On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
... Keywords: appetitive aggression, posttraumatic stress disorder, trauma-related guilt, depression, moral injury In the decades since World War II, the American military has developed techniques to overcome humans' natural aversion to killing other humans (Grossman, 1995). Research has suggested that exposure to violence in warfare, whether it be through witnessing or perpetrating atrocities or through killing, can leave profound and lasting psychological wounds on combatants after they return from the battlefield including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD; Beckham et al., 1998;Dennis et al., 2017), depression (Currier et al., 2015;Dennis et al., 2017), and suicidality (Bryan et al., 2015). ...
... Yet there are also reports that violence in war can sometimes be associated with positive affective states, including enjoyment, that may persist even after the conflict is over (Currier et al., 2015;Nandi et al., 2020;. For example, the feeling of a "combat high" has been reported by soldiers who served in Vietnam and other recent U.S. conflicts (Grossman, 1995;Shay, 1994), and killing in war has been described as addictive: "Killing can be like sex, and you can get carried away with it" (Grossman, 1995, p. 137). ...
... Within the past few decades, research has increasingly focused on the psychological impact of having caused injury or death in the context of war (Grossman, 1995). In the broader literature, two separate bodies of work have evolved that, on their surface, appear to present a contradictory picture of the psychological aftermath of harming or killing others in war. ...
Objective: Engaging in war-related violence can have a devastating impact on military personnel, with research suggesting that injuring or killing others can contribute to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and moral injury. However, there is also evidence that perpetrating violence in war can become pleasurable to a substantial number of combatants and that developing this “appetitive” form of aggression can diminish PTSD severity. Secondary analyses were conducted on data from a study of moral injury in U.S., Iraq, and Afghanistan combat veterans, to examine the impact of recognizing that one enjoyed war-related violence on outcomes of PTSD, depression, and trauma-related guilt. Method: Three multiple regression models evaluated the impact of endorsing the item, “I came to realize during the war that I enjoyed violence” on PTSD, depression, and trauma-related guilt, after controlling for age, gender, and combat exposure. Results: Results indicated that enjoying violence was positively associated with PTSD, β (SE) = 15.86 (3.02), p < .001, depression, β (SE) = 5.41 (0.98), p < .001, and guilt, β (SE) = 0.20 (0.08), p < .05. Enjoying violence moderated the relationship between combat exposure and PTSD symptoms, β (SE) = −0.28 (0.15), p < .05, such that there was a decrease in the strength of the relationship between combat exposure and PTSD in the presence of endorsing having enjoyed violence. Conclusions: Implications for understanding the impact of combat experiences on postdeployment adjustment, and for applying this understanding to effectively treating posttraumatic symptomatology, are discussed.
... Combat veterans struggle to trust mental health practitioners and researchers who have never experienced the true horrors of war (Resick et al., 2007). Often combat brothers have closer emotional connections to each other than they do with their own wives (Grossman, 1995). ...
... A largely forgotten component of recovery from war trauma is the vital need to heal the psychospiritual trauma and wounds. According to Grossman (1995), "Killing is what war is all about, and killing in combat, by its very nature, causes deep wounds of pain and guilt" (p. 93). ...
The progressive escalation in military suicides, along with a substantial increase in post-traumatic stress diagnosis among active military personnel and veterans, has become a significant humanitarian, societal, and cultural concern. Such a defining moment illuminates the need for timely and innovative treatment approaches for combat-related post-traumatic stress. This research explored depth psychological practices within short-term, group-based treatment programs. Using a phenomenological research method, interviews were conducted with six former combat veteran alumni of these programs to gather new insights and understanding into their lived experience. Informants described meaningful reductions in post-traumatic stress, moral injury, and treatment-resistance, while treatment completion rates increased significantly. Research findings suggest depth psychological practices do exhibit compelling potential as valuable, or formidable treatment approaches, alongside current evidence-based treatments. Based on the findings of this preliminary exploration future research is warranted on depth psychological treatments and group-based programs for combat-related post-traumatic stress.
... Furthermore, they may encounter human suffering of various kinds and may even witness abuses of power. Such experiences may lead to moral conflicts in soldiers , to the experience of losing one's existential foundation and to psychological trauma (Grossman, 2009;. While this subject has attracted the attention of (clinical) psychologists and, to a lesser extent, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists and historians, it has rarely been approached from the perspective of organizational science. ...
