From Complicit Citizens to Potential Prey: State Imaginaries and Subjectivities in US War Resistance

Introduction

Three years into the Vietnam War, a fledgling group calling itself the Resistance ¹ began urging young men to engage in acts of non-cooperation – to return their draft cards, relinquish deferments, and refuse induction – as a way of actualizing their opposition to the war. Through widespread draft resistance they hoped to delegitimate and disrupt the functioning of the Selective Service System and, by extension, the war itself. For its first major action, the Resistance organized a national draft card turn-in on 16 October 1967. On that day nearly one thousand young men returned their draft cards, while countless more burned theirs, at rallies or in somber ceremonies from Boston to San Francisco. They acted in violation of the law, willingly assuming the risk of a potential five-year prison term. ² Many did so because they understood themselves to be personally responsible for the war. An early Resistance call-to-action captured this sensibility:

We act because we must – because our lives, lived in complicity with the military slavery and dehumanized fanaticism of our nation’s dance of death, have become meaningless. We look up from our studies, from our work, from the amusements American society provides, and we know the crimes committed in our names. We see insanity’s picture every day in our newspaper and we read the day’s reports of torture and mass murder and we know that we have been silent too long. We can turn away no longer. Only our massive, united resistance will turn our nation from its course of destruction. ³

They understood themselves to be complicit, as citizens, in the ‘crimes committed in [their] names’, and were thereby compelled to resist.

Thirty-six years later, with the United States at war in Iraq, peace activists began to promote counter-recruitment work as a way to interfere ‘in a material way with the government’s ability to wage its wars’. ⁴ A number of organizations had been engaged in counter-recruitment work since the 1970s, but the movement swelled in response to the Iraq War. In addition to counseling youth on alternatives to military service, it has focused on lobbying local school districts to restrict military recruiters’ access to students. Rather than describing themselves as complicit citizens, counter-recruitment activists are more likely to foreground their felt vulnerability to military predation. In a flier outlining ways that students, parents, and communities could get involved in counter-recruitment work, the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft noted:

There is a lot of concern right now about how war may affect our children, loved ones, friends and ourselves. … People should be worried about the impact of war and of a possible draft on themselves and their loved ones, but they should also be concerned about the many others who might be taken or recruited by the military. And everyone should worry about the long-term consequences of our country when we let the Pentagon expand its influence in elementary, middle and high schools. That’s where the seeds of war and militarism are planted, and that’s where we can do something to stop it! ⁵

In this flier, as elsewhere in movement discourse, those targeted by the Pentagon are American youth (not Iraqis). This sense of embattlement impels counter-recruitment work, calling forth collective efforts to defend local communities.

These two quotes capture something of the different subjectivities at play in the draft resistance and counter-recruitment movements: one complicit, the other potentially victimized. In each, however, there is an unmistakable sense of agency: through collective action, each affirms, people can do something to stop war and militarism. This belief – that structures are not immutable, that culture can be transformed, that the people united can have an effect – is a necessary precondition of any protest movement, as scholars of social movements have long noted. McAdam (1999), for one, stresses the importance of ‘cognitive liberation’, a process suggestive of a conversion experience, of coming to ‘see the light’ and oneself in a new way. Much of the literature on the ideational moment of social movements is premised on this conversion model, asking how movements (attempt to) catalyze a change in consciousness amongst potential supporters or the wider public, whether through framing issues in a particular way (Snow and Benford, 1988; Snow et al., 1986), educating others into a group’s ideology (Oliver and Johnston, 2000), or shocking people into consciousness with powerful symbols and images (Jasper and Poulsen, 1995).

For people to experience something like cognitive liberation – recognizing both their (collective) agency and a system’s malleability – is undoubtedly important. But we need to ask more than whether or under what conditions actors have experienced a coming to consciousness: we need to also understand something of the texture and content of that consciousness. We need to understand how movement participants see themselves as actors in relation to larger structures and cultural formations. Piven (2006) points to the importance of this when she notes that (to be effective) people not only need to believe that systems are malleable, they also must recognize the critical role they play in the everyday functioning of those systems, and thus the power they wield in their threatened or actual withdrawal of cooperation. That is, movement actors must understand themselves as subjects in an interdependent relation with the systems they seek to change. Piven’s formulation points to an important set of questions: how do movement actors see themselves as subjects on a terrain of struggle? in relation to the broader structures they seek to change? and, what shapes these understandings?

