Forum
The Self-Realising Soldier: Post-Heroic Reflections from Norwegian Afghanistan Veterans by Heidi Mogstad
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2300337 |
|---|---|
| Authors | H Mogstad (0000-0003-2925-4162, Chr. Michelsen Institute), T Molendijk (0000-0003-0325-5087, Netherlands Defence Academy), Noora Kotilainen, Noora Katariina Kotilainen (0000-0001-7047-754X, University of Helsinki), Jeni Hunniecutt (Ronin Institute) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 79-124 |
| Publication date | 2024-05-22 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Public Anthropologist (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2589-1707 • E-ISSN: 2589-1715 |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1163/25891715-06010002 |
| OpenAlex | W4405073593 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
In western media and politics, Afghanistan is usually depicted as a place of scarcity and hardship. This article attends to a different western representation of the country, that is, Afghanistan, as a site of self-fulfilment and growth. In doing so, I outline a mode of soldiering that emerged from my ethnographic interviews with Norwegian Afghanistan veterans: the self-realising soldier seeking combat, adventure and personal development in a distant and failing war. While not entirely new, this mode of soldiering challenges dominant representations of western soldiers in the post-9/11 wars as driven by humanitarian values or socio-economic mobility. However, the soldiers' narratives are not merely fragments of lived and embodied experience. Nor do I read them as duped by military recruitment campaigns or neoliberal discourses idealising self-investment. Instead, this article interprets their post-war reflections as confessional speech acts that constitute the Norwegian Afghanistan veterans as realistic and sincere vis-à-vis "dishonest" politicians and "naïve" civilians far removed from the battlefield. The self-realisation discourse has ambiguous political effects, as it both exposes and obscures the military's core functions and simultaneously unsettles and reinforces imperialist images of Afghanistan. Moreover, the self-realising soldiers challenge us to consider alternative moralities of war and raise important questions about the ethics of contemporary western expeditionary warfare
Media studies · Norwegian · Political science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Gender, Security, and Conflict · History · Military History and Strategy · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 3 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,5 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2026 (3) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 3 |