Paper short abstract:

Humanitarians increasingly pay attention to civilian self-protection strategies. However, crucial to these self-protection strategies is people’s own conception of safety and insecurity, and music during conflict can help us understand these. We draw on findings from Warrap State (South Sudan).

Paper long abstract:

We advocate for ethnomusicology - the critical study of the dialogical relationship between music and the contexts that define it - as a research approach to better understanding experiences of humanitarian protection and the way that people stay safe during conflict. As humanitarian protection strategies have not kept all civilians safe, there is growing scholarly and policy attention to self-protection strategies. We argue that paying attention to music can help humanitarians to build upon, and not undermine, local safety strategies and understand their potentially alternative epistemologies and priorities. As humanitarians pay more attention to self-protection strategies, the danger is that they instrumentalise these strategies without understanding their nuances and moral justifications. Paying attention to songs and music has the potential to help humanitarians understand better. For example, music offers an alternative lens to better understand people’s protection priorities in contexts where lived experiences can be too emotive or political to be verbalised in other ways.

The paper is based on empirical research in Warrap State, South Sudan. Warrap State was a key battle ground for the wars of the 1980s – 2000s and has remained a sight of deadly armed conflict in subsequent decades, and even during periods of ‘peace’. We carried out qualitative research in 2022 and 2023, and were supported by local researchers Regina Nyankiir Arop, Benjamin Dut Dut and Bol Mawien. We find that people use songs aesthetically and symbolically to communicate understandings of protection and safety that can vary from those of humanitarian protection actors.