Violence and the contemporary soldiering body

Introduction

Soldiers’ bodies, and the violences they enact and encounter in war, have long been rendered (in)visible by various means and to greater and lesser extents. Focusing on the ‘Long War’ in Afghanistan (2001–14), this article uses the 2011–12 War Story exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, London, to track how violences during this conflict were rendered visible to the visiting public and mediated through the bodies of the British soldiers depicted within it. Unlike in the high-technology wars waged by Western nations during the latter years of the 20th century, for the British public at home watching the recent Afghanistan conflict unfold via a range of mediums, British soldiering bodies, as well as the violences inflicted on them, were central to the war’s depiction. In this article, I use the concept of hypervisibility to describe this heightened ‘seen-ness’ of British soldiering bodies during the conflict ¹ (and the attending invisibility of other bodies), and argue that this hypervisibility was crucial both for how wartime violences were mediated and understood, and for putting in place the conditions of possibility for their continuation.

My use of ‘hypervisibility’ draws from the work of Jean Baudrillard (1983) and Julianne Pidduck (1990, 2011). Borrowing from Baudrillard, Pidduck coins the term ‘hypervisible’ to register changes ‘in epistemological, cultural, political and economic regimes governing the re/production and dissemination of images [whereby] the prefix “hyper” points to a new order of excessive visibility’ (Pidduck, 2011: 9, emphasis in original). In this article, I specifically focus on the hypervisibility of British soldiering bodies and their discursive representation (and idealization) in the War Story exhibition, as well as the effects of this (hyper)visibility. I ask what is the significance of making British soldiering bodies hypervisible in war; what work does this hypervisibility do to our understandings of war and its violences; and what bodies remain invisible? The article starts by tracking the (in)visibility of British soldiering bodies to their home publics from World War I onwards, connecting the hypervisibility of the contemporary soldiering figure to understandings of a more humanized and embodied form of warfare. I then proceed to locate my argument in two broad literatures: one that places the body and embodied experiences at the centre of theorizing about war, the other being the militarized masculinities literature. Building on the insights of these two bodies of scholarship, I introduce a specific soldiering subject produced through the doctrine of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. As a body that both bore and enacted violence, it was through this particular militarized masculinity that war’s violences were rendered visible to the British public. Locating its analysis in the Imperial War Museum’s War Story exhibition, the article details two specific moments of violence in Afghanistan, demonstrating how it was in, on and through this soldiering body that the violence was rendered visible and understood. The article ends with a discussion of the bodies that fail to materialize in this regime of hypervisibility: the thousands of Afghan civilians killed and injured, and those soldiers and veterans who fall outside the intelligibility of a discursively idealized warrior. Through this regime of hypervisibility, the fact that it is often British soldiers who are the direct or indirect cause of Afghan suffering is occluded, while their representational status helps makes possible the continuation and acceptance of violence abroad.

At this point, it should be noted that violence is by no means a stable ontological phenomenon and has engendered a vast amount of scholarship (e.g. Arendt, 1969; Cavarero, 2009; Fanon, 2001). This article does not seek to engage in a definitional debate on violence. Rather, its concern with violence is quite straightforward: it is concerned with the physical violence of war – with how war is enacted through the firing of guns, the dropping of bombs and the injuring of bodies – and, in particular, the visible bodily effects of this physical violence. This is not to suggest that this is the only way in which violence emerges in/through war (think, for example, of the indirect violence caused through the damaging of infrastructure or the destruction of crops), or that violence is only something that is done rather than something that is inherent to our being a ‘woman’, ‘man’, ‘citizen’ and so forth (see Frazer and Hutchings, 2008: 105). Furthermore, and as the article will go on to explore, when (physical) violence is rendered visible in the War Story exhibition (as well as in broader representational framings of soldiers within British society), it does not emerge in the abstract. Rather, it is mediated by and through the bodies, context and relations it materializes in/on/through. It is this mediation and the effects it has that the article tracks.

