Across an entire wall of a community art studio, a mural has been painted. It’s an enchanting woodland scene: flowers-in-bloom, a solid oak tree, a gentle flowing stream crossed by a bridge made of old cobbled stone. In the background are layers of dense green forest, illuminated under a blue sky. It’s incredibly detailed, with light, shading, contrast, form and colour all carefully constructed, inviting the viewer to inhabit the beautiful scene. Foreground-right there is a house, a large two-storey building with big, clear windows offering a view inside. But there’s nothing to see inside the windows, yet.
Today a green-screen has been draped over the mural’s mid-section, covering it from floor to ceiling. A man carrying a paint brush walks in front of the screen and stops in the middle. As a camera watches on, the man mimics the action of painting up and down. Peals of laughter emerge from somewhere off-screen as the man plays up to the camera, smiling brazenly and exaggerating his brush strokes while he ‘paints’ the screen. Later, during the edit, figures in front of the green-screen are positioned inside the windows of the house, appearing as though they are decorating it from the inside.
There is more going on here than meets the eye, or more than what the camera sees. The moment in front of the green-screen is playful and spontaneous but is later adopted by a more profound meaning which emerges through the creative practice of filmmaking. The mural, the film, the act of decorating the house; these are all acts of community and of ownership. The mural itself acquires meaning through the process of its creation by members of a community art group. It is the product of people who share a common identity and sense of belonging, working together. The house being ‘painted’ via the green-screen technique is the house in which the mural room is situated – the premises owned by the charity Veterans in Communities (VIC). The building was taken on by the charity, renovated and transformed by the same people now leading the mural’s creation and co-directing the film. The film, Return, Belong, Prosper, is their story, and an opportunity to show the world what VIC does, and why. These layers of meaning piece together like a jigsaw, slotted into place by the veterans who co-directed the film. We would later learn how the creative practice had enabled these meanings to emerge: while screening the first rough edit to the charity’s trustees, one of the veterans reflected that the green-screen scene, aside from the humour it generated, ‘was like when we took ownership of the building’, and when VIC really began.
Relational imaginations of agency and care are central to the story being told through our co-created film, as well as the story we wish to tell through this research. We have no interest in romanticising notions of agency and care nor moments of their enactment, such as the green-screen scene, which was simply one of a hundred daily moments of community, care, and belonging. Both agency and care are complex achievements, always partial, limited, and undermined in various ways in life as in research. Rather, what we hope to show, following Sophie Harman,Footnote 1 is how film can function as narrative agency in international politics, and how this unfolds in ways that offer to remake the political landscape of veterans’ post-military lives with a focus on care. Our core argument is that while care holds transformative possibilities in the aftermath of war and military service, the transitional spaces veterans enter into upon discharge from the military are often, curiously, care-depleted, and that the act of making care visible in care-depleted spaces thus constitutes an act of political significance.Footnote 2 In making this argument, we move beyond establishing the relevance of care in post-conflict settings – as feminist international political economy (IPE) scholarship has argued previouslyFootnote 3 – to examine how film as a communicative technology can make agentic enactments of care tangible, evocative, and visually stimulating. In highlighting the potential of film to centre care in care-depleted spaces, our argument also seeks to move beyond the specific politics of military-to-civilian transition and connect with broader areas of IR scholarship including visual politics, narrative and conflict, critical military studies, and feminist IPE.
We situate our intervention in relation to three overlapping areas of feminist scholarship: ‘war as experience’, feminist IPE, and feminist care ethics, though with a particular grounding in care ethics. Within the feminist IR literature on ‘war as experience’, veterans’ lives are often productively understood as war’s embodied legacies; that is, the forms of violence veterans carry with them and how these violences make and unmake civilian futures.Footnote 4 Such work highlights how the violence of war transforms lives and bodies, including how these transformations become somehow ordinary and everyday.Footnote 5 While keeping these important insights about war’s violence within our field of vision – our ‘frame of war’,Footnote 6 perhaps – we ask what additional insights might be brought to bear by allowing a politics of care to assume the foreground. Following recent moves within feminist IR to take ‘love and care seriously’ in the wake of violence,Footnote 7 we consider the act of making care visible through co-created film as an agentic move towards care, constituted within a wider political landscape that valorises the liberal individual or ‘entrepreneurial’ veteran and that routinely undermines care as a worthwhile project within military–civilian transition.
Feminist IPE has long documented the centrality of care not only to social reproduction in global economic terms, but also the functioning of everyday life.Footnote 8 In particular, Shirin Rai’s recent contribution to understanding ‘depletion’ as the human cost of care makes clear that care-as-unremunerated-labour results in discursive, emotional, bodily, and citizenship-related harms suffered mostly by women as a result of bearing the responsibility for care at the level of both individual household and global political economy.Footnote 9 Depletion occurs at the tipping point where ‘the outflow of social reproductive labour exceeds the inflow of resources’.Footnote 10 Moreover, the harms of depletion, entangled as they are with ‘productivist regimes of capitalism’,Footnote 11 are easily ignored given the chronic (and deeply gendered) under-valuing of care both as a value (the care ethics perspective) and in economic terms (the feminist IPE perspective). Drawing on the notion of depletion, we characterise as ‘care-depleted’ the transitional landscape that veterans enter into upon discharge from the military, in which an emphasis on ‘returning’ veterans to economic productivity squeezes out care, even within charitable settings whereby care is the ostensible raison d’etre.
