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Norway: the forced deportation machine

The return
«Sovereign is He who makes the exception», begins Political Theology, the classical work of the later German Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt.

And so at 05:00 in the morning of Saturday June 15 this year, police officers burst into the home of an Afghan Hazara family in the inner-city area of Møllendal in Trondheim, Norway. The Trondheim police was implementing a forced deportation order issued by the Norwegian police’s specialized unit for forced deportations, the Politiets Utlendingsenhet (PU) against the Abbasi family. Having lived as refugees in Iran since 1999, the Abbasi family had first arrived in Norway via Turkey and Greece in 2012. The Abbasi family appears to have chosen Norway as their destination due to the fact that the eldest son in the family, Reza, had arrived separately in Norway in 2008 and been granted asylum here. In Iran, it had been impossible for the children in the Abbasi family to gain access to state education: the court records in their case testifies to their having been schooled privately. Of the three siblings living with their mother at the Abbasi family home in Møllendal, only the eldest son Yasin (22) had ever been to Afghanistan. The rest of the family had been granted asylum in Norway in 2012, but the decision was rescinded the same year after their father, a shoemaker, had suddenly turned up in Norway in 2012, some months after his wife and children had been granted asylum. His asylum application was turned down in 2014. A verdict from the Oslo Magistrate’s Court in 2016 was issued against the Immigration Appeals Board (UNE)’s decision of rescinding the asylum granted to the Abbasi family on the grounds that UNE had not taken the best interests of the Abbasi children into account. The verdict reiterates that Atefa Rezaie and her children were victims of domestic abuse by her husband, who disappeared in 2014 from the small town of Ulsteinvik in Norway where the family was settled since 2012. Rezaie intended to divorce from him. UNE still maintained that the Abbasis could and should seek to re-unite with theirfather in Afghanistan. The Oslo Magistrate’s Court’s finding against UNE and in favor of the Abbasi family was however overturned by a verdict from Borgarting Court of Appeals in 2017. Unlike the lower court verdict, the verdict from the Borgarting Court of Appeals is noteworthy for its explicit lack of attention to the question of the best interests of the child: the verdict simply takes UNE’s claim in court to have taken that into consideration at face value, and rubberstamps UNE’s decision.
Yasin, who used to reside with the family at Møllendal in Trondheim, had already been arrested and detained at his place of work a few days before. There were even allegations to the effect that a work colleague of Yasin’s in a likely breach of Norwegian laws detained and held without access to a legal representative and incommunicado for five hours in order to prevent him from sounding the alarm about the impending police action to the Abbasi family or their legal representatives.
The Abbasi family’s neighbours at Møllendal awoke to loud screams and pleas for help in the street as the Abassis – the mother Atefa (54), her daughter Taibeh (20) and her son Ehsan (16) were forcibly taken into the awaiting police cars.
According to the PU’s own reports, Atefa (54) has a medical condition, which led her to lose consciousness at the very moment that police burst into the family’s home. The arrest, detention and forced deportation of the Abbasi family also vividly illustrated the stark distance between Norwegian police’s flowery rhetoric and actual practice. PU guidelines has it that children in families facing forced deportation should as a general rule not be arrested and detained before 06:00 AM in the morning.

Trandum and a doctor working the dark side
Trondheim police soon transferred responsibility for the Abbasi family to PU. PU had for the purpose of this forced deportation flown in a medical doctor, Gunnar Fæhn, whose private medical corporation Legetjenester AS in Trandum, near Oslo Airport Gardermoen, has since 2005 had a contract with PU to service PU’s detention unit for detainees destined for forced deportation to their countries of origin.
Conditions at PU’s detention facility at Trandum have repeatedly come in for strong criticism from the Norwegian Ombudsperson for Civil Affairs. In its 2017 inspection report on Trandum, the Ombudsperson noted strong concerns relating to the use of force against detainees at risk of suicide and self-harm, and the extensive use of security cells against such detainees, which included their use in the case of legal minors. In a 2019 report, the European Council’s Committee on Torture also criticized conditions at Trandum, especially as these relate to the extensive use of bodily searches and handcuffs, which the committee described as “clearly disproportional and unacceptable”.
Save The Children Norway and the Norwegian Lawyers’ Association have declared that the detention facility at Trandum, where children are reported to have been held for up to twenty-four days in a row, is unfit for children.
Fæhn, whose firm has since 2010 earned 16 million Norwegian kroner (NOK) from a contract with PU renewed without any competition in 2009 and 2015 and which expires in 2019, was in 2016 revealed to have published extensive racist and xenophobic commentaries on assorted far-right and racist websites in Norway, Sweden and Germany.
Fæhn’s racist and xenophobic online comments were not one-offs, but amounted to well over a hundred comments in the period 2012 to 2018. Courtesy of long-standing media editorial practice in Norway – a country where media editors are still overwhelmingly white and male – racist and xenophobic comments are not referred to as such, but rather euphemized as comments that are simply “critical of immigration”. And so Fæhn’s comments have been received as merely representing views that are “critical of immigration” too. There are also allegations against Fæhn relating to inadequate medical care for detainees and unethical behavior at Trandum. These include testimonies from a married female Palestinian asylum seeker to Norway, Mithel Ghaneem of Jenin in the West Bank, who had spontaneously aborted two days before her detention at Trandum in 2012. Ghaneem, who after her abortion had obtained a medical declaration from her local GP at Sandnes in Norway stating that she need to rest and recover for two weeks was still bleeding profusely when she was strip searched at Trandum, and forced onto a plane. Back in Jenin, Ghaneem was sick and bedridden for two months.
There had been no competition for the bid to provide medical services to detainees at Trandum when Fæhn got the contract back in 2004. After a medical check-up, Fæhn according to his statements to the Norwegian press signed off a “fit-to-fly”-declaration for the unconscious Atefa Rezaie on the grounds that “she had a pulse”.
In a demonstration of exactly how legitimate and mainstream far-right dehumanization has become in Norway in the past decades, the leading national lib-con newspaper Aftenposten’s syndicated columnist, the sociologist Kjetil Rolness, implied that Rezaie, whose unconsciousness was caused by a medical condition well-documented by the court records in the Abbasi case had somehow “faked unconsciousness” in order to avoid deportation. It goes without saying, of course, that Rolness has no medical expertise whatsoever.
The government-aligned and conservative media editor Nils August Andresen chimed in from his observation tower in Oslo, and declared that “the forced deportation of the Abbasi family was well-founded”.
Since ordinary Norwegian airlines with reference to their own standards on ethics refused to be part of the forced deportation of an unconscious person, PU had by then chartered a private business flight from the Finnish company Jetflite at the cost of Norwegian kroner (NOK) 900 000 (equivalent to EUR 98 000) to transport the Abbasi family to Istanbul, where the plan was to transport them onwards to Kabul on a regular flight.
PU would later estimate the total cost of the forced deportation of the Abbasi family at close to 3 million Norwegian kroner. The chartered flight took off from the small town of Røros near Trondheim at 11:00 that morning, and first landed at Oslo Gardermoen Airport. After a second medical check-up of Atefa Rezaie at PU’s detention facility at Trandum conducted by Fæhn’s medical colleague in Legetjenester AS, another “fit-for-flight”-declaration was issued for a still unconscious Atefa Rezaie, and the chartered flight with Rezaie and her children took off from Oslo Airport Gardermoen destined for Istanbul Airport. By then, Norwegian online news media, having first been alerted to the case by the Abbasi’s neighbours at Møllendal in Trondheim, had started publishing the first news items about their forced deportation online.
By the time of the Abbasi family’s arrival at Istanbul Airport on Saturday evening, Atefa Rezaie had been unconscious for many hours, and the accompanying medical team consisting of a nurse and a medical doctor had failed to bring her to consciousness.
Clearly panicking, with the Abbasi family stuck in Istanbul and Atefa Rezaie still unconscious, by Sunday afternoon, PU in Oslo made the decision that Atefa Rezaie would be returned to Norway, but that the forced deportation of her children to Kabul and Afghanistan would proceed apace.
This decision was in clear and unequivocal contradiction with statements from the Immigration Appeals Board (UNE) in Oslo from March 15, which asserted that “the family will return together”. It was UNE’s final rescinding of its granting of asylum to Atefa Rezaie and her children back in 2012 in this statement from March that had paved the way for PU’s forced deportation order. In the rescinding order it is also alleged that due to the fact that Atefa’s son, Yasin, is “an adult”, his younger sister Taibeh (20) “will have a necessary and sufficient male network upon their return” to Afghanistan – in spite of the patently obvious fact that Yasin has never been in the country of his birth as an adult.

