Introduction
The circumstances under which academics produce knowledge, and how and why certain modes of knowledge become valued over others, has long interested International Relations (IR) scholars.Footnote 1 While research expertise is under fire from ‘fake news’ and anti-intellectual strains of populism, knowledge has always played an important role in human advancement. Faced with increasing deindustrialisation and greater outsourcing of manufacturing and service jobs to developing economies, many governments in the Global North have come to believe that continued economic prosperity will come from growing their ‘knowledge economies’.Footnote 2 This term, while often over-used and ill defined,Footnote 3 broadly refers to the idea that knowledge, conceived of as ‘creative problem-solving’, has utility that drives economic development.Footnote 4 In the context of the knowledge economy, universities have become producers of entrepreneurial knowledge; UK universities have been described by the government as ‘powerhouses’ that ‘create the knowledge, capability and expertise that drive competitiveness’.Footnote 5
This commodification of knowledge means research is now expected to ‘add value’, to have utility beyond academia.Footnote 6 British Research funding councils have also been awarded additional funds to boost government, industry, and academic cooperation to develop ‘the next generation of innovators’,Footnote 7 leading them to become fixated on evaluating, measuring, and monitoring research utility.Footnote 8 One of the ways that the utility of research is evaluated and measured is through ‘impact case studies’, which now inform a large part of the prestige and public funding awarded to British universities and so increasingly determine what types of research are valued.Footnote 9 Research does not occur in ‘apolitical vacuums’ and particular forms of ‘research productivity’ tend to be consequently rewarded.Footnote 10
By subjecting researchers to ‘impact agendas’,Footnote 11 funders have created an imperative for them to demonstrate that their research has some utility and value in the ‘real world’.Footnote 12 In 2014, we, and three other UK-based research teams, were awarded public funding amounting to £1.35 million to carry out ‘impactful’ research,Footnote 13 which would ‘help inform some of the pressing issues facing the armed forces in the process of integrating regular and reserve components into a “Whole Force” structure’.Footnote 14 These four funded projects became collectively known as the Future Reserves Research Programme (FRRP). Co-funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), Ministry of Defence (MoD) and British Army, our three-year research project aimed to examine how Army reservists – the majority of whom are men in relationships with women – balance their work-Army-life commitments.Footnote 15 We also examined the role of reservists’ women partners/spouses in facilitating this balance, and the implications for them of reservists having to juggle multiple roles under the MoD's plans to rely more heavily on reservists to fulfil UK military objectives than previously.Footnote 16
As IR scholars, our intellectual interest in the FRRP was that the UK's defence restructuring plans were occurring in a highly politicised context of public spending cuts justified by global financial recession, and in changing geopolitical circumstances in which the UK's military and foreign policy goals were being questioned.Footnote 17 This intellectual curiosity was accompanied however, by the growing pressure on us to demonstrate the value and ‘impact’ of our work beyond academia. As interpretive researchers, we make knowledge claims about the ‘social existence of others’ that are not readily amenable to the evaluation, measuring, and monitoring often required to easily demonstrate research impact and utility.Footnote 18 We were therefore surprised that our project, and some of the other projects with interpretive-qualitative components, were funded by the FRRP, given strong preferences towards positivist/quantitative studies among policymakers. Our success might also be attributed to the fact that our pathways to impact statement may have slightly exaggerated the impact prospects of our research. Jennifer Chubb and Richard Watermeyer, who locate the requirement to produce pathways to impact statements in the knowledge economy, argue that many prospective researchers are susceptible to such ‘impact sensationalism and hyperbole’ in order to win the increasingly diminishing public funding available to academics.Footnote 19 What will become apparent below is that the knowledge economy is the motive for why functionalist research is privileged and the impact agenda is the means by which functionalist research is often privileged.
While cognisant of critiques of the impact agenda, we saw the FRRP as an opportunity to work with MoD and Army stakeholders to potentially influence defence policy through insights drawn from the everyday lives of those most affected by it, namely reservists and their family members. We began the research optimistic about the knowledge we would produce through our direct access to reservists and their spouses/partners, afforded to us by conducting publicly funded research with the direct support of the MoD and Army. We were well-aware that the secretive nature of the military as a core institution of the security state means that, ‘military-social scientific collaboration or interaction’ is often the only way to access primary and/or secondary data on the military,Footnote 20 and that such collaboration requires cooperating with military gatekeepers, who due to the ‘total’,Footnote 21 and significantly hierarchical, nature of the military will likely have substantial influence in forging the direction in which research develops.Footnote 22 As recipients of FRRP funding we saw ourselves as having been afforded a seat at a table where we would have to negotiate such hierarchies to conduct our research. However, we also hoped to sit at a table alongside stakeholders with a clear interest in facilitating our project and in learning from us as researchers. It soon became apparent that this was not the case.
A key strength of our interpretive approach was that it would allow us to explore reservists’ and their spouse/partners’ personal experiences of military transformation and to trace what modes of sense-making were ‘culturally available’ to them. Interpretive research can provide rich, contextualised data that enhance our understanding of the ‘latent, underlying or nonobvious issues’ that often occur within social and political settings.Footnote 23 If we had instead prioritised what could be readily evaluated, measured, and monitored, as the MoD arguably already does through its annual Reserves Continuous Attitudes Survey (RESCAS), we would have reinforced the idea that policymakers are best placed to identify the most pertinent issues, arguably undermining the rationale for funding our project.Footnote 24 We would have been less able to understand how the lived experiences of reservists and their motivations to serve compare and contrast with the conceptions that policymakers have of these.Footnote 25 As Matthew F. Rech et al. caution, however, cooperation between social scientists and security institutions may necessitate assenting to the latter's ‘definitions of acceptable methodologies’ and ‘conceptualisations of the social world’, which often validate the idea that military research should befit a wider national interest rationale.Footnote 26 We soon realised that we had very different ideas from our military stakeholders about why researching the lives of reservists and their family members mattered, about how the research should be conducted, and about whose voices provide better understanding of the implications of military transformation. Ultimately, this determined what knowledge we could produce and communicate to others during the lifetime of the FRRP. By reflecting on the why, how, who, and what of the research process below, we contend that the challenges that we faced during the project are best explained as having been shaped by functionalist and masculinist logics that pervade both the military and the knowledge economy. These made our research, and its value, intelligible in specific and limiting ways.
