ConscriptedVolunteer · Conscripted Volunteering: An Ethnographic Study of Community Engagement Schemes in the Israeli Military

Conscripted Volunteering: An Ethnographic Study of Community Engagement Schemes in the Israeli Military

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.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union