Placing care within the frame (in both a literal and theoretical sense), we reveal not only how care matters within lives transformed by violence, but also how it risks being further eroded by a dominant economic rationality of employment as the leading concern of veterans’ transition journeys. Following recent contributions in this journal by Katarzyna Jezierska,Footnote 12 and elsewhere by Roxani Krystalli and Philip Schulz,Footnote 13 we show how a care ethics (and a related care aesthetics) perspective can help IR scholars construct new understandings of IR, with care politically positioned as a value and a practice that enriches human life, and which also enables other priorities which come into being as a result of care needs being addressed. In line with the emerging work in this area, our contribution adds to calls for care to be considered an integral component of IR scholarship which can expand our understanding of conflict and its aftermath. In our theoretical framework below, we further unpack the contribution of feminist care ethics to understanding the politics of care, within and beyond our study domain.
Our argument unfolds over two main sections. In the first, we make the theoretical case for combining feminist care ethics with a focus on film as narrative agency by weaving together several theoretical strands. We argue that narrative agency, understood as storytelling used to foreground relational identities and to articulate particular forms of belonging and need,Footnote 14 is an essential quality for sustaining the hope of belonging in the midst of a socio-political environment characterised by abandonment, indifference, and isolation from meaningful community. Here, we draw from narrative theoryFootnote 15 and from IR scholarship on film and visual politicsFootnote 16 to pave the way for understanding ‘careful’ agentic narratives as an ethical and aesthetic intervention in global politics. Then, drawing on feminist care ethics,Footnote 17 and in particular James Thompson’s notion of ‘care aesthetics’,Footnote 18 we propose that narrative agency may be realised in the process of caring and of making care visible, and that this offers a comforting and necessary response to care-deficient political landscapes, both in general and in the specific context of veterans in the UK. In the second section, we put this theoretical assemblage to work by introducing the Stories in Transition project and examining the processes through which narrative agency – imperfect and slippery as it is – found expression through co-creating three 30-minute films with veterans situated in three UK veterans’ charities. Each of these films develops a care aesthetics which emphasises attentiveness and interdependence as the fundamental values that sustain life and hope against a backdrop of strident individualism and an emphasis on employability and economic productivity. Care aesthetics also interrupts the gendered ideologies, or ‘militarised masculinities’,Footnote 19 which characterise military and ex-military spaces, even while it struggles to break free from these ideologies entirely. We argue that a politics of care, such as that enacted through our focus on care ethics and aesthetics, creates new opportunities to reckon with the gendered legacies of war and military service in ways that lead to more hopeful, community-driven futures. Linked to our anticipated contribution, this analytical-aesthetic move shifts the focus on veterans’ lives from one of (predominantly) violence and harm (as per the feminist IR literature on ‘war as experience’) or of employability (as per state-driven narratives of veteran transition) towards projects of care that hold the potential to transform veterans’ lives and civilian futures beyond the grasp and impact of militarised violence.
Prior to embarking on this argument, it worth first reflecting on why veterans’ agency matters for international studies. As Sarah Bulmer and Maya Eichler suggest, veterans occupy ‘the space between military and civilian life, war and peace, and the domestic and the international’, and further that they are ‘key protagonists in the negotiation of relations between geopolitics, the state, the military, and society’.Footnote 20 As such, veterans’ stories reveal much about the morality and politics of war and military life.Footnote 21 Contrary to this view, it has been argued that veterans constitute an already privileged group within society and that they represent a white, Western, militaristic voice on war.Footnote 22 Yet this is not necessarily and certainly not always the case. Veterans can also be marginalised and dismissed on the basis of their experiences. Given their service to the state, veterans are vulnerable to institutional forms of betrayal if the state fails to uphold its responsibilities in the aftermath of war and military service.Footnote 23 Such betrayals can include, for example, failure to provide adequate care for the psychological and physical consequences of war,Footnote 24 withholding of compensation payments,Footnote 25 failure to recognise and investigate cases of veteran suicide,Footnote 26 and an inability to address persistent high levels of sexual violence within military institutions.Footnote 27 Furthermore, military service is embedded within masculine hierarchies which privilege strength, aggression, and heteronormativity, and which are integral to the military’s overall ability to enact violence.Footnote 28 For veterans, the deep seated personal-psychological changes instigated by military training and gendered socialisation can undermine their efforts to reintegrate into their communities on discharge from the military,Footnote 29 rendering deeply problematic any straightforward claims of ‘transitioning’ to civilian life. To claim that veterans’ agency matters for international studies is therefore not to call for greater attention to already privileged voices. Rather, it is a recognition of the complicated political subjectivity that veterans occupy and of the necessity of community, solidarity, and reclaiming of agency in circumstances that fundamentally challenge veterans’ ability to narrate stories that represent their lives and communities.
Theoretical framework: narrative, film, and care ethics
This section brings together multiple theoretical perspectives to reveal their combined relevance for our proposition that making care visible through co-created filmmaking practice constitutes an agentic act of narration with the potential to centre a politics of care within the landscape of veterans’ transition, and IR more broadly. For IR scholars interested in war and its aftermath, our theoretical assemblage shows how the politics of care matters as both societal response and research praxis, as we reckon with the unruly mess created by war and military service.
