Over the past decade British troops have been stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan as part of what was previously called the 'war on terror'. During this period reports have emerged of British soldiers engaging in sexual abuse against local detainees, the killing of innocent Iraqi and Afghan civilians, and the use of banned techniques during interrogations. At the same time, widely televised repatriations of dead and injured soldiers have taken place, and a combination of the proliferation in use of improvised explosive devices by enemy forces and improvements in battlefield medicine has meant increasing numbers of soldiers are returning home with limbs missing and permanent disfigurement. It is unpacking how these specific acts of wartime violence have become possible that this thesis is concerned with. Specifically, this project will ask questions about the relation between contemporary constructions of British militarised masculinity - what I call a 'liberal warrior' - and the enactment of wartime violence. At its core, this thesis will argue that a liberal warrior subjectivity will never be stable or 'complete', and that it is in its precariousness and attempts at stabilisation that specific militarised violences become possible. Building on a burgeoning feminist literature on militarised masculinities and appropriating Avery Gordon's epistemology of ghosts and hauntings, I detail a way of conceptualising a militarised masculine liberal warrior that avoids mapping 'hard' and 'fixed' borders. Constituted through gendered discourses and hierarchical gendered binaries, boundaries are marked around a liberal warrior that excludes traits and characteristics a liberal warrior is not. However, those traits and characteristics that a liberal warrior has attempted to expel remain an integral constituting part of what is included, haunting the subjectivity, and destabilising its attempts at coherent representation. I argue it is through the appearances of ghosts - the concrete materialisation of an aspect of a haunting - that notice can be given to the ever-presence of hauntings. Focusing specifically on attempts at expelling - exorcising - hauntings of (homo)sexual potential, uncontrollability, colonial desires and fears, and the brutality of warfare in the (re)construction of a liberal warrior, the thesis pays attention to the materialisations of ghosts across multiple sites, including basic training, barrack living and during a tour of duty. Emerging as the banal and mundane, and also as spectacular wartime violence, recognising these materialisations as ghosts has several effects. It draws attention to the (im)possibility of a liberal warrior and always already haunting presences, it allows the conceptual space between everyday soldiering 'doings' and the spectacularly violent to be bridged, and it reveals the ways in which attempts at expelling hauntings and (re)articulating the borders of a liberal warrior makes these (sometimes violent) appearances of ghosts possible.

This thesis aims to investigate the phenomenon of war rape in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in order to understand the dynamics, contextual realities and consequences of its perpetration. Practical and theoretical knowledge is generated which is relevant for health care interventions, humanitarian assistance and peace initiatives, that are cognizant of the actual needs of the affected populations. The study employed ethnographic methodology involving prolonged engagement with the field, participant observation, formal and informal interviews, keeping of field notes and the continuous practice of reflexivity. The four papers in this thesis represent formal interviews with participants from three distinct groups: local leaders (Paper I), ex-child soldier boys (Paper II) and women survivors of sexual violence (Paper III & IV). Qualitative Content Analysis was used for the interview study with local leaders (Paper I). Findings from this study reveal how mass rape and the methods of perpetration create a chaos effectively destroying communities. The leaders draw attention to the fact that an exclusive focus on raped women misses other structural factors that contribute to war and sexual violence, factors such as the global political economy, international apathy, the stance of the church, effects of militarization, inappropriate aid and interpretations of gender roles. Through the theoretical lenses of militarised masculinity and gender based violence, interviews with ex-child soldier boys, seen as both victims of war as well as proxy perpetrators of sexual violence, were analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings revealed the systematic and violent construction of children into soldiers, inculcating a rigid set of stereotypical hyper-masculine behaviors promoting dominance by violating the subordinate “other”. These findings argue for a more complex, contextualized view of the perpetrator resulting from the ways society has (re)constructed gender, ethnicity and class. Papers III and IV reflect the interviews and narratives provided by women survivors. Guided by thematic analysis and a matrix of theories: Structural violence, Intersectionality and “new wars”; Paper III bears witness to the women’s expressions of their profound losses and dispossession as they struggle to survive stigmatization in the impoverished margins of the warzone, along with children born of rape. The perpetrator is cited here as well as by the leaders as predominantly Interhamwe. Payne’s Sites of Resilience model used in Paper IV situates stigmatized women survivors suffering in a global context as they navigate survival, demonstrating resilience in the margins through support from their faith in God, scarce health services, indigenous healing and strategic alliances. Findings suggest that collaborations of existing strengthened networks, ie: the church, healthcare and indigenous healers, could extend the reach of sustainable and holistic support services, positively effecting already identified sites of resilience. Findings draw attention to the challenges faced by public health in addressing mass trauma. Women’s raped bodies represent tangible material damage, embedded in a matrix of globalization processes and structural violence involving gender, ethnicity and class. This requires serious reflection.