Conflict and Society

This article examines two female researchers’ fieldwork experiences researching the transitional justice process in post-conflict Nepal. Drawing on social anthropology and applied research, it explores the complexities of researcher positionality, including their gender and social status, and addresses the challenges of engaging with the “local” and managing emotions. The authors argue that researchers need to move beyond self-awareness and sit in the complex, liminal space to examine the changing agency between researched and researchers. This article also contributes to the insider/outsider dichotomy and promotes two primary reflexive practices in ethnographic research. It contributes to discussions on intersectionality of researchers’ positions, emphasizing the relational and situational nature of social identities, and the need for a nuanced understanding of the fluidities of researchers’ roles in the field.

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork and analysis of mass media to explore how public life is perceived and made by residents in Turkey's Syrian borderlands. Deploying two case studies from the ethnically and religiously diverse border provinces of Mardin and Hatay, we investigate how people in these borderlands contest and renegotiate terms of solidarity across multiple forms of social difference, considering how this process both responds to and is reflected in larger shifts in Turkey's politics, economy, and public culture. In addition, we explore how differently positioned actors practice manifold forms of identification and competing forms of political alignment, paying close attention to how “ideological axes of social differentiation” (Gal and Irvine 2019) are deployed in understanding and making relations of solidarity and difference.

What makes recognition of veterans “authentic,” and how does authentic recognition shape and establish “war veteranship” among wounded veterans? Through ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, this article explores how Danish wounded veterans experience and evaluate official recognition ceremonies. We demonstrate that recognition ceremonies alone do not establish effective recognition. Rather, for recognition to be perceived as authentic, it must be mutual, grounded in the moral originality of the recognizers, and manifested in words as well as actions. Authentic recognition, we argue, establishes a reciprocal relationship between wounded veterans and the state, which positions veterans as valuable contributors to society. Conversely, the absence of authentic recognition generates experiences of misrecognition and invisibility, leading in some cases to wounded veterans feeling “like immigrants” in their own country.

Building on fieldwork with the Danish Frogman Corps and the Ghana Navy Special Boat Squadron (Ghana Navy SBS), this article discusses how naval special warfare operators train for combat by learning to maneuver in water. The article argues that operators familiarize themselves with underwater work through “water habituation.” It presents unique ethnographic data from sessions, where operators learn to perform edgework by navigating the space between uncertainty and control. The article contributes to discussions about professional edgework and socialization, analyzing how operators learn to control their emotions when preparing for combat. In understanding naval special warfare, it holds, we need to study the trained, controlled response to emotions of fear. Thus, the learned ability to enter “a state of calmness” during extreme situations makes these operators an efficient political tool able to conduct high-risk operations worldwide.

Most research on vigilantism in the social sciences assumes that vigilante groups in Africa operate on the basis of a homogenous moral order. Based on a rare opportunity to conduct ethnographic fieldwork with Koglweogo vigilante groups in urban Burkina Faso, I argue instead that vigilantism is an experimental moral project that struggles with the question of how to exercise violence in a “good” way. Drawing on recent debates in moral anthropology, I investigate the personal dilemmas and moral conflicts that emerge among Koglweogo members, as well as the transformative potential of their violent interventions. This in-depth look at the ordinary moral practices of vigilantes reveals that the morality of vigilante violence is contingent and highly negotiated, and this perspective complicates our understanding of violence where it appears to be collective.

Starting from the ambivalence and contradiction of social categories at the margins, this introduction points out the potential of a perspective from and on the margins for a Critical Anthropology of Security. We conceptualize security from the margins as discourses and practices concerned with the social reproduction of marginalized actors, and security concepts and strategies used to negotiate, and establish notions of a “good life.” Security from the margins is characterized by the positionality, temporality, and (in)visibility of marginalized actors and security practices, which, taken seriously, illustrate the diversity of specific threats, practices, and concepts involved in increasingly complex (in)security situations. Marginalized security practices not only aim to minimize negative security risks but generate positive options that secure living conditions at the margins.