We begin by focusing on the challenges that can arise when members of a research programme have divergent agendas as to why the research is necessary and who it should primarily benefit. We explore how positivist and functionalist logics suffuse military research and the impact agenda, favouring instrumentalised knowledge over other forms, including interpretive and feminist-inspired research like ours, which seeks to generate knowledge from people's everyday lives to better understand their relationship to (geo)political phenomena.Footnote 27 We then turn to how the research was conducted and the masculinist politics of methodology that pervades IR, military ethics committees, and defence communities. Linked to this we examine the various barriers we faced as a result of having to rely on ‘gatekeepers’ to access our research participants, which shaped who was accessible to us as researchers external to the military. This highlighted how the marginalisation of women's voices can result from masculinist assumptions about which topics and modes of inquiry are deemed ‘legitimate’. Finally, we ponder what knowledge we could produce as a result of our collaboration with the MoD and British Army and what we could subsequently communicate about our findings.
This article acts as a cautionary tale for those planning to research the security state but also constitutes an invitation to do so. Given that our project was heavily influenced by MoD stakeholder collaboration, we are able to offer detailed insights into the kinds of interactions that can take place between social science and public policy, and thus into the pitfalls and opportunities of this, something that warrants systematic academic inquiry.Footnote 28 By centring our experiences of researching a timely policy issue in the context of the knowledge economy, we aim to show how gendered power relations, and orthodox knowledge about militaries and security, are (re)produced. We conclude that functionalist and masculinist logics must be scrutinised and challenged to advance complex experiential knowledge of the military, which could greatly enrich international studies.
Why research military transformation? Functionalist vs enlightenment approaches
The study of military institutions and civil-military relations has been principally dictated by functionalist rather than enlightenment approaches.Footnote 29 Functionalist approaches concentrate on producing knowledge of benefit to the military, whereas enlightenment approaches seek to advance scholarly knowledge of the military. The favouring of functionalist research by government and military officials arises not only from it being conducted with a view to benefit the security state but also because such officials tend to prefer what they often perceive as more clear-cut, generalisable (usually quantitative) data that can be readily operationalised as policy. Research seeking to produce knowledge about, rather than for, the state can conversely often shed critical light on the state's policies and practices, making it harder to operationalise.Footnote 30 The effect of this, especially in an environment where knowledge is seen as a commodity to trade with public officials or private industry, can be the dismissal of critical scholarship as lacking clear value or as merely antagonistic, constraining its impact and perceived value to the knowledge economy.Footnote 31
The preference for easily applicable data among state and military officials often makes them doubtful of more experiential, particularly feminist, approaches. Whereas feminist research often aims to generate knowledge from and about everyday – and often underexplored – settings because women have historically been less visible in the public sphere,Footnote 32 militaries have long exploited the divide between public and private lifeFootnote 33 in highly heteronormative, gendered, and gendering ways to utilise women's private and men's public labours.Footnote 34 The public/private divide has marginalised women's experiences by obscuring actions that arise ‘within the feminised psycho-social and physical spaces of privacy’, allowing men to wield power over women without repercussion.Footnote 35 Space, including the military home, is therefore permeated ‘with power and politics, constructed by, and in turn constitutive of, social relations’.Footnote 36
For many feminists, social reality and our knowledge about it are situated in experience (interpretivism),Footnote 37 so one must reject the notion that researchers are somehow outside or above that social experience (positivism). Feminist IR scholars have accordingly demonstrated that focusing on people's experiences, and how they are mediated by gendered, racialised, socioeconomic, and other power relations, tells us much about the international.Footnote 38 The situatedness of subjects and knowledge embraced by feminists often proves uncomfortable for policymakers precisely because it refuses any certainty that there can be ‘complete truth, objectivity or self-knowledge’, while also promoting normative political interventions into those social forces.Footnote 39 The feminist case for situated knowledge is animated by the fact that claims to objectivity and generalisability are, in practice, rarely cognisant of the prioritisation of the masculinised ways of experiencing and seeing the world that underpin them. Hostility towards experiential research and the favouring of functionalism can therefore retrench masculinist modes of knowledge production,Footnote 40 and perpetuate masculinist modes of social relations.Footnote 41
It was clear from the funding call for the FRRP that the hoped-for outcome was that the three-year programme would inform military policies regarding the Future Reserves 2020 (FR2020) transformation programme and especially help the armed forces overcome the recruitment, retention, and integration challenges it posed through empirically grounded research.Footnote 42 Given that prior research has shown that family support is a key determinant of retention,Footnote 43 we sought to explore what role family members, especially reservists’ partners/spouses, have in enabling reservists serve in the Army Reserves. We sought to build on feminist work on militaries that highlights how the ‘ordinary, domestic and intimate spaces so often occupied by women have remained understudied’,Footnote 44 and offer up original insights into ‘the interactive and entangled nature of domestic life and geopolitics’.Footnote 45
Such aims, we believed, were consistent with the ESRC's impact agenda, which presses social scientists into proving that their publicly funded research projects make a ‘demonstrable contribution … to society and the economy’, particularly by encouraging engagement with stakeholders.Footnote 46 To secure public funding, we had to write a ‘pathways to impact plan’ with such potential stakeholders in mind. We were required to outline the detailed steps we intended to take in order to, among other things: (1) establish ‘networks and relationships with research users’, that is, stakeholders; (2) involve ‘users at all stages of the research’; and (3) develop ‘good understanding of policy/practice contexts [thus] encouraging users to bring knowledge of context to research’.Footnote 47 While these expectations could permit a range of interactions between researchers and stakeholders, the ESRC call specification expected our research inter alia, ‘to inform personnel and training policies’ and that the pathways to impact would provide ‘evidence of … engagement and dissemination plans to maximise … the potential benefits to defence and national security capability’.Footnote 48
While what constitutes impactful research is not always so prescriptive, the impact agenda raises important questions about why knowledge is produced and to what ends, especially given that not all researchers can establish relationships with research users and stakeholders on equal terms. It can be harder for example, for those with disabilities and/or caring responsibilities to travel and engage in overnight stays to attend meetings, which may limit diversity among contemporary ‘impact stars’.Footnote 49 Such structural constraints may also exacerbate others. For example, if institutions do not address the ‘exclusionary tendencies of impact work’ and instead invest greater resource in ‘impact stars’, this could further entrench ‘inequalities of workload, bearing in mind the context of gendered workloads and time constraints already affecting career progression’ within academia.Footnote 50 Moreover, while social media can be a hostile environment for any researcher seeking to disseminate ‘real world’ research, it has proved especially so for women and ethnic minority scholars.Footnote 51 Though arguably all scholars should want to develop a better understanding of the policy or practice contexts of their research, the impact agenda elides the unequal relationships between scholars and stakeholders who ‘gate keep’ access to their environments. Academics may find themselves demonstrating ‘deference to power’ in exchange for access, often by engaging in functionalist research, which risks either ‘inadvertently or deliberately sustaining dominant’ and, we would suggest, masculinist, ways of producing and applying knowledge.Footnote 52 In the more particular context of military and defence research, where functionalist and positivist perspectives dominate, it is easy to see why our messy engagement with the everyday experiences of women in relationships with reservists might trouble military stakeholders.
