Short Abstract:

Armed conflicts and crises are often synonymous with excess mortality. Therefore, dealing with difficult deaths is unavoidable. In this panel we explore how people navigate difficult deaths and their aftermath, and what socio-political dynamics this entrenches or challenges.

Long Abstract:

Deaths during conflict and crisis are not only difficult because they are excessive, but also because they do not fit people’s hopes of when, where and how they should die. Combatants and civilians do not only die from direct violence, but because of a crisis-induced lack of food, water and medicine. This panel pays attention to the dead and the aftermath of death to help us understand living people’s experiences of armed conflict and crisis, the politics at play during these crises, but also how people navigate and reimaging the future despite loss. Literature from Sociology, Anthropology and Death Studies has already taught us that responses to death are always shaped by and, in turn, reshape society, culture and politics. In contexts of political violence, bodies (of the living and dead), as well as ghosts, memories and ‘emotive materialities’, become a particularly important political space. War-time bodies can shape global politics, and everyday struggles for power and equity. In this panel we invite papers from a mixture of disciplines that explore how dealing with death and its aftermath during conflict and crisis allow (or hinder) civilians and combatants themselves to navigate the often inequitable, hierarchical, predatory, future-less politics of crisis.

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