Conflict and Society

This article discusses a high-profile 2020 Danish murder case where a young man was brutally killed by two brothers on the small island of Bornholm—a case that became the center of attention not only in Denmark but internationally with the New York Times reporting on it, saying “A Black Man Was Tortured and Killed in Denmark. The Police Insist It Wasn't about Race.” Building on my long-standing ethnographic research of police investigations in and beyond Denmark, the article contemplates why the Danish police so readily denied the existence of a hate crime. How, in other words, was it possible for the Danish police to deny what to others seemed so apparent? Was it indeed yet another case of police prejudice as both media and many others believed? Or could it, as this article suggests, also be an example of a specific mode of rationality that governs much police thinking and detective work specifically?

Drawing from a yearlong ethnography alongside police officers, door staff, and venue managers, this article explores my research participants’ conceptions, and governance of, “urban nights” in “Greenshire, UK.” My research participants used the term “urban nights” to refer to nighttime events where traditionally Black music is played, such as drill, grime, and R&B. In doing this, I reveal how institutional racism is embedded within policing cultures and everyday policing practices used to govern nightlife. In exploring how nightlife is governed in a white provincial context in Southern England, I uncover how the public and private police work together to produce nightlife as an “acceptably white space.” The article outlines the impact this has on the governance of “urban nights” and the management, access, and experiences of Black nighttime participants.

This article provides an ethnographically informed critique of the humanitarian self-management model that informs reproductive health trainings for young urban refugees in Kampala, Uganda. It draws on interviews with 16 adolescent refugees, as well as policymakers, aid workers and health care professionals in Kampala in April 2019. We found that reproductive health education training sessions are a site of gendered learning where displaced boys and girls gain an understanding of what it means “how to live a good life” and how to become marriage material. Their focus on self-control also reflects a wider shift in humanitarianism toward female empowerment as a tool of neoliberal governance. In a low-resource context, however, “self-managing” one's reproductive health takes on a different meaning, as displaced adolescents weigh up opportunities for short-term income from transactional sex with imagined reproductive futures elsewhere.

This introduction to the special section charts the ways in which the concept of vigilance has been loosely conceptualized at the intersection between security, surveillance, and border studies. It rethinks vigilance through the conceptual lens of vigilance regimes, as well as through the productivity of watchfulness in different contexts. Vigilance is conceptualized as an assemblage of moral ideas, belonging, increased attention, and social practice, located in certain sociopolitical contexts, concrete spaces, and technologies. Regimes of vigilance are defined as complex assemblages of practices and discourses that mobilize alertness for specific goals, which are embedded in particular materialities of watchfulness, and which in turn have effects on social practice and processes of subjectivation. This introduction calls for greater analytic attention toward the agency that vigilance produces, and seeks to define vigilance and the regimes that it constitutes, offering a productive lens for the study of socially mobilized alertness.

Reflecting on the generic construction of the nomad through discursive imaginaries and regulatory forms of control, this work engages in the interpretation of vigilance through the acknowledgment of its connectedness to the politics and practice of visuality. Based on essentialized interpretations of identity, ahistorical accounts of mobility, and stereotypical representations of difference, generalized nomadic representations legitimize measures of vigilance and subject formation. By reflecting on the representation of the Banjara community in Rajasthan, India, and their contexts of socioeconomic discrimination, the article thus emphasizes how acts of vigilance in the form of measures of classification and discipline operate in relation to imaginaries of normative order and social distinction, to engage in the structural reproduction of distance, difference and (in)visibility.

In this article, I explore the construction of the “refugee crisis” from the perspective of border vigilantes in Bulgaria. Drawing on ethnography in Harmanli, a border town with a refugee camp, the article explores how the identity and agency of the “refugee hunter” emerged. I argue that the gendered identity of the “refugee hunter” combines a national feminized victim and a vigilant masculinized protector. The masculinized protector patrols the Bulgarian-Turkish border in order to defend the victimized national community from the immigrant Other and the nongoverning state. The article illustrates that the refugee hunter identity has produced a new mode of hegemonic masculinity, where immigrant men and women are constructed as criminals, while men’ border patrols as heroic.

Informal policing has recently been on the rise in Europe: in several countries, “concerned citizens” have mobilized for the protection of their neighborhoods. This article examines the production and mobilization of vigilance in the negotiations around practices of informal policing in Italy and Germany and analyzes the relational way in which discourses and practices of vigilantism make and unmake the state. Grounded in research on practices of informal policing in Italy and Germany, the article argues that practices of vigilance manifested in informal policing are simultaneously and ambivalently state-(un)making practices. What is obtained in the process is an ambivalent regime of vigilance.

This article examines the navigation and enactment of vigilance in the UK citizenship regime. Drawing on data from a four-year research project in a UK city, including observations of citizenship ceremonies and interviews with institutional actors and citizen-candidates, it sees vigilance as a central feature of the naturalization process, with watchfulness oriented toward three key areas: the bureaucratic precision, the linguistic proficiency, and the commitment to the nation evidenced by the citizen-candidate. It sees the navigation of anxious vigilance among all actors—state, institutional, and citizen-candidates—but argues that this is directed unevenly, with the state's securitizing gaze particularly maintained upon those racialized as Other. Reading citizenship in domopolitical terms as a technology through which the securitized state can enact its bordering practices, it sees the vigilance enacted in the naturalization process as productive: as working to realize the legitimacy of the state and the Good citizen, to articulate and exclude from membership those deemed illegitimate, and, ultimately, to curtail possibilities for solidarity.