While some of the FRRP projects used more critical approaches than others, all of us hoped to influence military policy through our findings. We adopted a critical military studies (CMS) perspective, an approach that emphasises that critical engagement with militaries and other security institutions can be generative of deeper insights, especially when ‘underpinned by an understanding of these institutions as accountable to the civilian world, and necessarily understood as potentially open to collaboration and knowledge exchange’.Footnote 53 For many CMS scholars, there is often a clear ‘desire to engage with [military] people in interpersonal situations that comes with asking critical questions about the military writ large’.Footnote 54 Mindful of the militarising processes of functionalism that can often occur when researching the military,Footnote 55 we attempted to make sure that we did not carry out ‘sanitized military-driven research’,Footnote 56 while being open to the possibilities for dialogue highlighted by CMS scholars. We prioritised the experiences of reservists and their spouses/partners because as K. Neil Jenkings et al. highlight, while there is much research on military recruitment and retention relating to general trends, policy reforms, and organisational practices, there is a dearth of fine-detailed accounts of individuals’ lived experiences of joining and remaining in the military.Footnote 57 We approached our project believing in the ‘need for everyday mundane experiences of respondents to be heard’.Footnote 58
All of the FRRP teams were aware that attracting public funding would involve clear plans for stakeholder engagement, which was even more crucial because our projects and the programme had been co-funded by the MoD and Army. Immediately following notification of our award in April 2014, the ESRC held an initial meeting between the four research teams and our MoD/Army stakeholders. Following this meeting, and notwithstanding the fact that all four projects had developed their own detailed pathways to impact plans, which had already been reviewed by the ESRC's Peer Review College, the ESRC issued a call for applications for further funding for establishing a programme-wide ‘integrator’ team led by one of the four project teams. The specific remit of the Integrator Team (IT) was to increase the potential impact of the research programme, by coordinating and facilitating knowledge exchange activities and collaboration across the programme and with all interested stakeholders.
The effect for us of establishing the IT was to engender unease about the potential conflict of interest between one project team being given overall control of the impact agenda for the whole FRRP. This increased when it became evident that the IT appeared keen to closely align the FRRP's impact objectives with military stakeholder aims without full discussion of its merits. One critique of the impact agenda in relation to security projects is the risk that academics can end up ‘offering, in effect, to work for the security services’ to get ahead in the knowledge economy.Footnote 59 Another is that many security practitioners and scholars marginalise women's experiences of insecurity and the benefits of better understanding them, instead universalising ‘malestream’ experiences, which our project sought to challenge.Footnote 60 This kind of deference and willingness to be useful to masculinised defence actors was evident in many of the interactions between the IT, which was managed by a veteran turned academic, and the FRRP's military stakeholders. This was particularly the case for the dissemination of results and engagement with the media (discussed below), and the ESRC's, FRRP's, and our institution's acquiescence to the MoD's ethics approval procedures to which we now turn.
How can we know? Disciplining feminist research on militaries
Traditional studies of war, strategy, and militaries are ‘characterised by hypothetico-deductive epistemology and a resultant emphasis on positivist methodologies’.Footnote 61 The preference for making sense of military power in this way has led some to question the place of feminist research in IR.Footnote 62 There has been considerable debate between feminist scholars, who approach the international with an epistemological understanding that ‘the theorising that counts or matters, in terms of affecting and/or creating international political events, is not confined either to policymakers or to academics’,Footnote 63 and more traditional scholars who regard such approaches ‘unscientific’.Footnote 64 Ironically, given the feminist emphasis on engaging with people's lives and experiences, one line of questioning that feminist IR scholars have been confronted with is what gender has to do with ‘real-world’ issues.Footnote 65 Feminist IR has demonstrated repeatedly how profoundly gender matters to the international.Footnote 66 Yet the most authoritative voices in, and on, state security are still, for many, those who occupy the elite masculinised world of statesmen, diplomats, and the highest-ranking military officials where both men and masculinised cultures dominate.Footnote 67
The positivist and masculinist emphasis on the ‘numerical representation of reality’ in the study of war and militaries has been bolstered by the military's own needs to quantitatively evaluate personnel and their motivations.Footnote 68 Perhaps unsurprisingly therefore, the greatest challenge for us in aiming to avoid conducting functionalist research while trying to gain access to participants was created by members of the Army Scientific Advisory Committee (ASAC), comprised of psychologists, who acted as the guardians of what they considered ‘proper’ scientific, that is, positivist, quantitative research, and the MoD's Research Ethics Committee (MoDREC), comprised almost entirely of medical and natural scientists plus some lay members either working in or with the NHS.Footnote 69 MoDREC was established in 2005 to assess and approve any research protocols involving human participants within defence. Anyone in receipt of MoD funding must seek MoDREC approval before initiating research on human subjects, though in practice, the broad remit of the Joint Service Publication 536 (JSP 536), which establishes the MoD's policy on research usually means that individual services, sections, and units of the armed forces who have been approached by non-MoD funded researchers for access defer to MoDREC. This is because MoDREC stipulates that it provides guidance ‘for all involved in sponsoring, funding, managing, reviewing and utilising research funded by MoD and/or involving MoD staff and/or MoD entitled dependants that involves human participants’.Footnote 70 This steering of researchers without MoD or armed forces funding who want to engage with military personnel and their ‘entitled dependents’ towards MoDREC as a condition of access raises important questions about the democratic accountability of the military given that the MoDREC process arguably makes it harder for civilians, including researchers, to subject the military to oversight.
