Samenvatting

Military intervention is a collective enterprise which may have a great moral impact on soldiers. Although this has since long been known, most current conceptualizations of military distress pay marginal attention to its moral and sociopolitical-political aspects. Current concepts such as 'post-traumatic stress disorder' tend to focus on fear-related pathology rather than moral conflict, and on the psyche of the soldier rather than of the people who send soldiers on a mission and welcome them back. To address these gaps, the present study examined potential moral dimensions of deployment-related distress and the role of political and societal factors in this. The focus is on the relatively new concept of 'moral injury', which refers to the suffering that may arise when a person's expectations and beliefs about right and wrong and personal goodness are violated, either by him- or herself or by others.