The discipline of International Relations has always had a troubled relationship with the bodies that inhabit its world. The bodies that sweat, strain and toil to make consumer goods for the global market rarely feature in books about the international political economy. The weak, malnourished and dehydrated bodies of refugees fleeing war zones around the world rarely figure in discussions about immigration. And the broken, bloody and bruised bodies of those targeted in war are often invisible in discussions about military conflict. In her recent book Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations, Lauren Wilcox argues that the body rarely figures in discussions about war in spite of its central role, leaving the discipline ill-equipped to deal with the dead and injured bodies that are piling up around us. The corporeal dimension of international politics has been neglected for so long that Wilcox is concerned that it has become almost ‘unrecognisable even as the modes of violence that use, target and construct bodies … have proliferated’ (2015: 1). Likewise, Christine Sylvester (2012) has warned that the discipline's obsessive interest with states and state systems means that people's embodied experiences of war are often erased from view. Thirty years after Elaine Scarry first penned the phrase, it is still possible to read pages upon pages of military history without ever encountering a basic acknowledgement that the primary purpose of ‘the events described is to alter (to burn, to blast, to shell, to cut) human tissue’ (1985: 65).

If the discipline of International Relations is marked by its silences around the body at war, then cinema can be seen as one of the few places where the embodied effects of war can be seen in full view.

Few can forget seeing the bullet-riddled bodies, unclaimed limbs and puddles of blood on Omaha Beach during the frenetic opening scenes of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998). The volatile bodies of suicide bombers wearing explosive vests and the armoured bodies of those sent to defuse them are essential to the story told by Kathryn Bigelow in The Hurt Locker (2009); and in Lebanon (2009) we see both the hot, sweaty and constricted bodies of the Israeli soldiers cloistered inside the tank and the bodies of those civilians visible through their gun sight.