An unexpected turn of events
But PU had another unexpected surprise in waiting. When they contacted Afghan authorities about the imminent arrival of the Abbasi siblings, Afghan authorities made it clear that given the absence of the mother in the family among the returnees, they would refuse to accept the Abbasi siblings upon their arrival in Kabul and Afghanistan. It so happens that Mrs Shukria Barakzai, the Afghan Ambassador to Norway, have together with the UNHCR, Save The Children Norway, and various Norwegian experts on Afghanistan been critical of Norwegian authorities’ practice of returning unaccompanied minors to Afghanistan. Afghanistan has long been rated as the most dangerous country in the world.
People present at a Norwegian government-initiated conference organized to put further pressure on “third-world countries” to co-operate with a Norwegian government extremely keen to increase the number of deportations in 2016 had there witnessed Mrs Barakzai making it perfectly clear to Norway’s most far-right cabinet minister, Mrs Sylvi Listhaug of the populist right-wing Progress Party in government in Norway since 2013, that she stood for human rights and was not willing to accept the Norwegian government’s extortion tactics on the matter.
To be lectured on human rights and international refugee law by the Afghan Ambassador to Norway predictably proved too much for a governing populist right-wing Progress Party which since its breakthrough election in 1987 has instrumentalized Islamophobia and anti-immigration sentiment in Norway.
In response to Afghan authorities’ refusal to accept the Abbasi siblings back, Progress Party’s MP and Spokesperson on immigration and integration Mr Jon Hegheim promptly issued threats to cut all Norwegian development aid to Afghanistan as a form of revenge from the Norwegian right-wing government.
It is not as if Norwegian authorities are unaware of the fact that Afghanistan is an extremely dangerous country: official travel advice available from the Conservative Party-controlled Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the time of the forced deportation of the Abbasi family still had it that “any travel or stay in Afghanistan is inadvisable”.
Norway has, in spite of its international reputation as a beacon of human rights, peace and prosperity, under a right-wing coalition government now in power since 2013 become something of a world leader in forced deportations of minor unaccompanied children to Afghanistan. It is also well documented by now that a number of Afghans who have under the present government been forcibly deported to Afghanistan have in fact been killed after their return to an Afghanistan, which UNE and Norwegian authorities have declared to be sufficiently safe to return people to. Such was the case of an Afghan father of three who applied for asylum in Norway in November 2015 but was deported in August 2016 after his asylum application was rejected. Faiz was found killed in Afghanistan in February 2017, leaving behind a widow and three children.

The far-right drift of Norwegian politics
There is of course an intrinsic and state-generated logic to all of this. Under the present right-wing government, the Ministry of Justice and Preparedness, a cabinet ministry under the control of the populist right-wing Progress Party since 2013, assumed powers of instruction over the hitherto nominally independent UNE under then Justice Minister Sylvi Listhaug in response to the global refugee crisis in 2015. In the Abbasi case, as in an increasing number of asylum cases, so-called “immigration-regulating concerns” now trump all humanitarian concerns, including the best interests and rights of children. The Norwegian right-wing government is very proud of the forced deportation quotas that it sets for PU, and Progress Party cabinet ministers are regularly seen posing for willing Norwegian media cameras outside the Trandum detention facility near Oslo Airport Gardermoen, especially ahead of Norwegian elections.
Through the Abbasi case, and in spite of a spiraling number of civilian casualties from political violence and terror, and recommendations from the UNHCR, UNE and its research unit Landinfo, which is generally staffed by generalist academics with no actual experience from Afghanistan let alone command of Afghan languages, have maintained that Kabul is a sufficiently safe area to return Afghan asylum seekers to. The often violent persecution and discrimination of Shia Muslim Hazaras like the Abbasi in Afghanistan, is hardly ever taken into account by UNE. In its final rescinding of the Abassi family’s right to remain in Norway, a female legal official tasked with deciding the case even contradicts standard textbook definitions of terrorism by arguing that “none of the main actors in the conflict in Afghanistan direct their attacks primarily against civilians” [sic]. The court records in the Abbasi case provides a long and sustained archive of refugee children being brutalized, and severely scarred mentally and physically by a Norwegian state hellbent on closing its borders to them and people like them. Courtesy of Norway having had anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant populist right-wingers in government power since 2013 and effectively in control of Norwegian immigration and integration policies since then, the Immigration Appeals Board (UNE) has also been stuffed with members nominated by far-right civil society organizations with close links to the Progress Party, such as the state and government-funded far-right and Islamophobic Human Rights Service (HRS).
Among the members of UNE appointed by the HRS, we find the Progress Party politician and writer on Document.no Trond Ellingsen, who in the context of Steve Bannon’s recent visit to Norway and appearance at an event organized by the Norwegian right-wing extremist and terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s former favourite far-right website Document.no introduced himself as a “close friend of Fjordman”.
“Fjordman”, aka Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen, is also known as the Norwegian far-right counter-jihadist blogger whose online writings provided the main inspiration for Behring Breivik.
So where are Norwegian anthropologists in all of this? A few exceptions apart, they have for the most part maintained a studied silence in the face of the Abbasi case, as they have in the ongoing far-right drift and mainstreaming of far-right ideas and sentiments in Norwegian politics since 2009. The anthropologists involved in migration studies in Norway are relatively few, far between and politically marginal under the current right-wing hegemonic constellation. There are however exceptions. At a government-funded integration conference initiated by the then Minister of Justice and Preparedness Sylvi Listhaug, Prof Emerita Unni Wikan from the University of Oslo, who has in recent years in several interviews and essays quite incorrectly alleged that she was in the context of integration debates in Norway described as a “Nazi” even appeared as a keynote speaker, and was duly photographed sitting alongside Sylvi Listhaug and Kjetil Rolness, whilst being described by the far-right Listhaug as “my favourite academic”.
In the Abbasi case, both the governing parties and the main opposition party, the social democratic Labour Party have been conspicuously silent about the brutal practical effect of political measures they have for the most part all long supported. The two minor left-wing parties (SV and Rødt) and the Green Party MDG apart, there is no reason to think that dominant political parties in Norway will cease competing over which party can market itself as having the strictest immigration and integration policy of all in Norway. At Trandum, Gunnar Fæhn has now been reported to the Norwegian Medical Association’s Board on Ethics. They may of course choose to censure him over his conduct in the Abbasi case, but as long as he has the support of PU and the Norwegian right-wing government, there is no reason to think that he will face any professional consequences. Since implementing the EU’s directive on the return of asylum seekers, the Norwegian state has pledged to establish an independent body tasked with oversight over Norway’s forced deportation machinery. In spite of Norway having being repeatedly rebuked by the EU for its failure to act on this, such an oversight body is still not in place, and the current Norwegian right-wing government has now instead suggested a body located at Trandum and under the direct control of Norwegian authorities.

