Abstract
This article critically examines public responses to attempts at holding former British soldiers accountable for historic human rights violations committed during conflicts fought overseas. Using the case of British Army veterans who served in the North of Ireland and Iraq as an empirical basis, it posits that such responses are defined by a moral myopia that distinguishes between state violence ‘here’ and ‘there’ and ‘now’ and ‘then’. This moral myopia, it is submitted, is a form of identity politics forged through a marriage between deep imperialism and the strategies of denial used by the state. This essentially misrecognises the victim of state violence and ultimately leads to public sympathy favouring those who stand accused of human rights abuse over and above those actually subjected to it. Ultimately, the article concludes, this means that public opinion is channelled in a way that calls for such violations not to be punished rather than for them to be punished.
Highlights
We believe the recent arrests directed against former soldiers who served in Northern Ireland are not an attempt at bringing criminals to account
Situating itself within the critical criminological literature on state violence, this article uses recent cases involving British Army veterans who served in the North of Ireland and in Iraq as an empirical grounding for its conceptual claims on moral myopia
This article has critically evaluated the response to attempts at holding former British soldiers accountable for human rights abuses in the North of Ireland and Iraq, exposing how state denial and ‘deep imperialism’ have sought to condition the British national imagination
Summary
We believe the recent arrests directed against former soldiers who served in Northern Ireland are not an attempt at bringing criminals to account. Situating itself within the critical criminological literature on state violence, this article uses recent cases involving British Army veterans who served in the North of Ireland and in Iraq as an empirical grounding for its conceptual claims on moral myopia It will interrogate how and why the British public imagination that can paradoxically ‘see’ ‘our boys’ as both ‘hero’ and ‘victim’ is discouraged from ‘seeing’ them as human rights violators that need punished. Building from here, it examines Britain’s imperialist military history, drawing attention to how ‘deep imperialism’ has birthed a supremacist variant of identity politics that favours the self-image of ‘our boys’ This theory is applied to official discourse on British state violence in Iraq and Northern Ireland. With an emerging discourse on military victimhood that has recently come under study in the criminology of war literature [24, 59,60,61, 65, 88, 91]
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