Whiteness in the glare of war: Soldiers, migrants and citizenship

Abstract

The figure of the soldier-migrant demonstrates why it is important to bring the question of military service into contemporary sociological debates about citizenship, belonging and racism. The article draws on an understanding of whiteness as a fundamental component of historical and gendered notions of citizenship that feed the ‘hypnotic ideals’ of national identity. Because of academic specialism and disciplinary boundaries, however, the intersections between civil and military spheres are often neglected as a locus for exploring racialized terms of belonging and exclusion, particularly in times of war. The article discusses key questions raised by the campaign for Gurkha settlement rights and the employment of thousands of personnel from Commonwealth countries in the British Army, bringing the notion of whiteness as ‘fitness for citizenship’ into dialogue with recent work on the soldier-citizen developed in Canada and the USA. Recent British National Party (BNP) propaganda demonstrates the perils of leaving the link between military service and the indigenous ‘deserving’ Brit undisturbed, and the concept of postcolonial melancholia remains a vital way to approach the mobilization of war memories as a way of defining the terms of UK citizenship today