Mirko Palestrino: Timing victory: A new ontology of military victory

Tuesday May 7 2024 @12:00 (CEST)
Sala B, Edificio de Humanidades, UNED & online

Abstract
Military victory is a recurring theme in both public and specialised political discourse. Victory guides policymaking, shapes our understanding of war and the conduct of hostilities, and influences post-conflict politics. In International Relations (IR), victory has long been understood as one of the outcomes of battles: an event that brings war to cessation and restores peace. However, scholars also suggest that we live in an age of forever wars, in which the boundaries between war and peace are increasingly blurred. This paper re-centres the profound relationship between victory and time to offer a new ontology of military victory capable of coming to grips with this inconsistency. This work argues that victory is not one of the outcomes of armed conflicts but a temporal, sense-making device. As a result, victory is produced just as much outside the battlefield as on it, during both “wartime” and “peacetime”. Indeed, the political and emotional pull of military victory rests precisely on its capacity to mould time while being perceived as a seemingly timeless, atemporal, and yet time-altering occurrence: a material fact, an event precipitated by military developments “on the ground”. In short, it is precisely in and through time that victories are made and remade, and that the (conceptual) politics of victory emerge more clearly. This work concludes that in the critical study of war a new ontology of military victory is needed: one that straddles the lines between war and peace and that can attend to both kinetic and non-kinetic practices of wars.

Bio
Mirko Palestrino joined Queen Mary University of London in 2023 as Lecturer in Sociology. He previously held teaching positions at both QMUL and King’s College London. Mirko’s research sits within the fields of Critical War Studies and International Political Sociology. He investigates 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.