Description
In this paper I argue that research on militarized identities has generally paid insufficient attention to the agency of the people who inhabit and negotiate them. I engage with theories of narrative agency to analyse life narrative interviews with 45 veterans that were conducted in South West England in 2017-18. Veterans’ life narratives reveal a high degree of agency, reflexive awareness, and conscious negotiation of their relationship with the military institution and its discourses. I argue that it is narrative agency which enables military personnel and veterans to pursue their own life projects in and through military ideas, behaviours and opportunities, whilst simultaneously situating themselves in critical relation to the institution. It is essential to understand and engage critically with these lived experiences and processes of negotiation to develop more nuanced accounts of militarized identities, and to rethink what we think we know about the military institution, and military power.
