State violence, empire, and the figure of the “soldier-victim” in Northern Ireland

Abstract

This article examines some of the deeper meanings of the denial of accountability in killings perpetrated by British soldiers during the conflict in Northern Ireland, as part of the debate on how to deal with the legacy of the past. It investigates the ways in which such "soldier-perpetrators" are turned, instead, into "soldier-victims" and asks what this tells us about the political culture that shapes such a response. In part, it will be argued, this is the product of a longer term Manichean distinction, deeply embedded in the history of empire and its wars, between "civilians" and "barbarians." Here lawfulness, as a mark of "civility," is identified with the self-image of the (post-) imperial state, contrasted with the unlawful chaos of the barbarian "Other." In the context of both the counterinsurgency wars of the late 20th and early 21st century, and amid a presiding mood of "post-imperial melancholia" and "heroic failure", the figure of the "soldier-victim," therefore, becomes a means to turn the wrongs of state violence into an ideological potent imaginary of empire, the state (and its agents) as themselves those who have been wronged.

Closing the ranks: Bondedness, sense of self and moral injury during legacy case prosecutions

“…At the same time that former British soldiers are facing reinvestigation over their conduct in NI, evidence of systemic human rights abuse has cast a shadow over the British Army's record in post-NI deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq (Mallory, 2022). Persistent allegations of systemic human rights abuse spanning from Belfast in the last century to Basra this century is thus injurious to the moral self-superiority inherent in post-Brexit English nationalism and to the colonial mindset that 'our boys' have been dutiful peacekeepers while deployed overseas (Hearty, 2020;McGovern, 2019).…”

“…With British Army veterans believing that they selflessly performed a peacekeeping role in NI, legacy case investigations are perceived as a personal and collective betrayal. They represent a ‘moral injury’ – essentially ‘the violation of what is right, what one has long held to be sacred’ (Meagher, 2014: 4). Psychology literature on US veterans has shown that the deep seated sense of betrayal underpinning moral injury can lead to a lack of trust in the military institution, government and society (Shay, 2002).…”

“…Against this backdrop, British Army veterans have framed the prosecution of a small number of veterans as a politically motivated 'witch hunt' against those previously cleared of wrongdoing. Their 'witch hunt' claim, however, fails to stand up to empirical statistical scrutiny and, just like Bradley's comments, overlooks well documented flaws in many of the original investigations (Bryson, 2021;McEvoy, 2020McEvoy, , 2022McGovern, 2019). Nevertheless, within the veteran constituency 'reclassifying' the past has become synonymous with the post-Good Friday Agreement (GFA) scapegoating of veterans, leading them to close ranks (Brewer and Herron, 2019: 56) and take to the streets in protest at legacy investigations.…”

“…While there has been an emerging body of criminological (Hearty, 2020;McGovern, 2019), legal (Bryson, 2021;Mallinder, 2020;Mallory et al, 2020;McEvoy, 2020), and political (Chung, 2021) scholarship on veteran prosecutions in NI, sociological examination has been surprisingly absent despite the clear relevance of several strands of sociology. Situating itself within a broader sociological terrain that includes military sociology, the sociology of emotions, and social movement studies, this article seeks to encourage sociological exploration of the internal mobilisation of 'intimates' (Jasper and Poulsen, 1995) within the veteran constituency (i.e., veterans and/or their families) against NI legacy case prosecutions.…”

“…Between 1969 and 2007 approximately 300,000 British Army personnel were deployed to the North of Ireland (Armour et al, 2017). While the British state narrative has always insisted that Operation Banner was a human rights compliant 'peacekeeping' mission amidst escalating violence in Northern Ireland (NI), social science scholarship has long problematised this narrative through exposing systemic state violence (Burke, 2018;Burton, 1978;Hearty, 2020;McGovern, 2019;Sanders, 2021). As NI undergoes the difficult process of 'dealing with the past', the state narrative has been further challenged through truth recovery and belated official acknowledgment that a number of killings attributed to the British Army were unjustified (Lundy and Rolston, 2016); the most notable examples here being the shooting of civil rights marchers on Bloody Sunday in 1972 for which the UK Government formally apologised in 2010 following the Saville Inquiry (Rolston, 2010) and the shooting dead of a number of people in Ballymurphy in August 1971 that an inquest in July 2021 concluded were innocent (McEvoy, 2022: 10).…”