Conflict and Society

This article looks at the everyday security practices of local residents in violent local orders, where capacities and strategies of state and non-state armed actors to produce regularity and stability are weak and contested. It discusses the case of gang-controlled neighborhoods in the metropolitan area of Greater San Salvador, El Salvador, in the years 2017–2018, when security “provision” of armed state and non-state actors was weak and contested, and as a result civilians mostly took care of themselves. The article analyzes the main characteristics of local violent orders, the insecurity experiences of local residents, and the everyday practices of local residents to deal with these circumstances. It argues that in neighborhoods where security provision by state and non-state actors is weak and contested, everyday security practices of local residents are key to understanding the functioning and reproduction of the local forms of “disordered order.”

For many Hondurans fleeing poverty, political corruption, violent crime, and climate change-induced disasters and seeking settlement in the United States, insecurity is a lived condition throughout the non-linear migratory journey. Add to that an ever-expanding surveillance infrastructure and thickening of the securitized US–Mexico border, and the very act of leaving arguably becomes political in its assertion of the right to dignified life. In this article I examine how undocumented Honduran migrants living in New Orleans rationalize the levels of risk they have faced during their migration and residency in the city. By focusing on violence—potential and actual—from petty criminals, gangs, traffickers, and law enforcement, I argue for heightened attention to how insecurity is an ongoing, cumulative, and transnational process that migrants face in their search for the good life.

This article offers an analysis of how a revolutionary organization—the LTTE in the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009)—used military training camps to produce new members. By framing war as a “transformative social condition” (Lubkemann 2008), I will show that the LTTE did not only teach recruits how to fight but also attempted to produce new political subjectivities and construct a new community. Through the imposition of discipline and punishments, control over the recruits’ body and emotions, and the spread of nationalistic narratives, the LTTE aimed to transform them into freedom fighters embodying the political will of the organization. The proposed research on a self-making process under an authoritarian regime will lead us to develop a more nuanced understanding of the contrast that is usually drawn between will and coercion.

This article describes and analyzes the disrupted femininity of women within gangs in the city of Bucaramanga (Colombia) through the employment of a gender approach. We argue that such women, albeit exposed to multiple forms of violence in their neighborhoods, are also agents of violence with a singular identity, which is expressed by performative acts and ways of being and caring for others, in which broad gender arrangements are simultaneously disrupted and maintained. This research followed a qualitative methodology based on ethnographic work and 50 in-depth and semi-structured interviews.

Israeli denials and classification of documents, alongside scholarly work (Nitsán 2007; Wood 2006), have all contributed to the perception that aside from the 1948 war and its aftermath, rape and other forms of sexual violence are missing from Israel's military toolbox. A spatial intersectional analysis of Israeli state sexual violence against Palestinians finds that in the context of the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt), the wartime rape paradigm is doing a disservice. It further silences Israeli state sexual violence against Palestinians and diverts our attention from the colonial nature of the Israeli control regime. These findings unearth (1) the risks of stripping rape of the specific context in which it materializes, (2) the importance of incorporating power structures that transgress the framework of conflict and war-related sexual violence and (3) the necessity of deciphering and attending to colonial and settler colonial- related sexual violence.

How is conflict reshaped by and through the displacement of millions of people into neighboring countries? Does conflict follow displaced people and how does this spatial rupture reconfigure conflict itself? Based on ethnographies of Syrians in Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Syria, this introduction to a special section on displaced conflict argues that displacement, generating a spatial rupture between people and the state, layers conflict by embedding state level competitions over power in intimate relationships. Moreover, displacement inscribes the altered stakes of everyday social life into state level politics. In displacement, the Syrian conflict re-emerges as a layer of decision about, for instance, where and how to bury the deceased, just as shifting forms of solidarity between Syrians and Lebanese becomes one layer of what the conflict is all about. As such, comprehending the conflict and the transformations it instigates in people's lifeworlds requires attention to the layering induced by spatial rupture.

This article discusses how the ongoing conflict in Syria and the Rojava Revolution gave way to newly imagined futures and political possibilities for displaced Kurdish Syrians. It examines the Syrian war and the broader Middle Eastern context as a system of unpredictable escalations (Højer et al. 2018) and the liberation of Kobanî as a “critical” and “generative” moment (Das 1995; Kapferer 2015) in the Kurdish imaginary. Using ethnographic (audiovisual) material, I point to how people in forced displacement must constantly navigate uncertainty and reconfigure and consolidate their unknown future paths. I argue that my interlocutor Mihemed stabilized these uncertainties through his capacity to hold multiple future possibilities open simultaneously in order to keep every outcome viable.

