Military Workfare: The Soldier and Social Citizenship in Canada (Studies in Comparative Political Economy and Public Policy Book 31)

This book is the culmination of many years' work and the product of many people's contributions. It began with the devastating events of 11 September 2001, which also happened to be the first day of my PhD work in geography at the University of Toronto. This timing eliminates what, to friends and family, was a bit of a mystery in my decision to pursue questions of war and citizenship for the dissertation research that forms the basis of this book. At 9 a.m. on 9/11 I joined a large group of students, staff, and faculty who stood watching the stadium-sized television monitor mounted in the lobby of the arts and science building at the University of Toronto's downtown campus. We watched as the second plane flew into New York's World Trade Center towers, stunned and immobilized for some time, before eventually proceeding to class. I would like to thank Emily Gilbert, who taught that class, and the small group of dedicated and thoughtful graduate students who made it such a fabulous learning experience, specifically Ann Simonds and Valentine Cadieux. With them it became possible to start to work through that opening day's events. Emily has since become a tremendous friend, and our discussions since that day have helped shape this work in myriad ways. This was not, however, the only event that provoked this project. Downsview Park, a decommissioned Canadian Forces military base, sits en route to the post-war suburban campus of York University. I travelled there regularly in 2002 to take part in two graduate seminars in citizenship studies with Engin Isin. The eerily iconic post-war subdivisions that constitute the military family housing of the base were of immediate and lasting intrigue. Trying to understand the political geographies and genealogies of this landscape in connection with x Acknowledgments

Despite the centrality of war in social and political thought, the military remains marginal in academic and public conceptions of citizenship, and the soldier seems to be thought of as a peripheral or even exceptional player. Military Workfare draws on five decades of restricted archival material and critical theories on war and politics to examine how a military model of work, discipline, domestic space, and the social self has redefined citizenship in the wake of the Second World War. It is also a study of the complex, often concealed ways in which organized violence continues to shape national belonging.

What does the military have to do with welfare? Could war-work be at the centre of social rights in both historic and contemporary contexts? Deborah Cowen undertakes such important questions with the citizenship of the soldier front and centre in the debate. Connecting global geopolitics to intimate struggles over entitlement and identity at home, she challenges our assumptions about the national geographies of citizenship, proposing that the soldier has, in fact, long been the model citizen of the social state. Paying particular attention to the rise of neoliberalism and the emergence of civilian workfare, Military Workfare looks to the institution of the military to unsettle established ideas about the past and raise new questions about our collective future.

Contents 5 Illustrations 7 Acknowledgments 9 1. Introduction: The Soldier and the Social 17 2. The (Military) Labour of Social Citizenship 39 3. Post-War Citizenship: Mass and Militarized 74 4. The Urban, the Educated, and the Recruitment Crisis 138 5. Reorienting Recruitment: Towards a ‘Different’ Military? 173 6. The Military after Discipline 212 7. The Soldier and the Rise of Workfare: Generalizing an Exceptional Figure? 244 Conclusion: Neoliberal Military Citizenship? 269 Notes 275 Bibliography 289 Index 317 Studies in Comparative Political Economy and Public Policy 329