We're not playing at being soldiers: An ethnographic study of the Czech military and its changing relationship with the state and society in the period of post-socialist transformation

This dissertation draws on ethnographic research conducted by the author in the Czech Armed Forces and focuses on the changing relationship between the military institution, the Czech state and society in the post socialist period. Important to the ethnographic observations that constitute this dissertation is the author's view of the time following the end of socialism in East and Central Europe as a liminal period, in which post-socialist states and societies experience the simultaneous unsettlement of old norms and institutionalization of new standards. This moment is filled with ambiguity that has an especially strong and unsettling effect on the military—an institution closely tied to the power of the state. As the period of liminal transformation in the post-socialist Czech Republic continues, the position and the power of the institution of legitimate violence is becoming consolidated. This process, however, is accompanied by multiple displacements of people, institutions, machines and sentiments. In five chapters, this dissertation describes the rather grotesque events and paradoxes that accompany the process of displacement whereby the larger apparatus of power of the war machine is becoming embedded within the state, society and people's lives.