Ratko Mladić: Relativism,myth and reality (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This editorial explores the context of the arrest and subsequent extradition to the ICTY at the Hague of Ratko Mladi?, former Bosnian Serb Army Commander. As Mladi? acquired an almost mythical status among the Serbs, the issue of dealing with the recent past is important, especially when relativized in relation to recent events. This offers an excellent opportunity for the anthropology of violence and reconciliation processes, as well to re‐examine some of the old debates of the relationship between universalism and relativism when it comes to human rights. Since some of these issues have been present there for a number of years, Serbia offers a unique opportunity to further our understanding of some of these processes.     

On the question of historical injuries: Transitional justice,anthropology and the vicissitudes of listening (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In this paper I am concerned with how certain kinds of violence and injuries, located simultaneously in multiple spaces and temporalities, question the prospect of what I call an ‘imagined new future’. I take the proceedings of a recent workshop on transitional justice, held in a university situated in the global North, as an avenue to unpack this idea. Here, I distinguish two instances when testimonies of violence embodied by survivors, may challenge broader assumptions about transitional justice. Firstly, when the prospect of historical injuries emerge, when difference and inequality – despite the promise of new post‐violence nations – are in fact woven together into a longue durée, a longer temporality, that remains beyond the theoretical contours and technical mandates defined by experts in the field. From this perspective, transitions may be experienced by specific communities not as fractures but as relative continuities, for example, of historically rooted political and economic hegemonies. Secondly, when the voice of survivors fracture the theoretical space created by larger discourses of reconciliation. In this case, they may incarnate an unforgiving victim, displaced outside the moral economy of reconciliation that stresses forgiveness and unity over resentment and fragmentation. In the end, the question I would like to pose is how certain forms of violence are rendered unintelligible by mainstream transitional justice discourses.     

‘Operation Restore Public Hope’: Youth and the Magic of Modernity in Vanuatu

ABSTRACT This paper explores the measures known as ‘Operation Restore Public Hope,’ which were authorized during the State of Emergency in January 1998 in Port Vila, Vanuatu, after rioting and looting erupted over the alleged government mismanagement of the mandatory workers' savings fund. The excessive police violence associated with these ‘clean‐up measures’, I argue, undermined the state's claim ‘to restore public hope’ and illuminated the changing relationship between kastomary leaders and the state as well as their competing strategies to define and maintain social order. The extraordinary events of the State of Emergency point to the confluence of sorcery practices and police violence; underline the contested nature of everyday life, and draw attention to the disciplining of young bodies in new urban spaces. Exploring the deployment of a sorcery technique to counter police violence highlights the landscapes of modern power in Vanuatu where magical and state practices coexist with regimes of violence.     

The Mediation and Remediation of Disaster: Hurricanes Katrina and Felix in/and the New Media Environment

Hurricanes Katrina and Felix made landfall in 2005 and 2007 on the Gulf Coast of the US and the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua respectively. Despite many economic, political and cultural differences between these two sites, they share a number of interesting similarities. Their inhabitants are subject to similar modes of racialized Othering and internal colonialism, and both places have vital links with the transnational cultural consciousness that Gilroy referred to as the Black Atlantic. Katrina and Felix also occurred at a time when centralized forms of media are increasingly perceived to be in crisis. This crisis is creating new spaces for the development of alternative ways of knowing, watching and making media. This paper draws on recent literature on decolonization by Mignolo, Escobar, Quijano and others to explore the prospects for decolonizing energies within the new media environment and a context of devastation wrought by neoliberalism and disaster. This research examines disasters in/and the new media environment, and suggests that activists should understand the distinctions between mainstream (or corporate) and alternative media, between top‐down and grassroots media, and between “old” and “new” media, in relational and non‐categorical rather than absolute terms. These media realms should be engaged from an awareness of how they interact with and impact upon one another. This research also suggests that disasters must be understood as ongoing and open‐ended events embedded within historical, social, cultural, economic and political processes and systems. Media, policymaking and emergency management practices that are informed by an awareness of this complex embedding, and which are therefore able to take a long‐term view of the unfolding of disasters, will be best equipped to engage effectively, and in democratically responsive ways, with disasters and in particular with the needs of those populations most vulnerable to their impacts.     

Separatism redux: Crimea,Transnistria, and Eurasia's de facto states (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article compares recent events in Crimea to Transnistria, another de facto, separatist state located in eastern Moldova. The article asks what Crimea and Transnistria, along with Eurasia's other unrecognized states, can tell us about statehood, sovereignty, and a ‘people’ in the 21st century. Though Eurasia's de facto states can be seen as entities that emerged with the backing of the Russian state, their continued existence reflects a wider uncertainty that emerged with the demise of the Soviet Union. More broadly, these de facto states problematize many of the fundamental terms of political existence.     

