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- Convenors:
-
Pascale Schild
(University of Bern)
Bushra Punjabi (Jamia Millia Islamia)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Networks:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
This APeCS panel suggests affect and emotion as an analytical lens to explore processes of conflict, violence and collective struggle. Building on feminist scholarship, we seek to examine how emotions shape bodies, boundaries, and relationships, bringing people together and driving them apart.
Long Abstract
This panel explores how emotions and feelings sustain and transform processes of conflict, violence and collective struggle. Building on feminist critiques of the supposed dichotomy between emotion and reason, and between the personal and the political, we adopt affect and emotion as an analytical lens to examine 'what matters' (Lutz, 2017) to people. Emotions, we argue, ‘move’ people and groups to see and respond to the world in certain ways. With Sara Ahmed, we understand emotions as ‘a form of cultural politics and world-making’ (Ahmed, 2005, 11). While emotions and feelings are shaped by social encounters, memories and materialities, they enable social and political structures to be reified as forms of being.
For this panel, we invite ethnographic, theoretical and methodological contributions examining what affects and emotions — including emotional intensities, affective practices, and languages of emotion in everyday life and politics — ‘do’ in violent conflicts and collective struggles around the world. We explore how feelings normalise processes of violence and inequality, including authoritarian politics, and how they enable and sustain more inclusive forms of resistance and struggles for freedom and social justice. Possible questions are: How do emotions circulate between bodies, creating intimacies, solidarities, and forms of radical disagreement? How do feelings such as anger, hate, frustration, fear, vulnerability, hope and pleasure shape bodies, boundaries, and relationships, bringing people together and driving them apart? And also: What can we learn about conflict, violence and struggle from listening to our emotions as anthropologists working and living in conflict contexts?
Accepted papers
Session 3Paper short abstract
An ethnography of Mingas del Buen Vivir examines how memory politics become feminist pedagogies of life-making. Focusing on a community space in Argentina built through collective labor, the paper explores how grief and joy operate as political forces linking Latin American and Kurdish feminisms.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how collective emotions, memory politics, and embodied pedagogies sustain feminist life-making practices in contexts marked by violence and dispossession. It draws on an ethnography of the Mingas del Buen Vivir—collective labor practices with Latin American Indigenous roots—through which the Espacio Alina has been built since 2020 in the province of Córdoba, Argentina. Convened by the popular education collective Pañuelos en Rebeldía, the Espacio is a site where material construction, ecological practices, and feminist learning unfold, bringing together activists transnationally.
Named after Alina, an Argentine medical doctor who lost her life in a car accident in northern Syria while participating in community health practices promoted by the Kurdish Women’s Movement, the Espacio is grounded in a transnational dialogue between Latin American and Kurdish feminist epistemologies. Central to its constitution was the donation of the land by Alina’s mother, an act that transforms grief into a community-building gesture, inscribing it within Argentine traditions of mothers´ activism.
Drawing on long-term participant observation as a co-constructor in the Mingas, I explore how bodies and territories are re-signified as spaces of memory, political grammars, alternative pedagogies, and embodied forms of resistance. Rather than focusing on the effects of state and extractivist violence, I analyze how memories of activist women whose lives were taken become forces that continue to act across generations and geographies as a living pedagogy and an affective archive, where grief, spirituality, collective labor, and body–territory imaginaries intertwine to produce feminist practices of world-making.
Paper short abstract
Using affect as an analytical lens, this paper explores how emotions such as guilt, anger and exhaustion shape the forging of solidarity, tracing how political belonging, care and boundary-making emerge in contexts of ongoing border violence.
Paper long abstract
This paper draws on my ongoing fieldwork in the EU/Moroccan borderland exploring the affective arrangements of solidarity within the No Border Network—an autonomous social movement that opposes border regimes, supports migrants, and aims to prefigure horizontal relationships with them. I examine how emotions such as anger, guilt, and despair, as well as joy, hope, and affection, shape political identities, collective action, personal well-being, and interpersonal relationships.
