Assemblages of conflict termination: popular culture,global politics and the end of wars

Abstract

The question of how wars end is of continued importance, especially in the context of the ongoing War on Terror. This question has traditionally been approached within International Relations through rational choice theories, logical modelling and game theory. Such approaches have become increasingly ill-suited to capturing the complexity and ambiguity of contemporary warfare and the War on Terror in particular. These battlefield ambiguities are often at odds with political and public desires to see decisive victory in wars. This article builds on recent critical work within War Termination Studies in order to re-conceptualise the end of war as assemblages. By paying greater attention to the affects inculcated by political rhetoric surrounding war and utilising the concepts of affect and emergence, this article presents a novel approach to the study of contemporary war termination. Utilising popular culture, increasingly seen as a crucial site of global politics, the case study analysed here advances the argument that sacrifice emerges from cinema and presidential rhetoric as a trope that allows leaders to claim victory in war despite indecisive conditions of the ground. Through affective cinematic encounters, conceptualised here through the end of wars assemblages, audiences can become more accepting of such political claims.

Introduction

How do we know when a war is over? Without the traditional trappings of surrender ceremonies or ticker-tape parades, how do we determine the end of armed hostilities? More pressingly, how do political leaders make claims that armed conflicts have ended or will end, and how are those claims legitimised and accepted? How, for instance, could President Trump claim that ‘Now we’ve won, it’s time to come back. . .they’ve [US troops] killed ISIS. . .and they’re [US troops] up there looking down on us. . .We won, and that’s the way we want it, and that’s the way they [gesturing skywards] want it’ despite all rational evidence to the contrary. ¹ In the context of the decline of decisive battles and the growth of ambiguous battlefield conditions, this article seeks to provide an answer to these questions by investigating the processes that work to construct a sense of ending for US-led conflicts in the War on Terror, arguably one of the most ambiguous conflicts in history. ² Given that the traditional modalities of war have altered in the past 30 years, traditional dyadic cost-benefit analyses and rational actor modelling can only provide a partial and limited account of how wars end. To improve our understanding of how conflicts end, this article advances the idea that we can better conceptualise war termination as assemblages. Assemblages can address this increased complexity by bringing analytical light to bear on questions of emotions, discourses, affects, material and embodied processes and therefore build on already existing analyses of battlefield conditions, political calculations and strategic concerns. ³ Such an approach can help to not just address the limitations of traditional war termination studies, but can serve to bring a more comprehensive understanding of all the processes and forces that shape and influence how these US-led violent episodes are understood to be waged and conclude.

Drawing on the literature of popular culture and world politics, this article engages with contemporary Hollywood action movies and presidential speech as sites of meaning making for the endings of post-9/11 US-led wars. While not seeking to present a generalisable model of how all wars end, this article examines one aspect of the end of wars assemblages thereby demonstrating an approach that develops our understanding of how political leaders make claims about the end of wars and how these claims are legitimised.

Specifically, this article argues that affective encounters that are induced by cinema allow for the emergence of conditions of success including, among others, sacrifice and determination. When politically operationalised, these conditions of success carry the affective power and weight necessary to make a claim to truth that a war has ended, or will end, with victory. This power comes from audiences’ pre-primed patterns of thought that are cinematically produced through the embodied encounters of intense cinematic moments.

The article proceeds in three parts. Firstly, I explore the existing literature on popular culture as well as war termination to make the point that utilising cultural artefacts can help researchers move beyond traditional explanatory patterns to come to a more complete understanding of how wars end. Following this, I argue that thinking of wars and their endings as assemblages allows us to analyse their complexity through multiple dimensions and identify the cultural and affective processes that make the termination of war possible. As popular culture is a site through which geopolitical imaginaries are constructed, ⁴ it is logical to argue that it is also a site where ideas about victory in war are shaped. Having established both the limitations of rational choice models and the utility of an assemblage and popular culture led approach, I discuss the end of wars assemblages as theoretical tool and orientation and explore how thinking with and through assemblages can help us unpick some of the processes and artefacts that contribute to war termination. ⁵ Utilising the related concepts of affect, encounter and emergence I argue that assemblages produce properties that are more than the sum of their parts and have far reaching consequences on political possibilities. These emergent properties have the capacity to construct ideas around what victory in war requires, entails and looks like. Furthermore, when utilised by political leaders, these properties have the effect of strengthening claims of war termination because of their cultural popularity, prevalence and resonance. Finally, to underline the utility of such an approach, I introduce a brief case study exploring how two movies – Children of Men (2006) and I am Legend (2007) – could function within the end of wars assemblages. I discuss how they stimulate intensive and affective encounters, how these encounters lead to the emergence of determination and sacrifice as being crucial to victory, and how such encounters pre-prime patterns of thought within audiences to connect them with political and military victory in the Iraq War.