Narrative agency
We begin with narrative agency, constituted as a key manifestation of power and of the ethical dimension of narrative creation and distribution. Describing narrative agency and its political importance, Plummer stated that ‘the power to narrate one’s own story, in ways one wishes to narrate it, is an act of narrative power’, and, further, that ‘stories live in this flow of power. The power to tell a story, or indeed to not tell a story, under the conditions of one’s own choosing, is part of the political process’.Footnote 30 Narrative agency can contribute to the restoration of identity, particularly in contexts whereby violence has undermined people’s ability to tell their stories and to advocate for their community’s particular needs.Footnote 31 Creating the conditions for narrative agency to emerge thus constitutes a form of empowerment. In taking opportunities to enact narrative agency, people can represent themselves and their communities; that is, who people feel themselves to be and what the moral bearings of their lives look like.Footnote 32 In making these observations about narrative agency, however, we recognise that a crucial component of agency as a relational accomplishment is its location within wider narrative structures. Recalling the earlier structure-agency debates in IR,Footnote 33 we therefore acknowledge that dominant cultural narratives function as linguistic manifestations of structure, in much the same way that scholars of strategic narratives conceptualise international system narratives as describing (and, importantly, reinscribing) the structure of world order.Footnote 34 Moreover, narratives themselves possess structural power, creating the impetus for a ‘story to unfold in anticipated ways’.Footnote 35 Positioned in this way, narratives as structural devices are the necessary conditions within which individual storytellers operate, whereas these storytellers work to reproduce, contest, and perhaps occasionally to transform, elements of the social structure through exercising narrative agency.
Working with and in response to the structural possibilities of narrative, narrative agency can therefore be about decentring or displacing the dominant narratives that claim to represent people as certain kinds of characters. Yet the power to alter the social conditions for narration never simply resides within an individual storytelling agent, and thus narrative agency, or the telling of ‘one’s own story’ – in Plummer’s termsFootnote 36 – always emerges as a relational and negotiated accomplishment. At a theoretical level, narrative agency is complicated by the Bakhtinian notion of ‘polyphony’, explained by Frank as ‘emphasizing how one speaker’s voice is always resonant with the voices of specific others’,Footnote 37 which suggests that no story is ever completely original or individual, no matter how distinctive the teller. The notion of stories as polyphonic does not so much undermine narrative agency as it demonstrates that to enact agency is always to draw upon narrative resources that others have provided.Footnote 38 At a practical level, narrative agency is always complicated by the circumstances of telling as well as the personal resources and cultural capital available to the storyteller.Footnote 39 In the context of the film narratives we discuss in this article, such circumstances might include, for instance, the cultural privileging of certain kinds of narratives (e.g., heroic veteran narratives), the necessity of others to help create and disseminate cinematic film narratives, the agendas and priorities of the co-creators, and the responses (anticipated and actual) of audiences. Especially in relation to co-produced film, agency needs to be understood, as Sophie Harman puts it, ‘as fluid rather than static throughout co-production: to acknowledge the agency of research partners is not to establish methods of how they see and represent themselves, but to discern how this agency can be used to maximise self-interests over a project’s life cycle’.Footnote 40 Yet even where narrative agency is incomplete and imperfect, film can still harness the power to make things visible, and to raise political questions about what visibility entails and the actions it calls for.
Film and visual politics
Film, then, can be understood as a powerful yet underutilised (in the context of IR scholarship) tool for practicing narrative agency in ways that offer to rewrite the international politics of people’s lives. Harman argues this case when she suggests that ‘Film demonstrates the importance of showing rather than explaining politics. Film can show the shifting dynamics of informal politics and the relationship between structure and agency in ways the written word cannot’.Footnote 41 In a rare example of film production in IR (the dominant approach to film being analysis of popular cultureFootnote 42), Harman’s co-produced film, Pili, shows the international politics of women in Tanzania living with HIV/AIDS, read through the compelling narration of one women’s story, that of the lead character ‘Pili’.Footnote 43 Recognising that African women’s narratives are routinely instrumentalised, co-opted, or otherwise ignored within existing hierarchies of global politics, Harman uses feminist co-produced film ‘as a source and site of African agency’,Footnote 44 and thus a means of shifting the dynamics of ‘who speaks and who sees IR’.Footnote 45 In Pili, the dialectic of structure and agency is made tangible and highly evocative in the ways Pili navigates both her own illness and her social surroundings in pursuit of her goals. Yet in presenting the film itself as an example of narrative agency, Harman too is aware of the structural constraints – in this case, ‘the international politics of film distribution and financing’Footnote 46 – which strongly favour narratives of the African continent as violent and poor. Always within limits, film thus provides a means of working through, and making visible, invisible power relations, and in so doing offers to enliven and enrich IR scholarship, not only creating new insights but making them emotionally real and vivid.