‘There will be no development without security and no security without development’ (Annan, 2005). This mantra became the foundation for many missions—a combination of security forces and development strategies—and has been given various names, such as ‘comprehensive approach’, ‘whole of government approach’ and ‘3D -approach’. To date the future of this approach is far from certain. This chapter evaluates the application of the comprehensive approach of the last decades by connecting it to three perspectives on the human security concept, leading to the conclusion that the future of the comprehensive approach as a feasible option for military interventions depends on which version of human security becomes dominant in policy making.
... Many works on the military have emphasized such strong feelings and most authors have found that the motivation to fight first of all comes from the will not to let down your buddies (Grossman, 1995;Holmes, 1985). Having a group around you makes the meta-motivations as ideological ideas less important, because what you do, you do for the comrades you share your direct experiences with. ...
Soldiers often use different kinds of reasoning to explain, justify or legitimize their behaviour. Often these explanations can be classified as moral, because the end goal is to do what is theoretically ‘good’. However, when looking more closely at the incentives for acting justly, we can see they are often triggered by other, more instrumental, motivations. I then want to categorize such reasoning and subsequent acts as instrumental morality. In this chapter, I focus on Israeli and I look at how their actions and explanations fall into three levels; the personal (protecting the self) focused on the group (the unit, or military as a whole) or even as considering the whole nation state. I will further show how this instrumental morality is often influenced by a ‘disciplinary gaze’. I argue in this chapter for a contextualized approach to morality that takes into account power relations, physical circumstances and interpersonal relationships.
... Представители второго подхода рассматривают врага как обязательное условие вооруженных конфликтов, которые неизбежны в человеческой истории. Заставить человека убивать себе подобного не так просто; войны или геноцид были бы невозможны без интерпретации Других как врагов, предполагающей наделение их суммой отрицательных характеристик [Grossman, 1996]. Объективная конфликтогенность социальности предполагает наличие соперничества, вооруженной борьбы, что, в свою очередь, обусловливает существование образа врага как необходимого элемента насилия [Delori, Ware, 2019]. ...
«Враг номер один» в символической политике кинематографий СССР и США периода холодной войны / Под ред. О. В. Рябова. — М.: Издательство «Аспект Пресс», 2023. — 400 с.
The monograph deals with the “cinematic Cold War”. The authors analyze how the images of Soviet and American enemies were employed in symbolic politics conducted by by U.S. and Soviet cinema respectively.
The book is addressed to specialists in the field of History, Film Studies, International Relations, Cultural Studies, and Political Science.
The publication is supported by the Russian Science Foundation, grant № 18–18–00233 “The Cinematic Images of Soviet and American Enemies in the Cold War Symbolic Politics: Comparative Analysis”
... Numerous studies, most prominent being those ofMarshall (2000) andGrossman (1996) have demonstrated that human beings have innate inhibitions towards "destruction of their own species"(Holmes 1985: 29) and that "unless one is a sociopath, a psychologically disturbed person devoid of empathy and moral feeling, there are strong inhibitions against killing others" (Livingstone Smith 2011: 67). 9 This is merely a reflection of the regrettably still-present general anti-academism and the "antiintellectual culture"(Mileham 2008: 44) within most armed forces, which aims to "minimize academic education and to limit education to learning skills and drills"(De Munnik 2012: 462) ...
This paper aims to explain the inadequacies of the traditional approach to moral education in the military and present an optimal approach to teaching military ethics. Author provides a short review of key notions, the subject, and the importance of military ethics in armed forces, followed by a short analysis of both traditional approaches-aspirational and functionalist-to teaching military ethics identifying their weaknesses. Author concludes that it is necessary to transcend the traditional approach and include both moral philosophy and character development in moral education in order to develop a military ethos based on solid ethical foundations. Finally, author offers a solution to the identified problem and proposes an optimal approach to military ethics education, which includes both basic formal education in moral philosophy and meaningful integration of ethics in various other classes and forms of military training, in order to develop the desired ethics-based military ethos.
... Soldiers are sometimes called "specialists in violence"; killing and maiming people when the government says so is part of their job description. Most ordinary people would find this activity deeply emotionally aversive (Grossman 1995), but we have seen that Propranolol and Adderall can make them less so. These substances can make a person more comfortable with killing and maiming people; they can take the emotional and moral sting out of violence and, with this, reduce the likelihood of moral trauma. ...
