Join us in person or online for a seminar with Dr Bianca Baggiarini.
Governing Military Sacrifice: Drones, Privatization, and the Future of War
Governing Military Sacrifice examines the deterioration of the relationship between citizen-soldiering and military sacrifice. As a key historical archetype, the citizen-soldier has come to represent the highest expression of devotion for the nation in cultural imaginings of war. However, this book asks if war today even requires this offering of the self. This work explores the social, ethical, and political implications of the desire to enact violence in a post-sacrificial world. Following the Vietnam War, casualty-aversion and a political intolerance for wartime deaths and injuries turned military sacrifice from a simple assumption to an increasingly contested idea. As a result, military sacrifice became governed. Sociologist and international relations scholar Bianca Baggiarini argues that military privatization and the usage of drones in warfare emerged as related or parallel measures to exercise control over the politics of sacrifice. Drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis and interview data with drone pilots, soldiers, veterans, and defence professionals, the book traces the decay of the sacrificial cults and idioms surrounding the citizen-soldier. When military sacrifice is no longer an assumed feature of war, it radically transforms the social and political meaning of bodies-in-war. Altering how we understand and witness war, technological transformations create an ‘anti-social’ version of conflict which constrains our ability to critique and prevent its outbreak. Governing Military Sacrifice thus inquires whether the future of war may be found in a return to the past.
22 July 2026, 11am AEST
Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC1.108
Zoom: Click here.
Bianca Baggiarini’s interdisciplinary research examines the social, political, and ethical justifications for (and effects of) militarized remote and autonomous systems (RAS). Her work is situated at the intersection between international political sociology and critical war, military, and security studies. Bianca considers RAS as an assemblage of sociotechnical practices and ideas, and is primarily interested in what RAS might tell us about the changing quality and character of war. She is the author of Governing Military Sacrifice: Drones, Privatization, and the Future of War (University of Toronto Press, 2026).
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