Sociology of military captivity in the modern military and social contexts

Abstract

General social contexts of the conflict-centered transformations of the modern world order are evaluated and conceived first and foremost in terms and categories of “hybrid warfare”. Their most significant subjects and objects, principles and structures, norms and institutions, rules and manifestations undergo significant changes. This applies in particular to practically the entire spectrum of political and social subjects and/or socio-political actors in relevant social processes, both at the macro and micro levels. In practice, this is manifested in the blurring and intertwining, the diversity of combinations of their respective social roles and derived socio-legal statuses. These features are, first of all, articulated on fundamentally specific social group as “prisoners of war” and related to it (“hostages”, etc.). Such “mutations” are primarily derived from the “external” socially-meaningful context of a complex and largely ambiguous situation related to the historical-genetic nature of such dynamic situations as the Donbas conflict, operationalized primarily in the categories “Anti-terrorist operation” (ATO), “Joint Forces Operations” (JFO). One of the most important socially significant consequences of this to be some indirect polarization of the respective social groups (which is a complex structured mix of elements of their “victimization” / “stigmatization” and/or “heroization” / “idealization”), and above all “prisoners of war” / “hostages” in public opinion and media discourses.