‘Sow the seeds of victory’: wartime gardening and the ontology of military victory

Abstract

During the World Wars, the Italian, German, UK, US and USSR governments launched national initiatives to foster wartime gardening among their non-enlisted citizens, especially women. ‘Victory gardens’ had a twofold function: enrolling the home public to the war effort and stimulating the national production of vegetables to counter food scarcity. Attending to this understudied martial practice, this paper suggests that IR and War studies should re-think what the concept of victory is and does, as well as how we study it. Rather than by the end of fighting, military victory is determined by, and operates through, a series of practices that are both martial and peaceful, military and civilian and always temporal in nature. To grasp these dynamics, victory cannot be conceptualised as a mere outcome of war, nor can research on victory only focus on the study of fighting, the battlefield or wartime. Instead, I argue for a theorisation of victory as a temporal marker. Often construed as the outcome of conflicts, victory can bring wars to an end but does not necessarily do so. Examining the social construction of victory through the example of wartime gardening, indeed, the article demonstrates that victory does not happen between wartime and peacetime but constitutes this temporal distinction while also shaping global social hierarchies that transcend war and peace.