Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the different meanings attributed to military related mental health problems in different institutional environments in the UK.

Paper long abstract:

Soldiers experience many kinds of mobilities, such as coming home from war, transitioning to civilian life, or moving from national service into private security. These movements in place may bring problems in adjusting or mental health problems. They may also, though, entail new assessments and responses to such problems. For example, PTSD might be seen as an honorable badge of combat, grounds for financial compensation, a "medicalizing" description that prevents the return to duty, shirking, or something else again. This paper draws on ethnographic research in the UK with a wide range of people who work on military-related mental and social health problems. Research participants included: soldiers and veterans, their family members, health care providers, veterans' charities, and military managers. It argues that while the diagnosis of PTSD is made by clinicians according to precisely defined criteria, the recognition of legitimate war-related mental health suffering is a fiercely contested process shaped by military, medical and wider social environments.

Paper short abstract:

Peacekeeper's Stress-Syndrome is a new stress syndrome that travels between medical military spaces across the globe. By analysing how Argentinian peacekeepers become enmeshed in transnational regimes of conflict and care this paper explores how military subjectivities are in the making.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the transnational network of policies, persons, institutions and regimes of knowledge that shape military health policies worldwide. Peacekeeping health risks have recently become an area of focused interest in both scholarly and public fields, such as the Medical Support Manual for United Nations Field Missions (2015). Since the 1990s, the Argentinian military has adjusted psychological treatment to these UN policies (Sotomayor 2007, 179). Within these travelling treatments and diagnoses, it is recognized that peacekeeping operations, based on humanitarian aid and unclear obligations of UN mandates, produce a unique type of military distress. This new syndrome, Peacekeeper's Stress-Syndrome, involves feelings of boredom, vulnerability and humiliation.

The paper explores how travelling syndromes interrelate to local health practices and military subjectivities in the global South, which constitute more than 90% of the employed peacekeepers. In my current research project, the Argentinian peacekeepers serve as a micro-cosmos in which to examine the contemporary mobility and settlement of military medical policies concerning peacekeepers' health. Argentinian peacekeepers at the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus have patrolled the buffer zone to prevent a recurrence of violence between Greek and Turkish Cypriots for decades. How do they contest and internalize UN policies and deployment treatments? How do the Argentinian medical facilities change due to these new standards? Based on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Cyprus and Argentina, I will analyse how Argentinian peacekeepers and medical staff become enmeshed in complex and continuously changing regimes of care through which new military subjectivities are in the making.

Paper short abstract:

If "to travel is to live", as Hans Christian Andersen once wrote, what are we then to make of the travelling at stake when 'our troops' deploy to remote war zones? Based on fieldwork with Danish ISAF troops, this paper explores the tour of duty as an adventurous form of military mobility.

Paper long abstract:

If "to travel is to live", as Hans Christian Andersen wrote once upon a time, what are we then to make of the travelling at stake when 'our troops' deploy to distant war zones? Based on ethnographic fieldwork with two Danish combat units before, during and after deployment to Helmand, this paper explores the tour of duty as an adventurous form of military mobility. Ethnographically, I probe into the home-away-home structure of the deployment cycle for some of the very last Danish ISAF forces: their preparing for war, their being at war and their returning from war. Anthropologically, I conceive their tour of duty as a search for adventure and thereby as a quest for personal transformation - a struggle for self-becoming in existential, moral and social terms. I argue that the Danish soldiers, I have followed, were broadly speaking seeking out the US-led war in Afghanistan as an opportunity, however temporarily, for pursuing a life in movement, a life in transition, a life oscillating between the 'home' and the 'front', the familiar and the unknown, or to draw upon Michael D. Jackson, the 'civilisation' and the 'wilderness'. I show that the tour of duty potentially entails a 'happy ending' adventure insofar that the deployment offers the troops in question a chance of trying their strength on the world. By the same token, I demonstrate that the tour might easily turn into an unsuccessful adventure if the soldiers fail or miss out on the deployment cycle's tests and trials.

