A pint to remember: the pub as community militarism

This article focuses on The Don War Memorial Bar in Stockton-upon-Tees as a themed space. This space ‘made’ through embodied labour, martial images and objects and practices of care and compassion as well as of mourning forges an emotional community that signals specific political effects in times of austerity and in relation to potential immunity for atrocity crime in the context of British imperial war-making (specifically focusing on Northern Ireland). This article builds on diverse and multidisciplinary insights to explore the understudied space of the war-themed pub as a crucial site of everyday liberal militarism delineated by aesthetic and material modes of immersion, memorialisation and affective praxis. It makes a significant contribution to ongoing conversations about martial memory-curation and the significance of emotional nationalism crafted through banal sites of encounter and embodied performances. Moreover, it further highlights the importance of the pub, especially in the context of the UK, to ‘everyday IR’ and complex configurations of national atmospheres and geopolitical ritual.