The award will fund Dr Tidy and a postdoctoral researcher to undertake a two year project in partnership with EUROMIL, the umbrella association for military unions and labour associations in Europe.
At the heart of the project is a central puzzle: in some European countries military personnel have full trade union rights including the right to strike. In others they have the right to join professional associations without full union powers, and in some countries there is no recognition of a right to labour association at all. There are thus very different approaches to governing the essential terms of the relationship between soldier and state across European militaries. This is in tension with the fact that European militaries are increasingly interoperable and function in the context of labour rights and social freedoms central to the European social model. Military labour association is a contentious area; in March 2025 the European Committee of Social Rights (ECSR) ruled that Portugal’s restrictions on trade union rights for military personnel violated the European Social Charter.
The research, which will begin in September 2026, will significantly progress current academic knowledge on military power and institutions and have important implications for labour rights and policy. Academic work on military institutions and military activities does not typically understand and conceptualise these as domains of work and labour.
Militaries are usually understood as ciphers for state power and interests, with soldiers intelligible through ideas of 'duty', 'service', or 'fraternity'. In contrast, the project aims to undertake conceptual development in order to understand differing approaches to military labour association as an aspect of a ‘military labour regime’, tracing the social relations and institutions bringing together and stabilising arrangements of capital and military labour in specific times and places to produce the conditions for military work. It will deploy this conceptualisation to analyse political conditions underpinning the uneven recognition of military labour association across several European case studies.
The project will disrupt existing academic orthodoxy concerning military institutions, provide conceptual and analytical innovation and catalyse future scholarship across politics and international relations, political economy and cognate fields such as critical military studies. Understanding the constellations of social and economic norms, understandings, and interests that shape particular configurations of labour rights will have significant non-academic impacts, both for the partner organisation EUROMIL and for a wider set of stakeholders working to progress fair working conditions and social rights.