The forced deportation machine and the myth of Norwegian exceptionalism
Norway formed part of the NATO-led ISAF Forces, which have been present in Afghanistan since the invasion of Afghanistan in response to al-Qaida’s terrorist attacks on the USA in September 11 2001, and the Afghan Taliban government’s refusal to expel al-Qaida from Afghanistan in the wake of these terrorist attacks. As part of the ISAF Forces, Norway controlled the Faryab Province in Afghanistan, and before Norway’s withdrawal from the province in 2012 in the period 2005 to 2012 committed a total of 20 billion Norwegian kroner and 9000 Norwegian soldiers to the ISAF Forces in Afghanistan. Several Norwegian soldiers were killed in Faryab Province and there were also instances in which Norwegian soldiers killed Afghan civilians. The Norwegian ISAF Forces were gradually forced into a tactical alliance with the Faryab Afghan warlord Nizamuddin Qaisari, allied to the Uzbek warlord and war criminal Abdulrashid Dostum. In developments documented by the Norwegian war reporter and documentary filmmaker Anders Sømme Hammer (1977 -) large parts of Faryab Province has since fallen under the control of Taliban.
The Shia Muslim Hazara Abbasi family was originally from the central Afghan Uruzgan province, and had prior to their flight from Afghanistan to Iran in 1999 reportedly also lived in the Afghan capital of Kabul.
In the current context, in which a number of countries, and not the least the USA, have introduced measures to forcibly detain, surveil and deport immigrants and refugees,
which routinizes what Hannah Arendt memorably (if incorrectly in the actual case of Adolf Eichmann) characterized as the “banality of evil” in the name of the interests of Schmittian logics, the case of the forced deportation of the Abbasi family from Norway once more demonstrates that Norway and Norwegians are by no means as “exceptional” when it comes to the intertwined legacies of racism and colonialism as many both nationally and internationally like to think that Norway and Norwegians are. Democracy and human rights die slowly and from within – in Norway as in any other country.

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Call for Papers: The Illicit Global Economy Discourse

Special Issue of Public Anthropologist

Guest Editors: Luigi Achilli and Gabriella Sanchez (European University Institute)

In the contemporary literature on transnational organized crime it is common to find references to how criminal actors – from migrant smugglers to drug traffickers to weapons dealers – have hijacked the global economy, creating in the process a criminal underworld that is swiftly bypassing, challenging, corrupting, and subverting state controls and authorities. Most disturbingly these criminal entities, we are told, are converging –in other words, they are building bridges with one another, putting at risk (western) ways of life.

These claims have been the subject of criticism. Scholars have labeled them as ahistorical (Andreas 2012), as not reflective of the dynamics of criminal markets (Zhang 2009), as privileging law enforcement perspectives (Baird and van Liempt 2016), and even as imperialistic (Kalifa 2019). The reliance on statistics and numbers pervasive in the organized crime literature has also been criticized for how it seeks to instill a sense of impending doom, in the process justifying criminalization and enforcement responses (Engle-Merry 2016).

These critiques are important for they have shown the importance of examining crime and criminalization processes contextually, and that of scrutinizing the sources of criminological data. Yet while legitimate and important, they must also be dissected. Much of the research on organized crime is not based on empirical work. Other draws solely from official records or sources or is merely reflective of enforcement trends without being critical of the state’s role in the production of data. Other work, claiming that criminal markets are inherently difficult and dangerous to access continue to privilege the perspectives of elite informants (law enforcement, policy makers, other academics and/or professional experts), in a sense re-enforcing the boundaries that situate only professional or formally educated knowledges as legitimate or important. And while critical examinations into the illicit global economy do exist, they often remain silent on the ways they themselves rely upon, endorse or reproduce state-centric narratives of crime, how they perpetuate the labeling of specific bodies as criminal, and of their own reliance on exclusionary and extractive research methods and dissemination practices.

We agree with the scholars who have called for ethnographic engagements as a corrective to the abstract nature of many theoretical assumptions about the ‘dark-side of globalization’ (see for example, Vigh and Sausdal 2018). As anthropologists, we do believe that a critical engagement with contemporary scholarship on illicit markets does require theoretical and ethnographic examinations of social and community dimensions. But it increasingly demands a more critical, reflexive reflection of how knowledge continues to be produced and disseminated and whose roles/views positions it privileges. Without this approach, any contribution intended to critically engage with the so-called threat of organized crime is at risk of remaining on the launching pad. Furthermore, because organized crime continues to be depicted as deeply enmeshed within ethnic, racial, class and gender categories, it is also fundamental to critically engage with its scholarship, examining the places and spaces where it emerges, but most importantly whose gaze it reflects. Any body of scholarship that claims that the clandestine nature of the subject it explores precludes access to its actors –in this case, those whose actions have earned them a spot in the contemporary criminal pantheon as racialized and gendered smugglers, traffickers, cartel operatives, gang members, militias and else—must be rendered suspect.

