Conflict, Intimacy, and Military Wives: A Lively Geopolitics

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In the aftermath of a period of deployment that has span across nearly two decades, the recovery of veterans and serving members of the armed forces has become a central concern for the British state. A 2018 Government report indicated that as many as 10% of British veterans could suffer from mental health conditions, with deployment and combat exposure being recognized triggers (House of Commons Defence Committee 2018). Clinical services have been developed alongside non-clinical services and support for veterans, with the aim of helping ex-servicemen and women to properly reintegrate into society, and in recent years participatory theatre has been increasingly mobilised as a way of helping veterans to 'recover' from trauma and injury. Beyond simply mechanisms of recovery, these kinds of military performance projects have, like other cultural forms, become a popular form of communicating war stories to a receptive public audience. One only has to look to the success of military theatre projects such as the Royal British Legion's The Two Worlds of Charlie F, which won the prestigious Amnesty International Award for Freedom of Expression, and Lola Arias' Minefield which continues to tour across the world in its third year, to see that there is a great deal of public interest in the lived experiences of war and conflict.Creative and theatrical approaches to exploring these lived experiences have a great deal of potential for helping the public think critically about the diverse effects of war on communities and individuals. And yet, what we continue to see in these projects and performances is a privileging of masculine heroic soldier narratives and images of spatially 'far away' wars. In these narratives, the lived experiences of military partners and families are rarely given a platform, let alone centered, meaning that the domestic and intimate sites in which conflict can play out are absent from the conversation. This sidelining of military wives is further reflected in the 'lip-service' paid to military families in the rhetoric of the Armed Forces Covenant, despite long standing recognition that families play an integral role in upholding military practices and values.In a departure from these masculinized narratives regarding the nature and sites of war, this research will explore 'conflict' from the perspective of military wives, as something which plays out not only in far-away battle sites but also in intimate domestic spaces and personal relationships. It will use theatre techniques from Theatre of the Oppressed, forum theatre, and Rainbow of Desires, which focus on mobilising drama to explore conflict and resolution, to help us think differently about what the real lived impacts of conflict and deployment are for military families. Research has shown that creative performance groups and projects have great value for empowering and giving a voice to military wives and female veterans. The proposed project will extend this research, and explore how participatory community theatre can not only empower military spouses, but also change how we approach 'conflict' in political geography.The research questions for this project are as follows:1) How can theatre help to centre the agency and significance of military wives in the study of the lived impacts of armed conflict?2) How might creative research with military wives help us to understand 'conflict' as a fluid complex of violence that permeates intimate and domestic spaces?3) What can forum theatre-as-method do that other methods cannot in critical military studies?The long term ambitions of the project are to help shape public debate on the spaces and consequences of 'war' through the theatre performance and Q&A, and to help shape MoD provision of support for military families.