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Abstract

This article represents an entry point for the sociological study of protests by British Army veterans opposed to legacy case prosecutions arsing out of the conflict in the North of Ireland. Acknowledging the lack of sociological analysis when compared with recent legal, criminological and political studies, it uses insights from military sociology, the sociology of emotions, and the social movement literature to understand how and why veterans have mobilised against these prosecutions. It argues that veterans have resorted to taking collective action for three reasons: out of loyalty to the handful of veterans currently facing prosecution; because these prosecutions challenge their self-image as peacekeepers; and because of their sense of betrayal by the British government. In making this argument, the article highlights how political and moral contestation over past political violence touches on collective and individual identities constructed during that violence, social solidarity within groups impacted by that violence, and different expectations of post-conflict justice in its aftermath.

Keywords

social movements sociology of emotions military sociology transitional justice northern Ireland

Introduction

Between 1969 and 2007 approximately 300,000 British Army personnel were deployed to the North of Ireland (Armour et al., 2017). While the British state narrative has always insisted that Operation Banner was a human rights compliant ‘peacekeeping’ mission amidst escalating violence in Northern Ireland (NI), social science scholarship has long problematised this narrative through exposing systemic state violence (Burke, 2018; Burton, 1978; Hearty, 2020; McGovern, 2019; Sanders, 2021). As NI undergoes the difficult process of ‘dealing with the past’, the state narrative has been further challenged through truth recovery and belated official acknowledgment that a number of killings attributed to the British Army were unjustified (Lundy and Rolston, 2016); the most notable examples here being the shooting of civil rights marchers on Bloody Sunday in 1972 for which the UK Government formally apologised in 2010 following the Saville Inquiry (Rolston, 2010) and the shooting dead of a number of people in Ballymurphy in August 1971 that an inquest in July 2021 concluded were innocent (McEvoy, 2022: 10). A former British soldier – Soldier F – was subsequently sent for prosecution over Bloody Sunday in March 2019,¹ while a small number of former British soldiers are being – or have been unsuccessfully - prosecuted over other conflict-related deaths in what has been a bitterly contested and highly convoluted criminal justice process.² These developments reflect the ‘reclassification’ of the past when previous acts of violence that went unpunished, and perhaps even celebrated, are critically (re)examined following transition out of protracted violence (Dudai, 2018).

While truth and justice have been, and remain, important to victims of state violence (Lundy and Rolston, 2016; Rolston, 2010), legacy case prosecutions of British Army veterans have been co-opted into existing disagreement over the ‘dealing with the past’ process in NI. Unionist politicians and communities who have been critical of public inquiries, inquests and legacy case investigations for failing to differentiate between state and non-state actors, and for seemingly focusing on the former rather than the latter (Mallinder, 2019), have publicly shown their support for prosecuted veterans (Pinkerton 2021). Likewise, the UK Government has criticised the ‘dealing with the past’ process for birthing what former NI Secretary of State Theresa Villiers misguidedly called a ‘pernicious counter narrative … that seeks to displace responsibility from the people who perpetrated acts of terrorism and place the State at the heart of nearly every atrocity and murder that took place’ (News Letter, 2016). Karen Bradley, a subsequent Secretary of State, later doubled down on this by telling a parliamentary debate that ‘over 90% of the killings during the Troubles were at the hands of terrorists, every single one of those was a crime. The fewer than 10% that were at the hands of the military and police were not crimes. They were people acting under orders and under instruction and fulfilling their duty in a dignified and appropriate way’ (BBC, 2019a). Bradley's comments wilfully overlook shortcomings in how state violence was legally regulated and investigated at the time (Bryson, 2021; Lundy and Rolston, 2016; McEvoy, 2020), yet in reducing the discussion to a macabre and simplistic numbers game they typify the UK Government narrative that the ‘dealing with the past’ process has been hijacked by human rights groups, activist lawyers and former ‘terrorists’ intent on ‘rewriting the past’ (Hearty, 2020).

