 I'm really pleased to welcome Dr. Nattelay. Nattelay, gosh, I'm sorry, I probably mispronounced that, but you can pronounce your name more beautifully than I can. Anyway, Eleanor Nattelay today to talk about her research. The New Voices Seminar Series is a collaboration now with the School of Security Studies, but also with the Journal of International Affairs. And so we're really excited about this collaboration. So Eleanor will present her research to us live now, but watch this space for a follow-up blog and a more engagement with her research. We're so pleased to have her here. Dr. Eleanor Nattelay is a military historian and a lecturer in international history here in the Department of War Studies. As a historian, she applies ethnography as a key method to examine military families of the Argentinian dictatorship and their experiences of war, political violence, and transnational justice. Oh, if you haven't muted yourself, I'm just getting some feedback. Can I just ask everyone to mute themselves? Good, right. So Dr. Nattelay is especially interested in the everyday dimensions of military life, particularly the social and family spears. She uses the same ethnographic methodology to also examine Argentinian military involvement in the 1982 Falklands War, interviewing veterans of the conflict who were serving up the time for crimes of the regime. Before joining Kins College London, she held a postdoc fellow, or she was a postdoc fellow rather at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín in Buenos Aires. And Eleanor has also taught at Durham University and Keel University where she obtained her PhD in 2019. So today she'll be discussing an alternative perspective on the Argentinian military, addressing the everyday aspects of military life before and during the last dictatorship, 1976 to 83. By exploring the private sphere of the family, her ethnographic work challenges the traditional geopolitical focus on the monolithic masculine narrative of military action in Latin America. Her work seeks to embrace the experiences of both former military officers and their wives. And based on her field work conducted in Buenos Aires 35 years after the end of the dictatorship, when the military are being prosecuted for crimes of the regime, Eleonora presents an innovative, interpretive framework in which understandings of violence and political confrontation emerge. So so excited to have you here Eleonora. Eleonora is joined today by our very own, Dr. Vinícius Del Carvalho, oh gosh, sorry Vinícius. He's the director of the Kings Brazil Institute and a colleague again of ours here at War Studies. Vinícius has played an active role in contributing to the field of Brazilian studies founding and editing Brazilana, which is a journal for Brazilian studies and an editor of the Anthem Brazilians study series. Vinícius research and publications on the epistemology of Brazilian studies are a reference within the field covering a diverse range of areas including literature, music, religion, history, international relations, defense and security. In the fields of defense and security, Vinícius specializes in Latin American and Brazilian armed forces with reference to historical and contemporary issues. In his teaching and research, he covers aspects such as Brazilian participation in the United Nations, peace operations, civil military relations, the role of the armed forces and police, tasks, strategic communication, strategic thinking from Latin American perspectives and the relationship between art, music and conflict. So Vinícius will be Dr. Anatole's discussant today. How we're going to proceed is Eleonora has agreed to talk for about 20 to 25 minutes and then Vinícius will offer some commentary and discussant points before we open it up to you, the audience. You can either ask questions live by raising your Zoom hand or you can type them in the chat box and I'll read them live to Eleonora. So without further ado, Eleonora, I'm going to hand the floor over to you. Thank you. Thank you Amanda for the invitation and thank you Vinícius for agreeing for being my discussant. So I'm gonna share some slides with you. Please let me know if it works. Should be, can you see? Okay, yes, we can see. Right, so yeah, this presentation is based on, sorry, okay. It's based on a paper that is a work in progress. I recently submitted it to the Bulletin of Latin American Research and it's called Research in Violence and Everyday Life in the 1970s and ethnographic approach to the Argentine military family. It's based on my doctoral research and it explores political violence in Argentina from the point of view of the military which is quite under research perspective in the studies on the subject. In the analysis includes of subjectivities not usually questioned by military studies in Argentina or those especially focusing on the 1970s and in so doing it challenges dominant narratives of the violence of the Cold War in Latin America. So the paper itself falls within the anthropological tradition of military studies that approach particularly the social dimension in Argentina and in Brazil. And it opens a dialogue with recent developments in everyday geopolitics in Latin America because of its interest in the grounded embodied and emotional encounters that citizens have with the geopolitical and particularly the military in this case. So I think it's worth to give a little bit of a context. So my research looks particularly at the 1970s in Argentina which were the age in which the militarization of politics and the political violence reached its climax. Several actors were involved in this process Army forces, paramilitary groups, guerrilla groups and the military in particular had intervened in the political life of the country several times in the 20th century. When they did it for the last time in 1976 the military regime was initially welcomed or at least tolerated by the wider population and it was initially justified as a way to contrast the action of guerrilla groups that were particularly active in the territory since the early 70s inspired by the success of the Castro revolution. So between 1976 and 1983 the military led this military regime that carried out a huge repression of any form of political opposition and armed struggle. The military were involved in a two-folded forms of violence which included operations of state terrorism which were preponderant but also visible operations of counterinsurgency directly specifically against the armed groups. This repression made thousands of victims and contested number between 10,000 and 30,000 of people who died by the end of the military supported by the police and with the con events of social sectors, civil sectors of society. Two years after the end of the dictatorship in 1985 a historical trial brought to justice the military juntas whose members were condemned to life in prison but were pardoned only some years after. And subsequent democratic government adopted some measures that in fact impeded the further prosecution of lower ranks military for the crimes of the dictatorship. This led Argentina to 30 years of impunity in which civil military relations were particularly tense until 2005 when President Kirchner opened a cycle of trials for crimes against humanity that are still ongoing and involved about 2,000 people in the trial including hundreds of former military of all ranks which are currently facing jail time or house arrest for their implication in the crimes of the dictatorship. Now this story led to several interpretations of the violence of the 1970s which has shifted in time. At the time itself of the violence the violence was described as a dirty war as an internal conflict by the combatants on both sides. So both the military and the guerrilla groups were defining their confrontation as a dirty war. Then thanks to the action of human rights organization the violence was defined as state terrorism and more recently the framework that allowed the prosecution