Citizens in Camouflage: the Production of the Means of Violence in the Everyday

This thesis is motivated by ordinary objects that are produced for violence, and the extra-ordinary story of a farmer turned gallows-exporter, and asks in what ways do civilians participate and contribute to the production of the means of violence? This question is embedded in a broader social context in which state-sanctioned violence and its production typically is attributed to distinct militarised agents, whereas civilians are seen to not take part in any of these dynamics and thus hold no agency in the production of it.
Recent scholarship on militarisation has called into question the assumption of a peaceful and non-violent civilian sphere that is encroached upon by military agents and raised the question of how to transcend the civil/military dichotomy. In building on these, I argue that we need to take agency seriously and scrutinise how different spheres are established. I draw on Marxist and Feminist thought that takes the agency of the civil seriously, and empirically explore what work the civil is doing, through a multi-sited ethnographic approach. Taking the objects produced for collective violence and their design as a starting point, I follow them to the people who promote, design, produce, and contest their existence. I argue that the production of the means of violence takes place beyond a narrow security and defence sphere and set out to empirically explore this sphere. In so doing I trace what work the civil is doing in a literal sense, as well as how this work is rendered invisible. I am highlighting the civil as a force in the production of the means of violence and trace how it depoliticises its own contribution. The civil is thus integral to the integration of violence into broader logics of capitalism.