It’s widely recognized that the Covid-19 pandemic undoubtedly affects the economy and, as a result, also negatively affects healthcare, education, and culture. However, in the face of hard times like the ones we’ve experienced this year, national priorities are oriented through the policies implemented by political leaders.

Si bien se reconoce que la pandemia afecta indudablemente la economía y como a partir de ella sectores como la salud, la educación, la cultura, también cobran algún impacto desfavorable, son las decisiones políticas de sus dirigentes las que orientan las prioridades de un país frente a  situaciones tan adversas como las que se viven en la actualidad.

The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY), in collaboration with Project on Youth and Non-Military Opportunities - Project YANO,, has developed a new resource called, Guide to Removing Marksmanship Training from High Schools. This guide documents the process and strategies learned by the Education Not Arms Coalition comprised of students, teachers, and parents that successfully lobbied the San Diego California City school board for the removal of Shooting Ranges from eleven high schools in 2009 and adopting a zero-tolerance policy for marksmanship training in their school district. 

NNOMY recommends this proven strategy for organizing a campaign for the removal of marksmanship training on a school district level thus accomplishing an important aspect of school demilitarization.

Here are some of the accomplishments of the Education Not Arms Coalition strategy:

• School Board Votes to End Weapons Training in their school district.
  
• Marine Corps JROTC at one San Diego school fell so low that the unit was eventually forced to leave.
• Shooting ranges from eleven high schools in the San Diego school  district were closed in 2009

Despite constituting the formal mechanism by which states and militaries persuade and enrol their personnel, military recruitment is poorly understood in the social and political sciences. Tied either to a normative and partisan sociology which aims to provide applied solutions for recruitment and retention programmes, or subsumed under a broad banner, by critical scholars, of a global ‘cultural condition’ of militarisation, studies of recruitment lack the rigour they should be afforded. In exploring these issues, the paper offers a vision of critical military studies which takes seriously the efforts of counter-military recruiting activist and protest movements in the US and UK. Counter-recruitment activism is billed as the most practical way to resist policies of militarism and militarisation. In promoting locally situated, practical solutions to the effects of militarised cultures (often as part of activism in schools), it aims to expose the relationship between, and acts to correct, both local and global injustices. In reviewing the practical and conceptual basis for counter-recruiting strategies, and speaking to broader movements in feminist scholarship on militarisation, the paper demonstrates the importance of critical studies of military recruitment, and in so doing, argues for a critical military studies which is situated amidst the people and places militarism affects.