"This isn't a real war": The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Fiction

“This isn’t a real war”: The Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in Fiction examines the literary representations of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan after the 9/11 at-tacks. It begins with the observation that for the soldiers the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have not been war as they envisioned. Their war, they claim, is lack-ing in the kind of activities you would expect of something called war, and some of them even conclude that this isn’t a real war. The question of how to under-stand the soldiers’ statements has shaped the research questions through which the text corpus have been approached throughout the thesis.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were preceded by, coincided with, and prompted the publication of a number of scholarly books and essays which all claim that the character of war had changed and is changing (see Mary Kaldor, Rupert Smith, and Grégorie Chamayou). In light of these publications, the con-clusion that the soldiers are incapable of recognizing their war as war, because their idea of what war is no longer corresponds with the realities of war, might seem like an obvious one. The thesis argues that this explanation is not correct. Building on analyses of the depictions of the soldiers’ everyday life and Iraqi ac-counts of life in Iraq after the U.S.-led invasions, it argues that occupation would be the more applicable term for the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The aim of the thesis is twofold: firstly, to show that the soldiers’ com-ments about their war not being a “real” war should not be interpreted as the re-sult of the changing character of war and as a testimony to the fact that our notion of war is outdated, but as a sign that the soldiers find themselves in a situation which can best be described as an occupation; and secondly, to explore how my reading contributes to our understanding of the aesthetics of occupation, of occu-pation as a phenomenon, and of these wars as such.