In the wake of the Syrian uprising in 2011, Syrian dissidents in Lebanon cultivated their revolutionary commitment with the support of Lebanese communities. This political solidarity morphed into humanitarian care toward wounded and displaced Syrians in response to the emergency created by the war. With the mutations of the war in Syria and the collapse of the revolution as a political project, these solidarities were reconfigured to tackle the everyday hardship of displacement. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon (2014–2019), the article retraces the manifold incarnations of revolutionary solidarity in Lebanon and their relation to the other side of the border. By moving away from hospitality, the article rethinks the Syrian displacement in Lebanon through the concept of solidarity and its spatial and temporal intricacies.

Through an ethnographic account of quotidian family activities like cooking or watching the news, this article investigates how authoritarian history and ongoing conflict in Syria play out in the everyday life of Syrians displaced to Lebanon and Turkey. It traces the day-to-day activities through which the value of the anti-authoritarian actions of some family members is recalibrated in friction with the social and material price the family has paid for such actions, the futures various family members imagine for themselves and the particular family history of adaptation to authoritarian rule. The article argues that unfolding these recalibrations among the displaced allows us to see how Syrians formulate the conflict (also) as a family matter. Investigating this family layer of the conflict in turn alerts us to the ways in which political contestation and collaboration in authoritarian contexts is navigated (also) through ethical propositions related to the family.

What gets displaced in war, even when people don't move? How does conflict transform and reverberate among those still there? And, what can sectarianism tell us about state power in war and in occupation? To answer, we theorize and problematize the relationship of sectarianism to the state, and explore the effects of war and occupation in everyday practice and in socio-economic and political institutions. The cases come from two Syrian Druze regions, from the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Height and from Jaramana, Damascus. In the first case, the Israeli occupation shifted the national border, and, in the second case, the war in Syria created new internal borders and checkpoints. Tracing the displacement of conflict through sectarianism allows us to think through state borders, and explore everyday life in relation to economic pressures and geopolitics. It is within these absences and presences of the state that the transformations of conflict and belonging appear.

We all know that conflict creates displacement. Life becomes untenable in different ways, and people are forced to move; the majority ending up as internally displaced people within the nation-state, while others wind up in refugee camps in neighboring countries, and a very few seek asylum in faraway places. The recent war in Ukraine and the conflict in Syria since 2011 seemingly fit into this classical conception of why and how people are displaced. Sudden violent events forced them to run for their lives. Often, we perceive the flight as a one-way movement in space and time, as people move from hot spaces in search of cool ground. However, the journeys are most often more complicated—even in seemingly straightforward cases like Ukraine and Syria. Decisions to move are made gradually, in steps and at times in leaps, sometimes stopping along the way, at other times being temporarily reversed, as individuals and families continue to engage with the conflict, assessing its potential to diffuse, escalate or morph into something else (Bredeloup 2012; Collyer and de Haas 2012). This collection engages closely with these processes as they unfold in the intimate sphere of family and friends while keeping in mind that the conflict in Syria is still there and it still plays an active role in displaced Syrians’ present lives and plans for futures.

The following conversation took place as an online round table organized by the Anthropology of Peace, Conflict, and Security research network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists on 14 March 2023. The aim of the round table was to create a space where Ukrainian anthropologists would reflect collectively on the anthropological approach to the invasion of Ukraine one year on. We asked them: What kinds of debates, narratives, imaginaries, and forms of activism have emerged under the invasion, and how have they shifted with time? How does an anthropological lens complicate some of the debates that have perhaps been posed in too simplistic terms? What is the view “from below” in Ukraine regarding life under the invasion, prospects for peace, solidarity, hope, and resistance? And last, but not least: how can we—anthropologists, non-Ukrainians—support them?

Composing Violence: The Limits of Exposure and the Making of Minorities. By Moyukh Chatterjee. Duke University Press, 2023. 184 pp. Paperback. ISBN: 978-1-4780-1966-4.

Policing Race, Ethnicity and Culture: Ethnographic Perspectives across Europe. Edited by Jan Beek, Thomas Bierschenk, Annalena Koch, and Bernd Meyer. Manchester University Press, 2023. 332 pp. Hard cover. ISBN 978-1-5261-6558-9.

Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity's Dark Side. By Antonius C. G. M. Robben and Alexander Laban Hinton. Stanford University Press, 2023. 253pp. ISBN 9781503-634275.

There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince. By Greg Beckett. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. 312 pages. ISBN: 9780520378995.