War is often studied through its horrors: death, injury, violence, trauma, barbarity, and destruction. Unsurprisingly, when international relations theorists—and the public at large— think about human experiences in war, it is usually in relation to these forms of suffering.
However, personal accounts from soldiers, humanitarians, and journalists reveal that war also generates a range of pleasurable experiences. My work investigates the overlooked dimension of pleasure in war and the implications of its exclusion from how we think about war.
Drawing on interviews with 32 noncombatants who worked in Afghanistan during the most recent war, as well as memoirs and poetry by war workers across various conflicts, my research identifies a wide array of pleasures that are largely absent from current thinking, including job satisfaction, emotional connection, meaning, purpose, excitement, pride and more.
These accounts reveal that pleasure, far from being an anomaly, permeates daily life in war. By centring the experiences of war workers who report feeling good in war, I challenge dominant narratives that reduce war to fighting and trauma. It seeks to expand what counts as legitimate knowledge about war and highlights the moralism embedded in war studies.
Excluding pleasure from the study of war allows war to be framed as something that only sadists or sociopaths could enjoy. This thesis proposes that to truly understand war, we must take its pleasures as seriously as its horrors.
Pleasure is as intrinsic to war as pain and death, and ignoring it purifies war in a way that helps make it more palatable. War is easier to comprehend when it is exclusively awful. I argue that by focusing only on its terrible aspects, vast as they are, we offer ourselves a comfortable, sanitised version of war that may even contribute to its endurance.