Security Lancaster is home to a diverse community of scholars working on defence, security and citizen protection. This includes the lived realities and ethical challenges of contemporary conflicts. Among our emerging research themes is an innovative and increasingly urgent inquiry into the “Epistemic Conditions of Soldiering” with particular attention to military medics and the ethical demands placed upon those who serve.

Led by one of our institute members, Dr Sarah Hitchen, with her Lancaster colleagues, Dr Sam Clark and Dr Leonie Smith, this project opens new conceptual ground by examining what it means to “be a soldier” not only as a moral agent but as a knower: someone whose reasoning, testimony, and expertise are shaped, and sometimes constrained, by the structures of military life and the challenges of increasingly ambiguous forms of contemporary conflict.

At the heart of this programme of research is the concept of the epistemic grey zone. Soldiers, it’s argued, occupy a distinctive and often overlooked epistemic position, situated between epistemic privilege grounded in training, experience, and expertise, and epistemic oppression that restricts their ability to speak, testify, or be heard. This dual positioning produces a unique form of vulnerability, exacerbated by current security demands. Soldiers must be expert reasoners capable of life‑critical decisions, while simultaneously navigating institutional and societal limits on what they can say, how they can say it, and when their testimony is recognised as expert at all.

This tension becomes especially acute in the case of military medics, whose responsibilities require rapid decision‑making, moral clarity, and the capacity to shape and implement ethical practice in dynamic and uncertain operational environments. Medics inhabit a role defined not only by clinical expertise but by evolving doctrinal expectations, rules of engagement, and emerging technologies that can change the nature of care in conflict. The research suggests that many medics and experts who serve may experience epistemic injury, i.e. a form of harm stemming from role‑based constraints on their ability to articulate their experience, combined with the misrecognition or undervaluing of their testimony by those outside military contexts.

These epistemic injuries are not merely abstract. They have concrete implications for mental health, professional identity, and the broader development of ethical military doctrines. If medics and soldiers cannot speak authentically from their experience or if their testimony is filtered through stereotypes, institutional boundaries, or civilian expectations then their expertise risks being sidelined at precisely the moment it is most needed.

More broadly, this research reframes debates about moral injury by highlighting the epistemic dimensions of harm in military life. Soldiers are required to act as moral and epistemic agents, assessing legality, interpreting orders, and making judgments in cognitively degrading environments. Yet they are often prevented from contributing their perspectives as experts outside these tightly bounded roles. The result is a complex form of epistemic objectification that, in some cases, the authors argue, approaches epistemic dehumanisation.

By bringing these dynamics to light, this emerging research agenda invites a deeper understanding of how knowledge, identity, and ethical agency intersect in military service. It underscores the need for institutional, academic, and societal attention to the epistemic lives of soldiers and medics, whose expertise is both indispensable and insufficiently appreciated.

Security Lancaster is proud to support and showcase this work as part of our commitment to advancing nuanced, evidence‑based understandings of contemporary security practices.

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