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- Convenors:
-
Saskia Jaschek
(Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies)
Valerie Haensch (LMU Munich)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
The panel explores how war reshapes the responsibilities, relationships and methods entwined in anthropological knowledge production. It asks how anthropologists can navigate fragmentation and polarization to sustain solidarity, collective inquiry, and critical engagement amid violence and division.
Long Abstract
Contemporary wars and armed conflicts around the globe, whether in Europe, the SWANA region, or elsewhere, once again reveal how polarizations emerge both within and beyond the immediate context of war. In this process, diverse actors, such as governments, activists, regional forces, local populations, or diasporic communities, often become positioned against one another, producing fragmented moral and political landscapes. In such contexts, anthropology is often confronted with the limits of its own modes of knowledge production, as well as the ethical, political, and epistemological frameworks in which they are grounded. War reshapes the conditions of knowing, witnessing, and belonging, raising the question of whether and how anthropology can remain balanced amid such polarizations.
This panel asks what it means to produce anthropological knowledge under conditions of violence and division. How can anthropologists engage with these conflicts that fragment their fields? We invite contributions that examine how war transforms anthropology’s methods, relations, and responsibilities. How do categories such as “inside” and “outside,” “observer” and “participant,” or “victim” and “perpetrator”, become enforced, destabilized, or collapse in the lived realities of war? What responsibilities do anthropologists bear in this regard when engaging with these conflicts?
Finally, we ask: how can ethnographic practice become a means of resisting the logic of division? We invite scholars working on contexts of armed conflict to explore the possibilities for solidarity and collective knowledge production in the face of fragmentation. We want to reflect on how anthropologists can act in solidarity while remaining critical, when their fields are marked by violent polarization and their discipline itself is implicated in global hierarchies that are reproduced in such conflicts.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Ecuador’s declaration of internal armed conflict reshapes everyday life in Guayaquil’s barrios. This paper reflects on how war on organized crime transforms ethnographic relations, methods and responsibilities in contexts where fear and community defense coexist.
Paper long abstract
In early 2024, the Ecuadorian state declared an internal armed conflict against organized crime groups, reframing urban life through a war logic that quickly permeated Guayaquil’s popular neighborhoods. Based on my fieldwork from 2022 to 2025, this paper reflects on how this shift has influenced the moral, political and epistemological conditions of my ethnographic research in self-built peripheral barrios such as Bastión Popular and Isla Trinitaria. As militarization intensified and criminal groups enforced their own territorial order, residents encountered polarizing categories: victim, suspect, collaborator, protected, abandoned - that simultaneously structured survival and meanings about social belonging.
These polarizations also fragment the ethnographic field. Access becomes uneven, trust becomes fragile and the distinction between “inside” and “outside” collapses when fear circulates in the urban context. Yet ethnographic practice can also reveal forms of solidarity and collective agency that resist division. In Guayaquil’s barrios, community networks, women’s groups and neighborhood leaders mobilize practices of mutual defense, care and information-sharing that counter both state abandonment and criminal coercion. This paper argues that anthropology can not be neutral in armed conflict contexts and accounts for a methodological approach that challenges the logic of violence by integrating militancy and participatory tools of representation.
Paper short abstract
This paper focuses on author's experience of fieldwork in Rojava and engagement in teaching at University of Rojava, disrupted by STG offensive in january 2026. It uses concepts of commradeship and (specifically udnerstood) salvage ethnography to deal with the experince of war and loss in research.
Paper long abstract
In my paper I will reflect on my experience of doing the ethnography in Rojava/North-East Syria, focusing on research in the context of protracted armed struggle. My previous research focused on the ecology in the Kurdish Freedom Movement and the effects of climate change on NES. It benefited greatly from the period of stability in the region and cooperation with newly established University of Rojava. This reality, however, come to and end in January 2026. Through the auto-ethnographic lens, I will explore porous nature of both academic and political fields that created loopholes, allowing me to perform activist ethnography in a field easily described as dangerous. Such positionality entails a degree of moral commitment that I will explore through the figure of “comrade” as discussed by Jodi Dean and indigenous notion of “heval”. With help of fellow anthropologists of revolutionary movements, Alpa Shah and Axel Rudi, I will attempt to characterize the moral and emotional ambiguity of working with the movements where death and martyrdom are part of experience. Finally I will discuss my involvement in preparation of masters studies programme in social ecology at University of Rojava and its abrupt suspension due to attack of Syran Transitional Governement against the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North-East Syria. This experience highlights the futility of academic engagement vis-à-vis militarized violence yet also allow to explore themes of hope and resilience through the work that can be seen as form of “salvage ethnography” as well as revolutionary continuity.