Popular culture, global politics and war termination

Popular culture has become an increasingly discussed, accepted and exciting medium through which to analyse and understand global politics. Popular culture is now seen as one of many sites where political meanings are made, circulated, legitimised and critiqued. Developing on the postmodern, aesthetic and increasingly material turns in International Relations, ⁶ scholars have analysed global politics through popular culture and explored how popular culture can (co-)constitute political realities. ⁷ Work on popular culture and global politics encompasses multiple media and genres including television, music, video games, art, literature, comic books and sport. ⁸ Just as the cultural artefacts that they draw on are diverse, so too are the political questions that they wish to explore. These include migration, genocide, militarisation, torture and many more. ⁹ It is also important to make clear that the analyses of popular culture and global politics are not monolithic. Merely because they share a concern about the cultural and the political does not mean that they share ontological, methodological or theoretical approaches. The field, while still in the process of developing and establishing itself, is nonetheless too varied and extensive to present a detailed review of here. What should be emphasised, however, is that popular culture has become an important and increasingly recognised field of study for a myriad of political issues and topics within International Relations.

Most relevant from a pop culture perspective to the argument of this article are those works that engage with cinema. But even when focussing on one cultural medium, academic analyses are heterogeneous. Traditional questions of import for International Relations have been examined through movies for as Daniel and Musgrave ¹⁰ admit, ‘more people have learned how the world works from Steven Spielberg than from Stephen Walt’. For example Löfflmann ¹¹ examines the production of national security in Battleship, Schmid ¹² analyses American identity formation through Captain America, and Hanska ¹³ reads Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’ in Pacific Rim. Cinematic depictions of (counter-)terrorism have also intrigued scholars with Rich ¹⁴ arguing that far-right terrorists derive their imagery from cinema while Brereton and Culloty examined the depiction of counter-terrorism in the Jason Bourne franchise. Within film studies itself, movies that deal with war have long been a topic of interest from World War Two to the present day. ¹⁵ Meanwhile, Weber has discussed the convergence between early US foreign policy in the War on Terror with narratives in films that were (re-)released in the year after 9/11, the blending of real/reel politics and how cinema helped to construct an idea of ‘moral America(ns)’. ¹⁶ Going back further, Shapiro ¹⁷ parsed the Gulf War through Buñuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) and teased out the sexualised and gendered resonances that exist between them.

Another approach to the intersection of war and cinema is through documentary movies. Oram ¹⁸ has argued that The Battle of the Somme (1916) provided more immediate access to the war, strengthening the connection between home front and front lines. More contemporarily, Aufderheide ¹⁹ admits that documentaries about the War on Terror do not have a wide appeal but can still shape political reality through social media and small scale screenings. In contrast, Philpott ²⁰ argues that, in the case of The Act of Killing (2012), documentary cinema may not present a penetrating analysis of or intervention into politics. Shapiro, ²¹ meanwhile, has located political analysis not just in the movie itself or in the audiences, but in the material loci of movie theatres and festivals arguing that these can ‘articulate resistance to the new violent cartographies’. The literature on cinema and war is inherently multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary and necessarily heterogeneous. Movies have been created for and analysed through the lens of propaganda, but they can be just as effective at articulating a resistance to violence. ²² There has naturally been a focus on questions of why wars happen, how they are fought, and to what ends they are directed, mirroring the prominence of these debates within International Relations, as discussed below.

Culturally oriented approaches to global politics have taken the grand questions of International Relations seriously: foreign policy, terrorism, the causes and conduct of war and national security. As such, popular culture can also be utilised as a tool to explore the question of how wars end. As explored below, this is a gap within the wider discipline of International Relations. As such, the novelty and contribution of this article is primarily to that wider literature, but also to the popular culture and world politics field as well. Bringing the insights of popular culture and global politics to bear on war termination can begin to address this gap within these disparate fields.

While the causes of war have long been one of the most prominent, persistent and important concerns of International Relations, the question of how conflicts end is something that has been largely under-researched within the discipline. ²³ This is despite the importance of war termination to our understanding of peace, security and warfare. ²⁴ This importance, alongside the prima facie, is at least partly due to evidence that shows a clear link between how wars start and how they end. ²⁵ In other words, by analysing the processes through which wars end, we can potentially gain a deeper understanding of how they begin in the first place. Additionally, as conflict unleashes violence and destruction on a grand scale, it is necessary to understand not only how this came about and how it continues, but how it can be brought under control. ²⁶ Furthermore, there are legal implications for the demarcation between war and peace. Internationally, this transition is important for considering when the application of jus in bello ceases and when jus post bellum begins. ²⁷ Domestically in the United States, the legal consequences of war termination might necessitate the release of ‘enemy combatants’ and the destabilisation of counter-terrorism architectures. ²⁸

