Spirituality and war: soldier practices in deployment in African Military landscapes

Abstract

This special issue is about spirituality and war, and specifically the ways in which soldiers engage with spiritual ideas, beliefs and practices within the context of military deployments. The geographical focus of the five papers is sub-Saharan Africa. The five papers included in this special issue all engage with these ideas and this context. The impetus for this special issue came from two sources. The first was an observation about the limits of conventional analytic approaches to military landscapes, which emphasize an idea of landscape as a text to be read. Although this conceptualization has proved fruitful in a range of analytic contexts for opening up the idea of landscape as constituted, expressed and read through military practices (Woodward, 2014), this approach is limited in the extent to which it engages with soldiers’ own responses to the spaces and places of their deployments.