Against this backdrop, British Army veterans have framed the prosecution of a small number of veterans as a politically motivated ‘witch hunt’ against those previously cleared of wrongdoing. Their ‘witch hunt’ claim, however, fails to stand up to empirical statistical scrutiny and, just like Bradley's comments, overlooks well documented flaws in many of the original investigations (Bryson, 2021; McEvoy, 2020, 2022; McGovern, 2019). Nevertheless, within the veteran constituency ‘reclassifying’ the past has become synonymous with the post-Good Friday Agreement (GFA) scapegoating of veterans, leading them to close ranks (Brewer and Herron, 2019: 56) and take to the streets in protest at legacy investigations. These legacy case prosecutions, however, could be coming to an end should the UK Government successfully pass the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill into law. Introduced to parliament in May 2022 under the pretext of bringing closure and providing information to bereaved families, the move to close down further criminal prosecutions – as well as civil cases and inquests - has been seen as legally, politically and morally problematic by legal experts, human rights groups and victims across the board (Bryson, 2021; McEvoy, 2022). Here, the Bill insulates NI veterans from criminal prosecution in a similar way that the recent Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act 2021 protects those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan will (Mallory, 2022). Even if it remains a matter of conjecture at the time of writing as to whether or not the UK Government will ultimately succeed in preventing future prosecutions of veterans, there are nonetheless valuable insights to be gained in critically examining veteran mobilisation that precipitated the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill's introduction to parliament.

While there has been an emerging body of criminological (Hearty, 2020; McGovern, 2019), legal (Bryson, 2021; Mallinder, 2020; Mallory et al., 2020; McEvoy, 2020), and political (Chung, 2021) scholarship on veteran prosecutions in NI, sociological examination has been surprisingly absent despite the clear relevance of several strands of sociology. Situating itself within a broader sociological terrain that includes military sociology, the sociology of emotions, and social movement studies, this article seeks to encourage sociological exploration of the internal mobilisation of ‘intimates’ (Jasper and Poulsen, 1995) within the veteran constituency (i.e., veterans and/or their families) against NI legacy case prosecutions. In turning a lens towards campaigns by protagonists against accountability, the article seeks to offer a new avenue of exploration that departs from the rich sociological literature on victims’ campaigns for such accountability in the North of Ireland (Lundy and Rolston, 2016; Nagle, 2009; Rolston, 2010).

The article opens by outlining what sociology has to offer the study of veteran mobilisation against legacy case prosecutions in NI, identifying how military sociology, the sociology of emotions, and social movement theories can enrich the academic understanding of how and why the veteran constituency has mobilised on this issue. These theoretical insights are then applied to media and social media coverage of veteran campaigns against legacy case prosecutions. Locating this empirical discussion within the context of veterans closing ranks against the ‘reclassification’ of the past, it suggests that veteran mobilisation simultaneously feeds into and grows out of the bondedness of veterans, the veteran sense of self, and post-conflict moral injury. The synopsis, then, is that their collective mobilisation reflects and reifies the close bonds veterans feel towards one another, the favourable ‘peacekeeper’ self-image constructed and subscribed to by veterans, and the sense of governmental betrayal that they feel.

The case for a sociological exploration

The collective mobilisation of British Army veterans against legacy case prosecutions speaks directly to several strands of sociology. Even if it has been slow to engage with the issue, established sociological literatures on military sociology, the sociology of emotions and social movement studies offer a plethora of conceptual and theoretical lenses for understanding how identity, group membership, and emotion bear on veteran mobilisation.

As a powerful social institution, the military was an object of theorisation for leading sociologists like Marx, Durkheim and Weber (Soeters, 2018). Out of this military sociology subsequently emerged as a more focused body of empirically-informed scholarship dedicated to examining relations within the military and relations between the military and society (Caforio, 2018; Huntington, 1981; Janowitz, 1976, 2017). The military sociology literature has critically examined the motivations of soldiers (Moskos, 1988), the profile of military recruits (Lutz, 2008) and military identities (Bugg and Dentice, 2017). Mirroring global and macro-level change that heralded the ‘new’ wars of modern times, the literature has also tracked the evolution of political decision making about the military, public opinion of the military, and work-related challenges faced by the military (King, 2011; Soeters, 2018).

The sociology of emotions grew out of seminal works by Thomas Scheff (1977), Theodore Kemper (1978), and Arlie Hothschild (1983), with several notable overviews of its theoretical development and expansion subsequently emerging (Bericat, 2016; Kemper, 1990; Thoits, 1989). Sociologists now recognise emotions as the product of culture and social structures (Stets, 2010), allowing it to be studied as both a motivator for action and a mediator for feelings experienced by individuals and collectives (Thoits, 1989). Several theories have been developed within the literature: expectation states theory exploring how emotion is influenced by the subject's prior expectations (Heise, 1979, 2007; Turner and Stets, 2006); attribution theories linking emotion to how responsibility for an event is attributed (Lawler et al., 2008); symbolic interactionist theories emphasising the role of identities and self (Burke, 1991; Stets and Turner, 2008: 38); and intergroup emotions theory examining how the individual's emotion is conditioned by whatever happens to the social group(s) to which they belong (Yzerbyt, 2003). More recently, and of direct relevance to the case at hand, the concept of ‘moral emotions’ (Jeffery, 2015) has been developed to explain how emotion maps onto judgements of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’. This has, in turn, been usefully applied to the study of post-conflict contexts (Brewer, 2010; Elster, 2003; Mihai, 2016).

