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- Convenors:
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Volodymyr Artiukh
(University of Oxford)
Taras Fedirko (University of Glasgow)
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- Discussant:
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Rebecca Empson
(UCL)
Short Abstract:
Wars are complex social endeavors that reverberate through space and time. Taking our cue from the Russo-Ukrainian war and intending to put it in comparative perspective, we are interested in empirically grounded papers that explore transformative social effects of wars across the globe.
Long Abstract:
Wars depend on complex social organisation on the battlefield and beyond, and in turn transform the networks of power they rely on. Military mobilisation of people and resources, formation of subjectivities and social groups through discipline and combat, and destruction and displacement caused by organised violence, have far-reaching and long-lasting effects. Thus, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the largest and bloodiest war in Europe since WWII, has arguably dismantled the European security infrastructure, ended the post-Soviet condition, caused unprecedented flows of refugees, and transformed European energy and global food markets. Within Ukraine, it will likely give rise to a new coalition of political forces grounded in networks of war-time solidarity. Elsewhere, the war has sparked a wave of securitisation and militarisation, delivered economic growth to sites of defense production, and spurred right-wing reaction among groups discontented with the economic fallout of the Russian invasion and responses to it. The challenge to the US hegemony in the West and Russia's domination in the post-Soviet space has rekindled numerous regional conflicts from the Balkans through Caucasus to South-East Asia.
These and other reverberations of the Russo-Ukrainian war have been felt in anthropologists' field-sites far beyond Central and Eastern Europe, but they are not unique to this war. We invite contributions that examine processes of social transformation set in motion by past and present wars in order to bring analyses of the global effects of the Russo-Ukrainian war in comparative dialogue with studies of other conflicts.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 13 April, 2023, -Dominic Martin (Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
This paper describes an encounter with a long-term ethnographic informant and friend in September 2022, shortly after Russia's 'partial mobilization', when he tried to convince me why I should fight in Russia's 'Special Military Operation' i.e. the invasion of Ukraine.
Paper long abstract:
This paper describes an encounter with a long-term ethnographic informant and friend in September 2022, shortly after Russia's 'partial mobilization', when he tried to convince me (of the moral and material reasons) why I should fight in Russia's 'Special Military Operation' i.e. the invasion of Ukraine. At the time the Russian Federation promised foreigners a fast track to citizenship if they signed a contract to participate in the war. As my visa was running out I said that I had no option but to leave Russia; no option but one, I joked: to sign-up for the SVO. Much to my incomprehension, this man proceeded to argue for the advantages of this option. The paper takes this perplexing encounter as an entry point to think about and with a variant of 'otherness' that has been little theorized in anthropology: the otherness produced by war. Can anthropologists take 'seriously' something they find not only ostensibly unfathomable or ontologically alien, but also morally reprehensible and politically unconscionable? Is the alterity one is presented with here moral, political, ontological or all of these? Carl Schmitt argued famously for the absoluteness of the friend-enemy distinction that canceled any and all aspirations to ethical universalism. Yet what happens at the micro-interpersonal level of the anthropological encounter when putative friends get re-cast as representatives of 'unfriendly' states?
Alexander Edmonds (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
In the “psywars” of Britain since the early 2000s the psyche of the soldier and ex-soldier has become a problematised object of management, with implications for the delivery of good care, military politics, and the conduct of future war.
Paper long abstract:
Before the start of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan British military authorities had assumed that a highly trained and fit professional force was at little risk of psychological disturbance. But as the wars dragged on, a new military and wider national conversation opened up about the mental health of British soldiers and ex-soldiers. The military ramped up its psychological monitoring of personnel and launched new mental health awareness campaigns, while the psychological troubles of ex-soldiers attracted heightened public sympathy and support. In this talk I discuss the emergence of “post-stoic” military subjects in Britain who must not silently suffer, but are rather enjoined to talk about their mental health. However, whilst clinicians, charities, and the military itself now encourage soldiers to seek psychological help, I argue the recognition of valid service-connected mental suffering nonetheless is highly contested. Drawing on ethnography with soldiers, ex-soldiers, officers, and mental health professionals, I examine how different moral, military, and clinical environments shaped how my research participants talk about violence and suffering – and the consequences of such talk. In what I call the “psywars” of Britain since the early 2000s the psyche of the soldier and ex-soldier has become a problematised object of management, with implications for the delivery of good care, military politics, and the conduct of future war.
Ana Margarida Sousa Santos (Durham University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the different meanings and expressions of traumatic memories of Portuguese soldiers who fought in the liberation wars in Lusophone Africa, exploring the afterlives of war in contemporary Portugal.
Paper long abstract:
Portugal’s late colonial wars have been silenced in national public memory until recently, but in individual memory they remain central. Between 1961 and 1974 Portugal was engaged in three theatres of war in Lusophone Africa: Angola, Guinea Bissau, and Mozambique. Nearly one million Portuguese young men were mobilized to fight a war they did not understand and/or agree with. Upon returning home, especially in the aftermath of the 1974 revolution and the rapid political and social changes taking place in Portugal, the experiences of these young men, and the impact of the war experience on their mental health were silenced or left unacknowledged. New research on the anti-colonial wars in Lusophone Africa (1961-1974) has revealed the range of changes brought at the political, social, and cultural levels in Portuguese society, moving from silenced war experiences to a close examination of its effects and memories.
