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 United States and Bahrain: Interpreting the Differentiated U.S. Responses to the Arab Spring

We examine how the United States' response to the situation in Bahrain can be differentiated from that in Libya and Egypt based on a comparative content analysis of the U.S. administration's press releases, remarks, and interviews during the first three months of the Arab Spring movement. Our findings indicate that although the level and duration of violence were comparable, the U.S. government response was strikingly different with the support given to the Bahraini government, in contrast to the critical stances adopted towards Libya and Egypt. We explain how the United States' lack of political incentive to act and concerted support by its allies were influential factors for the United States' differentiated policy during the Arab Spring.     

Managing mass migration after the war: The case of Sarajevo’s unification in 1996

This study analyses the immediate consequences of the transition from war to peace in Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia–Herzegovina. It focuses on the management of a tense security situation related to the postwar unification of the city, which was divided between warring belligerents during the Bosnian conflict. Firstly, it shows how ethno-nationalist leaders' visions and practices of ethnic homogenization continued after the end of the war as the result of the Dayton Peace Agreement (DPA). The principal tool of their postwar ‘ethnic engineering’ endeavour was to maintain and generate an atmosphere of fear, based on anticipated discrimination, maltreatment, and persecution from former belligerents. Secondly, this study explores how experienced wartime violence and related transformations in personal identities and social positioning activated latent boundaries between groups and made individuals more disposed to forms of group identification. As a result, the mass migration of people out and into Sarajevo strengthened the grip over the territories assigned to former adversaries by the DPA. This article argues that studying the mutually constitutive roles of the elite's ethnic engineering as well as ordinary people's experiences is necessary to understand how organised wartime violence transformed into structural, institutional, and other less visible forms during the postwar period. Ethno-nationalists’ discourses and points of view demonstrate how wartime violence channelled the postwar lives of Sarajevo's residents into a desired spatio-political arrangement.     

The Changing Geography of Violence in Russia's North Caucasus, 1999-2011: Regional Trends and Local Dynamics in Dagestan,Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria

Three U.S. geographers analyze the temporal and spatial trends of 17,438 violent events in Russia's North Caucasus region from August 1999 to July 2011, demonstrating that the diffusion of conflict away from Chechnya intensified during the period 2007-2011, as levels of violence rose in neighboring republics. An increasing number of casualties are civilians in Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria, the three republics that are the focus of the paper. Employing multiple methods of spatial pattern analysis and geographically sensitive regression models, the authors examine the spatial fragmentation of violence from the perspective of rebel groups operating in the three republics. The analysis documents how the incidence of violence varies dramatically over space (i.e., reflecting the influence of urbanization, strategic location, and physical geographic factors such as elevation and extent of forest cover). Although violence in the North Caucasus region as a whole has declined in absolute terms over the past four years, the authors show how new geographies of violence are developing in the region, underscoring the emergence of republic-based insurgent operations against the various organs of the Russian state. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H560, H770, O180. 9 figures, 3 tables, 1 appendix, 103 references:     

Ethnic belonging of the children born out of rape in postconflict Bosnia‐Herzegovina and Rwanda

Sexual violence has been used as a weapon of war in ethnic conflicts, and forced impregnations have been central to this strategy. Scholars however disagree on whether the cultural assimilation to the maternal group influences these children's identities, or whether they are perceived as belonging to the enemy group (Carpenter; Nikolic‐Ristanovic). Drawing on preliminary qualitative findings collected in 2013 in Rwanda and Bosnia‐Herzegovina, this paper analyses the ethnic identification imposed by the enemy group, the mothers and their community on the children born out of rape. It first explores how the mothers' ethnic identities are often subordinated to their fathers' ethnic background, and how this then justifies their social exclusion from their maternal ethnic group. This paper suggests that sexual violence is extremely effective in ensuring the continuation of the ethnic conflict in the aftermath of the violence by attacking the children's senses of belonging.     

The aftermath of an election crisis: Kenyan attitudes and the influence of individual-level and locality violence

How does violent conflict affect social and political attitudes? To answer this question I pair Kenyan survey and violence data for the time period following the country's December 27th 2007 national election. I find that respondents who personally experienced electoral violence are less likely to express certain forms of inter-personal and institutional trust than those individuals who did not. The association is not universally powerful, however. First, noteworthy differences emerge between populations who relocated as a result of post-election conflict and those who did not. Differences between these groups suggest that internal migration in the wake of tragedy influenced the Kenyan social landscape. In addition to personal exposure to electoral conflict, I test how local level violence may indirectly condition Kenyan political attitudes. Across all models, individual-level exposure to violence has the most consistent influence upon opinions, although district level effects emerge in analyses without survey respondent ethnicity controls. This finding suggests that living in a setting of regional insecurity does not have as important an effect on certain political views as personal victimization.     