The vast majority of studies of war termination have been based on a methodology of rational choice theory or game theory. ²⁹ This methodological dominance includes variations on utility theory, ³⁰ cost-benefit analysis, ³¹ information that decision-makers derive from battles, ³² logic, ³³ war termination equations, ³⁴ bargaining processes ³⁵ and other formal quantitative, logical and game theoretical methods that I will comment on in more detail below. However, there has recently been an increase of more critical work that challenges these approaches. Cronin ³⁶ for instance analyses political discourse in order to ascertain the type of postwar settlements that can be arrived at while Victoria Carty argues that publics apply real electoral pressures to force conclusions to violent foreign interventions. A recent special issue of the Journal of Strategic Studies was also dedicated to the topic of how wars end bringing new perspectives from strategic thought, just war theory, history and transitional justice into a multi-disciplinary enquiry which is very much to be welcomed. ³⁷ These more critically aware approaches open up space for discursive, material, cultural and emotional understandings of war termination and highlight a continuing reappraisal of the field on which this article will build. Several are also opened up by these non-rational choice approaches that have been built upon by others and will be continued in this article. For example, Engelkamp et al. ³⁸ use the visual metaphors of Mango Dreams (2016) to explore conflict resolution, pointing towards ‘a more encompassing understanding of peace’. Similarly, Heck ³⁹ has explored the visualisation of peace in the Danish film A War (2016) in order to move beyond the idea of peace as merely an absence of violence. And Holland ⁴⁰ has argued that The West Wing articulated the importance of victory in the War on Terror for the defence of liberalism.

Despite these more critical approaches to questions of war termination, and the gradual opening of the field to alternative methods the area is still largely dominated by rational choice approaches. This poses at least three limitations for the field. Firstly, there are the inherent and general limitations of rational choice theories including selection bias, anomalies being ignored, a lack of empirical success and other methodological problems as detailed by Green and Shapiro, ⁴¹ among others. Secondly, there are also critiques that centre on the problems of reducing decisions down to self-interest and assuming that state elites are somehow outside cultural practices, norms and influences and act along rational lines based on the best available evidence. ⁴² These critiques argue that rational choice modelling removes all aspects of decision making that involve the affective, the embodied, the emotional, the historical and the cultural contexts in which they are embedded. ⁴³ Given the changes in contemporary warfare brought about by the increased salience of non-state actors, the importance of information for and about warfare, and changing modalities of how political violence is communicated to, and justified for, audiences placing so much analytical emphasis on the supposedly rational choices of political leaders can lead to significant blind spots in our understanding of this important aspect of war. ⁴⁴ It is clear that decisions to go to war, the progress of wars on the battlefield and the (perceptions) of success or defeat are deeply emotional, cultural and historicised phenomena. ⁴⁵ While parsimony is often to be welcomed in the study of important phenomena, these emotional and affective dimensions of warfare are omitted from approaches that are based on rational choice theories despite evidence pointing to their crucial importance. ⁴⁶ Ideally, the inherent political, emotional and embodied complexity of modern warfare and the challenges of its termination should be met with an embracing of that political, emotional and embodied complexity rather than its denial. Assemblages, oriented as they are to an analysis of complex causality in networks of power, are well suited to the task of uncovering the processes through which wars are terminated.

Thirdly, the ways in which the conduct of contemporary war and its categories of victory have changed undermines the ability of dyadic rational choice models to understand them. ⁴⁷ Victory has long been a decisive and almost ritualistic process from ancient times. Whether this is the ‘small army of street cleaners, clergymen, senators, poets, prisoners and spectators’ necessary for a Byzantine triumph, the US flags during the Japanese surrender ceremony in World War Two, or the 21st century reunion videos that circulate on social media. ⁴⁸ It is clear that historic victories, and the imagery that we associate with them, have a strong emotional and psychological effect and import that, as discussed above, rational choice approaches are ill-suited to capture. Indeed, the importance of the ritualistic and symbolic aspects of surrender ceremonies and victory celebrations points to the importance not just of having won, but having been seen to have won. ⁴⁹ The bases of rational choice approaches to war termination such as battlefield conditions, utility and cost-benefit calculations have perhaps never been as significant as the emotional and cultural appeal and pull of the imagery, pomp and ceremony associated with the declaration of victory. Additionally, the decline of decisive outcomes in contemporary warfare has led to what Johnson and Tierney ⁵⁰ term ‘match-fixing’, the tendency of publics to pre-ordain outcomes as fixed due to various elements such as mind-sets, public pressure and particular events. These desires towards decisive victories rather than complicated outcomes can be shaped emotionally as well as culturally. An assemblage-oriented approach to war termination then, allows for a more detailed assessment of these culturally mediated and emotional aspects of contemporary conflict and its conclusion and the effect that these have on publics’ and elite’s claims to, and perceptions of, victory. ⁵¹

Such performances also cater to diverse audiences. Tierney ⁵² identifies five main groups to which politicians should speak on the nature of victory: domestic publics, troops in the warzone, local populations, the global audience and the enemy. Being seen to have won is important domestically, abroad and internationally. Contemporary wars, however, with their additional complexity, disorderliness, lack of clear enemy or even objective and potential for never ending pose serious questions about how we understand, mark and legitimise their endings. ⁵³ Despite this complexity though, there is still an expectation that there will be an ending, and that ending will be marked. ⁵⁴ Indeed, Johnson and Tierney ⁵⁵ highlight the contested nature of victory in contemporary war when they argue that ‘the interpretation of success and failure can become a matter of great uncertainty and controversy. Unless the outcome on the ground is heavily one-sided, it can be unclear how to cast judgement’.

