Argentinian peacekeepers and moral becoming in Cyprus

Abstract

ABSTRACT The chronic absence of combat is central to deployment experience for Argentinian Army personnel, and serves as a lens to explore ethical life from a military perspective, not as a fixed set of military virtues, yet as an evolving moral project grounded in everyday ambiguities around humanitarian militarism. Combining a historical analysis of state repression and institutional reform with ethnographic fieldwork with Argentinian members of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, this article shows how present-day Argentinian military ideals and aspirations change, overlap, and awkwardly sit together while being a ‘beachkeeper’. Due to far-reaching military curtailment and precarious working conditions that are both related to legacies of authoritarianism, even the potential of combat is no longer a possibility for the Argentinian Army. Through the analysis of both ethnographic observations and interviews with mid-career Argentinian officers, this article suggests that because of a chronic inaccessibility to military virtues (such as thrill, manliness, and toughness), participating in humanitarian assistance does not provoke military boredom nor a moral failure to become a competent and virtuous warrior. Being involved in light peacekeeping is rather a form of survival from a social death in a society that has largely turned its back to its armed forces, while at the same time it is an expression of their institutional limitations. This article concludes by suggesting how the ethical turn in anthropology can critically address the absence of combat as a productive force for a non-violent ethic without fixing military virtue in stone.