This paper explores the legacies of war in Portugal, focusing on the returning Portuguese soldiers’ war experiences, trauma, and memories. I will address one central question: how the health and reintegration of military veterans, and the representation and memorialization of war mutually affect each other, specifically focusing on the changing meaning of war related illness and disability. Drawing upon ethnographic research in Portugal, I will explore the enduring links between war, mental health, and memory (collective and personal) through an analysis of meaning, practice, and representation.
Alex Pillen (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
This paper is centred around the notion of ‘wooden phrases’, a term I borrow from Merridale’s book 'Ivan’s War' (2005). ‘Ivan’ – as the ordinary Russian soldier was called – was surrounded by formulaic nonsense. This linguistic predicament is far from unique and reverberates across other wars.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is centred around the notion of ‘wooden phrases’, a term I borrow from Merridale’s book 'Ivan’s War'. This comprehensive history of the Red Army’s rank and file is based on ethnographic work with veterans of the Great Patriotric War. Other data emerged from previously closed military and secret police archives, and the private letters and diaries of soldiers. At the Eastern front, men and women of the Red Army, an underfed and ragtag mass of soldiers, confronted Hitler’s advancing troops. Relentless shelling, marching, terror, and sleeplessness brought many to a breaking point. ‘Ivan’ – as the ordinary Russian soldier was called – was surrounded by formulaic nonsense, ‘wooden phrases’. This linguistic predicament is far from unique and reverberates across other wars. An anthropology of the language of warfare is well-placed to engage in a comparative dialogue about other conflicts including the current Russo-Ukrainian war. This paper unpicks such linguistic realities step by step. A distinction is made between wooden phrases and propaganda, whilst ethnographic material is presented to document unfettered formulaic speech. The formulaic has long been studied as a form of self-evidence that can be judged instantly, based on intuition, guts knowledge. Here snippets of self-evidence are scattered in an impoverished linguistic landscape, far from centres of ritual and political authority. Such an excess of wooden phrases has consequences. I rely on the work of Bakhtin and Polanyi to portray a loss of our ‘sense of language’, and the ‘impressions’ wooden phrases make as people endure war.
Taras Fedirko (University of Glasgow)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with war veterans in Donbas, court records, war memoirs, and social network data, this paper analyses the informal economy of war and its implication for state formation in Ukraine since 2014.
Paper long abstract:
Since the beginning of the war in Donbas in 2014, informal pro-government militias and charities crowdfunding military supplies have been central to the Ukrainian war effort. Mobilizing networks of nationalists and former Maidan revolutionaries, the militias strengthened the Armed Forces of Ukraine in their operations in Donbas, while military charities supplied everything from food and technical gear, to drones, vehicles, ammunition and light weapons, to make up for deficient army logistics. In 2014-15, this informal economy of war increased the efficiency of pro-government forces in Donbas, but also gave militias a certain autonomy from the state even when the state succeeded in regularizing them. The cooperation on which this informal economy of war thrived, created densely interconnected civic networks linking veteran groups with political parties, Western-funded NGOs, and state institutions. By late 2021, even the most anti-government, right-wing networks of volunteer fighters and activists were tightly integrated with Ukrainian political elites and various branches of the executive. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has galvanized these networks anew. This paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork with Donbas war veterans and activists, court records, war memoirs, and social network analysis of author’s database of connections among key players in the political economy of war since February 2022. It describes and analyzes the role of the informal economy of war in the formation of new alliances between armed groups and political patrons, parties and movements on the right since 2014, and their changing relationship to different parts of the Ukrainian state.
Sergen Bahceci (London School of Economics)
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the long aftermath of Cypriot wars which occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, I argue that anthropologists should pay attention to indifference as a particular form of everyday disposition in relation to wars and violence that is distinct from ‘silence’, ‘denial’, or ‘forgetting’.
Paper long abstract:
In my paper I focus on the ‘indifference’ that Turkish Cypriot villagers in my field site in northern Cyprus demonstrate towards the work of the UN supervised Committee of Missing Persons (CMP). The CMP is a joint Greek and Turkish Cypriot effort founded with the aim of locating, exhuming, and identifying about 2000 Greek and Turkish Cypriot persons who went ‘missing’ in Cyprus during the conflict in the 1960s and the war in 1974. Specifically in the village under discussion, the CMP is searching for Greek Cypriot prisoners of war who were summarily executed and unceremoniously buried in a number of mass graves in the village. It is suspected that several Turkish Cypriot villagers, most now deceased, were responsible for these atrocities. Nevertheless, contemporary Turkish Cypriot villagers neither overwhelmingly aid (because the CMP relies on ‘witness’ testimonies) nor seek to hinder the investigative and excavation efforts near their homes. Instead, most villagers express a remarkable ‘indifference’ towards the CMP and the discovered mass grave sites and detach themselves from the ‘historical’ events under investigation. Inspired also by local self-criticisms and moral evaluations, I argue that ‘indifference’ should be analysed with attention to local experiences of time, space, and ethics in post-conflict settings as a generationally specific everyday disposition related to, but distinct from, ‘silence,’ ‘denial,’ or ‘forgetting’. I also trace these expressions of indifference back to the very particular post-conflict ethics of ‘reciprocity’ and ‘closure’ disseminated by the CMP itself.
