Emmanuel Goffi

Many debates have been raised about the sense to make the supreme sacrifice by French military personnel in Afghanistan (Merchet, 2008). The question of sacrifice has, in addition, been widely studied in sociology and philosophy (Girard, 1972; Mauss & Hubert, 1899; Kantorowicz, 1984).
In a conflict often presented in France as based on humanitarian motives, it seems paradoxical, to expect troops to give their lives for other peoples, whiles there is a strong tradition of sacrifice for the sake of the nation and its values (Kantorowicz, 1984; Cuchet & al., 2009). This paradox is partly due to the shift from a patriotic to a cosmopolitan approach of overseas military operations in the international realm. If, until the early nineties France deployed troops solely to defend its interests, the end of the Cold War led to deployments made under United Nations’ mandates characterized by their cosmopolitan tropism. This marked a shift in the way France uses its military tool. Already in 1995, Edward Luttwak announced, a move to “post-heroic warfare” in which there would be no longer any national great purposes that could justify casualties among national forces. Besides, the peaceful European environment led the French to consider that wars were no longer an option and that modern conflicts would be waged quickly with few casualties. This post Cold War framework shaped new perceptions, often distorted, about the nature of war and the profession of arms.
The first goal of my thesis is to show that sacrifice is a social construct deeply linked to perceptions (Jervis, 1976) of values worth being defended, and that in the specific case of Afghanistan those values are not clear enough to justify the sacrifice of military professionals such as officers (Huntington, 1957; Janowitz, 1971), and its acceptance by the whole nation. The second goal is then to determine to what extent conducting the operation in Afghanistan has been impacted by the perceptions of officers’ sacrifice within the nation and amongst the officers themselves.
With these goals in mind, this thesis will be explicated through the constructivist approach of international relations (Wendt, 1999; Finnemore, 1996), and more specifically to constructivism as applied to war (Lindeman, 2008).

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