Description
Recent scholarship on concepts like ‘Military Social Harm’ (Basham et al., 2024) expands our understanding of harm beyond direct or physical violence, challenging conventional frameworks of scrutiny and accountability. Yet state institutions often have great difficulty understanding the causes and consequences of these harms, or even acknowledging the harms at all. In this paper, we demonstrate both this foreclosure and absurdity of state-led accountability mechanisms through an analysis of annual reports from the Common Law Claims & Policy (CLC&P) team responsible for processing compensation claims against and on behalf of the Ministry of Defence (MOD) at home and abroad (1997-2023). We map the nature of the different claims, the rationales for their acceptance or rejection by the MOD, and the narrative framing by the CLC&P team. Our analysis demonstrates how these reports make specific harms legible within official narratives, reflecting a particular understanding of harm and responsibility. The reports reveal the British military’s claimed rights and prerogatives, to frame certain modes of violence as necessary, unavoidable, or inevitable. Additionally, the reports rely upon and affirm a specific causality to rationalise and restrict responsibility. Through our analysis, we demonstrate how compensation provides a partial account of harms produced by activities involved in retaining and deploying military power and ask whether reveal how compensation itself is complicit in the production of violence it is often used to remedy.