The (in)visibility of soldiering bodies in war

While, as I will argue below, it has only been in recent years that British soldiering bodies have become hypervisible, the specific contexts and historical ‘realities’ of war have always resulted in different degrees of (in)visibility of soldiers to their publics at home. For example, in Britain during World War I – considered the first large-scale industrial or mechanized war – the war wounded were rendered visible on a scale never seen before, with over 41,000 men having limbs amputated during this period and limblessness becoming normalized (Bourke, 1996: 33; see also Carden-Coyne, 2014). With the development of powerful weaponry during World War II this trend continued, with the scale of disability during the war leading to the creation of rehabilitation facilities and, as such, greater visibility of disabled individuals in the workforce and sometimes within the armed services (see Anderson, 2011). While a limited and tightly controlled media presence during the Falklands/Malvinas conflict meant only a highly mediated view of the war was presented to the British public (see Tumber, 2004: 191–194), it was during the ‘techno-warfare’ of the 1990–91 Gulf War that Britain’s soldiering bodies and war’s violences were most memorably (not) seen. For the British public who watched the war unfold in their front rooms, the war appeared as ‘a largely celebratory account of surgical strikes that accurately targeted and precisely destroyed enemy locations, without obvious casualties’ (McSorley, 2012: 48). Rhetoric surrounding the war and the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) fetishized the military technologies on display and made claims that the human body in war was being eclipsed ‘by the growing importance of machines in general and weapons in particular’ (Gray, 1997: 47). The signature motif was not that of (masculine) soldiers but ‘footage from the pilots’ display-screens of their so-called “smart” bombing raids’ (McSorley, 2012: 47–48). While the soldiering body was not erased from the war’s visual grammars in its entirety – appearing as a technologically enhanced ‘cyborg soldier’ (Masters, 2005) – in this techno-fetishistic portrayal of war, the bloody, broken, lifeless human bodies of British and American service personnel, along with the tens of thousands of Iraqi troop and civilian casualties, were absented, leaving in their place a seemingly bloodless war of machine-to-machine combat.

With the introduction and increasing use of drones, Afghanistan offered, in some respects, a continuation of these techno-scientific discourses with the even further removal of British soldiering bodies from the battlezone. However, despite the use of drones and the continued reliance on airstrikes, for the watching public at home the British soldiering body was far more present in Afghanistan – or at least visible – than it was in the Gulf or Kosovo conflicts. For as Afghanistan hovered somewhere between war and occupation, and as the insurgency failed to be quelled, it was the bodies of soldiers, not their technologies, that became central to the military doctrine initiated.

Codified in the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3-24 (FM 3-24) in 2006 and its British equivalent three years later, ² population-centric counterinsurgency – or ‘COIN’ as it came to be known – built on the experiences of European and British colonial warfighting and imperial policing, prioritizing political as opposed to military goals (see Galula, 1964; Kitson, 1971; Thompson, 1966). Implemented as the central military doctrine in Afghanistan in 2009, COIN signalled a sharp diversion from the force-heavy strategies of the Gulf War and Kosovo campaign, as well as the ‘shock and awe’ tactics that had brought down Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003. COIN was a military strategy that, in rhetoric at least, purported to have at its centre not the destruction of enemy forces but the winning of the ‘hearts and minds’ of the civilian population. This meant that the establishment of security through military means was only part of the strategy. ‘Non-kinetic’ activities such as the building of infrastructure, the provision of jobs and the creation of a functioning legal system also needed to be put in place. FM 3-24 was explicit in its rejection of the view commonly held within some American military circles that success in war was achieved through technological advantage and overwhelming force alone, emphasizing instead the multiple dimensions needed to defeat an insurgency – military, political, civic and even psychological. It was a doctrine that could not be carried out (solely) from the skies, but one that expected counterinsurgents to expose themselves to greater risks (US Army, 2007: xxvii). In the shift from force to civilian protection, counterinsurgency soldiers patrolled on foot rather than in heavily armoured vehicles, saw their rules of engagement tightened and spent significant time engaging with the local population. For the soldiers enacting this doctrine, such a shift came with an increased exposure to harm.

Despite proclamations that COIN was a distinctly humanized form of warfare, those responsible for enacting it took great care to distance it from perceptions that it was a more passive form of fighting. Addressing the US Government Counterinsurgency Conference, David Kilcullen (2006a), an Australian counterinsurgency expert, stated:

If this [counterinsurgency] sounds soft, non-lethal and non-confrontational, it is not: this is life-and-death competition in which the loser is marginalized, starved of support and ultimately destroyed…. There is no known way of doing counterinsurgency without inflicting casualties on the enemy: there is always a lot of killing, one way or another.

