Moral Injury and the Psyche of Counterinsurgency

Abstract

Public and clinical interest in a condition called moral injury – psychological distress resembling posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) but said to originate from shame, guilt, or transgression in war experience – explicitly links moral, psychological, and political dimensions of war-making in the context of the US’s post-9/11 wars. This article critically analyzes moral injury’s politics of psychological suffering, which tends to treat morality as a universal and apolitical terrain, by reading it against soldier narratives of combat experience. American soldiers’ accounts of US military violence in Iraq and Afghanistan suggest that embodied, affective, and technical dimensions of military experience constitute their own moral worlds that do not necessarily conform to moral injury’s narratives of individual transgression. These accounts show that the US’s counterinsurgency techniques produce Orientalist framings of threat and violence but also volatile and ambivalent battlefield moralities that critically comment on the ostensibly liberal and humane techniques of US war-making.