This dissertation produces the first attempt to bring the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the political theory literature on citizenship into dialogue with the scholarship on American empire in the field of International Relations (IR). It explores how the United States’ quest for global pre-eminence, mirrored by the war in Iraq, reveals and exacerbates the social wounds at the seams of American society. To do this, it introduces three new concepts to the field of International Relations. It builds on historian Christophe Charle’s sociological framework of “imperial society” and “national habitus” (2001, 2004 and 2005) and introduces an original concept, the field of citizenship, to examine social conflict over the distribution of military sacrifice amongst citizens in the United States. Finally, it explores these tensions by looking at multiple documentary sources, including over 200 newspaper articles, 60 testimonies about the war from soldiers and their relatives, congressional documents, and military manpower policies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OOU-OLD./19808 |
| Date | 10 March 2011 |
| Creators | Olsen, Florian B. |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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