‘I Saw a Nightmare . . .’: Violence and the Construction of Memory (Soweto,June 16, 1976)

The protests on June 16, 1976 of black schoolchildren in Soweto against the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in their schools precipitated one of the most pro‐found challenges to the South African apartheid state. These events were experienced in a context of violent social and political conflict. They were almost immediately drawn into a discourse that discredited and silenced them, manipulating meaning for ideological and political reasons with little regard for how language and its absence—silences—further violated those who had experienced the events. Violence, in its physical and discursive shape, forged individual memories that remain torn with pain, anger, distrust, and open questions; collective memories that left few spaces for ambiguity; and official or public histories tarnished by their political agendas or the very structures—and sources—that produced them. Based on oral histories and historical documents, this article discusses the collusion of violence and silence and its consequences. It argues that—while the collusion between violence and silence might appear to disrupt or, worse, destroy the ability of individuals to think historically—the individual historical actor can and does have the will to contest and engage with collective memory and official history.     

Spaces of violence: A typology of the political geography of violence against migrants seeking asylum in the EU

This paper, based on research conducted with asylum seekers in three European Union (EU) member-states, examines the connections among various forms of violence against forced migrants in different state settings. Because violence that is produced within states is not uniform and often transcends borders, understanding how it varies across different geographical settings illustrates the complexity of the risks that migrants face. This paper presents a typology that examines interconnections between the production of various forms of violence and the complex spaces that constitute irregular migration into the EU to better understand these multifaceted factors and why we can anticipate certain forms of violence in a particular space. It also fosters future avenues of research as it provides a foundation for greater collaboration and advocacy to expose and rectify hierarchical imbalances of power and actors responsible for such violence.     

Reclaiming the social body through self‐directed violence: Seeking anthropological understanding of Suicide attacks (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Suicide bombings receive tremendous attention in the media and are a central aspect of the Western public's imagination of terrorism, yet anthropology has remained relatively silent in debates around this form of violence. Drawing on constructs central to anthropology, namely embodiment and agency, I suggest that when political and structural violence threatens the body and thus the identity of both individual and group, this force can be ultimately rejected and the body can be ‘reclaimed’ through self‐directed violence. In trying to explain the horror that this act generates in the West the article introduces a new element central to anthropology ‐ namely pollution ‐ that has not previously been examined in discourse around suicide bombing. This is a theoretical piece that tries to problematize the role of the body, as a physical entity central to this ‘act’ and offers some questions and potential hypotheses for further research.     

“Let us create space”: Reclaiming peace and security in a Kenyan Somali community

This article pushes for a postcolonial, feminist critique of “anti-terrorist” securitization, that makes space for transformative peace-building. The post-9/11 securitization of the African continent builds on a long legacy of colonial conquest and racist Othering. Somalia is regularly centered here, portrayed in media and state narratives as a volatile failed state, one that produces terrorist bodies and acts. But rather than building peace, we follow others in arguing that the projects of securitization have stoked violence, intensifying discrimination against the Somali diasporic community (Mohamed, 2017; Wairuri, 2020). To counter this dominant narrative, we centre the Somali-Kenyan Awjama Cultural Centre, in the Eastleigh neighborhood of Nairobi, Kenya. A particularly rich and instructive case study of peace-making through community activism, we ask: How do Somalis who use the Centre subvert racist, Islamophobic narratives and reclaim their own modes of representation? And how do these new narratives disrupt systemic violence and build peace? Demonstrating the insights of a feminist, postcolonial geographic approach, we argue that spaces like the Awjama Centre provide interpersonal support and new kinds of (self-) representation. These fundamentally disrupt single stories of Africa and of terrorism, with greater possibilities for establishing long-term embodied peace than projects of geopolitical securitization.     

The Redevelopmental State: Governing Surplus Life and Land in the ‘Urban Age’

This article theorizes changing configurations of development governance emerging as states attempt to reconcile two contradictory pressures of global urbanization: dispossessing capitalist accumulation and demands for inclusive welfare. It introduces the ‘redevelopmental state’ as a dynamic spatio‐political framework for understanding how hegemonic rule is tenuously forged amid potentially volatile urban land struggles. Whereas Northern urban redevelopment theories are less attentive to post‐colonial urbanization processes and most developmental state scholarship has not focused on cities, the redevelopmental state offers an alternative conceptualization. It centres on how emerging regimes of territorial rule, development and political participation contour access to land and social benefits in Southern cities. Forged at key conjunctures of social pressure, these redevelopmental state spaces work through and beyond formal policies and institutions, and articulate with nationalist cultural politics of belonging and aspiration that foster consent for redevelopment while also legitimating exclusions, violence and dispossession. A case study of Mumbai illustrates redevelopmental state spaces that suture ethno‐religious nationalism, urbanized accumulation and populist welfare to unevenly distribute life capacities, garnering both cooperation and contestation. The article concludes by suggesting ways this spatially attuned framing can provide insights into the recent rise of ethno‐nationalism and authoritarian populism around the world.     