Paper short abstract:

Based on field-work and interviews with spouses and mental health professionals, the paper presents a study conducted on a group of wives of Israeli POWs and their perceptions coming back "home."

Paper long abstract:

In her research on the meaning of war among IDF veterans, Lomsky-Feder argued that not only the return home from, but also the actual encounter of the individual with war, is "significant in terms of the perception of everyday life… and as a unique phenomenon." In the case of POWs, the meaning of "front" and "home" have an additional and perhaps a more complex significance, since during their imprisonment they were neither in the "front" nor at "home."

Previous studies examined the "secondary traumatization" among wives of Israeli POWs (Dekel/Solomon 2006; Greene et al 2014). My paper presents a study conducted on a group of wives of Israeli POWs with PTSD, and their perceptions of their husbands' coming back "home." The paper is based on field work of the group's regular meetings and on interviews with some of these women as well as interviews with mental health professionals, who offer couples' consultation for former IDF POWs and their spouses.

Paper short abstract:

This paper documents experiences of veterans returning to the site of their deployment, and interprets them as meaning-making practices. The focus is on Dutchbat UNPROFOR veterans re-visiting Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, but experiences from other missions also shed light on these journeys.

Paper long abstract:

The longing to return to the place that had shaped their lives was common in the veterans I have known. Three tropes can be distinguished in their narratives about returning.

One trope is reconnecting with locals, especially those who were children during the deployment; specific bonds may have developed from life-saving events. Reconnection also occurs when veterans participate to rebuild the country. Reconnecting veterans express commitment to locals, which they were not allowed during deployment. Through contact with locals the veterans can search for a clue that their mission had not been in vain, and that at least for some it made a difference.

Another trope involves the desire to know. This may take the form of reconstructing a particular event (e.g. a shooting). It may also involve reevaluating political events together with locals (e.g. mothers of Srebrenica). Veterans often identify a healing aspect of retrospectively obtaining insight. Reconstructing events in situ also provides opportunities to share experiences with partners and family members.

Confrontation is the third trope. It may foster a feeling of sanity; in the presence of landmines, the obsession to avoid walking on grass becomes sane behavior again. The veteran may recognize himself in the country, as the war is still present in both. But he also sees the resilience in the landscape ("there are trees now"), and finds encouragement to endure.

These veterans used their military pensions and PTSD recompensation to finance their return, and obtain a form of self-healing no clinical psychotherapy offers.

Paper short abstract:

The paper explores an ethnographic account of a group of Israeli Defense Forces Veterans with PTSD who go camping near the "front", and "play" with traumatic stimuli in different ways. I argue that the anthropology of play can shed light on the psychological concept of trauma reenactment.

Paper long abstract:

In the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the geographical and emotional boundaries between "home" and "front" are often blurred, as do distinctions between "civilian" and "military". For Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD), this means that intrusive traumatic stimuli are ubiquitous. However, while intrusive memories are a central part of PTSD pathology, mental-health professionals consider some clinically controlled forms of reenactment as essential for healing. This paper analyses a very different "healthy reenactment" in a non-clinical context based on fieldwork and interviews with a group of Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) veterans with PTSD called "No Man Left Behind". The group engages in playful and dramaturgical reenactment through practices that let them "flow" from "home" to "front", such as camping trips to the Gaza envelope ("deployment to a conflict zone"), the use of military ranks and hierarchy within the group, and "emergency deployments" to help veterans in need. Using concepts from the anthropology of play, these practices will be examined as a collective "game of reenactment" with coherent and culturally-anchored rules, roles, limits, spaces, and values. By introducing the term "trauma-play" I will consider this playful reenactment as a way for players to productively engage with traumatic experiences. Trauma-play allows players to create new double-meanings for traumatic stimuli, to assume new, non-traumatized identities, and to reframe suffering as a unique moral sensibility, thereby supplying players with resources for healing from symptoms and life problems they attribute to military service.

