From the strategic self to the ethical relation, pedagogies of war and peace

grantor: University of TorontoAs a student of sociology, and sociology in education in particular, I have a specific interest in how war and peace have been conceptualised in the social sciences. Such study has hitherto been the domain of sociology and political science with its sub-disciplines of security studies and international relations. However, what I have found to be lacking in the standard literature on conflict and war, peace and security, within both political science and sociology, is an adequate theorisation of how militarism, the ideology of war, functions 'outside' of military structures, impacting on culture, identity and subjectivity. This dissertation, therefore, expands the traditional social science framework to include an analysis of war in its epistemological and ontological dimensions, as opposed to its purely strategic functions. In this project, I examine war as a lived cultural practice, expressed and reproduced in cultural forms ranging from the military metaphors and battle imagery of medical science to representations of the other as Enemy and enemy as Other. The dissertation therefore moves from an examination of how war has been conceptualised in classical war theory and international relations to an analysis of military strategy as a key organising principle in cultural production and social relations. In the first part of the project I relocate the Clausewitzian "theatre of war" from the foreground of the state to what I refer to as a "cultural logic of war" and its sites of militarised masculinity, such as, for example, the battlefield of the Self constructed by the medical/military intertext. A closer examination of what I term the "Strategic Self" reveals a construction of the enemy/Other as a racialised discourse of desire. The dissertation then moves from an examination of the will to security as an effort to secure desire, to a suggestion of a pedagogy for peace based on a more ethical relation with alterity.Ph.D