The paper traces how both the utopian vision of horizontality and the critical reflection of existing asymmetries of privilege evoke strong emotions that influence political practice, relationships, and well-being. My research shows that activists of European descent often adopt self-sacrificial practices and weak boundaries in attempts to “make up” for Europe’s colonial history and border regimes. Working in the context of ongoing border violence also evokes what my interlocutors call “dystopian feelings,” in which even moments of joy are shadowed by cynicism and the weight of injustice. These complex emotional experiences can foster intimacy and solidarity but also provoke conflict, withdrawal, and burnout.
The paper pays particular attention to how activists negotiate emotions tied to privilege, including shame and guilt, and how these feelings shape practices of care, boundary-setting, and political belonging, while mental health struggles emerge as shared concerns and collective reflection.
By foregrounding the affective dimensions of activism, the paper argues that emotions are not merely responses to political conditions, but active forces that sustain collective struggle and shape emergent solidarities.
Paper short abstract
This paper reads inscriptions on military road barriers as affective injunctions that govern through blame. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, it shows how peace is attached to Kashmiri bodies, making emotional restraint a moral duty while structural and militarized violence recedes into the background.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the inscription “Hello Kashmir! Let Peace Prevail” encountered on movable vehicular barriers at the entrances of security camps in Kashmir. Addressed to those who encounter it, the message functions not simply as signage but as an instrument of affective control through which peace is governed, emotions are regulated, and blame is redistributed in everyday life.
Encountered during routine street movement, the wheeled barrier rests to the side, provisional yet ever-present. Its capacity to halt mobility at any moment produces anticipatory waiting, bodily vigilance, and affective tension, making militarized authority ordinary and atmospheric.
By addressing both place and people, “Hello Kashmir!” and urging them to “let peace prevail,” the inscription displaces responsibility for peace onto Kashmir and its inhabitants. Calmness, patience, and emotional self-regulation are moralized as civic obligations, while dissent, unsanctioned mobility, or overlooking the injunction are implicitly framed as impediments to peace. Structural and spatial forms of violence; curfews, checkpoints, frisking, surveillance fade into the background as routine features of the landscape, while blame for violence and the absence of peace attaches to Kashmiri bodies themselves. In this way, the message reproduces virulent imaginaries of Kashmir as dangerous and disorderly, rendering restriction and surveillance reasonable and justified.
Yet everyday life at the barriers is not reducible to submission. Through waiting, adjustment, shared cues, and collective navigation of streets, Kashmiris endure and negotiate these affective demands. The paper shows how peace operates simultaneously as a technology of emotional blame and as an object of lived, collective struggle.
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnography with (LBT) women activists in Colombia, this paper examines how activists’ emotions mediate experiences of threat and inform practices of resistance. It argues for attending to emotions as central to feminist and anthropological understandings of (in)security.
Paper long abstract
This contribution draws on ethnographic research with female social leaders and human rights activists, including lesbian, bisexual, and trans women, who conduct their activism in Colombia’s Meta and Montes de María. These contexts are simultaneously characterised by the ongoing peace process and the persistence of armed conflict. Drawing on an intersectional feminist understanding of emotions (Ahmed 2005) and critical anthropology of security (Goldstein 2010), we examine how emotions shape the navigation of (in)security in contexts marked by both the persistent targeting of social leaders and the everyday struggles of (LBT) women activists.
Based on ethnography, focus groups, and participatory audiovisual methods, we investigate emotions such as fear, anger and helplessness. These emotions are not merely reactions to current threats and injustice, but also deeply embedded in the collective memory of violence against social leaders, women and LGBTIQ+ individuals and continue to shape how insecurity is perceived today. On the one hand, these affects are circulating within shared spaces and thus contesting political work and solidarity. On the other hand, the activists analyse emotions as part of current political strategies designed to produce silencing, fragmentation, and withdrawal from public life.