COIN, then, was not a straightforward shift from a techno-strategic to a humanized form of warfare. Rather, it brought both logics to bear. Policies of reconstruction and development existed alongside increasing numbers of combat-trained troops, and soldiers would spend their deployment both living among the local population and engaging in firefights and calling in airstrikes. As Derek Gregory (2010) has pointed to, COIN demonstrated significant continuity with many of the developments of the RMA (see also McSorley, 2013a).

What had shifted, however, was the visibility of the on-the-ground NATO combat soldier, ³ both in official military doctrine and in the media- and culture-scape of Afghanistan projected back to the UK public. From a relative invisibility during the Gulf War and the intervention in Kosovo, during the conflict in Afghanistan depictions of British soldiering bodies proliferated. While, as documented above, military doctrine expected the combat soldier to take a more visible and exposed role in counterinsurgency operations, at home in Britain the counterinsurgent’s soldiering body emerged as hypervisible through an abundance of representations of soldiers and soldiering. In this ‘new order of excessive visibility’ (Pidduck, 2011: 9, emphasis in original), the British public were flooded with images and narratives about the (mostly) men who fought via print and television media, numerous documentaries and films, ⁴ museum and art exhibitions, ⁵ and the proliferation of soldier memoirs (see Duncanson, 2013), as well as in Armistice Day and Armed Forces Day events (see Åhäll, 2016; Basham, 2016).

Hypervisibility, however, does not simply signal towards increased visibility. First, through its excess of visibility, a ‘constitutive outside’ is simultaneously produced in which there is a relative, or even complete, absence of images and voices (Pidduck, 2011: 11). For Pidduck, who tracks the shift in visibility of same-sex desire and identities in Western European and North American cinema and television, this constitutive outside includes areas away from ‘international gay commercial culture’, such as sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb and the Antilles, and demonstrates the ‘political nature of LGBT representation’ (Pidduck, 2011: 11, emphasis in original). As will be detailed, in this article this constitutive invisibility is made up of the tens of thousands of Afghan civilians killed and injured by the war and those British soldiering bodies who do not fit the discursively idealized and hypervisible representations. Hypervisibility’s second effect refers to the fact that while hypervisibility may mean an excess of visibility, this explosion is ‘more a mark of desire and fantasy than [an] anchor of “realness”’ (Pidduck, 2011: 10). Looking at LGBT-authored and LGBT-themed visual culture, Pidduck notes that the images of lesbians and gay men found within this culture proliferate at ‘increasing remove from [the] lesbian and gay lives and communities’ they supposedly depict, and reflect little of the ‘realities’ they are supposedly anchored within (Pidduck, 2011: 10). Thus, just as Baudrillard used the term ‘hyperreal’ to detail the severance of the postmodern image from its referent in the ‘real’, that which is rendered hypervisible through its continuous reproduction and reiteration – be it the everyday experiences of gay and lesbian communities or British soldiering bodies – is done so at an ever-increasing remove from the ‘realities’ that it purports to represent. In effect, the hypervisible image or subject is one ‘without origin or reality’ (Baudrillard, 1983: 2).

(Hyper)visibility relies, of course, on visuality – the ability to see and that there is something/someone to be seen – and there is a vast literature that grapples with the social and cultural processes associated with this (for overviews, see Berger, 1972; Jenks, 1995a; Mirzoeff, 2013). As Pidduck recognizes, what/who is rendered hypervisible and what/who is invisible is always political. In this article, visuality and ‘seeing’ are understood as socially constructed and culturally located, with the ‘conditions of visibility’ (Teresa de Lauretis, cited in Pidduck, 2011: 12) producing not just who is represented and excluded but also spectatorship. In respect to British soldiering bodies during the war in Afghanistan, the ‘conditions of their (hyper)visibility’ in which they were (and continue to be) represented and ‘seen’ across a range of mediums is a contemporary British society marked by an ever-increasing degree of militarization (see Åhäll, 2016; Tidy, 2015).