Film as a source of agency builds on a tradition of IR scholarship which emphasises the power of the visual to convey meaning, evoke emotion, and to reproduce or challenge relations of power.Footnote 47 Key to acting in, asserting, and challenging politics is the ability to make things visible.Footnote 48 As Roland Bleiker argues, visual global politics sharpens our political acuity by calling attention to what is made visible, and conversely, what is rendered or left invisible within regimes of representation and ways of knowing.Footnote 49 To make something visible is to make it known, to make it tangible, and visibility thus begets power. Mere visibility, however, is not always positive, since ‘visibility can also entrench existing political patterns’,Footnote 50 especially if visual representation occurs on terms established by another. As Elspeth Van Veeren therefore argues, ‘invisibility and visibility are always intertwined’,Footnote 51 such that dialectics of in/visibility are a crucial site of politics. This site can be understood as Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible’, which explains how aesthetic practices shape the possibilities for apprehending and engaging in the realm of politics.Footnote 52 To shift the distribution of the sensible by rendering things or people either visible or invisible is to enact power over how the world is represented, and what actions, politics, or policies become possible as a result. Beyond the focus on violence in much visual IR research – the mapping of ‘violent cartographies’ in Shapiro’s termsFootnote 53 – our work explores how a focus on the visibility of care might alter distributions of the sensible.
Feminist care ethics
Care ethics seeks to make care, defined broadly as in Joan Tronto and Bernice Fisher’s definition as ‘a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can continue to live in it as well as possible’,Footnote 54 visible as a public value and set of practices.Footnote 55 It emphasises that care – including the assignment of caring responsibilities, how care is enacted and recognised, as well as the dependence of economic and political activity upon care having taken place – is necessarily a gendered political issue. Furthermore, care ethics is built on a relational ontology (and care relations thus the basic empirical unit of analysis) and a recognition of our mutual responsiveness to need at the interpersonal, societal, and global levels.Footnote 56 Contrary to liberal individualist conceptions of persons as self-sufficient and independent, care ethics thereby advocates a moral view of persons as interdependent, embedded, and encumbered.Footnote 57 It also makes clear that the application of liberal individualist thinking to all domains of life results in both the persistent undervaluing of care and a denial of all human life as fundamentally interdependent with human and non-human caring relations. Despite its historical marginality within the discipline, care has also been constructed as an issue of relevance and importance to IR, for example in understanding diplomatic engagements in civil society,Footnote 58 transforming research agendas beyond violence and war in the quest to remake worlds,Footnote 59 as a core component of peacebuilding,Footnote 60 and as fundamental to the social reproduction of everyday life and post-conflict restoration.Footnote 61
Feminist care ethics anchors our framework in the sense that it provides theoretical resources that help to articulate what might be accomplished via the work of film as narrative agency. That is, situating our work as an intervention in the politics of care helps to make clear what is at stake in moves toward care as a core value, and how it might reshape other values. Moreover, the link between film, narrative agency, and care can be conceptualised using James Thompson’s notion of ‘care aesthetics’, which builds directly on feminist care ethics scholarship.Footnote 62 Care aesthetics emphasises the sensory and affective dimensions of human relations as these are realised in the making of ‘careful’ art projects. As Thompson explains,
An ‘aesthetics of care’ is then about a set of values realised in a relational process that emphasise engagements between individuals or groups over time. It is one that might consist of small creative encounters or large-scale exhibitions, but it is always one that notices inter-human relations in both the creation and the display of art projects.Footnote 63
Sensitive to the political importance of care and to the necessarily interdependent character of human relations, care aesthetics thereby calls attention to the sensory-affective dimensions of creative and visual research in ways yet to be fully explored within IR. Thompson furthermore argues that ‘careful art projects hope to produce protective forms of sociality in an unequal world, and beautiful acts of solidarity in communities that for too long have been brutalised by an insistence that people must survive on their own’.Footnote 64 This careful art ethos resonates strongly with our research context, whereby placing care relations at the forefront of concerns constitutes both a critical intervention in the instrumentalised transitional spaces veterans pass through, and a crucial feature of the interpersonal trust and safety on which the research process was necessarily contingent. Contrary to the aim of much critical visual research in IR which aims to shock and to disrupt in order to force a distribution of the sensible,Footnote 65 the negotiated project of our films became the representation of safe spaces and of making care visible through the production of care aesthetics. Through an attentiveness to the unique care aesthetics being developed, careful art thus works against the general assumption that ‘success in artistic practice is determined by the degree to which the event or experience shocks, disrupts or forces audiences or participants from their comfort zones’.Footnote 66 Instead, Thompson argues, the artistic practice of careful art ‘draws people out of their discomfort zones’,Footnote 67 creating opportunities for respite, change, and strengthening of communal ties.
In the next section, we discuss the emergence and impact of care aesthetics through our co-created filmmaking project, Stories in Transition. Care practices that form the focus of our analysis are twofold, encompassing both the interdependencies and relationships that helped to nurture hope and belonging amongst veterans involved in the three charities with whom we worked, together with opportunities for engaging in research practices (in particular, the creative practice of filmmaking) oriented towards responsibilities of care rather than (predominantly or only) the necessity of stories as ‘data’. The latter aspect of care is embodied in the notion of care aesthetics as both a method of collaborative engagement and as a visual product that viewers are invited to witness.
