Military atrocity, national identity and warrior masculinity on trial

The article explores different and contested narrations surrounding alleged war crimes by former Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, with a particular focus on one veteran with considerable public standing, Ben Roberts-Smith. It shows how certain stories told to identify and condemn acts of extra-legal violence, work to separate these acts out as exceptional and different from wider violence in war, and thus support the normalization and justification of war violence more broadly. However, it also demonstrates how attention to the role of race and gender in shaping meaning-making around violence in war disrupts the idea that extra-legal violence is exceptional. It finally articulates a thematic reading of how allegations of war crimes are interpreted and rejected in discourses of support for Roberts-Smith expressed on Facebook. It shows how different constructions of extra-legal violence at different sites each contribute to the ways that meaning might be drawn from acts of violence into narrative formulations about liberal war and offer important insights into the political configurations surrounding war crimes and their relationship to national identity and liberal militarism. The article thus contributes conceptually and empirically to debates surrounding the politics of war crimes.