... People neither "have" aggression, nor do they "release" it. The orchestration of aggressive acts requires a multivariate, multilevel causal sequence that is fairly well understood at the local or proximate level (Grossman, 1996;Waller, 2007), but more complicated and difficult to articulate at progressively higher levels of analysis. Intraspecific competition for resources provides the main selective pressure occasioning the evolution of violent intergroup aggression and ingroup altruism. ...
The divergence of Hominini and Panini from a common ancestor approximately 4-8 million years ago resulted in Homo sapiens sapiens' apparent uniqueness. An intergroup, intraspecific predatory niche is herein hypothesized to have driven many of the interdependent adaptations characterizing modern humanity. Hominini are species that systematically and collectively prey upon members of their own genera, paradoxically necessitating acute sociability, cranial expansion, and tool use as responses to both predatory tactics and prey defenses. Furthermore, the social dynamics of intergroup, intraspecific predation and its parasitic and parasitoid variants describe and predict important contemporary human responses in select individual and group contexts, including interpersonal cooperation and aggression, warfare, genocide, torture, slavery, and the rise of nations, states, and empires. The present account is a theoretical synthesis of data on human evolution with implications for psychology, anthropology, medicine, politics, economics, and interpersonal as well as interstate relations.
... Em duas obras seminais, Dave Grossman (GROSSMAN, 2009;GROSSMAN;CHRISTEN-SEN, 2008) defendeu o emprego do condicionamento operante e do condicionamento clássico -também chamado condicionamento respondente ou pavloviano -no treinamento de policiais e militares para o uso da força. Ambos os procedimentos foram descritos por uma ciência denominada Análise do Comportamento. ...
The worldwide debate over police use of force has made the study of police training necessary. From evidence of the inadequacy of current training methodology, another perspective on police training was proposed. Therefore, a perspective on police training based on principles of Behavior Analysis and on published evidence was presented. A narrative literature review was adopted in order to achieve that. The study presented a method based on the shaping of police behavior in the face of the need of using force and on the usage of stressing stimuli during training. Furthermore, it showed experimental evidence that supports the presented training method. The method bears some resemblances to traditional military and police training practices. Those were also briefly addressed, drawing a line between efficient and abusive practices. The study concluded that the presented perspective on police training might help to prepare law enforcement officers for the use of force. The return to some aspects of traditional training, with some caveats, might be profitable to officer’s training. New research on the matter is necessary.
... Such tasks contradict moral norms and entail high psychological burdens for those who undertake them (e.g., Milgram 1974;Klee, Dressen, and Riess 1991;Browning 1998). Even specialists trained in the application of violence commonly oppose duties that impose direct harm on innocent or defenseless individuals (Grossman 1996;Huggins, Haritos-Fatouros, and Zimbardo 2002;Hoover Green 2018). 10 Historical accounts suggest that during combat, more than two-thirds of professional soldiers, including those who fought in the American Civil War and the two World Wars, avoided killing their enemies, let alone civilians. ...
Dictators, rebel commanders, and mafia bosses frequently delegate gruesome and immoral tasks to their subordinates. However, most individuals want to avoid such work. This analytical essay proposes an institutional logic to understand how dictatorships, insurgent organizations, and criminal gangs get their evil work done nonetheless. We argue that common features of organizations produce mundane career pressures that incentivize subordinates to zealously execute reprehensible tasks. Subordinates may come under pressure for six distinct reasons: incompetence, misconduct, origin, isolation, organizational backlog, and shrinkage. Superiors, in turn, can exploit that pressured subordinates hope to improve their prospects for advancement by loyally executing the organization’s evil tasks. Empirically, we illustrate how Nazi Germany utilized each of the suggested career pressures to staff the units in charge of the Holocaust. We highlight that our logic might also apply to less extreme forms of organizational evil. Together, the essay offers a novel perspective to demystify radical behavior in state and non-state organizations with important implications for our understanding of transnational terrorist violence and underworld crimes.
