Towards a Soldier-Based View in Research on The Military: An Empathetically Critical Approach

The military has long been a topic of interest in the social sciences. However, to date, military studies tend to take an overly researcher-oriented viewpoint rather than actually engaging with the ‘native’ experience of the soldier. This article intends to reorient military studies to a perspective that encompasses the lived and embodied worldviews, actions, and experiences of military personnel. Reviewing existing research on the military, it identifies two dominant approaches—a functionalist and a ‘condemnatory critical’ approach—which, despite important differences, share an ‘etic’ viewpoint. Subsequently, it proposes an alternative approach that includes ‘emic’ attention to soldiers’ lifeworlds and comprises an empathetically critical approach. This new line of scholarship also involves empirical redirection. At least five major themes merit empirical attention: military identity, boredom and thrill, humor, violence and death, and homesickness for war. Moreover, the proposed reorientation has theoretical and methodological implications, including ontological and epistemological reconsideration towards critical realism, the development of an interdisciplinarity perspective, and new methodological approaches such as basenographies, visual data, and fictional novels by veterans. These novel empirical, theoretical, and methodological venues are valuable not only for research on the military but for all fields of study that are dominated by an etic approach. They contribute to a more scientifically holistic perspective that includes and takes seriously the experiences and meaning making of the people being studied.