For this special issue of Public Anthropologist, we seek pieces that empirically re-energize the important yet stagnant conversation on the critique of the illicit global economy discourse. We welcome contributions that articulate an empirical challenge to dominant, official narratives concerning illicit or organized crime and their actors, whose depictions often remain narrowed to dramatic, sensationalistic representations of ethnic cartels, mafias, militias or gangs. In so doing we seek to articulate a much larger question about the role of contemporary crime control regimes at criminalizing transnational/translocal practices. We want to uncover how ordinary activities have changed or have been changed amid global trends of securitization.

All authors will have a common point of departure: the rendering of the categories that define or classify specific practices as illicit and criminal as suspect, and the need to rethink and reframe them critically amid contemporary global law enforcement regimes. A distinctive element of the contributions must be their reliance on primary data.

Abstracts not to exceed one page in length will be accepted until 30 June 2019. We are eager to bring together practices, perspectives and contributors from around the world and whose work tackles criminalized practices not often discussed in mainstream crime control discourse.

 

Questions and abstracts can be sent to the guest editors, Luigi Achilli and Gabriella Sanchez at luigi.achilli@eui.eu and gabriella.sanchez@eui.eu.

 

References

Andreas, Peter (2015). “International politics and the illicit global economy.” Perspectives on Politics 13(3): 782-788.

Baird, Theodore, and Ilse van Liempt (2016). “Scrutinising the double disadvantage: knowledge production in the messy field of migrant smuggling.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42(3): 400-417.

Kalifa, Dominique (2019). Vice, Crime, and Poverty: How the Western Imagination Invented the Underworld. New York: Columbia University Press.

Merry, Sally Engle. The seductions of quantification: Measuring human rights, gender violence, and sex trafficking. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Vigh, Henrik, and David Sausdal. “26. The anthropology of crime.” In Wydra, Harald and Thomassen, Bjorn, eds. Handbook of Political Anthropology (2018): 441-461. Cheltelham: Edward Elgar.

Zhang, Sheldon X. (2009). Beyond the ‘Natasha’story–a review and critique of current research on sex trafficking. Global crime, 10(3), 178-195.

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Interview with Carolyn M. Rouse

by Sindre Bangstad (with Gard Ringen Høibjerg and Michelle Antoinette Tisdel)(1)

Sindre: First of all, it is great to have you back in Norway, you have actually been here before – only a year ago. But this project of yours, Trumplandia, that you actually started sometime before the election of Donald Trump as US president back in 2016, November 2016. I mean, I take it that your ethnographic location here is a trailer park in rural northern California, right? So for me as an anthropologist, that immediately raises the question of access. You know, you are everything they are not. You happen to be based in this liberal east coast enclave of Princeton, New Jersey, you have an African American background. So that basic question, how does one get access to such an ethnographic field, and what does it entail to work with people you don’t necessarily like, and who don’t necessarily like you either?

Carolyn: I often say of our discipline that we teach students how to ask great questions but we do not always have great answers. So actually, that is what I like to do, ask questions, but I do not always feel like I have the answers. In terms of Trumplandia, I had been studying African American racial disparities in health (Rouse 2009). And while I was doing that, of course, the data was coming out that there were declining white life expectancy in parts of rural America. In 2004 I think it was documented that white women in Appalachia had lost six years of life expectancy. Angus Deaton had just won the Noble Prize in Economics in 2015 and we were all in Ireland together and he was unveiling this new study he had undertaken, which was published in 2015 (Case and Deaton 2015). Now more data was out that whites were losing life expectancy in the United States. Deaton and his colleagues were economists and their first hypothesis was that “well, it is because they anticipate that they won’t get the same kind of jobs or make the same amount of money as their parents did.” So blaming this trend on declining economic deindustrialization in rural America. Getting rid of factories and outsourcing them abroad. But I had simultaneously been trying to make sense of white declines in life expectancy in order to make claims about black life expectancy. And what I was finding was that it is really not fears about the future. One of the outcomes of white racism in the United States is that in order to hold onto this notion that there was a time when white people were wealthy, particularly white men, was that you have to believe they were the smartest people, the most hard-working, and the most moral. So, all of these people I was interviewing in this place called Lake County (and it is not a trailer park. It’s actually a really beautiful lake where they grow a lot of marijuana) they were all from these white families who were middle class and upper middle class in the Bay Area. And from what we now call Silicone Valley, which is incredibly expensive. Almost all of them had grown up in families where there was substance abuse. But their fathers were able to hold on to their jobs because in the 60s the structures were such that white men with substance abuse issues kept their jobs, and there was no competition from blacks or Mexicans or Asians. They lived this middle-class existence. But then, in the 70s with feminism and integration, all of a sudden they were competing with people who were not like them. So their explanation for their falling down the economic ladder was the government. Because “I’m the most intelligent, I’m the most moral, I’m the most hardworking,” therefore my economic decline is because the government is giving all the resources to Mexicans and black people. Right? That is their explanation. And so… Part of what they want is the government not to support anyone anymore – kind of a libertarian idea. Because they believe in utilitarian economic theories, where the cream rises to the top in a perfect system. They really believe they will rise economically if the government is out of the way. But the government is actually the one providing health care, education, clean water, and safe roads. So they keep voting for people who are dismantling the government because they keep thinking government is the thing that is artificially inflating the economic profile of people who are not like them. Therefore, they choose to vote against the policies that are actually helping them stay alive. And part and parcel of that idea of getting rid of the government is this notion that “I need to be free. I need my guns. I need to be able to drink and smoke however much I want. I don’t even want to have to go to work.” A lot of them strangely see themselves as hardworking, but a lot of them are not. But some of them are hardworking, and they still have to live on food stamps, and they still have to rely on government support for their health care. So, they are voting against their economic interests because they really believe that white people naturally have these characteristics, and that it’s really the government completely distorting everything. And were it not for government, they would rise just like the cream to the top again. So, it is a very strange place. I went there to actually study declining white life expectancies. I started doing this before Trump was elected. And I was shocked. I didn’t know I was going to run into a lot of people explaining why Trump was “the best choice.” So, my interlocutors were telling me “Trump’s gonna win.” They knew! Right? They understood what the stakes were in a way that I didn’t. I didn’t go in there looking for conversations about Trump, and my subjects were prepped by my primary interlocutor. They were told that I was just coming to talk about health and health care. So they were schooling me. It was that kind of relationship. And there is also another thing about this. People who have racial ideas don’t see themselves as racist. Racists don’t look like Hitler (they don’t have the little mustache and everything). They don’t look like that. They really believe in their point of view. This is cultural. This is ideology at its best. And when they say things sometimes they’ll use Mexicans as a proxy. Instead of saying black people, they’ll say Mexicans, because I’m not Mexican. That’s a safe thing to say. “Those Mexicans…..”  But access, it’s not so difficult because most of the people don’t see themselves as racist. My primary interlocutor invited me to the area. She had heard on a television show about my work, so she actually invited me there. I did not have access to many of the pot places, she said I’d be shot on the spot. I mean this was before pot was made legal in California, so I didn’t have all the access.