Concomitant with this heightened visibility of British soldiering bodies was that violences of war once concealed in techno-fetishistic discourses and imagery were now similarly (hyper)visible upon these bodies. Throughout the conflict, service personnel returned to the UK displaying the brutality of war in their disablement and disfigurement, and repatriations became public and publicized affairs. Injuries and deaths caused by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were particularly visible, ⁶ and as the mutilations of World War I reflected the increasing use of artillery fire, hand grenades and small firearms, the injuries of Afghanistan reflected the specific violence of IEDs. Unlike the IEDs used in Iraq, which tended to be aimed at coalition troops’ vehicles, in Afghanistan IEDs were designed to detonate under foot. The shockwave that occurred after a detonation would instantly pulverize flesh, bone, tissue and muscle of one or both of the lower limbs (Drury, 2011: 159), with traumatic amputations below the waist among coalition troops so frequent that during the conflict the injury became known as the war’s ‘signature wound’ (Drury, 2011). The hypervisibility of these injuries was propagated by military charities such as Help for Heroes, who ran high-profile campaigns documenting the traumas and recoveries experienced by service personnel, and popular television shows such as X Factor, which featured stories of personal triumph. As with the immediate aftermath of World Wars I and II, the wounded British soldier moved from the margins of public consciousness to the centre, ⁷ ‘discursively constructed as the epitome of heroic sacrifice for the nation’ (Caso, 2016: 4).

As noted above, in this article I trace the hypervisibility of British soldiering bodies in the War Story exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London and explore how wartime violence – both that experienced by British soldiers and that enacted by them – was represented, as well as what bodies and violences remained invisible. Before going on to detail the exhibition and its (hyper)visibilities and invisibilities, I want to locate my analysis within two broad literatures. The first is a literature that takes bodies and embodied experiences of war seriously. The second, the militarized masculinities literature, focuses on the gendered production of soldiering subjects and their intimate links with violence in international relations.

Soldiering bodies

In recent years, and predominantly among feminist scholars, there has been a move away from grand and abstract theorizing about war, towards an understanding of war that places the human body and embodied experiences at the centre of theorizing. It is how a body experiences war, both physically and emotionally, that is used to provide a fuller conception of war, its effects and the conditions of its possibility (see, for example, Åhäll and Gregory, 2015; Dyvik, 2017; McSorley, 2013b). Despite the fact that the body is both the enactor and the target of war’s violence (Sylvester, 2013), and that war shapes, travels on and through, and destroys so many, bodies have often remained absent from analytic engagements with war. For Elaine Scarry, this is ‘the key paradox that constitutes the structure of war’ (McSorley, 2013a: 3): that while war in its injuring is ‘the most radically embodying event in which human beings ever collectively participate’ (Scarry, 1985: 71), recognition of this injuring and embodiment is continually displaced. This article confronts this paradox head-on, locating one particular body – the discursively idealized British soldiering body – at the centre of its analysis, along with this body’s experiences of injuring (as both victim and perpetrator).

I am not, of course, the first to foreground soldiering bodies. Given their centrality to the waging of war, these bodies have received an unsurprising degree of attention. While it has not just been feminists who have studied the figure of the soldier (see Grossman, 1995; King, 2013), feminists and other gender-aware scholars have offered the most sustained interrogation of the (predominantly masculine) soldiering body and the gendered/racialized/sexualized/classed discourses through which it is produced (see, for example, Basham, 2013; Welland, 2013; Whitworth, 2004). Feminist scholars point to the link between masculinity and the military, arguing that it is constructed and maintained for the purposes of waging war, with traits stereotypically associated with masculinity acquired and proven via participation in military service and combat in particular (see, for example, Duncanson, 2013; Eichler, 2011; Welland, 2013). While characteristics associated with militarized masculinity have traditionally included ‘toughness, violence, aggression, courage, control, and domination’ (Eichler, 2014: 82), scholars working with this subject position have revealed it, and those who embody it, not to be fixed or monolithic but to encompass a range and diversity of traits and behaviours (see Duncanson, 2013; Eichler, 2011; Higate, 2003). Feminists who have tracked the production and operation of militarized masculinities have frequently done so within the context of a specific war or military intervention, paying attention to the ways in which a discursively idealized militarized masculinity shifts in line with the perceived needs of the conflict they emerge for, in and through (see Masters, 2005; Niva, 1998; Welland, 2015). Thus, against the backdrop of COIN, a reconceptualized militarized masculine subjectivity was embodied.

