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- Convenors:
-
Gal Kramarski
(University of Cambridge)
Erella Grassiani (University of Amsterdam)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
This panel asks how do people make sense of their (conscious) engagement with violent political orders, or otherwise, how do they navigate the accusation of complicity? It invites a critical debate on the subjective experiences and tensions involved in producing, upholding, and resisting the state
Long Abstract
Often understood through its ‘dark’ connotations, complicity is usually associated with involvement in the production and maintenance of cruel and violent realities. In times marked by political instability, ongoing violence and genocide, questions around complicity with state violence and accountability for one’s actions acquire renewed urgency. In such moments, individuals and their societies are required to (re)assess their positions and consider alternative forms of confronting violent orders.
In this panel, we seek to unpack how people confront accusations of complicity and make sense of their (often fraught) involvement in the production and sustaining of violent political orders. Attending to the messy space between collaboration and resistance to state violence, and the possibilities and impossibilities that unfold within it, we ask: what does it mean (socially, morally, politically, economically, psychologically or otherwise) to navigate, carry and confront the accusation of complicity? What enables people to (perhaps unconsciously or otherwise strategically) ‘work from within’ violent political orders? What forms of subjectivity are shaped and respectively what new types of political action might emerge in these critical moments? And, finally, we ask, how should we study complicity?
While anthropologists have critically engaged with the concept of complicity mainly through exploring their own roles, positionalities and responsibilities, this panel seeks to extend this query also to those with whom we work. We seek to advance an anthropology of complicity as a conceptual lens for understanding current processes of social transformation through, rather than despite, the tensions that animate them. We therefore, attend to ‘complicity’ not as a moral verdict, but as an everyday practice that may explain how violent realities are shaped, sustained, but also opposed.
We welcome theoretical and ethnographic contributions that critically explore the intersections of political action, state violence, social transformation and resistance, involving both civil and state actors.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Unpacking the connections between counterinsurgency and infrastructures, the paper discusses the duplicitous developmental claims of infrastructure and polarization within Adivasi communities enduring armed violence. The paper theorizes on militarisation of infrastructure, conflict and indigeneity.
Paper long abstract
Based on ethnographic explorations on changes in state-society relationship in the case of the Maoist conflict in Central India, the paper expands on the securitisation and militarization of infrastructure and the resistances to such actions of state-led discourse on development and complicity. Local and regional disputes on control of land, access to natural resources and the dispossession of indigenous communities- form the everyday reality in the forested region of Bastar in Central India. Against the backdrop of seventy year armed Maoist resistance and India's counterinsurgency campaign, the logic of development through infrastructure such as roads and bridges is complicit in further exacerbating oppression and dispossession of the forest-dwelling Adivasis residing in the region. The paper problematizes the neutral nature of infrastructure and highlights the polarizing nature of it through piecing the complexities of a securitised development discourse that is rooted in a racial logic. Recounting vignettes from the fieldwork conducted in August 2019 and December 2022, the paper elaborates on narratives of Adivasis enduring long-term violence and counter violence and the overall complicity of both state and the non-state in inadvertent marginalisation of the Adivasi through loss of their lifeworld. This work contributes to understanding how infrastructure becomes a terrain of struggle where development, security collide with indigenous rights and their resistance to militarised state-formation.
