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- Convenors:
-
Melina Kalfelis
(University of Bayreuth)
Rossye Alvarez (Queen Mary University of London)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Peter Froggatt Centre (PFC), 03/006B
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel scrutinizes trust dynamics in contexts of conflict, violence, and global inequality. We invite scholars to reflect on trust in historical and recent processes of (un)commoning and explore to what extent violence not only refutes but also changes, drives, and determines trust.
Long Abstract:
The British philosopher Thomas Hobbes considered state monopolization of violence indispensable for citizens' trust in the prospect of nonviolent interaction. However, in countries of today's world, duress, injustice, and exclusion are still part and parcel of many human lifeworlds. How are people trusting in such circumstances? While scholarship primarily associates violence and conflict with distrust and its corrosive effects, we ask instead how they shape and change the ways people trust. What do political formations like vigilantism, secessionism, extremism, post-truth politics, state resistance, and many more tell us about the interplay of trust and violence in everyday life? How are trust and distrust diverging and converging throughout conflict?
This panel invites scholars to reflect on trust dynamics in historical and recent processes of (un)commoning and explores violence not only as a refutation, but also as a condition, driver, or basis of trust. If we understand trust informed by the past, present, and future, how do enduring experiences of harm and inequality determine and affect trust and its connections with violence? How are political projects of (un)commoning in different contexts creating, destroying or maintaining trust? What is the role of trust in conflicts manifesting through senses of belonging or identity? And how are governments incapable to protect their citizens from crime and hardship creating the conditions for a changed sense of justice?
The panel opens a reflexive space to discuss these and other questions about trust as an ongoing process in the context of conflict, violence, and global inequality.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This contribution deals with issues of trust and violence in the history of ethnology as a discipline. Focusing on ethnologists who were persecuted during the Nazi era, it discusses how we can determine which relation of trust existed at a personal level when trust in the state was completely lost.
Paper long abstract:
This contribution approaches issues of trust and violence in the history of anthropology as a discipline at a time when surveillance, arbitrary measures, denunciations, and violent attacks were the order of the day and trust in the state was completely lost. Focusing on ethnologists who were persecuted during the Nazi era and drawing from extensive archival research, the paper discusses how trust at the personal level became enormously important, asking how we can methodologically identify and determine relations of trust between colleagues during the Nazi era. During this time, trust emerged partly as a function of collective identities: while belonging to a persecuted group (as defined by the Nazis) provided a relatively secure basis of initial trust for interactions, the trustworthiness of outsiders to these groups first had to be proven. In professional relations a shared academic approach was often a basis for relatively close connections and personal support in this time of crisis. Yet in emigration, respective theoretical or methodological orientations lost their significance for contacts between the refugees. Instead, common fate, personal sensitivities and mutual support became more relevant.
This paper examines these connections and concludes with a look at the post-war period in West Germany, where not only the experiences of the past years, but also the hesitant and partly vague way in which state and population addressed the Nazi era as well as the process of denazification continued to influence mutual trust between colleagues who had emigrated and those who had stayed.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the issue of interpersonal trust as one of political affect in Cold War East Germany. It argues that East Germans, as part of their socialisation, developed intuition about whom to trust in relation to the State Security’s (Stasi) employment of informers (IMs).
Paper long abstract:
During the protracted conflict of the Cold War, the political elites on both sides of the Iron Curtain employed extensive state security measures to protect their respective political projects from external and internal threats. After the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR/East Germany), the work strategies of the Ministry of State Security (MfS/Stasi) became the focus for assessing the former regime. It was the revelation of the Stasi’s vast network of informers (IMs), who spied on colleagues, neighbours, and friends as potential ‘internal enemies’, that shocked most East Germans. Yet, at the same time, almost everyone in the former East Germany appeared to have already known during the Cold War that the Stasi employed such Spitzel (snitches) in all aspects of everyday life. This awareness renders the question of interpersonal trust also as one of political affect. How did East Germans trust one another when such trust could also pose a potential risk of harm through the state’s use of its monopoly on violence? In this paper, I take seriously my East German interlocutors’ accounts of their ‘gut feeling’, that is, the sensory and intuitional nature of their knowledge attainment on whom to trust or not in relation to the state. I argue that East Germans developed such intuition as part of their socialisation process in the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ that served as a protective mechanism against becoming the target of state surveillance.
Paper short abstract:
Providing a rare comparative angle from Czech and Poland, this paper offers an insight into the changing perception of political culture and institutional trust in the context of present and past crises.
Paper long abstract:
This paper presents preliminary findings of an ethnographic research project that inquires into the phenomenon of populist politics in Central and Eastern Europe in a comparative way. Based on conversations with research participants sharing their political views and concerns within the Czech and Polish networked publics, the study explores a relationship between current political choices and perception of the transition from a communist to a neoliberal free-market economy. Simultaneously, the authors wish to reflect upon and problematize the notion of the commons, as perceived by the interviewees with regards to their historical experiences of ‘actually existing socialism.
In what way various forms of state-driven violence and oppression - in the past and in the present - have influenced the popular perception of and trust towards public institutions? What are perceived reasons for the state malfunctions, among Czech and Polish research participants? In what ways has the coronavirus pandemic further deepened the fears over the interviewees’ already precarious living conditions and how has that affected their political participation and levels of institutional trust? Those and other questions will be addressed by the paper’s authors.
Paper short abstract:
Across Canada, grassroots initiatives, universities and museums have started to unravel the complex system of settler colonialism. The paper will reflect on these attempts at decolonization through the prism of trust built on the grounds of violence.
Paper long abstract:
Canada’s violent legacy made headlines in 2021, when the remains of more than 1,500 bodies were found on premises of “residential schools”. As of the mid-nineteenth century, as part of a government policy of re-education, Indigenous children were forced to attend these schools, most of them run by churches and located far away from the settlement areas of their families. The discoveries were a shock for the Canadian public, despite the fact that between 2008 and 2015, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) had already been conducting investigations into the practices and occurrences at these boarding schools. The TRC had published its findings in an extensive report and had furthermore concluded that the intentional alienation of Indigenous children constituted cultural genocide. Still, for years these findings did not have any noteworthy consequences. It was only with the discovery of bodies in anonymous graves that the wider public took notice. While the 2021 shock is still fresh within Canadian society, the country has an opportunity to face up to its history, which can be understood as representing entanglements of violence and trust. So far, there is no political strategy for how this process could trigger changes in the relationships between different population groups. But across the country grassroots initiatives, universities and museums have started to unravel the complex system of power distribution and domination in Canadian settler colonialism. The paper will reflect on these attempts at decolonization through the prism of trust built on the grounds of experienced violence.