Stories in transition
Stories in Transition used co-created film to explore how veterans might reimagine ‘transition’ to civilian life in the context of arts, culture, and sport-focused activities. The notion that former military personnel transition from military to civilian life, thereby becoming ‘veteran’, has become popular in the decades of the Global War on Terror. In the UK, transition is primarily understood as a project of continuity of employment, such that veterans may become, in policy terms ‘net contributors to society’.Footnote 68 This emphasis on employment and employability centres the liberal individual veteran as the ideal subject of transition, realised through policy narratives of ‘successful transition’ as the aspirational norm for veterans, with aspects of struggle, brokenness, and failure cast as marginal and deviant.Footnote 69 Missing from the dominant employment-based model of transition is an understanding of the loss of community, belonging and identity which – research has demonstrated – often accompanies the move from military to civilian life.Footnote 70 It also neglects the significant degree to which transition is marked by gendered and racialised struggles for recognition, with female as well as ethnic and sexual minority veterans rarely able to claim and express a social identity as veterans similar to that of their white, male counterparts.Footnote 71 Research on veterans’ transition thus depicts an alienated veteranhood, whereby the transition to civilian life fractures the communal relations of belonging that once formed the bedrock of institutional life in the military.Footnote 72 Alongside more clinically defined problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or battlefield and other injuries, this transformation in relationality creates care needs among veterans; needs which are underserved by an emphasis on employment as the core concern of transition.
Taking a view informed by feminist care ethics and feminist IPE, we suggest that the privileging of employability over care needs results in a care deficit which characterises the transitional spaces veterans emerge into when leaving the military.Footnote 73 This care deficit can be expressed as the unmet need to sustain hope and a sense of belonging while envisioning civilian futures in the aftermath of military service. One of our contributors captured this overall sense of deficit when describing the unavailability of care along with the elevation of charities’ internal bureaucracy over care needs. Discussing the problem of care ‘waiting lists’, Jimmy commented: ‘You end up on a waiting list … But if you’re in that mindset of “Things are going really, really bad”, you’ve got hours to wait around, you haven’t got days and weeks. And everything goes … Its like looking at the world through a letterbox; if all you can see is … you can’t see any greatness or any good. And it just felt when I left the military, I was left on my own’.
Responding to this care deficit with a desire for more hopeful civilian futures, Stories in Transition sought to examine the care work being undertaken within three small ex-service charities, and to create space for veterans to exercise narrative agency in a context whereby heavily mediated representations of their lives (e.g., the entrepreneurial veteran, the heroic veteran, the broken veteran) have come to dominate public understandings of ‘veteranhood’.Footnote 74 Of the four veterans with whom we collaborated most closely (i.e., as co-directors of the films), three were male and one was female, all were white.Footnote 75 During the two-year project, we worked intensively with the three charities to co-create films documenting transition through the lens of the veterans’ participation in the charities’ programmes and activities.Footnote 76 We also carried out organisational case studies of the three groups to understand more about their practices and the impact of their work. The three charities took unique approaches to supporting veterans. They were: Turn to Starboard, a sailing charity based in Cornwall (Southwest England); VIC, a community arts and outreach organisation based in Lancashire (Northwest England), and Waterloo Uncovered, a battlefield archaeology and veterans’ welfare charity carrying out archaeological excavation of the historic Waterloo battlefield in Belgium. All share a focus on practice (i.e., sailing, arts, archaeology) as a means of supporting veterans dealing with a wide range of circumstances, including PTSD and battlefield injuries, as well as a more generalised struggle to integrate into ‘civilian’ communities and workplaces beyond the hyper-social, hyper-masculine military environment. Ethical approval for the research was granted by Anglia Ruskin University.
Our work with the charities was grounded in a practice-based approach to filmmaking,Footnote 77 characterised by a focus on process as the most integral and impactful component of the research encounter.Footnote 78 In other words, the process of making the film, ‘rather than the film itself’, as Neil Fox argues, is the research.Footnote 79 In this section, we show how this process oscillated back and forth with narrative agency as a core dynamic tension, and how it ultimately produced – and was produced through – a care aesthetic. In the very process of representing care relations and practices on film, we came to realise Thompson’s claim that care itself can be an ‘aesthetic experience’ in that it can be understood and appreciated for the qualities it embodies, with reference to the quality of social relations that become constituted by and transformed through care.Footnote 80 Just as with care relations themselves, the research process was necessarily interdependent, with reciprocity and above all, time and trust, the core values on which our co-creation depended. Contrary to the frantic pace of media production in the new digital media environment,Footnote 81 as with a neoliberal academic context which similarly privileges speed and efficiency,Footnote 82 this work required a slow and deliberate approach as we navigated tensions and uncertainty at each stage of our research.