By emphasising the activists’ own reflections regarding the role of emotions, the paper traces how they deliberately turn towards their emotions as a means of understanding their own vulnerability and practicing resistance. Finally, we propose that both activist and scholarly attention to emotions contributes fundamentally to (feminist) critical thinking about security for/from communities that continue to organise under conditions of threat.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores "memory walks" in Turkey as urban practices of facing the past. Using ethnography and theories of affect and memory, it examines how affective encounters with places and stories shape everyday ways of engaging with difficult histories.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines affective encounters through urban memorialization practices in the context of facing past atrocities that have shaped present-day societies. Drawing on theories of transitional justice, social memory, place, and affect, and using ethnographic fieldwork as a research method, it focuses on “memory walks” organized by non-governmental organizations in Turkey. Memory walks are one-day-long urban walks in which participants encounter silenced (hi)stories and memories through collective walking and storytelling.
The paper argues that memory walks create ‘in-between’ space and time in which participants face difficult pasts of conflict, violence, and loss through different ways of feeling and knowing. By bringing together urban walking practices, performances of memory, and emotions, the paper seeks to broaden the legal, policy-related, and nation-state-centered approaches to facing the past. It sees facing the past as an open-ended, everyday process, emphasizing how emotions can move people toward or away from critically engaging with the past and their own position within it.
Based on ethnographic data, the paper explores affective encounters among places, memories, and people during memory walks. Engaging with scholarship on affect and emotions, especially Ahmed (2004), Berlant (2011), and Cherry (2021), it analyzes emotions such as shame, empathy, hope, anger, curiosity, and wonder in relation to situatedness, identity, responsibility, and solidarity.
The paper asks: How do affective encounters in memorialization practices shape everyday experiences of facing the past?
Paper short abstract
This presentation explores the mobilising effect of anger in response to state violence among members of the Anglophone minority in Cameroon and its diaspora, highlighting intra-movement tensions and dialogue about entitlement to emotional reactions.
Paper long abstract
Since the beginning of the separatist conflict known as the Anglophone Crisis in 2016, many Anglophone Cameroonians have become witnesses to acts of state violence, either in person or through videos on social media. While recent studies of online mobilisation and radicalisation have focused on the effects of disinformation, filter bubbles, and algorithms introducing users to radical positions, I argue, with reference to Manuel Castells (2015) and Donatella della Porta (2018), that emotional reactions to witnessing acts of violence play a central role in the mobilisation of support for the Anglophone separatist movement, both locally and abroad. Through hybrid ethnographic research, I trace the mobilisation trajectories of Anglophone diaspora members, demonstrating that their mobilisation processes are equally relational in nature and driven by pivotal moments of anger as those of people in the conflict regions. Yet, animosities exist within the Anglophone separatist movement regarding who gets to act upon their anger in ways that may impact and potentially escalate the conflict. Presenting exchanges between actors from both spheres, I highlight the potential for intra-movement dialogue based on shared affectedness. Lastly, I argue that such dialogue should inform scholarly inquiries into diaspora involvement in homeland conflict in order to counter characterisations of diasporic anger and radicalism as “unaccountable” (Anderson 1992) and “irresponsible” (Conversi 2012). Instead, I emphasise that, while diaspora members experience a specifically positioned and mediated version of a given conflict, this experience remains one of affectedness.
This presentation is based on a chapter of my recently submitted PhD thesis.
Paper short abstract
Israelis’ preoccupation with national trauma plays a central role in denying Israel’s war crimes. The prevailing cultural logic that traumatized persons cannot be held accountable for their own aggressions is extended to the state, whose aggressions are framed as mere acts of self-defence.
