This post was originally written for the School of Histories, Languages and Cultures blog at the University of Hull.
From the ranks of past, present and future soldiers on toyshop shelves to the ubiquitous red Remembrance poppy, war and the military permeate everyday life in ways we often take for granted. Yet these everyday traces of militarism in popular culture, and the histories behind how they were produced or how people talked about them, can give us insights into what a society thought the relationship between the military and the public might be, what stories it told about the nation’s past, or what it meant to be a woman or a man. Historians studying ‘militarisation’ and the everyday imagination of war in previous centuries might use material objects, song sheets or recordings, paintings and photographs, or the popular press, depending on the technology of the time; future historians of our present will find social media just as rich a source.
For the last four years, a research team at Stockholm University with partners in Germany (University of Siegen), the Netherlands (Radboud University) and the UK (Leeds) has had funding from the Swedish Research Council to investigate how ‘militarisation’ works through social media. In late October, they invited some other researchers who study militarism, media and gender to a workshop in Stockholm where we’d discuss our own research and join in a public engagement day at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, helping the ‘Militarisation 2.0’ team pilot-test a toolkit peace activists can use for critically analysing social media clips that make war and the arms trade seem ‘good, natural and necessary’ (to coincide with the team’s new policy brief for SIPRI).
Because I often research popular music and am especially interested in music video, the shift from television to YouTube as the main communications channel for music video means that the ecosystem of social media has had to become part of my research. This time, however, I was exploring how Croatia’s first female president, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović, has constructed her public persona through the photo-opportunities she has created for news and social media since her election in 2015, including a striking number of her wearing Croatian military uniform or posing with rifles while visiting arms fairs and bases in Croatia, Afghanistan and the USA: in a Croatian context, these help to cast her presidency and Croatia’s 2009 accession to NATO as a fulfilment of what Croats are supposed to have struggled for during the 1991–5 war of independence from Yugoslavia. Indeed, they even seem to present her as a symbolic daughter of the 1990s president, Franjo Tuđman, whose own public persona was as a symbolic father of the nation.
During the rest of the workshop, at the Swedish Army Museum, I was giving feedback on other colleagues’ papers (which covered everything from how users interact with photos on the British Army’s Facebook page to how the Nigerian military has communicated through social media in its operations against the militant group Boko Haram) and taking some time to look around the museum – where the gift shop was as interesting as the collections in the invitations it was making for visitors to take home pieces of the Swedish military past. I’ll be able to teach about some of these topics later this year, when I contribute to our Masters module on ‘Memory, Meaning and History’ – and in the meantime will have even more ideas about what to look out for in the social media I see…
Catherine Baker 