Moral Injury and the Psyche of Counterinsurgency

Abstract

Public and clinical interest in a condition called moral injury – psychological distress resembling posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but said to originate from shame, guilt, or transgression in war experience – explicitly links moral, psychological, and political dimensions of war-making in the context of the US’s post-9/11 wars. This article critically analyzes moral injury’s politics of psychological suffering, which tends to treat morality as a universal and apolitical terrain, by reading it against soldier narratives of combat experience. American soldiers’ accounts of US military violence in Iraq and Afghanistan suggest that embodied, affective, and technical dimensions of military experience constitute their own moral worlds that do not necessarily conform to moral injury’s narratives of individual transgression. These accounts show that the US’s counterinsurgency techniques produce Orientalist framings of threat and violence but also volatile and ambivalent battlefield moralities that critically comment on the ostensibly liberal and humane techniques of US war-making.

Contextual dimensions of moral injury: An interdisciplinary review

“…A study on morally injurious events during military missions demonstrates that when conflicts at the political level are not resolved (or only ostensibly through compromises), they will engender moral dilemmas for soldiers on the ground (Molendijk, 2019 ). Consequently, soldiers may develop feelings of abandonment and betrayal by the political leadership (Bica, 1999 ; Lifton, 1973 ; K. MacLeish, 2021 ; Molendijk, 2019 ). Regarding society as a whole, soldiers have reported resentment and alienation because of feeling misunderstood by civilians (Ferrajão & Aragão Oliveira, 2016 ; Worthen & Ahern, 2014 ).…”

“…Regarding society as a whole, soldiers have reported resentment and alienation because of feeling misunderstood by civilians (Ferrajão & Aragão Oliveira, 2016 ; Worthen & Ahern, 2014 ). Soldiers have said to perceive both the negative image of perpetrator and positive representations such as victim and hero as misrecognition (Farnsworth, 2014 ; Molendijk, 2018a ; see also, K. MacLeish, 2021 ). This indicates that distorting caricatures in societal discourses may be perceived as doing injustice to the soldiers’ experience.…”

Between Moral Injury and Moral Agency​: Exploring Treatment for Men with Histories of Military Sexual Trauma

“…This view informs much of the shame we will describe in this article and accounts for survivors' attempts to manage it, including their avoidance of relationships and manifestations of irritability. However, in general, psychological research on moral injury has not tracked individual differences in personally salient morals or people's 'local moral worlds' (see Kleinman 1999;MacLeish 2021;Mattingly 2014;Molendijk, Kramer, and Verwiej 2018). It thus risks overlooking the intersectional, culturally distinct factors that constitute shame, such as the particular factors that inform veteran men's experience of masculinity as well as the lived experience of identifying and being seen as culturally, ethnically, or racially different.…”