What is it about?
In this article we return to WikiLeaks' infamous "Collateral Murder" video to offer an analysis of the way military operatives orient to violence as work. The article focuses on the forms of action and practical reasoning that are part and parcel of combat operations. These are not things we normally have much access to. However, as a result of a series of high profile releases by organisations like WikiLeaks, we have access to videos which show us what soldiers were doing as they were doing it in a small number of incidents. We demonstrate how that data can be used to provide insight into combat operations.
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Why is it important?
We lack access to the everyday practices that characterise military operations. When we gain access, as social scientists we should make the most of it. That requires an engagement with the details of incidents and how they unfolded. This article demonstrates one way of approaching an analysis in those terms, drawing on work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis to do so.
Perspectives
This paper is the first our collaborative group of researchers has done on the "collateral murder" incident. It is difficult material to engage with and we have tried to lay out the practical logics that underpinned the actions of the military personnel involved. We think such engagements are important because it is easy to reach conclusions prematurely, particularly when working with a video which artificially forefronts a single perspective - that of the viewpoint of the aircraft the video centres on - in a distributed and collaborative work environment. By focusing on what the aircrews were doing together with others and how they organised that in real-time, we hope to have provided a different kind of foundation for assessments of what took place during the incident.
Dr Michael Mair
University of Liverpool
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Violence as work: Ethnomethodological insights into military combat operations., Psychology of Violence, May 2018, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/vio0000173.
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