This paper offers a partial answer to this constellation of questions by drawing attention to the way that the respective subjectivities of draft resisters and counter-recruitment activists are conditioned by and intertwined with different assumptions about the nature of the state they confront. I call these sets of assumptions ‘state imaginaries’. Situated in different eras, the draft resistance and counter-recruitment movements were steeped in distinct ways of imagining the state which created different subject positions for war resisters in each moment. As I demonstrate below, the state imaginary shaping draft resistance during the Vietnam War was of a state based fundamentally on the consent of the people. This state imaginary situated draft resisters as complicit citizens, responsible for the war being waged in their name. In contrast, the state imaginary informing counter-recruitment work during the Iraq War severed state from society and cast the state as an alien and invasive force in local communities and individuals’ private lives. This state imaginary situated counter-recruitment activists as embattled subjects vulnerable to state predation.

To develop this argument, I begin in the next section by explaining the notion of state imaginaries in more detail. Subsequent sections describe how draft resisters and counter-recruitment activists saw themselves as subjects situated on a terrain of struggle, confronting, in each case, a dimension of state power concretized in and by the military. These case studies inform the concluding reflections on how state imaginaries matter for (understanding) political subjectivities and the possibilities for effective struggle in different historical eras.

Theorizing State Imaginaries

The notion of state imaginaries I develop in this paper is inspired by Philip Abrams’ (1988) insightful work on the state-idea. Drawing out a thread implicit in Marxist theorizing on the state from Marx (1978 [1843]) through Miliband (1969), Abrams notes that ‘the state’ as such does not exist but is instead an effect of ideology, a moment of mystification and reification in which ‘the actual disunity of political power’ is glossed in a coherent image of ‘the state’ (p. 79). To capture these different dimensions – the real tension-ridden exercise of power, and its sanitized, legitimating image – Abrams suggests that we distinguish between the state-system and the state-idea. The state-system refers to the constellation of actually existing agencies, policies, and personnel which often work at cross-purposes or pursue different logics. It includes the administration, legislature, and courts; the various branches of civil service; and the military and intelligence agencies – from the federal level down to the municipal (Miliband, 1969). None of these particular sites of state power is itself monolithic or uniform, and taken together they are even less so. To speak of ‘the state’ is to impose coherence where none in fact exists and to effectively reify the state as a thing. The state-idea, for Abrams, is the image of coherence that is constructed and reified: it is ‘the res publica, the public reification’ (p. 82). Encouraging greater attention to the state-idea, Abrams argues that ‘we should recognize the cogency of the idea of the state as an ideological power and treat that as a compelling object of analysis’ (p. 79).

A developing literature exploring the construction of the state in discourse and practice has responded to this call (Aretxaga, 2003; Gupta, 1995; Mitchell, 1991; Taussig, 1992; Yang, 2005). Some authors working in this vein have explored how the state is imagined from the bottom up by subaltern groups. Arguing that the state is imagined differently by differently situated groups, they draw attention to the possibility of political struggle over whose vision of the state will prevail (Gupta, 1995; Yang, 2005). While inspired by this approach, I want to shift the emphasis in this paper from the agency of actors imagining the state in particular ways to the question of how state imaginaries, circulating within a given cultural-historical milieu, situate actors and shape their subjectivities.

Rather than presuming subjects prior to and outside of the work of imagining the state, the approach I develop through this paper stresses the way that subjects are constituted in and through a given state imaginary. It is here that I draw upon a second strand of theorizing, namely, philosophical and anthropological work on social imaginaries. According to Charles Taylor (2002: 106–7), social imaginaries express a ‘common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy’ (see also Anderson, 1991; Gaonkar, 2002; Strauss, 2006). Imaginaries encode a set of expectations and normative understandings of how people relate to one another, and are part of the ‘background’, ‘that largely unstructured and inarticulate understanding of our whole situation’ (Taylor, 2002: 107). Unlike theories (to which they are nevertheless related), imaginaries are not given developed form, but are instead more diffuse, more implicit, finding expression in ‘images, stories, and legends’ (Taylor, 2002: 106–7; see also Angenot, 2004; Somers and Block, 2005). Akin to what James Jasper (1997: 154–9) calls a sensibility, imaginaries include unelaborated affective responses and moral orientations that shape more deliberate normative commitments, discourse, and action. The notion of state imaginaries that I employ here thus refers to implicit assumptions about the nature of the state, which are reflected in more explicit metaphors and stories about political life.