Sindre: Now, this brings me back to this classical question. William Mazzarella from the University of Chicago is publishing a review essay about what he terms “The anthropology of populism” (Mazzarella 2019). In this piece, he notes that there really isn’t much of an anthropology of populism to speak of, either in the US nor in Europe. And I remember this, I think we were both at the meeting of the American Anthropological Association in November 2016, this was about a week after the election of Trump as president, and I certainly recall being struck by the shared sense of cognitive dissonance among my US anthropological colleagues, you know all the talk of “What on earth is going on here? We really didn’t see this coming” (Bangstad, Bertelsen and Henkel 2019a). I don’t think necessarily so much in anthropological circles, but there certainly seems to be some sort of reluctance in some quarters to admit that the world that Reaganite neoliberalism made in the US and in a number of other countries had anything to do with the rise of plutocratic right-wing populism in the USA. So what is it that anthropology can bring to the table of the analysis of this that other disciplines cannot?

Carolyn: I just finished teaching your book Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia (Bangstad 2014), and when I teach this book, I always say, if Americans had read his book when it came out in 2014, Trump would not have been a surprise. And I think that you have contributed a lot to the conversation about populism not as such, but as a set of practices around – again we are going to this notion of free speech – a kind of use of the public space to push ideas in a way that connects with pathos. But let me first get your sense of this debate about, or what may be lacking, or what anthropologists’ could do with populism. I know this isn’t supposed to be about you.

Sindre: You’re asking me questions now all of a sudden, right? Well, my basic assumption here would be that we have, for better or for worse, access to a sort of micro-perspective of, and the ability to sort of put ordinary people at the center of our analysis. So that would be one advantage in what we have to offer. Anthropology at its very best is also able to speak to the concerns of ordinary people, not necessarily in accepting everything that they say or take it at face value, but you know… There is a sense of grounded-ness and working from below rather than working from above.

Carolyn: Right, and that’s why my project was really to use ethnography as opposed to media as a way to really understand the United States. That’s what my Trumplandia is. Because my interlocutors were right about Trump, so there is something that they know that oftentimes doesn’t translate into the media. But again, I don’t trust people’s opinions, I don’t trust opinion polling. I don’t know why we do it. It distorts perceptions on everybody’s part. That said, I think that at a theoretical level anthropologists have a problem with populism, which is that we appreciate the intelligence of our interlocutors, but we know that what they say doesn’t necessarily mean it is true. And so, you know, Aristotle is right about rhetoric. Some part of rhetoric has to have some emotional component. Plato just didn’t like emotion-laden rhetoric, he didn’t like the Sophists. For the Sophists it was all about persuasion of the masses. Plato thought we needed philosopher kings to rule us – experts if you will. But there is a part of democracy that requires that ability to hear the voices of the people, at the same time that we check those voices. In the case of my Trumplandia project, another book just came out about Dying from Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl (Metzl 2019). He is a sociologist and doctor and he writes about all of the crazy… he saw the same things that I did. But one place that he didn’t go that I want to go, because I think in anthropology we allow ourselves to be humanists as well, is to do a bit more with philosophy. What I am doing with this work on whiteness and Trumplandia is really thinking about how we cannot have both social justice and rational – I’m going to use a Marxian term – rational bourgeoisie capitalism. The kind of capitalism that’s really rough. In America it is rough. Social inequality is vicious. We don’t have a safety net, so it’s vicious. We can’t have a capitalist system that operates where you have to have a class of people that you so dehumanize, that you feel okay about the fact that they live in the kinds of conditions that I see my interlocutors. Whether they are in white rural America or black and Hispanic South Central Los Angeles, How have we created such an awful economic system that Americans can literally see certain kinds of poverty and exclusions? We have schools in New Jersey where the fountains are covered with plastic because the water is so toxic the students can’t drink the water – and we keep talking about cutting taxes for the wealthy. That’s how bad it is in my country. I am sure you have heard about Flint, Michigan – about the water. It’s not just Flint, it’s all over poor neighborhoods in the United States. Our economic system has become so vicious that when I look at my interlocutors in Lake County, for me the question is: How can we create a better redistributive system? And one that doesn’t involve an industrial revolution kind of economy. I mean already we have enough junk. We don’t need any more junk. We can produce junk really rapidly, but we’re not a hundred and fifty years ago. We need to start focusing our economy on care as opposed to things, an economy of care as opposed to an economy of things. Because there is a lot of work that we need to do. I interviewed a number of home health aids in my Trumplandia project. They make minimum wage. Then every time a business is sold or reorganizes, these people who worked ten years they are back to making minimum wage, which was one time nine dollars per hour which translates to nothing in the United States. They were living, these two women I knew, living in this tiny rental in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Oroville. When I interviewed them they had literally three dollars between them until their next paycheck, and they were so happy to get my research subjects compensation for participation in my study. These people are caring for sick elderly people and they are making so little money that they can’t even feed themselves at the end of every month. So how did we create an economy where people who don’t actually produce anything (financial investors for example) make a lot of money, and people who are taking care of others make barely anything? How can we recreate a system where we are less focused on somebody making more junk for us that we don’t need that is destroying the environment, and how can we shift that to paying people living wages for doing things that actually matter – which is caring for each other.

Sindre: You are starting to sound like a Norwegian social democrat here… Or a “Communist” as I suppose they are known as in the US.

Carolyn: Can I defect? Can I become an expat in Norway?

Bangstad: I organized a double roundtable on what I termed the politics of affect. The anthropology of populism, at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Washington DC back in 2017 (Bangstad, Bertelsen and Henkel 2019b). Now, in that roundtable I was as an organizer struck by the fact that my US colleagues would much more readily opt for the analytical optics related to “race” than their European counterparts. In other words, anthropological colleagues who were working on this material in the US would it seemed at least, accord primacy to “race,” whereas their European counterparts would prefer to talk about this in the language of class and social economics. And that, of course, raises specific questions in the Norwegian context. For we have learned by now that “race” is a social construction, but that even so, “race” is real in its material consequences, right, and “racialized” thinking persists. We agree here in Norway that it is not a good idea to talk about “race” at all, and would like to pretend that such a thing doesn’t exist and that there is consequently no problem relating to racialized discourses in a country like Norway. In Norwegian anthropology, the interesting thing is of course that we learn this, any normal anthropologist also learned this in the course of 1960s and 70s with Barth and his Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Barth 1969) – that we should rather talk about ethnicity, right? The counter-argument would here be that you don’t necessarily change racialized thinking simply by substituting one term for another (Hall 2018). And if we look at the far-right in Europe these days, they talk about ethnicity, and even with Norwegian neo-Nazis in the 1990s, who were really violent and they were racists, they learned to speak about “ethnicity” and “culture” rather than “race,” as do all the world’s “Identitarians” and “Alt-righters” these days (Zúquete 2018). But is there some way of bridging these analytical optics so that we don’t get into a situation where it becomes impossible to talk to one another across these continental divides?