Clearly, both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama understood that success in the War on Terror was not going to be as decisive as those in the past or marked with an official surrender, a ticker-tape parade in Times Square or a historic peace treaty. As President Bush made clear, ‘victory will not look like the ones our father and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship’. ⁵⁶ Nonetheless, both presidents were adamant that the wars would end, and that the USA would be victorious, an approach continued under President Trump. ⁵⁷ This hint towards complexity does not preclude, however, the utilisation of psychological, emotional and affective narratives and ideas being used to make truth claims regarding US victory in the various conflicts of the War on Terror. ⁵⁸ Approaching the conclusions of these conflicts as assemblages rather than as a discrete outcome of a series of rational choices or a specific moment in time allows us to explore how these narratives and ideas emerge, how they are utilised, what affects and encounters they might allow for and how they contribute to a sense of decisive ending when none might exist on the battlefield.

While the audience for whom these articulations of success are made are diverse, as highlighted by Tierney above, the focus of this article will be on the domestic public. Different audiences will engage with these speech acts in different ways, encountering as they do multiple other artefacts affectively and politically. The message received by the Taliban, for example, will be different to that of a movie-going 18–24 year old American male despite listening to the same speech. ⁵⁹ That is not to dismiss the possibilities of these diverse lines of flight, but rather to focus on those audiences most attuned to popular culture as a site of emergence. As Young and Carpenter ⁶⁰ find, those who are most fluent with popular culture encounter the most political effect from its consumption.

Popular culture is an important site for the emergence of these narratives and ideas through which audiences and populations parse war and its conclusions. As Hellmich and Purse ⁶¹ argue, cinema is a persuasive medium that shapes audiences’ and populations’ understanding of war while Lucaites and Simons add that due to war’s paradoxical ‘in/visibility’ we need to approach it through diverse visual depictions. Expanding our understanding of war termination through a cultural lens therefore is not just a useful addition to the existing rational choice and more critical approaches discussed above, but it may be one of the central loci for understanding complex political phenomena such as war termination.

The end of wars assemblages

While both popular culture and assemblages are well-developed approaches to the analysis of issues and topics in International Relations, the combination of the two is less so. ⁶² Therefore, it is useful to explore the nature of assemblages in general as well as their processes and patterns of functioning. It is necessary to preface this discussion with an appreciation that there is no single or stable understanding of what assemblages are, how they function or how to analyse them. ⁶³ While an assemblage can be a vast constellation or a single object, ⁶⁴ what we can say is that assemblages are complex systems that are dynamic, open and allow for multiple heterogeneous forces, processes and objects to come together in non-linear ways in order to produce properties that are more than the sum of the constituent parts. The key concepts that allow the end of wars assemblages to contribute to the construction of conditions of success through politico-cultural interaction and to be discussed below are emergence, affect and encounters.

Thinking of the end of wars as assemblages allows us to analyse how wars end not just through the lenses of rational choice but rather allow us to take account of the multiple forces that shape conflict outcomes and, crucially, perceptions of those outcomes. I argue that conceptualising the end of wars as assemblages of multiple components, processes and patterns will help us understand the end of wars not just as a specific moment of political decision or decisive battlefield outcome but rather as a complex politico-cultural process through which claims of victory emerge, circulate and are legitimised. There are myriad things that shape and influence the end of wars assemblages including popular support for a conflict; economic issues; electoral calculations; moral quandaries; (geo)strategic concerns; tactical decisions and so on. Modelling the interaction of these, and many more, issues into a coherent and general model for how wars end would be next to impossible. However, by looking at certain forces within the assemblages at a micro level, we can understand how specific claims of war termination are made, legitimised and not seen as absurd given battlefield conditions. ⁶⁵

The conditions of success discussed in this article can be thought of as emergent properties of the end of wars assemblages or, as Urry ⁶⁶ explains it, the system effects that materialise from complex systems. Importantly, these conditions of success (emergent properties, system effects) are more than the sum of the components of the end of wars assemblages and are not reducible to those components or merely the interactions between them. ⁶⁷ In this model of assemblages, unconnected elements merge to form ‘energised complexities’ through ‘reciprocal or circular causality’ that are difficult to explain in a linear fashion. ⁶⁸ Emergence is the ‘construction of functional structures in complex systems that achieve a. . .focus of systematic behaviour as they constrain the behaviour of individual components’. ⁶⁹ The emergent properties of the end of war assemblages under analysis here, then, are the conditions of success for conflicts in the War on Terror. These emergent properties are therefore irreducible to the component artefacts of the assemblages (the speeches, movies, economies, strategies and so forth).