Social scientists have long studied protesting social movements (Wilson, 1973), with a rich body of literature emerging on how social movements recruit ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ members (Jasper and Poulsen, 1995), frame certain events and processes (Benford, 1997), and mobilise through physical acts of protest (Jasper, 2014a, 2014b). Mirroring the core concern of this article, an increasing body of social movement studies literature has examined the role of emotions in social movements, with political protest being seen as intrinsically linked to emotion (Goodwin and Jasper, 2006: 611) and emotion being key to understanding the dynamics of protesting movements (Demertzis, 2020). A sociological exploration of the emotions of social movements can help us to answer key questions on where the individual ends and the group begins, how group and individual goals are linked, what triggers collective emotions, and how these are expressed (Jasper, 2014a). Given that scholars have previously interrogated how and why multifarious social movements were at the heart of escalating and/or resolving political violence in NI (Bosi and de Fazio, 2017), a strong case exists for using social movement studies insights to understand the veteran constituency's post-conflict mobilisation.

While each of these strands of sociology can furnish us with conceptual and theoretical knowledge in their own right, this article avoids privileging one strand above the others or, for that matter, privileging certain theoretical perspectives within the separate strands. It seeks to act as an entry point for sociological examination of veteran mobilisation on legacy issues; once the initial sociological foray has been made, subsequent studies can, and indeed should, offer more nuanced critiques that speak specifically to particular strands of the literature or to certain theoretical perspectives. This article therefore synthesises insights from across these literatures that can help explain how collective and individual expectations, identities and emotions have brought veterans onto the streets in protest

Empirical data drawn from mainstream and localised media coverage of veteran protests as well as from military/veteran focused news sites, social media platforms and blogs is used at certain junctures to substantiate the article's conceptual claims. While media campaigns have often been rich data sources given their intrinsic importance to protesting movements, and the UK media have traditionally led campaigns supporting British soldiers convicted of wrongdoing (Hearty, 2020; Sanders, 2021), the advent of social media has seen protesting constituencies take advantage of online space to create visibility for their group and/or cause (Uldam, 2018) and to mobilise their membership (Mergetts, 2016). Taking a ‘netnographic’ (Kozinets et al., 2014: 262) and ‘unobtrusive’ (Liamputtong, 2020) approach of using existing data sets from online sources, this content was then analysed to identify and critique the ‘language games’ (Demertzis, 2020) used by veterans to explain why they are protesting, how the situation deteriorated to the point of protest action being needed, and what they hope to achieve by protesting.

Although based on content analysis of secondary data not created by the author or for the specific purpose of this research, this methodological approach is justified when it provides the researcher with data that is easily found, easily accessed, and directly relevant to the research topic (Hox and Boeije, 2005). Online searches of Google, using both generic terms like ‘Northern Ireland veterans protest’ and more focused searches like ‘Rolling Thunder protest’, produced dozens of newspaper reports, many of which reproduced protest march speeches verbatim, carried lengthy interviews with protest organisers, and directly quoted from protesting veterans in attendance. This was further complemented by data drawn from online platforms managed by protesting groups where the origins, objectives, activities and perspectives of the group were all articulated in their own words. This approach ensured that both the data and the context of its creation could be taken into consideration by the researcher during the analysis (Hox and Boeije, 2005). Of course, future research drawing on primary data gained through interviews with military veterans can, and should, build upon this article's ‘netnographic’ endeavour.

Veteran ‘bondedness’

The military is a ‘total institution’ (Goffman, 1968) where individuality is subordinated to collective ways of seeing and thinking. As a bonded group (Woodward and Jenkings, 2011), soldiers distinguish between those who are ‘inside’ and those who are ‘outside’ the military institution (Higate and Cameron, 2006). Life in the military is defined by a complex interrelationship between the individual soldier, their fellow soldiers and the military institution (Hockey, 2002). Consequentially, any distinction between the ‘me-identity’ of the individual soldier and the ‘we-identity’ of the military collective becomes obscured (Kummel, 2018: 480) as soldiers develop an ‘institutional self’ (Brewer and Herron, 2021: 124).