Paper long abstract
This paper presents a critical reading of Israelis’ preoccupation with national trauma, particularly in the aftermath of October 7th. In keeping with the broader emotional turn in late capitalism, Israeli political discourse has become saturated with emotional overtones, giving precedence to emotions over opinions. I argue that the disproportionate focus on emotions, combined with an overwhelming sense of victimhood, plays a central role in Israelis’ avoidance of confronting and taking a moral stand on Israel’s war crimes against Palestinians. The prevailing cultural logic suggests that emotions cannot be argued with, and traumatized persons cannot be held accountable for their own aggressions. Traumatized people are seen as fragile victims who must be cared for rather than confronted or judged. By extension, a traumatized state cannot, and should not, be held accountable for its aggressions, which are consistently framed as acts of self-defence. Further reinforcing this perspective is the broader framing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a zero-sum game, whereby recognizing Israeli aggressions is perceived as denying its vulnerability and thus as an act bordering on treason.
Paper short abstract
In this paper I argue that Masti - a mode of fun, playfulness, enjoyment, and light-heartedness - enables the right-wing ideology to circulate as an everyday affective practice rather than as an overtly political or party-based ideology among youth between 19 to 32 years of age.
Paper long abstract
This paper draws on a multimodal ethnographic study conducted in Ahmedabad in Gujarat, India that studies the lived experiences, stories, and narratives of young people (19–32 years) as they navigate and organise their ‘everyday’ around the right-wing nationalist ideology in contemporary India. The present-day right-wing ideology in India is built upon a majoritarian religious discourse that envisions India as a Hindu (only) nation. More recently, this ideology has begun permeating everyday spaces, objects, and conversations, resulting in a routinised yet widespread idea of the discourse, that scholars are referring to as a ‘banalization of Hindu nationalism’ (Jafferlot, 2018). In this paper I argue that Masti - a mode of fun, playfulness, enjoyment, and light-heartedness - enables the right-wing ideology to circulate as an everyday affective practice rather than as an overtly political or party-based ideology. Drawing on concepts of “happy objects” and “happiness pointers” (Ahmed, 2010), the paper theorizes how the idea of a Hindu nation has been constructed as a happy object through promises of joy, optimism, and belonging. Everyday affective practices of songs, dances, pranks, and humour function as happiness pointers that accumulate positive value and orient subjects toward the right-wing ideology. By foregrounding joy and pleasure, Masti shifts the locus of the political into the realm of the ordinary, rendering exclusionary and authoritarian politics liveable, desirable, and emotionally sustaining. The paper thus contributes to debates on the politics of emotion by showing how emotions bolster quotidian cultural politics and thus normalise religious inequality and ideological violence.
Paper short abstract
Exploring narratives of Jewish radical-left dissidents, who left Israel and the struggle out of despair, this paper aims to show the merits of despair. Contrary to the perception of despair as paralysing, the paper highlights it as a realistic appraisal of the political conditions leading to action.
Paper long abstract
“The bad guys won,” posted a devoted radical left activist when a Palestinian community in the West Bank, with which she worked, left their homes following a series of violent Jewish settlers’ attacks. This perception of defeat was prevalent in narratives of Jewish radical-left activists I interviewed, who, after years of activism, lost hope of changing the Israeli regime and left Palestine/Israel and the struggle on the grounds.
In the literature, hope is mainly associated with envisioning a better future and the ability to work towards it, whereas despair is associated with fear and paralysis. Exploring the narratives of Jewish radical-left dissidents, the reasons for their despair, and its consequences, this paper aims to show the merits of despair. In these narratives, despair is not depicted as a negative emotion but as a realistic appraisal of the political conditions. Indeed, despair is accompanied by feelings such as disappointment, sorrow, or distress, but it does not result in paralysis. On the contrary, it results in action. This action, in some cases, displaces the struggle to another arena, and in others, leads to the abandonment of activism altogether. However, it is an action, it is political, and it raises questions regarding the importance attributed to hope.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on fieldwork at European arms fairs, this paper examines how emotion within the fairs is used to sustain violence. I suggest pleasure and play build an affective veil, integrating explicit acknowledgements of killing into a broader ideological frame, neutralising harm and naturalising war.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines the affective dimensions through which violence is sustained and rendered ordinary within the global arms trade. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at arms fairs in Prague, Istanbul, Athens, and London I explore the place of emotions within arms fairs. While scholarship has highlighted the spectacle, sanitisation, and aestheticization of weapons at defence fairs, this paper focuses on the men who sell them and the everyday emotional and moral labour that makes this work ordinary, enjoyable, and ethically survivable.