The specific condition of success to be discussed in the following section is determination and sacrifice, but there are of course multiple conditions that will emerge from such a complex system as the end of wars. They are imbued with a political meaning and power that can be utilised to argue that a war has ended, or will end, with a victory. By drawing on already existing and powerfully affective cultural moments and tropes, claims to truth articulated by political leaders can be more readily accepted by audiences whose patterns of thought have become pre-primed to accept this connection. As explored in the previous section, while these articulations of success are aimed at diverse audiences, my focus here is on the domestic public as those are arguably the most engaged with the popular culture that forms a key component of the encounter as analysed here. ⁷⁰ Rather than just being discursive moves that are confined to political speech, then, these conditions of success actually emerge from complex interactions between multiple forces. ⁷¹

The process of emergence is not, however, reducible to some hidden or deeper meaning of a cultural text (or economic trend, battlefield victory, campaign speech or polling average) and the ways in which it is used politically. ⁷² Contemporary Hollywood films are not made for their base propaganda value, as some World War Two films were, nor is there an intention to achieve this slowly. ⁷³ Rather, the process by which these conditions of success emerge is through the capacity of cultural artefacts to affect and be affected. ⁷⁴ In other words, it is not about how particular movies represent endings to wars, but rather how cinema produces intense and affective encounters that then allow for particular conditions of success to emerge as system effects of the assemblages. ⁷⁵ The affects they can induce are based on their formal elements such as framing, editing, sound and language as well as their narrative elements such as plot and dialogue. These qualities are not just ‘logical properties or sense perceptions’, but rather they are the potential to affect and be affected. ⁷⁶

For cinema, these affects affect audiences who are, of course, active. As such I do not want to essentialise the affects or encounters that are experienced. ⁷⁷ All cultural artefacts have the potential for diverse articulations and alternative lines of flight depending on the qualities, demographics and locations of an audience. As such, the affects, intensities and encounters that are present within the end of wars assemblages are not definitive or total, but probable or possible. Affect is the ‘product of an encounter’ that is not passive but rather active and pre-cognitive. ⁷⁸ That is, it is produced not at the level of conscious thought, but rather at a non-conscious or pre-cognitive level. ⁷⁹ Affect is also a process that can shape ideas, opinions, knowledge and power. ⁸⁰ Within the context of the end of wars assemblages, affect is that which allows for conditions of success to emerge with neither intentionality nor a conscious process of thought on the part of either audiences or political leaders. ⁸¹ Rather than the decision to end wars resting solely on the shoulders of politicians then, an affective and assemblage-oriented understanding of war termination posits that these endings are allowed for through the affective interaction of human (in this example politicians, moviemakers, audiences) and non-human (again, in this example, political speech, films, particular forms of cinematic technique) entities. ⁸²

Affect functions within the end of wars assemblages through the cinematic encounter. ⁸³ The encounters that allow for conditions of success to emerge are deeply affective ones that have an impact on cinema viewers; this impact creates a political space within an audience that then allows for certain political realities to become possible. ⁸⁴ The action genre’s fast paced movement, explosions, shouting, visceral depictions of violence and quick edits have a strong bodily response in an audience. ⁸⁵ And as Pisters ⁸⁶ notes, ‘[w]hat affects the body has an effect in the mind’. Audiences can watch movies with certain political events and encounters in their mind and thus films are pre-cognitively parsed through this, forging an intense, affective and embodied encounter. Similarly, people can observe political events, watch the news or listen to political speeches and pre-cognitively parse these through previously experienced cinematic encounters. Connolly summarises this, saying that as you leave a cinema after a movie, ‘numerous thoughts arrive and depart with lightning speed, faster than they could be spoken. Their shape and texture are triggered by a series of encounters between scenes in the film and affective memories they trigger in you’. ⁸⁷ This is further echoed by Shapiro ⁸⁸ who writes that films ‘develop political implications that exceed the particular moments experienced’. Therefore, following this, if audiences encounter affective moments that relate to, for instance, sacrifice leading to victory in a movie, then when political leaders claim that victory is at hand because of the sacrifices that have been made, those cinematic encounters are re-triggered forging the emergent property – condition of success – of sacrifice. Rather than being processed consciously and rationally assessed against the battlefield realities of a particular war, such claims are rather parsed pre-cognitively and the encounter can work to ‘compress diffuse affects into comparably clear and coherent emotions’. ⁸⁹ This can then allow audiences to potentially more readily accept such a political claim as truth due to the mobilisation of feeling.

From this we can see that the political potential of movies is not limited to the narrative of the film itself or some deeper, hidden, meaning, but rather cultural artefacts have potentials that exist beyond this. At the end of a violent and cathartic action blockbuster for instance, viewers leave the cinema feeling that the particular cinematic conflict has been decisively resolved through the utilisation of certain conditions of success that resonate strongly with the reality and political discourse of the War on Terror. Affective and emotional appeals then create a sense of ending for conflict, but without the tricky and detailed legal implications of actual war termination, as discussed briefly in the previous section. As Mandel ⁹⁰ observes, ‘quick and decisive postwar victories silence moral outrage, whether from military personnel involved in the mission, domestic civilians or foreign observers’. Therefore, conditions of success that emerge from the assemblages and are culturally and politically articulated serve to affectively end a conflict but are distinct from and avoid any legal concepts that such a termination might be indexed to. Popular culture, then, in a non-linear fashion and at a pre-cognitive affective level can work to bind certain tropes to ideas of success, and therefore the creation of political patterns of victory. ⁹¹ In the following section I explore this idea through the trope of sacrifice and determination and argue that moments of cinematic intensity embed the idea that sacrifice begets victory.