This institutionalisation is conducive to the closing of the ranks seen during the ‘dealing with the past’ debate in NI because veterans, as former soldiers, are conditioned to see a threat to one as a threat to all. The notion of being under collective threat feeds into their collective mobilisation, reflecting how collective action represents the amalgamation of interests, organisation, resources and opportunities/threats (Tilly, 1978). The veteran ‘interest’ is opposing the ‘reclassification’ of the past, the ‘threat’ to veterans is legacy case prosecutions, yet ‘resources’ and ‘organisations’ are noteworthy here too. A plethora of charities, veteran associations and support networks exist to campaign on various veteran issues. Rather than having to cultivate support for prosecuted veterans from scratch, the presence of a well established ‘issue network’ (Heclo, 1978) is conducive to ‘bloc recruitment’ (Oberschall, 1973) for campaigns against legacy case prosecutions. Given that individuals are drawn into protests by a range of factors including their individual interests, their social networks, shared cultural meanings and experiences (Goodwin and Jasper, 2006: 614), a protest movement can grow out of pre-existing structures once a grievance arises (McAdam et al., 1988). While the presence and prevalence of these pre-existent structures and networks cannot be taken for granted, several of the newly emergent veterans’ groups set up to protest against legacy case prosecutions are ‘networked social movements’ (Castells, 2015: 3) that began online before growing into physically protesting movements. For example, the Rolling Thunder motorcycle cavalcade protest grew out of a social media post that subsequently went viral and brought thousands of bikers on to the streets in physical protest at the ‘vexatious prosecution of our veterans who were tasked to Operation Banner’ (Rolling Thunder, n.d.b). These structural factors thus help to mobilise ‘intimates’ in the face of the perceived collective threat posed by legacy case investigations.

This sense of collective threat was captured in the comments of one protesting veteran:

Where will it end? We have the flags that say we support Soldier F but it is not only about Soldier F, it's Soldier A, B, C… and all after. Where are they going to go then, once they have finished with the alphabet, where will it end? We are saying that we want it to stop here (Belfast Telegraph, 2019).

A similar sentiment can be found in Dennis Hutchings’ crowdfunding appeal for the legal campaign against his prosecution:

I am taking the following action to ensure what is happening to me does not happen to any of the other thousands of British Army veterans… while a decision may not come in time to help me, I hope that this action will help all those other veterans who are currently wondering whether the next knock will be on their door (Hutchings, 2020).

From this perspective, veterans must collectively oppose ongoing prosecutions in order to stop further prosecutions. So even if only a handful of soldiers are actually being prosecuted like Hutchings, the fact that ‘200 other soldiers are being ‘investigated’’ leaves ‘the threat [or prosecution] hanging over the heads of others’ ( Rolling Thunder , n.d.b). This argument appears to have resonated within the veteran constituency, with the Northern Ireland Veterans Movement (NIVM) group that has been prominent in recent protests noting that ‘Dennis has been the point man for Justice for Northern Ireland Veterans, he represents hundreds more who are still suffering the same abuse’ (NIVM, n.d.e).

The strong emotional bonds among veterans are likely to be relevant here too, not least because the counter-insurgency context of the North of Ireland extracted ‘particularly high emotional labour costs’ from veterans (Brewer and Herron, 2021: 123). Military sociologists have long observed the close bonds between soldiers, with the most extreme manifestation of this seeing soldiers endanger their own lives to save their comrades (Frisk, 2018; Moskos, 1988: 3). This operates on the basis of reciprocation; you look out for your fellow soldiers and they look out for you (Connor, 2021). A strong sense of ‘mateship’ emerges (Woodward, 2008: 377) whereby the soldier's primary loyalty is to the soldiers that they are fighting alongside rather than to abstract ideals like cause and country. The military unit, then, becomes a marker of collective identity, a source of pride and a surrogate family for those within it (Woodward, 2008: 375). These bonds, Schrader (2019) argues, can outlive military service and translate into veteran activism, with affective emotions like solidarity and loyalty being rooted in common experience, identification with the group and loyalty to and among its members (Jasper, 1998). The bond between veterans, then, extends beyond those one immediately fought alongside so that veterans can identify with and feel loyalty towards those who fought in different campaigns (Bulmer and Jackson, 2016). Because loyalty is about our relationships with others and how we respond to their needs and interests (Connor, 2021), opposing legacy case prosecutions can be seen as an act of loyalty to those currently being prosecuted.

When a veteran is threatened with prosecution, then, the emotionally charged and socially cohesive veteran community closes ranks to protect its own. Hence a Belfast rally in support of Soldier F was told that all veterans ‘must stand together’ to fight legacy prosecutions (BBC, 2019b). Heeding these calls for a unified front, protest rallies have drawn together thousands of veterans who served in different campaigns, different regiments and at different times in support of the handful of veterans currently being prosecuted (Nicholls, 2019). This, at least according to the Rolling Thunder organisers, shows those being prosecuted that ‘other vets… were behind them and felt angry at the injustice’ (Rolling Thunder, n.d.a). Those being prosecuted have therefore gained the open support of ‘many thousands of veterans’ (Justice for Northern Ireland Veterans, 2020).