of the military is actually a legal framework, the one of genocide. However, regardless of which framework we adopt the narrative of the past is still very dichotomous. On the one hand we have the military, the state and on the other hand we have depending on which framework we use we have guerrillas or ordinary citizens or indiscriminate victims. Now the image that results from these interpretations of the military is that of a monolithic and critical masculinist bloc. Most studies that started from the age itself of the authoritarian regimes in Latin America tend to look at the military as something somehow intrinsically different or separated from society. A huge body of knowledge has been developed since those years about the military but it's somehow a body of knowledge that is indirect or external to the military. It tends to neglect the complexity of the military identities, the daily lives of the military and their daily behaviors. It tends to draw directly to the mastodontic geopolitical theories of the 60s and 70s. For example, especially from a domestic point of view. So internal control, anti-communist. Can't tell you. Yeah, I think I need to leave. Sorry. Sorry. I love you. I love you. Sorry, okay. So these studies on the military draw directly on the theories that influence the agency of the military in the 70s. So the domestic geopolitics theory like internal control, anti-communism, counter-evolutionary doctrine that directly shaped the repressive state in the southern corner. And on the other hand, also these huge ideologies that constitute in the cultural universe of the 1970s soldier, such as, for example, national Catholicism, doctrines that basically portrayed the repressive action of the state as a crusade for the superior good of the nation. So this led to limit the production of new ones critical knowledge on the military that takes into account the multiple aspects that determine their subjectivities, their identities and their daily behaviors in the past. Now this paper, it goes in a different direction. It is based on an ethnographic study of military families of the dictatorship. I will be happy to give more context to the fieldwork in the Q&A session. And it doesn't look at the military as a political actor or as an identification of the state or as a device for the delivery of violence. It looks at the military as a community made of families. It looks at the military as a social group. It explores identities that the military developed within and beyond the military community before and during their incorporation in the army and that they often constructed with other social groups. So the study on which this paper is based developed a bottom-up approach to lower-ranked militaries, those who at the time were the young officers of the dictatorship, people who had just graduated from the military academy. And this allowed to explore the everyday life dimension of the violence itself to see how these bigger theories and ideologies were transformed and used in the militaries everyday life. So a bit of context on military families themselves. In the 1970s and to quite a lot of extent also in the present, military families in Argentina conduct a very specific lifestyle, which they partially share with other contexts of military families, for example, in Brazil or in the United States and also in the UK. In Argentina, military families belong to the middle class. They're not particularly wealthy, but in the 1970s, they were respected because of their affiliation to the army, at least by great part of the population. This was of course before the conduction of heinous violence during the regime. But they were historically gravitating around the oligarchy and they tended to protect the interests of this oligarchy. In turn, the affiliation to the army guaranteed some benefits to the military family, such as, for example, affordable housing options or a secure job, good pension scheme, schools for the children, summer camps for the children, medical insurance and so on. So in a certain way, this presupposed the dependence of the family from the officer and his affiliation to the army. Now, these benefits came to a cost. The lifestyle of the military families in Argentina is very nomadic. They tend to relocate quite often every two or three years for even 20 years and Argentina is a huge country. So that involved, that implied many times that military families were actually very far away from their family of origin, from their biological family. So in order to survive in everyday life, they had to develop a different support network based on identification with other military families that they met in different military posts. So this meant that when men were absent because they were, for example, in missions or in actual conflict, like, for example, during the Falklands War, women were at home and they used to rely on each other to take care of the errands and to take care of the children together. So in a way, the men were developing comradeship bonds in the barracks and in the battlefield and women were staying like more at home, holding the threads of this community in their husband's absence. Now, we're gonna look straight into the data. So particularly the narratives because while my study has focused on the creation and the understanding of social bonds within the military family, this paper looks specifically at the narratives that members of military families produced in the past, in the present, referring to the facts of the 70s. So violence is a generational fact in Argentina. And in the 1970s, it was a phenomenon that involved specifically the youth. Now, most studies on the period emphasize how ideology was something that was particularly pervasive, especially for political militants and activists and even the guerrillas. But the military actually belonged to that same generation that was so active from an ideological point of view. In the 70s, they were young, they had just graduated from the academy. They were getting married and starting a new family. So it was a very crucial moment for them. But they were still part of that young generation that was so subject to the influence of the counterculture and the political beliefs that motivated the armed struggle in the 1970s. So Miguel, a former officer, said about the 70s, my generation was completely immersed into a climate of political violence that you could see in the streets, in the news, every day. And I joined the army as many others at the time because I saw those things. After all, in an internal conflict with gunshots and bombs, which 18 years old men doesn't want to take side for one faction or the other? We were moved by ideas just like the guerrillas, but they defied the state and the state responded with weapons much more powerful. So they lost the war. So this is a very soldierly reading of what happened in the 70s. They still believe and look at what happened in the 70s as a war, but they insert themselves into the ideological ground that basically supported the violence. And interesting also, their wives insert into that phenomenon. They're not passive witnesses of the political confrontation, but in their narratives, I could clearly see that they claim a space in that confrontation. They didn't actively participate in the violence, but they were still in the very front row of the confrontation. Fernanda, military wife, said, it wasn't easy at the time, but we were young. We took it as a normal thing. We were there in the middle of the clash. I mean, my father was an officer too, but he spent his whole life behind the desk. And I think he never had to use a gun. Instead, I lived in 1972 and I swear the city was blowing up in the air. So here there is clearly also a sort of normalization of the violence as the daily background of their transformation into adults, into wives, into mothers. And it's interesting to see that while most members of Argentine middle class tend to take distance from the violence, these