Description
This paper asks: how do soldiers deployed in domestic security operations come to understand and justify their professional role, not only through discipline and defence guidelines, but through emotion? To answer this, the paper explores how military professionalism, officially framed as apolitical and detached, is in fact deeply shaped by emotional registers and moral orders. It focuses on French soldiers deployed domestically under the ‘Vigipirate’ plan (approximately 10,000 boots on the ground) and draws on ethnographic interviews with 44 participants. Feminist and critical military studies have shown how militarism is sustained through gendered imaginaries and everyday practices. Yet what remains underexplored is how soldiers’ emotions — shaped here by vulnerability, care, and family relations — legitimise domestic militarisation. Soldiers see themselves as vulnerable soldier-civilians protecting other vulnerable civilians, embedding personal feelings into their professional practice. The paper traces how affect circulates between the military and civilian spheres, revealing a society perceived by soldiers as emotionally invested in militarist logics, which, in turn, fosters a corresponding emotional professionalism that enables militarisation. By showing how affect frames what is possible and acceptable in military work, the paper contributes to debates on security practices, militarisation in Western democracies, and the porous boundaries of civil-military relations.