Studying State Imaginaries in Social Movement Discourse

In order to draw out the implicit cultural assumptions about the state – the state imaginaries – informing draft resistance and counter-recruitment work, I use movement ephemera as a contemporaneous record of how activists understood themselves and the terrain of struggle at the time. The following discussion draws from movement discourse found in fliers, calls-to-action, pamphlets, manuals, essays, posters, and videos.

For the draft resistance movement, I made use of archival materials found in The Social Protest Collection of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley and in the Foley Papers of the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. The Bancroft Library holdings consist primarily of ephemera produced by Bay Area chapters of the Resistance, but also include some documents from the Chicago-based anti-draft organization CADRE, as well as materials related to draft board raids by the ‘Ultra-Resistance’ (see Ferber and Lynd, 1971; Peters, 2012). The Foley Papers consist of a range of materials related to draft resistance in Boston, including letters written by resisters to their local draft boards and other personal and collective statements explaining resisters’ actions. In addition to these archival materials, I also examined published pamphlets (e.g. Catonsville Nine, 1969), essays (e.g. Goodman, 1969), an edited volume of resisters’ personal statements (Lynd, 1968), and contemporaneous secondary analyses (Ferber and Lynd, 1971; Thorne, 1971, 1975; Useem, 1973).

For the counter-recruitment movement, I approached organizational websites as an archive. To identify organizations doing counter-recruitment work, I began with the National Network Opposed to the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY) and Leave My Child Alone! (LMCA) (noted in Tannock, 2005), and then constructed a snowball sample by following the suggested links on each organization’s website. The final sample included documents produced by the Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD), including back issues of their newsletter, Draft NOtices; Project YANO; Not Your Soldier; and a handful of local or regional organizations. I also analyzed published counter-recruitment manuals (Allison and Solnit, 2007; War Resisters League, 2006) and examined the counter-recruitment work of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC); the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors (CCCO); and Code Pink.

In analyzing these documents, I adopted what Levitas (2007: 61) describes as an archaeological approach to discourse analysis, ‘read[ing] back from … fragments a more total picture of the social origin of those shards’. As implicit understandings, state imaginaries are subterranean; they do not announce themselves, but must be ‘excavated and reconstructed’ through an interpretive process that entails a ‘mixture of evidence, deduction, and imagination, representing as whole something of which only fragments are actually available’ (p. 61). In order to excavate and reconstruct the state imaginaries circulating in draft resistance and counter-recruitment discourse, I used emergent coding to generate a catalog of the issues and themes (in short: frames) invoked by each movement. Once I created this catalog of frames, I then identified the common threads or underlying assumptions within each movement’s discourse, by examining what those frames, read holistically, revealed about how movement actors understood the state and themselves as political subjects. Although my approach was primarily inductive, my analysis of the frames and underlying imaginaries embedded in each movement’s discourse necessarily unfolded in an iterative process: all documents were subjected to multiple rounds of coding, in part to look for disconfirming data, as my interpretation – that is, as my efforts at reconstruction – took shape.

Following Taylor’s (2002: 106) suggestion that we will find imaginaries expressed in ‘images, stories, and legends’, I focused particularly on the metaphors each movement deployed. It is worth noting that the two movements differed significantly in their styles of communication: whereas the draft resistance movement produced dense, double-sided fliers and introspective essays, alongside the occasional political cartoon, the counter-recruitment movement made much greater use of visual imagery and produced more how-to advice than personal reflection. The ephemera produced by each movement are thus not entirely comparable, but there is little reason to believe that these differences in form and style could account for the observed differences in content, that is, in the metaphors each movement used. My focus here is on those metaphors, whether rendered in prose or through visual images. The following discussion explicates and contrasts two of these metaphors: draft resisters’ claim to be the ‘bricks and mortar’ of the state, and counter-recruitment activists’ casting of military recruiters as child predators.

