Since the birth of Military Sociology in the wake of the World War II, the discipline has dealt with the puzzle of troubled identities, conceptually as well as empirically. In armed conflict, man trespasses the two most fundamental rules of social life: The obligation of self-preservation and the prohibition of killing. Yet, putting your life at stake in war continues to fascinate us all. The heat of battle is, and has always been, the stuff good narratives are made of. Likewise, an important strand in the empirical study of military socialisation centres on how the clash between civilian and military values affect the individual's identity.  In the US, this question became pivotal following the transition to the All Volunteer Force in 1973 and in Denmark the abandonment of compulsory service in practice (today, if you do not want to be deployed, you are not allowed to serve) may raise similar questions: Should the composition of the military reflect that of the population in general, and if so, how should this be implemented? Should e.g. women or immigrants who are under-represented in the armed forces be endorsed to join, either by benefits or by affirmative action, and how do these changes affect military cohesion? Moreover, the increasing number of European soldiers engaged in combat since the end of the Cold War, points to a central question in modern society: How do we deal with the fact that more soldiers are killed and wounded, and how should we cope with the challenge of re-integrating those who return?

In this panel, we invite papers studying the ongoing adjustment process between military and society, especially with a focus on how this process affects identities. In this context, the perception of the military should not be confined to the legitimate armed forces of a particular country only, but can also include studies of extra-governmental military organisations or companies, e.g. terrorist groups or private military firms.

This paper is a theoretical and empirical analysis of the connection between psychological war injuries and the subjective feeling of being recognised as a human being. We go to war, and we lose men in war, but these casualties don‟t stop after the soldiers have ended duty. It is a fact that 15 % of the Danish veterans suffer from psychological war injuries. That this only is the tip of the iceberg is confirmed by the fact that 11 Danish veterans from Balkan committed suicide last year – almost twenty years after ended duty. If we look at the more experienced warfare state United States, the same tendency is  noticeable.  Historically the  veterans  have claimed for recognition  –  veteran benefits. The western belligerent welfare state has an enormous “new” social class to serve. But how to serve the veterans? The theoretical framework builds on the theory of recognition by the German  professor  of  philosophy  Axel  Honneth.  Honneth‟s social-philosophical  and  normative theory argues that recognition is necessary for human beings to be able to develop their self-esteem and fully live „the good life‟.  This includes non- and mis-recognition  as a basis of social and interpersonal conflict. My starting point is Honneth‟s thesis as a possible understanding  of  the veterans‟ hard rehabilitation in the society as the veterans have experiences of disrespectfulness and lacking recognition both in private- and public life. The somewhat vague concept of recognition is unpacked in the qualitative analysis of 32 eyewitness testimonies of American veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, where it  becomes noticeable that the veterans have experienced mis- recognition in all three intersubjective relations of love, rights and solidarity. It brings out the fact that it is not really recognition in the form of a social object such as “honour” and “prestige” as Bourdieu would define it, but rather an ontological recognition which the veterans are in demand of. This  study emphasises  the  need  of  an  increased  awareness  of  how  the  war  systematically is dehumanizing the general soldier and the aspect of recognition which looks due to a lot of the social consequences that the veterans experience recapturing their civil identity.

This paper examines whether the ‘modern soldier’ is suffering from somewhat of a ‘crisis of identity’ during the conduct of contemporary operations. Complex emergencies call for humanitarian interventions and peacebuilding efforts that point to a security discourse that goes beyond traditional and conventional military ‘criteria’ such as self-defence, notably ensuring the survival of national identity and territory. Today, the roles performed by and the tasks undertaken by militaries and individual soldiers (as well as expected of them by publics at home and abroad) have become progressively more complex, including involving ‘non-kinetic’ as well as ‘kinetic’ skills and abilities. Embedded within increasingly condensed-space and high-tempo multi-functional operational environments during an era of exponential globalisation, soldiers are increasingly engaged in several facets of the peacebuilding, peacekeeping and peacemaking processes, in addition to any combat requirements.

The transformation in operations encountered by contemporary militaries calls for an investigation into the construction of soldiers’ ‘identity’ so that their engagement in complex emergencies can be realised most expeditiously. Soldiers are now operating in a space full of uncertainties and ‘new ’insecurities, where the soldier needs  to  cross  boundaries  of  self-perception.  Arguably,  the  distinction  between  ‘combat’  and  ‘non-combat’,

‘innocent’ and ‘guilty’, ‘illegitimate’ and ‘legitimate’ violence has become increasingly blurred in contemporary operations. This paper, based on e-mail interviews with eight officers, pre- during and post-deployment to Afghanistan, further argues that the ‘new soldier’ has both traditional and non-traditional military roles, and this impacts upon their identity. There is a stark contrast between being an agent of violence and a humanitarian, yet on an operational basis the tasks are increasingly intermingled.

The aim of this paper is to present a research problem of my postdoctoral thesis "The veterans of military operations in the twenty-first century Polish experience. The problem of constitution a new social group". This is a working title. The paper reports the tentative theoretical and empirical findings based on the analysis of biographical interviews with the ex-servicemen of the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are the people who were injured (lost their health, physical or mental) as a result of hostilities during these missions. The injuries resulted in dismissal from the military service or retirement. In my research I define this social category as veterans because respondents identify themselves as such, too. They are also called veterans by the military community, journalists and politicians. Yet, they are still not called as veterans by the Polish law.