Paper short abstract
The paper theorizes war as an epistemic condition shaping anthropological knowledge. Drawing on wartime ethnography in Ukraine, it examines positionality, fragmentation, and epistemic restraint, arguing that uncertainty and incompleteness are constitutive of knowing under violence.
Paper long abstract
This paper theorizes war as an epistemic condition that reshapes how anthropological knowledge is produced, authorized, and constrained. Rather than treating war as an object of study, it asks how ongoing violence reorganizes the basic conditions of knowing, witnessing, and analytical distance in anthropology.
Drawing on wartime ethnographic engagement in Ukraine, the paper uses empirical experience primarily as a site for epistemological reflection. It examines how familiar anthropological distinctions, such as observer and participant, distance and involvement, or data and analysis, lose analytical stability under conditions of violence and polarization. In such contexts, knowledge cannot be separated from the researcher’s situated position within unequal regimes of risk, safety, and responsibility.
The paper argues that anthropology conducted in times of war produces knowledge that is necessarily partial, interrupted, and affectively charged. Fragmentation is treated not as methodological failure but as a structural feature of ethnography carried out under insecurity, moral pressure, and uncertainty. Practices such as silence, refusal, and non-publication are approached not as ethical exceptions, but as epistemic practices shaped by limits of representation and responsibility.
Building on debates about situated knowledge and the ethics of witnessing, the paper suggests that claims to neutrality in wartime anthropology risk reproducing epistemic harm by obscuring unequal exposure to violence. It cautions against replacing analytical work with moral or political alignment. The paper concludes by asking whether anthropology can remain analytically rigorous without seeking closure or coherence, and how epistemic restraint may function in wartime.
Paper short abstract
Drawing from long-standing research with Arab tribal and Syrian Kurdish interlocutors, who stand on opposite sides of the current conflict in Syria, I ask how anthropologists can speak for local perspectives that are contradictory and that may also be in opposition to the researcher's own views.
Paper long abstract
Anthropological research is associated with a moral/political obligation to stand behind the communities who have supported us during the research process, as interlocutors and hosts. Among other things, this may be understood as making interlocutors' voices heard and their standpoints understood, to both scholarly and wider publics.
This obligation weighs particularly heavily in situations of existential crisis and war. Yet in an ongoing (civil) war situation, where local interpretations and expectations may not only differ but diametrically oppose each other, this seemingly simple tenet may present serious problems. This is exacerbated by methodological issues, as fieldwork in places of war is typically difficult if not impossible to do, leading to a shift in research methods towards remote research, conversations with exiled and diasporic communities to learn about the situation "at home", and a strong reliance on digital representations and social media.
The ongoing conflict in Syria is a case in point. I draw from my long-standing research with two different rural communities in Northern Syria - tribal Arab groups on the one hand, Syrian Kurds on the other - to unpack these issues further. Although the historical experiences of both communities are closely entangled, they stand on opposite sides in the current conflict, contradicting and negating each others' perceptions. How is it possible to accurately reflect local communities' views in this setting in a nuanced and precise manner, while violence, distrust and hatred create an atmosphere of urgency and despair?
Paper short abstract
Images circulated from Sudan’s war act as forms of witnessing, conveying atrocities, violence, and displacement. This paper examines how anthropologists navigate mediated witnessing from afar, the ethical tensions involved, and the co-production of solidarity through visual testimony.
Paper long abstract
Anthropologists are increasingly confronted with the transformation of their research fields into zones of conflict. This raises challenges for producing and conveying knowledge under highly polarized conditions, as well as for engaging with violence through mediated forms of witnessing from afar.
According to the United Nations, the war in Sudan currently constitutes the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, yet it receives comparatively little media attention. In response, those affected by violence and displacement circulate images of loss and destruction on social media in order to generate visibility and evidence of atrocities. Since the outbreak of the violent conflict in 2023, Sudanese journalists, artists, and activists—both inside Sudan and in the diaspora—have shared photographs and videos documenting the war. These images depict the violent destruction of cities, mass killings, forced displacement, and memories of home before the war.
These visual materials do more than testifying war and violence; they convey affects such as loss, trauma, and grief, but also hope for renewal in exile. By mobilizing affects, these circulated images contribute both to emotional processing among artists and activists and to a sense of urgency in the distant witnesses. Taking mediated witnessing from afar as a starting point, I examine the tensions anthropologists face between the felt obligation to draw attention to violence and the risk of reproducing violent or victimizing discourses. These frictions reveal both the possibilities and the limits of anthropological engagement in the co-production of witnessing through collaborative interventions that seek to foster networks of solidarity.