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- Convenors:
-
Tormod Sund
(University of Tromsø)
Bjørn Enge Bertelsen (University of Bergen)
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- Format:
- Workshops
- Location:
- Wills 3.30
- Start time:
- 19 September, 2006 at
Time zone: Europe/London
- Session slots:
- 3
Short Abstract:
This workshop intends to explore theoretical and methodological of doing anthropological research on the relations between violence and the state in Europe and beyond.
Long Abstract:
The intimate relationship between violence and the state has been central to political philosophy discourse since Hobbes alleged the necessity of a central power securing a monopoly on violence to prevent a 'warre of all against all'. Within anthropology a central focus in the research on violence has been the group dynamics of violent behaviour, with a strong emphasis on the instrumental qualities of violence as a means to gain power and control over scarce resources. However, newer research has criticised such purely instrumental theoretical approaches and has suggested both the need to go beyond the group dynamics and the necessity of including the state in an analysis of violence. Beyond the shift of focus and level to include the state, these newer takes also include the importance of dimensions of meaning in relation to violence, the violence of sovereignty, the symbolic dimensions of violence etc.. These perspectives, and the relationships between violence and the state such as terrorism, insurgencies, rebellions, death squads, repressive regimes and war, have increasingly caught the attention of anthropologists during the recent decades. This workshop wishes to address complexities and challenges related to anthropological research on violence within a state context. We are interested in empirically based contributions that explore different ways of understanding the relations between violence and the state anthropologically and theoretically. For example, how can we anthropologically adequately deal with the local, regional and global dimensions of relationships between violence and the state? How should we address serious challenges in relation to the ethics and politics of research on violence in state contexts?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
The paper examines the long-term impacts of violence during the Bosnian war on today’s inter-ethnic relationships on the local level. On the basis of a social network analysis and from the perspective of local women, it will discuss the scope and the limits of societal reintegration processes.
Paper long abstract:
This paper discusses everyday networking and coping strategies of women, and their role for the societal reintegration process and it's boundaries in the Bosnian post-war community of Prijedor.
The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina heavily affected the inter-ethnic relationships, and destroyed networks of trust, exchange and mutual support within neighbourhoods, networks of friends and even among relatives. These relationships had been vital in pre-war social life. At that time, women were at the heart of inter-ethnic and informal exchange in these neighbourhoods and within families. But these relations and the women's roles in the neighbourhoods have been heavily affected by the war, especially in a region where high rates of violence or even genocide took place. Therefore the process of rebuilding the society as well as the coping with the suffering of intimate violence between and among neighbours has become a crucial challenge for the building of sustainable peace.
On the basis of a social network analysis and from the perspectives of local women, this paper examines the reintegration (and reconciliation) process and it's boundaries between two different groups: the so called Bosnian-Serb women and the Bosnjak (Muslim) women. The focus on social networks in specific localities such as villages and neighbourhoods sheds light on both amicable and hostile relations, and the re-formation or persistence of ethnic boundaries. This helps to explain at what times and under what circumstances such and other boundaries are weakened and processes of ethnicization softened.
Paper short abstract:
This paper highlights the value of long-term participant observation within ethnography for understanding kinship and relations that produced political violence in Peru and shaped how local people and outside agencies struggled to promote (re)construction and ‘reconciliation’.
Paper long abstract:
Truth commissions are now familiar institutions set up to investigate contemporary global conflicts and promote peace and 'reconciliation' processes in 'new' and emerging democratic states. They have attracted the interests of a number of scholars, including anthropologists, who have applied their knowledge and expertise to the work of truth commissions and/or conducted ethnographies of them and the politico-legal discourses particular truth commissions have promoted. However, this paper will argue that these approaches have steered anthropologists away from conducting long-term participant observation within ethnography. Based on examples from research within a 'community' in the Andean highlands of Ayacucho, Peru, this paper will show that long-term participant observation within ethnography can shed light on a network of relations, and especially kinship relations that both produced political violence and shaped conflicted ways local people and intervening outside agencies struggled to (re)build community and promote 'reconciliation' in a contemporary context. The Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission was one of these intervening outside agencies that this paper will argue could not encompass long-term participant observation within ethnography as a research method or engage with local forms of violence and 'reconciliation' in its project to promote national 'reconciliation'. The paper concludes by discussing the ways anthropologists go about 'doing ethnography' in order to contribute both to geopolitical debates on global conflicts and existing knowledge and discussions within the discipline of anthropology.