FROM VIOLENCE TO RECONSTRUCTION: THE MAKING, DISINTEGRATION AND REMAKING OF AN APARTHEID CITY

This article analyzes the relationship between violence and the racial city. It examines Durban's construction and disintegration in the context of unsuccessful apartheid reform, and traces corresponding distinct but overlapping stages of violence. Internecine violence of the latter 1980s constituted a racially displaced confrontation over political control and resources of the society transformed into internecine conflict within black residential areas, especially the urban peripheries. The violence was rooted in spatial and material differentiation reinforced by township and shantytown power structures, which clandestine state intervention accentuated. The article concludes by analyzing the new spatial and racial city forms, suggesting alternative urban reconstruction paths to redress the deeper causes of violence.     

Proximate Strangers and Familiar Antagonists: Violence on an Intimate Frontier

A generation of scholarship on the experiences of the frontier—spanning models of violent conflict to various kinds of intimacy—has been highly influential in building a nuanced picture of Australia's colonial race relations. Regionally-focused histories provide a valuable avenue for bringing these models of frontier historiography together within the same frame, because it is at the localised level of social relations that the cross-hatched intersections between violence and intimacy can emerge into clearest view. This article traces the threads of cross-cultural encounter on one Australian frontier to assess how violent conflict could arise as much from conditions of inter-connectedness and familiarity as from conditions of strangeness and fear, and to ask, under such conditions, what kinds of frontier violence drew the intervention of the law.     

Building from Scratch: The aesthetics of post‐disaster reconstruction(Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article looks at the visual character of post‐conflict and post‐disaster settings, and shows how states of physical ruin can help to produce an ‘aesthetics of post‐disaster reconstruction’. With examples primarily drawn from the author's field site in Timor‐Leste, the article shows how ruins, ashes and demolition may be perceived as enabling particular kinds of agency and opportunity. Thus, some of the most hopeful of international‐intervention dreams of recent decades have been produced out of sites of mass‐scale destruction.     

Promoting Women,Peace and Security in the Pacific Islands: hot conflict/slow violence

How has the Women, Peace and Security agenda been advanced in the Pacific Islands? While some observers argue that this region suffers from a contagion of unrest, violence and state weakness, these estimates commonly ignore the vital work women have performed in the region as promoters of peace and security. Even when such activity places them in direct personal danger, women across the region have spearheaded efforts to bridge communal boundaries and challenge the increasing normalisation of violence, gendered and otherwise, that accompanies threatened or actual incidents of conflict. As this article demonstrates, these efforts have had profound impacts on the ground in conflict-affected Pacific Island countries. They have also received increased recognition at the level of institutional politics, with member states of the Pacific Islands Forum recently accepting a Regional Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security. This has been hailed as a significant achievement for the region's women peacebuilders. But much of this plan is focused on women's contributions to peacebuilding at the pointy end of a crisis. This overlooks the extent to which the ‘slow violence’ of environmental degradation, masculinised politics and militarism also compound gendered insecurity in the region. Attention to these issues offers a contradictory picture of the gains made in promoting the Women, Peace and Security agenda in the Pacific Islands. While this advocacy framework has provided important opportunities for the region's women peacebuilders, it may also have discouraged broader reflection on the prevailing structural conditions at work across the region which function in an attenuated fashion to undermine women's security and the achievement of a gendered regional peace.     

Violins and trowels for Palmyra: Post‐conflict heritage politics

Since the rise of the Islamic State in the Middle East, anthropological research has focused on the many deliberate destructions of cultural heritage in the region. Whilst such analyses can offer important insights into the multidimensionality of contemporary warfare and the important role of culture in perpetuating physical violence, heritage ethnographers should also spotlight the post‐conflict futures of Syria and Iraq's war‐torn heritage. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research on (world) heritage politics in the Russian Federation, this article highlights the strategic manipulation of Palmyra by the Russian Federation and investigates how conservation and reconstruction are also important political episodes in a heritage object's cultural biography.     

