Book Launch & In Conversation with Ben Wadham & James Connor

Please join us for a panel discussion with author Ben Wadham, Dr Nikki Coleman and Bernadette Carmel Boss on Warrior Soldier Brigand: Institutional Abuse within the Australian Defence Force – MUP  A forensic analysis of how institutionalised abuse in the Australian Defence Force has affected its personnel.  Author James Connor will launch proceedings on the night.           

About the Book

Questions of institutional abuse have been at the centre of numerous royal commissions, inquiries and reviews of the clergy, the police and defence forces over the past decade. This scrutiny has highlighted how those organisations foster forms of violence and violation. One of their principal characteristics is that the culture of abuse and its perpetration is largely the work of men. In Warrior Soldier Brigand, Ben Wadham and James Connor argue that three pillars shape the patterns of abuse in the Australian Defence Force: martial masculinities, military exceptionalism and fraternity. Historically, the military has been an almost exclusively male domain, but since the Vietnam War it has become an all-volunteer force and more culturally diverse, a change that has proven to be profoundly challenging, and one the ADF has not always readily welcomed nor sufficiently addressed. While the ADF may train and accommodate some of the best military personnel in the world, it has not resolved the use of that violent potential against its own. Exploring the fundamental paradox that underpins abuse in the military - an organisation of and for violence -Wadham and Connor report on the shifting landscape of the ADF since 1969, describing military institutional abuse across the decades and asking the question: to what extent can an authoritarian institution liberalise?

About the Authors

James Connor is an associate professor in the School of Business, UNSW Canberra, located at the Australian Defence Force Academy. James has spent two decades researching militaries and the conduct of men within them. His work started with questioning how loyalty fosters cohesion amongst soldiers, enabling them to fight, but also how that fraternal bonding can lead to malfeasance. This research has since expanded into military scandal, misconduct and the vexed question of gender.

Ben Wadham is a professor in Sociology (Defence and Veteran Studies) at Flinders University in South Australia. He is a veteran of the Australian Army, having served in the Royal Australian Infantry Corps and the Royal Australian Corps of Military Police. Ben is the director of Open Door: Improving the wellbeing of veterans and public safety personnel and their families, a research initiative at Flinders University. Ben’s research is ethnographic, focusing on the cultural relations of the military organisation, specifically the Australian Defence Force, but also militaries across the Five Eye nations.

About the Event

Please be advised that the contents of Warrior, Soldier, Brigand depict first person accounts of institutional abuse that readers may find distressing.

• Books will be available for purchase and signing at the event.
• Registration is required for this event.
• Accessible parking spaces directly below the Harry Hartog ANU Bookshop are available should you require them. Kambri ANU / Parking
• If you do not feel well, please refrain from attending this event.
• Disability Access available - please ask in-store.