Description
Based on the analysis of observations of 15 hearings at a British military court centre, this paper explores what happens when offences that are not explicitly ‘military’ in nature enter the space of the military courtroom. The military courts are one element of the distinct system of justice that governs the British Armed Forces: The Service Justice System (SJS). The seemingly unique and exceptional nature often ascribed to the military forms the rationale for maintaining this separate justice system. However, the SJS is routinely used to deal with offences that are not unique to the military, for example gendered and racial violence perpetrated by military personnel in non-operational contexts. In this paper, I ask how ideas of institutional exceptionalism are troubled by the presence of such violence in the courtroom. To answer this question, I engage with three embodied exhibits that emerged from my observations: fieldnotes, the privacy screen, and the remnants of a handwritten note. Rather than rely on the textual analysis of judgments, transcripts, or case files, I instead engage with these three exhibits to uncover the bodies which are so often written out of this exceptionalised institution. In this paper, I demonstrate how these exhibits turn attention to the vulnerability of, and connections between, bodies in this space, revealing how the court centre is infused with an intimate, crisis-shaped subjectivity that invites trial participants to respond to violence within the military in particular ways.
