War

On ‘moral injury’

“…This normative, prescriptive perspective on the violence of war and the intuitive but elliptical rhetoric by which it is expressed reveal what anthropologists Catherine Lutz and Katharine Millar (2012) describe as the paradoxically co-constitutive relationship between war and morality. Moral injury theorists describe war as a place where morality is ‘broken’ and destroyed, but Lutz and Millar point out that war is a ‘uniquely privileged venue for the production of morality’ (ibid.).…”

“…Certain modes or instances of violence are relegated to the ‘moral margins’ of war and made the objects of interdiction and anxious policing (chemical weapons, child soldiers, suicide bombers). But many others occupy a legalized and largely unquestioned ‘moral center’ of conventional war-making that legitimates all violence that is not explicitly forbidden (Lutz and Millar, 2012). Medical and psychological labels do not stand outside this distinction, but traffic in it, defining normal and excessive forms of violence and healthy and pathological reactions to it in ways that seize upon the individual actor as the primary site of both responsible action and psychic damage (Crawford, 2013; Howell, 2013: Ch.…”

“…Cultural common sense and military doctrine and laws of war regard the individual soldier as the most fundamental locus of action and responsibility (Crawford, 2013; Lutz and Millar, 2012), but it is military institutions that discipline soldiers, empower them to kill, and expose them to harm – that, in Michel Foucault’s (1979) terms, ‘make’ them as individuals in the first place. Obedience, embodied discipline, and engrained technical competence are sources of moral value in themselves, tools of survival and mutual protection as well as the expression of a professional ethic.…”

“…As Allsopp puts it (2013), such rhetoric takes the metaphor of the psychic injury and metaphorizes it again, casting not just the self or the soul but an entire society as wounded. This metaphorization works in the opposite direction as well: staking out a novel form of psychological harm, moral injury makes that harm available for expert intervention and management, and thereby also serves to ‘morally renovate’ the conflicts that gave rise to such harms in the first place (Lutz and Millar, 2012). Affirming the goodness of those who carry it out, the evil of enemies, and the inevitable transgressions of the battlefield, moral injury affirms that war possesses a coherent ‘moral center’, a place of ends-justifiable means and regrettable excesses where some lives and some anguish simply carry more moral weight than others.…”

The ethnography of good machines

“…That structure cites humane necessity and good intentions to legitimate "just" wars and tactics (Asad 2007). It casts some forms of war-making as beyond the pale (chemical weapons, child soldiers) and so legalizes and legitimizes others (preemptive invasion and occupation, depleted uranium munitions, cluster bombs, involuntary stop-loss reenlistments) (Lutz and Millar 2012). It builds legalization directly into combat even when that combat inevitably kills civilians (Orford 2003;Gregory 2011;Crawford 2013).…”