Description
For decades the British military has been beset by scandal and afflicted by allegations of institutional and individual wrongdoing both at home and abroad. Claims of sexual and racist violence, discrimination against LGBTQ+ and female personnel, and the systemic adoption of practices of torture and unlawful killing, mark the contemporary history of the armed forces. Institutional responses have been to address these issues as isolated problems (typically conceptualised as the result of individual bad behaviour) that can be resolved by regulatory and organisational reform or punishment through public inquiries and criminal justice measures. Scholars have effectively critiqued these mechanisms. However, we argue that they have relied too heavily on exposing rationalities of military power, and fail to recognize the irrational perversity that is often at the heart of its organisational practices. Bringing together analysis of two seemingly disparate examples (the absurd attempt in the late twentieth century to justify the continuation of the ‘gay ban’ and the sexualised nature of ill-treatment of detainees evident in the Iraq occupation) we illustrate that such acts and behaviours are symptomatic of the British military as a perverse institution. Three elements reveal the perversity : (1) Individual and group pleasure in the infliction of sexualised violence and humiliation, (2) a warped relationship with reality that both sees and refuses to see such behaviour, and (3) drawing the complicity of the law, the British state, and its people, to ignore, excuse, and legitimise the continuation of this violence (Long 2018). We argue that charting the multiple dimensions of this perversity is a necessary step to understand the nature of military violence and begin to determine what responses might better address it.
