Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield

Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield rethinks hegemonic understandings of military victory as the outcome of war by focusing on the relationship between victory and time. While International Relations and War Studies increasingly recognise that the boundaries between war and peace are blurry, military victory is still conceptualised as an event that brings war to cessation and restores peace. Instead, this book argues that victory
is a temporal, sense-making device. It shows that victory is produced just as much outside the battlefield as on it, during both wartime and peacetime. Palestrino demonstrates that the end of war has little to
do with warfighting. Wars are made to end through a series of victory practices that seek to clearly mark a conflict’s temporal boundaries to convince key audiences of its definitive outcome. Analysing exhibitions of military tattoos, war memorials, commemoration rituals, doctrine manuals, history textbooks and videogames, this book shows that, as soon as we stop looking for victory in the usual places, a plurality of wartimes comes to the surface and the assumption that
victory ends war is cast into doubt. It also shows that attending to these victory practices and their politics is important because they can appear to be peaceful yet conceal overlooked forms of
violence. Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield offers an innovative account of what victory means, explains victory’s conceptual, affective and international politics, and sheds light on understudied victory practices that straddle the lines between war and peace, politics and military strategy, narratives and materiality. ABOUT THE SERIES: Voices in International Relations, published under the auspices of the
European International Studies Association (EISA), furthers the development of research at the frontiers of International Relations (IR). It expands the remit of the field by including innovative scholarship that broadens
key debates in the discipline, but it is more interested in reconfiguring such debates by approaching them from inside and outside the conventional core. Thematically, we aim to publish research that pushes the limits of IR conventionally defined from within and connects it to debates developing outside the discipline. We are committed to furthering diversity and inclusion in terms of authorship, location, topics and approaches from both inside and outside Europe. We have an inclusive approach
to neighbouring disciplines, be it sociology, history, anthropology, geography, economics, political theory or law. Series editors: Debbie Lisle, Tanja Aalberts, Anna Leander, and
Laura Sjoberg.

Author Biography

Mirko Palestrino is Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. His research sits within the fields of Critical War Studies and International Political Sociology and focuses on the sociologies and politics of time and temporality, experiences and narratives of war, theories and practices of military victory, and the embodied politics of military training and deployment. His work has been published
in leading International Relations journals. He is the co-convenor of the transnational research network Doing International Political Sociology.