Rethinking Mutiny

This chapter begins with defining mutiny and exploring its origins. It considers the nature of military relationships across time before focusing upon the British Army Act (1955) and the American Uniform Code of Military Justice. The issues of mutiny as a collective act, and the active or passive role of those involved in mutinies, are used to illustrate the intricacies of the legal framework which then flows into using cases of mutiny on slave ships to highlight the importance of the historical context. The nature of sovereign power is then used to illustrate both the coercive control over military subordinates and the fragility of that very same coercion. This leads into the way the act of mutiny is socially constructed—in other words, what counts as ‘mutiny’ is a subjective not an objective construction. The chapter concludes with two sections, the first of which lists the ‘Refrains of Mutiny’: the patterns that recur across space and time, from the social construction of mutiny to the importance of establishing who the enemy is, the role of antecedence, the default response of the authorities, the importance of scapegoating, the omnipresence of the phenomena, the role of the heroic leader, the impact of serendipity, the relational nature of leadership, and finally the role of enthralment. The final section focuses on various explanations of mutiny, using material drawn from political revolutions and industrial relations to highlight the similarities and differences between these and mutinies, and relates such disputes to the difference between agonism and antagonism.