Strange Meetings: Enemy Encounters 1800-2020

The ability to kill in war has often been attributed to propaganda that has made the enemy subhuman, or to technology which has placed the enemy at a more comfortable distance. This project, however, traces an alternative trajectory of feeling for the enemy as a 'strange friend' as Wilfred Owen famously put it, in which enmity is swiftly transformed into forms of fellow feeling. As Owen's work suggests, and a wealth of other soldier writings confirm, intimacy with the enemy is not necessarily a barrier to killing him. Exploring encounters with the enemy in literature (including Shelley, Tolstoy, Hardy, Kipling, Owen, Thomas, Jones, Douglas, O'Brien, Parker), philosophy, and soldiers' life writings from 1800-now, this project seeks to explore the range of work done by announcements of feeling for the enemy both to challenge and enable militarism.

This research offers new understandings of soldiers' emotions and motivations, and wider insights into rationales - military and civilian - for war violence, attending to the ways in which relationships with the enemy have been culturally deployed to make us feel better or worse about war. It considers which enemies can become familiar and which are held as other, investigating dividing lines of nation, race, religion, and culture. In so doing the project asks questions pressing for our contemporary moment about the nature of amity, enmity, familiarity and otherness.

The relationship with the enemy is at the heart of thinking about the ethics of war, with theorists as diverse as St Augustine, Clausewitz, Baudrillard, and Butler, concerned with proportion, proximity and mutual precarity in the positions of opposing sides in determining the legitimacy of war. This project draws on literary archives to consider questions central to legislation to bring war violence within tolerable limits: Is it better to kill in recognition or denial of the humanity of one's enemy, when the end result is similar, people are killed? Do technologies for killing at distance reduce the emotional toll of that killing? The project uses humanities methods of comparative close reading, historical contextualisation and theoretical approaches from gender and emotion studies, showing how the various answers proffered by long-nineteenth century texts illuminate our present of xenophobia, counter-insurgency operations, and drone dominated strategy.

This research will be informed by an international steering committee, bringing expertise complementary to the PI's British studies background, on the 'other' side(s) of the four major conflicts of focus - Napoleonic, Crimean, South African and First World Wars. It will seek new methodologies for military history, extending beyond a single country of focus to suggest more dialogic and international methods of critical military studies.

The project will be shaped by focus groups with soldiers and veterans, and will work with award winning charity Re-Live to consider the relationships between feeling for the enemy and veterans' mental health. A sustained series of 12 Life Story workshops and performance with Re-Live will place the experiences of veterans, their families and communities at the project's centre. Partnerships with leading military museums will inform the way in which the 'other' side is curated, with the research used in new galleries at Military Medical Museum and Imperial War Museum. A series of events and online materials will engage the public with debates about the cultural work done by the presentation of the enemy.

Who will benefit?
It is intended that this work will be of particular value to soldiers and veterans, to organisations working to improve veterans' mental health and connections between soldiers and veterans and their communities, to military museums, and to a general public interested in war and culture.

Anticipated impacts:
Improved wellbeing for soldiers, veterans, their families, and communities
New methodologies for organisations working therapeutically with soldiers and veterans
New museums practice in representing the 'enemy'
Enhanced understanding of soldiers experiences for wider public.
More informed public debate about the cultural work done by presentations of the enemy

How will they benefit?
We will work directly with these beneficiaries with project partners Arts in Health charity Re-Live, who have previously produced award winning creative therapeutic work with veterans and their communities, and national museums Military Medical Museum (MMM) and Imperial War Museum (IWM) (see Pathways for wider public dissemination, communication and evaluation processes). All partners have been fully involved in designing the project and in formulating research questions which speak to our shared agenda. The project will place current soldiers' and veterans' experiences of the enemy in a long historical context, and give them new voice through a central role in producing a creative output and shaping the academic publications. It will work closely with museum practitioners, identifying limitations in the current curation of the enemy (minimised or simplified) and working on new approaches. These partnerships will also inform and nuance the academic outputs.

The Re-Live partnership provides frameworks through which veterans can speak to one another, to their families and communities, and to the public about less discussed experiences. Workshops with veterans will culminate in the performance of a new work on enemy encounters. The workshops blend Re-Live's established Life-Story methods with a historical research dimension provided by the participation of PI and RA. Through public dissemination and follow-on work with wellbeing charities (Pathways) we aspire to directly benefit participants and their communities, to change public perceptions, and model new research-led approaches to charities.

The research will help to shape the narrative for Military Medical Museum's new museum, anticipated opening 2023, with threads through the 5 major galleries on treating the enemy, and the possibility of a special exhibition on the theme. This addresses the museum's objective to more fully represent the other sides involved in conflicts covered, particularly medical care to opposing forces and to civilians. Work with a steering group of Medical Corps Personnel will, in turn, shape the research, and a series of public events on Treating the Enemy will extend ethical questions about allegiance and care to wider audiences.

Imperial War Museum will host the project's international two day symposium. The curatorial strand of this event, formulated with the two museum parters, will address urgent current questions for IWM, MMM and this project, around how is the enemy presented within war museums?
The event will include a public roundtable event with soldier and war journalist perspectives on encountering the enemy today.

All the project's public events seek to instigate public debate about how presentations and (literally) treatments of the enemy work to make war more or less acceptable. Near the end of the project the PI will pitch a series on Enemy Encounters, to be delivered with project partners, to BBC producers.

These ambitious impact plans build upon my career-long commitment to working with non-academic audiences. In an earlier AHRC ECLF in partnership with National Army Museum I also began to establish relationships with these 3 organisations, substantially developed here.