Until the early 2010s, social science research involving military personnel did not require MoDREC approval. Ethics approval obtained by university/institutional boards was deemed sufficient and researchers’ access to potential military research participants was informally granted by mid-to-high ranking officers (lieutenant colonel and above) through ‘gentlemen's agreements’.Footnote 71 ‘Sponsoring’ senior officers would provide access to researchers on the understanding that they would conduct research that could be useful to them/the military and that such research would not cause any reputational damage to them or the wider military.Footnote 72 However, in early 2014, Territorial Army Captain Mike Martin, who had been commissioned and funded by the MoD to pursue a PhD examining the British military campaign in Helmand, was banned by the MoD from publishing his thesis because his critique of the intelligence mishaps and failures of commanders on the ground proved embarrassing to several MoD officials. Due to this very public fallout between Martin, his publisher, and the MoD, Martin resigned from the Army in order to get his uncensored PhD published.Footnote 73 Then Defence Minister, Phillip Hammond, already accused of being paranoid about his handling of any criticism involving the MoD,Footnote 74 set out to limit researchers’ access to defence.Footnote 75 This, we argue, has circumscribed what research is conducted, and how – and thus, whose voices are heard – by mandating that projects undergo MoDREC in order to avoid research causing further reputational damage to the MoD.
JSP 536 ensures that functionalism is built into research involving military personnel from the outset by stipulating that the MoD ‘does not undertake research involving human participants unless it is for the benefit of MoD or other Government Departments’.Footnote 76 On submission of a research protocol – a form comprised of some twenty sections, numerous subsections, and up to 11 supporting documents – applications are first sent to the relevant service committee, in our case the ASAC ‘for scientific review’.Footnote 77 Our relationship with most of ASAC's members was fraught from the start because of their assumptions about the validity of our interpretive methodology and about the utility of our critically informed approach. ASAC members conduct ‘in-house’ research on the Army's behalf when not assisting the MoDREC process. Suspicion towards our methodology and the utility of our project was likely heightened by the fact that such in-house teams ‘have potentially much to lose from research that is conducted by academic investigators’.Footnote 78 That is, external academics can be perceived as competitors or as disruptive if challenging long-held assumptions of what good social science is.
While ASAC's official role in the MoDREC process is to guarantee that studies do not ‘present an unacceptable risk to either the participants or the researchers’ from a research ethics standpoint, protocols are assessed also ‘for technical and scientific rigour, i.e. to ensure that the methods proposed in the application are well-designed and sufficiently robust to provide the information required’.Footnote 79 Although the process was purportedly focused on research ethics, ASAC principally concentrated on ensuring that our project was ‘scientifically and methodologically robust’.Footnote 80 Despite being told that we had a ‘clear rationale’ and that the ‘overarching project aims [were] clearly specified’, ASAC reviewers insisted that we ‘more fully explain what potential value there might [be] to the MoD in terms of application/utility of the research findings’.Footnote 81 Despite the fact that we could not predict our research findings, and thus their utility to the MoD, due to adopting a grounded theory approach, and given the fact that ASAC had already mandated changes to our research participant recruitment strategies that were not envisaged in our original research proposal, we were nonetheless forced to speculate, again, on the utility of our future research findings as already outlined and assessed in our pathways to impact plan.
Furthermore, although we had not made generalisability claims in our research proposal or ethics application – given that our project was based on an interpretive, inductive, and grounded theory approach – ASAC insisted that we ‘emphasise the limitations of findings derived through the proposed methodology, particularly with regards to generalisability’.Footnote 82 Within military institutions, masculinist common sense knowledge dictates that generalisable data is preferable;Footnote 83 being asked to emphasise the limitations of our feminist approach was gendered.Footnote 84 Moreover, this stipulation from ASAC made it easier for those within the MoD, who later did not like our findings, to more easily dismiss them as anecdotal and of no use to the MoD.
