What a Country Owes Its Soldiers
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Harvard University Press
Publishing:27th Nov '26
£24.95
This title is due to be published on 27th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
A clarion call to recognize soldiers’ rights, arguing that volunteering to fight and die for one’s country does not mean consenting to exploitation in the process.
American leaders endlessly profess their admiration for military service members. But these effusive declarations hardly comport with reality. Soldiers receive shoddy equipment and inadequate medical care; they are ordered to commit crimes and deployed to illegal wars. Such treatment is rarely recognized for what it is: a violation of the duty owed to soldiers by their government. When American service members are injured or killed during training, for example, they and their families are barred from suing the military for negligence or malfeasance. And when the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib came to light, the subsequent proceedings focused just on low-ranking perpetrators. The psychological harm done to the soldiers themselves by commanders who ordered them to commit torture in the first place went unacknowledged.
Examining statutes, treaties, court cases, and congressional hearings, Saira Mohamed shows how the law encourages the treatment of soldiers as mere instruments, to be used and abused however the government wishes. She also unearths overlooked laws that point in the other direction, suggesting the possibility of robust protections for service members. Paradoxically, these get ignored in part because of the popular adulation of the military—the vision of service members as heroes who selflessly endure unlimited sacrifice. The all-volunteer nature of the force also promotes the misguided notion that soldiers have willingly accepted whatever mistreatment they might experience.
What a Country Owes Its Soldiers shows how laws and mindsets can change, enabling genuine respect for soldiers’ humanity. Acknowledging their rights can transform our understanding of those who fight America’s wars, and of American warmaking itself.
What a Country Owes Its Soldiers is a deeply thoughtful and philosophically rich look not simply at how the state often fails to care for soldiers, but how those failures are built upon a dangerously flawed conception of the state’s relationship to violence and to the tools it uses to dole it out. A marvelous book. -- Phil Klay, author of Redeployment
This is a paradigm-shifting book for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners in the United States and around the world. We are used to seeing soldiers as perpetrators, not rights-holders. Saira Mohamed shows us irrefutably that they are both. -- Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of The Idea That Is America
A bracing and deeply original book. At a moment when leaders openly treat the military as a tool of personal and political will, What a Country Owes Its Soldiers is not just a profound work of legal scholarship but an urgent moral reckoning—one that should change how lawyers, policymakers, and citizens alike think about war and the people we ask to fight in it. -- Stephen Vladeck, author of The Shadow Docket
Americans purport to hold their troops in the highest regard. In reality, as this compelling study shows, they routinely subject their fellow citizens in uniform to neglect, abuse, and casual mistreatment. An illuminating look at an important and overlooked subject. -- Andrew J. Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power
Saira Mohamed persuasively argues that soldiers should be treated not as mere instruments of state power, but as people with rightful claims on the government they serve. What a Country Owes Its Soldiers is a bracing rethinking of war, law, and democratic responsibility—and a reminder that how a country treats its military personnel is the concern of every citizen. -- Oona A. Hathaway, author of The Internationalists
A provocative and carefully documented case that US law actively sustains the treatment of military personnel as mere instruments of the state, ‘weapons’ rather than people—and that the law itself, examined more closely, already contains the tools to dismantle this legal architecture. Beautifully written, ambitious in scope, and humanistic in method, What a Country Owes Its Soldiers reads legal doctrine alongside the poetry of Wilfred Owen and the accounts of soldiers themselves to argue that recognizing service members as rights-holders, not just heroes or weapons, is both legally grounded and morally urgent. -- Rosa Brooks, author of How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything
ISBN: 9780674301641
Dimensions: 235mm x 156mm x 19mm
Weight: 577g
288 pages