women who are still members of the middle class they tend to insert themselves in the confrontation somehow. Now, another thing that emerged from the narratives is that there is a quite nuanced way in which the military look back at the past. One would expect a very monolithic narrative. Instead, I found very different voices. For example, this officer is talking about what happened just before the military queue in 1976. And it's interesting to see that the generational dimension of the violence, it had repercussions on how those who were young officers at the time look now at their superiors and the masterminds of the military regime. Because he said, Argentina was living a difficult time. There was violence in the streets, social unrest, inflation, the economy was a disaster. That's why in 1975, President Isabel Beron ordered the armed forces to fight terrorists by decree. The president did it. Instead in 1976, the year of the queue, the armed forces over through a democratic government through a subversive move because what the army did was to violate the constitution once again. Fine, people were happy with the military government but this doesn't change the fact it was a queue which abused the constitution. And I personally think the armed forces failed there because they had the legal instruments to fight the subversion within the rule of law. So this is interesting because this officer who at the time was young is directly criticizing the generals of the dictatorship by saying that what they did was illegal. He is even applying the logic of the subversion to his own army. And this is interesting because of course these narratives are produced in the present, in a present in which the military are being convicted for the orders that they executed 40 years ago. And it's interesting that they find a place in the narrative also for their superiors. Military wives, they became quickly aware of the rapid escalation of violence in the 1970s. And they observed it from a very front row position. They were members of the military families and military families in turn, they were targets of the guerrillas. The guerrillas were attacking in their actions, especially military families, families of police officers, members of the oligarchy. So clearly there was a constant attention in the military community in that time to change their daily routines, adapt their daily routines in order to avoid being object of kidnapping or killing. And this is something that emerged very vividly in especially military wives narratives. Patricia said, I saw my husband the day our son was born and then I didn't see him for 20 days until I was told he got shot by the guerrillas. The subversive threatening while he was in the hospital, they said they would kill him to end the job. Another wife said, somehow you didn't trust anyone, you didn't know who the enemy was. When my second child was born, there were no nurses and how could I choose a babysitter to put into my own house to look after my children when the guerrillas used to put bombs in military households? So the solution was to quit my job and stay at home. This is interesting to see that the political violence of the 70s entered the houses of thousands of Argentines. Of course, this is particularly true for the victims of the regime who were often kidnapped at night and taken from their homes. But in a way, this is also somehow it affected also the military household. And the military wives were part of that daily life, their daily coexistence with the threat and the violence. And they claim that role in the present in their narratives. They make it very clear that they had to make sacrifice to deal with it. Like for example, giving up their professional life, which was also a consequence of the very nomadic lifestyle of the military families, but it was also a very specific condition of the 1970s. Interestingly, military wives remember the facts of the 70s because of their position in military families, but their understanding of what was happening of the political confrontation is actually a product also of their engagement with environment that are not part of the military world. For example, some of these women were studying at universities, others were working as we saw. So they were socializing in environments with which their husbands were not too familiar because their husbands had entered the military academy straight after high school. So they didn't have the chance to even get closer to what then became their enemy, the guerrillas, the political activists, et cetera. Instead, military wives did quite often. They're hybrid beings that live on the edge between the military and civilian world. So Fernanda said, Fernanda was studying sociology in 1969. And she said, faculties were very hot centers. Students wanted to change the world. I had mates at the faculty who got desaparecidos, but I always respected their choice. And she means the political choice. They were highly committed. They thought the armed fight was the solution. Rongo Wright, they believed and fought for a cause and died because of this confrontation. And I respect them because they knew they could get killed. Just like I knew my husbands could return in a coffin one day. So again, here there is an attempt to sort of get closer to the core of the political and armed confrontation by ennobling the confrontation, by saying that they respected the former enemy of their husbands, by saying that they got to know people who then got disappeared by the regime, and by saying that they respected their choices. Of course, again, we have to remember that these narratives are produced in an age in which the military are being prosecuted. So it's also perhaps a way to legitimate the position of their husbands in the past by legitimating the position of the victims of the dictatorship, former guerrillas and former militants in the past. But it's interesting that it's the wives that are voicing this dimension of the confrontation, as again, belonging to a same generation and a same group. Finally, I would like to bring your attention on the fact that also the military themselves find a way in the present to emphasize the points in common with their former enemy. Julio, this former officer said, talking about the former guerrillas, they were my enemies. It was me or them. Today, I don't feel hate. They fought as I did because they were combatants. They lost their companions fighting against us. We have had several contacts in the last few years with the terrorists, now old, fat and bold. We speak the same language. They know it's been a war and politicians are speculating on the blood of their comrades and on ours too. So this is interesting because this is the logic of the worthy enemy, right? The fact that after the conflict, enemies tend to recognize each other and respect each other in a way that during the conflict is not possible because, and especially in situations in which the violence was so heinous and exceptional, there is a logic of dehumanization of the enemy. Instead of the present, by reflecting on the points in common with the former enemy, the military are actually able to create a different kind of narrative, which is not that dichotomous as the official narrative of the seventies would suggest. They said, they were my enemies. We were combatants. We speak the same language. They know it's been a war. So this narrative is based on a common understanding of the past with the former enemy. They tend to recover a dimension of the conflict that is soldierly and that is being neglected by the official narrative and not only connected, but also criminalized and condemned, but condemned on one side only because the guerrillas were not called to respond for their actions in the past, right? And this is often the case with transitional justice in several contexts. So in order to legitimize the position in the past, the military bring into the discourse the former enemy, which is described as combatant. So