How does our understanding of security change when we reflect on it from the perspective of crime offender, and within the space where the security apparatus assumes a vital importance—the prison? Based on ethnographic data from 12 prison facilities in Portugal, in this article I discuss vernacular notions of security from the perspective of male and female inmates. My aim is to bring to the forefront of the Anthropology of Security research the experiences, practices, and discourses of actors that so far have been excluded from the crime-security nexus debate.

This article introduces the concept of securosociality by drawing on my research on non-state security in South Africa. By examining ethnographic examples of how actors establish security-related social ties with each other and the role of vernacular understandings of security in forging them, I argue that this concept is a productive lens for analyzing the social lives of security. Among other things, its focus on the dynamic and versatile nature of social life allows justice to be done to the observation that one and the same actor can be involved in different security-related social arrangements and to highlight the existence of securosocialities that bridge otherwise prevailing social divisions and cleavages.

Security issues are at the heart of processes of peace—also in Colombia. The termination of hostilities and reintegration of combatants is aimed at increasing physical and public security in conflict regions. Peace measures such as land restitution and legalization are designed to reduce conflict causes and insecurity, notably in the rural areas. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the article shows how the (in)security situation in the conflict area of San José de Apartadó is shifting rather than improving with the current peace process. At the same time, the peasant population developed security strategies that have enabled them to survive the armed conflict and adapt to the transforming (in)security situation. The strategies are based on a marginalized notion of security that is closely linked to imaginings of a dignified peasant life.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Dominican-Haitian borderland, I depict various security practices of the local population to minimize everyday insecurities caused by structural, physical, epistemic, and racial state violence and a restrictive border regime. By focusing on mixed Dominican-Haitian households, I show how the local socio-politically and economically marginalized population has developed strategic cross-border kin relations that are based on a place-specific form of creating “kin” and thus “family” to ensure a secure life across generations. I present these kin-making strategies and their related security practices as “Lakou security” and argue for their long history dating back to colonial times. This article introduces kinship as security from the margins and calls for a greater focus on cultural and place-specific forms of making relationships or kin in anthropological security studies.

How do Mexican-American women in the US-Mexico borderlands respond to insecurity relating to multiple forms of discrimination? The present article compares the experiences of women of different class and ethnic backgrounds to analyze their gendered watchfulness in response to the racialized and classed anti-immigrant vigilance of privileged Anglo-Americans. We argue that, in a context of ongoing coloniality, maintaining an exploitable racialized and gendered sub-worker class requires conjuring the illusion of the border as a necessary security feature. Mexican-American women's watchfulness strategies, including professionalism, beauty practices, and artistic performances, instead makes visible the ways in which the border as the margin of the state actively produces insecurity and violence. Viewing security from the margins of the margins allows us to expand and decolonize previous understandings.

Moving Memory: Remembering Palestine in Postdictatorship Chile. By Siri Schwabe. Cornell University Press, 2023. 120 pp. Paperback. ISBN: 9781501770647

The Invisible Palestinians: The Hidden Struggle for Inclusion in Jewish Tel Aviv. By Andreas Hackl. Indiana University Press, 2022. 230 pp. Paperback ISBN: 9780253060839.

Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon. By Maya Mikdashi. Stanford University Press, 2022. 288 pp. Hard cover. ISBN 978-1-5036-2887-8.

Syria Divided: Patterns of Violence in a Complex Civil War. By Ora Szekely. Columbia University Press, 2023. 278pp. Paperback. ISBN: 978-0-231-20539-9

Waves of Upheaval in Myanmar: Gendered Transformations and Political Transitions. By Jenny Hedström and Elisabeth Olivius, eds., 2022. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. ISBN 978-87-7694-323-3; Hardback GBP 70; Paperback GBP 22,50.

At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War. By Jennifer Greenburg. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023. 267 pages. ISBN: 9781501767746.