War and embodiment: cultural and military practices

An earlier issue of this journal, ‘The Body at War: Wounds, Wounding and the Wounded’ noted that ‘the centrality of the wounded body to war demands that we continue to make it the focus of scholarly enquiry’ (2008: 121). This issue takes up that call and revisits the crucial subject of war and the body, building upon the previous work developed in the pages of this journal and elsewhere. The aim here is not specifically to examine further the act and idiom of wounding, but rather to illuminate and explore some of the multiple modes of embodiment and disembodiment through which political, social and cultural worlds are enacted and contested in conflict and post-conflict societies.