Victory through sacrifice

While there are multiple possible conditions of success for any war, this article will explore the role of sacrifice and determination. Sacrifice is an interesting condition of success to analyse in more detail because of its frequency in political and cultural discourses on war and its longevity within Western culture. On the former point, President Bush made more than 100 direct references to sacrifice in speeches on the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars while the latter point can be seen from at least as far back as the funeral oration of Pericles during the Peloponnesian Wars. ⁹² The Christian narrative of Christ’s death bringing redemption to humankind also further strengthens this connection between sacrifice and victory within the West, and within the George W. Bush administration in particular. ⁹³ While the emergence of sacrifice as a condition of success is not confined to the War on Terror, the particular resonances between evangelical Christianity, the Bush administration’s deployment of the trope, and the increase in US fatalities during the Iraqi insurgency provide sufficient political salience for this condition to be analysed in detail.

Sacrifice is a common and prominent trope in many movies and the moment of sacrifice within a film can act not just as a denouement but also as an intensive and affective encounter between screen and audience. As discussed above, these encounters can lead to audiences affectively and pre-cognitively associating particular tropes with victory and success, thus making their political deployment more compelling. This section of the article will discuss Children of Men and I am Legend to elucidate what particular affects their depictions of death and sacrifice induce and how these affects produce encounters that allow for conditions of success to emerge from the assemblages. These two movies have been selected to serve as examples not just based on their narratives, or on their perceived importance to the assemblages of the end of wars, but on their critical and commercial success. Children of Men scores 92 and 84 out of 100 on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic respectively both of which aggregate reviews from audiences and critics. ⁹⁴ It was nominated for three Academy Awards and three BAFTAs, winning two of the latter. Although it only grossed a moderate $70 million in its theatrical release it received wide critical acclaim, making the top ten lists of 18 publications and coming number one for five. ⁹⁵ I am Legend was a greater box office hit, grossing more than $500 million at the box office on a budget of $150 million. ⁹⁶ While a bigger commercial success, critical reviews were more muted than for Children of Men with the movie only garnering aggregate scores of 68 and 65 on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic respectively and a number of nominations for lesser awards (Saturn, Screen Actors Guild). ⁹⁷

The two movies therefore represent an interesting cross-section of contemporary Hollywood movies – the big budget, block busting, commercial success that is somewhat unloved by critics, and the less financially rewarding, but critically acclaimed auteur movie. Both movies also engage with visions of the future of humanity from a post-apocalyptic or dystopian angle. Children of Men features the main character, Theo (Clive Owen), travel through the Britain of 2027 where a fertility crisis has stopped people reproducing to ensure that the first child born for more than a decade finds sanctuary with the mysterious Human Project. Dystopian tropes abound in the movie, from the ‘fascist pigs’ of the police and border force to the stark inequalities of wealth and power to the horrors of Bexhill refugee camp. I am Legend takes a more traditionally post-apocalyptic route of the ‘last man on earth’ (and his dog). ⁹⁸ Robert Neville (Will Smith) is an army virologist fighting hordes of ‘Darkseekers’ in a New York devoid of other human life. Taking cues from both post-apocalyptic movies and zombie films, Neville works alone to develop a cure for those mutated by a virus.

Children of Men deliberately utilises Christian narratives with director Alfonso Cuarón saying that he did not want to ‘shy away from spiritual archetypes’. ⁹⁹ This use of religious allusion allows audiences to approach the movie with biblical stories in mind despite the lack of overt Christian symbolism. ¹⁰⁰ For example, the escape from The Fishes, birth of the child in Bexhill refugee camp and flight from both army and armed groups is a similar trajectory to the biblical massacre of the innocents and flight into Egypt. The implication of this is to induce in audiences a feeling that a sacrifice will inevitably be necessary to complete this journey, much as the biblical journey is completed with Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. ¹⁰¹ As will be explored below, the actual moment of sacrifice is also a powerful encounter. Similar Christian eschatological themes can be seen in I am Legend where (in the theatrical release) Neville must sacrifice himself to ensure humanity’s survival. Neville tells the Darkseekers towards the end of the film ‘I can save you. I can help you. You are sick and I can help you. I can fix this. I can save everybody. Let me save you’ before detonating a grenade to allow other survivors to escape. ¹⁰² Again the Christian iconography of redemption, or success, through sacrifice is very clear. However, neither Theo nor Neville sets out with the intention of sacrificing themselves. Rather, both are determined to fulfil the quest on which they embark and achieve a return to the status quo ante: a world without Darkseekers and a world with children. It is their belief in their goals that sees them through the challenges they face and allows them to accept the sacrifices that may be necessary to succeed. While the success of their missions is cinematically predicated on their death, their decisiveness and determination to see it through to the end is key.

