Whither class in critical military studies?

Abstract

Although it is often mentioned, social class is rarely deployed as an overarching heuristic for studying the military nor militarism within Critical Military Studies, both as a discipline and journal. This represents a significant departure from older ‘critical’ (i.e. Marxist) approaches to militarism which explicitly linked militarism to class society; but also from ‘traditional’ military sociologists such as Moskos (1970) who also routinely discussed class. This is a glaring, worrying lacunae within a self-proclaimed ‘critical’ discipline, yet given the disappearance and subsequent fragmentation of class analysis within the academy, it may seem difficult to imagine what class analysis of the military might look like today. This Encounters piece aims to catalyse a return to class analysis within Critical Military Studies. It provides- as a starting point- a brief overview of a range of classic and newer perspectives on class and militarism taken from history and political economy and from the macro and micro level.