Dialectics of narrative agency were a central feature of the developing care aesthetic throughout each co-created film production. The early phases of each production were given over to exploring the conditions under which the veterans’ agency would emerge. A key part of this exploration involved the veteran co-creators becoming willing to take on the identity of a filmmaker, which called for a shift in their relationship to their own experience. Rather than simply ‘living’ transition moment-by-moment, their emerging filmmaker identities required them to stand aside and critically consider modes of representation that would enable them to communicate their experience on their own terms. Grasping the responsibility for representational choices, the veterans understood well that narrative tone was vital to the success of the project if they were to avoid the familiar sentimentalising stories which presented a sickly portrait of veterans as the ‘deserving poor’: mistreated, misunderstood, but quietly heroic.Footnote 83 Our co-creators felt strongly that these were other people’s stories about them, and that they did not represent their own experiences. In other words, they became tacitly aware of what Roland Bleiker described as the representational gap between ‘a form of representation and the object it seeks to represent’,Footnote 84 such that they were able to resist the imagery and narratives associated with veteran victimhood and disenfranchisement.Footnote 85 With this understanding in place, the veterans freed themselves up to test ideas and experiment with cameras and modes of representation, gradually becoming comfortable discussing these in production meetings both online and in person. Such discussions formed part of a bi-directional exchange of knowledge and skills, with knowledge and stories of transition flowing from the veterans, and film language and techniques from the researchers.
There followed a collaborative process of learning and reflection about the experience of transition and of generating new insights about the past through creative practice. As Sonja Marzi found with her participatory film work with communities in Colombia, this reciprocal learning and the sense of empowerment and self-understanding it generated was key to the ‘impact-in-process’ generated throughout and beyond the project.Footnote 86 These new insights would gradually enable the veterans to cast a different light of understanding upon their past and present experiences. As one of our co-directors, Darren, reflected to camera, ‘You don’t normally see things, right, everyday; you look but you don’t see. And yet, for me, when I was looking through a camera, that’s completely different’ (Figure 1).
‘When I was looking through a camera, that’s completely different’: a still image from the film return, belong, prosper.
To prepare the groundwork for these new insights to occur, the early research process also demanded extensive relationship building, including discussion about what forms these relationships would take in each of the three unique organisations, and what the roles of the veterans would be. These roles varied from participant to co-director according to the veterans’ interests and skills along with their capacity to commit time and ideas to the project. One of the foremost challenges we encountered was trust-building, which is integral to co-creating film in IR.Footnote 87 A key example was a three-week sea voyage which formed the basis of our film with Turn to Starboard, Turn to the Wind. The voyage was undertaken on a fleet of small yachts – confined spaces with close living and working arrangements – and ran from ‘tip-to-tip’ along the British coastline (Lands End to John O’Groats). Crewed by veterans facing diverse struggles in their transitional journey, these yachts were intense environments where the confrontation between ‘veteran’ and ‘civilian’ worlds was stark, and the chaotic aftermath of military service was being lived out. Our camera crew including lead filmmaker, Katie Davies, had to negotiate these spaces that were defined in opposition to the notion of civilian and marked by masculine norms of interaction and language use. To focus on the care aesthetics of sailing, the team had to observe how multiply gendered expressions of care emerged within, and were sometimes undermined by, the prevailing gender dynamics on board the yachts, including how the rules around socialisation were transformed by alcohol. The key task of trust building thus rested on the team’s ability to establish credibility both by learning how to sail and by deftly navigating these gendered spaces.
The particular care aesthetic of Turn to the Wind – captured in the slow undulations of the boats on the water, the shared tasks of crewing the boats, the changing skies overhead, and the reflective spaces these opened up for the veterans and film crew alike – was thus grounded in weeks of gendered relational work, and sailing practice, leading up to production. Our attention to the developing care aesthetic revealed that the moments when veterans harnessed the serenity of the open water for quiet reflection constituted one of Turn to Starboard’s most important care practices, in clear contrast with the employment and outcomes-focused programmes run by other charities which left veterans feeling cold and ‘processed’.Footnote 88 Care aesthetics and narrative agency alike are thus slow and demanding processes, calling upon IR scholars to reflect on modes of research practice that might enable the possibilities for their emergence, together with the possible risks entailed in doing so.Footnote 89
During the production phase, representational choices and the filming techniques through which they might be realised shifted clearer into focus as the careful work of preparation was drawn together in the process of narrative creation. Aware that the films would be watched by other veterans, our co-creators felt pressure not to portray their experience as representative of anything other than necessarily their own, and to avoid defining what transition ‘is’. Instead, they chose to use the creative process to reflect on their own journeys since leaving the military and even to understand their past differently by interrogating it together through the camera lens. This element of the process is especially illustrative of the potential for filmmaking practice to generate representation as an agentic act.Footnote 90 In using the multiple tools of filmmaking to craft their own narrative, the veterans empowered themselves as active narrative agents while foregoing the temptation to extend this power beyond the realm of their own transitional spaces and communities. This is most evident in the film Return, Belong, Prosper, whereby playful cinematic techniques including use of the green-screen, computer-generated animations, and time-lapse photography all formed part of the film ‘toolkit’ the veterans chose to convey their story of community building and the creation of safe spaces. These techniques coalesce into a ‘sensory schema’,Footnote 91 in Thompson’s terms, that brings to life the care aesthetic of Return, Belong, Prosper with the express intention of helping other veterans to envisage themselves as part of such safe spaces. The act of imagining safe space is thus integral to the production process and the generative capacity of the film itself to arouse the narrative imagination of the viewer/veteran.Footnote 92
Production was organised to a greater or lesser extent depending on contextual factors such as time available for filming and whether or not the film was to be based around a single event (e.g., a battlefield excavation). Time and filming constraints thus set practical limits on the degree to which narrative agency could be prioritised. The process for Return, Belong, Prosper was most flexible, with play and experimentation central to the narrative creation. Aesthetic decisions were driven by the veterans’ ideas for how to convey their core story of community and belonging. In this way, the mural (introduced at the beginning of this paper) ended up forming a visual anchor for the film’s narrative as well as being a key signifier of community and a collective safe space. The mural itself became a living care aesthetic. For example, at certain points throughout the film, veterans are shown working together on the mural and at others, time-lapse photography of the mural’s gradual emergence is voiced over with reflections on transition and community recorded during production meetings. As a standalone artwork, the mural forms a visual representation of safety and community. Yet the process of its creation, as it was constructed and portrayed on film, adds to the mural a further layer of relational meaning – evoking a care aesthetic in terms of the character, sensation and affect of relationships within VIC. The mural embodies Virginia Held’s notion of care as both a practice and a value.Footnote 93 As an agentic practice, it develops out of and responds to the need for community strength among the members of VIC (civilian and veteran alike), with this mutual responsiveness to need a core component of Held’s care-as-practice. As a value, made visible through its representation on film, it highlights the moral worth of care in a wider context whereby morality is encapsulated in the idealised figure of the autonomous, liberal individual.