In Barcelona, in the name of convivencia (a concept that means togetherness, conviviality, public order), various municipal services have created teams to patrol the city. These are “proximity” services, a type of social vigilance managed by social patrols who aim to survey specific areas in Barcelona within which poor, illegalized, and racialized people, move, work, and live. Drawing on ethnographic notes and interviews with the patrols and people affected by this “proximity” vigilance, I show how institutional vigilance produces insecurity and perceptions of conflicts. In addition, this vigilant presence disrupts the intimacy of affected people, taking away their autonomy and producing alienation. Paradoxically, in the name of convivencia, the vigilance of illegalized and racialized people produces their isolation from the city, creating a social and racial order.

This article shows how vigilance against racism and coloniality in the US-Mexico borderlands produces knowledge, highlighting the decolonizing potential of their dynamic entanglement. Before the Black Lives Matter protests against police violence across the United States in late May 2020, many Latin@s in San Diego, California, already anticipated racial discrimination and violence in light of growing anti-migration sentiment. Those Latin@s who took part in the protests often also protested border patrol violence. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, we argue that the vigilance of Latin@s, who were further racialized as “immigrants” through their protest participation, produced knowledge about ongoing racism and coloniality in San Diego. We propose theorizing vigilance as having both the potential to uphold colonialist structures and to undermine these.

Violent conflict and displacement reconfigure societies in abrupt, dramatic, and often contradictory ways. Power relations are often shaken up, with new social hierarchies emerging. Artists play a central role in periods of uncertainty and volatility, both as commentators of events and as inspirators for change. This special section explores the role of art practice in transformation in contexts of violent conflict and displacement. The articles focus on artists that either create in the context of oppression and control or respond to these contexts by creating spaces of resistance, life in and with violent conflict, transformation, and inspiration. The articles discuss a range of initiatives and artistic practices that take place in a variety of contexts, from artists involved in societal transformation in Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Syria, to artists working in Palestine, Chad, Sri Lanka, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In this article, I examine encounters with an artist and his art: Cambodian exile filmmaker Rithy Panh. In his cinematographic and artwork, Rithy Panh comes to terms with his childhood, the death of his family, and the suffering of his people during the Khmer Rouge regime and the genocide in Cambodia. Conflict and displacement are themes usually approached by researchers using language-based methods, which do not give us fully adequate insights into the “felt and experienced” temporal/spatial aspects of conflict and displacement. I frame my discussion through the reflective interaction between art, an artist with violent conflict and displacement background and the audience—a researcher. First, I examine how taking the sentipensar approach to research through art encounters and researcher as a thinking-feeling person contributes to a different understanding of personal trajectories, experiences of, and emotions connected to conflict, war, and displacement. My second aim is to analyze how artistic practice of Rithy Panh contributes to coming to terms with and to creating alternatives to the official public discourses about the past and the present, at individual and societal levels.

In this article, I explore the concept of the questioning individual through life history research with two female artists from (post)war contexts. Afghan theater producer Monirah Hashemi's story illustrates how self-expression in contexts of violence is not only politically but also socially repressed, and illustrates the role that marginalized outsiders can play in questioning. Diala Brisly, a visual artist from Syria, talks of public expression after the suspension of censorship and shows the power of creative self-expression to support resistance to repression. This article explores their contributions of both societal critique and alternative visions of (post)war societies from their positions in exile. I argue that creative processes and cultural expressions can play crucial roles as sources of resistance and ways of creating alternative societal visions.

In this article I explore the experiences of three dance artists living and working in Palestine through the concept of “embodied agency.” Based on fieldwork in Palestine and a decade of professional engagement as a dancer and choreographer with the Palestinian dancing community, I examine how the body—through the practice of dance—creates movement in the artists’ lives. The article highlights how embodied and expressive spaces of dance expand the artists’ possibilities and room for maneuver. I argue that in the context of protracted occupation, like Palestine, where individuals have little possibility to impact their situation, zooming into the body can be a powerful way to identify spaces where it is possible to have influence on oneself and others.

How can we explain the increasing popularity of slam poetry among youth in societies colored by long histories of conflict and political repression? This article explores this question for the rise of slam poetry in Chad, since 2014, a conflict-ridden country with an authoritarian regime and deep poverty, characteristics of a society in duress. In Francophone Africa we can speak of a slam poetry movement, where slam as a form of expression and the organization of (inter)national festivals has become a space of belonging for young people in Africa who must cope with societies in duress. The article is the result of my long engagement with the slam scene in francophone Africa.

This article explores the ways in which arts experiences in conflicted and territorialized settings may invite a heightened engagement with space, and what this suggests about creative experiences as a vehicle for transforming space and the (re)construction of one's presence and place in the world. Presenting ethnographic data from two youth music projects established after the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sri Lanka and argued from the perspective of musician-practitioner-researchers, the authors examine how musical interaction, improvisation, and performance creation enabled processes of exploring, reconfiguring, and expanding the participants’ identities and sense of place in the surrounding world. Using Tia DeNora's conceptualization of “music asylum,” the article shows how strategies of removal and refurnishing created creative and safe spaces in which alternative lives and more complex identities could be rehearsed and conflict narratives could be revised, fostering a temporary transformation of space that is captured in metaphors like bubble, refuge, and sanctuary.

Francio Guadeloupe, Black Man in the Netherlands: An Afro-Antillean Anthropology (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2022)