Reimagining the Veteran: An investigation into violent veterans in England and Wales post 9/11

This thesis provides an original investigation into the status of violent veterans in the United Kingdom post 9/11. Drawing upon a series of interviews conducted during 2011-2014, it frames the problem through the focused lens of Veteranality. Veteranality is understood here to be the regulation and rehabilitation of veteran offenders within the criminal justice framework, with a conscious attempt to understand the limitations of governing regimes by foregrounding questions of political agency. It looks directly at the tensions and conflicts veteran offenders experience as they move from a war paradigm to one of criminal justice on domestic soil. Central here is the ethical decision to “give voice” to the veterans by allowing them to narrate their own experiences prior, during and after war, which proves crucial to the study. As violent veterans expose the limits of juridical approaches to their crimes, so they add further empirical weight to the claims that times of war and peace are less easily demarcated and set apart. Embodying the normalisation of violence in new security terrains, their testimonies present significant challenges and demand a thorough rethinking of the violence of warfare in the 21st Century