The Bricks and Mortar of the State

During the years of the Vietnam War, there were far more young men of draft age than were needed for military service. According to General Hershey, Director of the Selective Service System (SSS), the administrative challenge was not in procuring bodies for war, but rather in ‘channeling’ an entire generation of draft registrants, through a complex system of educational and occupational deferments, into pursuits that served the national interest: encouraging some to pursue degrees in engineering, others to teach; some to work in agriculture to feed the nation, others to serve in the military. ⁶ Draft resisters recognized that their consent was integral to this process, to the functioning of the Selective Service more generally, and thus to the continued execution of the war in Vietnam. Indeed, resisters understood the state to be ultimately dependent on the consent of the people. Whatever technical capacity the state might have, however much it might shape lives and behavior, the state continued to depend upon the cooperation of people acting out their expected roles. If resisters saw the Selective Service as a ‘system which manipulates … lives for the purposes of death and repression’, they went on to argue that they were ‘the bricks and mortar of that System’ which could ‘exist only with [their] acquiescence’. ⁷ In an extended iteration of this point, Resistance co-founder David Harris (who served 20 months in prison for refusing induction) warned against externalizing the Selective Service as an alien force:

[C]onscription does not exist without you and me. That system of conscription is not General Hershey. It is not Lyndon Johnson. It is not any Congressman or Senator who voted upon that bill. It is not any one of the little old ladies that shuffle the daily papers of the SSS. Military conscription is every man that carries a draft card. You and I are the bricks and mortar of that system. And the most elaborate bureaucracy for selective service in the world does not function without people such as you and me willing to sign our lives over to that system. ⁸

If the Selective Service operated by channeling young men into different pursuits, it could not do so without individuals’ willingness to seek educational and occupational deferments. ‘In America all young men are conscripted’, a Resistance flyer directed at college students noted. ‘Some train in the university, “in the national interest.” Others fight and die in Vietnam for the same interest. While students are usually white, middle-class, and well-educated, soldiers are more often non-white, poor and uneducated.’ Draft resisters fell mostly into the first category and thus were those least vulnerable to being drafted. Resisters were overwhelmingly students and clergy eligible for deferments, conscientious objectors, and those ineligible for the draft due to age or gender. They recognized their privilege and moved to renounce it, pushing others to do likewise: ‘You are privileged, by choice or chance. But it is a privilege which you request: as long as you stay in college and satisfy your local board that you are progressing normally they will give you a [deferred draft status of] 2-S.’ Counseling their peers that it was necessary ‘to deny its deferments, its orders, its legitimacy in our lives’, the Resistance stressed that the ‘draft is nothing more than the consent of all the young people like us all around the country; it is our willingness to ask for a privilege, and to do what the state wishes in order to keep it’. ⁹

The state imaginary thus circulating in draft resistance discourse was of a state based fundamentally on consent. Because imaginaries provide a way of making sense of one’s relation to others and larger social structures, ‘they are the means by which individuals understand their identities and their place in the world’ (Gaonkar, 2002: 4). In this way, they imply certain kinds of subjects and not others. The imaginary of a state based on consent positioned draft resisters as subjects with leverage in their capacity to refuse. As the Resistance pointed out: ‘the basis of [the SSS’s] power is our acquiescence, and our refusal to acquiesce exposes the System’s acute vulnerability’. ¹⁰ The Resistance maintained that they could ‘dismantle’ the Selective Service ‘by openly refusing to cooperate with it’. ¹¹ After all, they were the bricks and mortar – the constituent elements – of the state, giving it form through their willingness to be slotted into place. While it was not the only tactic employed by the draft resistance movement, non-cooperation was a logical extension of this state imaginary: in an act of non-cooperation, consent was withdrawn, and with this (they believed) the state’s power could be disrupted, shaken, perhaps even smashed. In one of the most straightforward declarations of this position, they argued simply: ‘The government has no power except that which we the people give it. And if we withdraw our cooperation, the government will collapse.’ ¹²

The state imaginary circulating within the draft resistance movement not only positioned resisters as capacious actors, it positioned them also as complicit citizens. This engendered a profound sense of responsibility amongst resisters: they understood themselves to be personally responsible for state policies and their consequences. This sensibility can be seen in a Service of Rededication held at the Arlington Street Church in Boston on 29 January 1968, the day when five men active in the draft resistance movement – including pediatrician Dr Spock and Yale Chaplain William Sloan Coffin – were arraigned on conspiracy charges. The rededication aspect of the service came in the form of a responsive reading, which rehearsed some of the ways individuals continued to give the state tacit consent, through their acquiescence and participation, despite their avowed opposition to the war:

