Courtroom intimacies: Responses to everyday violence in the British military’s justice system

Here is the abstract of a Cardiff University doctoral dissertation by Hannah Richards. The full text of her thesis will be available in a year.

This thesis examines the everyday workings of a Military Court Centre to demonstrate how specific imaginaries of military service, (sexual) violence, and justice are brought into being within the British military. Curious about how the institution’s justice system claims ownership over ‘everyday’ offences that are not unique to a military context, this thesis asks what imaginaries of military justice are reproduced in the Court Centre, how are military personnel enlisted in their remaking, and how are these imaginaries resisted and unsettled? Drawing on observations of 15 hearings, and over 150 hours spent at one of the UK’s permanent Military Court Centres, this thesis responds to these questions by exploring how the spatial, temporal, and intimate dynamics of the Court Centre both resist and reproduce ideas of military exceptionalism. Thus far, research on how British military justice responds to ‘everyday’ offences has been restricted to the historical evolution of the internal justice system, and doctrinal legal studies and jurisprudence. In contrast, critical, feminist-informed empirical studies of military justice are scarce. Drawing together literatures from Critical Military Studies, Feminist Legal Studies, and Political Geography, this thesis provides the first in-depth, qualitative analysis of the Military Courts. Ultimately, it argues that everyday entanglements between imaginaries of military justice and the soldiering subject within the Court Centre work to reinvigorate an understanding of the military as an exceptional institution, in turn reproducing epistemic and material violences that otherwise remain hidden. Yet, this thesis also shows how the Court Centre can be viewed as an affective terrain of resistance and intimacy in which lives are not just disciplined and curtailed, but also lived in ways that unsettle dominant configurations of military power.