in a way it legitimizes the whole fight, the whole conflict, but also is a reflection of their very soldier mindset. We have to remember that the guerrillas were organizations that were organized on, you know, in a way that resembled the military and they shared the same military morals with the regular army. So in a way, this is also a way of acknowledging a similar hardship, although of course the means at disposal to fight the violence were completely different, but it's a way to, yeah, legitimate the past and understand the present as well. So to conclude, by looking at the narratives of the everyday and by bringing into the analysis different actors and different subjectivities, it is possible to enrich the narratives of the past and look at things that may get lost if we just focus on the official narratives. This presentation, I think, is show that military identities are actually made of multiple elements, such as class, education, gender, generation, kinship, all things that are not visible if we just focus on the doctrines, the procedures and the more institutional aspect of the army. This reading helps to identify other actors, other than combatants in the violence, such as, for example, military wives. And the paper also shows that military wives narrative aligns with that of their husband. Okay, yes, the military were doing their job, the military were a generation that was active from an ideological point of view, but it also develops in a way that is independent to their husband's narrative. Wives have their own agency in developing their own narrative, which reflects their position in the past and in the present. And then, of course, the worthy enemy narrative can help us recover some dimension of the conflict that got lost in time, such as, for example, the fact that combatants on both sides still read what happened as a war. And this is evident from the publications of the former guerrillas as well. So to conclude, violence is understood by the military as a social phenomenon in which kin, social and generational ties are crucial. And the social dimension of the military is essential to its functioning, even in context of extreme violence like this one. And acknowledging and researching empirically this dimension is crucial to understand how violence works in the first place and how military power is embedded in society. So thanks a lot for your attention. On the back, there is some references that could be useful. And I'm happy to share them with you if you like, send me an email. Okay. So, I think it's my turn now. First of all, I would like to thank Amanda and Eleonora for inviting me to take part in this debate. It is very, very good to see that we have more people discussing Latin American issues in our department of war studies. For a while, I was a little bit alone with very few other colleagues that were looking at topics related to Latin American issues on defense and security. And yeah, let's say in war studies in general aspects, no? So thanks again for this opportunity to know better your work, Eleonora. The role of a debatant tends to be a quite uncomfortable one because normally the debatant is the one who points to one thing and say, oh, you should have said that as the work should be in another direction. It was more or less look to a dog and say, well, but it's not flying. No, the dog is doing very well what the dog should do, but we are expecting something else from it. But don't worry, I'm not going into this direction. I will look at the dog as a dog and not expect this dog to fly. So I think your work has a lot of points of originality in this field, especially in our context of Latin America. The first aspect of it is the ethnographic work that you have done there with the unsuspect people involved on the issue. And I don't know, and probably I could be wrong, but I don't know a previous work that has been done with the families of the military in Argentina, especially in this perspective of ethnography as you have done. And this is, as I said, quite original and bring some lights that we probably neglected to see in the construction of the transitional justice period from the end of the dictatorship in Argentina up today, both in academic studies, but also in the policies that were built up in order to address the violations of human rights committed during the regime. So sorry for my coughing, but I'm still recovering from COVID. Well, I think again, your research was interesting in looking at this concept of military family. Now, again, there is a sort of a tendency to look at the military as someone or some group that's not connected with another social bonds than their own military bonds. But yeah, families are an important one here. And these fairies are exactly as you pointed out, this bridge in which the military can see or be seen outside the institution or the framing of the armed force. And some of the interviews that you both showed that very well. My questions would be a little bit about the methodology and again, about the conclusion. About the methodology you mentioned that you interviewed lower rank military officers at that time. Yeah, okay, they were lower rank at that time, but they were career officers. So what happened to their career? What happened through their career that also framed their perception of events that happened when they were lieutenants? So if we are asking a colonel today what he thinks about what was happening when he was lieutenant, it's not the lieutenant answer about his lieutenancy but is a colonel framing and interpreting what he would say about that lieutenant. Basically, it's almost another person. So how you address that in your research, methodologically speaking, understanding again that they moved up in their ranks. And moving up in their ranks, they move also the way of interpreting their own roles at that moment. So if a young lieutenant don't ask or don't put questions about the orders that he received and a colonel who gives orders, probably we will have another criteria of questioning this behavior or other frame even to interpret the orders that he's giving. So that would be my first question here. The other question that I would bring is that, and then probably, when is this narrative of worthy enemies? This is quite recurrent in post-war, post-conflict narratives in both sides, especially from the sides of the victorious that to glorify their own actions, I need to make my enemy worthy because if not, would be our courtes to fight this war. But the question is, when we look at the Argentinian case, how does military fit themselves as victorious in that war or in that battles or losers? How they look at themselves? Because again, the transitional justice process and the historiography today don't give them the status of winners in a political war, much more than a war in the sense of extension of politics by another means. So why they call the guerrillas as worthy enemies? It's from a perspective of a winner or it's from a perspective of a loser in terms of conflicts. Yeah, that is another aspect, is when they talk about that today, it's clearly to see that narratives change and they change to make existential sense to those who lived at that period in this military family. So we can see that there are levels of existential sense they are trying to answer here. Personal levels, finding themselves explanations for their own acts. Social levels find a meaning for that community, that family in a period in which they were perpetrating acts of violation of human rights and historical because when we look at the Argentinian history of dictatorship today, there is no space for them to have a voice and that's again the point of your research that's so I think important here is how you touch the wound and I really am not sure if this wound is completely healed still. And then when you touch this wound, we touch in the last point of my dialogue with you is the ethical aspect of it, the ethical level. I know that you are