The last comprehensive study of dona militaria was that of Steiner in 1906 (Bonner Jahrbűcher, 114/5), since when the amount of epigraphic evidence on the subject has increased by over fifty per-cent, casting doubts upon some of the hypotheses put forward by Steiner and largely accepted since his time. The object of the present study is to trace the developments of the system of award from its origins in the Republic till its disappearance or radical transformation in the Severan period. In the Republic each decoration had a specific meaning and was awarded with regard only to the nature of the deed it rewarded; much of this meaning was lost in the Principate when types of award received depended largely on rank. However, the system never became as hidebound and impersonal as has hitherto been believed, for although rules appear to have existed as to the types of award for which each rank was eligible, the quantity and combination thereof remained flexible, giving ample scope for the recognition of individual merit. The evidence for the Republic is largely literary and the information it yields deals more with the nature of the awards than with details of the recipient; the evidence for the Principate is almost wholly epigraphic, being concerned with specific awards to specific people. The treatment of the two periods differs, therefore, the one being approached from the standpoint of the decoration itself, the other from the standpoint of the recipient. Working from the specific to the general a detailed prosopographical study has been made of each individual case in order to determine what rules lay behind the granting of dona and the scale on which they were given, whether the practice changed over the years, who was eligible to be decorated and in what type of campaign.

There is evidence from epidemiological studies of recent armed conflicts that resilience and the ability to recover from adversity might be common amongst Service personnel. Despite this, neither has yet been directly assessed within U.K. military. The military policy of Rest and Recuperation (R&R) is thought to play an important role in promoting resilience, recovery and wellbeing; however, as yet there is no empirical evidence to support its effectiveness. The current study aimed to develop a measure of experiences of and satisfaction with R&R (R&R-RQ), in order to evaluate its effectiveness in promoting resilience, psychological wellbeing and recovery from deployment. It further aimed to investigate the relationship between exposure to potentially traumatic events (PTEs) and resilience and wellbeing, before and after a period ofR&R. A total of97 participants were recruited who completed self-report measures of mental health, resilience and exposure to PTEs, as well as the new measure ofR&R- RQ. Statistical analysis indicated that R&R-RQ was a reliable measure within the current sample. Recovery following R&R was associated with greater resilience and fewer symptoms of mental health difficulties. Furthermore, exposure to PTEs was associated with some mental health measures but not with resilience. The findings provide information that furthers our understanding of the role ofR&R and its capacity to promote resilience and wellbeing amongst Service personnel. Future research could focus on replicating and extending these findings within the U.K. military as well as further developing and refining R&R-RQ.

This thesis presents an account of contemporary military dissent in the United States in which dissent is practised through continuities and negotiations of the military subjectivity of the soldier dissenter. The project focuses upon a strand of contemporary US military dissent characterised by critical patriotism, in which dissent is represented as part of the continuing duty of the soldier and congruent with American ideals. The analysis is grounded in a conceptualisation of military subjectivity, with its immanent security logics, as simultaneously the resource for, and the target of, dissent. Therefore, the approach avoids conceptualising military subjects as straightforward conduits for state power and official discourse. To explore these dynamics, the thesis presents an analysis of veterans group Iraq Veterans Against the War (2008-2012), the writing of military blogger The Usual Suspect (2005-2009), and the release by Wikileaks' of the 'Collateral Murder' footage (2010). The analysis utilises a synthesis of theory drawing on Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, ideas of public memory, a Foucauldian conceptualisation of power, and Butler's account of the subject and performativity. The thesis focuses on representations of killing in Iraq within the discursive struggle to define the public memory of the US experience in Iraq after 2003. The key findings of the thesis are that the concept of 'ground truth' is highly significant in critical patriotic discourses of dissent; that such dissent involves the re-working of soldierly subjectivity; that representations produce the ground truths of soldiers' experiences as inimical to that subjectivity; and that critical patriotic military dissent can reinforce the privileges, silences and absences it seems to disrupt. This thesis has implications for critical security studies which lie in foregrounding the contingency of the subject in 'alternative' accounts and projects of change. The thesis also has implications for our understanding of military dissent - and dissent more broadly - as it argues for dissenters to be conceptualised not as wielders of dissenting political strategy but as the strategy itself.

