A pint to remember: the pub as community militarism

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on The Don War Memorial Bar in Stockton-upon-Tees as a themed space. This space ‘made’ through embodied labour, martial images and objects and practices of care and compassion as well as of mourning forges an emotional community that signals specific political effects in times of austerity and in relation to potential immunity for atrocity crime in the context of British imperial war-making (specifically focusing on Northern Ireland). This article builds on diverse and multidisciplinary insights to explore the understudied space of the war-themed pub as a crucial site of everyday liberal militarism delineated by aesthetic and material modes of immersion, memorialization and affective praxis. It makes a significant contribution to ongoing conversations about martial memory-curation and the significance of emotional nationalism crafted through banal sites of encounter and embodied performances. Moreover, it further highlights the importance of the pub, especially in the context of the UK, to ‘everyday IR’ and complex configurations of national atmospheres and geopolitical ritual.

KEYWORDS:

• Pub
• memorial
• military
• war
• community
• austerity
• images
• themed space

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank the editor of Critical Military Studies, Dr Victoria Basham, as well as two fantastic reviewers, for their critique, suggestions and encouragement in relation to this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a discussion of atrocity and the British Army in Northern Ireland see Burke (2018).

2. The British Army contested this and claimed that soldiers were acting in self-defence (Kennedy-Pipe 1997, 60–1).

3. This video has 41,500 views.

4. This video has 5,200 views.

5. With thanks to a reviewer for clarifying this point.