleansed of any mention of Palestinian dispossession or Israeli occupation after a highly coordinated public outcry. These attacks, of course, dovetailed with white supremacist attacks on critical race theory across the country and spoke to the militarized stakes in education on the histories of race, racialized violence, and the state. Gelman’s article suggests such co-optations of antiracist discourse must be understood within the larger history of the Anti-Defamation League’s conservative, anticommunist, Cold War history. Likewise, in “From Comfort Woman to Comfort Child: Genealogies of Gendered and Sexualized Violence in the Korean Diaspora,” Yuri W. Doolan foregrounds the intergenerational nature of militarization and its effects across time and space. By offering the heuristic of “comfort” affixed to a racialized, sexualized, and gendered genealogy of three figures—the Japanese comfort woman, the U.S. military camptown sex worker, and the transnational adoptee—Doolan insists on the material and epistemological entrenchment of imperial violence that has long produced subjectivity in the Korean peninsula.

In identifying militarization as a pervasive element of imperial capitalist power, we also turn to the centrality of landscapes and seascapes, as well as the build-out of material infrastructure—spanning from transportation logistics and networks to tourism and leisure circuits to data collection and police surveillance systems—to disrupt the normalized logic that conveniently separates civilian life from militarization.22 Here, Laleh Khalili’s magisterial Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula—the focus of this issue’s Forum—demonstrates the degree to which something as seemingly neutral as maritime transport is nestled within a sprawling nexus of capital profit accumulation, racial and gender violence, environmental catastrophe, and histories of war, colonialism, and imperialism. An interdisciplinary group of participants, including Iyko Day, Hatim El-Hibri, Kale Bantigue Fajardo, and Salar Mameni, provides vibrant reflections on how Khalili’s text moves them to consider other lines of thought that reflect on their own research and scholarship. As intuited by several of these responses, Khalili’s work is in generative dialogue with research and writing that examines how globalized systems of trade, commerce, and financialization—for example, Rocío Zambrana’s crucial work on Puerto Rico’s colonial regime of debt and austerity, as well as Allan E. S. Lumba’s scholarship on U.S. monetary policy and banking systems that enforced the capitalist exploitation of the Philippines, and Peter James Hudson’s work on the imperial history of U.S banking, backed by military occupation, violence, and soft power in the Caribbean—are indelibly embedded in long histories of imperialism and militarized occupation.23 In generative conversation with this Forum, Diana Pardo Pedraza’s syllabus, titled “Ordinary Warfare and Militarized Landscapes,” punctuates how war unfolds, in explosive and mundane ways, across everyday landscapes, atmospheres, and wastelands. Refusing to confine war to discrete periods and spaces, Pedraza’s interdisciplinary syllabus insists that we frame and teach war as an entrenched set of relations, affects and effects, and technologies.

This collection also attends to the differentiated ways in which militarization enmeshes itself within the tentacles of settler colonial governance, rule, and enforcement. Here, a focus on logics amplifies that (settler) colonialism, occupation, and warmaking are knowledge-producing processes, as much as they inflict devastating harm and violence on racialized and communities experiencing poverty. As Marie Lo powerfully shares in an article published in Critical Ethnic Studies several years ago, the routine use of state-sanctioned violence against racialized peoples through judiciary apparatuses, like plenary power, demonstrates the degree to which the U.S. settler colonial state is principally founded upon a doctrine of “permanent war” against “Indigenous peoples, immigrants, colonized peoples, and people of color.”24 People survive, resist, and leave traces of their lives, simultaneously against and because of this organizing logic of militarism. Diana Flores Ruíz’s essay “Object Lessons: Humanitarian and Vigilante Imaging of Migrants’ Belongings along the U.S.–Mexico Border” examines this duality through forensic photographs of confiscated migrant belongings. She shows how these images are used by those seeking humane border policy but also are deployed, troublingly, by reactionary, right-wing forces self-organized in paramilitary groups. In this way, the object stands in for, or provides a forensic account of, the absent migrant’s body and thus reveals an organizing logic of the border that hinges on questions of detection. By articulating militarization as a logic in which relations of power manifest, we also underscore how militarization functions across ideological and epistemological scales.

