Hidden WarriorsServicewomen on the Front Line of Britain’s Counterinsurgencies

Explores how we know war and women’s place in it

• Discusses cases from three pivotal campaigns across the modern history of British counterinsurgency from the Malaya Emergency (1948-1960) and the conflicts in Northern Ireland (1968-1998) and Afghanistan (2001-2021)
• Based on semi-structured interviews and archival records, drawing on my access as a former servicewomen, embedding my personal narrative throughout, highlighting and exploring the things we cannot see when serving
• Includes creative methodologies taking the form of film-making as a tool to reflexivity and innovative means of exploring servicewomen’s experiences and identities in new ways

In 2018, all British military roles opened to women, but it is a myth to say that women were only then allowed to serve in ‘front line combat’. Examining seventy years of British counterinsurgency, from Malaya to Northern Ireland and then Afghanistan, Hannah West illustrates that women were there too. And yet their stories have been marginalised as the British Army has exerted power over the story told about women’s war labour.

Based on semi-structured interviews and archival records, this critical feminist history examines how the British Army enters into a ‘bargain’ with servicewomen. Servicewomen are subsequently controlled by co-option, whilst being permitted some agency but nonetheless repeatedly subjected to unnecessary risk. Hannah West demonstrates that women’s voices, as subjugated and situated knowledges, can be used to deconstruct gendered knowledge systems and bring about change.