Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ConscriptedVolunteer (Conscripted Volunteering: An Ethnographic Study of Community Engagement Schemes in the Israeli Military)

Teaser

Militaries increasingly engage their soldiers in activities framed as ‘community engagement’ or ‘volunteering’, ranging from facilitating activities for children to delivering food to the needy. The research project was the first study to investigate these activities...

Summary

Militaries increasingly engage their soldiers in activities framed as ‘community engagement’ or ‘volunteering’, ranging from facilitating activities for children to delivering food to the needy. The research project was the first study to investigate these activities in depth, and have coined the term ‘conscripted volunteering’ to describe this domain of community engagement by military units. The project explored this phenomenon through the case of the Israeli military, a military which is considered a paradigmatic case in studies of armed forces, using an ethnographic approach and qualitative methods.

The research objectives have been to explain:
• Why and how did ‘conscripted volunteering’ emerge and institutionalize in the Israeli military?
• How are these volunteering schemes assembled, organised and managed?
• How does this new type of soldiers’ volunteering engagement affect their notions of morality, citizenship and subjecthood?

‘Conscripted volunteering’ is part of a broader ‘moralization’ of contemporary society that glorifies ‘volunteering’ as a prominent route for ethical conduct. Under neoliberalism, ‘volunteering’ becomes an object of intensified political interest and promotion. The first conscripted volunteering activities in the Israeli military were initiated around the year of 2000, and became widespread and institutionalized in the following few years through the support of higher military echelons. Volunteering activities and continuous partnerships have been produced through assemblages that aligned military actors, nonprofit organizations or semi-public institutions, and sometimes even corporate actors. ‘Conscripted volunteering’ can be considered as a means to enhance the military’s public legitimacy, inspired by corporate techniques of reputation management that align with neoliberal tendencies to corporatization of militaries. However, the research results demonstrate that conscripted volunteering is also a powerful affective tool that works to mould soldiers’ subjecthood. Engaging soldiers in activities organized by the military that are consensually perceived as ‘good’, strengthened their belief in the military’s morality despite its routine actions that are embedded in violence and oppression, and thus consolidating soldiers’ ‘moral coherence’. The military is thus interested in conscripted volunteering as a mechanism that produced engaged militarized subjects that are disposed to participate in routinized labour that may carry with it moral doubts.

Work performed

The research project included four months of ethnographic fieldwork in Israel, where conscripted volunteering activities have been studied through the case of the Israeli military, using in-depth interviews, participant observations and content analysis. The study did not involve any official collaboration with the Israeli military.

The research results were disseminated so far through two published articles in peer-reviewed journals and eight presentations in academic conferences.

As part of the project, the researcher organized an international academic symposium titled “Weaponized Volunteering: New Configurations Between Civil Society and Armed Organizations”. It was held on 21-22 February 2019 at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. The symposium included a roundtable with representatives from civil society organizations working around themes of peace and anti-militarization. Following the symposium, a special issue proposal carrying the symposium’s title was submitted and accepted to the monograph series of Current Sociology, the official journal of the International Sociological Association, and expected to be published around July 2021. The monograph publication will be accompanied with a short video aimed to communicate the research results to broader publics, within and outside the academic world.

Final results

The project provided a theoretically-informed, in-depth ethnographic account of a phenomenon that did not receive scholarly attention so far. The project created a unique interface between the thematic areas of military studies and volunteering research.

The study revealed that the interest of the Israeli military in conscripted activities goes beyond mere reputation management. Conscripted volunteering can be analyzed as a tool inspired by corporate techniques of reputation management that enables the Israeli military to engage in what is termed as ‘social’ missions in a manner that does not contradict its neoliberal tendencies, and by doing so nurturing the military’s public legitimacy. However, the research results demonstrate that conscripted volunteering is also a powerful affective tool that works to mould soldiers’ subjecthood. Engaging soldiers in activities organized by the military that are consensually perceived as ‘good’, strengthened their belief in the military’s morality despite its routine actions that are embedded in violence and oppression, and thus consolidating soldiers’ ‘moral coherence’. The military is thus interested in conscripted volunteering as a mechanism that produced engaged militarized subjects that are disposed to participate in routinized labour that may carry with it moral doubts.

While ‘volunteering’ is often constructed as an ultimate expression of ‘doing good’, it has become an object of interest, particularly with the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s, even to actors whose moral qualities are dubious: from corporations trying to engage their employees in programs of corporate volunteering to militaries engaging soldiers in ‘conscripted volunteering’ activities, as described in this research project. As the project results demonstrate, volunteering can in fact be aligned with militarization processes through the rising domain of ‘conscripted volunteering’. The exploration of this domain assists in unsettling the often-naturalized connection between ‘volunteering’ and ‘morality’ or ‘virtue’ and in examining critically the role that ‘volunteering’ plays in contemporary societies. Furthermore, the project problematizes the scholarly and popular tendency to identify non-governmental or civil society organizations as autonomous environments for ‘doing good’, by examining their alignment with military interests. As the monograph that will result from the research project demonstrates, the increasing promotion and popularity of the notion of ‘volunteering’ can cohere with and support militarization processes, policing efforts and violent endeavours. Exploring such alignments, as this research project demonstrate, contributes to the development of an alternative theoretical framework to the traditional distinction between the military and civic spheres.

Website & more info

More info: https://aissr.uva.nl/content/research-groups/moving-matters/moving-matters.html.