In ongoing studies and research, I am interested in the answer to the following questions: what is the biographical identity’s of the veterans? Is it different from their social identity? What are the cultural and social determinants of biographical experience of veterans? What interaction strategies are used by narrators? What are the resources used to describe the symbolic universe of their biographical experience? What is the biographical content of the experience? How the story is built by the narrator? I try to research both what constitutes the content of the identity of the narrators and the form of the presentation of their biographical experiences. I aim at describing the details indicating the framework of the surveyed population and the identification of knowledge sources to determine its own identity. I undertake an attempt to determine what elements constitute a specific type of identity and the circumstances which encourage the creation of such identification. This fact determines the specific way of interpreting the world by narrators both in terms of specific resources of language, narrative structure, as well as in terms of the creation of their own identity.

This crisis can be mitigate only if civilian and military communities, to accept and realize the existence new community which the veterans are. The importance of veterans for these communities is quite significant. Acting as an intermediary s/he can contribute to crossing these boundaries, and especially to changing the "beliefs" of those group. And the same veterans are as marginal people, in whose minds these systems combine, conflict, each other possibly work out some sort of mutual accommodation and interpretation.

Der har været danske soldater i Afghanistan siden 2002, men ingen undersøgelse har belyst hvordan den sociale reproduktion, der sikrer, at der hele tiden er nye soldater, der står klar til at blive udsendt, finder sted.

Formålet med dette papir er at belyse samspillet mellem forskelle i soldaters opvækst forhold og hvordan de indplacerer sig i den sociale orden inden for det militære felt. Vi undersøger om der er homologe strukturer i rummet at udsendte, og det undersøges ud fra et perspektiv at reproduktion og sociale stratifikation.

Ud fra en forståelse af hvordan reproduktionen forekommer i specifikke kontekster, har vi efterstræbt ikke at anlægge et analytisk blik, der ser kausale sammenhænge, men i stedet at anlægge et blik, der ser selvforstærkende sociale processer, der er med til at opretholde reproduktionen af det militære rum. Relationen mellem forskelle i opvækst og symbolsk anerkendte grader skal således forstås dialektisk.

Papiret fokuserer på konstabler, overkonstabler, sergenter og officerer og deres position i rummet af udsendte. Vi konstruerer i alt tre rum: Et rum af opvækstforskelle, et symbolsk rum af militære fraktioner og et rum af forskelle i militær kapital. Ved at applicere specifik multipel korrespondanceanalyse, analyseres objektive relationer af kapitalfordelinger og de knyttes til positioner i rummet af udsendte. Rummet af udsendte differentieres af tre akser: Fysisk kropslig kapital, familiekapital og samlet kapitalvolumen.

I rummet defineret af først og anden akse, er det fysisk kropslig kapital der adskiller konstabler fra overkonstabler, sergenter og officerer. Familiekapital differentierer konstabler og overkonstabler fra sergenter og officerer. I rummet defineret af anden og tredje akse, polariseres konstabler og overkonstabler fra officerer på familiekapital og kapitalvolumen. Modaliteten for sergenter er tæt på origo.

I det militære rum, som er struktureret af forskelle i opvækstvilkår, optræder der tre forskellige idealtypiske militære strategier, som knytter an til forskelle i grad og forskelle i den militære kapital, de tildeles af forsvaret. Konstablernes strategi er primært knyttet til den udvælgelse, der begynder ved værnepligt og ved reaktionsstyrkeuddannelsen. Her er det særligt en anerkendelse af besiddelsen af fysisk kropslig kapital, der indgår. Militær kapital kan desuden antage en tidslig form, hvilket især ses i forhold til overkonstablerne, hvis anciennitet gør, at de automatisk stiger i grad. Sergenterne og officerernes strategi opnås ligeledes gennem anciennitet ved forsvaret og desuden gennem en yderligere tidslig investering i form af en længerevarende militær uddannelse, hvor både fysisk kropslig kapital og kulturel kapital anerkendes.

Undersøgelsen er bygget på registeroplysninger fra forsvaret og fra Danmarks Statistik. Data er stillet til rådighed fra SFI.

Analyses of war strategies do seldom or never link the analysis of forms of war with the protracted warfare that continues when the war comes home. If we follow Clausewitz’ philosophy of war forms, war is not only a battle of first order concerning a material, social and temporal dimension but also of a second order. This concerns the transformation of, firstly,  matter into a conflict about the supplies and logistics of resources (financial and human); secondly, about the social inclusion and implications of vulnerable persons; and thirdly, about the temporal extension far beyond the so-called “victory” or “defeat” and into the second (and even third) generation of traumatised stress disordered persons (children, wifes). The First World War isn’t over yet. Now in the very long perspective of war history traumas have been known since the Iliad and Odysseus. With the Crusades the warriors became heroes as nobilised knights and aristocrats and their descendants got leading positions. In the course of civilisation process (Elias) war experiences became less recognised and during the modern individualisation processes the psychic autonomy of individuals has become increasingly vulnerable, also due to asymmetrical warfare. Still, soldiers in the Second World War could have war experiences without becoming severely traumatised; they could function afterwards. But after Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars won’t stop destroying soldiers in extreme numbers. Hence, strategies that link politics and war should include long term costs.