The specter of being the American equivalent of a ‘good German’, one who was complicit through silence and inaction in that which the state wrought, was pervasive throughout the draft and antiwar movements of the 1960s (DeBenedetti and Chatfield, 1990; Farrell, 1997). References to the Holocaust were coupled frequently with invocations of the Nuremberg Principles, which define an ethic of personal responsibility that both ties individuals to the state and makes individuals ultimately responsible for their own actions, whatever state sanction they may have had. In a letter to his draft board explaining his non-cooperation, one resister wrote that the Nuremberg Principles entailed ‘a view of personal responsibility’ to which he ‘wholeheartedly subscribe[d]’ and emphasized, quoting directly from Principle IV, that ‘the fact that a person acted pursuant to orders of his government or of a superior DOES NOT FREE HIM OF RESPONSIBILITY under international law’. ¹⁴ The movement interpreted these Principles broadly: they did not apply only to the soldier in the jungles of Vietnam or the young man facing induction, but to all citizens, who were personally responsible for wars carried out in their names. This sense of personal responsibility for the war was larger than the instance of the draft, and reflected a fundamental understanding of what it meant to be a citizen in those years.

Antonio Gramsci (1971: 337) suggests that social change occurs in part when subaltern groups shed their fatalism and begin to recognize their own capacity to act, to see themselves endowed with will, responsibility, and initiative. But he also notes that at no time are actors truly without those capacities; they only see themselves as ‘non-things’ and ‘non-responsibility’ when in a weak position. The state imaginary circulating within and beyond the draft resistance movement created a powerful subject position for would-be resisters. As the bricks and mortar of the state, draft resisters understood themselves to be ultimately and personally responsible for the defoliation, displacement, and death occurring in Vietnam. This sense of responsibility called for committed action:

Now is a time when every American must, if he is to survive, re-evaluate and understand the implications of his way of life to his fellow man. If a woman is burned painfully to death, and a young boy has his jaw melted to his chest because of the actions of our government, there is a terrible brotherhood we must express, and it cannot be expressed in a letter to the Times, or through a couple of pleasant marches down Market Street. It must be expressed through actions which stem from a total commitment to end such suffering, and a total readiness to accept all the consequences those actions imply. ¹⁵

Notions of complicity and ‘terrible brotherhood’ that infused the draft resistance movement find little, if any, echo in the discourse of the counter-recruitment movement. They were affective accompaniments to a state imaginary that linked state and citizens together in a relation of mutuality premised on consent and cooperation. And while this republican imaginary has not completely disappeared from the political landscape, it has been superseded – as I will demonstrate below. Before turning to the state imaginary informing counter-recruitment work, however, it is worth pausing a moment to consider how the nature of military recruitment has changed since the Vietnam era.

Interlude: Changes in Military Recruitment

In 1973, the draft was replaced by the All-Volunteer Force (AVF). This did not mark a simple administrative shift in the nature of military manpower procurement, but instead introduced a new logic to military service, one intimately tied to an emergent neoliberalism. While draft resistance and active-duty GI resistance (see Cortright, 2005; Lembcke, 1998; Moser, 1996) played a critical role in delegitimating the draft, the vision for the All-Volunteer Force that would replace it came from a group of neoliberal economists, among them Milton Friedman, one of the earliest proponents of the AVF. Friedman (1974 [1967]) argued that the military would function more efficiently and effectively, and at a lower overall cost, if market dynamics were introduced – that is, if wages and benefits were improved to make enlistment an appealing economic choice. Friedman also advocated the AVF on the grounds that it would preserve individual freedom against the threat of state encroachment: if Friedman decried channeling as much as draft resisters did, his reasons for doing so had little to do with conscience or complicity and more to do with the investments in human capital that were imperiled by a system that could snatch young men from their chosen paths at any time. Despite serious reservations from top military officials, the neoliberals’ vision was actualized, and in the shift to the AVF, the Army increased pay, relaxed grooming standards, and began to market itself by emphasizing individual opportunity and personal enrichment (Bailey, 2007). The AVF was concatenated with neoliberal principles, privileging individual choice over the obligations of citizenship, and relied increasingly on market research and advertising campaigns to reach potential recruits. Some 30 years after this shift, the counter-recruitment movement would oppose the military’s recruiting efforts, but in a way that curiously echoed Friedman’s concerns about individual choice in the face of state encroachment (Brissette, 2013). To understand why counter-recruitment activists did not raise issues of complicity or consent in the way that draft resisters once did, we must examine the state imaginary informing their work.

