Ross McGarry

Witnessing Wootton Bassett: An Exploration in Cultural Victimology

The media reporting and visual witnessing of repatriations at Wootton Bassett have become an increasingly frequent occurrence since the first spontaneous saluting of what was then a lonely procession, by Royal British Legion members in 2007. UK military deaths from the war in Afghanistan have now reached over 300 and media sources have begun speculating as to which entry point is likely to replace Wootton Bassett when RAF Lyneham closes in August 2011. Our purpose in this paper is to explore the ‘public performance’ and ‘witnessing’ of these events through two ‘lenses’: the literal via photography and the theoretical by way of victimology. Our intention is to situate ourselves as visual, critical, and certainly not neutral, witnesses. In so doing, we wish to use pictures taken by the photographer Stuart Griffiths to propose three cultural trends that our witnessing of his pictures of Wootton Bassett suggests. In so doing we present three themes that we think are identifiable within these photographs: the compression of private and public grief; gothicism and the emergence of ‘dark tourism’; and displays of resistance. By way of conclusion we discuss the implications of this analysis for victimology.

A sociological analysis of military resilience: Opening up the debate

The term ‘resilience’ has grown in its usage across a range of disciplines and practices. The US military and the British armed forces have typified this increasing use of ‘resilience’ in recent years within such initiatives as Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) and throughout British Army Doctrine. However by unpacking what being ‘resilient’ for soldiers might mean we explore the interaction between their personal ‘masculine’ characteristics, the structural environment within which they operate, and the civilian life they return to. In doing so this paper offers a critical sociological analysis combining the agency of the soldiers’ body with the structure of the military as a [total institution] to problematize issues of masculinity, stigma and resilience within the military setting. As such, we question if the fostering of ‘resilience’ in military personnel is something that may be productive during service, but counter-productive thereafter when service personnel return to civilian life as veterans.

The Soldier, Human Rights and the Military Covenant: a Permissible State of Exception?

In the light of the coalition governments plans to enshrine the tenets of the military covenant in law this article addresses the issue of the human rights of soldiers in the British Armed Forces. Over the last decade an increasing number of active and ex-service personnel, alongside families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, have sought legal redress with recourse to human rights legislation. Drawing upon a qualitative study involving veterans of the Iraq conflict, we present experiential accounts of structural and institutional deficiencies which indicate that the British state has placed military personnel at unnecessary risk and violated the military covenant. In conclusion, we argue that continuing to cast soldiers as ‘exceptional actors’ under the auspices of the covenant serves to conceal institutional negligence and compromises their fundamental human rights.

Searching for Resilience A Conceptual Excavation

Resilience has become a concept that has increasingly informed political and policy discussions around disaster planning and preparedness. In this article, we explore this “resilience creep” and examine the different ways in which this concept has been used in making sense of how to respond to contemporary threats to national security. In order to do this, we establish a typology of resilience that enables us to identify both the overlapping and the contradictory uses that this term has been put to. In addition, this typology affords the opportunity to reflect upon what is made visible and invisible in contemporary resilience speak and to highlight the dangers that may lie in continuing with an uncritical embrace of this concept.

Demystifying the “Victimized State” A Civil–Military Crisis in Waiting?

The purpose of this article is to illustrate prescient issues relating to current and ex-military communities in the United Kingdom who have featured heavily within the policy arena over the past decade in relation to several key areas of importance. It will be illustrated how this population becomes visible within the public imagination (via military losses), how discourses relating to the harms they experience are structured and articulated within political and policy domains (particularly in relation to mental health) via “state talk” (qua Sim), and what the potential social consequences are for politically rendering an unproblematized populist view of current and ex-military communities (i.e., pending crises). This argument is made with the express intention of reengaging critical recognition of the distancing of the military institution from the physical and psychological vulnerability of those who have participated in war and military environments. This is an argument returned to pertinence from the recent publication of the Chilcot Inquiry into British involvement in the Iraq war.

Introduction: The Criminology of War, What Is It Good For?

During 2014, Ruth Jamieson produced a long-awaited edited collection entitled The Criminology of War, published by Ashgate. This substantial reader evidenced a wide-ranging collection of progressive literature—sourced from both within and outwith criminology—relating to the study of war. Despite the existence of such extant literature, however, in the opening comments, it is noted that a sustained engagement and awareness of war as a criminological concern has not always been evident. Jamieson (2014: xiii) observes that as an area of ‘intellectual curiosity’ war has had intermittent attention paid to it by criminology as a discipline, with interest waxing and waning as wars and armed conflicts have emerged and seceded throughout the decades. Moreover, it is noted that when war has been addressed it has been previously treated as a ‘bounded historical episode with discernable beginning and end points’ (Jamieson 2014: xiii) rather than as articulations of power, power relations and (geo)politics within the international domain. The following year in 2015, we produced an edited collection of our own entitled Criminology and War: Transgressing the Borders, published by Routledge (see Walklate and McGarry 2015). This contained a differently constituted set of original essays intended to make some new conceptual inroads into the ways in which we—as criminologists—engage with war as a theoretical, methodological and empirical endeavour. Although noting within our introduction that ‘criminology, and indeed its sub-discipline victimology, have yet to address war in the substantive ways demonstrated by other disciplines’ (McGarry and Walklate 2015a: 2), our intention was to debunk the myth that criminologists had failed to engage with war at all. Instead, we drew attention to some of the substantive criminological areas where war had been studied, theorised and researched from within the margins of the discipline. Drawing on a previous discussion raised by Hagan and Greer (2002), we professed that the marginal nature of debates regarding war within criminology was due to this constituting ‘deviant knowledge’ (qua Walters 2003), comprehension that would be insouciant to the centrefolds of a criminological enterprise invested in by state institutions.

