Description
The British Army is an inherently imperial institution that defies decolonisation. Politically, the decolonisation of the British Army requires its undoing in the present and past through abolition and reparation. Claims about ‘decolonising the British Army’ (King 2021) rely on a “decolonising light” (Raghuram and Sondhi 2023) perspective and fail to reckon with the fact that the political decolonisation (as liberation) of certain institutions and practices is a logical impossibility. Inspired by Barkawi’s work to decolonise war studies (2016), this paper instead explores what a decolonial critique of the British Army can offer epistemically by proposing that its core concepts simultaneously rely on and obscure its continued coloniality. By seeking to decentre the concepts of the ‘soldier/civilian distinction’, the ‘political impartiality of the army’, ‘unit cohesion’ and ‘operational effectiveness’, it makes the more limited and modest claim that a decolonial critique of the British Army can enable alternative understandings of the coloniality (Maldonado-Torres 2007) embedded in the operation and structure of the army.