The Bloody Skirt of Settlement: Arthur Vogan and Anti-Slavery in 1890s Australia

This article concerns Arthur Vogan's novel The Black Police, published in 1890. In his book Vogan drew upon an affective global language of suffering that combined appeals to his experience as an eyewitness of the frontier with popular stereotypes drawn from British and American abolitionist precedents. These sources included Uncle Tom's Cabin and popular newspaper commentary on Queensland frontier violence that had circulated earlier in Australia and Britain. The reception of Vogan's novel was mixed: while it reached a wide audience, it failed to prompt official action, and local and British reviewers charged him with sensationalism and ‘embellishment’. Vogan defended his work vehemently, asserting it was based on fact. Reviewers' scepticism stemmed, however, from Vogan's uneasy blend of realist narrative, grounded in eyewitness testimony, and the popular and sensational fictional and visual conventions he deployed. At the end of a period of intense frontier conflict in Queensland over the preceding three decades, Vogan's novel of protest and its ambivalent reception point to the limits of humanitarian influence within an Australian, intercolonial, and ultimately imperial framework.     

Field of Fire: Evidence for Wartime Conflict in a 17th-Century Cottier Settlement in County Meath,Ireland

Abstract

Much of conflict archaeology is focused on battlefields and the material culture of military troops, but what about civilians caught up in warzones? Can archaeology contribute to our understanding of how such people fared during troublous times, and the manner in which political and social turmoil affected them?

By considering the recently excavated, late 16th–17th century A.D. settlement of 'Cleglin', this article will examine the evidence for wartime conflict: whether poor inhabitants were subject to violence such as armed raids and the razing of buildings; whether they were forced to abandon their homes for any extended period; and whether there is evidence for the occupation or billeting of soldiers, or for the enrolment of male inhabitants in militias. A more comprehensive—and historically accurate—conflict archaeology should not just scrutinize the evidence for overt violence, or it risks excluding non-combatants from such historical endeavour (except, perhaps, as hapless victims). Instead the material culture of certain related events associated with warfare—market price fluctuations, famine, plague—needs also to be considered. At Killegland, scrutiny of household economies yielded some of the most profound and intriguing data: relating to wartime economy and risk-averse behaviour in agricultural practice.     

The global,the ethnic and the gendered war: women and rape in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

The purpose of this study was to illuminate the perspectives of women who experienced sexual violence perpetrated in the warscapes of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Civilians are targeted for rape, loot and pillage yielding deleterious effects on the social fabric and the sustenance the community provides. The article is based on 11 qualitative semistructured interviews and 4 written narratives from women of reproductive age, recruited from organizations providing support post-sexual violation. The study departs from a larger ethnographic project investigating the phenomenon of war-rape. Thematic analysis guided the analysis through the theoretical lenses of structural violence and intersectionality. The women expressed total insecurity and a multitude of losses from bodily integrity, health, loss of family, life course possibilities, livelihoods and a sense of place; a profound dispossession of identity and marginalization. Pregnancies resulting from rape reinforced stigma and burdened the survivor with raising a stigmatized child on the margins of society. Perpetrators of rape were mostly identified as Interhamwe (Rwandan Hutus rebels) who entered Congo after the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Their goal, according to the women, was to spread HIV and impregnate Congolese women, thereby destroying families, communities and society. The women survivors of war-rape described experiences of profound loss in this conflict which has global, ethnic and gendered dimensions. Congo's conflict thus requires critical reflection on how local wars and subsequent human suffering are situated in a matrix of globalization processes, enabled by transnational actors and embedded in structural violence.     

Sri Lankan Muslims: between ethno‐nationalism and the global ummah

ABSTRACT. Sri Lanka's Sunni Muslims or “Moors”, who make up eight percent of the population, are the country's third largest ethnic group, after the Buddhist Sinhalese (seventy‐four per cent) and the Hindu Tamils (eighteen per cent). Although the armed LTTE (Tamil Tiger) rebel movement was defeated militarily by government forces in May 2009, the island's Muslims still face the long‐standing external threats of ethno‐linguistic Tamil nationalism and pro‐Sinhala Buddhist government land and resettlement policies. In addition, during the past decade a sharp internal conflict has arisen within the Sri Lankan Muslim community between locally popular Sufi sheiks and the followers of hostile Islamic reformist movements energised by ideas and resources from the global ummah, or world community of Muslims. This simultaneous combination of “external” ethno‐nationalist rivalries and “internal” Islamic doctrinal conflict has placed Sri Lanka's Muslims in a double bind: how to defend against Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic hegemonies while not appearing to embrace an Islamist or jihadist agenda. This article first traces the historical development of Sri Lankan Muslim identity in the context of twentieth‐century Sri Lankan nationalism and the south Indian Dravidian movement, then examines the recent anti‐Sufi violence that threatens to divide the Sri Lankan Muslim community today.     