not doing that in your study. I'm not asking your dog to fly, but it's just this topic specifically when we talk about memory aspects, ethical aspects of memory, traumatic memories. I remember vividly the work of Avishahil Magalit in a book called Ethics of Memory and it's not for this study again. Now your study is there as it should be and as it is and it's important to touch this wound, but to think about the next step, it's to bring the discussion of ethics of memory. How can we frame into an ethical discourse what this testimonies that you collect gave to us here and what is the questionings of the current narrative that these testimonies will bring here and helping us to construct a sort of more ethical memory of this time. So to conclude, I just would like to remind one topic that or one quotation that you brought to us, but I think it makes a lot of sense for our times today and that's also shows the relevance of studies like that, not only to look at the past, but to look of the present of some Latin American realities. And we could see something written in the newspapers today exactly like that. My generation was completely immersed into climate of political violence. You can see in the streets, in the news, everywhere. So I would finish here with this quotation because I think it also refers to some aspects that we are still living in many Latin American countries. Consequently, it shows again how relevant is your study, not only as I said to look at narratives of the past of the Argentinian period of dictatorship, but also to shed some lights to current issues that we are living in these countries. And especially looking at the role of armed forces in politics. Why we discuss so much this issue in Latin America? Should we give such importance to armed forces as political actors in the context of Latin America? Are we free of that after dictatorships or this risk is still there? So thanks again for your presentation. Apologies for if my comments are too poor in comparison to the fantastic work that you have done. But I would like again to thank you for this good presentation and for teaching me many things here today. Thank you. Thank you, Vinicius. Eleanor, we've got a few collection of questions. So I'm gonna throw them all at you and then you can respond so we can have time. I just wanna thank Vinicius because actually that was clarifying a lot of the questions I had. And I think also one of our other audience members, Dudley Ancherson as well too. So thanks for doing the work for us too. I'm gonna abuse my point of chair just to make it also a quick kind of tag onto Vinicius's discussion points too. You know, when you were, I guess I am not a subject matter expert when it comes to particular your case study itself. But a lot of the discussion points when you're bringing in the voices of military spouses resonated with my own interviews with British special forces spouses reflecting upon Northern Ireland and their husband's engagement to Northern Ireland particularly around how the potential for violence and insecurity was felt in their immediate home as well. And where their husbands would leave on a moment's notice and they wouldn't know when they were gonna be back if they were gonna be back and the ways in which that potential for violence or violence itself very much profoundly impacted there every day, right? And every day lives and whatnot too. And I guess, you know, I'm thinking and maybe I'm going to ask you to do, I'm gonna ask your dog to fly but that's more of kind of in the future is to think about what is exceptional in particular about these military families and military spouses as, you know, in comparison to what other feminists or feminist ethnographers on military military families have written like I'm thinking about chemical issues work on making war at Fort Hood that looks at Fort Hood military base in the US and the ways in which, you know, the wives but also the soldiers themselves organize themselves socially around violence around militarism and around kind of state violence and the ways in which you talk about military families being quite insular on their camps. So women, you know, collectively inform a military family with other military wives that happens in other military communities as well too. So like in the US, in Canada, in the UK, in Nepal, in India so I'm just wondering, you might not know the answer to this this is more of my curiosity but kind of just teasing out your contribution to her how you think, what you think actually what are these women doing politically in these moments, I guess, you know and the broader claim for identity or their claim to speak about this is it a claim of recognition as well that, you know they sacrificed, they were impacted do they also recognize the combatants' wives themselves, you know, as political people able to speak to just to more reflect upon that, I guess. And then the last point we have a question from an audience member here, Guilermo Macon, he asks and this is more based on, I guess what Venusius was talking about too is what sort of the narratives that these, your interviewees how they constructed the narratives what sort of evidence were they basing it on, right? And so Guilmero asks, he says a survey by Policion Consulateor in Buenos Aires province in November 2019 showed that 75% of those who had voted for Macri's can be her most backed military interventions did your interviewees continue to support military activism and politics? And was there any indication that the same families had changed from favoring coups to rejecting them? And then he said his research supported this supported by data in newspapers such as La Nación, La Prezna and La Pinyon on an official figures from the former ministry of interior shows that the politically aware suffered a large number of civilian casualties between 1975 and 76, 226 deaths or 67% the military accounted for 66 deaths or 5% the security forces 170 deaths, 12% and guerrillas 445 deaths, 33% and civilians 677 deaths and 50% of total deaths so lots of stats there according to the ministry of interior did military families know of this information and take it on board? And I guess that these stats are further published in less crisis politicas argentinas in Buenos Aires 2019 I hope I represented that statement, right? And one final question before I'll let you respond This is from Rafael Lima I have a question that speaks directly to you Oh, to the question I guess I asked I would ask Vinicius your dog metaphor is being used again I would also ask the dog to fly and ask Eleonora the following considering your case study in Argentina has your study given you insights on aspects that could account for variants amongst post-authoritarian Latin American military families example Brazil and or Chile Right, I'll leave it there Eleonora the floor is yours Thank you Amanda, thank you Vinicius and thank you for everyone who's asking question Okay, there's a lot of stuff I'll try to address all these points I will start from perhaps Amanda's point about what's the role of military wives and how can we actually what use can we make of their testimony more broadly I think it's not a coincidence that you mentioned the case of Northern Ireland in your interviews with British military spouses because I think that if we shift the focus slightly from to less question actors like for example military wives we can actually be able to see things also in a comparative perspective and make connections among cases that one might not initially connect so for example political violence in the global south and in the north, where are the points in common? Well, I think that the daily experiences of the actors involved like combatants especially and wives combatants can give us an insight into dimensions of conflict that are not usually addressed or fully addressed, okay? So this aspect of insecurity of threat, et cetera it tells a lot about how deep the violence in context of internal confrontation