Veteran sense of self

What British Army veterans say about legacy prosecutions must be viewed within the twin context of what they say about being a veteran and what they say about their service in NI. Being a ‘veteran’ can be a significant component of an individual's identity (Burdett, 2012), with veterans often narrating their past service as one of pride for doing ‘the right thing’ (Albertson et al., 2017). British Army veterans, whether having served in the North of Ireland (Brewer and Herron, 2019: 63) or in Afghanistan (Parry and Thumim, 2016), believe that their service made the world a more peaceful place. Personal accounts of veterans who served in NI reveal that despite having little understanding of the NI context prior to deployment, they unquestioningly believe that they were sent to perform a peacekeeping role there amidst worsening sectarian violence (Beaves, 2018; Lindsay, 1998; Wharton, 2008). The identity that underpins the NI veterans lobby as an ‘identity movement’ (Husu, 2013) therefore has two distinct components: that of veteran and that of peacekeeper.

Veterans have sought to maintain this self-image of being a peacekeeping force that stood against the ‘terrorist’ on both ‘sides’. Dennis Hutchings, for instance, argued that ‘I was posted to Northern Ireland during the Troubles in the early 1970s… I did my duty as did many others… who served their country to protect the public from terrorism and civil unrest during the Troubles’ (Hutchings, 2020). Here the merging of Hutchings’ ‘me-identity’ and the ‘we-identity’ of British Army veterans means that the I that was a dutiful peacekeeper becomes a collective we, transforming a favourable individual sense of self into a collective one. Similarly, NIVM (NIVM, n.d.d) maintained that ‘there were three sides in the Troubles; Republican, Unionist and the Security Forces. Only one party was acting for the people and only one is currently subject to repeated investigations’.

The self-image of British troops being benign peacekeepers was cultivated, and then sustained, by the colonial lens through which the British ‘imagined community’ has always viewed its armed forces (Hearty, 2020; McGovern, 2019), and, in the North of Ireland more specifically, how the state sought to control the public narrative that Operation Banner was a peacekeeping mission premised on restraint and respect for human rights (Lord, 2020). When veterans like Hutchings stand over their past record in NI, then, their self-image mirrors the British Army's institutional way of ‘seeing’ its NI campaign. For instance, former British Army Major General Julian Thompson, who served in NI during the 1970s, argued that ‘the British Army behaved exceedingly well’ there. Expanding further on this, and in keeping with the British Army's way of ‘seeing’ Operation Banner, he said:

I can think of few armies in the world who would have behaved as well as the British Army did. One of the things we forget is that the army came in here, into Northern Ireland, originally to protect the Catholic minority against some pretty unfortunate events. At the beginning the army was very much the darling of the Catholic community here because they were protecting them (News Letter, 2018).

These comments are suggestive that far from being prosecuted for their service in the North of Ireland, British Army veterans should be commended and thanked for it – not least by the section of the community that are pushing hardest for legacy case prosecutions today.

Legacy case prosecutions are thus seen as an integral part of ‘reclassifying’ the past, and one of the core components of this ‘reclassification’ is reframing certain actors and their actions (Dudai, 2018). When British Army veterans are prosecuted for conflict-related deaths they are ‘seen’ as those who harmed, rather than protected, civilians. This reframing is grievously injurious to the peacekeeper self-image constructed and subscribed to by veterans. For veterans, legacy case prosecutions represent ‘identity non-verification’ (Stets, 2010) that challenges their sense of self. When self-identities are challenged like this they are reasserted (Burke, 1991). Thus far from being the deserving punishment of wrongdoers, veterans claim that legacy case prosecutions are targeting ‘men who placed themselves bravely between two warring factions to keep the peace’.³ There is, though, a wider backdrop to this ‘identity non-verification’ that goes beyond the NI context. At the same time that former British soldiers are facing reinvestigation over their conduct in NI, evidence of systemic human rights abuse has cast a shadow over the British Army's record in post-NI deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq (Mallory, 2022). Persistent allegations of systemic human rights abuse spanning from Belfast in the last century to Basra this century is thus injurious to the moral self-superiority inherent in post-Brexit English nationalism and to the colonial mindset that ‘our boys’ have been dutiful peacekeepers while deployed overseas (Hearty, 2020; McGovern, 2019).