Forest becomes frontline: Conservation and counter-insurgency in a space of violent conflict in Assam,Northeast India

Using the case of the Ecological Task Force (ETF) of the Indian Army as an entry point, this contribution nudges the existing conceptual and theoretical views on green militarization and violent environments in the context of reserve and protected forest areas. This is achieved by going beyond coercive physical violence and accounting for forms of symbolic and structural violence meted out to populations. I position this work within and also complement the broader literature on critical and militarized practices and apply it to the reserve forests in the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts (BTAD) in Assam, northeast India. Here, politics that surround conservation is immersed within a context of violent ethno-religious conflict. The BTAD has been a theatre of recurrent insurgencies between the autochthonous Bodo tribe and the Adivasi, Muslim groups over land and demographics. A key characteristic of the conflict is its occurrence in the reserve forests on Assam-Bhutan borderlands, which can be traced back to the colonial process of forest making that brought immigrants into Assam, threatening cultural and territorial loss for Bodos. During the Bodo movement for a separate state, starting in 1980s and continuing, the militants operated from within the forest, leading to the departure of the forest department. As a result, rebels and locals appropriated the forest through rampant resource extraction. In response, the ETF was constituted in 2007. Fieldwork suggests that ETF through its military tactic and discipline engages in ‘soft’ militarization while also trusting on the regular Army for protection during conservation operations. Further, drawing on regional environmental history, I analyze how ethno-religious conflict influences modes of conservation and is exemplified by continuing inter-institutional competition between the forest department and the ETF. In the ensuing conservation-counterinsurgency nexus, retribution towards insurgents prevail over forest protection. Moreover, despite ETF's efforts to buffer from local politics, incidents of a political nature seep into its operations, e.g. ambushed by militants during conservation activities.     

‘Mr Neville did all in [his] power to assist me’: A. P. Elkin,A. O. Neville and Anthropological Research in Northwest Western Australia, 1927–1928

From the commencement of his field research A. P. Elkin sought to bring a practical application to his work on Aborigines. He positioned anthropology as an enabling science which had the capacity to reduce conflict, violence and misunderstanding on the frontier. He stated that the ‘object of his mission [field work]’ was both ‘academic and practical’. He declared that the knowledge gained through anthropological field research would serve not only narrow academic aims but would also be put at the service of government. Anthropology's purpose was to inform and influence the formulation of government Aboriginal policy. This paper examines Elkin's first encounter and interaction with government through his relationship with A. O. Neville, chief protector of Aborigines in Western Australia. It illustrates the beginnings of what Gillian Cowlishaw has called a discourse of helping, that is Australian anthropologists in the 1930s constructed a discourse about their usefulness to government. It was a discourse which seemingly lacked critical distance from the policies of government. I argue that this discourse of helping government was heavily influenced by Elkin once he became professor of anthropology but it can be discovered in this earlier period. I conclude by discussing how the implications of this discourse were played out in the decade of the 1930s. The focus of this paper is on Elkin and his relationship with Neville and the consequences of this relationship for Elkin's later actions.     

Drought and cooperation in a conflict prone area: Bedouin herders and Jewish farmers in Israel's northern Negev, 1957–1963

Climate change is increasingly considered a security problem by academics and politicians alike. Although research is challenging such neo-Malthusian views, it focuses on conflict, or lack thereof, paying limited attention, if any, to cooperation. This study examines the effect of a severe drought on a spectrum of both conflict and cooperation in a highly incendiary setting, between Muslim Bedouin herders and Jewish agricultural settlements in Israel's semi-arid northern Negev region. This region, lying between the Mediterranean zone and the Negev Desert, has historically been a battle ground between farmers and pastoralists.Using archival data, both conflictive and cooperative interactions between the two groups during the 1957–63 drought, the worst in the 20th century, were examined. The results indicate that although the entire range of responses occurred, violence was limited and occurred only when some of the Bedouins migrated to the more northern Mediterranean zone. In the semi-arid northern Negev the Bedouins and two settlements engaged in substantive cooperation and assistance. Grazing on damaged crops in return for payment was also practiced during the drought.A number of factors that affected both conflict and cooperation are identified. The severity of conflicts increased when farmers and herders lacked previous familiarity, while the need to reduce the drought's impacts and settlements' left-wing political affiliation formed main incentives for cooperation. Measures taken by state institutions to directly reduce frictions and to provide relief assistance were central to the overall limited level of conflict, but also reinforced the power disparities between the groups.