Paper short abstract
This paper follows a series of land grabs that unfolded around the construction of the Mayan Train in Mexico. Examining instances of corruption as business-as-usual, I ask how environmentalists, Mayan landholders, and elite property owners become complicit in the destruction of pristine rainforest.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines a series of land grabs that have unfolded around the construction of the touristic Mayan Train in Mexico's southeast. Examining instances in which the corruption of state officials is taken as "business-as-usual," I ask how environmentalists, Mayan landholders, and elite property owners become willing and unwilling accomplices in the destruction of pristine rainforest. Taking the Mayan Train as an instance of left-wing monumentalized infrastructural politics, I review the ethical conundrum created when a left-wing populist government promises to deliver "wellbeing" through precarious arrangements for large-scale urbanization. While I follow environmentalists’ continuous attempts to document the impacts of the Mayan Train, I center on the ideal world that they envision beyond corrupt politics—a term that they associate to their status as global-south citizens and to the spectrum of Latin American failed states. Imagining that there is a “better” world beyond their reach, these environmental activists participate in an ethical projection that may insufficiently account for the way in which they are part of the processes of state corruption and environmental degradation. Following Mayan landholders' similar participation in the undoing of a natural frontier, I focus on particularly key moments of cynicism and complicity in which people project images of their non-involvement precisely at the times in which they are most involved in the processes that they condemn. With the purchase and sale of pristine rainforest being orchestrated by corrupt government officials, I focus away from "them" and center on the Indigenous and Mestizo landholders who (un)willingly assist them.
Paper short abstract
Introducing dætachment, this paper traces tactics of living with and within a politically non-recognised state, exploring how irony, embarrassment, and aspiration hold complicity and critique together in everyday life.
Paper long abstract
The paper introduces the concept of dætachment to analyse how attachment and detachment to the materialities of statehood are produced, negotiated, and narrated in everyday life in Northern Cyprus, a politically non-recognised state.
Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s understanding of tactics as everyday practices of navigation and re-signification, dætachment attends to the affective and ethical ambivalence through which people both lean on and pull away from the state, inhabiting its promises while sensing and exposing its contradictions. The typographic ligature æ materializes this simultaneity: it visually binds attachment and detachment into a single form, mirroring, for instance, the lived ambiguity of desiring public employment in a non-recognised polity while speaking of the state with irony, frustration, and embarrassment.
The paper follows how such affective and narrative manoeuvres emerge in everyday speech, gestures, and silences. Utterances such as “they put us on the bus” or “we only took a sofa” appear not as neutral recollections but as improvisational acts of repositioning within a non-recognised polity. Stories of state-organised celebrations, the ambivalent privileges of public employment, and the moral uncertainties surrounding looted homes reveal dætachment as a repertoire for accessing fragments of a “good life” promised by the state while quietly unsettling the legitimacy of the very state that promises it. Hence, dætachment names everyday tactics through which people live with and within a contested state, revealing how complicity and critique fold into one another through irony, embarrassment, and aspiration.
Paper short abstract
What does it mean for a Palestinian to work for an Israeli development project? Based on ethnographic research conducted in Jerusalem, this paper explores the relations between resistance and collaboration with the Israeli occupying state among different generations of Palestinian Jerusalemites
Paper long abstract
This paper explores the entanglements of 'resistance' and 'collaboration' by examining the daily experiences of Palestinian workers employed by an Israeli development project that targets Jerusalem's Palestinian neighbourhoods.
Often criticised for enabling, producing, maintaining or normalising Israel's occupation, these young professionals who consciously accept such fraught positions operate in a dangerous zone marked by accusations of complicity with the Occupation. How do they deal with such accusations of complicity, often voiced within their immediate social circles? How do they carry it? And how do they navigate a social position that confronts them with competing and contradictory demands and expectations?
Discussing the ways in which younger generations of Palestinian Jerusalemites view the entanglements of different political struggles (for national/gender/economic liberation), the paper confronts the question of of complicity with systems of power across generations in the context of the ongoing Palestinian Nakba. Essentially, it attends to the question of complicity from the perspectives of those who struggle under coercive conditions of Occupation and who develop their own approaches towards the kind of opportunities that exist in moments of (imposed) social transformation.
Paper short abstract
This paper discusses an ongoing lecture series entitled “Eyes on Gaza,” curated by 3 Israeli academics. Stemming from our complicity in the Gaza genocide and our resistance to it, the series highlights the possibilities of using our positions as faculty to forge a form of complicit political action.