Engaging feminist critiques of the supposed dichotomy between emotion and reason (Ahmed 2005), I argue that emotion plays a central role in the functioning of the arms trade. Within arms fairs, an affective environment is carefully cultivated in which play, masculine pleasure, technological awe, and commercial festivity intertwine. This environment does not work to obscure violence through ignorance; rather, it creates what I conceptualise as an affective veil, integrating explicit acknowledgements of killing into a broader ideological frame that neutralises harm and naturalises war.
I trace how sellers oscillate between fantasies of domination, rooted in masculine imaginaries of power, mastery, and technological superiority, and claims of powerlessness, articulated through references to geopolitics or the inevitability of conflict. This oscillation reveals the emotional and moral labour through which responsibility for violence is simultaneously felt and veiled.
By foregrounding emotion, this paper contributes to anthropological debates on complicity, harm, and wilful blindness, while demonstrating how emotion, and particularly pleasure, operates as a mechanism sustaining the trade in the implements of violence.
Paper short abstract
Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a university in the Turkish capital, this paper examines how queer students endure authoritarian repression after prefigurative protest ends, tracing how affect, vulnerability, and everyday presence sustain political subjectivity beyond mobilisation.
Paper long abstract
Following the repression and gradual demobilisation of large-scale student protests against state intervention at a university in the Turkish capital, many students described the movement as “having ended.” Yet the existing power structures remained challenged in the practices of the everyday. Addressing a gap in resistance studies where limited attention has been paid to what happens after mobilisation subsides and how the afterlife of prefigurative protest continues to shape political subjectivities (Theodosopoulos, 2014), this paper examines how political life is sustained following an almost year-long occupation of campus space.
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2023 and 2024, the paper traces how resistance persists through affective practices of endurance among queer students, who became primary targets of state homophobia (Özbay, 2021) alongside the authoritarian intervention on the university. Confronted with invisibilisation and erasure, queer students mobilise the very vulnerability that exposed them as targets (Butler, 2016), reclaiming their queerness by continuing to inhabit the university as queer subjects. While collective occupation was no longer possible, the encounters, solidarities, and political imaginaries forged during protest persisted through friendships and everyday practices of care.
Engaging this afterlife of mobilisation through Asef Bayat’s notion of a politics of presence, the paper argues that resistance under authoritarianism cannot be reduced to mobilisation or articulated demands. By foregrounding the aftermath of protest as a distinct ethnographic problem and political condition, the paper contributes to debates on affect, resistance, and authoritarian governance, while positioning queer students as key theorists of political life within the contemporary university.
Paper short abstract
Applying a theoretical framework of Islamic feminism, the paper analyses how the women survivors of enforced disappearances in Kashmir develop the solidarity and emotional bond among each other. The paper traces their transition from an individual journey to a collective struggle for justice
Paper long abstract
Women, in the violent conflict of Kashmir, experienced direct and indirect violence for many years. The enforced disappearance of their loved ones (sons, brothers and husbands) inflicted a profound socio-economic impact on the surviving women, who face formidable challenges in the aftermath of the disappearance. However, rather than being mere victims of enforced disappearances of loved ones, these women act as “survivors” who exercise their agency by navigating socio-economic challenges and building the strong bonds with the other survivors. The Association of Parents of Disappeared not only to takes up their legal battles but also provides a space of sharing grief and develop emotional bonds. Applying a theoretical framework of Islamic feminism, the paper analyses the agentive role of the women survivors while developing the solidarity among each other to face the emotional and material losses. The paper uncovers how the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons provided a space for solidarity among the women survivors where they continue to provide emotional and collective support to each other. By in-depth analysis of few cases, the paper explores the journey of the women survivors from an individual journey to a collective struggle for justice, which reflects the transformative potential of empowering these women in Kashmir.