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents research into the methods for analysing and monitoring international interaction toward crises/conflict management. The relevance of these methods will be illustrated using the case of the Israeli-Lebanon Conflict.
Paper long abstract:
Societies develop through integration and conflict: local, national and international communities, social/political institutions and networks as well as separate individuals are constantly balancing between a certain degree of cooperation and conflict being involved in the processes of social communication and interaction. The balance between cooperative - conflict tendencies is the main precondition for harmonious social development in which conflict acts as a healthy competition among actors. This paper represents a research into the methods for analyzing and monitoring international interaction toward crises/conflict prevention and peace-building, that though originated outside anthropology can be usefully employed within this discipline.
The increasing level of interaction supports the emergence and growth of social networks, accelerates the process of social dynamics and finally leads to the rise of integration. The decrease of intensity of interaction delays the process of integration that gradually overweighs the conflict tendencies above the peace ones. The destruction of cooperative links and institutional/legal frameworks of interaction is the main cause of dispute's transition from the civil discourse to the conflict one (which varies from the verbal aggression in the latent conflict phase to the escalation of violence in its active phase). The balance in the integration-disintegration continuum predefined by the intensity of interaction is the main focus of the paper.
The intensity of interaction can be analysed by means of the Discourse and Event Data Analysis. The Discourse Analysis is aimed at analysing the context and the content field of the interaction. The Automated Event Data analysis estimates the interaction quantitatively and together with Statistical Analysis evaluates the correlation between variables of conflict-cooperative behaviour.The combination of these methods allows estimating and predicting the dynamics of a dispute toward the peaceful settlement or conflict escalation scenario and in the latter case, to generate the tools of early warning and third party intervention. These methods can promote making anthropological understandings relevant to processes of conflict prevention/resolution and policy-making. The relevance of the methods for anthropology will be illustrated upon the background of anthropological approaches to the Israeli - Lebanon conflict.
Paper short abstract:
If homelessness represents the clearest manifestation of exclusion, incarceration is the central mechanism of punishment. The dual moments come together in a powerful self-reinforcing nexus, revealing the interdependence of exclusion and punishment in American poverty policy.
Paper long abstract:
The US tendency to the understand poverty in terms of moral failings has two faces. The first face turns away from the poverty and misery of the economically excluded, relying on the saving power of low wage jobs. The other face turns towards the excluded individual, defining and treating him or her as a criminal. American men cycling through homelessness and incarceration experience both faces of the discourse, in often rapid succession. The incarceration/homelessness cycle which will be elaborated in this paper represents a force greater than the sum of its parts. For those trying to adjust after prison or jail time, homelessness reinforces social marginalization, alienation, and criminal status. While street homelessness was experienced by some of space of freedom from illegitimate authority, living on the street reinforced their isolation from mainstream social institutions, trapping at the same time as it liberated. Once living on the street, crimes of desperation, rabble management, and the close proximity of many ex-cons makes incarceration and reincarceration far more likely than it would be for the same people if they were not homeless. If homelessness represents the clearest manifestation of exclusion, incarceration is the central mechanism of punishment. The dual moments come together in a powerful self-reinforcing nexus, revealing the interdependence of exclusion and punishment in American poverty policy.
Paper short abstract:
Based on fieldwork in 2004-05, this paper explores the relationship between violence and state assertions of territorial sovereignty by focusing on the role of border guards as transmitters of 'everyday state violence' in an area of politicised borderland between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between violence and state assertions of territorial sovereignty by focusing on the role of border guards as transmitters of "everyday state violence" in an area of contested borderland. I am interested in the place of violence both as potentially marking an exception (by asserting territorial primacy or banishing "foreigners") and of signalling in-corporation into the body politic (through, for instance, the hazing of soldiers). The ethnographic focus is an area of politicized border in the Ferghana valley, where Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan have been inscribing their independence on the landscape with increasing vigour over the last decade. Here, young military conscripts charged with upholding "state sovereignty" are a common site in border villages otherwise scarred by the hasty retreat of Soviet collective farming. As well as regulating movement across borders that until recently were unmarked and largely irrelevant to daily life, border guards from all three states are now often invoked as local "strong men" to back up property claims, guard "contested territory" and regulate disputes over water.