In the editing phase, play and experimentation necessarily gave way to the somewhat more critical and reflective process of crafting the final edit. The collaborative dialogue with our veteran co-creators became focused on the structure and artistic underpinnings of each film. This required not only that the veterans become acquainted with the editing process, but also for many, confronting the reality of seeing themselves on screen, talking about traumatic and upsetting experiences. One of our co-creators described this as the feeling of ‘being punched in the stomach’, such was the starkness of realising how they would soon be seen through an audience’s eyes. Yet when asked whether they would prefer for these difficult moments to be removed from the edit they all declined, recognising the integrity of these sequences to the story. The power of the editing process was the opportunity it offered the veterans to represent, to re-work and to re-frame time and space; to construct and reflect on their stories. Yet doing so also proved challenging and exposing, demanding further care practices such as talking with the veterans at length about their contributions and gaining individual sign-off prior to each film being considered ready.
Furthermore, editing required us to balance a sense of responsibility to the veterans and their stories with the responsibilities we held toward the three charities supporting them. In each case, this involved careful negotiation over the final film through which each of the organisations would soon become known to a wider audience. At pre-screenings, we invited their feedback and commentary, offering to clarify story, adjust tone, and re-edit where necessary. This final part of the editing process once again demanded cautious and sensitive dialogue. A key example was a discussion over criticisms that veterans had made about a well-known military charity in one of the films. Veterans we spoke to across all groups had often found their experiences with larger charities unsatisfactory; marked, that is, by the care deficit we identified earlier. Having asked for help, they felt they were casually dismissed, signposted elsewhere, and ultimately that they were processed and treated as a ‘case’ rather than a vulnerable human being. One of the veterans expressed such criticisms on camera, and the research team felt it was important to include this sequence since it captured something significant about relations of care in the wider charitable sector; that these criticisms shone light on the prioritisation of accounting and bureaucracy over care for the person. When we screened the rough cut, however, our partner was deeply concerned about this sequence, given the ramifications that voicing such criticisms about a larger charity could have for their own funding and reputation. In dialogue with our partner, we acknowledged and agreed that our responsibility not to cause potential damage to our partner’s standing outweighed our responsibility to ‘the truth’ – or at least, this particular truth – and so the sequence was removed from the final version. The experience prompted much discussion within the team over whether editing this out would constitute a further challenge to narrative agency, as it would deny those who had expressed these criticisms the opportunity to voice them publicly (at least in the film format). Yet the experience reminded us that it was not only the veterans’ stories we were responsible for telling, but to a significant degree it was also the stories of the organisations supporting them.
Throughout each production, then, dialogue was essential to the relational emergence of agency. The dialogical exchange continued following completion of the films during a private screening for all three partner charities ahead of the films’ release date. This was the first time all three partners had the opportunity to meet and spend time with one another. Across a two-day event, the three organisations along with the veteran co-creators and the research team watched the films and discussed them at length. This being the first time each partner had seen the other two films, the screenings stimulated insightful and impassioned responses. The screening environment (a private-hired cinema with separate meeting area) was an emotionally complex space, for the capacity of film to ‘capture or convey feeling and emotion’Footnote 94 was amplified for those whose own emotional experiences were being represented. Anticipating such complexity, one of our own care practices was to ensure the availability of a separate room to which our co-creators could adjourn if the emotional load became overwhelming. In this collaborative forum, we reflected in depth on representational choices including what the creative process had enabled the veterans to ‘see’ about transition that had hitherto been either implicit or unacknowledged. This was a co-creation of ‘research impact’, whereby our dialogical exchange was key to revealing the transformation and social change initiated during the project.Footnote 95 An example which illustrates the role of dialogical exchange in generating meaning within creative practice was a reflection on the titling of our film with Waterloo Uncovered, Leave No One Behind. The centrepiece of the film’s narrative is the gradual unearthing of an extremely rare find (in the case of Waterloo): an intact human skeleton. For obvious reasons, the unearthing of human remains at the site of a historic battlefield carried profound significance for the veterans involved in excavating the skeleton, as well as for those watching this discovery on film. Describing the title-inspiration, our veteran co-director of the film reflected during group discussion:
If you remember, Ash said [in the film] “I could not imagine leaving one of my colleagues behind”; the psychological weight of that. And unfortunately, we were at many, many funerals of our colleagues. But we had that honour of standing up and showing their family that we keep them right to that point – we’re not leaving them behind. War is horrible. It is horrible. And if you leave that human out, you’re not telling the truth. You can’t fluff it up. The politicians and people who ought to watch this, they have to realise, this is what happens. This can be a result of me failing to do my job as a politician.
