Councils of war

‘Seeing’ gender, war and terror

“…Following Jamieson (1999: 26), ‘[l]ike most violent crime, war is “bad”. It is mainly conducted by men.…”

“…It is mainly conducted by men. But there is more to be said.’ Some of what ‘more to be said’ lies as Jamieson (1999: 26) observed, in the fact that war ‘is mainly conducted by men’. This in itself is uncontroversial.…”

The Soldier as Victim: Peering through the Looking Glass

“…The war/crime nexus can also be conceived in anomic terms wherein accelerated states of emergency during war result in the production of 'hyper-discipline': the generation of new laws, and thus new crimes and criminal behaviours (Jamieson 1998: 482-483). Furthermore, not only is war said to exaggerate the 'gender order' and encourage violent masculine behaviour, butas an act of violenceit is mainly conducted by men (Jamieson 1999). Interestingly Jamieson (1998) acknowledges the 'self-referential' nature of criminological analysis in this domain as it focuses on the impacts of war in relation to 'routine' or 'street crimes'.…”

“…Other estimates are more conservative, suggesting that just 3% of the prison population in England and Wales (approximately 2,500 people) are British veterans (Ministry of Defence 2010; Prison Reform Trust 2010). In critiquing this framing of the soldier as 'criminal', Jamieson (1999) was quick to point out that it is questionable whether the sociologizing of war and the military are meaningfully perceived and understood. Similarly, as Treadwell (2010b: 74) has recently suggested, 'it would also be short-sighted to simply reduce the issue of ex-forces personnel in custody to a statistical counting exercise' given the latent impacts that war can have on British soldiers.…”

“…The prevailing research that focuses on imprisonment and PTSD inevitably detracts attention from these 'others'. Jamieson (1999) notes, few of the criminological literatures concerning themselves with war have been interested in the more banal activities of military life or conflict. So it is worth turning our attention to British soldiers who have had such experiences but not 'officially' suffered as a result, or perhaps suffered at all; those who do not have criminal records and are without the diagnosis of a psychological impairment.…”