State Predation, Youth as Prey

With the shift to the AVF, the military has directed significant resources to reaching students in their schools. Reading this as an ‘intrusion’ into or ‘invasion of our schools, our communities and our future’, ¹⁶ activists have framed public schools as the critical battleground in counter-recruitment work (Anderson, 2009; Friesen, 2014; Harding and Kershner, 2011; Kershner and Harding, 2014). Citing the manual of the Army’s School Recruiting Program, counter-recruitment activists point out that military recruiters seek ‘“school ownership” and “total market penetration” by insinuating themselves into the social and cultural fabric of public schools and colleges’ (Mariscal, 2004). This ‘penetration’ takes myriad forms, from JROTC programs (Bartlett and Lutz, 1998) and the administration of the military jobs assessment test (the ASVAB) to high-tech military adventure vans, rifle ranges, and obstacle courses on school campuses. The language of invasion, intrusion, and penetration here offers a window into the state imaginary informing counter-recruitment work, casting the prerogative dimension of state power, concretized in the military, as an alien and threatening force.

Within counter-recruitment discourse, the threatening nature of state power finds its most evocative expression in the trope of military recruiters as child predators, a trope that appears on posters and fliers, in educational videos, and even in the policy recommendations of the American Public Health Association. One poster depicts three young soldiers at attention before a senior officer, under the caution: ‘WARNING: child predators operate here’. Below the picture, it continues: ‘military recruiters like to prey on unsuspecting people’. In another image, a deranged, drooling figure in uniform peers through a telescope while his hand rests on a book of student records; along the bottom of the poster are the words ‘campus predator’. In a third, more subtle, take on the theme, a talon covers the top third of the frame, while underneath a mouse scurries upright on rear feet, book in hand. The mouse is little more than a rectangle, with two rounded ears, one substantially larger than the other, and a nose pointing off to the left. The mouse doubles as mother and child: the rounded ears of the mouse serving as heads, the mouse’s nose the outstretched arm of a young child being carried by his mother. In case the image itself does not convey the message, the viewer is warned: ‘DON’T FALL PREY TO FALSE INFORMATION’. ¹⁷ This latter image is particularly striking in the way it infantilizes those targeted by the military. Although the movement is concerned with an increasing military presence in elementary schools, the text alludes to the movement refrain that ‘recruiters lie’ (Gilberd, 2004; Brissette, 2013). And those most at risk of falling prey to false information, to recruiter promises of educational opportunities or job training, are those on the cusp of adulthood – not babes in arms.

As this last image exemplifies, the metaphor of military recruiters as child predators positions adolescents and young adults as inherently vulnerable and interpellates adults as their protectors. The Leave My Child Alone! (LMCA) coalition instantiates this in its very name and underscores the point further with an illustration placed prominently at the top of its website. The image depicts a mother situated between her young son (whose short stature suggests he is 10, maybe 12, years old) and a recruiter (who had been hiding in the bushes, but is now standing, branches affixed to his hat). The recruiter extends an enlistment contract and pen while the mother stands, fists clenched, ready to strike. ¹⁸ If military recruiters are child predators, then adults must be vigilant, ever ready to intervene. In an educational video directed at parents that LMCA produced, one mother describes the rescue of her adolescent son from a recruiting center: ‘We felt like they were taking him away and isolating him so they could work on him some more, and it was frightening. … [W]e just both grabbed him by the arms and said “we have to go right now.”’ She then invokes the child predator metaphor: ‘It doesn’t seem right. I mean, you warn your kids not to take candy from strangers, but you don’t think that you’re going to have to warn them to not take Xboxes from recruiters.’ ¹⁹ Elaborating the metaphor, two scholar-activists involved in counter-recruitment work in Seattle published an article in the American Journal of Public Health, arguing that recruiters engage in ‘behaviors [that] are remarkably similar to those psychologists characterize as predatory grooming, defined as “the process by which a child is befriended by a would-be abuser in an attempt to gain the child’s confidence and trust, enabling them to get the child to acquiesce to abusive activity”’ (Hagopian and Barker, 2011: 21). ²⁰

