This chapter is dedicated to understanding what the far right believes about women and gender more generally. This includes examining the alt-right’s origins in the so-called manosphere and how this has shaped the misogyny of the contemporary digital far right. It explores how anti-feminism was employed as a key recruitment tactic, radicalising young men to the point of committing misogynistic terrorism. The chapter moves on to ask how an anti-feminist movement is able to successfully recruit women by exploring the ways in which anti-feminist content is targeted at women, including exploring pro-natalism, benevolent sexism and white supremacy.
This chapter looks to map the ‘femosphere’, exploring the overlapping communities such as red pill women, pink pill women, femcels, tradwives, so-called tradcaths and trans-exclusionary feminists. It then examines each of the most common recruitment pipelines for women, exploring the arguments and ideology of each, as well as why they appeal to women specifically. This includes anti-feminism, anti-immigration and Islamophobia, antisemitism and white supremacy, transphobia, pro-natalism and motherhood and wellness, conspirituality and anti-fatness. The chapter concludes by asking what these on-ramps mean for women once they have joined these communities, including what they might reveal about the experiences of women in the far right.
This chapter looks to the future to ask how we can address the issue of women’s radicalisation. To do so, it explores the ways in which tech companies can and are trying to address radicalisation on their platforms, while also considering how their profit motives hinder those efforts. It then explores how better education, including increased digital media literacy and education about bodily autonomy and politics, might help to address the radicalisation of young girls. Finally, the book concludes by asking how we might go about building resilient communities which resist the rise of the far right and inoculate us against hate and fascist indoctrination.
This chapter examines the experiences of women once they are in far-right communities. It reflects back on the misogynistic violence at the heart of far-right beliefs and how this is directed at women within far-right communities. It touches on the experiences of several women who have since left the far right and/or white nationalism, including looking at the ways in which they were victimised by far-right men. The chapter goes on to ask what it might mean to think of women who leave the far right as both perpetrators and victims of its violence, before exploring how deradicalisation programmes might adapt to better serve female formers.
The Covid-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to find out whether inhabitants of towns and villages on or near the training area felt protected as a result of living so close to soldiers, who were categorised as key workers. Previously, the attempted poisoning of the Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia Skripal drew global attention to the military laboratory at Porton Down, situated just outside Salisbury where the attack took place. The fact that this facility was associated with experiments in military ‘secret science’ dating back to the post-1945 era did little to reassure local residents that they might be safer living so close to the scene of the crime. While the housing of vulnerable asylum seekers in disused military bases is not unprecedented in post-1945 UK history, today the decrepit state of the buildings and their isolated locations raise questions about basic human rights. Once again, the fact that so many refugees are themselves casualties of war waged elsewhere – often in conflicts in which the UK armed forces are or have been involved – is integral to the wider military geographies that this book explores.
This chapter focuses on Tidworth itself, beginning at Station Road which is the commercial heart of the garrison. It identifies the places where people mix socially and reports on a range of conversations with residents. Approaching the project of military–civilian integration as a political initiative, it investigates certain places that bring people together, and observes how particular groups or communities interact. The topic of loneliness in rural places is addressed. We meet more individuals whose experiences speak to these questions, including an elderly retired Gurkha and a Ghanaian pastor married to a soldier.
This book provides a glimpse of life lived next to and within the perimeter of a British Army ‘super garrison’ located in Wiltshire in south-west England. Comprising the largest training area in the country, Salisbury Plain offers a unique opportunity to investigate the impact of this military base on rural communities living close to the wire. Situated within the precious ecology of mostly ‘unimproved’ chalk grassland, in an area known for its rich prehistoric remains, this is an environment that bears the scars of more than a century of modern warfare. While the names of road and buildings in the camps and garrisons offer lessons in imperial military history, the new housing estates perched on the edge of open country point to the vast infrastructure of service family life required to maintain the modern army. In addition to the social, cultural, economic and political aspects of life in an area dominated by military training needs, the book examines different facets of nature conservation, farming and other ecological questions that emanate from the army’s historic occupation of the Plain. The relationship between this Wiltshire ‘super garrison’ and the zones of contemporary conflict elsewhere in the world accounts for the secrecy and inaccessibility that pervades this militarised landscape. By drawing attention to this particular place, this book interrogates the costs and consequences for society as a whole of maintaining a professional military workforce.
The book begins with a visual introduction to the main road that skirts the southern edge of the Salisbury Plain training area. Vehicles pass close to Stonehenge, which acts as a decoy detracting attention from the sights and sounds of the army nearby. Some of the key concepts are introduced, alerting readers to the idea that, in a place like this, it is rarely possible to draw a line between what is military and what is not. As it begins to outline the aims and scope of the book, the introduction explains some of the methods used to carry out the research as well as the obstacles that were inevitably placed in its path. Summaries of each chapter are provided, indicating how the overall narrative develops from a descriptive account of the landscape to an engaged interaction with local residents. The final section reflects on the militarisation of the English countryside, beginning with reference to the use of dilapidated defence estate to house asylum seekers. It then looks back at the anti-nuclear movement of the Cold War era, in particular the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common in Berkshire. Noting that the concepts of wartime and peacetime have become anachronistic, the introduction ends by urging readers to pay attention to the costs and consequences for society as a whole of maintaining a professional military workforce equipped and trained to use weapons of mutual destruction as a mode of solving political conflict.
How would you know this is a historic military training area? How and when did this happen? How did the Ministry of Defence, and associated bodies, manage to justify occupying so much land, including forcibly deserted villages, over such a long period? This chapter offers a tour of the western side of the training area, noting the different structures that represent earlier phases of conflict. It then touches on questions of public access and environmental politics, offering a critique of ‘camouwash’ or military ‘greenwash’ that claims the army is preserving the distinct ecology of the plain rather than damaging it. It also shows how Britain’s imperial military heritage is manifest in the built environment of Salisbury Plain, tucked away and rarely noticed. The chapter situates the book within a genre of eco-political, decolonial place-writing, attentive to the country’s record of colonial violence while showing connections with its current network of military bases around the world.
This chapter asks if it is possible to assess the economic benefits brought by the army presence, and how this might be estimated. It looks at various recent developments – a business enterprise centre, for example – and at the amount invested in defence and security in the wider South West region. The chapter is framed by the support given to military spouses to start their own businesses, seeing this as partly an outcome of the military covenant campaign from the 2007 period onwards. The consequent politicisation of military service led to wide-ranging promises to support soldiers and their families, but, in the meantime, it had become clear that the gender dynamics of the military way of life are not conducive to long-term careers in the service. The chapter ends by asking about the effect of military discounts on the local economy, asking if this actually detracts from efforts to integrate or at least to bring benefits to a region.