The Moral Imperative to Fight : Grievous and Combat-Driven Masculinities in the Syrian War

Aldoughli, Rahaf (2026) The Moral Imperative to Fight : Grievous and Combat-Driven Masculinities in the Syrian War. Security Dialogue. ISSN 0967-0106 (In Press)

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Abstract

Why do individuals join and persist in armed conflict even under conditions of extreme risk and loss? This article examines how political grievances are internalised through gendered identity to produce a moral imperative to fight in the Syrian war. Drawing on over 200 hours of interviews with Syrian fighters conducted between 2022 and 2024, including in-depth interviews with thirty-four Syrian National Army (SNA) fighters analysed in this article, and complemented by new follow-up fieldwork conducted in Syria in 2025 after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the article develops a relational framework linking structural grievance, emotional experience, and masculine subjectivity. The study introduces two interrelated analytical typologies. Grievous masculinity describes a gendered response to humiliation, political dispossession, and moral injury that constructs violence as an obligation to restore dignity and honour. Combat-driven masculinity emerges through the embodied practices of fighting, where risk, sacrifice, and camaraderie consolidate masculine identity and sustain participation in violence. Integrating feminist security studies, just war theory, and critical masculinity scholarship, the article conceptualises the moral imperative to fight as a gendered logic that fuses emotional injury with ethical justification for armed mobilisation. By moving beyond material or ideological explanations, it demonstrates how masculine identities operate as affective and moral economies that sustain combatant persistence and reproduce militarised social orders. The findings advance theoretical and policy discussions on gender and armed mobilisation, offering insights for future research on military integration, combatant transitions, and violent behaviour in postwar Syria and comparable conflict contexts.