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- Convenors:
-
Brigittine French
(Grinnell College)
Victoria Sanford (CUNY)
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- Discussants:
-
Brigittine French
(Grinnell College)
Victoria Sanford (CUNY)
- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 26 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel examines survivors’ discourses and embodied experiences of past violence in relation to hopes for more peaceful futures during uncertain times. It does so by interrogating multiple affective stances, which guide human action toward a horizon of possibility that is collectively imagined.
Long Abstract:
Since the horrors of the Holocaust, agents of international human rights efforts and survivors of genocide have proclaimed emphatically “never again.” Despite such commitments and hopes initiated at the end of World War II, the 20th and 21st centuries have been plagued by genocides and on-going political violence in which civilians have been 90 percent of all fatalities (Lutz 2002:729). How then are we to understand the hopes for possible new futures when such atrocities become relegated solely to histories of the past (Nora 1989)? The papers in this panel seek to engage that question through analyses of survivors’ discourses and embodied experiences of past violence in relation to collective hopes for futures that are more peaceful. In so doing, the papers interrogate the notion of hope as one of many possible affective stances social actors hold about the future and consider others like anticipation, expectation, speculation, potentiality, and destiny that guide human action in the present toward a horizon of possibility (Bryant and Knight 2019). They also recognize and consider Berlant’s insight that “all attachments are optimistic, meaning the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world” (2011: 1), in ways that may produce unintended consequences. In so doing, the papers collectively challenge commonplace frames of “reconciliation” and “healing” to enumerate alterative possibilities of justice, reparation, and memory. Papers pay particular attention to intersectional notions of collective identity and non-linear notions of temporality in the articulation of imagined futures by survivors, witnesses, activists, and scholars.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 26 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
The paper engages with the historic al-Anfāl trials in Baghdad, asking whether legal justice for genocide can be punishment in the form of the death penalty or life imprisonment. It brings the trials in dialogue with survivors of one of al-Anfāl massacres in the village of Korêmê in Kurdistan-Iraq.
Paper long abstract:
Korêmê is a lonely village that is located in a small valley within an open but hilly area on the frontal range of the Zagros Mountains and not far from the Iraqi-Turkish border. After the arrest and separation of men from women and children and the destruction of the village of Korêmê, a massacre takes place on 28 August 1988. This is part of what the Iraqi Baʿth state called “chain of command of al-Anfāl operation” (1987-1991). Human remains from the mass grave in the village, hiding and conserving the historic massacre, return in form of forensic and visual evidence. These are then attached to the survivor and expert witnesses in the al-Anfāl trials, who testify against the identified perpetrators in Bagdad from 2006 to 2007. This paper details how the jurisdiction of the Baghdad Tribunal was restricted to the Iraqi Baʿth Party’s crimes that had been committed in Iraq between 1968 and 2003. It then turns to the al-Anfāl trials and the application of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, the 1950 Nürnberg Principles and the 1967 Iraqi Penal Code, concluding with a verdict recognising al-Anfāl as genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The paper is asking whether legal justice for genocide can be punishment in the form of the death penalty or life imprisonment. The al-Anfāl trials are then brought forth as a dialogue with the memories and critical reflections of women and men survivors more than two decades after the massacre and the destruction of Korêmê.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I interrelate three anthropological instances to seek out people’s incentives for the making of compromises and the reliance on promises. There is a sense of an ethics of radical futurity at work in Rwanda, a way of seeing the other as companion human being.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I interrelate three anthropological instances to seek out people’s incentives for the making of compromises and the reliance on promises. I put forth the assumption about com/promising as interactive force that ties into people's hopes never to return to, repeat or revisit the violence of the past and their promise to never again let happen any of the atrocious acts that had devastated, exiled or exterminated previous generations seeking a life in Rwanda. I accompany three persons who engage compromise and forge promises in their everyday lives. Not only do they sensibly measure their doings based on experience, they seek to chart an itinerary on how to live peacefully together as reliable humans. They ask for the possibility to lead meaningful lives when they have to move beyond law and its forceful institutions, in search for possibilities that can hold the future together. Moreover, there is a pressing urge and unconditional longing for the future. There is a sense of an ethics of radical futurity at work in a country with a more-than-difficult past and a more-than-contested present. This includes itineraries into a future beyond day-to-day disputing, a future of recognition, trustworthiness and truthfulness. Futurity surfaces in an ever-present ordinary ethic, a way of seeing the other for what a person is in the everyday existence as companion human being. In the seeking out of a common humanity, lies a desire to inhabit a temporality where everyone’s experiences exist in sync.