Violent place-making: How Kenya's post-election violence transforms a workers' settlement at Lake Naivasha

Violent events significantly influence the identity of places. Post-conflict areas evoke specific meanings and emotions, and the narratives of violent events have profound effects on the individual and collective interpretations of the venues of violence. This paper addresses the interdependent relationship between violence and place, considering the structural and multi-scalar conditions of a relational and discursive making of places. By linking them with an empirically grounded analysis of the materialisation of violence, we follow Gearóid Ó Tuathail's (2010) call for a more grounded study of place-specific causes for violent conflict. We focus on an empirical example – the post-election violence in Kenya 2007/08 – and look into one of its venues, a poor and heterogeneous workers' settlement at Lake Naivasha in Kenya's Rift Valley. Considering the specific socio-political setting in Kenya, we first examine the factors that explain why the violence broke out at that place in particular. We combine an exploration of the structural conditions that determined the violence, and which still regulate social life at present, with a presentation of the individual accounts of people directly or indirectly involved in the violence in Naivasha. We then investigate how the experience of violence has influenced the imaginations of the place, and whether these localised imprints of violence in Naivasha continue to regulate social and spatial (re)organisation after the events themselves. The study reveals that politically instigated societal divides continue to exist, and that memories of the violence induce intensified processes of segregation in the surveyed settlement during times of political uncertainty.     

The violence of space and spaces of violence: Peace as violence in unequal and divided spaces

Peace is a spatio-social and temporal experience, dependent on a number of variables that are influenced by positionality and privilege. Often “peaceful” spaces are inherently violent due to racism, sexism, classism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, and agism among other forms of oppression. This article presents the conceptualisation of the violence of space, as a means by which inequalities are maintained spatially and socially, and demonstrates how in Cape Town, South Africa this exacerbates displacement and reinforces the persistence of violence in townships and informal settlements or temporal and physical spaces of violence. Empirically, through thematic analysis I evidence the conceptualisation of peace without justice as a form of violence through participant narratives of movement and use of space in the post-apartheid city. Using a spatial lens, I demonstrate how these inequalities perpetuate violence and observe the work still to be done in addressing maintained transgenerational inequalities. I utilise interviews with a range of actors working across different city spaces to demonstrate the violence of maintained divides with a specific focus on materialisations of violence, both structural and direct violence, in the areas of housing and transport. In this paper I also highlight organisation and resistance to inequalities, while overall, arguing that the product of the violence of space and spaces of violence is a violent peace whereby engineered poverty and systemic inequalities are maintained.     

Crisis attack: Impromptu ethnography in the Greek maelstom (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Assailed by mounting debt and increasing economic distress, Greece today is also the target of media representations that emphasize violence and disorder. Michael Herzfeld – who was mugged and tear‐gassed in Athens this past July – argues that these representations are misleading and indeed are part of the problem they seek to explain. The structural violence of an insistent barrage of negative media coverage as well as that of international financial pressures undermines a previously stable and relatively crime‐free country, encouraging new forms – including police and popular racism, physical violence at demonstrations, and acts of petty crime – of what had once been a largely codified and ritualized idiom of aggression. While many Greeks do feel that debts should be paid, increasing economic desperation fuels a different view, and one that can best be interpreted in light of the social values that anthropologists have long studied in Greece: that the country's creditors are violating their own obligations toward Greece and thus deserve to face both default on the massive debt and the public hostility of the Greek people.     

Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization

This article explores the links between globalization and ethnic violence in comparative perspective. By looking at ethnographic material from Central Africa, Europe, India and China, the paper suggests that bodily violence between social intimates may be viewed as a form of vivisection, and as an effort to resolve unacceptable levels of uncertainty through bodily deconstruction. This approach may cast light on the surplus of rage displayed in many recent episodes of inter-group violence. At the same time, the study suggests that the conditions for such extreme and intimate violence may partly lie in the deformation of national and local spaces of everyday life by the physical and moral pressures of globalization.     