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This research is an ethnography of a British Army regiment from the perspective of women married to servicemen. Its aim is to question wives's power and positionality vis-à-vis the military institution and consider the implications for how to understand the everyday operation of military power. The project is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted on and around a regimental camp in Germany during a period when the regiment’s soldiers were also deployed in Afghanistan. As social relations are spun across multiple times and spaces, it analyses women's negotiation of presence and absence, home and away, and distance and proximity. Women married to servicemen emerge as mobile subjects, whose gendered labour and identities serve to trouble the boundary between the military and civilian 'spheres'. The research explores multiple conditions for women's encounters with military presence on a day-to-day basis, from the mandate for international migration and the regiment’s production of social cohesion, to the formal hierarchy of rank and the temporal and spatial registers of an operational tour. The analysis highlights the dependence of these structures on a military-sexual division of labour, at the same time as women can be argued to mobilise social, cultural and discursive resources to appropriate or transcend the place they are allocated in a military social order. It is in this sense that they might be argued to bargain with the terms of their militarisation.

This thesis examines the issue of marriage breakdown in the British Armed Forces in light of claims that rates are double that of the civilian population. The research is situated within the context of existing research on the relationship between the service family and the military organisation. This thesis is distinctive in that it employs Bacchi's (1999) method of critical analysis to problem framing in Governmental policy and existing discourses on service families. The objective is to show how the impact of military demands on marriage and family life are framed by the media, politicians, and academics as a problem for the military, in relation to a tension that exists between retention and divorce. Attention to the effects of service life on families is therefore embedded in policy directives, and framed by concerns over the retention and recruitment of military personnel as implications for operational effectiveness. By re-focusing attention to the implications of marriage breakdown for service families this thesis constructs new problem frames, a key question being: what is problematic about marriage and marital breakdown for military wives? The empirical areas explored through in-depth qualitative interviews with a sample of ex-service wives from across the tri-Services are women s experiences and perceptions of marriage and family life, and of marriage breakdown in the military. This methodological approach is unique in that previous studies of service wives have focused on a single community. The voices and experiences of ex-service wives are noticeably absent in previous research, representing neglected routes to experience and knowledge that are vital to a more holistic understanding of the impact of military demands on the family. This thesis highlights the role of emotion in the socialisation of service families which has not been made in the existing literature to date. It has been acknowledged that the conceptual boundaries between the public and private spheres are practically non-existent where the military and service families are concerned. The interface between work and home can be explained in terms of the invisible emotion work service wives perform in support of husbands careers and the institutional goals of the military. This thesis is also distinctive in that it defines wives work in relation to the military in terms of emotional labour and the two-person career. As wives receive little recompense for this labour, responding to role appropriate emotions can have implications for the well-being of military wives, and illustrates the complex picture that emerges as to the reasons why military marriages might end. Factors linked to issues of marital adversity were: infidelity, domestic violence and emotional and psychological abuse, the effects of a culture of alcohol, and the impact of post-operational stress. In addition, family separation was viewed as creating emotional distance between couples. Many women became very independent and adept at coping with the military lifestyle, which created problems for the reintegration of personnel into family life. Moreover, husbands that were perceived by women to be married to the military, in terms of an institutional and social identity, were less satisfied with their relationships. This thesis concludes that the construct of the service family is embedded in institutional rules and regulations regarding marriage and family life, therefore current problematisations of marriage breakdown fail to reveal the difficulties experienced by families in navigating post-divorce family life. Non-intact families are rendered operationally ineffective, hence there are a number of consequences experienced by service families, and women and children in particular, that represent a far-reaching problem of marriage breakdown in the UK Armed Forces.

This thesis examines the development war memorialisation from 1860 until 2014 in the UK, France and the USA. It represents the first holistic and longitudinal study of war memorialisation as a continuing process. Previous approaches to memorialisation are critically reviewed and a unique new methodology is proposed. This approach challenges assumptions that memorials are only important to the generation responsible for their creation. Moving beyond an understanding that is based wholly on the socio-political circumstances surrounding their construction, it conceptualises memorials within a framework of three parallel time scales; the point of development within the war memorial tradition, the time that has passed from the conflict being commemorated and the time that has passed from the construction of the memorial. This methodology is used to demonstrate that these objects continue to have meanings for many years after the conflict they commemorate. This illustrates the many ways in which individuals continue to engage with war memorials, appropriating and re-appropriating them and transforming their meanings. Furthermore, this approach demonstrates that themes can be defined within the memorialisation process, and that these themes are not bounded by geographical context or period of time.