Throughout the ethics approval process and during our mid-term and final project presentations to stakeholders, it was difficult to convince ASAC members and MoD stakeholders of the benefits of our interpretivist approach and, thus that experiential data could be of value to the MoD. As emphasised by others who have researched the military, ‘those working within military institutions and forces … have a more traditional view of what constitutes “reliable” social scientific research’.Footnote 85 For example, at a mid-project stakeholder event held by the four FRRP project teams in June 2017 to share our interim findings, we went to great lengths to explain that our data was rigorously obtained and analysed in accordance with established qualitative social science methods and that it was therefore indicative of clear trends across interviews. Regardless, a disheartening number of military personnel and stakeholders dismissed our findings as ‘anecdotes’ and our methodology as inadequate. The vehement criticism levelled at the methodological underpinnings of FRRP projects in front of a large stakeholder audience led to the research teams and FRRP stakeholders having to agree at a subsequent Programme Board (PB) meeting on minimal standards of civilised behaviour that future stakeholder workshop/conference attendees would have to adhere to. A primer explaining the utility of qualitative research was also drawn up as a result of the blowback the projects experienced in stakeholder workshops and PB meetings.Footnote 86
Other objections from ASAC during the MoDREC process seemed to be based on political concerns. The complex reality of recruiting research participants and, even more so, getting to interview them again, requires flexible sampling strategies. We consequently built flexible timelines into our project because our purposive sampling method involved recruiting reservists with very busy lifestyles and spouses/partners who likely had caring responsibilities, were in some form of employment, and possibly were also involved in volunteer work and/or a hobby. Yet, ASAC insisted that sampling timelines should be ‘unambiguously specified’. ASAC justified this on the basis that it was ‘a key component of a triangulated approach’ but admitted that their request was ‘especially important as this subject is highly politicised and therefore subject to much media scrutiny’.Footnote 87 Indeed, following many years of underfunding and neglect, the Army Reserve was set to receive significant investment (£1.8 billion) and to increase its personnel numbers at a time in which,Footnote 88 as a result of the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review process, Regular forces and capabilities were undergoing major cutbacks, including 30,000 personnel cuts in the Regular Army alone. As Patrick Bury and Sergio Catignani show, this sizeable investment of the Reserves, notwithstanding the planned Regular armed forces cuts, was the result of lobbying efforts by both serving and former Reserve personnel who were members of Parliament, some of whom were also sitting on the Defence Select Committee. Such members recommended the expansion of the Reserves in order to obviate the cuts of the Regular armed forces. Even so, many other Conservative backbenchers resented the planned Regular Army personnel cuts.Footnote 89
Born out of political controversy and in contrast to the wishes of the Army's leadership,Footnote 90 which consisted almost entirely of Regular officers, the Coalition government were concerned that the Army would not fully comply with the FR2020 reforms and that deviation from its implementation would galvanise opposition from both proponents and opponents of the proposed organisational reforms. Thus, ‘[f]rom the outset of the FR20 programme, the size and capability of the Reserves … attracted intense political and media interest.’Footnote 91 Many believed that the feasibility of FR2020 programmes hinged on achieving ambitious recruitment and retention objectives. Reports from organisations such as the National Audit Office,Footnote 92 Select Defence Committee,Footnote 93 Reserve Forces and Cadets Association's Annual External Scrutiny Team,Footnote 94 as well as Parliamentary debates,Footnote 95 and media coverage obsessively focused on whether or not the Army would achieve its recruitment and retention targets.Footnote 96 During the period of research associated with the FRRP such scrutiny was at its height given that such targets were regularly being missed and reported publicly, much to the Army and MoD's embarrassment.Footnote 97 Thus, projects like ours, which examined factors affecting recruitment and retention shortcomings had the potential to highlight the Army's recruitment and retention failures, and thus, add further stress on the Army's and MoD's public image concerns. As we show below, the MoD accordingly ensured that social and regular media engagement with the FRRP was severely limited, if not stifled, by the ‘Communications and Engagement Plan’ that all projects had to abide by during the programme's duration.
Who can we know about? Marginalising women's voices in military research
The central concern of research ethics frameworks is avoiding the coercion of potential research participants and, thus, ensuring that participation in research is voluntary.Footnote 98 However, the fact that ethics committees require that research relationships must be ‘formalized through written consent at the outset … has implications for those trying to research hidden groups or those who are difficult to access’.Footnote 99 Moreover, efforts to ‘standardise procedures and regulate ethical practice’ can act as mechanisms to ‘contain what are often, in reality, complex social worlds and research encounters that do not fit neatly into boxes which can be ticked’.Footnote 100 Such standardisation and regulation is particularly challenging for research, such as ours, which attempts to focus its ‘attention to the micropolitics of military power’.Footnote 101
We had set out to examine ‘the intricate [and thus] … complex and often contradictory power of gender in terms of the various roles, identities and scripts’,Footnote 102 which spouses/partners of military personnel take on or are subject to and which have been shown to affect the everyday lives of those involved in war-making or war preparations.Footnote 103 Both ASAC and MoDREC made this difficult when they deemed snowballing, a commonly used and legitimate sampling strategy that is particularly effective for accessing ‘hard to reach’ populations,Footnote 104 a ‘poor’ methodological approach. ASAC and MoDREC forced us to create an intricate recruitment process whereby spouses/partners would learn about our research project only if the reservist interviewed was willing to share our information and recruitment leaflet with his spouse/partner. That is, we could only recruit spouses/partners through reservists acting as gatekeepers. Such restrictions in the name of ‘ethics’ impeded our ability to give voice to the concerns of reservists’ partners/spouses, highlighting how the politics of knowledge production often influences and underpins ethical quandaries.Footnote 105
Accessing prospective research participants presupposes that individuals can decide whether or not to consent to participate. Yet most qualitative research depends on gatekeepers: those who are in a position to permit access to others. While the nature of the research relationship between researcher and researched is crucial, we believe that particularly within the context of researching military institutions, the research process and types of information that are ultimately produced are produced through the relationship that develops between the researcher(s) and gatekeeper(s). As Paul Higate and Ailsa Cameron, and Amanda Chisholm, have argued, access in military-related research is often influenced by military culture, which tends to engender the social construction of ‘insider and outsider categories between military personnel and civilians’.Footnote 106 They argue that this ‘“them” and “us” dichotomy may impact on the practical problem of access’ to the military and the interactions that civilian researchers can have with their military research participants.Footnote 107 The outsider researcher can come to be seen as a comparatively ‘uncontrolled element in an otherwise highly structured environment’.Footnote 108 Thus, gatekeepers often evaluate the potential for any negative consequences as a result of the research before granting access to those they have gatekeeping power over.