... Using advanced analytical methods, such as diffusion and network models, GIS can provide a more realistic and explicit geographical picture of warriors' mobility and its far-reaching impact on societies (Kristiansen & Suchowska-Ducke, 2015). Studies on the psychology and physiology of the human body indicate what sort of character traits professional warriors must have had (Grossman, 1996), and experimental archaeology shows what the fighting techniques could have looked like (Molloy, 2010;Hermann et al., 2020). DNA and isotope analysis of bones coming from the sites of prehistoric massacres and battlefields enable insights into the genetic signature of people involved in such conflicts and their places of origin (Price et al., 2017). ...
The study of warfare among ancient societies – its nature, scale and impacts – has become an increasingly fertile multidisciplinary field of research in archaeology and related disciplines. This is particularly true for the European Bronze Age, an epoch that has produced iconic arte- facts, architecture, images, and written sources that speak about war and warriorhood. Modern research has made it sufficiently clear that, far from being the singular acts of heroic individ - uals, ancient warfare was common, brutal, and well-organized. However, war, as an extreme form of social interaction, has also been a driver for technological and economic development. From Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, the archaeological record has preserved rich traces of the warrior elite that was instrumental in transforming Bronze Age societies. This body of evidence is being studied with increasingly diverse analytical tools, ranging from use-wear analysis of weapons to forensic analysis of human remains and GIS-based spatial analysis. The following is a summary of author’s research on the multiple aspects and archaeological sources that surround the topics of war and warriors in Bronze Age Europe.
The article looks into why, to date, discourses of peace in the Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict context failed to present a challenge to the hegemony of ethnonationalism. With the liberal world order in crisis and Armenian and Azerbaijani identities entering a period of redefinition following the latter’s overwhelming military victory and exodus of the Armenian population from Nagorno-Karabakh, the article argues for a sustained effort towards rethinking peace and ongoing dialogue among realist, liberal, and post-liberal thinkers a road towards a multifaceted and interdisciplinary process that could move the South Caucasus away from violence and towards peace.
This study explores the practice of peace education in the Philippines in the twenty-first century. Data were collected through interviews and focus group discussions with teachers and students from various schools. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data, which revealed several key findings. First, the implementation of peace education varies across schools, with some schools prioritizing it more than others. Second, teachers play a crucial role in promoting peace education, particularly those who are passionate about the topic and receive training and support in this area. Third, peace education should be integrated into the formal curriculum and tailored to be age-appropriate and culturally relevant. Fourth, the lack of resources and support is a major challenge in promoting peace education. Fifth, social justice education is an important component of peace education. Lastly, peace education should be promoted at all levels of education, from primary school to university. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of prioritizing peace education and providing resources and support to educators in promoting it. By integrating peace education into the formal curriculum and tailoring it to be age-appropriate and culturally relevant, students can develop positive values and attitudes towards peace and conflict resolution.
This paper aims to point out the discourses of fear of video games, which are present in the media and the public appearances of politicians and scientists. The aim is also to test the hypothesis of medium panic. It is a new term whose meaning is derived primarily from the terms moral panic and media panic. The purpose of the paper is to make an argument in favor of its application in recognizing and explaining the fear of video games in various social groups. Medium panic implies fear that arises from the way the media is structured and how user interaction with the media is established. In addition to media content - representation of violence, narratives, and characters - which is most often the target of criticism, the focus in this article is on other formal elements. Those are mechanics, rules, and goals as well as their phenomenological aspects - interactivity and immersion - which distinguish video games from other media. The term media panic is proposed as an analytical tool in future research of moral panic in its wider and media panic in its narrower sense.
The issue of human nature is very complex and elusive, and mankind has been trying to unveil its elements since the beginnings of any philosophical reasoning. Whether they were questions of ontology, gnoseology, or ethics, it has been an uneasy task to uncover the complexity of the term. This article concentrates on finding ideas that support the existence of human nature and consequently searches for its possible ethical implications. I focused on the traditional issues of good vs evil, especially in terms of dichotomy between committing violent acts and waging wars in contradiction to creation of conditions for peaceful and just societies. In the article, I compare various ideas on human nature and analyse their potential in unveiling its ethical implications. I also comment on the possibility of war and peace being consequences of human nature and its connection to our disposition of being moral subjects.