can go and how long lasting they are because also in the case of Northern Ireland we're talking about, I mean a very long conflict that has protracted for decades so not like in Argentina but the consequences are still very visible and also by making this connection we can see what is different and this connects to Vinicius point I think which is what position do the military speak from in Argentina? Are they victorious? Are they defeated? I think that it makes a huge difference whether you're talking from a position of power in the present or not. Now the military in Argentina is a group that is quite defeated politically, socially and there is a huge anti-military rhetoric going on in Argentina at the moment which is a direct result of the delivery of violence in the past but also the judicial prosecution of this violence. So clearly the military see themselves as victorious militarily against the guerrillas because indeed they exterminated the guerrillas was totally broken by 1978, okay even if the military stayed in power until 1983 from a military point of view the military considered having reached their objective. So this is why they insist so much on this point of the word the enemy narrative. Politically clearly that's another story they're pretty aware of the fact that they're being socially ostracized on top of judicially condemned because of that involvement in the violence. So in a way it's like they speak from this duplicity of roles in the present. And that also has to do with these are happens of course when you are looking at the past when there is this transition, no temporal transition from the past to the present you always need to take into account this double dimension even when you are drawing your conclusions. So from a methodological point of view it's true that these people Vinicius these officers were young officers at the time and in these 40 years they reached higher positions but I think it still informs the way which they say themselves as lower rank officers because now in the present before they retired they had soldiers under their command and lower rank officers under their command. So in a way it informs the critique that they do to the superiors at the time. And ethnographically how can you put those things into communication? Well perhaps you can ask current lower rank officers what they think of what participants did in the 70s how do they, how do current lower rank officers see the action of their predecessors in the 70s? You know, triangulating those different experiences and narratives you can get an insight into the dynamics and the values and the beliefs behind those narratives. And then again, there are so many points. I think there was a question about what makes the Argentine context specific in terms of, I think you Amanda spoke about the role of military wives and what is so specific of this context. I think that because when they got married to these young officers in the 70s they signed up for a certain lifestyle and a certain outcome of the military career which is basically respectability and a quiet life after retirement. And of course in the case of the Argentine this is not happening because these women have seen their husbands getting arrested and go to prison for the crimes of the dictatorship or in the best case scenarios they are waiting for this thing to happen from one night to the other. So that insecurity is protracted. It's something that survives the completion of active duty. It's something that goes beyond the completion of their service in the army. So this is something that makes military wives very vocal in Argentina I think about expressing their point of view. And if we look at their narratives we can understand things that go beyond the Argentine story, the Argentine past and present. It's about what is the role of the army in societies? How do military families have a dialogue with the army, with the broader society, with the state, these are not all the same things. There are different claims and different accusations and different expectations from all these actors. So I think that they need to be addressed carefully. And the Argentine case it's a good case that allows us to see how complicated these relations are in democratic societies. I'm not entirely sure I understood Guillermo Makin's point because there was a lot of data and I couldn't read it. So I couldn't quite understand everything. If Guillermo, you would like to email me and send me those things. I'm more than happy to reply to you or you can perhaps unmute yourself and tell me your questions because I got lost. It was so much information, sorry. Yes, the questions are two basically. One is what hold does the view of the military have on society as a whole? And that is why I used data from a recent survey in 2019 that showed that the voters that went for Macri and Cambiemos that were defeated in 2019, they supported military intervention. So that talks of a sort of another life. This isn't what I perceived among students or student officers in Argentina who were very critical as in the case of some of your interviewees. Now, the second question has to do with the construction that the military put and that has been picked up by some of the media that it was either a symmetric war with two demons or and the data is completely different. That is according to Guillermo Donald, the reason for a bureaucratic authoritarian regime is fear of the majority of the popular sector. Well, therefore it has to repress it. And that is what they did. They repressed and they killed not only guerrillas which were a small percentage like the military were but they killed people that belong to the radical party, for example, or trade unions that were not extreme because they were extreme trade unions. So it gives us a different picture of demobilization that is in a sense at variance with what we are insistently told. So I want to know if the military that you interviewed process this or they insisted on their own view, shall we say? Okay, thank you. Now it's much clearer. Thank you so much. So about the first question, yes. It's absolutely true that we tend to, especially in Argentina, social sciences tend to forget almost the fact that there is a huge part of the Argentine society, the actual Argentine society, which actually is not too much in disagreement with what happened in the 70s. And yes, it is reflected in Macri's two porters, I agree. But also these people are basically those who live the 70s and remember those times. So the official narratives of the genocide and the most recent interpretation of the violence affects them less because they remember the political violence of that time. They remember, for example, the activity of the guerrillas which is something that the official narrative of the present kind of not really addresses too much. So yeah, by bringing out this voice is that might sound very controversial. Indeed, we are actually looking at much broader complicity of broader society in the violence, in the state violence perpetrated by the military and by the regime because it did have a huge support and it still does. Although most vocal sectors of the left in Argentina, especially tend not to acknowledge that, but indeed it is absolutely happening. And about the second point, yes. The military's narrative tends to reflect this very polarized view in which we had two demons, guerrillas and militaries and they fought each other. And this is also what most people in the non-activist, non-radicalized middle class in Argentina tend to say. This was a confrontation between among them, among the military and the guerrillas and we had nothing to do with this. And these are people who live the 70s and today take distance from the phenomenon. But yeah, the military insists on this discourse also because as I said, they saw those facts as war facts. And this has to do with the multiplicity of factors, the fact that they were trained in that way, the fact that they were