Voices of veteran researchers

Abstract

The ‘voice of the veteran’ is simultaneously over and under-represented in our society and our scholarship alike (Bulmer and Jackson 2015). Veterans’ voices are both privileged and marginalized, their stories glorified and vilified, their subjectivity either militarized or demilitarized, and their experiences both banal and extraordinary (Kelly 2013; Tidy 2015; Bulmer and Eichler 2017; Wool 2015). The figure of the veteran suffers from an ‘over-determination’ of meaning and an impoverished language to explore it, such that negotiating a veteran identity can become overwhelmingly complicated (Macleish 2013; Caddick Forthcoming). Veterans’ voices are a site of contestation related to their authenticity, and mediated or performative nature (Tidy 2015; Woodward and Jenkings 2011). Within scholarship, military experience either bestows legitimacy upon the author (e.g. traditional war studies, see Antrobus and West 2022), or invites suspicion (e.g. some anti-militarist feminist scholars, see Duncanson 2013). In this special issue we move away from attempting to determine the meaning of the veteran’s voice in research, and instead reflect on the contingent and contextual emergence of voices, how stories are made, and what reflective labour is undertaken, when veterans critically engage with their experience in their academic research. We foreground the ‘disruptive potential’ (Basham and Bulmer 2017, 62) of veterans’ voices by bringing their unique and complex positionality to ‘throw light onto the dark recesses of the military interior’ (Ware 2016, 240). We bring together an interdisciplinary collection of contributors with different military experiences to think about their voices and contribution in new ways. This special issue emerged from a series of workshops and panels held over the last eighteen months by both the European International Studies Association and the Defence Research Network, funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung (Cooperation Agreement 2134–002) and the Defence Studies Department, King’s College London. These workshops and panels provided a space for dialogue between our authors, their past selves, and their academic expertise, using conversation as ‘an alternative mode of research praxis’ (Bulmer and Jackson 2015).