Ina Zharkevich (Oxford University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will reflect on my long-term fieldwork in the village of Thabang, which was hailed as the Maoist capital during the civil war in Nepal (1996-2006) and explore how the conflict radically transformed Nepali society within a period of less than a decade.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will reflect on my long-term fieldwork in the village of Thabang, which was hailed as the Maoist capital during the civil war in Nepal (1996-2006) and describe how the conflict radically transformed Nepali society within a period of less than a decade. It will explore how the spatial and temporal dimension of Nepal’s civil war – the creation of the guerrilla enclaves which functioned as a parallel state and the exceptional nature of wartime when different rules apply (apaddharma)– came together in transforming people’s everyday lives, normalizing previously transgressive norms, such as beef-eating and inter-caste commensality, and reconfiguring the ways people act in and think about the world. By focusing on the relational side of war – kinship ties between ordinary villagers and guerillas, fraternal bonds within the Maoist Movement, new solidarities that cut across caste and gender divides, and the new divisions across ethnic lines – the paper will show that the social processes and relationships through which the Maoist mobilization/project became possible outlived the war, leading to profound social change in post-conflict Nepal.
The paper will suggest that social change in Nepal came about not so much as a result of war, but rather in the process of war, with the praxis of revolutionary modes of sociality and ‘embodied change’ being key to understanding how social change came about. Rather than being simply a result of the Maoist ideology, it was the embodied experience of new ways of acting during the war – relating across caste, gender and generational divides, enforced as part of the exceptional times of war - that transformed people’s consciousness, their subjectivities, and their everyday praxis.
Emma Rimpiläinen (Uppsala University)
Paper short abstract:
Based on discussions with temporary protection seekers from Ukraine in Finland, this paper analyses tensions arising from the rapid implementation of the protection scheme and the lack of long-term plans for accommodating Ukrainians fleeing war.
Paper long abstract:
This paper reflects on the impact of the Russo-Ukrainian war within Europe by examining how the arrival of tens of thousands of temporary protection seekers has been managed in Finland. Based on qualitative materials collected while working in an NGO, advising people seeking temporary protection in Helsinki from April to September 2022, the paper maps Finland’s place in the European division of labour in accommodating Ukrainian refugees of war. Ukrainians have enjoyed special benefits such as immediate access to employment, free transportation, clothing donations, free meals, and access to museums and attractions, based either on the peculiarities of the temporary protection status or the mobilisation of empathy within Finnish society. At the same time, the very temporariness of residence permits granted within the temporary protection scheme was a source of worry to many Ukrainians who wanted to make sure they would not be sent back involuntarily when the temporary protection directive ends. Regardless of their plans for returning to Ukraine, most Ukrainians appeared to wish to find a job and settle down as quickly as possible. They voiced complaints about access to childcare, opaque practices of transferring clients from transit reception centres in the capital region to reception centres elsewhere in the country, and slow access to healthcare. The paper examines these tensions arising from the quick implementation of the temporary protection directive on the one hand, and the lack of long-term plans for the legal status and integration of this group of people in Finland on the other.
Volodymyr Artiukh (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
Hospitality towards Ukrainian refugees in the EU faces increasing challenges as the Russo-Ukrainian war drags on. This paper explores the contradiction between hospitality towards Ukrainians as a moral/political virtue and its implementation in the housing market in Romania.
Paper long abstract:
Ukrainian refugees enjoyed an unusually warm welcome in the EU as opposed to victims of other recent conflicts.
Although the number of forced migrants from Ukraine surpassed all recent ‘migration crises,’ EU endowed Ukrainian refugees with a bundle of quasi-citizenship rights under the Temporary Protection Directive.
However, this hospitality faces increasing challenges as the Russo-Ukrainian war drags on. European governments report exacerbating problems with housing, cultural integration, and unequal distribution of migrants, while Ukrainians point out lack of social support and employment opportunities as well as occasional conflicts..
These challenges reflect a broader tension between the normative and the political-economic aspects of European migration policy in the context of Russo-Ukrainian war. Addressing this tension, this paper explores the contradiction between hospitality towards Ukrainians as a moral/political virtue and its implementation in the housing market in Romania. Interviews with Ukrainians refugees, Romanian volunteers and civil society activists show that the empathy towards Ukrainian refugees is rooted in class affinity and positive discursive securitisation of Ukrainians. This empathy, however, is restricted to short-term encounters and a limited civil society mobilisation. The reaction of the housing market, however, has been defined by medium-term interest in seeking state funds under the ‘50/20 scheme’. In this sector of the civil society Ukrainian refugees are viewed as a means of appropriating state-distributed funds, thus exacerbating conflicts inherent in unregulated housing market.