ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces readers to the topic of military recruitment promotion. Taking a long durée perspective, it shows how public spectacles and cultural artefacts have been used to sell service in armed forces throughout the world and how such things have been combined, in recent years, with persuasive strategies and techniques derived from the modern advertising, public relations and media industries. A fair amount has been written about these developments, with some scholars offering expansive overviews of the many different ways in which civilians are enticed to serve and others charting the use of specific channels of communication, such as posters or films, in large-scale mobilisation efforts. The approach taken in this book, and one called for in this chapter, is different. Focusing on recruitment campaigns as objects of analysis in their own right, it makes a case for studying them nationally and internationally before concluding with an overview of the book’s case studies.