The challenge that ‘reclassification’ of the past has posed to their sense of self has created an interesting emotional dynamic among veterans. Confirmation of self-identities leads to positive emotions, yet challenges by others to these same identities causes negative emotions (Bericat, 2016). From an interactionist perspective such emotions arise out of solidarity with or conflict to other actors (Kemper, 1990); positive emotions like pride reflect favourably on the actions of our group and our long-term association with and commitment to the group, while anger is the negative emotional reaction to those outside the group who seek to undermine or threaten the individual and collective sense of self felt by group members (Jasper, 2014a: 348). Veteran mobilisation against legacy case prosecutions therefore reinforces the veteran sense of self by reaffirming their peacekeeper self-image, by expressing pride in the role of the British Army in NI, and by showing solidarity with members of the bonded group who are now under investigation.

By the same token, veteran mobilisation also channels anger, largely understood as an umbrella of expressive emotions provoked by a perceived or real sense of injustice, betrayal or insult (Schieman, 2006: 496), towards those veterans believe are ‘reclassifying’ the past The primary outlet for their anger has been Irish republicans (i.e., Sinn Féin as the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA⁴)), and, to a lesser extent, human rights groups and lawyers (Hearty, 2020) dismissed by veterans as the ‘human rights proxies of the republican movement’ (Justice for Northern Ireland Veterans, 2020). With these legacy case prosecutions ‘being driven by Irish Republicans’ (Rolling Thunder, n.d.b), they are, according to NIVM (NIVM, n.d.d) at least, part of a ‘propaganda exercise to discredit the British Government by rewriting the history of Operation Banner and to further the Nationalist cause’. This, veterans allege, represents the transformation of the physical conflict Irish republicans once fought against the British Army into a post-conflict discursive ‘war by other means’. According to NIVM:

Our battle is between two messages. The dystopian story of a group of freedom fighters who defended their country against an occupying army, and the second factual message of an army sent to support the police to maintain law and order, prevent a massacre and subsequent civil war (NIVM, n.d.c).

Likewise, a protesting veteran claimed that:

There is a determination by the republican movement to rewrite history… they require to rewrite history one conviction of one British soldier back from the earlier years. If they can achieve that then they can turn around and say ‘See, we told you there were atrocities; see we told you the soldiers were occupying Northern Ireland’ and they can create a completely new history based on that one conviction (Shropshire Star, 2020).

Accordingly, Justice for Northern Ireland Veterans (2020) have labelled legacy case prosecutions a ‘weapon’ for Irish republicans to ‘further their revisionist policies’.

Legacy case investigations, from the veteran perspective at least, epitomise the post-conflict censuring of those once celebrated as heroes but now ‘seen’ as villains (Dudai, 2018). Because veterans believe that they did ‘the right thing’ in NI, legacy case prosecutions are injurious to their collective sense of self. Mobilising against these prosecutions thus becomes a form of protectionist ‘identity work’ (Einwohner et al., 2008: 2) amidst the onset of ‘war by other means’.

Veteran moral injury

With British Army veterans believing that they selflessly performed a peacekeeping role in NI, legacy case investigations are perceived as a personal and collective betrayal. They represent a ‘moral injury’ – essentially ‘the violation of what is right, what one has long held to be sacred’ (Meagher, 2014: 4). Psychology literature on US veterans has shown that the deep seated sense of betrayal underpinning moral injury can lead to a lack of trust in the military institution, government and society (Shay, 2002). While the concept has most often been associated with being ordered to violate one's moral code during battle, there are good grounds for extending its application to the post-conflict fate of veterans. Although primarily premised on a betrayal of ‘what is right’, it can have overlapping cultural, social, and personal dimensions (Shay, 2012). Legacy case prosecutions, then, reify the personal sense of betrayal felt by veterans at the prosecution of their fellow soldiers, a digression from the cultural norms whereby veterans believe they should be favourably viewed as peacekeepers, and a social reality where closely bonded veterans are deeply mistrustful of politicians who have seemingly betrayed them after their service.

The perceived lack of reciprocation felt by veterans in terms of the loyalty given back (or not) by the government (Connor, 2021) creates a sense of betrayal. Dennis Hutchings argued that prosecuted veterans like him were ‘just fodder’ during service and ‘disposable’ afterwards (Forces Network, 2018). Even if veterans maintain that it is Sinn Féin who are ultimately pushing for veteran prosecutions in order to ‘rewrite’ the past, their sense of moral injury emanates from what they see as the UK government's readiness ‘to put a few old soldiers on a cross and sacrifice them for the benefit of peace in Northern Ireland’ (Shropshire Star, 2020). Particular criticism has been levelled at the Blair administration for facilitating the early release of politically motivated prisoners under the GFA and for its subsequent involvement in an administrative scheme that allowed several ‘on the run’ suspects to return to NI. Decrying the prosecution of British Army veterans as ‘absolutely monstrous’, Major General Julian Thompson contrasted this with the prosecution of veterans:

If members of the extremist organisations have been given a get out of jail card by Mr Blair, did he forget about the soldiers? I suspect he did you see. And I think it is absolutely disgraceful and I think the British parliament should say: Stop it (News Letter, 2018).

