ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of how war can be enabling and disabling, and what kinds of agency concepts war entails. It focuses on the resources that literature has at its disposal to represent agency on different levels. Philosophy is concerned predominantly with the individual experience and expression of agency, whereas sociology focuses on the socio-cultural contexts in which actions are conceived, take place, and resonate. Rather than seeing agency as conditioned by determinist or libertarian views, compatibilism sees the locus of agency in action explanation. As intentional actions constitute the expression of agency, an explanation of them is indispensable. From the perspective of structure as a restriction of agency, as in Karl Marx and Louis Althusser, agency is often seen as existent only somehow outside of social structures. The relationship between acting and reflecting is therefore of utmost importance for the evaluation of a character’s agency.
