Book Launch: Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield

This book 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 recognize that the boundaries between war and peace are blurry, military victory is still conceptualized as an event that brings war to cessation and restores peace. Instead, Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield 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. The book 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 video games, 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.

Mirko Palestrino is joined by Paul Higate (University of Bath), Aggie Hirst (King’s College London), Andrew Hom (University of Edinburgh), and Debbie Lisle (Queen’s University Belfast) as discussants. Kimberly Hutchings (Queen Mary University of London) will chair the panel.

The discussion will be followed by a small reception.

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Host or Publisher School of Society and Environment