The liberal warrior

Laleh Khalili has written about the ways in which the counterinsurgency doctrines of Afghanistan and Iraq were gendered in how they were formulated, put into practice and experienced (see also Dyvik, 2017). Presented as the opposite of a ‘hyper-masculine’ and ‘more mechanised, technologically advanced, higher-fire-power form of warfare’, Khalili argues that the doctrine was itself gendered feminine. Looking to where COIN policy and doctrine was produced, Khalili identifies a ‘new form of masculinity’ emerging: ‘the humanitarian soldier-scholar’, ⁸ whose ‘softened’ masculinity ‘over-shadows the hyper-masculinity of warrior kings’ (Khalili, 2011: 1474–1475). Unlike the raw physical masculinity of a warrior, these soldier-scholars ‘are not interested in chest-thumping gestures’; instead, they ‘deploy the language of “hearts and minds” … and see their wont as being the wielders of softer or smarter power’ (Khalili, 2011: 1487). Building on Khalili’s insights on counterinsurgency and its production of new masculinities, but extending it from the location where COIN doctrine was produced to the everyday spaces in Afghanistan where it was enacted, I trace a particular conceptualization of militarized masculinity: a soldiering figure who was understood to both fight wars and build nations – a liberal warrior (see also Furneaux, 2016; Howell, 2015; Welland, 2015).

Over the past 30 years, Britain has involved itself in numerous ‘Wars of Choice’ (Duncanson, 2013: 54), in the name of protecting the territorial integrity of another state in the first Gulf War (1990–91), preventing ethnic cleansing in Kosovo (1999) and ‘liberating’ the Iraqi population from its despotic leader (2003–11). The waging of these wars was not for British self-determination, sovereignty or independence, nor were they for territory, wealth or plunder; rather, these wars proclaimed a humanitarian logic. Some theorists, drawing on the later writings of Michel Foucault, have argued that these wars correlate to liberalism’s original commitment to ‘making life live’ and to wage war on behalf of life, making use of the liberal way of rule and its legal armature in order to rationalize and provide a narrative for its violence (see Dillon and Reid, 2009; Evans, 2011; Gregory, 2015). Because of their humanitarian logics, these ‘liberal wars’ frequently take place and are operationalized at the level of the population. COIN, with its focus on the civilian population, was archetypal of the war doctrine these theorists refer to and, as such, required soldiering subjects who embodied these idea(l)s – liberal warriors – for its enactment.

Given that the priority for counterinsurgents in Afghanistan was to engage with the local community and create an environment where governance and development could flourish, everyday counterinsurgency practices included soft-hatted foot patrols, ensuring the provision of humanitarian relief and contributing towards infrastructure projects. Thus, in this context, a liberal warrior was better served not by traits such as dominance, aggression or toughness – those conventionally associated with militarized masculinity – but by encompassing more typically ‘feminine’ attributes such as compassion, restraint and cooperation. In this respect, both the counterinsurgents and the soldiering they were doing were ‘softened’, presented akin to a caring profession, or as ‘armed social work’ as David Kilcullen (2006b: 107) termed it. However, just as ideas that COIN was a more passive form of warfare were vociferously denied, so too were any attempts to portray counterinsurgency soldiers as anything less than masculinized warriors. ⁹ FM 3-24 describes the counterinsurgency environment as ‘inherently dangerous’ (US Army, 2007: xxvii), and infantry troops continued to engage in close combat, called in airstrikes and disgorged an incredible amount of ordnance. COIN in Afghanistan, therefore, required military personnel who could not only win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the local population but who also resembled the more traditional highly masculinized combat soldier. It was not, then, that violence was absent or concealed from a liberal warrior’s performances in war; rather, that in the shift from force to civilian protection, and the change from maximum possible to minimum necessary force, the notion of restraint and the use of controlled and proportionate violence became integral to the imagining of a liberal warrior.