Paper short abstract:

Militant mobility is generated by Shai militants who move across the Middle East to fight for various causes and different banners. We should ask the mobility of meanings between the fronts and ever-changing politics of home-ground to understand participation in political violence.

Paper long abstract:

The on-going conflict in Syria has highlighted the mobility of Shia' militants more than ever. There has been discussions about involvement of Iranian state in Lebanon however before 2014. However, there has not much attention on how the rise of conflict has generated the militants without borders in the Middle East. Shia' militants generate ethnic, ideological and territorial mobility in order to justify their movements and contribution to resistance movements and theatres of war. Their boundaries and 'realities' are drawn through the lens of religiosity and theatres of war that are challenged with constant changing politics behind the front lines. Therefore, the question is how these imagined boundaries and combat mobility are produced and coped with between home and fronts? What are the discourse and set of practices after combat that helps them to justify their militancy home grounds ? What is the link between these boundaries and flow of the Shia' militants and regeneration of the Other across the Middle East?

Owing to these questions, I have followed Shia militants through anthropology of resistant movements and observed flows of Shia militants from Afghanistan till Syria. I explore how these militant mobility acquires sacrality in process of its emergence and how battlefield is articulated and justified in the home-grounds.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on the case of four veterans of the Soviet-Afghan war, I show how aging, by making available new ways of speaking about disease, injury and pain, plays an important role in the veterans' movement between "military" and "civilian" life.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I attend to the presence of disease and injury in the lives of four friends, Russian veterans of the Soviet-Afghan war. I map out how, over the years, their relationship to disease and injury has changed as they moved between the often-blurred boundaries of "military" and "civilian" life. Aging, understood as a non-linear process that meshes the biological and the moral in complex and paradoxical ways, has become central to my consideration of this question. Describing the case of these four "brothers", I investigate how aging's accelerations, decelerations and interruptions map onto the experiences of a life in common, with kin and friends, and onto the movements between "front" and "home". Precisely, I argue that aging, the expressivity and "mobility" of an aging body, has opened up new ways of speaking about disease, injury and pain that are not available to younger veterans. It is as if a circulating language of pain and a series of diagnoses could attach themselves more easily to aging bodies. Furthermore, I show how, in the contexts of the lives of these veterans, this articulation was made possible not only by the alignment of a particular rhythm of the body and the availability of a standing language of pain, but also by the emergence of specific institutions in Russia in the 1990s (clinics, veterans' organizations, NGOs).

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how acts of war violated the assumptions and beliefs about right and wrong and personal goodness of veterans of Dutch peacekeeping missions. It is argued that military mobility between battlefield and home implies shifting narratives.

Paper long abstract:

Dutch soldiers in the peacekeeping missions in Bosnia, 1992-1995, and Afghanistan, 2006-2010, were confronted with pain, sadness and death. They were direct or indirect victims of violence, witnessed the human toll of violence and its aftermath, and also inflicted violence and destruction upon others. They survived violent contacts, yet the violence has not left them unscathed. This paper examines how acts of war violated these soldiers' assumptions and beliefs about right and wrong and personal goodness. It looks into more detail how they justify the violent acts they have inflicted, suffered and observed according to the conflicting norms and values of army culture and civilian society, arguing that the military mobility from the "front" to "home" implies a shift of narrative.

Our fieldwork material suggests that the psychological problems some soldiers develop after deployment are not so much about what had happened in combat, but rather follow from the struggle of returning home. As soldiers they have been disciplined to embody a specific organizational identity; their unit prepares them for missions by restructuring their connections to civilian life. Moving between battlefield and home, they undergo significant identity shifts following institutionally sanctioned regulation and socialization. They are expected to realign in society yet the moral systems of military culture and civilian life conflict. Shifting narratives help to make sense of these experiences of moral breakdown.