Carolyn: I taught a seminar at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell a couple of summers ago, and it was a course called “A Case Against Reparations: Rethinking Social Justice for the 21st Century.” And it’s complicated, but all my work has gotten me to that point – and maybe we’ll talk about that later – but I had a class full of advanced PhD students and assistant professors, and literally they split down the middle. There were the class folks and then the “race,” post-coloniality folks. And they could not find common ground. I was saying to myself “Isn’t it both? Why can’t you find common ground?” But it is really fascinating how those discourses have gone in these separate directions when it is the overlay of both. There are a lot of things I celebrate about Pierre Bourdieu’s work, and one of them is his trying to understand the relationships between objective structures and subjectivity, and the kind of overlay between them. Bourdieu’s incredible study, the book called Distinction (Bourdieu 1984), about how class translates into taste. And what we see in this book, one of the examples is, he interviews working-class French folks and upper-class French folks about the kind of music they like. And the lower class, their favorite is the Blue Danube, and the upper class – it’s Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier or American jazz. So in the educational institutions, what kind of taste is rewarded with a degree? And praised? It is the people who like American jazz. Things have changed, of course. But the Blue Danube, the upper-class considered kind of low class, and people who liked it less intelligent. Bourdieu traces it all to peoples’ class standing and what they’re exposed to. And this is recursive, it reproduces itself. So when you create a separate group, let’s say immigrants in Norway – let’s use that as an example from the top of my head.  I’ve been using this concept a lot recently: schismogenesis. It is a fun concept by Gregory Bateson. It is a great term, schismogenesis. Schisms, genesis, generating schisms. Bateson describes it in his ethnography of the the Iatmul in Papua New Guinea (Bateson 1936). Schismogenesis is about how people differentiate themselves just for the sake of differentiating themselves. It is an emotional thing – you want to show that you are different from this person and different from that person, or like this other person. He shows how in society – even though people share so much in common – they just keep finding smaller and smaller things to differentiate themselves from others. This is cumulative and it can cause schisms, real radical schisms in small scale societies, it can cause radical breaks. I can use Chicago as another example, inner-city Chicago and African Americans. When you treat them as an exception, as different, as dysfunctional and all sorts of other things, you wind up producing the things that make you want to act out, make the young kids want to act out and be different and differentiate themselves from the people who consider them lowly, or who condescend to them. And I think about Paul Willis’ Learning to Labour (Willis 1977), that wonderful book about education in Britain where he writes about how working-class kids reproduce their social class because of the school system. The teachers are so negative towards the kids that the way in which they assert their identity is to differentiate themselves from their teachers by acting out badly, disrupting the system. So when you create a system where you’ve said “Okay you guys are different and we’re kind of suspicious of you,” they get that sense. They’ll start to differentiate themselves even more, and then those differentiations grow on both sides. And I think the literature that you’ve been diving into and reading, on the part of these feminists who think they own the enlightenment or whatever (for critiques of secular “femo-nationalism,” see Abu-Lughod 2015 and Farris 2017), they also produce greater and greater differentiation to the point where now it’s becoming…  Well, the New York Times traced a bunch of these violent white supremacists terrorist attacks back to Norway and Breivik in 2011. Nationalist discourses are producing differentiations for the sake of differentiations and the internet allows them to do this for free and rapidly. It’s a binary, a like or a dislike, a thumb up or a thumb down, and people are liking or differentiating themselves at a rapid pace now through social media to the point where everybody has forgotten: “Wait a minute, we pretty much are all the same,” right, at some level. So again, I think class, race, ethnicity, all these things produce these kinds of difference that then get discursively created into things that we think to be “real,” but they are not really real. So I think it is an overlay of both racialization and class, and I think it is a shame that we don’t do more to write about the relationships between class and race or ethnicity. But I don’t have any apt or great solutions.

Sindre: So we need to talk about free speech, right. You became rather notorious in right-wing corporate media in the US, by organizing a seminar some years ago at Princeton University where you teach, with the more than slightly provocative title “F#&* free speech.” And in the US context, of course, where there is arguably a much greater left- and right- wing consensus about First Amendment principles, as developed in the 1920s in United State’s Supreme Court jurisprudence. This would be akin to the proverbial shouting of “Fire!” in a crowded theater, just titling a seminar this way. And you’ve also appeared on this wonderful podcast entitled “Think About It” organized by Ulrich Baer.(2)

And Baer also became notorious by arguing that there was actually something to learn from the so-called “snowflakes” (Baer 2018). So if you could sort of stake out your position here in this extremely contested field, you might gain new friends in the Norwegian right-wing corporate media as well, I’m thinking.

