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Kuus M, 2009, "Cosmopolitan militarism? Spaces of NATO expansion" Environment and Planning A 41(3) 545 – 562
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Cosmopolitan militarism? Spaces of NATO expansion

Merje Kuus

Received 10 October 2007; in revised form 22 December 2007; published online 10 December 2008

Abstract. This paper investigates the normalization of military institutions through narratives of global cooperation—a phenomenon that I call cosmopolitan militarism. Empirically, I analyze how the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) uses globalist spatial imaginaries to frame military approaches to political problems as enlightened and good (as well as necessary). In particular, I examine how this framing is effected by nonstate actors in the civil society—for example, through educational and entertainment events organized for young people by nongovernmental organizations. Theoretically, I illuminate the multiple scales, sites, and agents of militarization in Western liberal democracies. I foreground the production of a particular kind of normative space for Western military force. This is an expansive and open space in which the outsiders are gradually pulled into NATO’s networks of cooperation. To understand how it operates, we need to examine not only institutions of the nation-state but also transnational networks of cooperation.

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