Although sacrifice has been part of the religious, cultural and conflictual landscape from antiquity the simultaneity between political and cultural articulations during the War on Terror allows for the affects generated by the films to be more intensive and therefore politically salient. The affective encounter that exists between film and audiences and how this is strengthened by political speech is what allows for the end of wars assemblages to produce emergent properties such as conditions of success. Sacrifice, redemption and victory are explored in I am Legend and Children of Men in some detail and there are several sequences in these films that have strong affective qualities. The final scene of I am Legend, for instance, firmly establishes that despite the initial determination of Neville to continue his work, success only comes through his sacrifice. This scene echoes the last stand narrative of combat and other action films as Neville, Anna (Alice Braga) and Ethan (Charlie Tahan) eventually retreat into the lab/basement of Neville’s house. Cinematically, the orchestral music serves to heighten the emotion of the denouement while the sounds of violence are increasingly muted and the limited colour palette (mostly yellow and orange) focusses the audience’s attention on the impending death. Our last glimpse of Neville is him charging into the leading Darkseeker before being engulfed in flames. The encounter induced by this sequence combines with the concurrent political salience of death during the height of the Iraqi insurgency in 2006–08. The effect of this is that the cinematic encounter serves to construct, circulate and legitimise the idea that one must be determined to keep fighting, whatever the chances and that when deaths occur in the name of righteous causes, those sacrifices beget, and are necessary for, success.

In Children of Men, we see similar cinematic techniques used to highlight the importance of determination and ultimate death and sacrifice to success. During the battle in Bexhill refugee camp, Theo, Kee and her baby descend the stairs of a block of flats being stormed by troops. As the baby cries, the violence begins to slow and stop. There is limited coherent dialogue in this sequence; the music becomes increasingly choral (religious, even); the sound of gunfire is muffled; and the baby’s cries are amplified. The affective power of this moment is to establish the saviour narrative within the film as well as the importance of the sacrifices that have been made to get Kee this far and will be necessary going forward. As they leave the block of flats surrounded by soldiers in awe, kneeling and crossing themselves, the battle suddenly re-erupts and the reverie is broken. The final scene of the movie has Theo, Kee and the baby in a boat seemingly lost in fog. Theo, who has been mortally wounded during the battle, slowly bleeds to death. Just as he collapses, the Tomorrow, the boat of the Human Project, emerges from the fog. The translucency granted by the fog, the image of a man dying to save humankind, the return of the choral music and the promise of redemption by the Human Project are all powerful aspects of this final sequence. The calm that descends around Kee and her child, the sudden violence of the battle restarting and the slow death of Theo in the boat all work to produce an affective encounter that links Theo’s sacrifice with success. As explored in the previous section, such encounters allow for conditions of success, in this case sacrifice, to emerge from the end of wars assemblages. ¹⁰³

The notion of salvation or victory through sacrifice is not only closely linked to the Christian narrative of Christ, but it is also clearly related to common wartime narratives about the sacrifice of soldiers and victims. Already in November 2001, President Bush stated that ‘the American people understand that we’ve got a mighty struggle on our hands and there will be sacrifice. After all, some people made the greatest sacrifice possible on September the 11th’. ¹⁰⁴ In a later speech in 2006 that attempts to refocus attention on Afghanistan, President Bush also said that ‘We live in freedom because of the courage of men like Matthew and Danny [two Navy SEALs killed in action in Afghanistan and awarded the Navy Cross]. And we will honor their sacrifice by completing the mission’. ¹⁰⁵ Not only will victory honour the sacrifices of those killed fighting the War on Terror, but sacrifice is here and in other speeches presented as a necessary step towards victory. Just as the death of Theo and Neville are depicted as necessary for the resolution of the dramatic narrative above, military sacrifices in warfare are here depicted as a necessary step towards success. In other words, it is politically articulated as a condition of success that draws on cinematic, cultural and religious tropes as well as a long history of sacrifice being crucial to victory in war. It is not, of course, that the people referred to here by President Bush intended to sacrifice themselves for some greater good, but rather it was their determination to achieve their goals that allowed their deaths to become meaningful and inculcate the affects necessary for emergence. This determination allows their deaths to become transformed from mere killing to a meaningful sacrifice. Children of Men, I am Legend and the rhetoric of President Bush then articulate the importance of determination and sacrifice for decisive success. The effect of this is that when President Bush claims that a mission will be completed because of the sacrifices of soldiers, he is drawing on audiences’ patterns of thought that sacrifice ultimately brings success. These patterns of thought emerge from the encounters with cinema and function through assemblages to imbue conditions of success with greater power.