Border crossings and checkpoints provide exceptional sites to explore the phenomenon of state violence as an element of everyday life. Borders are central to the imagination of the state as sovereign and territorially bounded. Border guards often have a central place in official demonstrations of sovereign power. And yet, studied ethnographically, from the bottom up, border encounters also reveal both the arbitrariness and contingency of state violence. In an area such as the Ferghana valley, where bribes at borders are common and the young conscripts are often intensely dependent on the friendship and goodwill of the local villagers, borders often simultaneously expose the flimsiness of the distinction between legality and illegality, "state" and "society". By looking at interactions between border guards and villagers in an area of newly-salient border, I explore the place of violence in marking the state's "edge", and in so doing, examine theoretically the relationship between sovereignty, territoriality and the everyday violence of the state.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores dynamics of power, authority and transformations of violence in post-war Mozambique. The concepts 'war machine'/'state' and 'naked life' are used to argue for the postcolonial context being marked by multiple, violent and adversely related sovereignities underlining its non-unity.
Paper long abstract:
This paper seeks to explore the dynamics of power, authority and violence within the context of Mozambique. The country is taken as an example of the predicaments of the postcolonial states. Emerging from almost 30 years of civil war following liberation war in 1992, the country is now formally at peace. However, it will be argued in this paper that the particular configurations of violence and power from the country's belligerent past have not faded away, but rather have been transformed after the formal ending of warfare. In using the empirical examples of sorcery of accumulation and protection and police-related death squads, the paper will argue for the need to theorise not only postconflict violence but the imperative of locating these processes within the context of the postcolonial state. Employing Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of 'state' and 'war-machine' and Giorgio Agamben's notion of 'naked/bare life', the analysis aims at demonstrating the non-unity of the postcolonial state, arguing specifically for the existence of multiple, violent and adversely related sovereignities in these contexts. The paper is based on recurring fieldworks since 1998 in periurban and urban Chimoio, Manica province, central Mozambique.
Paper short abstract:
In Kashmir, where Indian forces have fought pro-independence militants for 17 years, state violence is not only a means to an end but an expression of the logic of nation-building and notions of cultural and territorial identity.
Paper long abstract:
Paper proposal
Symbol and function in the violence of counterinsurgency: stories from Kashmir
Shubh Mathur
June 2006
Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Connecticut College
This paper looks at the violence of the ongoing conflict in Kashmir, where Indian forces have fought pro-independence militants for seventeen years. It seeks to understand the violence of counterinsurgency not only in terms of its stated goals but also as an expression of the underlying logic of nation-building and notions of Indian cultural and territorial identity. Representations of this violence in Indian media, official and academic accounts constitute a second wave of symbolic violence, serving to silence or marginalize the voices of its victims and survivors.
This paper questions these accounts from the perspective of Kashmiri victims and survivors - torture survivors, families of the disappeared, former prisoners and their advocates. It seeks to understand the everyday reality of state terror and thereby to add another dimension to the study of the Indian state and its social and political dynamics. Three stories are used to illustrate the mechanics and symbolic meanings of violence - the killing of human rights lawyer Jalil Andrabi by the Indian army in 1996 and the impunity provided by the state to the killers; the 'disappearance' of a chemist, father of three children, who was arrested by Indian forces in Budgam district in 2002; and the use of teenage children as 'human shields' by Indian forces in search operations.
Finally this paper seeks to evaluate the positive and negative consequences of 'dangerous anthropology', of research on conflict situations where the safety of subjects and researcher are at stake.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between the anthropologist, his informants and the wider context of violent conflict in the Spanish part of the Basque region. The paper will draw on field experiences of the anthropologist being in between antagonistic worlds of suffering within a state context.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between the anthropologist, his informants and the wider context of violent conflict in Spanish part of the Basque region. The paper will draw on field experiences of the anthropologist being in between antagonistic worlds of suffering within a state context.
I will argue that fieldwork in state contexts, where antagonism, tension, suffering and conflict are prevalent, pose particular or at least highlight certain challenges in connection with the anthropological method of participant observation. Informants trying to persuade the ethnographer "to chose side" in the conflict, might be described as one such challenge. Narrators of stories of suffering often claim absolute truth value and an acceptance of these "truths" by the anthropologist. Moreover narrators and narratives of suffering and violent acts are often intricately connected with dominant antagonistic discourses. In this way narratives of violence suffering accentuate issues of positioning and ethics while in the field and while writing ethnography. In this paper I will focus on these challenges as an anthropologist doing research in the intersection between antagonistic worlds.