The military experience presents novel moral dilemmas and traumatic experiences in the lives of service members. This chapter explores how service members use religious beliefs and practices in the context of potential moral trauma. Exploring the concept of moral injury, I investigate what accounts for religion’s role in mitigating moral trauma in some while exacerbating it in others. While most veterans experienced PMIEs, the differences between those with moral injury and those without depended on whether they could find resonance with meaning-making toolkits amid trauma. This investigation of religion amid moral injury revealed a social process of culture in action amid the moral trials of war.KeywordsMoral injuryCulture in actionHabitsResonanceDissonance
This chapter focuses on education and moral training. As service members enter the military, training plays a vital role in instilling military cultural frameworks in cadets and academy students in an intense process of inculcating the warrior identity. Alongside intensive training on rules, norms, combat, and the like, ethics education and moral training find varied relevance. With deep roots in Christian theology, religion is not absent from such training, even if it remains implicit. This chapter investigates the historical just war tradition roots and overarching influence of Christianity in military ethics education and the differences between training provided to enlisted versus that of officers.KeywordsEthics educationMilitary trainingMoral trainingCore valuesJust war theory
The relationship between science and religion is a topic that runs rife with misconceptions, misunderstandings and debates. Are science and religion always in conflict? Is Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection atheistic? How does history shape current debates around science and religion? This book explores these questions in a neutral and balanced way, focusing on the Christianity-evolution relationship. It shows that two paradigms – the world as an organism and the world as a machine – have critically informed and guided the discussions. The author uses his deep understanding of the history and philosophy of science, particularly Darwinian evolutionary theory and its controversies through the past 150 years, to bring fresh ideas to the debate and to wider discussions such as environmental issues and hate. Understanding the Christianity-Evolution Relationship provides a lively and informative analysis and lays out multiple views so that readers can make their own judgements to increase their understanding.
The psychological demands of the military profession have been a focal point of reflection in military studies, yet not from the perspective of organizational science. This chapter explores the relevance of the systems psychodynamic perspective for the military organization. It discusses historical examples to reflect on the differences between armed forces that sustained both a form of social psychological integration and operational effectiveness and those that did not. Subsequently, it focuses on contemporary missions and considers how their characteristic structural configurations influence the ability of operators to deal with the psychological demands of such missions. In doing so, it considers the relationship between structural features of military organizations and the means available to operators for dealing with the psychological demands intrinsic to their profession.
Although the term “Industrial Revolution” is now a commonplace, it actually has a rather long and interesting history. Its first use is as early as 1799, when a French envoy to Berlin wrote that his country had entered upon one (Landes in The British industrial revolution: An economic perspective (2nd ed.). Westview Press, 1999). Its meaning in this context was a rapid advance in just one industry in one place in one time. For a long while after that, contemporaries used the phrase in this relatively limited sense (Griffin in The ‘industrial revolution’: interpretations from 1830 to the present. Working Paper, School of History, UEA, Norwich, 2013). However, the meaning of the term expanded to its present usage in the late nineteenth century when the social and economic effects of industrialisation were at their more disruptive and had clearly become irreversible. This chapter considers the potential effects that human sociality has had in causing and shaping the Industrial Revolution and how that Revolution has in turn affected human society and the individual.
The Roman statesman Cassiodorus is credited with the first use of the term “modern” (“modernus”) in the fifth century C.E. to contrast the Roman Empire’s Christian era with its preceding pagan history. The term then fell into disuse until the seventeenth century when members of the French Academy were debating about whether contemporary culture, defined by French Enlightenment thinkers as marked by the use of reason, logic, and science to perfect the human individual through knowledge and its systematic application to the natural and human social world, was superior to classical culture, which contained some of the same values without the scientific apparatus.
This article considers the contribution of faith-based chaplains who provide holistic pastoral and spiritual care within critical environments such as the military, first responders, and hospitals. The contribution of faith-based chaplains can sometimes be taken for granted or not properly understood, particularly in some Western countries which are currently experiencing a decline in religiosity. Following on from a previous paper regarding chaplaincy utilization (Layson et al. 2022), this article presents an alternative argument to the secularist-humanist perspective by noting five ways by which the faith based chaplaincy model provides best practice service and builds a capability advantage for organizations that engage faith-based chaplaincy services. The first section discusses faith-based chaplaincy and organizational holistic care; the second section considers the role of faith-based chaplains—much of which is largely unknown and poorly appreciated; the third section considers the unique capability of faith-based chaplains to provide spiritual and religious care to those of faith and for those of none; the fourth section explores how faith-based chaplains can leverage the positive impact of religious organizations to provide additional low-cost resources for other organizations and their staff; and lastly, the operational advantage of faith-based chaplains on the world stage is considered, particularly in light of culturally and linguistically diverse populations to whom religiosity is increasingly important.
