An emerging military-industrial-nonprofit complex? Exploring conscripted volunteering in Israel

Abstract

‘Volunteering’ has been emerging in the last decades as an object of intensified political interest and promotion, assembled through a myriad of alignments, composed of state institutions and international bodies, corporations, and third sector actors, operating across local, nationwide, and transnational scales. This article focuses on a particular configuration that I call ‘conscripted volunteering’, in which soldiers engage in activities framed as ‘doing good’ beyond their regular military duties. The article explores how this configuration emerges in Israel through growing efforts to create assemblages of corporate, public, nonprofit, and military actors. These assembling efforts include initiating and maintaining connections, routinizing and sustaining partnerships, and aligning various interests and needs. While some assemblages gradually dissolve, others are successfully sustained and new ones emerge. The overall proliferation of such assemblages in Israel is identified in this article as an emerging ‘military-industrial-nonprofit complex’ that is forged by a consensual neoliberal agenda regarding citizenship and modalities of participation. These insights could be utilized to understand various types of military-humanitarian interventions and to reconceptualize military-society relations more broadly.