In the intense and intimate screening environment, these words resonated deeply with our co-creators from the other charities, prompting collective agreement accompanied by an affective ‘shift’ throughout the room. As well as offering further evocative insights, these reflections seemed to deepen and extend the truths this film sought to convey. Indeed, while we sacrificed the ability to tell some truths out of obligation to our partners, other truths which carried deep emotional resonance for our co-creators found expression through both the core content and the titling of the films. Reflecting on our editing process, therefore, we do not believe that the requirement for dialogue in the creative process necessarily sanitised the films or blunted their critical edge. Indeed, by making care relations and safe spaces visible, the films harness the power of the medium to narrate a relational version of ‘transition’ substantially different from the liberal individualist conception of transition as the realisation of individual employability. Rather, at each stage of production, these films were a negotiated accomplishment in that they had to balance the veterans’ own truths and stories, the partner organisations’ sensitivities, the practical constraints of filming, and the ideas and interests of the research team, while seeking to retain – as far as possible – narrative agency as an organising production principle.
Conclusion
As with other narratives in IR, relational narratives which centre care and belonging make value claims (what matters) as well as truth claims (what is). What transpires is a contested terrain of narrative – a politics of storytellingFootnote 96 – whereby the stories of individuals and communities enact values and truths which relate to, respond to, and sometimes counteract the wider narratives which structure political imaginations.Footnote 97 While still underutilised as a tool of production, film in IR offers a way of making value and truth claims vivid and compelling by ‘showing rather than explaining’ politics in people’s everyday lives.Footnote 98 In the terrain of veterans’ post-military storytelling that we analyse in this paper, cinematic narratives about care and the creation of safe spaces contrast with wider narratives which characterise veterans as, for example, the embodiment of war’s violent and traumatic legacy, or as liberal individual subjects dutifully realising their employment potential. In terms of the latter, care and liberal individualism occupy competing domains and logics, such that an emphasis on employability turns veterans into economic indicators rather than recipients and providers of care.
Viewed through the politics of care (incorporating insights from both feminist care ethics and feminist IPE), this tension occurs because market logics dominate our socio-political understanding of human relations to the detriment of care. As Joan Tronto explains, ‘care is so thoroughly “backgrounded” as a critical part of human life that its role is hardly visible’.Footnote 99 Similarly, as Beth Goldblatt and Shirin Rai argue, care along with social reproduction more broadly is placed outside the ‘production boundary’,Footnote 100 making it easy to neglect both its contributions to national economies and to post-war recovery and transition. Care matters politically because its invisibility too often occludes the costs of war and war-preparedness, and contributes to the depoliticisation of war itself. In this context, restoring care to the foreground constitutes a necessary intervention, one which can, at least in part, be achieved by making care visible through film as method in IR. The words of our veteran co-creators amplify and clarify the stakes involved in this intervention. In Return, Belong, Prosper, for instance, viewers encounter both the reality of struggle and the necessity of care in Darren’s description of ‘transition’ in the aftermath of war:
I was in a section of 12 on the Falklands. When we all came out, we all came out with minor injuries but nothing really traumatic. Out of those 12 now, there’s only two of us left, the other ten have committed suicide. They’ve all died by their own hands. And that’s purely because - that’s how hard they find transitioning from military life into civilian life. And it’s a good point as well because if there was more centres like this [Veterans in Communities] set up, that wouldn’t happen as much. Which is why we then have to rely on civilians for the funding.
The co-created films of the Stories in Transition project did not set out deliberately to undermine dominant understandings of ‘transition’ as employment and economic continuity. Rather, they articulate a different version of what matters, and in this way, they enact narrative agency by telling stories outside the narrow parameters of liberal individualism. Whereas care is marginal to transition for the liberal individual, the films all reveal that what matters to veterans struggling to transition between the military and civilian life is care for the person and a reinstating of communal relations and belonging. Belonging is what veterans lose upon separation from the communal bonds of military life,Footnote 101 and it is what immersion in communities fostered around practices of art, archaeology, and sailing fundamentally restores. The care aesthetic cultivated in each of our three films illustrates how care is grafted onto these practices in ways that sustain hope against the isolating experience of transition and against the callousness of economic rationalities. Making care visible, our veteran co-creators enact narrative agency by showing core aspects of their transition experience which other narratives leave out, refuse to acknowledge, or perhaps even deny. Herein lies the power of film as a communicative tool in international relations.
Video Abstract
To view the online video abstract, please visit: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210525000245.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the support of our three partner organisations: Turn to Starboard, Veterans in Communities, and Waterloo Uncovered. The Stories in Transition project was supported by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, grant number AH/T006862/1. We also thank the editors and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions on our original article.
Competing interests
No competing interests are declared by the authors.
