Committing suicide like a man: analysing the suicide of conscripts in the Greek army

In Greece, conscripts, men between 18 and 45 years of age doing their military service, kill themselves at least three times more frequently than civilians do. How can an institution that claims to masculinise young people through extreme experiences and training in weapons and war host such a remarkable phenomenon of voluntary deaths? Based on a mosaic of complementary data (semi-structured interviews, discourse analysis, statistical data analysis, participant observation), this article shows that visions of masculinity in the specific context of the Greek army structure suicidal trajectories. By employing feminist theory to examine military service in a masculine institution that aims to produce “real” men, this paper analyses and proposes a Durkheimian typology of the voluntary deaths studied as a “social fact”: fatalistic suicides at the beginning of conscription and fatalistic suicides towards the end.