As British soldiering bodies were rendered hypervisible in the warscape, for the UK public at home it was primarily through a discursively idealized liberal warrior body, as well as hypervisibility’s concomitant rendering invisible of other bodies, that the Afghanistan conflict came to be understood. It was through a liberal warrior’s performances, injuries and death, represented and reiterated across a range of mediums in British society, that the public came to ‘see’ the war. In the hypervisibility of this body, violences of war were not concealed: they materialized in the frequently depicted firefights and in the rising body counts of British service personnel. Violence, however, is inherently relational and does not dis/appear in the abstract. It is rendered (in)visible and becomes (in)comprehensible through wider relations, processes and discourses. As the dominant body in the visual grammars of the conflict, and one that both experienced and enacted violence, a liberal warrior’s body was crucial to violences’ (in)visibility and mediation.

War Story and two mediations of violence

Focusing on the War Story exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London as one specific site of representation of the liberal warrior, the article now explores the particular ways in which liberal warriors were rendered hypervisible within it and the effects of this hypervisibility in relation to both how wartime violence was mediated and understood and what was silenced and rendered invisible through this hypervisibility. A Ministry of Defence-supported initiative, War Story ran from October 2011 to December 2012 and was part of a series of events, exhibitions and broadcasts that marked the decade British troops had been stationed in Afghanistan. The exhibition was explicit in its focus on the experiences of British service personnel serving in Afghanistan and, as such, provides an exemplary site in which to trace representations of contemporary British soldiering subjects.

Although generally understudied within the discipline of international relations, museums are key sites for the representation and performance of global politics (see Sylvester, 2006, 2009). Museums not only shape national and ethnic identity and play a key role in nation-building (Anderson, 1991) but also have the potential to offer creative and imaginative methodologies for researching and understanding global politics. My own analysis comes from a visit to the exhibition in 2012 in which I took numerous photographs and wrote detailed notes about the exhibition and my own responses to it, supported by a range of Imperial War Museum online resources and a small collection of academic articles that have also engaged with the exhibition (see McSorley, 2012; Maltby and Thornham, 2012; Parry and Thumim, 2016). While at the exhibit and when reviewing materials about it, I deployed what Christine Sylvester (2006: 218) has termed ‘feminist gazing’. Although Sylvester outlines her methodology of ‘feminist gazing’ in relation to looking at fine art, it can equally be applied to attending and looking at museum exhibits. As with the ‘male gaze’ identified by feminist art historians (see Broude and Garrard, 1992; Kleinfelder, 1993), the feminist gaze is not neutral. Rather, it seeks to understand how an artwork or particular museum exhibit ‘works’ (Sylvester, 2006: 204) and what ‘excesses … a certain visualization, characterization, or measurement tries to control or keep out’ (Sylvester, 2006: 210). In this respect, feminist gazing is attuned to the socially constructed and culturally located act of ‘seeing’, and is well placed to uncover the operations and effects of hypervisibility.

Taking the form of a freestanding structure set among the permanent exhibits, War Story was organized around the themes ‘First Impressions’, ‘Daily Life’, ‘On the Ground’, ‘Coming Home’ and ‘Loss’. Visitors were encouraged to walk around the structure and physically touch some of the exhibits, and could engage in more depth via listening posts, which held recordings of soldiers’ voices and stories from the conflict. It was an exhibition that familiarized and presented the visitor with intimate knowledge of the service personnel involved and, by extension, members of the British armed forces as a whole. However, while the exhibition may have ‘principally render[ed] the Afghanistan conflict in terms of private, disaggregated experiences’ (McSorley, 2012: 52), this did not mean that violence was absent from the exhibition. What follows is an analysis of two specific visibilities of violence and their mediation through the hypervisible liberal warrior body within the exhibition.

