Abstract
This paper explores contemporary cultures of British military recruitment and considers the domestication of geopolitics as matters of the ephemeral (fleeting, sensory encounters), and of ephemera (everyday objects). It employs an auto/ethnographic approach toward spaces critical to recruitment–the airshow, the home and the body. Three central contributions are developed: first, building on a recent turn to the material in political geography, the paper argues that taking seriously materiality, objects, and ‘stuff’ enhances our understanding of the connections between geopolitical, militarised and everyday; second, deploying a notion of the geopolitical social, it explores the geopolitical as it is situated in everyday lives and spaces; third, it investigates the tendency for militarised objects to find their way onto and around bodies and into domestic spaces. Set at the interface of literatures in critical geopolitics and critical military studies, the paper concludes that material encounters and everyday objects are matters central to the business of geopolitics and militarism.
DOI
10.1080/14650045.2019.1570920
Publication Date
2020-10-19
Publication Title
Geopolitics
Volume
25
Issue
5
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
ISSN
1557-3028
Embargo Period
2024-11-25
First Page
1075
Last Page
1098
Recommended Citation
Rech, M. (2020) 'Ephemera(l) Geopolitics: The Material Cultures of British Military Recruitment', Geopolitics, 25(5), pp. 1075-1098. Informa UK Limited: Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2019.1570920
