Nisha Shah

Under the banner of martial empiricism, we advance a distinctive set of theoretical and methodological commitments for the study of war. Previous efforts to wrestle with this most recalcitrant of phenomena have sought to ground research upon primary definitions or foundational ontologies of war. By contrast, we propose to embrace war’s incessant becoming, making its creativity, mutability and polyvalence central to our enquiry. Leaving behind the interminable quest for its essence, we embrace war as mystery. We draw on a tradition of radical empiricism to devise a conceptual and contextual mode of enquiry that can follow the processes and operations of war wherever they lead us. Moving beyond the instrumental appropriations of strategic thought and the normative strictures typical of critical approaches, martial empiricism calls for an unbounded investigation into the emergent and generative character of war. Framing the accompanying special issue, we outline three domains around wh...

This book seeks to critically analyse the metaphorical knowledge and practices that constitute globalization. Well aware of the power of metaphors and language, the various contributors resist the temptation to try and grasp the ‘essence’ of globalization. ‘Only that which has no history can be defined’, writes Nietzsche. Instead, our shared premise is that the remarkable ambiguity of the concept of globalization, so often decried by academics, is testimony not to a lack of scientific rigor but to the irreducible politics and ethics of thinking through world transformations. Metaphors of globalization, this book argues, cast global experiences in terms of something else, a move that comes with huge political, social, cultural and economic effects. For instance, widespread metaphors such as ‘global village’ have come to constitute what globalization means and actually is for many people. Metaphors carry the meanings of globalization. As a result, the nexus between globalization and metaphor offers one of the best vantage points to examine the past, present and future of our world(s).

Of the 13,000 works of art in the Canadian War Museum's holdings, only 64 display dead bodies. Prevailing explanations of this absence revolve around respect for the dead and ethical responsibility to avoid the glorification of war. And yet death and destruction are pervasive in war. The irony is that one leaves the museum with the sense that war does not produce corpses, or at least not very many of them. Nowhere is this irony more evident than in the Canadian War Museum's armaments collection, described as 'the way in which human ingenuity has been applied to the science of war, creating weapons and other devices to attack, protect and kill', but with only technical information about weapon calibre and capacities provided. This article describes an effort to dig up the dead. Studying the form and function of the labels accompanying weapons, I argue that seemingly mundane technical specifications classify and standardize certain kinds of bodily injury and death, and make the bodies destroyed by war present. Overall, arguing that injury and death are in the (technical) details, I challenge the assumption that a focus on technological devices sanitizes war. Instead, I propose a way to investigate and interrogate how death and injury in war are calibrated and embodied in the standards that make weapons 'conventional'.

Infantry rifles are responsible for the majority of war-related deaths. This paper describes how and why they became ‘stan- dard-issue’ military equipment. Examining testing reports, field surgery observations and bullet specifications, I develop a theory of instrumentality through which a specific way of killing in war- fare becomes legitimate and manifest in infantry rifles. Rather than pregiven objects that are made acceptable through an evaluation of their uses and consequences, I show that weapons become possible through an ontology that calibrates how killing in war occurs, technologically and ethically. More generally, this paper expands the study of weaponry and war by uncovering the mate- rial and moral specifications that not only design but also crucially define what counts as a weapon. Clearly stated are when and against whom the line between life and death can be drawn. This paper, by contrast, uncovers the conditions that generate how and with what that line can be legitimately crossed.

ABSTRACT 'Global village'. 'Empire'. 'Global Marketplace'. 'Network Society'. These metaphors have become so deeply entrenched in discussions of globalization that it is impossible to understand the globalizing world without them. But, how specifically do these metaphors help us make sense of globalization? Metaphors of Globalization inquires into the power and politics of metaphors in the making of our globalizing era. By examining globalization via an analysis of metaphors, this groundbreaking volume sheds new light on an overlooked dimension of global politics, redresses outdated understandings and conceptualizations, and provides a critical analysis of existing approaches to the study of globalization. The contributors provides an interdisciplinary approach, with case studies in global finance, global governance, literary theory, political theory, anthropology and sociology.

ABSTRACT 'Global village'. 'Empire'. 'Global Marketplace'. 'Network Society'. These metaphors have become so deeply entrenched in discussions of globalization that it is impossible to understand the globalizing world without them. But, how specifically do these metaphors help us make sense of globalization? Metaphors of Globalization inquires into the power and politics of metaphors in the making of our globalizing era. By examining globalization via an analysis of metaphors, this groundbreaking volume sheds new light on an overlooked dimension of global politics, redresses outdated understandings and conceptualizations, and provides a critical analysis of existing approaches to the study of globalization. The contributors provides an interdisciplinary approach, with case studies in global finance, global governance, literary theory, political theory, anthropology and sociology.

Focusing on the seminal work of David Held, this essay attempts to denaturalize the assumed link between ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘global’ in two ways. First, I demonstrate that cosmopolitanism is a particular metaphor of globalization and not an objective reflection of globalization's ‘inherent’ tendencies or potentials and so adds justificatory force to cosmopolitan groundings of global political community through certain interpretations