raised as young officers with a clear alter ego in mind, which was the subversive, the guerrilla. And those are things that survive in decades. And interestingly, Maximo Badaro has actually proved that even current generations of officers who are trained in democracy, the sermon in the military academy is still against the subversive enemy. I mean, interestingly, even if Argentina had one international conflict against Great Britain, which is the Forkrans Malvinas war, the alter ego is not the British soldier, is the subversive. So these identity-making processes, they stay for decades. They're very difficult to dismantle once they're set up. So of course the narratives tend to reproduce that dynamic. No, it's not something that is determined by these or that government and the discourse that they promote about the past. So, and then of course, yeah, it's functional to the fact that they're being attacked and condemned in the present because of that violence. So in a way, it has been seen as well as a way of, how can I say? Yeah, justify their action in the past. I don't know if this answers a bit of your questions. Yes, Cermont. Thank you. Okay. There were other questions. I'm not sure we have time to answer that, all of them. Amanda, you know? Well, we are out of time. So people are free to leave if they need to go, but I'm free to stay for a few more minutes to if this is a fascinating conversation. So if you want to continue, but everyone else, I mean, by all means, if you need to scoot, that's fine. But yeah, Eleanor, maybe another five minutes. Yeah, and of course, I'm fine with that. I just don't want to, you know. Yeah, that's fine. Okay. There was a question about, the last question that you mentioned, Amanda, about someone who said about what insight does this case study give us in other Latin American complex about the role, especially of military families. I think it was something like that. Yeah. Asking about your case study, what sort of insights does it give into account for the variance amongst post-authoritarian Latin American military families? So, you know, similarities or contrasts with Brazil or with Chile, for example. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's not, it's absolutely not possible and it's not desirable actually to generalize, you know, the findings of this specific case study to other cases in Latin America because the transitions to democracy and the work on the past, the work on the memory, the work on transitional justice, it's been very different from Argentina to Chile to Brazil. So, I don't know that similar works have been done in other countries with military families of authoritarian regimes, but it would be super interesting, of course, to do a comparative study. A lot will depend, of course, on the position that the military occupy in current civil military relations. So, definitely, Vinicius can tell us something of the Brazilian case. I know a little bit about the Chilean case. The military in Chile are still a very powerful corporation. They count a lot in civil military relations and although there are judicial processes in place against the military, they're not as widespread in Argentina and the society is, as far as I know, is still quite, I mean, there are large portions of the society that still respect what the military did under Pinochet. So, I don't think any of the findings in my case can be extended to that. It really needs to, we really need to go in the field and check what's going on there. I don't know, Vinicius, would you like to give us your opinion on the state of Brazil instead? Probably we would use this few minutes just to advertise one conference that we are putting by the end of May that will be exactly about military and politics in Brazil. We are just starting to build up the research group around this topic and so stay tuned because we will have one full conference on this topic very soon instead of start to develop what would be a quite complex issue to try to summarize in a few minutes only. Yeah, thank you, Vinicius. So yeah, I know that in terms of everyday life and there has been remarkable work done on Chile about daily life of conscripts and their Pinochet regimes. So it's different because when we talk about military family and this strict tight community, of course we talk about officers, people who are military for their whole life, but it would be interesting to see the experiences of conscripts and in Chile there is work that has been done with Passmore has done a remarkable work in that sense. And last time I spoke to him, he told me that he would like to do something similar related to families of officers. So we'll see maybe something will come up from that front. Yeah, I have a question, which is a sort, okay, it's an answer to a question that I go asked, but it's more of a question than self, which is Vinicius, you said that my work gives today voice to actors who are not included in the collective memorialization of the past in Argentina, which is the perpetrators, the military. Although I think it is necessary to listen to those voices because they gave us a direct insight into the violence itself. I know that ethically it could be a little bit difficult to justify. So I think that my work on military wives especially has something to do with intersectionality and with looking at different levels of engagement with the military environment, different elements that make the subjectivity of an actor like a military wife, for example. And I wonder, do you think that this can be used also to understand oppressors or former oppressors? I don't know. It's something that I've been thinking recently. But there are several studies that focus on the voice of the perpetrators. I mean, if we think of Christopher Browning, who has done work on the Nazi ordinary men, the title itself says ordinary men. He said that basically understanding doesn't mean justifying, of course. So I think that there is always value in looking for unattressed voices even when they come from the perpetrators. I think you have your answer already. The answer is that I think an ethical discussion is not the one who is trying to find a unique answer or the unique response to historical phenomenon especially, but ethical discussions are those who put a lot of questions to the ways that we interpret and read this history. And the fact that we listen doesn't mean that we agree, means exactly just that we are trying to cover the spectrum in all its parts. And one important part of this spectrum was exactly the perpetrators. So we can never have clear picture, ethical probably, debate about it if they are not part of this discussion also. That doesn't mean that we agree with them or they respect what they did or we acknowledge or I think there are many questions or points here that should be taken into consideration in this debate. That's why I think the ethical aspect of this discussion, it's very relevant when, yeah, there are large literature developed about that and especially after Nuremberg, a large literature about also judgements and prosecution and many aspects of war criminals or not only war criminals but conflicts like the one we saw in Argentina. But I think you have the answer for your question and the answer is exactly that we should continually put in questions and listening and that would be the best way to create structures today that would prevent that to happen again. I think what Guillermo said, it's important because we haven't been so much debating, perhaps because we are so univocal and these things are repeating in some way. Perhaps I have no final answer either. Thank you, Vinicius. Okay, I think I covered pretty much all points unless there are still questions and I don't know, Amanda? Just to tag onto Vinicius' point too, I think what your work also does is it brings in the politics of remembering and how remembering and memory itself is very much framed in, like you said, the precarity of the future and the present and