In this chapter, the central elements of Moral Injury—moral beliefs, potentially moral injurious events, and moral suffering—are discussed with reference to the relevant literature. Keeping these elements in mind, an overview was provided of assessments as well as therapeutic approaches. Two case reports illustrate how guilt and shame, when left unrecognized and untreated, may contribute to chronic pathology and be a barrier to therapeutic change. The denial or repression of guilt and shame may be the “pressure cooker” that can lead to other presentations including distressing dreams, feelings of anger, self-hatred, distorted cognitions, somatic symptoms, or chronic fatigue. Moral Injury is an emerging construct. The lexicon of moral injury is predominantly clinical, which can obscure its non-clinical etiology and non-clinical impact. A greater understanding of moral injury, its assessment and treatment is needed to better address the profound human suffering that can result from exposure to potentially moral injurious events.KeywordsMoral injuryMoral dilemmaMilitaryPTSDVeteran
The notion of ‘one man’s terrorist is other man’s freedom fighter’ is highly debated when it comes to branding a person as a terrorist in academia as well as in the legal field. In the absence of an internationally accepted definition of terrorism, the usage of the word “terrorism” and “resistance” is often misused and hence, branding of someone being a “terrorist” or “resister” becomes sloppy and incorrect. Phoolan Devi, the Bandit Queen, on one hand is seen to be a dauntless dacoit dressed in Khaki with a rifle on her shoulder who killed 22 Thakur men in broad day-light. And on the other hand, she emerges as ‘figure of resistance’ for the people of her community who stood up against the atrocities committed to them and killed their perpetrators. Now, is she a terrorist or a resistor? This research looks into the politics of these definitions and the politics of branding establishing the idea that defining/branding comes into play with a certain exercise of power indicating towards the politics of hierarchy. Therefore, definitions of ‘terrorism’ and ‘resistance’ are based on their contextual references and depend on who defines and with what motives and what agency.
Drones, with their ever-increasing use in recent warfare, are capable of transmitting high-quality images, which might then be exploited for propaganda purposes by the opposing forces in a war. In this article, the release of drone footages by the Ministry of Defence of Azerbaijan during the 44-day war in Karabakh against the Armenian forces in 2020 is analyzed, and the Turkish media’s approach to this matter is evaluated. It was observed that 45% of the videos uploaded to the Ministry’s Facebook and YouTube accounts were taken by drones. These videos frequently mentioned by the international media not only circulated on the internet but also were used by the Turkish media, often without being edited. The increasing use of such footages from battlefields also poses new questions in terms of peace journalism. This paper claims that drone footages that are promoted to provide visual journalistic evidence and unlimited access to battlefields have intrinsic war-oriented characteristics. When used as directly shared by the military, such raw footages serve an elite and propaganda-oriented attitude and shut the viewer into a closed space and time, dividing the world into “us” and “them” while contributing to the perception of “them” being the target.
Police officials spend considerable time receiving comprehensive training in use-of-force tactics, particularly involving a firearm. Ultimately, however, the goal is to develop the necessary skills needed to avoid using force. As such, verbal de-escalations skills are clearly a more desirable option than resorting to the use of physical or deadly force. Training options that could be instituted to retain a tactical advantage, but also for police to be sufficiently prepared for all dangerous scenarios will be examined. Persistent public and media criticism of police actions involving enforcement actions and use of force warrant thorough analyses of this contemporary and rather controversial issue.KeywordsPolice use of forcePolice trainingVerbal de-escalationSelf-defenceTactical training
"The article presents one of the most significant psychological aspects experienced by the military during their operations – ethics and morality. Thus, it dives deeper into the idea of “war psychology”, to then analyse the biggest ethical and moral dilemmas of the military during battle. Far from exhausting the subject, the article wants to draw attention to the fact that, in the end, the military is still human, and in the absence of adequate preparation for combat and adequate post-action psychological support at the end of the conflict, moral wounds can appear, which, most of the time, are as painful and devastating as the physical ones."