Carolyn: I could always use more friends. Bannon, yeah I am thinking about Bannon here.(3) Yeah, isn’t that great? So, going back to the title. It wasn’t actually “Fuck free speech, it was F with some symbols… Free speech. And that is actually important. First, the title is oxymoronic, right? You wouldn’t use that term if you thought free speech was not important. At the same time, you’re saying – fuck free speech – right? But you don’t actually know what that means with F and a bunch of symbols unless you understand the context, unless you understand English unless you understand what the symbols mean [following in the F]: that’s a curse word. So it’s also referencing how language is contextual, or not comprehensible unless you understand the context. The title itself was very rich. Milo Yiannopouloses and all the rest of them, they had no clue. And they never saw my lecture. I embargoed the video of me doing the talk for several months so they actually never saw it when they started going after me in US right-wing media. They couldn’t read the title, they didn’t know what I was talking about anyway. That’s the depths that we’re talking about in a lot of this journalism. But it was fun. And my talk was supposed to be getting people to understand that there is really no such thing as absolute free speech – as far as anthropologists know. There is literally no sustainable society where people can speak freely in any space and say anything they want, and that is an okay thing. It just doesn’t exist. The reasons anthropologists know this are so complex that I decided to teach a course. I’m teaching a course this semester called Speech and Bull where I’m walking students through all of the literature we know. From the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis we know that even our language and our grammatical structures shape our cognition, or the way we think. The students read Sindre’s book and about schismogenesis. They learned from other texts that a secular democracy requires that the state allow institutions to be independent. You have law, you have medicine, you have religion, and you have education. A theocracy is one where the state determines in some way the final say with respect to law, the final say with medicine, the final say with education. That’s a theocracy. In a secular democracy, you have to let institutions control speech because they are controlling evidence. A doctor cannot just tell you, “I have this plant in my backyard, and I really think it is going to cure your cancer.” And they give it to you and you die. At least in my country, the family can come after you and sue you for malpractice, because you’re a licensed physician, which means you have the duty to give what we call evidence-based medicine. And if you haven’t prescribed those kinds of medicines that are proven based upon levels of evidence, then you open yourself up for lawsuits. In the court of law, you can’t defend yourself and just start shouting anything in the courtroom. There are rules, there are procedures, there are forms of evidence that can be used and forms that can’t be used. Religion, the same thing, you can’t go to a temple, a Jewish synagogue and start spouting off about Hare Krishna, right? That’s not the space for it. This is what a secular democracy does, it allows these institutions to be autonomous, semi-autonomous social fields. So when you have people screaming at educational institutions, to just let anybody say anything, we are undermining the legitimacy of the institution itself. Could you imagine being in a physics class… and I use physics because my father was a physicist, my brother is a physicist, and now my son is a physicist, so physics is close to my heart… Could you imagine my son having to sit through lectures where he has to really debate whether or not the earth is flat? Well, with social media, Flat Earthers are growing in number. In fact, there is somebody at Princeton who – my daughter saw it – is trying to get everyone committed to the Flat Earth hypothesis. We don’t have time for that. There may be a time where we can re-adjudicate that and maybe they will come up with evidence that undermines the idea that there are spheres in the universe called planets, but until then… We have also had natural social science experiments with slavery, Japanese internment, convict leasing, eugenics, and the Holocaust. Those are natural experiments. Did any of them work? What is the evidence for basing a society on racism and violence? Does that work? Is it sustainable? Well, do we as social scientists then have to keep opening our doors to relitigating racism? Really? Is that what we are going to spend all of this institutional money for when there are far more interesting and far more dynamic things to discuss to make the world a better place? Now, we can debate whether or not education is around trying to make the world a better place, but if making the world a better place is what we are trying to do – then there is no time to relitigate Nazism, right? This is my take on speech in the academy. They went after me without understanding what speech is, how it is used, how it is just another system of symbols like any other system of symbols: music, clothing, all sorts of systems of symbols. And when we speak words are not enough. It is also our affect when we talk that helps provide meaning. People also read our identities, our age and our gender, when they try to interpret us. Language is very complex. So anyway, I’m happy to go after the absolute free speechers at any time. I can’t believe your media was sucked into this, because sadly there is almost a direct line between Donald Trump saying horrible things about the media and some journalist being killed. Trump said things about protestors and then in Nigeria the government shot these protesters in December 2018 and traced it to Trump. I mean, speech is dangerous. It is not as though we can’t have these conversations, but the context has to be appropriate. In speech, being appropriate is critical. And it is not that it can’t be challenging. Academics are challenging each other all the time, that’s how we get tenure. We challenge each other, no one needs to tell us to be open to heterodoxy. Baer writes about this too, that the US Constitution has many amendments, many parts, and why should free speech somehow trump equality, which is also one of the principles upon which our nation was founded. Why should it trump other forms of rights? And again, even the constitution has a context, and to pull everything out of that context as if it could be understood alone, is – I think – a misreading. When people read the Bible and interpret the Bible, they read and interpret the whole thing. Exegesis is a science. We have to do a kind of exegesis with the constitution as well, that doesn’t just isolate parts as if they could be taken out of context.

Sindre: My qualified guess is that you have now won yourself some new enemies in the Norwegian Flat Earth Society. There was in fact one prominent member featured in a Norwegian newspaper only this morning, I noticed, so this is not unique to the USA, we seem to be heading onto that course here too. Anyway, we have taken a lot of time. It is a bit painful to me to have to admit that we won’t get to your excellent monographs (see inter alia Rouse 2004). But I am going to have to round off this conversation by a question relating to diversity in academia. Now, there have been black anthropologists in the US academy dating back to the legendary Zora Neale Hurston, and even before that, and there are quite a number of prominent African American anthropologists in US academia today. There is also the Association for Black Anthropologist (ABA) which is a subsidiary of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and which has around a thousand members, and which has been in existence since the 1970s. So even if we know that black academics in the US are much more adversely affected by academic precarity under conditions of academic neoliberalism, in the context of Norwegian anthropology being for all practical purposes very white still, what is there to learn from the struggles and mobilization of black anthropologists and other black scholars in an increasingly multicultural Norway in the years to come?

Carolyn: I made a documentary in 2015 called Listening is a Radical Act: World Anthropologies and the Decentering of Western Thought.(4) And the reason I made this film was to think about the ways in which we cite each other, the ways we listen to each other, and to think about what it really means to listen to somebody else’s concerns – not your own. For example I work in Ghana, and these global health foundations just want to keep giving money to Ghana for HIV/AIDS. Well, HIV/AIDS rates are lower in Ghana than among African Americans in Washington DC or Milwaukee. And so these foundations are like “we think that should be the primary concern in all parts of Africa,” but why?  We shot the film in Cape Town with academics from all over the world to discuss how to decenter Western scholarly concerns. I’m thinking about Africanists in particular. The film includes  Paul Nchoji Nkwi a scholar from Cameroon who talks about how he completely discounts the notion of post-coloniality because he says, “We are all being colonized all the time.” When you are a child and you are being enculturated, that is a kind of colonization. Colonization is a factor of life. People can disagree, but that is how he saw it. In America, academics who write about Africa as a post-colony, they are the ones who are celebrated. But as a Cameroonian scholar his concerns are about kinship structures and access to state resources such as health care. But for American anthropologists, for instance, we like to be theoretical. So, the practical and the pragmatic is not of interest in America. That is changing because Scandinavian anthropologists are whipping our butts! They really are. So this is the thing, people who have different concerns get shut out of scholarly conversations. I work with John Jackson and Marla Fredrick for instance (see Rouse, Jackson and Frederick 2016), who are brilliant African Americanist scholars, but they’ve never won single authored book awards for their research, even though they are at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. My sense that this is in part because the way they write about “race” is not polemical, it is so different and so nuanced. But sometimes people don’t like that nuance, because even when I wrote about the health care setting, some people wanted me to write a book that slammed doctors for being racist. But I didn’t find that. I found it far more nuanced and complex, but that is not how people wanted me to write about black health disparities. They wanted me to reiterate a certain kind of narrative. Scholars of color need mentors, like you and others, but they also need to be able to have a voice. So here is the other concern I have. Academia is becoming commodified in a super interesting way. You know click-bait, right? So there are scholars who are now creating sort of clickbait titles for their work. Here is an example of one, Bruce Gilley’s “The case for colonialism,” which was a scandalous article. But you want to cite it, right! Even just to challenge it, you want to cite it. But when you cite it, it winds up in a Google metric called the h-index which some use to determine a scholar’s prominence and impact in their field. Tenure is now being tied to the number of citations one has, or their h-index. In terms of the h-index it doesn’t matter if people hated what you wrote and said it was terrible, your score goes up regardless. And so now I don’t even want to cite some of the articles coming out. I don’t want to legitimate scholars like Gilley. So, there is a way in which certain people have learned how to capture the imagination of the academy through this kind of selling click-bait concepts. And then some scholars are really good selling a term they created like a commodity. That commoditization translates into being considered “cutting- edge” or being important to the field. So there is a lot more than just trying to mentor people who are from non-traditional backgrounds, but it is also trying to get them to understand this academic currency, which is really complex and kind of strange. And so one of the things that I do, I was on the tenuring committee at Princeton last year, and one of my interventions was to reject the Google h-index as proof of the value of a scholar.

