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- Convenors:
-
Valentina Zagaria
(University of Manchester)
Veronica Ferreri (Ca' Foscari University)
Maya Avis (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 9 University Square (UQ), 01/006
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Armed conflict often disrupts established hierarchies and ways of structuring social, political and economic life. This panel explores both the temporary and more long-lasting social arrangements and practices of commoning emerging in these contexts despite violence looming large.
Long Abstract:
Times of insurrection or siege, as well as protracted conflict, disrupt established ways of structuring social, political, and economic life. New solidarities and collectivities can form around needs and resources, as well as in reaction to political commitments, both in moments of open fighting and in their aftermath. These modes of collective organising and practices of commoning can also endure or re-emerge in the context of drawn-out, unresolved conflict. Experiences of peer-governance can nurture collectivities through time. This panel will reflect on the social, political, and economic experimentation occurring during and after conflict, including in the nearby sites to which the displaced have fled. It will also consider the ways in which those involved in forging different social arrangements conceptualise their shared efforts.
We are interested in papers about such diverse responses as organising around access to land, water, mobility, electricity or care, the use of space and housing, as well as papers on the administration of law, order, and education in contexts where these institutions no longer function. Who are the different actors involved in these collective projects, and what practices bring them together? What terms do those involved use to define their reconstitution of social relations? How do these relations and practices relate to and exist alongside those of the state, humanitarian actors, or families?
Our research is based in the Middle East and North Africa, but we hope to engage with papers reflecting the broad range of contexts in which people (re)organise in and beyond violent conflict.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 July, 2022, -Dominique Dillabough-Lefebvre (London School of Economics and Political Science)
Paper short abstract:
In Southeast Myanmar's Mutraw hills, the emergence of military formations within close groups of kin are seen to have fostered an ethic of care & common purpose, yet simultaneously bring question values of autonomy associated amongst these largely upland subsistence farmers.
Paper long abstract:
This paper highlights how previously more autonomous forms of social organisation in the Northern Papun (Mutraw) hills in Southeastern Burma, characterised in several ethnographies as broadly egalitarian & fitting with idealised visions of the commons (in terms of land governance and more equitable sharing of resources) shifted radically in wartime. Here the mobilisation of people through an armed movement, the Karen National Union, has led to a radical shift of living in common. Yet rather then a binary movement from autonomy to higher stratification - this paper highlights how intra-village kinship ties facilitated a supra-village form of organisation, in which care and family came to be extended through a militarised structure. These forms of militarised commoning can be seen as extensions of existing Christian networks and cross border NGO networks, which have long created communities of common purpose and sentiment amongst Karen people's living in Southeastern Myanmar' and in refugee camps along the Thai-Myanmar Border. Yet, more substantially, they represent a social formation in which military bonds and social trust has been built within a closely nit network of kin. This case will be elucidated the example of care of the displaced by local villagers, military and associated NGOs following airstrikes in the area by the Burmese military in early 2021.
Veronica Ferreri (Ca' Foscari University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the formation of Syrian networks of solidarity in response to the 'Syrian humanitarian crisis' in Lebanon and the challenges of everyday displacement. Mutuality, as the grounding principle of this political economy of care, offers new insights to rethink war displacement.
Paper long abstract:
In the wake of the Syrian uprising in 2011, Syrian dissidents displaced in Lebanon created different networks of solidarity in support of the Syrian political struggle against the regime. Throughout the years, these networks dissipated in light of the mutations of the conflict in Syria and the Lebanese state’s crackdown on Syrian rebels’ paramilitary activities and revolutionary activism. However, these networks also gave birth to new instances of solidarity and commoning amongst Syrians newly displaced in Lebanon following the escalation of violence inside Syria (2013-2016). These social (and political) relations set in motion a political economy of care in the immediate aftermath of the ‘humanitarian crisis’ in Lebanon working alongside transnational humanitarian actors. This Syrian humanitarian endeavour was a form of material solidarity offered to Syrians forged by a sense of obligations based on a shared predicament rather than on Syrians being purely beneficiaries. This political economy of care became the the ground upon which other forms of commoning emerged. These collectivities aimed to alleviate the hardships faced by Syrians in their everyday life in Lebanon such as accessing education, work, health assistance and official papers.
By dissecting these new social and political relationships of solidarity and their metamorphosis, this paper revisits war displacement through the concept of mutuality. Through this lens, it captures the formation of new forms of belonging and commoning distant from a conventional understanding of war displacement based on the concept of hospitality.