Eyal Ben-Ari and Yagil Levy suggest that insider/outsider categories are determined ‘upon entry and during the first stage of research’ on the basis of how closely the researcher is associated/aligned with the military at the outset of the project.Footnote 109 Whether an academic is deemed an insider or outsider is particularly crucial when considering which academics are invited to provide advice or conduct other impact activities by policymakers. As eminent defence academic Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman admits, those selected as defence ‘insiders’, are those who will most likely ‘share assumptions and are likely to reinforce conclusions’ with policymakers, thus turning what should be a ‘challenging interaction into an echo chamber’ and creating a ‘regular clique of scholars consulted’.Footnote 110 Our own experiences of engaging with such ‘defence intellectuals’ are that these circles are notoriously dominated by ideas and bodies that are male, pale, and, we would argue, increasingly stale. As feminist IR scholars have shown, it matters who gets to be in the ‘circle’ because ‘gender discourse informs and shapes’ security discourse and ‘in so doing creates silences and absences. It keeps things out of the room, unsaid, and keeps them ignored if they manage to get in.’Footnote 111
While JSP 536 aims to ensure that ethical standards are met, it neglects ‘the potentially complex power dynamics that can operate around access and consent especially where issues of gender’ are conspicuous.Footnote 112 As Sue Jervis has shown, ‘considerable anxiety arises in military communities when ordinarily concealed emotions are revealed’, which ‘inevitably influences negotiations between the military and researchers engaged in exploring service families’ underlying feelings'.Footnote 113 Rather than being motivated purely by research ethics, we contend that the MoDREC process was a means through which research on the complex lived experiences and emotions of reservists and members of their family could be kept hidden. Such barriers are perhaps unsurprising ‘given that the military institution itself discourages any engagement with potentially messy and unruly feelings’.Footnote 114 Our interviews highlighted discrepancies between the accounts of reservists and their spouses/partners over who and what enables reservists to fulfil their reserve service obligations, so they had the potential to cause friction. Nonetheless, while we were cognisant of the possibly delicate nature of research involving household relationships, we were also aware that British Army reservists’ partners/spouses (and by extension their families) are considered ‘hard-to-reach’ populations, making it important to try to reach them.Footnote 115 Indeed, during the ethics approval process ASAC members admitted that prior attempts by Army internal research teams to recruit reservist spouses/partners as research participants had all failed.Footnote 116 Ironically, ASAC members could not fathom that reservists’ spouses/partners are hard to reach precisely because of the complex recruitment and gatekeeping procedures that the ASAC/MoDREC process requires.
Military stakeholders set up methodological recruitment barriers that frustrated our attempts to explore dynamics we originally proposed and that the Army and MoD co-funded. In allowing reservists, the majority of whom are men, to act as gatekeepers, MoDREC gave them substantial power and choice over whether to allow or deny access to their spouses/partners, the majority of whom are women in heterosexual relationships. We recognised that our ability to access women's voices was contingent on reaching those reservists who less jealously guarded their personal time and space from the scrutiny of not only civilian ‘outsiders’ such as us, but also from their spouses/partners. By impeding access to their spouses/partners, reservists could avoid raising uncomfortable discussions regarding the gendered and unequal division of household labour and the negative impact that their time away has on household members.Footnote 117
The difficulty in accessing and recruiting spouses/partners led one of the project's stakeholders, the Army Directorate Personnel Capability, which administers and analyses responses from Army reservists to the RESCAS, to agree to inserting recruitment leaflets in each of the 12,428 questionnaires sent out to Army Reserve units during 2015 to assist us and two other projects researching reservist family issues. While the response rate for the 2015 RESCAS was 28 per cent (3,495 responses),Footnote 118 only 11 spouses/partners replied to the recruitment leaflet, giving a dismal response rate of 0.09 per cent. Once it became apparent during fieldwork that the recruitment strategies for spouse/partners approved by ASAC and MoDREC were not working, we considered breaching the protocol and resorting to snowball recruiting. We considered this to be justified because: (a) some of our project research aims and methods (including snowballing), and pathways to impact plans that had been approved during the ESRC peer review process could not be achieved by abiding by the MoDREC protocol; and (b) because the prohibiting of snowball sampling had been rationalised by ASAC and MoDREC on methodological rather than ethical grounds. Yet, because of the disciplining nature of the MoDREC process and the requirements for periodically reporting on our research activities to the FRRP PB – which included representatives from ASAC – we feared potential sanctions had we used snowballing and been discovered by members of the PB or by MoDREC itself. We therefore complied with restrictive participant recruitment measures and fell in line with the knowledge economy ethos to pander to stakeholder sensitivities.Footnote 119
What can we know and say? National security and research
Our research was also affected by assumptions about how it fitted with ‘a broader “national interest” dictum’ held by military gatekeepers.Footnote 120 As Ben-Ari argues, the ‘specific characteristics of the military as a large-scale, hierarchical, masculinised, and secretive organization’ influences what knowledge is produced about it.Footnote 121 Indeed, gatekeepers hold concerns over ‘representation … unwanted intrusions … concerns for the privacy of those engaged … and even harm to the gatekeeper or those associated with it’ that engagement can bring.Footnote 122 We argue that such concerns made our military gatekeepers more concerned about the public representation of their organisation than about civic and moral responsibilities to engage. Given the methodological hostility towards our qualitative, interpretive, feminist-inspired research and how this shaped who we were able to interview, our research objectives to identify good practice and areas for change in military policy were only partially reached. When it came to accessing reservists’ partners/spouses, a population overwhelmingly comprising women, gatekeepers limited our ability to engage and learn about these women's experiences. The spouse/partner interviews that we did manage to conduct highlighted the significant contributions they make to the UK's security capabilities through their support for reservists, but it left some questions we had about this ‘hidden population’ unanswered and left us frustrated about the ethics of marginalising these women, supposedly for their own protection.
These limits on what we could know were accompanied by limits on what we could say. Some months into the project, our military stakeholders suddenly communicated that in future, all communications material, whether in print or online, would require formal approval by the Army Media Team or Defence Communications Directorate before it could be circulated publicly. Ben-Ari has observed that any facilitation of access to material or personnel by militaries may come at the expense of constraints on publication and censorship.Footnote 123 Yet, as researchers co-funded by the ESRC, a body committed to independent research, this came as a shock. This stipulation was issued despite our project already having been approved by the ESRC's rigorous peer review process and by the MoD's highly bureaucratic and lengthy ethics approval process,Footnote 124 which had already limited what and who could be researched, and more crucially, how our research could be conducted methodologically.
