The Willing: Danish Soldiers on Endurance, Edgework, and Engagement in the Post-9/11 Era

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the question of culture and subjective life by virtue of exploring soldierly self-fashioning in the context of military subjectification. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with Danish combat troops, this study anthropologically investigates contemporary soldiering as a struggle with ‘wills’. I examine individual soldiers’ mobilisation of ‘will’ to follow their desires for becoming ‘hard men’ and ‘true warriors’ in the contexts of the Danish armed forces and the US-led war in Afghanistan. I theorise volition in terms of bodily stretching, character fashioning, and emotional re-orientation and argue that overcoming is becoming. I show that soldierly becomings are fashioned through enactments of ‘will to pain’ across three hyper-masculinised modalities of soldiering: endurance (‘will to persevere’ through pain and suffering), edgework (‘will to risk’ a life or death in pain and suffering), and engagement (‘will to kill’ by inflicting pain and suffering and live with the moral consequences).

KEYWORDS:

• Becoming
• masculinity
• pain
• soldiers
• will

Acknowledgements

This work originates from the collaborative research project Soldier and Society, University of Copenhagen, and was further developed as part of the research project Soldierly Becomings Revisited, Royal Danish Defence College. I owe the three anonymous reviewers a debt of gratitude for their very generous and insightful comments, and Ethnos co-editor-in-chief Nils Bubandt for his exceptional support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All interlocutors have provided informed consent to participate in the research (electronically recorded). Their names and other biographical details have been changed to shield their identities.

2 In 2014, women made up 5.0 per cent of the total number of military personnel employed in the Danish Army and 13.9 per cent of the total number of conscripts. In 2022, the number had increased to 8.8 and 25.3 per cent, respectively (MDPA 2023). Immigrants and their decedents counted for 15.4 per cent of the Danish population in 2023 (Statistics Denmark 2023) and for 1.4 per cent of the total number of military personnel employed in the Danish Defence in 2021 (Videnscenter for Integration 2021).

3 This composition arguably resonates with a survey study on Danish first-time deployees between 1992 and 2009, indicating no disproportionally large numbers deployed because of socio-economic factors (Lyk-Jensen et al. 2011).

Additional information

Funding

This article is funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark | Humanities (FKK) [grant number 0602-02345B].