the future which will also kind of condition so it's not to and I don't think people who look at memory critically do this but general populations do not see memory as this untainted pure kind of thing from the past but it's loaded with politics and there's material implications for how we frame and remember and what ways to remember it and that connects to Yelka Bolston's work in Global Affairs. She looks at perpetrators of violence in Peru and the ways in which they now remember their own engagement and frame or justify or otherwise their own engagement in violent encounters and these are serving or former serving non-officers so these would be non-commissioned that she engages with which I think would be really interesting and then I think you're, for me from a feminist political economy, security kind of literature, your exploration on the military family is there is something around a great comparison of the gendered labor that goes into, that is conditioned by this state violence, by militarism but also is shaping it, the ways in which divisions of labor are naturalized and constructed and gendered experiences of this sort of violence are also like you have a quote from one of the officers reflecting, it's like, yeah, we're young men, of course we're gonna be a part of this, right? Which is a very kind of masculinized, yeah, we need to be a part of this and then the one woman who's like, well, my father was an officer and just worked on a desk job so I thought this was gonna be safe employment. This sort of stuff resonates in the interviews with wives I've had conversations in the UK and in Nepal too, right? So the different how they prioritize concerns or even their own lives and the ways in which militarism and state violence shapes that and how they recall, all of this is fascinating stuff that I think there could be a lot of comparative for the future. To finish off though, you've got a few accolades from people who had to step out but, you know, oh, go ahead, Vinícius, yeah? There are one thing is related to exactly the Argentinian aspect here that I think also we didn't have time to discuss but there is another aspect exactly what Eleonora mentioned here that most of those military also participate in the Falklands-Malvinas war. So there is another aspect of what means defeat in a war that framed a lot their own identity and their own perception of their role inside the country. So are we military to fight external wars or just defend our country against communists or internal enemy? So I think that's another element that can be a complication for the future to discuss which role the Falklands war played in the construction of this narrative about their memory or their telling of the memory. That's one point. The second point is just a remark. 27 of January today, it's a very important day for memory studies also. It's the memory of the Holocaust and I think it's quite important that your presentation is happening also in this day symbolically speaking because it reminds us how important studies like yours are for our sense of human community and not forget what as humanity we have been capable of doing. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you Vinicius. And you're right about the point on the Falklands war because memory is situational as also Amanda was saying there is a lot of politics in it and the Malvinas Falklands war has a role in shipping the memory of the 70s and the other way around. Indeed, in my postdoctoral research I conducted interviews with veterans of the Malvinas who were also veterans of the dirty war. So they served under the dictatorship and these people are in jail. So if you wanna know about what the Argentine army did in the Falklands you have to go to prison and you have to talk to these people from the prison where they speak and socialize and how cannot that situation have an impact on the way they remember the war on the way we remember the whole life when you are conducting an interview within a prison that changes everything. So yes, absolutely. The things are interconnected and I think that this concept of generation can really help us also in putting together different generations of military across the world not like British, Argentines what they were doing in the 70s Falkland, Northern Ireland, Argentina there's a lot going on. Amazing, thank you so much. Elinora, I just what I love about this I said this before is void of actually going to workshops or different conferences. This is such a lovely space to feel intellectually nourished and enriched that in the manic craziness of COVID and working from home and all of that it's really nice to engage in intellectually stimulating ideas and discussions and I want to thank you so much. Sorry, could I just make a comment? Yeah, absolutely Dudley, yep. Sorry, I did send a message. Well, simply to say first of all I think this kind of research is extremely important. It was a very complex conflict, extremely difficult. I was, as I've just said to you in the message I was in Argentina at the time and I was in the embassy reporting on human rights and the politics of the period. It was a very, very complicated situation on all sides. It was very violent, lots of human rights abuses of course which was terrible. And secondly, I mean, I'll be very happy to subsequently to have a discussion if you wished but I think this kind of research is so important because I was struck when I've been back in Argentina in the last few years how the official narrative is so one dimensional. I mean, it's like a John Wayne film, it's good is and bad is and in fact, it was a lot more complicated than that. And if one knew all the participants and I knew a lot of them on all sides then you could see how it was like that. Secondly, regarding the Falklands I did warn the British government, the foreign office at the time informally that in my view, a lot of the military had a bad conscience about the methods they deployed against the guerrillas and they were looking for a clean war and they were frustrated in their clean war against Chile because of the papal mediation and therefore the Falklands was next on the list and that psychologically, I think there was support within the military for the Falklands because it was the kind of war they'd been trained to fight as opposed to this kind of highly violent and repressive police operation that they'd been drawn into. Some of them didn't feel that way but I am sure to this day that a lot of them did. So just those comments. Thank you very much. Thank you, those are really important comments. Sorry, Eleanor, do you wanna have the last word? No, I just wanna really thank everyone because this was such an interesting exchange really. I mean, it's great. I just love putting my research out there because so much equally good stuff comes back all the time, so it's great. Thank you also Dudley for this last comment. I would send you an email. It would be great to further ask you things about that time since I wasn't there, of course. So definitely you have much more to say than me. And yeah, thank you again, Amanda and Vinicius, this was brilliant. Thanks a lot. Lovely, and you see from the comment box, Eleanor, everyone is thanking you so much for a rich discussion as well too. And again, Dudley and other contributors too. Thank you so much for bringing your insights into this on the table too, it's been great. But now we have to go and do other work, I'm sure, what not. But thank you so much if you're interested in this. This is a series that runs every Wednesday from 1230 to 130, so different topics and scholars from across the school, security studies. So please join in if you're interested and if you don't have the list. I've been circulating it on social media. It's on our website, but email me and I can send you the list of contributors. Again, Eleanor, amazing. Same with Vinicius, brought your agrame, appreciate it. Have a lovely Wednesday afternoon, everyone. Thank you. Bye. Bye.