On temporality and morality: negotiating POW survival in current protracted wars

ABSTRACT This article juxtaposes the procedures and narratives by which US and Israeli political cultures mediate situations of prisoners of war (POWs) during protracted wars. In protracted wars, repatriation is independent of reconciliation processes, with no international contracts governing the ethics of asymmetric prisoner exchange. Empirically, this article examines political cultures by analyzing news reports of Bowe Bergdahl (USA) and Gilad Shalit (Israel), who were imprisoned and repatriated during the US war in Afghanistan, and the Israel/Palestine conflict, respectively. Theoretically, this article (1) Situates POW affairs as highlighting a contradiction between two ideals: casualty aversion and self-sacrifice. (2) Relates POW affairs to scholarship on military-to-civilian transitions, and harnesses van Gennep’s phases of separation, liminality and reintegration, to analyze transitions as experiences of collectives, and not of soldiers. The analysis shows that US media accounts depict both the war in Afghanistan and the three phases of transition as controlled by individuals’ actions. Israeli accounts, by contrast, employ passive terminology when mediating both conflicts and POW affairs. Both political cultures develop temporal pattens to regulate the mutual obligations pertaining to soldiers, publics and states: a lingering military trial in the USA, and a new conceptualization of abduction in Israel. Arguing that temporality and morality are interlinked due to the open duration of current conflicts, this article suggests a definition of protracted wars that highlights this reciprocity between open-endedness, disrupted ceremonies, and moral changes: from rescuing soldiers to questioning the convention of obligatory rescue.