Valentina Zagaria (University of Manchester)
Paper short abstract:
By focusing on the cross-border movements and political solidarities of Libyans and Tunisians ten years after the 2011 revolutions, this paper will explore how alternative, collective, more liveable presents and futures are being experimented with beyond national and judicial containers.
Paper long abstract:
Despite Libyans in Tunisia constituting one of the largest Libyan communities abroad, they are often not thought about in diplomatic circles and academic work as political actors contributing to Libya’s precarious limbo out of conflict and to bottom-up political initiatives in Tunisia. This is mostly because Libyans find themselves in this neighbouring country for a wide variety of reasons and timespans, and they have not for the most part established diaspora organisations while residing or in exile in Tunisia. Grassroots solidarities and alliances between Tunisians and Libyans who are moving in and out of these two countries due to different threats have however developed since the 2011 revolutions. These have been taking shape through the political convictions of different generations (like Arab nationalism), ethnic relations (such as Tamazight networks), through common political affinities or enmities (such as Islamist parties or militias in both countries gaining ground), as well as through friendships and shared professional goals. It is precisely by virtue of their displacement in neighbouring Tunisia and in their movements between Tunisia and Libya that ordinary Libyans from different backgrounds can keep engaged in perhaps more long-term, societal and political transformation in both countries. It is by focusing on their mobilities, on their comings and goings, and on the shared complicities and political solidarities of Libyans and Tunisians that this paper will strive to show how different, collective, more liveable presents and futures are being experimented with beyond national and judicial containers.
Samira Marty (Binghamton University (SUNY))
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores divergent meanings of transnational solidarity and temporalities in the "Free Nicaragua"-movement in Berlin, a political collective protesting the Nicaraguan regime’s violence.
Paper long abstract:
When mass protests in Nicaragua that erupted in April 2018 were met with extreme forms of state violence, the Nicaraguan communities outside the country were quick to express solidarity with their compatriots. In Berlin, the Free-Nicaragua movement was founded in those early weeks of this ongoing socio-political crisis and became one of the most active protest groups outside Nicaragua. Former supporters of the Nicaraguan regime and recently arrived Nicaraguan political exiles connected with former solidarity brigades who had supported the Nicaraguan revolution in the 1980s. Their protests revived historical links dating back to the Cold War, when the transnational solidarity movement of the former West-Germany with Nicaragua became a crucial support within the Western bloc to the Sandinista regime.
I argue that the protesters’ divergent views on solidarity, tied to national identity versus internationalist cosmology, bring central questions about contested versions of history to the fore: the solidarity brigades and former allies of the Sandinistas reminisce about the 1980s revolutionary decade’s achievements in Nicaragua. Their understanding of the present insurrection-turned crisis is informed by their nostalgic accounts of the past. The younger generation, on the other hand, employs a presentism-lens, rejecting remnants of the past as well as politics as they have gotten to know it altogether. These contrasting views on temporality contribute to debates on the meaning of history in transnational collectives striving for political change.
Manuel D'Hers Del Pozo (Universitat Rovira i Virgili)
Paper short abstract:
This communication analyze the challenges faced by "immobile migrants" in Venezuela due to the conditions of structural austerity caused by the crisis sustained for more than 8 years. This context allows us to describe those strategies of resistance and care, to guarantee the sustainability of life.
Paper long abstract:
Currently, Venezuela is going through one of the most delicate crises in its modern history and this translates into more than 6 million migrants and refugees. That is why in this communication we want to focus on the reflection of our analytical proposal which we have called "immobile migration" taking as reference the Venezuelan case, which seeks to describe and represent the context experienced by those people who have not been mobilized from their places of origin but who feel they are migrants due to two main and interrelated reasons: a) the diaspora that mobilizes around them and leaves them without their social networks; and b) the constant contingencies that threaten their lives in times of crisis, since all those factors that force and/or motivate those who have left the country are factors that those who remain in their place of origin experience and face every day. This condition of structural austerity implies, among other things, a daily life deprived of basic services such as water, electricity, transportation, telecommunications, health services, food, and medicine, which makes daily life significantly difficult.
In this context, this communication seeks to analyze the cartelization of the Venezuelan State as one of the main factors that give origin and continuity to said crisis, in order to recognize and describe collaborative networks (either from the family, neighborhood or the community level) as an exercise of the infrapolitics to manage those carework and life support strategies.