This article presents Arnold Van Gennep’s dynamic structure, suggesting that it depicts phenomena that are both linear and recurring. I elucidate Van Gennep’s structure by closely reading Rites de passage’s penultimate chapter. This chapter, which might seem a mere collection of “leftover” materials, is where Van Gennep’s conceptualization subverts perceptions of structure as a rigid social organization. Here, he does not envision a delimited order, bound by distinct phases of separation, liminality, and aggregation, but rather complexifies these three phases. Van Gennep portrays these phases as repeated beats and pulses, which attain modification and revitalization during events of differentiation and reintegration. This article continues to examine the utility of Van Gennep’s concepts for studying current warfare’s lingering and routinized nature, as an alternative to the study of war through the binary poles of peace and war, order and chaos, and structure and anti-structure. By discussing the 2015 Strategy Doctrine of the Israeli military, I suggest that Rites de passage’s unique formulation of structure allows considering the lingering, cyclical, and ambiguous aspects of current warfare.

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This article addresses the complementary work of psychological notions and courts in handling suicides occurring in the course of military service. We suggest the category of mutuality between individuals and social settings as an analytic perspective for the study of suicide, illuminating not only how suicide is constructed, but also theorizing the effects of this construction. Our findings rest on content analysis of 34 verdicts on cases of suicide occurring within the Israeli military. In these verdicts, mostly issued to resolve disputes between bereaved parents and state authorities, Israeli courts decided on the causes of death and the responsibilities of the military and state for soldiers’ suicides. Courts base their decisions on the ambiguous psychological concept of suicidal individuals, explaining self-demise as the result of an internal malaise and avoid addressing the coercive circumstances within which Israeli soldiers operate. By conclusively linking self-demise to suicidality, courts produce an idea of death-seeking soldiers, who fail to ensure their own well-being as well as to defend the common good. Courts render the difficulties encountered during military service mental and personal, thereby contracting, standardizing, and individualizing the idea of mutuality between soldiers, families, and state. To explain these repercussions of juridification and psychologization processes, we draw attention to Durkheim’s conceptualization of contractual obligations and non-contractual sentiments. We elaborate on the Durkheimian connection between solidarity and suicide, by highlighting the outcomes of their interrelated management, especially the courts’ shaping of thin mutuality when arbitrating suicide disputes. Adopting psychological reasoning and assessing personal responsibility, courts potentially fail in their constitutive role of discussing matters of collective concerns.

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