Dismantling Woolwich: terrorism ‘pure and simple’?

On 22 May 2013 a British soldier, Fusilier Lee Rigby, was brutally killed in Woolwich, London; the two men guilty of his murder are British born Michael Adebowale and Michael Adebolajo. The motives for this attack were purported as the involvement of the British Government in the wars in the Middle East since 2001. Uniquely video footage of the attack and its aftermath were captured by passers-by and broadcast extensively in the British media causing the binaries of this event to be presented as glaringly obvious: Fusilier Rigby was the victim of this brutal act, and Adebowale and Adebolajo are terrorists responsible for murder. Although the roles of the ‘criminal’ and ‘victim’ appear well defined in this incident, as ‘witnesses’ to such events criminologists are morally compelled – as Richard Quinney (1998) would suggest – to address who and what we consider to be both criminal and victimising.

Exploring Representations of the Soldier as Victim: From Northern Ireland to Iraq

From 1969 until the signing of the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement in 1998 the British armed forces were engaged in a political conflict in Northern Ireland (Operation [Op] Banner).During this operation the British military experienced the death of its first soldier – Gunner Robert Curtis – at the hands of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) in 1970.Until the end of Op Banner in 2007 a further 650 British soldiers were killed and 6307 wounded (Ministry of Defence, 2007).More recently in 2003 the British military committed thousands of its soldiers to fight in the conflict in Iraq (Op Telic).During the seven-year conflict 179 British service personnel were killed, 222 seriously injured1 and thousands more admitted to field hospitals for being wounded in action, contracting diseases or suffering non-battle injuries (Ministry of Defence, 2009).In addition to this physical suffering British soldiersfrom both operations are only just beginning to come forward to seek assistance with psychological ‘wounds’ sustained during conflict.However, with British operations in Northern Ireland now superseded by Op Helvetic and the conflict in Afghanistan (Op Herrick) progressing into its tenth year, the British military continues to experience the bloodshed of soldiers.During 2009 the Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA) killed two British soldiers in Northern Ireland, the first since Lance Bombardier Stephen Restorick in 1997 (McDonald et al., 2009).In addition,the British military is currently suffering a rising death toll of over 350 soldiers in Afghanistan, with thousands more wounded (Ministry of Defence, 2011).

The workplace of war: unlimited liability or safety crimes?

It has been 13 years since Ruth Jamieson (1999) called upon criminology to use its analysis more creatively in relation to war and show that ‘there is more to be said’ with regards the criminality of war itself and its impacts thereafter. With some notable exceptions during this time (e.g. Hudson and Walters, 2009) war has been paid limited attention by either criminology or victimology. However, given that more than 590 British soldiers have lost their lives serving in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (since 2001 and 2003 respectively) it is perhaps time to reconsider if there is even ‘more to be said’ about the circumstances under which some of these deaths have occurred.

Conclusion: Taking Account of War, Making It Count

Contra Elias’ (1937) presumption of a civilising process, rather than the two world wars of the twentieth century and their consequences provoking human beings into looking for different ways of resolving their differences, wars, conflicts, and genocidal behaviours continue to be a routine, everyday experience for many people across the globe. As noted in the comments of Shaw (1991) and Baudrillard (1991) relating to the 1991 Gulf War and commented on in the introduction to this Handbook, the nature, practice, and knowledge of such conflicts may indeed have changed their shape, form, and locus. Evidenced in the contemporary use of remotely controlled drones to deliver fatal blows to a distant enemy, war is now frequently—but not exclusively—fought remotely and at a distance. However, the costs to those targeted in this way remain the same: injury, death, and destruction of homes and infrastructure. These costs are visually self-evident but there are other costs, for example, to economies. As illustration, Bilmes (2013) has estimated that the projected financial costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the USA alone stand in the region of four to six trillion dollars. Hagan et al. (2012) further suggest that the economic costs to Iraq (borne predominantly by the Sunni groups) amount to around 239 billion dollars. If it were possible to add to these figures the costs on a global scale, not only of the impacts of war but also of the various investments made by different economies to the production of weapons, military personnel, and so on, it would be very difficult not to agree with Bourke (2015: 1) that ‘we are a warring people’. Whilst Bourke (2015) is talking primarily of the UK and the USA, it is an observation that carries weight above and beyond these particular nations. Thus, the ‘costs’ of war alone suggest an important agenda for the social sciences. At the conclusion of this Handbook the question remains: What does such an agenda imply for criminology?