Support the Troops: Gender, Military Obligation, and the Making of Political Community | Kate Millar

About the Event: In the past, it was assumed that men, as good citizens, would serve in the armed forces in wartime. In the present, however, liberal democratic states increasingly rely on small, all-volunteer militaries deployed in distant wars of choice. While few people now serve in the armed forces, our cultural myths and narratives of warfare continue to reproduce a strong connection between military service, citizenship, and normative masculinity.

In Support the Troops, Katharine M. Millar provides an empirical overview of "support the troops" discourses in the US and UK during the early years of the global war on terror (2001-2010). As Millar argues, seemingly stable understandings of the relationship between military service, citizenship, and gender norms are being unsettled by changes in warfare. The effect is a sense of uneasiness about the meaning of what it means to be a "good" citizen, "good" person, and, crucially, a "good" man in a context where neither war nor military service easily align with existing cultural myths about wartime obligations and collective sacrifice. Instead we participate in the performance of supporting the troops, even when we oppose war—an act that appears not only patriotic and moral, but also apolitical. Failing to support the troops, either through active opposition or a lack of overt supportive actions, is perceived as not only offensive and inappropriately political, but disloyal and dangerous. Millar asserts that military support acts as a new form of military service, which serves to limit anti-war dissent, plays a crucial role in naturalizing the violence of the transnational liberal order, and recasts war as an internal issue of solidarity and loyalty. Rigorous and politically challenging, Millar provides the first work to systematically examine "support the troops" as a distinct social phenomenon and offers a novel reading of this discourse through a gendered lens that places it in historical and transnational context.

About the Speaker: Katharine Millar is an Associate Professor of International Relations in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics.

Her broad research interests lie in examining the gendered cultural narratives underlying political violence and the modern collective use of force.  Her on-going research examines gender, race, sexuality and the transnational politics of death; gender and cybersecurity; and the politics of hypocrisy. Dr Millar is also researching the relationship between grief, mass death, and social order in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dr Millar has also published on female combatants, gendered representations of violent death, military and civilian masculinity, and critical conceptions of militarism.

Dr Millar's recent book, Support the Troops: Military Obligation, Gender, and the Making of Political Community, was published in 2022 by Oxford University Press. The book examines the relationship between support the troops discourses and gendered, normative citizenship in the US and UK during the early years of the so-called Global War on Terror. It outlines a theory connecting gendered notions of political obligation with the transformation of civil-military relations, and the normative use of violence, in contemporary liberal democracies.

Dr Millar is an Associate Editor at the journal Security Dialogue and an associated researcher with the Centre for Women, Peace and Security (formerly the Steering Committee) at the London School of Economics. She has participated in consultation processes regarding the UN's Women, Peace, and Security Agenda for the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the NATO Defense College and the NATO Defence Education Enhancement Project (DEEP). She also does policywork with various international organisations and international non-governmental organisations on gendered elements of cybersecurity and cybersecurity governance.

Dr Millar has frequently been recognised for Inspiring Teaching in the LSE Students' Union student-nominated teaching awards.

Previously, Dr Millar was at the University of Oxford, where she held a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada doctoral fellowship at Somerville College, and lectured in Politics at St. Anne's College. Before entering the academy, Dr Millar worked as a policy researcher for a major Canadian political party. She holds a Masters of International Studies from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland, and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.

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