One veterans group described the ‘reclassification’ of the past as a process where ‘the British Government has created this hostile system and are happy to throw veterans to these wolfs. History has been rewritten and the Armed Forces feel betrayed by their own government’ (Soldier A-Z Fund, 2020). This would, at least according to Alan Barry of Justice for Northern Ireland Veterans, fly in the face of the governmental protection that veterans expect: ‘we expect the very same Parliament that sent us to Northern Ireland to stand by us and defend us’ (The Military Times, 2017).

Legacy case prosecutions are a disruption to the veteran belief that the government would look after them following their service in NI, with such disruptions often acting as a catalyst for collective action (Heirich, 1971). Because unmet shared expectations generate a shared emotional response that resonates throughout the group (Gould, 2009), the failure of the UK Government to protect veterans naturally provokes an emotional response from the veteran constituency (Heise, 1979, 2007). Emotion, though, is always directed at someone/something, meaning that the particular emotional response experienced will be determined by how responsibility for legacy prosecutions is attributed (Lawler et al., 2008). Rather than adopting a critically self-reflective position on their role in NI that might birth moral emotions like shame, embarrassment and guilt, British Army veterans have sought to attribute responsibility outwards at external parties; on the one hand Sinn Féin for ‘rewriting’ the past and on the other hand the UK Government for allowing this. By attributing blame to someone else, the veteran constituency's emotional response is one premised on anger (Jasper, 2014a: 345) at the UK Government for facilitating legacy case prosecutions against veterans at the behest of the ‘terrorist’.

Whereas inward-directed moral emotions like shame and embarrassment can cripple collectives, outwardly directed moral emotions like anger can lead to collective action (Goodwin and Jasper, 2006: 619). Protesting veteran groups have drawn on a strong sense of indignation within the veteran community in order to mobilise against legacy investigations. Indignation is, after all, a ‘morally grounded form of anger’ that can motivate group members to participation but also direct blame for certain problems and create sympathy for certain parties (Jasper, 2014b). In the case at hand, this would be anger emanating from a sense of ‘moral injury’ sparking mobilisation that creates a sense of sympathy within the bonded group for group members currently being prosecuted and projects the blame for this onto the ‘terrorist’ waging ‘war by other means’ and an indifferent, if not duplicitous, UK Government. Mobilisation of the veteran constituency on this issue is therefore simultaneously an act of collective solidarity with and support for prosecuted veterans who are deserving of sympathy and an act of collective opposition to those implicated in the ‘reclassification’ of the past Hence according to the Rolling Thunder organisers:

We are supporting these Veterans in their fight for justice by organising and attending support marches and rides with other Veteran and biker groups. As well as letting them know they are not alone we are hoping to educate the public on what is really happening following the Good Friday Agreement (and its hidden agenda) as well as putting pressure on the Government to back those it sent to Northern Ireland and are now being persecuted and prosecuted for doing the job they were sent to do (Rolling Thunder, n.d.b).

This sense of ‘moral injury’ has shaped how veterans have physically mobilised on the issue. Although smaller localised protests have been held across the UK, major national demonstrations have concentrated on London -– specifically Westminster. According to Justice for Northern Ireland Veterans, this is a strategic decision based on their belief that ‘that is the only place that matters, and the only way this witch hunt will stop’ (Rainey, 2019). For example, in April 2019 thousands of veterans formed a motorbike cavalcade at Whitehall in protest at the prosecution of Soldier F. Many of those who took part displayed their medals and honours, while others wore tributes to lost colleagues (Nicholls, 2019). Taken cumulatively, this demonstrates not only the strength of their mobilisation but also how it is underpinned by a sense of self – as seen through the open display of military honours – and the emotional bond to their fellow soldiers – as seen through tributes to fallen comrades. The Rolling Thunder protest was followed by a protest march by thousands of veterans in response to the latest prosecution (Twomey, 2019), while other veterans would subsequently return medals they were awarded for service in NI in protest at the government's ‘cowardice’ in prosecuting their fellow veterans (Forces Network, 2019).