By focusing on the contradictions of and challenges to militarization, we emphasize throughout the issue that a history of militarized infrastructure must necessarily center critical grassroots movements and a view from below. Shared throughout this issue (but particularly in the Interview, Political Education Document, and Work-in-Translation sections), social and material histories of resistance and resurgence are always entangled with militarized infrastructures—or what Macarena Gómez-Barris might refer to as “submerged” vectors of resistance within extractive zones.25 This point is important because it recenters the peoples, communities, and lands most affected by militarization, while also rearticulating power in ways that exceed binary modes of analysis (for example, the “powerful versus the powerless”).

In the interview section, activist and filmmaker Kenan Emini from the Roma Antidiscrimination Network converses with Vanessa E. Thompson about the extensive history of racialized, gendered, and militarized violence that Roma people have experienced across Europe for over seven centuries. While this expansive interview touches upon Roma people’s entrenched experiences of militarized dispossession, criminalization, and forced migration throughout Europe, including in the former Yugoslavia, as well Ukraine due to Russia’s invasion of the country, Thompson and Emini also discuss resistance movements and resurgences that have always been a part of these brutal histories. Thompson—a critical feminist scholar of Black feminist studies and abolition raised and trained in Europe—and Emini discuss the synergetic connections and solidarities between Roma and Black communities in Europe, as well as the emergent formation of the Roma Antidiscrimination Network.

In generative conversation with Emini and Thompson’s interview, the Political Education Document section features the organization Dissenters to provide an inspiring example of robust antimilitary grassroots social-movement-building in the United States. A young people’s antiwar organization established in 2017, Dissenters emerged from a desire to identify the connections between militarism against Black, Latinx, and refugee communities in the United States and wars fought abroad. The work of Dissenters is, as shared by their website, “anchored in Black liberation traditions, and founding members include the children of Iraqi, Korean, and Vietnamese refugees committed to resisting wars waged abroad as well as wars waged by police, ICE, and other agencies.”26 As part of the Political Education Document section, Dissenters contributes key documents from their April 2022 campaign against Boeing in the corporation’s headquarters of Chicago. As a result of this hard-fought campaign, Dissenters and collaborating organizers were able to force the city of Chicago to cut its multimillion-dollar contract with Boeing. In many ways, Dissenters’ focus on defense spending, military contracts, and anti-imperial critique draws from long-standing traditions of internationalist struggle in order to address a contemporary neoliberal, polycentric, networked terrain of struggle.

Dissenters’ amplification of internationalist struggle and solidarity organizing as core principles of their work—against the backdrop of ongoing war profiteering, extraction, and military occupation—resonates with both Alborz Ghandehari’s translation of Ahmad Shamlou’s poem “The Great Anthem” and Kyle Kajihiro’s essay, “Aia i hea ka wai a Kāne? The Red Hill Crisis, Emerging Fluidarities, and the Radical Relationality of Water.” Kajihiro tackles the ecological effects of U.S. settler colonialism and militarized occupation of Hawaiʻi through the recent leakage of the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility in Oʻahu. Consisting of twenty underground fuel tanks secretly built by the U.S. military between 1940 and 1943 and situated next to the island’s sole source aquifer, the facility’s leakage imminently threatens Oʻahu’s drinking water supply. Yet, as Kajihiro explains, this crisis has not only made hypervisible the long-term environmental effects of U.S. military presence in Hawaiʻi. It has also forged unexpected openings for demilitarized coalition-building between Kānaka ‘Ōiwi and settler activists through Indigenous relations with water—or what Kajihiro describes as the Kānaka ‘Ōiwi ontology of water.

Lastly, in this issue’s Work-in-Translation section, Alborz Ghandehari mobilizes the poetry of Ahmad Shamlou—arguably Iran’s most provocative contemporary poet—to consider the urgent relevance and place of Third World internationalism in this explosive time of war and fire. Ghandehari translates from Farsi to English (and for the first time in its entirety) a testimonial poem by Shamlou titled “The Great Anthem.” As Ghandehari shares in a brief accompanying essay, this lesser-known poem by Shamlou was written during the Korean War (July 1951) and is the poet’s attempt to strategically situate the political upheavals of Korea and Iran within the global nexus of the U.S. Cold War aggression. Given the utter devastation wrought by U.S. militarized and political presence across these lands, Shamlou insists on the necessity of anti-imperialist solidarity across borders and divisions. Through Third World solidarity, different peoples and communities across the globe continue to, as Ghandehari eloquently puts it, “sing that ‘living song’ against today’s deathly cacophonies of imperialism, authoritarianism, and war.”

