| The invasion and occupation of Iraq has been the center of numerous political and theoretical disputes, and as the war heads into its seventh year, U.S. forces are still deployed in the tens of thousands, at massive social and economic expense. Rather than assuming that categories like 'soldier,' and 'combat zone' refer to stable objects, this dissertation looks at the work that goes into accomplishing them in practice. Asking how combatants make themselves available as 'instruments' of state power, the answers build from an analysis of interactive meaning-making processes amongst deployed U.S. combat forces in Iraq.;Utilizing publicly available audio-visual recordings made in Iraq as mediated access to empirical relationships, the arguments of this dissertation build from close readings of particular interactions between U.S. combatants and the world around them. Combining methods and insights from Ethnomethodology, Science and Technology Studies, and post-structural International Relations theory, this study points to the production and reproduction of shared understandings of who we are, what is going on, and how to respond. In making meaning, this dissertation argues, identities, combat units, and hierarchies are all effects of the depictions of the world that combatants create using concepts and discourses from the broader social and institutional contexts they find themselves within.;The dissertation concludes with an analysis of how the Abu Ghraib torture scandal came about, the investigation of combat incidents, the decision not to count Iraq deaths, and a discussion about tactics between two Colonels. Running through these various issues are two pervasive discourses, one which describes combat zones as inevitably violent, and the other which describes individual soldiers and marines as legally liable rational actors. Noting how these two ways of conceptualizing war overlap to produce confusing questions of moral accountability in combat, the institutional politics of these discourses in the war in Iraq are analyzed. Building from face-to-face interactions through public debates helps illustrate the ways that discourse circulates, linking different sites in a way that makes micro/macro distinctions moot.;Keywords. Post Structural International Relations, Iraq War, Ethnomethodology, Science and Technology Studies, Iraq Documentary, Iraq Video, Masculinity, Process Ontology... |
