View the archive of my 90-minute class and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about naming and understanding moral injury and about surviving its personal consequence.
I’m an author, an analyst, and — currently — a Professor of Practice of Human Rights at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. But first, and always, I am a reporter. I write long-format narratives, mainly about war and the politics of conflict.
My focus is on war crimes; global terrorism; refugee issues and sexual violence during war time. My goal is to document evidence on the ground that can later be cited in war crimes tribunals. I work alone; often undercover and in closed and difficult countries. And as a result, I’ve seen first-hand the profound trauma common to every war zone. Too often, I have also witnessed the devastating psychological consequences of conflict that continue to live on for members of local populations, for active soldiers, and for journalists like me.
In August 2020, Harper’s Magazine published my essay, “On Moral Injury,” in which I sought to give name to a single, shared scar common to all war zone participants — a scar that Dr. Anthony Feinstein, with whom I’ve worked closely, describes it as: “an affront to your moral compass based on your own behavior and the things you have failed to do.”
Moral injury is a branch of trauma that affects individuals forced to witness an event that goes against their moral core: A soldier, for example, who during war time is forced to witness torture; a a mother who sees her children bullied; journalists who witness terrible atrocities and must face choices between their obligation to help and their duty to observe, and who many remain haunted by their decisions for years afterward. In a collective sense, moral injury can similarly impact groups of people — citizens, for example, whose political values differ drastically from their country’s leaders and who feel deeply offended by lying, cheating or injustice in their political life.
In this ninety-minute class, I will look more closely at moral injury, and focus on what I’ve seen when individuals — and communities — believe they have significantly failed to live up to their own ethical standards. I’ll illustrate the psychological damage inflicted by this ethical dilemma with stories from my own career as a frontline journalist. I’ll address the responsibilities that journalists have toward their subjects, and that news organizations should their similarly have to their reporters. I will also explore some extended dimensions of moral injury, including for example, the moral injuries that the COVID-19 pandemic will likely inflict on us all in the months and years ahead.
Living through 2020 tested many of our core values — about what is fair and what is just, about illness as a metaphor. It also exposed the weakness of the health care system and the underlying structural injustice in America — who is rich, who is poor, who gets good care and who does not. How do we live with ourselves about witnessing such cataclysmic shifts in society, and our own collective trauma as a society? How can racism, sexism and injustice be so prevalent in a country that has so much to offer and is so evolved?
With the start of a new year, the beginning of a new U.S. government, and — we all hope — the beginning of the end of COVID-19 now in sight, it feels like the time to think through these issues, and to further develop together the concept of moral injury and its personal consequences.
I hope you’ll join me.
Janine di Giovanni is a multi-award winning journalist and author, a Senior Fellow and Lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. CNN made a short video of her life and work when the International Women’s’ Media Foundation gave her their prestigious Courage in Journalism Prize in 2016 for her life’s work.
Janine writes long format reportage, mainly about war and the politics of conflict. She was awarded a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, and is also a public speaker and a foreign policy analyst. In 2020, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her their highest non-fiction prize, the Blake Dodd. She is currently working on a new book called The Vanishing: The Twilight of Christianity in the Middle East which will be published in 2021. Her previous book, The Morning they Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria was translated into 30 languages and was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein New York Public Library Award for Excellence in Journalism. She has published eight other books.
She was a war reporter for nearly three decades, from the first Palestinian intifada in the early 1990s to the siege of Sarajevo; the Rwandan genocide; the brutal wars in Sierra Leone, Somalia, Ivory Coast and Liberia to Chechnya, Afghanistan, Pakistan. She reported extensively in Iraq pre- and post-invasion, and the Arab Spring and finally Syria. Her field work for her current book takes her to Gaza, Iraq, Egypt and Syria. Her focus is on war crimes; global terrorism; refugee issues and sexual violence during war time. Her goal is to document evidence on the ground that can later be cited in war crimes tribunals. She works alone; often undercover and in closed and difficult countries.
Janine is the former Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and has won more than a dozen awards, including the National Magazine Award, two Amnesty International Prizes and the prestigious Courage in Journalism, and many others.
As an analyst, Janine has written governmental white papers and been a Senior Consultant for projects for the UN Refugee Agency; the UN Democracy Fund; The Shattuck Center on Conflict, Negotiation and Recover; the International Refugee Commission. She is an International Board Member of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, and she is also an advisor on strategic communications.
She was a long-time Senior Foreign Correspondent for The Times of London and a Contributing Editor for Vanity Fair. She now writes for the New York Times; The Washington Post; The Guardian; The New York Review of Books; Harpers; The Atlantic; Foreign Affairs and many other publications. She currently has a twice monthly column on Global Affairs in The Nation Newspaper, in Abu Dhabi. She has written thousands of essays, reportage and Op Eds over her thirty-year career, and you can see all of them here.
As a speaker, her TED Talk “What I Saw in the War” has nearly 1million hits on YouTube. She has been a Delegate to the World Economic Forum, Davos; The UK Governments’ Conference on Sexual Violence during War Time; a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School; Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Government; the London School of Economics, She has moderated events at The World Bank, The United Nations, the US State Department; and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy where she was a Pakis Fellow in 2016.
She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the British Governments Stabilization Unit for Fragile States. She is a non-resident Fellow at New America Foundation and the Geneva Center for Security Policy.
A multi-national, Janine lives in Manhattan with her son, Luca Girodon, but she also considers London and Paris home.
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