Toward a Demilitarized Horizon

A note to our generous readers and interlocutors: While this collection of contributions is rich and nuanced, it is also necessarily incomplete. For example, it does not explicitly address the impact of policing on Black and brown peoples or the export of U.S. policing methods across the world or the transnational connections between varying police and military outfits. Missing, too, is a comprehensive coverage of the massive array of covert and overt American interventions in all corners of the globe, from CIA-backed coups to full-spectrum warfare, as well as a deep accounting of the ways that rewriting of our social world via technology is tied deeply to military innovation. As you already know, with a globe in your hands you’d be hard-pressed to find a bit of our planet—land or sea—not altered in some way by militarization. The geography represented here is a small sliver.

We suggest that this incompleteness signals the overwhelming ways in which militarization shapes histories of the late capitalist present in ways that, at times, are difficult to fully grasp or wholly express. Put simply: there is just too much to say. Our data from biometrics to phone texts are collected, mined, and then militarized; lands and seas are surveilled and militarized; school curricula and public spaces are militarized. Our diverse, geographically rich planetary histories are inextricable from this as-yet-unyielding and insidious force. Berkeley-based political artist Doug Minkler’s striking work The Victors, lead image of this special issue, vividly evokes these stark and staggering terms of global power. Composed in 1991, a year in which imperial war spilled both blood and oil into the Gulf, the piece looks at us from thirty-two years ago. “To the victors go the spoils; to the U.S. goes the oil,” the accompanying text reads.27 The image looks at us through and across the martyrs and the survivors of the many wars since, in bold colors and weeping strokes reflecting back our militarized present, our devastated planet, and the fossil fuels that continue to burn.

The works here thus collectively invite us to reconsider both modes of political solidarity and the stakes in intellectual labor. As a keyword, militarization offers a channel for comparison and rekindled solidarity across and through varying infrastructures of domination. What could be potentiated if we insist on a demilitarized horizon as a starting point for a decolonized present? This collection humbly prioritizes militarization—and demilitarization—as a crucial analytic within the intellectual, political, and activist work of ethnic studies in hopes of imagining a different future.

From this view, concrete political demands spring forth. We find Maryam S. Griffin’s recent work on public transit and mobility in Palestine offers one such way of thinking. Griffin illustrates the importance of self-determined mobility (that is, the practice and efforts to exist on and in relation to land in spite of—and in refusal of—policing functions of settler infrastructure) as a horizon of literal and material decolonization.28 Her work points us to an anticolonial praxis that frames territorial demand through already-existing practices of freedom, enacted by the movements of ordinary Palestinians. Along the same vein, the experimental cultural work of Demilit—a collaboration between Javier Arbona, Bryan Finoki, and Nick Sowers—draws on sound, performance, and walking to map the hidden yet ubiquitous histories of militarization in inhabited environments.29 For instance, through Demilit’s collective walking experiments through the Headlands in Marin County or downtown Oakland, participants uncover police and military infrastructures hidden in plain sight and, in doing so, reimagine place beyond the security state. Pieces of a demilitarized future already live in the everyday.

Might the demand to demilitarize remind us of that which sutures together an internationalist politics? Would not the most pressing, crushing, world-destroying brutalities be mitigated by a radical mandate to demilitarize? As Neta C. Crawford’s recent book The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions details, the American military drives climate catastrophe in a way that is unaccounted for in popular discourse and in the public imagination.30 Climate crises, like pandemic response, must not be framed through the lens of war, nor must this be another avenue for military funding through preparedness programs. Françoise Vergès suggests that this ravishing epoch that emerged from militarized plunder, extraction, death, and domination is perhaps most accurately known as the “Racial Capitalocene.”31 For both historical precision and political necessity, wherever possible, it is imperative to retether our planetary histories, our histories from below, and our histories of survival to that of demilitarization. Our special issue for Critical Ethnic Studies, assembled in imperfect conditions and in times of intensified crises—both personal and political—is one such offering: certainly not the first, and resolutely not the last.

Crystal Mun-hye Baik is associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique (Temple University Press, 2020), which explores the consequences of the Korean War through cultural forms including oral history. Currently, she is working on two book-length projects, including a creative nonfiction work titled The Grief Archive.

Anjali Nath is assistant professor in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga.