Narrating Conflict and Violence

This chapter reviews the perspectives of former combatants that raise a number of methodological questions in addition to the general methodological and ethical issues inherent in any field-based study of armed conflict. It looks into the accounts of soldiers involved in fighting in order to bring to light a unique and hard-to-capture perspective. It also explains why the reliance on soldier narratives raises specific methodological and ethical issues that are inherent in any study of war. The chapter discusses the shifting meanings of violence across different contexts, concealment and censorship. It examines the discursive reframing of violence narratives, the data-loyalty transaction, and the role of emotion in combatant accounts.

Participation in Counterinsurgency

This chapter begins with a description of Aviv Kochavi, who served as a commander in a paratrooper unit at the height of the Second Intifada. It talks about Aviv's strict and demanding command style that soldiers often label a “hard head.” The chapter shows how the military first instills and then enforces a set of norms that distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate violence based on the extent to which it serves organizational goals. It analyzes three analytically distinct categories of violence taken from the perspective of deployed combat soldiers: strategic, entrepreneurial, and opportunistic. It also points out how the categories of violence differ on a number of dimensions and highlights the beneficiary of the violence.