Paper long abstract
A central problem of structural complicity is the paralyzing impetus to ethical purity that arises in response. Moreover, because of the need to distance ourselves from its associated blame, complicity also seems to be paralyzing our capacity for political action. In my project, I seek to think of complicity as a political quandary (what is the best way to act in a situation of involuntary complicity) rather than a moral status (am I good or bad). I contend that the intractability of complicity can also be the source of its epistemological strength, allowing us to account for that which we cannot will away. In this way, complicity might ultimately also offer a political practice.
“All there is, while things perpetually fall apart,” writes Alexis Shotwell, “is the possibility of acting from where we are” (2016, 4). In this talk I thus wish to think of the affordances of this theory to examine our ongoing Zoom lecture series entitled “Eyes on Gaza,” which disseminates and archives academic, practical, and activist knowledge sorely lacking in Israeli media and all but banned in public discourse. The series is curated and facilitated by two colleagues from the University of Haifa and me. It stems equally from our complicity in the Gaza genocide and our resistance to it as citizens and as faculty members. I discuss the difficulties and pitfalls of using the complicity inherent in our tenure to forge a form of complicit political action.
Paper short abstract
Based on interviews conducted in Russia, the paper examines how female political activists navigate interactions with state authorities by mobilizing categories of kinship and traditional gender roles.
Paper long abstract
Protest communities in contemporary Russia are often understood solely through the lens of implicit or explicit resistance, presupposing the existence of a specific subject, independent from the state and internally coherent. It is particularly difficult to reframe the dichotomy between the violent state and resistance communities without undermining the community's moral purity. In addition, any collaboration with state structures is fraught with the possibility of becoming an unwitting co-author of violence. But the possibility of political expression and action in today’s Russia is shaped within the state not only by institutional but also categorical systems.
The paper examines how, by performing traditional gender roles when interacting with authorities in unsafe situations and presenting themselves as “proper” and as belonging to the state's traditional gender system, female political anti-war activists delegitimize and mitigate violence against them. In court, during detentions and arrests, women translate themselves into the language of the state, becoming “childish girls,” “brides,” “nieces,” “mothers,” and, more generally, “relatives.” While remaining political, their actions simultaneously shift into the private realm.
Respondents rarely describe their actions as a conscious strategy and emphasize the absence of reflective distance in the moment of interaction. Based on in-depth interviews, the paper explores how activists integrate the experience of resistance and collaboration with the state into various narratives through frameworks of irony, fun, surrealism, goal-setting, risks, and benefits.
The paper contributes to critiques of liberal models of agency by showing how political subjectivity emerges not only through resisting norms, but through inhabiting them.
Paper short abstract
This paper seeks to examine the processes by which depoliticisation of violence become tools of complicity in authoritarian contexts. Further, conceptualise how strategies of depoliticisation inform complicit behaviours, and how it manifests and sustains itself in the everyday behaviours.
Paper long abstract
Based on ethnographic research conducted in the aftermath of the Nuh Riots in 2023, India, this paper seeks to examine the processes by which depoliticisation of violence become tools of complicity in authoritarian contexts. As observed through participant observation and interviews, families of the Hindu right-wing when confronted with allegations of complicity with their membership in the Hindu nationalist groups renegotiate the bounds of their relationship by depoliticising the intent of the relationship. Through this paper, I wish to further analyse how complicity evolves, transforms and eventually gets instilled within these individuals as members of the in-group when surrounded by state violence against the out-group. I am interested in conceptualising how strategies of depoliticisation inform complicit behaviours, and how it manifests and sustains itself in the everyday behaviours. Family members of Hindu nationalists during my fieldwork purposely chose to identify themselves through the ‘spiritual or devotional’ aspects of the nationalist organisations. They thus, held the opinion that by keeping distance from the politicisation of violence they were not complicit in the violence. By selectively cherry-picking aspects of their Hindu nationalist identity and ranking them in a hierarchical fashion, I wish to argue that depoliticising tools are central in studying complicity within the Indian authoritarian context. Through this paper, I will investigate how these formulations intersect in a fascist context? How are the concept and action of complicity sustained through the everyday depoliticisation of violence? Does this also exhibit itself in other aspects of the Hindu nationalist society?