The metaphor of military recruiters as child predators, and the imaginary of the state as an alien and invasive force more generally, positions adults in the movement in a protective role: it is their job to be vigilant and involved, and to do what they can to keep the predators at bay. Thus, they have attempted to carve out and secure ‘demilitarized zones’ in local communities, mostly through lobbying local school districts and at least one state legislature to restrict recruiters’ access to students. (This is often done in the name of preserving family privacy against state intrusion.) The work and advocacy of Hagopian and Barker, among others, has also led the American Public Health Association (APHA) to release a policy statement calling for the cessation of military recruiting in public schools. This statement marks a clear victory for the movement, which has pursued a strategy of trying to secure ‘incremental gains’ within various institutions (Harding and Kershner, 2011: 102). These victories are undoubtedly important, especially when the demilitarized schools are those serving working-class youth of color who are most likely to be targeted by the military (see e.g. Kershner and Harding, 2014: 254–5). At the same time, however, the APHA statement strikingly strips youth of agency and responsibility. In arguing that military recruiting poses a public health threat, the APHA (2012) stresses adolescent vulnerability and declares youth incapable of making a considered decision about military enlistment: ‘Given their limitations in judging risk at this stage in life, [adolescents] are … unable to fully evaluate the consequences of making a choice to enter the military.’ It follows that adults must ensure their safety. In these examples, the metaphor of predation reflects an underlying state imaginary that renders the state as an alien and invasive force and positions youth as vulnerable, rather than capacious, subjects.

The metaphor of predation appears in youth-led counter-recruitment work as well, entailing a similar sense of vulnerability – vulnerability is, after all, inherent in the notion of predation – but tempered somewhat by a greater awareness of youth’s own agency. Not Your Soldier, a youth-led project affiliated with the War Resisters League, produced an agit-prop video, for example, which employed the metaphor of predation, albeit shifting from recruiters-as-predators to a more systemic military-as-beast-of-prey. ²¹ The video cast youth as the ‘fresh meat’ that ‘the beast’ needs to survive. If youth were thus vulnerable, the video went on to suggest that the military was dependent on them: ‘they need to recruit lots of fresh meat every year to feed the war machine’. The military’s dependency gives youth some leverage: they can ‘starve the beast’ by refusing to join and refusing to let their ‘homies’ join. The Not Your Soldier video explicitly invoked GI resistance to the Vietnam War (using footage from Zeiger, 2005) to stress what youth, acting in a concerted and collective fashion, might achieve in the context of the Iraq War. The threat of predation was thus not demobilizing for Not Your Soldier: instead, it compelled collective action by youth on their own behalf.

Like the Resistance before them, Not Your Soldier maintained that symbolic protest was not enough: ‘we can march our asses off but it won’t mean JACK unless we back it up with ACTION’. Indeed, counter-recruitment work as a whole is largely premised on the idea of interfering directly in the state’s capacity to wage war. It is a form of resistance, not simply protest. The imaginary of the state as an alien, predatory force does not foreclose resistance, but it does shape it, and the nature of collective action more generally, in significant ways. In positioning youth as potential prey, the imaginary makes counter-recruitment work largely a matter of self-defense rather than an exercise in solidarity ²² (‘terrible brotherhood’) or the responsibility of complicit citizens. Most counter-recruitment activists (like most anti-Iraq War activists) do not see themselves as implicated in the state’s wars in the way that draft resisters did. And many counter-recruitment activists, as Stuart Tannock (2005) has suggested and some of the above examples illustrate, evince a misplaced outrage, organizing around their own (or their children’s) vulnerability to recruiter manipulation rather than against the torture, destruction, and death being effected by the US military and subcontractors abroad.

Conclusion: State Imaginaries as a Terrain of Struggle

The state imaginary that informed draft resistance in the late 1960s was of a state based on consent. This imaginary situated resisters as active citizen-subjects who, because they lived in a democratic society, were personally responsible for acts carried out in their names. Draft resisters were highly reflexive about this responsibility: in the pamphlets, fliers, and letters they produced there is an intensely personal, and collective, wrestling with their relation to the state, to each other, and to the Vietnamese subject to and resisting US aggression. The counter-recruitment movement, in contrast, has been informed by an imaginary in which the state is severed from society and cast as an alien and invasive force in local communities and individuals’ private lives. This imaginary situates actors in a very different way, not as complicit citizens, but as beings vulnerable to subjection and predation. This sense of vulnerability has not crowded out all sense of agency, leading to passivism or immobility, but it has narrowed the focus of the counter-recruitment movement to an insular preoccupation with self-defense.