Paper short abstract:
State violations of human rights span executive, administrative, political, economic, moral and psychosocial forms of violence and victimhood. This paper explores how victim-perpetrator imbalances of structural power can be mobilized procedurally and destructively to silence victim-survivor voices.
Paper long abstract:
The acknowledged horrors of World War II acts as the political, legal and moral basis for the international evolution and political architectures of human rights. The same moral precepts, political imaginaries, socio-legal ideals and collective hopes are central to the impetus for reparative and apology movements. Such rights and hopes order both historical and contemporary national membership claims for official acknowledgement, accountability, reparations and the rights to social, economic, political, historical and retroactive justice in today’s political time. If the role of contemporary transitional justice mechanisms such as truth commissions and acts of official public apologies are to remain morally important in shaping national reparative frameworks, official victim testimony must have an administrative life beyond the narrow timeframes of statist recognition often imposed on official state procedures instantiated to manage ‘The Past’. The legal reasons, political ideals and social hopes of victim-survivors who provide witness testimony during post-conflict national productions of the ‘Official Record’ and ‘Official Truth’ should have continuous political, legal and moral life in state policies forced to address the past-present indignities, harms and injustice they voice, symbolize and represent in political time. My paper will theoretically and comparatively explore the socio-political, psycho-social and socio-economic impetus contained in the individual and collective embodiments of official testimony in colonial national membership transitions in South Africa, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces the transnational connections of the Greek Cypriot diaspora with a focus on peace politics seeking reconciliation between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. Although imagined as anchored in the past, diasporas are also made by their orientations towards the future and a politics of hope.
Paper long abstract:
This paper traces the transnational connections of the Greek Cypriot diaspora between the UK and Cyprus with a focus on peace politics that emphasise the need for reconciliation between Greek and Turkish Cypriots. It applies a temporal framework and proposes that diasporas and transnationalism –often analysed through an emphasis on space– have to be understood through an investigation of time. It argues that diasporas do not just exist, but are made, reorganised or enervated in and by time, aggregating at particular historical points and dissipating at others. Moreover, it illustrates that, although imagined as anchored in the past, diasporas are also made by their orientations towards the future and a politics of hope. Based on long-term anthropological research in Cyprus, the UK, and online, the presentation focuses on the Greek Cypriot diaspora as an epitomising case study of these processes. Connected to a divided island, British Cypriots have participated in the reproduction of conflict and partition but have also been active agents of peace-building and reconciliation. Focusing on the latter, I ask how the future mobilises the Cypriot diaspora and how the politics of hope shape transnational activity in the present into a conducive space for the articulation of counter-nationalist narratives and alternative visions of a ‘united’ future.
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces the origins of Ulster loyalism’s culture war against Irish republicans, unravelling the role loyalist songs played in inciting conflict during the Troubles (1969-98) and their ongoing legacy in legitimizing structural violence during peace.
Paper long abstract:
From the Shankill Defence Association’s Orange-Loyalist Songbook to the UDA’s appropriation of ‘Simply the Best’, music has long been used to celebrate loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. During the Troubles (1969-98), loyalist songs served a variety of functions, from community fundraising and entertainment to the transmission of loyalist cultural memory and the articulation of political perspectives ignored by the mainstream media. Yet, in addition to celebrating local practices and political traditions, loyalist songs now feed into a broader ‘culture war’ in Northern Ireland where, in the absence of intercommunal violence, the commemoration of paramilitary groups is used to continue the conflict by other means. This paper traces the origins of contemporary loyalism’s culture war against Irish republicans, unravelling the role loyalist songs played during the Troubles and their ongoing legacy.