Description
The British Armed Forces faces a plethora of ongoing ontological challenges. For example, the institution’s difficulty to recruit women and other diverse bodies means that it continuously misses proposed targets and aims for diversification, thereby having to redirect resources to develop new strategies for increasing numbers to reflect inclusivity, while also contending with an ongoing fluctuation in funding, service satisfaction and overall personnel targets (Brown, 2023; Grylls, 2023; Ministry of Defence, 2023). Research on militarisation and military masculinities largely argues that the hypermasculine traits which underpin military culture make the space inaccessible and largely prohibitive to individuals who do not conform to this narrative. An ontological security approach, however, indicates that there are significant theoretical and practical connections between ontological securitisation practices and feminist security studies research which can move us from a stagnant view on the Forces to one which integrates potential for change. This paper will embed an ontological security lens within wider feminist security studies literatures to explore possibilities for change in “unmaking” militarised identities.
