Abstract
<p>War depends on organizations that turn abstract political objectives into concrete acts of force. Yet within these organizations, violence must be carried out by individuals whose willingness to harm does not ensure disciplined action under conditions of threat, uncertainty, and time pressure. How do military organizations make lethal violence reliably executable under these conditions? Drawing on an abductive study of 57 soldiers from the United States, Ukraine, and Israel, we develop a theory of the execution of organized violence centered on mechanistic self-dehumanization (MSD): an episodic shift in self-perception in which people experience themselves as instruments, with reduced emotional responsiveness and reflective processing. We find that military socialization, training, and combat routines create strong situations in which this instrumental self-perception becomes viable and, in some cases, useful for execution. In these moments, participants recalled becoming less like reflective moral subjects and more like instruments of execution, a shift they described as helping them carry out violence that might otherwise be psychologically difficult. Effective execution could then become affirming, experienced as evidence of competence, validation of professional identity, or enactment of a valued moral purpose. By showing how organizations reshape self-experience to make difficult action performable, this study advances research on organized violence, self-dehumanization, and the micro-foundations of organizational action.</p>