What makes violence martial? Contemporary militarism scholarship, owing to an analytical overdetermination of the role of military institutions, frequently conflates martiality with violence writ large. Drawing upon the illustrative case of Adopt A Sniper, a US military support charity founded by police officers operating during the global war on terror and intended to help supporters ‘directly contribute to the killing of the enemy’, this article interrogates the intuitive ‘line’ between martial and other, particularly colonial, forms of violence. To do so, I develop the concept of ‘normative imaginaries of violence’ – articulations of intersubjective beliefs; political community; spatial geographies; gendered, sexualized, racialized and classed power relations; and logics of legitimation. Through this lens, and informed by the work of Frantz Fanon, the article demonstrates that though coloniality and martiality are deeply intertwined, they are neither reducible to nor epiphenomenal of each other. Through a juxtaposition of the titular sniper with two additional figures invoked by Adopt A Sniper – the militiaman and the vigilante – I outline a novel, genealogical method that enables us to trace the entangled histories of contemporary violences and identify the implicit politics of ordering at work in existing, often fragmented, analyses of political violence.

是什么使暴力军事化？由于对军事机构作用的过分确定性，当代军国主义奖学金经常使军事行动与暴力行为大相径庭。本文以全球军事反恐战争中由警察成立的美国军事支持慈善机构“领养狙击手”为例，旨在帮助支持者“直接为杀死敌人做出贡献”，本文审视了直觉上的“路线”在军事和其他形式的暴力之间，尤其是在殖民形式的暴力之间。为此，我提出了“暴力的规范想象”的概念–主体间信念的表达；政治共同体；空间地理；性别，性别，种族和等级权力关系；合法化的逻辑。通过这个镜头，并在弗朗兹·法农（Frantz Fanon）的著作的指导下，这篇文章表明，尽管殖民主义和军事性是紧密相连的，但它们既不能彼此还原，也不能彼此融合。通过将枪口狙击手与并列的两个人物并置，由“狙击手”和“民兵”两人调用，我概述了一种新颖的宗谱方法，使我们能够追溯当代暴力的纠结历史，并确定工作秩序的内在政治。在对政治暴力的现有分析中（通常是零散的）。