‘Peace begins at home’: Geographic imaginaries of violence and peacebuilding in northern Uganda

While there is an acknowledgment of the importance of geographic and historical context in contemporary feminist scholarship on the relationship between domestic violence and warfare, there remains an assumption that mainstream narratives will tend to separate these forms of violence or, if connections are acknowledged, warfare will be given primacy. Based on ethnographic research in northern Uganda, I demonstrate how the presence of Orientalist narratives of violence in peacebuilding programs disrupts these assumptions by not only drawing connections between domestic violence and warfare but prioritizing domestic violence. I argue that these narratives of violence, and their associated geographic imaginaries, contribute to uneven geographies of intervention – geographies in which racialized bodies and intimate spaces are associated with war and thereby seen as appropriate sites for peacebuilding. By engaging with peacebuilding programs as sites of geopolitical negotiations in which variously scaled actors are vying for position in the post-war landscape, I argue that the tendency for peacebuilding programs to focus on a singular site of intervention – ‘the Acholi home’ – says less about the centrality of this site to the creation of peace than it does about the centrality of this site in maintaining the networks of mutual legitimization amongst peacebuilding partners.     

Dancing on the graves: Independence,hot/banal nationalism and the mobilization of memory

Nationalism is frequently considered as an extreme, ‘hot’ phenomenon related to often violent nation/state-building processes. Billig’s Banal Nationalism turned the attention to how nationalism is also ‘flagged’ and routinely reproduced in existing states. This article studies the mobilization of these forms of nationalism and suggests that independence is a useful notion in bridging the hot/banal divide and for tracing the ‘hot in the banal’. Whereas for separatist movements independence is primarily a goal aspired to, in existing states independence/sovereignty is used to bring together hot and banal forms of nationalism which are mobilized in reproducing the discourses/practices related to the purported national identity. This paper first outlines a heuristic framework for conceptualizing independence and its key dimensions in relation to hot and banal nationalism as well as state-territory building. Secondly, the paper will study empirically the merit of the notion of independence regarding nationalism research via four themes: (1) the role of independence in Finland’s state/nation-building process, spatial socialization and in mixing hot and banal nationalism; (2) the use of the ‘independence card’ by (nationalist) parties; (3) the mobilization of nationalist practices/discourses in the performativity of Finnish Independence Day; and (4) the resistance that the independence celebrations have incited. This study shows that the idea of independence in this context is inward-looking, draws on Othering, and is flagged in media and spatial socialization (e.g. education) using particular iconographies, landscapes, events, and memories related above all to wars. Rather than expressing hot or banal nationalism these discourses/practices effectively merge the two, challenging any simple dichotomy between them. The performativity of Independence Day in particular displays this blending.     

Ethical predicaments: Advocating security for mobile pastoralists in weak states (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Some have argued that anthropologists have a moral responsibility to advocate on behalf of research subjects suffering from structural and other forms of violence. However, advocacy is not without its problems; action taken on behalf of one's research subjects may have adverse consequences for others. This is our current predicament. Violence and insecurity have always been major themes in our work with mobile pastoralists in the Far North Region of Cameroon, who have suffered deadly cattle raids for decades. More recently, pastoralists have been subject to child kidnappings and extortion by criminal gangs. As researchers working with these people, we have repeatedly informed development projects, NGOs and government authorities about these and other insecurity problems. The difficulty is that the government response, in particular the use of paramilitary forces, has created another kind of insecurity which has adverse effects on others.     

From War 2.0 to quantum war: the superpositionality of global violence

As information networks catalyse local incidents into international crises, as global events appear and disappear on multiple screens at an accelerated pace and as a war of images displaces the image of war, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand the rapidly changing nature of global violence within the confines of security studies. Phase-shifting with each media intervention from states to sub-states, local to global, public to private, organised to chaotic and virtual to real—and back again—global violence superpositions into a quantum war that requires new transdisciplinary, transnational and transmedial approaches.     

Getting comfortable to feel at home: clothing practices of black muslim women in Britain

This article explores the role of comfort as an affective encounter across bodies, objects (namely clothing) and spaces. I focus on how bodies that are marked as strange and a source of society’s discomfort negotiate this positioning through the presentation of one’s body. What does it mean for these bodies to be comfortable or uncomfortable? This question is answered through work done with Black Muslim women in Britain. By exploring how comfort is felt in relation to racially marked bodies, this article develops work on emotional geographies. Comfort is understood as both an emotional product and process that changes as bodies move across different spaces. In noting this movement, I also explore how boundaries around the body (enacted through e.g. the multi-dimensional hijab) presents a particular form of territorialisation that facilitates comfort as we present our bodies across different spaces. These boundaries can be both a source of comfort and discomfort through their positioning as deviant from social norms. In understanding the different roles of boundaries, I explore the social processes that construct comfort (or discomfort) as we move through different spaces. This is intertwined with furthering work on Muslim geographies by challenging the overwhelming focus placed on ‘public’ facing garments like the headscarf and abaya. Such a focus limits an understanding of the fluidity of Black Muslim women’s identities, and how these changes in our clothing practices affect and are affected by the relationships built across spaces.