Following initial work between the MoD and the IT, the first draft of the ‘Communications and Engagement Plan’ was matter-of-factly distributed by email to all project teams outlining the ‘Standard Operating Procedures’ [sic] that we would have to follow in order to disseminate any project and programme research findings. The plan was all encompassing; all dissemination events and communications were to be subject to ‘confidentialities by the MoD’, thus, raising concerns that the plan would produce unsuitable expectations of MoD control over research findings.Footnote 125 Despite tense negotiations conducted over two years between MoD/Army stakeholders and FRRP academics,Footnote 126 and despite the project teams’ continued resistance to such constraints, the plan continued to contain highly restrictive dissemination provisions. By late 2015 these were justified by the MoD as necessary in order ‘to avoid any unintended breaches of security’.Footnote 127 Notwithstanding the challenges of sharing information even within the military, let alone with people external to the military, due to the over-classification of most of its documentation,Footnote 128 the fact that none of the research projects had been given any security clearance made it highly unlikely that we would be privy to security-sensitive information that could be breached. Moreover, such ‘security’ concerns seemed preposterous given the fact that our project was mainly focused on ostensibly civilian individuals who spend their ‘spare’ time engaging in military activities or supporting their spouse/partners to do so.
Two years into the three-year research programme, reaching some form of compromise on dissemination and media engagement became necessary due to several project teams being close to submitting articles to academic journals. Communication guidelines for this were grudgingly agreed upon by all parties in June 2016. Reaching the agreement on the ‘Funders’ Communications and Engagement Guidelines’ was more a result of attrition than genuine collaboration. We simply could not continue negotiating guidelines into the third and final year of the programme because of the MoD's continued intransigence. Due to the fact that our stakeholders were not only co-funders, but also our sponsors – the principal gatekeepers who could grant us continued access to research participants – the balance of power ultimately remained with them. While the guidelines acknowledged the serious concerns regarding academic freedom that we had raised during negotiations, we would nonetheless be required to inform the MoD ‘of all planned releases of publications and/or contact with the media’.Footnote 129
The MoD insisted that all outputs would have to be reviewed in advance of dissemination for three key reasons. First, ‘to check that any material released posed no risk to national security’.Footnote 130 Given that any issue, no matter how mundane, can be securitised and, thus, become ultimately subject to censorship in the name of security,Footnote 131 we felt intellectually constrained by, but powerless to challenge, this. This was compounded by the second requirement, which necessitated that the MoD ‘check for factual accuracy’ in order to ‘reduce the need for any formal response of correction following the publication or release of material’.Footnote 132 Although the guidelines specified that this would mostly pertain to ‘numbers and dates’, the IT and eventually the project teams capitulated to MoD sensitivities by granting ‘that “facts” can become a grey area’ and that ‘in the spirit of collaboration, the MoD may offer comment about what may be perceived as deduction or interpretation’.Footnote 133 This allowed for possible MoD challenges to researchers’ deductions or interpretations making the guidelines’ reiteration of the need to not compromise ‘academic freedom or rigorous research practices’ sound rather perfunctory.Footnote 134
The third requirement was to provide the MoD with ‘adequate notice of the release of findings from the programme to allow them to prepare an appropriate response if required’.Footnote 135 Again, a major area of contention during negotiations related to what would be considered ‘adequate notice’ in light of the fact that the MoD was asking for long timelines to comb through research outputs. Ultimately, the research teams begrudgingly accepted both processes, and also the specific timescales for review and approval set out by the MoD and agreed by the ESRC. These were 28 days for the review and approval of any substantive publications (that is, research articles and monographs), 14 days for any other papers, and 72 hours’ notice for blog postings and press releases. In September 2016, the MoD also obliged project teams to provide ‘a copy of the abstract and details of the conference or event’ researchers were expecting to present research findings at within 72 hours of the proposal being accepted.Footnote 136 Any engagement with the media would require prior media training and 72 hours’ notice in order to receive ‘clearance of communications’ from the FRRP MoD Liaison Officer and the ESRC Lead/Press office. This effectively obliterated possibilities for media engagement, which require much quicker response times given the rapid media/information cycle. Both Twitter and blog media platforms could only be employed by the IT to disseminate information containing ‘previously approved content’ by the MoD.Footnote 137
While the above processes and timescales were portrayed as requirements instigated by both the ESRC and the MoD, the obsession with security sensitivities and the level of scrutiny instituted far superseded the ESRC's standard reporting requirements and media sensitivities. The ESRC only requires that researchers briefly summarise research outcomes, outputs, and impact-related activities annually through a simple online reporting platform called researchfish.Footnote 138 Furthermore, the ESRC does not require researchers to seek feedback, corrections, or approval for publication/dissemination. Crucially, it does not expect researchers to notify or seek its approval to communicate with, or publish in, the media; in fact the ESRC keenly encourages engagement with the media and even provides guidance and practical support, including media training. Media engagement is encouraged because ‘when academics seek to demonstrate their impact, they are most likely to point to blogs, tweets and TV commentary’.Footnote 139 It is often through such mediums that research is ‘picked up by the media and become[s] the subject of regular debate’.Footnote 140
Notwithstanding these differences in public dissemination requirements and the research teams’ protestations, the ESRC deferred to the MoD on these matters. The ESRC also acquiesced to the MoD's demand – which came after they heard our interim findings – that all FRRP researchers undergo bespoke mandatory media training provided by an external consultancy. Despite being reassured that this training would be a ‘safe space’ to test out communicating our findings to wider audiences, MoD personnel attended and offered commentary throughout, some of which directly contested the mock presentation of our research findings. The ESRC's senior press manager told us that the training would be ‘bespoke’ because as ‘part of the scheme you will be placed in a high-profile position when it comes to being spokespeople for any potentially contentious issues and policy areas affected by your topics’.Footnote 141 As a publicly funded organisation, the ESRC thus used additional taxpayer money to ensure we would communicate potentially politically contentious material ‘appropriately’; that is, according to the sensitivities of the MoD.
