Understanding and Explaining the Marginalization of Part-Time British Army Reservists

Recent changes in the British Army mean part-time reservists and full-time regulars need to become better integrated. However, there has been a long history of workplace tensions between the full-time and part-time elements in the British Army. This mirrors those found in many civilian workplaces. Focus group data with 105 full-time regular British Army soldiers confirmed that time and emotional commitment are strongly linked in a full-time professional workplace that has strong, definite, and enduring boundaries. This, alongside demands for conformity and stratification by rank explained the high risk of marginalization of part-time reservists. The legitimacy of part-time reservists, especially in the combat arms, was often challenged. Using this explanatory framework, some implications and practical ways that tensions may be reduced between full-time and part-time members of the British Army, and other armed forces facing similar tensions, were highlighted.

Introduction

Overall approximately 152,000 Irishmen and a few thousand Irish women enlisted in the British armed forces during the First World War, joining 58,000 Irish men who were already serving or were army reservists. This was an impressive number but compared poorly with rates in Great Britain. For many years there was a perception that it was only ‘Loyal’ Ulster which provided recruits. However, it is clear, from the important works of Patrick Callan and David Fitzpatrick, that recruitment was nationwide. The support of John Redmond, leader of the Irish Party, was essential in mobilising Catholic, Nationalist support for the British war effort.

Reproducing the military and heteropatriarchal normal: Army Reserve service as serious leisure

The notions that military violence engenders security and that military service is a selfless and necessary act are orthodoxies in political, military and scholarly debate. The UK Army Reserve’s recent expansion prompts reconsideration of this orthodoxy, particularly in relation to the suggestion that reservists serve selflessly. Drawing on fieldwork with British Army reservists and their spouses/partners, we examine how this orthodoxy allows reservists to engage in everyday embodied performances, and occasionally articulations, of the need to serve, in order to free themselves up from household responsibilities. This supposed necessity of military service necessitates heteropatriarchal divisions of labour, which facilitate participation in military service and the state’s ability to conduct war/war preparations. However, while reserve service is represented as sacrificial and necessary, it is far more self-serving and is better understood as ‘serious leisure’, an activity whose perceived importance engenders deep self-fulfilment. By showing that the performances of sacrifice and necessity reservists rely on are selfish, not selfless, we show how militarism is facilitated by such everyday desires. We conclude by reflecting on how exposing reserve service as serious leisure could contribute to problematizing the state’s ability to rely on everyday performances and articulations of militarism and heteropatriarchy to prepare for and wage war.

Doves Among Hawks

What has become of Israel's peace movement? In the early 1980s, it was a major political force, bringing hundreds of thousands onto the streets; but since then, its importance has declined amid spiralling violence. Now, and especially since the second Intifada of 2000–5, the “doves” of the Israel/Palestine conflict struggle to be heard over its 'hawks', and the days of mass mobilization are over. "Doves Among” Hawks charts the successes and failures of a beleaguered peace movement, from its formation after the Six-Day War to the current security-obsessed climate, where Israel's “doves” seem to be fighting a lost and outdated battle. Samy Cohen's history of a peace process that once took on the Israeli settler movements exposes how that cause has been derailed and demoralized by suicide attacks. But the peace movement is not dead—it has simply transformed. From human rights monitors to lobbies of the bereaved, Cohen reveals a multitude of smaller, grassroots organizations that have emerged with unexpected energy. These lawyers, doctors, army reservists, former diplomats and senior security personnel are the unsung heroes of his story.