In concentrating their efforts on Westminster, veterans are acutely aware that they have support within parliament, not least because there are dozens of ex-soldiers currently elected there (Sanders, 2021). The historic and contemporary relevance of this can be seen in how UK politicians supported media-driven campaigns during the 1990s in support of James Fisher, Mark Wright and Lee Clegg who were convicted for unlawful killings in Belfast (Sanders, 2021) and more recently for Alexander Blackman who was convicted for an unlawful killing in Afghanistan (Hearty, 2020). The veterans issue is also electorally useful in the post-Brexit UK (Mallory, 2022), with the NIVM claiming ‘we were influential in the last general election and were promised support’ (NIVM, n.d.c). The group subsequently led a letter writing campaign encouraging MPs to oppose ‘the continuing vexatious prosecutions of military veterans who served in Northern Ireland’ (NIVM, n.d.f). Given that several politicians, like former British soldier and current Conservative MP Johnny Mercer, have publicly supported prosecuted veterans there is evidently a sympathetic audience for their message. Mercer withdrew his support for Theresa May's government following the prosecution of Soldier F (Barnes, 2019) before subsequently resigning as Boris Johnson's Minister for Defence People and Veterans in April 2021 when it became clear that NI veterans would not receive the same protection under the Overseas Operation (Service Personnel and Veterans) Act 2021 as those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan would (Forces Network, 2021).

The recent move by the Johnson administration to introduce the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill is, according to the NIVM at least, ‘a major blow to Sinn Féin/IRA and a genuine victory for those who served in Northern Ireland’. While stating that ‘other parts of the bill are legacy issues and are the concern of the people of Northern Ireland’, they nevertheless maintained that ‘our single mission for five years has been to defend veterans who were previously cleared of wrong-doing from repeated, vexatious prosecution by representatives of Sinn Fein IRA… this legislation will put an end to that’ (NIVM, 2021). Baroness Kate Hoey, a vocal supporter of veterans, subsequently praised ‘the many recently formed veterans’ groups’ who campaigned to protect those who served in Iraq, Afghanistan and NI from prosecution, noting that ‘the power of social media has, in this instance, proved invaluable’.⁵ While the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill may provide veterans with protection from prosecution, it has not yet become law, leading the NIVM to recently warn Veterans Minister Leo Docherty (another ex-soldier) that ‘there would be major repercussions if legislation was not forthcoming to protect former soldiers from vexatious prosecutions’ (NIVM, n.d.a).

Conclusion

Far from being ‘normal’ criminal justice prosecutions, legacy case prosecutions cut to the heart of collective identities, opposing expectations of post-conflict ‘justice’, and dichotomous views on who or what is to blame for the conflict in the North of Ireland. While these issues are invariably contested at wider societal level (Dudai, 2018), legacy case prosecutions are a highly emotive threat that challenges the sense of self, cultivates a sense of moral injury, and reinforces bondedness among former British soldiers. Rather than being an unthinking kneejerk reaction to the belated prosecution of a handful of former soldiers, their protests reveal just how ingrained their ‘peacekeeper’ self-image is within the veteran psyche. It also exposes, too, the growing disillusionment with and growing detachment from the UK Government that military veterans feel in the aftermath of a counter-insurgency campaign that the state is too politically embarrassed to confront (Brewer and Herron, 2021: 124). This sense of external threat has galvanised the veteran bonded group where a deep sense of anger has mobilised it against the ‘reclassification’ of the past Even if it is legally and empirically erroneous (Bryson, 2021) and discounts the genuine and legitimate demands for truth and justice from the victims of state violence (Lundy and Rolston, 2016; Rolston, 2010), the ‘witch hunt’ narrative that reduces the ‘reclassification’ of the past to a crass ‘rewriting’ of history by ‘terrorists’ has gained remarkable traction among the closely bonded, insular veteran constituency (McEvoy, 2020). Turning to ‘intimates’ within the bonded group for support, aggrieved veterans have publicly confronted the UK government en masse demanding an end to a ‘witch hunt’ seemingly designed to appease the ‘terrorists’ under the GFA (NIVM n.d.b). In demanding an end to legacy case prosecutions, veterans are not simply seeking to protect those within the bonded group from the criminal justice process but are also seeking to protect their ‘peacekeeper’ self-image that is fundamentally challenged by legacy case prosecutions that ‘reclassify’ the past.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Kevin Hearty

Notes

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Closing the ranks: Bondedness,sense of self and moral injury during legacy case prosecutions

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

The case for a sociological exploration

Veteran ‘bondedness’

Veteran sense of self

Veteran moral injury

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References