The Falklands-Malvinas Conflict: A Reader

The Falklands-Malvinas War of 1982 ended hundreds of British and Argentine lives on the Islands, many of them very young, and definitively contributed to the later deaths of many ex-combatants. It ruined or adversely affected the lives of many thousands more survivors and military relatives. It put a stop to the patient diplomacy which had preceded it, and resoundingly consolidated the popular appeal of the UK Thatcher government, thus helping to ensure the dominance of right-wing Conservative administrations in the UK for another fifteen years. In Argentina, it contributed to the downfall of a terroristic dictatorship and gave the country a chance to follow a less frightening democratic path. It galvanized more serious and concerted efforts to address the problems of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and led to the creation of new model networks for veteran peer support. Neither side really won anything concrete by means of it, although the residents of the Islands themselves undoubtedly gained in military security, financial subsidy and political attention. Otherwise it is largely a sad tale of loss, grief, suffering and waste.

This Reader selects, forty years after the War, some of the most vital writing about it. It tends, without partisanship, towards evaluating the War in moral and political, humane and socially consequential terms, of the kind with which military historians and short-term-perspective politicians tend not to concern themselves. It likewise inclines towards remembering the War as an event in which identifiable individuals, or their friends and comrades, suffered and died, rather than simply viewing these many participants as anonymous pawns on a geopolitical chess board. While providing general factual commentary and discussion on the causes, events, consequences of and continuing debate about the War, it additionally gives considerable space to accounts of what it was like, experientially, to have been a combatant on either side in the conflict. It also takes into consideration the ways in which the War has been mediated in news, literature, film and television. The anthology therefore represents the variety of discourses to be found in the existing archive of writing about the dispute, encompassing diplomatic communications, historical accounts, personal memoirs, impassioned polemics and academic analyses originating in various disciplines.