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 counterproductive thereafter when service personnel return to civilian life as veterans.
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.Keywords cultural victimology, documentary photography, soldier as victim, witnessing 'In the desperation of grief, there can be an undeniable impulse to follow the dead, who are still somehow so much alive'
Despite a rising criminological interest in the criminogenic context of the Iraq conflict and a focus on the numbers of British veterans in the criminal justice system, a concern to understand the experiences of modern soldiers is largely hidden from the criminological and victimological gaze. This paper addresses this issue by presenting data from interviews with British military veterans and considers their 'unknowable' experiences of war in a framework of victimological otherness: including experiencing, perpetrating and witnessing conflict. Given the masculine connotations associated with 'soldiering', imagining the 'soldier as victim' is challenging given the presumption of vulnerability conjured by the term victim itself. Here we offer an insight into 'victimhood' by centering and analyzing the 'common place' experiences of British soldiers from the conflict in Iraq.
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