Invisible bodies

While the hypervisibility of the bodies of British soldiering subjects in War Story meant that violence enacted by these bodies materialized as radically different from the brutalism of an IED detonation, as the absence of Afghan civilian casualties from the exhibition demonstrates, hypervisibility has other effects. First, as Pidduck (2011: 11–12) notes, hypervisibility’s ‘constitutive outside’ is the relative absence of other images and voices, and in its practice ‘these inequities, invisibilities and silences are reiterated, [and] perhaps even amplified’. Thus, in the excess of visibility afforded to liberal warriors via news reports, documentaries, soldier memoirs, exhibitions, and highly publicized repatriations, the body of the ‘other’ – or more specifically, the broken, bloody and lifeless body of the ‘other’ – failed to materialize in the visual grammars of the war. Although the annual reports by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) on the protection of civilians provided statistics of recorded civilian injury and death, the reports make it clear that such figures may underestimate the ‘true’ figures owing to the difficulty collecting statistics in one of the most dangerous countries in the world. More significant, however, is that,

In contrast to the deaths of [NATO] soldiers, the lives of Afghan civilians do not seem to merit … attention. The number of civilians killed remains unknown and there is nobody to line the streets to acknowledge their passing. They are unnamed, unidentified and, increasingly, unexceptional. The deaths of Afghan civilians are not officially counted; their lives do not seem to count. (Gregory, 2012: 328)

Thus, while depictions of liberal warriors, as well as the violences they endure, proliferate across numerous mediums, rendered invisible are the violences inflicted on the bodies of the Afghan population, as well as the recognition that it is often liberal warriors themselves who are the direct or indirect cause of this injuring. Furthermore, an additional effect of this hypervisibility may well be an increase in calls for more high-technology weaponry and war at remove. ¹²

It is not, however, just the bodies of Afghan ‘others’ that are obscured through the hypervisibility of a liberal warrior. Absent from the warscape, and from depictions of the soldiering bodies that populate it, are the bodies of soldiers that fall outside the frames of intelligibility of a liberal warrior. For example, while liberal warrior bodies appear as tough and tender counterinsurgents, disabled but resilient survivors, and fallen heroes, invisible are the veterans who experience a range of mental health problems, engage in substance abuse, commit suicide, encounter social problems such as homelessness, or simply feel their experiences are ‘unheard’ (see Bulmer and Jackson, 2016). Alison Howell and Zoë Wool have explored the costs of the militarized response to 9/11 for US veterans and their families and have found

that soldiers exposed to violent combat, intense human trauma, or who kill another person are more likely to engage in a wide array of risky behaviors, including alcohol abuse and verbal and physical aggression, putting both themselves and those around them in danger. (Howell and Wool, 2016: 252)

For both American and British military personnel, much of the Afghanistan campaign was conducted alongside a military deployment in Iraq (2003–11), which meant significant numbers of troops experienced (multiple) tours of duty and returned home to overstretched militaries, inadequate health services and ‘a macho attitude that stigmatized help-seeking’ (Howell and Wool, 2016: 252). This, in turn, is where hypervisibility’s second effect can be traced: that the hypervisibility of a liberal warrior’s body is reproduced and reiterated at an increasing remove from the ‘real’ – the everyday lived realities of those who inhabit this body and subjectivity. Thus, in its hypervisibility, a liberal warrior is a figure ‘without origin or reality’ (Baudrillard, 1983: 2), a subject who is both ‘seen’ and ‘known’ but whose representations are not anchored in the experiences and ‘realities’ of counterinsurgency warfare or military afterlives.

Conclusion

Unlike the ‘techno-warfare’ of the 1990s that purported to remove (risks to) British soldiering bodies from the conduct of war, the counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan saw their re-centring. With COIN promising a less militaristic form of warfare and one that placed the needs of the civilian population, rather than military operations, at its centre, British counterinsurgents – what this article has called ‘liberal warriors’ – became hypervisible in the warscape. I have argued that wartime violences, concealed from the British public during the 1990s, were viscerally displayed on soldiering bodies and mediated through these bodies’ hypervisibility during the Afghanistan conflict. Locating my analysis in, and deploying a ‘feminist gaze’ at, the 2011–12 War Story exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London, I explored two specific mediations of violence: the detonation of an IED under the foot of Corporal Andy Reid and the day-to-day kinetic force engaged in by British soldiers. While violence inflicted by an IED and on Reid’s body was scripted as obscene and relation-less in its targeting, violences engaged in by liberal warriors were read as reciprocal and purposive. In both these readings, the hypervisibility of liberal warriors’ bodies – both in the exhibition and more widely – was central and, as detailed below, integral for putting in place the conditions of possibility for the continuation of violence. While in the detonation of an IED it was the physical destruction of Reid’s ‘pre-received’ softened and humanized body that scripted the technologized violence as beyond the pale of ‘ordinary’ warfare, violence perpetrated by liberal warriors was understood as qualitatively different. As a body that is deeply familiar, violence enacted by this figure could not be separated from wider understandings of a liberal warrior subjectivity. Who a liberal warrior is and what they are presumed to signify mediates the violence, suffusing it with meaning drawn from their bodies. Violences performed by this soldiering subject are therefore read not as (purely) destructive, but as purposive and holding nation-building potential.

