About the book, from the publisher:
Military Victory Beyond the Battlefield rethinks hegemonic understandings of military victory as the outcome of war by focusing on the relationship between victory and time. While International Relations and War Studies increasingly recognise that the boundaries between war and peace are blurry, military victory is still conceptualised as an event that brings war to cessation and restores peace.--Marshal Zeringue
Instead, this book argues that victory is a temporal, sense-making device. It shows that victory is produced just as much outside the battlefield as on it, during both wartime and peacetime. Palestrino demonstrates that the end of war has little to do with warfighting. Wars are made to end through a series of victory practices that seek to clearly mark a conflict's temporal boundaries to convince key audiences of its definitive outcome.
Analysing exhibitions of military tattoos, war memorials, commemoration rituals, doctrine manuals, history textbooks and videogames, this book shows that, as soon as we stop looking for victory in the usual places, a plurality of wartimes comes to the surface and the assumption that victory ends war is cast into doubt. It also shows that attending to these victory practices and their politics is important because they can appear to be peaceful yet conceal overlooked forms of violence.