These communication control measures ultimately fulfilled the MoD's desire to mitigate any reputational damage by deliberately limiting public knowledge of the FRRP and its findings. While the number of followers, tweets/retweets, and likes are not an exact indicator of a Twitter account's popularity and impact, the small number of followers (263) and the trifling number of tweets, retweets, and replies (303) mostly of other Twitter accounts and content not produced by the FRRP or any of its members, attests to the irrisory online/social media presence of the FRRP between 2014 and 2018.Footnote 142 Moreover, despite the compulsory media training and the stringent ‘standard operating procedures’ for engaging the media that FRRP researchers were required to undergo and abide by, MoD stakeholders were able to censure any media coverage of FRRP activities and outputs throughout the programme's lifetime. As part of its wider impact agenda, the ESRC sees increasing the likelihood that publicly funded research reaches a wider audience and has a greater chance of ‘influenc[ing] policy and public opinion’ as essential and encourages researchers to have a ‘clear media strategy’.Footnote 143 However, the bureaucratic and militarised approval process that the FRRP teams were subjected to reveals the extent to which the ESRC – given that it was closely involved in all correspondence and had attended all PB meetings with our MoD stakeholders – caved into the MoD's stifling media and communications ‘standard operating procedures’.Footnote 144 Indeed, the ESRC co-signed and, thus, approved the guidelines. Although the ESRC itself did not seek such reporting and approval requirements from the research teams, it nevertheless left us at the mercy of the MoD's scrutiny and its micromanagement of our public engagement and dissemination activities during the programme's duration.
The MoD's fastidious intrusion throughout the project can be explained by the fact that ultimately militaries are ‘bureaucratized, centralized, secretive, masculinized … and preoccupied by [their] public imagery’.Footnote 145 From their standpoint, the ultimate danger posed by ‘external’ researchers is the possible exposure of ‘information to the outside where the military organisation has much less control’.Footnote 146 Our stakeholders’ concerns regarding our potential research findings were palpable even during initial PB meetings where some stakeholders admitted from the outset that the FRRP was too politically sensitive and that our findings would raise undue media and political scrutiny.
The peak of such concerns manifested when, following the review of our end of project and programme draft reports, our MoD stakeholders admitted that ‘there remain[ed] some strong concern that there [would] be a negative backlash rather than constructive debate’ at the end of the programme stakeholder conference that was scheduled to run on Reserve Forces Day 2018. Our MoD stakeholders accordingly asked us to revise our reports by ‘consider[ing] how best to avoid easy wins for the press’.Footnote 147 The project teams though did not write such reports to gain press notoriety, but to candidly report three years’ worth of research findings. In light of the fact that the project teams were unwilling to tergiversate their findings due to MoD public image sensitivities, our MoD stakeholders informed us, just weeks prior to the end of programme stakeholder conference that it would have to be cancelled and rescheduled at a later date.
This event had been planned for almost a year. Exasperated by the MoD's behaviour, the four project teams threatened to walk out of any future MoD-endorsed events. The threat worked and the event went ahead as scheduled. However, the MoD insisted that no social media messages could be posted during the event and that no media representatives could attend given the programme's decision to not attenuate project and programme presentations. The conference had no dissemination or impact effects. Without any significantly senior Regular or Reserve commanders – including the actual MoD sponsor of the FRRP, the Head of the Army Reserves – present, the event that was supposed to represent the culmination of a major research collaboration between the military and civilian researchers, became little more than a footnote.
The MoD's growing disinterest, and ultimately the imminent conclusion of the FRRP, led our MoD stakeholders to concede that, with the official closure of the programme on 31 October 2018, they would no longer have personnel available to liaise with the FRRP and review future publications, and thus would no longer require the review and approval of our publications, including this one.
Conclusion: A cautionary tale and invitation
In this article we have examined the key challenges we faced as scholars trying to contribute to better policy and practice through a feminist, qualitative approach that prioritised the experiences and voices of those we researched. Cognisant of the pitfalls of contributing to the knowledge economy, which prioritises utilisable research, but mindful of the advantages of engaged critique outlined by CMS scholars, we sought to challenge the functionalist and masculinised assumptions of MoD policymakers and widen their understanding of ‘meaningful research’. However, the pervasiveness of functionalism, the politics of military policymaking, the weight of military bureaucracy, the passivity of the ESRC, and the power asymmetry between the four project teams and the MoD, ultimately frustrated how we could conduct our research, who we could access and hear, and what we could know and say.
This matters because the lives of reservists and their partners/spouses were our primary focus and little was known before our project about their lives began. Unfortunately, the challenges that we have detailed above meant that our project too was limited in its ability to give voice to these women's experiences. The effect of the ethical and methodological obstacles we faced has therefore been to reinforce functionalist and masculinist modes of knowledge production and to uphold the very power relations that we sought to probe and trouble as feminist, qualitative researchers.
As Carol Cohn notes, the ‘dominant voice of militarized masculinity and decontextualized rationality speaks so loudly in our culture, it will remain difficult for any other voices to be heard until that voice loses some of its power to define what we hear’.Footnote 148 Our article is thus a cautionary tale to those seeking to contribute through critical methods and analysis to military research in the context of the knowledge economy but also an invitation to do so. While our experience was taxing, it remains vital that feminist researchers seek to elevate voices beyond the malestream so that eventually, the power to define, be heard, and name the world becomes more dispersed. In liberal democratic contexts like the UK, why we study security institutions, how, whose voices we prioritise, and what we can say are crucial to ensuring meaningful democratic oversight of martial power.
Scholars who continue to examine only what makes militaries function and how to make them function ‘effectively’ are failing to further knowledge. In problematically reproducing the same tired methodological approaches and accepted ways of contributing to the knowledge economy, they impoverish our understanding of militaries, security, and contemporary international relations. We thus hope that while this paper is a cautionary tale, it also encourages more scholars to prioritise producing knowledge about military power than producing knowledge for it.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the panellists and the audience at the 2018 Political Studies Association 68th Annual International Conference, the 2018 European International Studies Association 12th Pan-European Conference on International Relations, and the 2018 British International Studies Association 43rd Annual Conference for comments provided on earlier versions of this article. We are also grateful for the very insightful and helpful comments and suggestions for revision that the RIS editors and the anonymous reviewers provided in spite of the difficulties brought on by the Coronavirus pandemic. The research carried out for this article received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (ES/L013029/1), the UK Ministry of Defence, and British Army. The opinions expressed in this publication are solely those of the individual authors and do not reflect the views of the funders. Ethics approval for this study was obtained from the Ministry of Defence Research Ethics Committee (Protocol no. 583/MODREC/14).
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