Moral injury recovery in military life: Reconstructing the moral landscape

Introduction: Moral injury, external demands and expectations conflicting with individuals’ moral beliefs, and subsequent recovery processes have received increasing attention in military research. Existing scholarship has either adopted an agency-centred perspective, emphasizing coping strategies, emotional regulation, and therapeutic repair, or foregrounded the organizational, institutional, and political conditions shaping recovery. Methods: This article develops a conceptual analysis grounded in Giddens’s structuration theory to examine moral injury and recovery as outcomes of the dynamic and mutually constitutive interplay between individual agency and social structures. Results: From this structuration perspective, military contexts are understood as evolving environments that both shape and are shaped by service members’ everyday practices. Moral injury is reconceptualized not only as an episodic clash between fixed personal values and external demands but also as increasing moral misalignment between soldiers and military institutions. Discussion: This recursive view reframes moral injury recovery as a process distributed across individuals and structures rather than as located solely within the individual or produced by the institution. The article concludes by outlining implications for research and intervention, calling for research that explicitly addresses the mutual constitution of agency and structure in advancing the understanding of moral injury recovery in military settings.