Young people’s emotional and embodied encounters with everyday militarism at the UK’s Armed Forces Day

The UK government’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review emphasizes the significant role public engagement activities such as Armed Forces Day (AFD) play in inspiring future generations and increasing recruitment into the armed forces and the defence industry more broadly. In contrast to existing literature, this article foregrounds the perspectives, experiences, and emotions of young people (aged 16–17) before, during, and after their engagements with an AFD event held in a city in northern England, in June 2025. We demonstrate what their perspectives contribute to existing research on AFD, and understandings of the workings of everyday militarism more broadly. We emphasize young people’s sensitivity to the ways AFD worked to generate a sense of community through their emotional and embodied engagements with various (non)human bodies and practices associated with the military. The sometimes conflicting emotions of excitement and unease generated by the event led young people to reflect on how they were made to feel included and/or excluded during the course of AFD. The nuances in young people’s experiences that we chart in this article illustrate the importance of engaging their varied experiences of everyday militarism. Given contemporary concerns with the UK’s (in)security in a geopolitically unstable world, and the imperative to increase defence spending with implications for processes of militarization ‘at home and abroad’, we argue that this is a critical moment to examine the subjectivities of young people who increasingly will be the targets of recruitment drives for the UK’s armed forces.