"The article presents one of the most significant psychological aspects experienced by the military during their operations – ethics and morality. Thus, it dives deeper into the idea of “war psychology”, to then analyse the biggest ethical and moral dilemmas of the military during battle. Far from exhausting the subject, the article wants to draw attention to the fact that, in the end, the military is still human, and in the absence of adequate preparation for combat and adequate post-action psychological support at the end of the conflict, moral wounds can appear, which, most of the time, are as painful and devastating as the physical ones."
The military has long been a topic of interest in the social sciences. However, to date, military studies tend to take an overly researcher-oriented viewpoint rather than actually engaging with the ‘native’ experience of the soldier. This article intends to reorient military studies to a perspective that encompasses the lived and embodied worldviews, actions, and experiences of military personnel. Reviewing existing research on the military, it identifies two dominant approaches—a functionalist and a ‘condemnatory critical’ approach—which, despite important differences, share an ‘etic’ viewpoint. Subsequently, it proposes an alternative approach that includes ‘emic’ attention to soldiers’ lifeworlds and comprises an empathetically critical approach. This new line of scholarship also involves empirical redirection. At least five major themes merit empirical attention: military identity, boredom and thrill, humor, violence and death, and homesickness for war. Moreover, the proposed reorientation has theoretical and methodological implications, including ontological and epistemological reconsideration towards critical realism, the development of an interdisciplinarity perspective, and new methodological approaches such as basenographies, visual data, and fictional novels by veterans. These novel empirical, theoretical, and methodological venues are valuable not only for research on the military but for all fields of study that are dominated by an etic approach. They contribute to a more scientifically holistic perspective that includes and takes seriously the experiences and meaning making of the people being studied.
Full text at: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/12/2/51
This article examines the relative absence of historical literature pertaining to the battlefield disposal of military corpses during and shortly after the First World War. It posits that while First World War Studies constitute an enormously rich field of research, scholars are yet to consider corpses and their disposal as a central topic of investigation, as is the case with other disciplines and historians of other conflicts. To address this lacuna, this article proposes the notion of 'administration of the dead' that may serve to both conceptualise and explore how First World War battlefield body disposal was performed. This article demonstrates the rich avenues that this topic opens to historians and sketches out areas of investigation such as the administrative, medical and technological dimensions of body disposal in the First World War.
Die kollektive Unterbringung von Asylsuchenden ist ein wichtiger Bestandteil der flüchtlingspolitischen Verwaltungspraxis in Deutschland. Bei aller Varianz der Art solcher Sammelunterkünfte sind damit stets auch prinzipielle Herausforderungen verbunden. Denn mit einem zentralen Raum zum Umgang mit Flucht und Ankunft werden zugleich Gefahren und Konflikte örtlich konzentriert. Parallel zur Entwicklung von Konzepten zur Bewältigung dieser Herausforderungen untersuchen die Beiträger*innen des Bandes die Lebensrealitäten in diesen Einrichtungen.
This chapter explores the way the concept of resilience is used in the US Marines in the twenty-first century. ‘Resilience’ valorizes character, choice, and Marine Corps values, rather than technology, medical developments, or belief in a higher mission. The Corps adopted ‘positive psychology’ deployed in the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program and Operational Stress Control and Readiness. These initiatives created tensions because of difference between macro-policies and micro-implementations as well as the coexistence of two different approaches (the physiological-social and emotional-social model). The chapter turns to responses to ‘bad events’ where attempts were made to distinguish distress of combat from avoidable traumas. The chapter concludes by addressing some of the larger political and ideological consequences of ‘resilience’.KeywordsResilienceMarine CorpsCSFOSCARMilitary trainingPTSD
As Joanna Bourke memorably observes: “The characteristic act of men at war not dying, it is killing.”¹ While many soldiers have killed in war without experiencing any significant psychological or ethical challenges, others, even those who kill in conditions justified militarily in the combat context, suffer the results not only of post-traumatic stress, but (less understood) of moral injury. Having killed places a combatant on the other side of an ontological divide. How do veterans who have undergone this kind of extreme and transformative experience understand themselves after experiencing the limit event of killing? The ways that veterans describe killing can inflect our understanding of life writing.
