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.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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