Strange Meetings: Enemy Encounters 1800-2020

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The ability to kill in war has often been attributed to propaganda that has made the enemy subhuman, or to technology which has placed the enemy at a more comfortable distance. This project, however, traces an alternative trajectory of feeling for the enemy as a 'strange friend' as Wilfred Owen famously put it, in which enmity is swiftly transformed into forms of fellow feeling. As Owen's work suggests, and a wealth of other soldier writings confirm, intimacy with the enemy is not necessarily a barrier to killing him. Exploring encounters with the enemy in literature (including Shelley, Tolstoy, Hardy, Kipling, Owen, Thomas, Jones, Douglas, O'Brien, Parker), philosophy, and soldiers' life writings from 1800-now, this project seeks to explore the range of work done by announcements of feeling for the enemy both to challenge and enable militarism. This research offers new understandings of soldiers' emotions and motivations, and wider insights into rationales - military and civilian - for war violence, attending to the ways in which relationships with the enemy have been culturally deployed to make us feel better or worse about war. It considers which enemies can become familiar and which are held as other, investigating dividing lines of nation, race, religion, and culture. In so doing the project asks questions pressing for our contemporary moment about the nature of amity, enmity, familiarity and otherness. The relationship with the enemy is at the heart of thinking about the ethics of war, with theorists as diverse as St Augustine, Clausewitz, Baudrillard, and Butler, concerned with proportion, proximity and mutual precarity in the positions of opposing sides in determining the legitimacy of war. This project draws on literary archives to consider questions central to legislation to bring war violence within tolerable limits: Is it better to kill in recognition or denial of the humanity of one's enemy, when the end result is similar, people are killed? Do technologies for killing at distance reduce the emotional toll of that killing? The project uses humanities methods of comparative close reading, historical contextualisation and theoretical approaches from gender and emotion studies, showing how the various answers proffered by long-nineteenth century texts illuminate our present of xenophobia, counter-insurgency operations, and drone dominated strategy.This research will be informed by an international steering committee, bringing expertise complementary to the PI's British studies background, on the 'other' side(s) of the four major conflicts of focus - Napoleonic, Crimean, South African and First World Wars. It will seek new methodologies for military history, extending beyond a single country of focus to suggest more dialogic and international methods of critical military studies.The project will be shaped by focus groups with soldiers and veterans, and will work with award winning charity Re-Live to consider the relationships between feeling for the enemy and veterans' mental health. A sustained series of 12 Life Story workshops and performance with Re-Live will place the experiences of veterans, their families and communities at the project's centre. Partnerships with leading military museums will inform the way in which the 'other' side is curated, with the research used in new galleries at Military Medical Museum and Imperial War Museum. A series of events and online materials will engage the public with debates about the cultural work done by the presentation of the enemy.