This article focuses on violent conflict among indigenous groups in the Eastern Woodlands of North America from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Amerindian groups struggled here against European domination and among themselves for various reasons. However, warfare was conceived in spiritual and religious terms and remained a highly ritualized affair. With their long and intense history of martial interaction and the prominent role of women in the war complex, the Iroquoian Amerindians of the Eastern Woodlands are an interesting case of collective violence in non-state societies. In contrast to many stratified pre-industrial societies, neither war nor religion had to legitimize domination by an elite class. Both spheres were individual, kinship, or communal affairs. But religious beliefs played a role in motivating and justifying raids and warfare, which were sanctified by the need to satisfy the souls of dead kinsmen. Failure to avenge a relative’s death meant provoking the wrath of the deceased’s soul. The torture and killing of captives was often a sacrifice to deities and a means to renew the spiritual strength of lineages, clans and villages. While Iroquois women did not go on the war path themselves, the female elders of the clans had, in contrast to most other societies, a say on issues of war and peace and female relatives played a crucial role in instigating raids in revenge for killed relatives. Beyond this, they actively participated in the ritual torture of captives.
This is No 10, Year 3, March 2022, of Nuova Antologia Militare (NAM), the international journal of the Italian Society of Military History. This is the third NAM issue on Ancient Military History
This essay focuses on the representation of religion in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987), Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and Brian de Palma's Casualties of War (1989). It explores how religion intersects with the experience of moral trauma at an individual level, and how the films portray moral injury to be as damaging an aspect of war trauma for Vietnam veterans as grievous physical harm. Further, the essay considers how moral injury is a fundamental component of the collective trauma the nation experienced and, in turn, the culture wars that erupted during and after the war in Vietnam.
Research shows that humans are inherently empathic toward non-human animals from an early age, implying that denialism and psychological distancing are prerequisites for an animal-industrial complex in which billions of animals are killed annually. This distancing comes at a high cost: individuals engaged in the killing of animals often suffer from so-called ‘Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress’ (PITS). This chapter regards PITS as a ‘moral stress,’ and argues that the animal-industrial complex is morally problematic in its entirety.KeywordsMoral stressAnimal-industrial complexPerpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress (PITS)
Military organizations around the world often struggle to integrate and utilize innovative changes in tactics and technology that would save lives and enhance military power. This dissertation explains why the integration of innovations often encounters resistance. I argue that resistance is most likely when innovations disrupt existing gender hierarchies. Accounting for the relationship between gender and changes in warfare can help us understand why some innovations are harder to integrate and why some militaries struggle more than others to integrate them. Such changes can also influence the inclusion (or exclusion) regimes of militaries. This dissertation builds a broad theory of military innovation and gender. It tests the theory through a nested case comparison of the integration of two military innovations that challenge the gender status quo by reducing exposure to risk and the need for physical strength: (1) drones by the Israel Air Force and Artillery Corps, and (2) population-based counterinsurgency (COIN) by the Turkish Armed Forces and Australian Defense Force. For each case, I rely on interviews with military personnel and defense experts, as well as the analysis of government documents, military journals, news articles, field manuals, and other primary sources. I find that in both cases military organizations with higher degrees of inclusion (the Israel Air Force and Australian Defense Force) more effectively integrated new innovations than military organizations that were less inclusive. Finally, I develop and utilize an original dataset of Institutional Commitments to Inclusion (ICI) across all NATO-member and partner countries from 1991 to 2016 to examine whether innovation integration drives gender inclusion reform. Given that data on gender in militaries worldwide is limited and often inconsistent, the collection of new data required a close analysis of government reports submitted to the NATO Committee on Gender Perspectives and a range of other primary sources for each country-year. The results show that innovative change is an important factor in understanding why and when gender policy reforms take place. This study suggests that policymakers and scholars interested in military innovation and its influence on the future security environment must account for the role of gender.
We humans have extended culture amplifying our powers. Our genotypes are differentially expressed in phenotypes, increasing our preferring us over them, escalating our worst and best. Our groups are more ruthless than individuals. Our brain/minds are hyperimmense, neuroplastic in advancing our powers in collective technology. We fear reaching a tipping point, a point of no return, pending doom for humans and jeopardizing the planet forever. We humans are the best and the worst and … we have blundered into doubly compounded wickedness. We struggle to gain truth, and live with our biases, religious and secular. We are capable of the highest good, exemplified in individuals in their spiritual communities. We can also fall into enormous evil, made worse by our community allegiances. We are well into the greatest experiment ever, an Anthropocene Epoch in which the dangerous outcome cannot be undone, nor the experiment repeated.
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