However, in the context both of War Story and of the Afghanistan counterinsurgency campaign as a whole, the hypervisibility of liberal warrior bodies has produced two other effects. First, in their hypervisibility, other bodies disappeared or were relegated to the margins. While the violence of the Afghan war may not have been fully obscured, having been rendered visible in the injuries inflicted on the bodies of liberal warriors and in the violent potential their bodies held, the ‘other’ bodies such violence was directed towards remained – and continue to remain – resolutely absent. These bodies who have failed to materialize include the estimated 26,000 Afghan civilians who are believed to have died a violent death as a direct result of the military intervention, and the thousands more who have died indirectly or suffered ill-health due to the exacerbated effects of poverty, malnutrition, lack of sanitation and poor access to healthcare that the conflict has both increased and caused (Costs of War, 2015). Furthermore, bodies of soldiers unrecognizable as tough and tender, resilient and heroic liberal warriors also failed to materialize. Counterinsurgent veterans’ multitude of experiences that may include mental health problems, alcohol and drug abuse, and other social difficulties are obscured in the hypervisibility of this discursively idealized subject. Both these absences point to hypervisibility’s second effect: that in the reproduction and reiteration of the hypervisible image or subject, it becomes ever further removed from its referent in the ‘real’ – in this case, the lived realities of British soldiers, both in the warscape and on their return home. The hypervisible liberal warrior is disconnected from the violence of counterinsurgency, both directly and indirectly targeted at the civilian population of Afghanistan, as well as removed from the ways in which the violence and trauma of the conflict ‘comes home’ (Howell and Wool, 2016) with the counterinsurgents themselves.

A longer shadow of this hypervisibility, however, lies in its putting in place the conditions of possibility for the continuation of violent projects abroad and their acceptance at home. Throughout this article it has been argued that for the British public, the majority of them far removed – both physically and emotionally – from the warscape, it is through the hypervisible bodies of liberal warriors that war comes to be understood. Such bodies were rendered visible across a range of mediums in an increasingly militarized British society, one in which wider narratives and discourses circulated about the benevolence of the British state and military, and the violence of Arab and Islamic ‘others’ (see Basham, 2013; Bennett, 2012; Welland, 2015). Thus, while the tens of thousands of disabled and disfigured World War I veterans told of the brutality of industrialized war, and the ‘cyborg soldiers’ of the 1990–91 Gulf conflict signalled towards the technological superiority and dominance of Western nations, in the counterinsurgency environ of Afghanistan a liberal warrior’s body narrated a softer and gentler approach to warfighting. As the central figure in the war’s visual grammars, (re)produced and (re)iterated through its continuous representation, it was through and in relation to this body, its experiences and what it came to signify that the war came to be ‘seen’ and understood by the British public. And what publics ‘see’ and ‘know’ about war is integral for its social acceptance and the possibility of its continuance. For example, mediated through the humanized and familiar hypervisible bodies of liberal warriors, violences enacted by the British state were capable of signifying something more than straightforward destruction, allowing COIN’s doctrinal claims of population protection to remain intact even when members of the population being protected were being killed, injured and having their livelihoods devastated. The body of a liberal warrior was (and is) therefore central to the stories and narratives of 21st-century British military interventions and militarism. Its hypervisibility communicated the discursively idealized soldiering narratives constructed around, in and through its (re)production, and rendered invisible those bodies, violences and effects that fell outside its frames of intelligibility. Liberal warriors therefore became not just the militarized and weaponized bodies that enacted the warfare and military power of the British state but a central representational figure in ensuring the continuance of its violent projects abroad and their acceptance back home.