These differences in state imaginaries are neither immaterial nor inconsequential, but rather structure social movements in important ways. While social movement scholars are well versed in the way that a range of political, economic, and organizational variables structure and constrain social movements, most treat culture as a tool that movement leaders deliberately and purposively wield, with differing degrees of success, in their attempts to engage potential supporters (see, e.g., Snow and Benford, 1988; Snow et al., 1986; Tarrow, 1992). How actors understand themselves or the terrain on which they struggle is less important than the choices they make to achieve their goals. As Polletta (2004) has noted, however, this volitional view of culture counterposes culture to structure, defining culture as subjective and enabling while positing structure as objective and constraining (see also Goodwin and Jasper, 2004; Jasper, 1997). Without erasing actors’ agency, we need to pay greater attention to the way that culture constrains, to the way that social movements are conditioned by cultural norms and assumptions that constitute actors as much as they are constituted by them. Rather than viewing culture only in instrumental terms, we need to also study culture as something which situates actors, creating particular subject positions for them, with profound effects on their subjectivities and the choices they can imagine.

In this spirit, I have used ‘state imaginaries’ to name one moment of a broader cultural milieu, to focus attention on how notions of the state and citizenship have changed over the past half-century, and to suggest this as one factor (amongst others) shaping the nature of war resistance in the US. By implying certain subject positions and not others, state imaginaries shape actors’ subjectivities, with potentially far-reaching consequences for how they then act in the world. As Gramsci (1971: 333) reminds us, one’s conception of the world serves as a guide for action; it ‘influences moral conduct and direction of will’. Different state imaginaries inscribe different subject positions, and such cultural ‘inscriptions have effects which are real. They make a material difference, since how we act in certain situations depends on what our definitions of the situation are’ (Hall, 1996: 40). If we are the constituent elements of the state, then we are responsible for wars waged in our name, as draft resisters and many other anti-Vietnam War activists maintained. If the state is alien, then war becomes someone else’s responsibility, not ours. The Iraq War was thus ‘Bush’s war’. People mobilized, protested, even resisted the war in some remarkable and inspiring ways, but few saw themselves implicated in the war, in the way that draft resisters and others did during the Vietnam War. The state imaginary informing the counter-recruitment movement – and the narrowed, ultimately privatized, focus of the latter – betray the inflection of a neoliberal rationality (Brown, 2005) that does not preclude collective action but nevertheless eviscerates the ground on which moral claims can be made and ruptures republican ideals of collective self-governance that proved fertile for movements in the 1960s.

We should not, however, despair. Although we are constituted as subjects by state imaginaries (and other aspects of culture), we are also creative beings with the capacity to reflexively alter received cultural notions. That is, the interpellatory, constitutive nature of culture remains in dialectical relationship with our ability to refashion the materials at hand, to take what is given, disassemble, and rework it. For Gramsci (1971: 331), this is what a project of turning common sense into good sense entails: it is a matter of ‘renovating and making “critical”’ what already exists in the thinking of a given group or era. If state imaginaries are largely intuitive, operating on the level of a sensibility rather than a more coherent and elaborate ideology, they can still be made subject to conscious development, extension, or revision once they are recognized and critically engaged. To make state imaginaries critical entails identifying and drawing out the elements inherent in the imaginary, making the assumptions guiding behavior manifest, so as to subject these assumptions to critical reflection and elaboration. Social movements are one of the key sites in which this elaboration and critique of unspoken assumptions might occur and in which oppositional knowledge (Woehrle et al., 2008) can be nurtured, developed, and disseminated. Moreover, there are always alternative traditions and imaginaries that are kept alive at the margins and which could serve as seeds for the flowering of new visions of self-governance, mutuality, and freedom. It is these seeds, these alternative elements, that social movements as sites of oppositional knowledge could nurture into bloom. It has been with the hope of furthering the critical reflection necessary to develop and nurture this oppositional knowledge that I have placed such stress on recognizing the constraining influence of state imaginaries on political subjectivities.