Description
Scholarship on troop misconduct typically focuses on the gendered dynamics at play in the violent act or events themselves. Instead, this panel considers institutional or state sense-making practices in the aftermath of troop misconduct. Bringing together an interdisciplinary panel of speakers, these papers shed light on how legal or disciplinary processes assume, (re)produce, and naturalise gendered logics in their approaches to troop transgression. By tracing the response to misconduct (broadly conceived) rather than the contours of the act itself, we will expand understandings of how ideas of gender, militarism, and violence are intertwined. We will explore how institutional practices of criminalisation and punishment in military contexts are both deeply individualistic and also reinforce patriarchal societal order. From the front line to the courtroom, peacekeeping missions to domestic spaces, we will discuss how gendered logics shape how the individuals implicated within the processes– including, but not limited to, the perpetrators, victims, and bystanders – are distorted by technical, disembodied calculations of criminality, mitigation, and sanction.