In the time period that these movies were released, the Iraqi insurgency was at its height and the troop surge was ongoing. The increased death toll of American soldiers resonates with the depiction of post-apocalyptic or dystopian death and sacrifice on the silver screen and in the two films discussed above. During this time, President Bush made frequent reference to the sacrifices of US and coalition troops in the Iraqi insurgency. A good example is in March 2006 when he says that

you’re helping to change this part of the world, and change the world with your courage and your sacrifice. I assure you that this government of yours will not blink, we will not yield. We’re on the right course, and the world is going to be a better place because of your service. ¹⁰⁶

This is despite the fact that there is no necessary causal battlefield link between sacrifice and success. ¹⁰⁷ After all, all parties to a conflict must sacrifice, but not all of them can win. However, the condition of sacrifice is politically articulated as determination to see the mission through. If we are able to do this, then the sacrifices in Afghanistan and Iraq cannot have been in vain. Therefore, we must and we will prevail. In other words, there is a logical connection made between the political and military determination to continue in a (claimed) righteous struggle, sacrifice and the claim that we will win, we are winning or we have already won. Just as the decisive victory over the Darkseekers in I am Legend is predicated on Neville’s sacrifice or the survival of the infant in Children of Men necessitates Theo’s death; decisive victory in war is – partly – rhetorically built on sacrifice. Or, to put it another way, sacrifices are constructed here as not just necessary for victory but victory can be portrayed as decisive if sacrifices have been made. As above, this resonates with the culturally pre-primed patterns of thought in audiences that have been inculcated through affective cinematic encounters of sacrifice begetting victory.

Accounts of salvation through sacrifice are deeply embedded in the Christian tradition, historical accounts of war and manifest in many cultural artefacts from Pericles to Tony Stark. Nonetheless, the concurrence of the political and the cultural, in this time and against the backdrop of escalating violence and death in Iraq, suggests that the resonance machine at play is strongly intensified by the encounters described above. These encounters, building on the deep embeddedness of these tropes, allow sacrifice to emerge from the end of wars assemblages as a powerful and persuasive political, discursive and material tool to claim that these wars have or will end in victory for the USA.

Conclusion

It has been said that it is easier to start a war than end one, and this article has hopefully highlighted the inherent complexity of war termination. There are multiple factors that contribute to the end of a war and while this article has been mostly concerned with the cultural, that is not to claim that other factors are not important, or less significant in our analysis of how and why wars end. ¹⁰⁸ The existing literature on war termination, dominated as it is by a focus on rational choice, utility maximisation and cost-benefit analyses has narrowed our understanding of the cessation of armed hostilities. Given the ambiguities and challenges of contemporary warfare, but the lingering public and political desire for a decisive conclusion, this leads to a lacuna in our understanding of this important process. By engaging with the cultural, the discursive and the affective, we can begin the process of creating a more comprehensive picture of how wars are brought to a conclusion and how political claims to relative successes and failures are articulated, accepted and challenged.

The end of wars assemblages, as presented in this article, is an attempt to open up a debate about how we conceptualise complex social phenomena such as war and bring non-traditional artefacts and understandings to bear on our knowledge of them. Thinking through the affective power of popular culture and the ways in which it resonates with political discourse to not only construct certain meanings, but also to allow them to become embedded within audiences is a useful technique to explore how wars end. My argument is that the affective encounter induced by cultural artefacts such as cinema allows for the emergence of conditions of success such as, inter alia, sacrifice. These conditions of success, when politically utilised carry significantly more power and weight because audiences have pre-primed patterns of thought to connect them with victory. Of course, there will be multiple intersecting, contradictory and mutually reinforcing conditions of success that emerge from the complexity of politico-cultural interaction, but this article has focussed on just one as an example of how assemblages of the end of wars can be a useful analytical tool to understand how claims around victory are created, circulated and legitimised. Sacrifice as a condition of success has a long history dating back at least to antiquity and is in a constant process of change and evolution. While not teleological in direction, it is perhaps useful to capture a moment in time to explore the political import of it. The Iraqi insurgency and troop surge of 2006–08 was a moment of heightened political pressure around death and increased questioning of the legitimacy and chances of success of the War on Terror. Despite this, it was also a period where much political rhetoric was focussed on claiming decisive victories were being achieved or were at hand. As such, this has proved to be a useful illustration of how politics, culture and war interact to produce particular meanings through encounters, affects and the assemblages of the end of wars.

To conclude, this article has argued that popular culture is an important site of political meaning making and that through affective encounters, movies can have a strong impact on the emergence of conditions of success in war. Conceptualising all of this through the end of wars assemblages allows for an engagement with affect that moves our understanding of politico-cultural interaction beyond the intertextual. The end of wars assemblages and their emergent properties are not, however, static entities and are always subjected to forces that strengthen them and weaken them, stabilise them and destabilise them and code and decode them and should be explored in further research. Engaging with popular culture to understand how affective encounters help to produce the end of wars is a critical and novel intervention into the study of International Relations, questions of how wars end, the interaction between politics and culture, and critical approaches to security. By understanding the crucial question of how endings to conflict are culturally created we can begin to ask questions of how, why and to what end these conflicts have been concluded and how, why and to what end they may start again.