Sindre: Damn, there goes Jordan Peterson, right! No tenure at Princeton! We will have to leave it at that. Thank you very much, Carolyn.

 

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila (2015). Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: Harvard University Press.

Baer, Ulrich (2018). What the “Snowflakes” Get Right About Free Speech, Op-ed, New York Times 24.04.18.

Bangstad, Sindre (2014). Anders Breivik And the Rise of Islamophobia. London and New York: Zed Books.

Bangstad, Sindre, Bertelsen, Bjørn Enge and Henkel, Heiko (2019). The Politics of Affect: Perspectives on the rise of the far-right and right-wing populism in the West, Focaal 83 (1): 99-113.

Barth, Fredrik (ed.) (1969). Ethnic Groups And Boundaries: The Social Organization of Cultural Difference. Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown & Co.

Bateson, Gregory (1936). Naven: A Study of the Problems Suggested by a Composite Picture of the Culture of a New Guinea Tribe Drawn From Three Points of View. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translate by Richard Nice. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Case, Anne and Deaton, Angus (2015). Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1-6. Available at: https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2015/10/29/1518393112.full.pdf?sid=c9772399-e254-46a8-9da6-33b3fdf014dd

Farris, Sara R. (2017). In The Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Hall, Stuart (2018). The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press.

Henkel, Heiko, Bangstad, Sindre and Bertelsen, Bjørn Enge (2019). The Politics of Affect: Perspectives on the rise of the far-right and right-wing populism in the West, Focaalblog March 14 2019. Available at: https://www.focaalblog.com/2019/03/14/heiko-henkel-and-sindre-bangstad-the-politics-of-affect-anthropological-perspectives-on-the-rise-of-far-right-and-right-wing-populism-in-the-west/

Mazzarella, William. (2019). The Anthropology of Populism: Beyond the Liberal Settlement, forthcoming in Annual Review of Anthropology

Metzl, Jonathan M. (2019). Dying of Whiteness: How The Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America’s Heartland. New York: Basic Books.

Rouse, Carolyn M. (2004). Engaged Surrender: African American Women And Islam. Berkeley, California: University of California Press.

Rouse, Carolyn M. (2009). Uncertain Suffering: Racial Health Care Disparities And Sickle Cell Disease. Berkeley, California: University of California Press.

Zúquete, José Pedro (2018). The Identitarians: The Movement Against Globalism And Islam in Europe. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.

Willis, Paul (1977). Learning to Labour: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Jobs. New York: Columbia University Press.

Notes

(1) This blog post is based on a recording of a conversation between Carolyn M. Rouse (Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, USA) and Sindre Bangstad (Research Professor at KIFO, Institute For Church, Religion and Worldview Research, Oslo, Norway) at the House of Literature in Oslo on April 23, 2019. We decided to keep the conversational style also in the written form to enable a level of immediacy that resonates with the original interview. The conversation was part of the “Anthropology of Our Times” series at the House of Literature in Oslo and the House of Literature in Bergen, funded by the Fritt Ord Foundation in Norway. Rouse was introduced by Senior Research Librarian Michelle Antoinette Tisdel from the National Library of Norway; the transcript was made by Gard Ringen Høibjerg of the Inland University of Applied Sciences in Norway. References and footnotes by Sindre Bangstad; edits by Carolyn M. Rouse and Sindre Bangstad. The authors also wish to thank the Norwegian Centre Against Racism (ARS), KIFO, and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen and Yael Harlap from the University of Bergen.

(2) Baer’s podcast “Think About It” is available at https://www.ulrichbaer.com/

(3) Rouse’s visit to Norway in late April 2019 came in the context of a heated media debate about so-called “no-platforming” after the annual Nordic Media Days in Bergen had invited the former Breitbart editor and Trump advisor turned far-right organizer Steven Bannon as a keynote for its conference in Bergen, Norway on May 9 2019. Inspired by the successful campaign against the New Yorker’s decision to platform Bannon at its annual New Yorker Festival in 2018, anti-racist public intellectuals of racialized black and/or Muslim background in Norway such as Mohamed Abdi and Camara Lundestad Joof responded to the Nordic Media Days’ invitation to “debate Bannon” by refusing to do so, leading to widespread condemnation in Norwegian media editors’ circles. At editorial and senior management level in Norway, mainstream media are and remain overwhelmingly white and middle-class. Bannon’s event at Nordic Media Days was from Bannon’s point of view, and entirely as predicted by Norwegian anti-racists in advance, a propaganda coup, what with few critical questions being asked, and the folksy Bannon being livestreamed on Norwegian state broadcasting NRK online, receiving carpet-to-wall and largely uncritical coverage in Norwegian mainstream media. After the appearance in Bergen, Bannon appeared at Oslo Militære Samfund in Oslo on May 10 at a sold-out event organized by Document.no, once the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik’s favorite website, an event which was in fact cross-subsidized by Nordic Media Day’s coverage of Bannon’s travels to and from Bergen.

(4) Available online from Vimeo at: https://vimeo.com/125713372

 

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Anthropology, Activism, and the Problem of Countering Violent Extremism in Africa

Abstract:

Anthropology has an ambivalent history of being involved in social justice activism, and much anthropological work circulates around issues of conflict resolution in cultures throughout the world. After unethically supporting the colonial mandate, in more recent years anthropologists involved themselves in the Civil Rights movement, Native American social justice issues, and most recently social movements for environmental justice and women’s rights. And yet, regarding Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), there has been relatively little anthropological input, and rarely do our efforts affect policy decisions. This article examines issues of conflict management, technology, and cultural awareness in terms of the core themes of cultural and activist anthropology, and some of the ethical conundrums anthropologists create and must face. My argument is that anthropology is uniquely positioned to provide a critical counter-narrative to CVE’s inherent problems and a conceptual anchor to diplomatic approaches for combatting violence and terrorism in Africa. Drawing on both anthropological literature and ethnographic research, I introduce the idea of a Culture and Peace Lab (CPL) to combat violence, with special attention to Togo in Western Africa, and Tanzania in Eastern Africa. The goal is to encourage ongoing dialogues, and spark new ones, about how to best deal with violent extremism.

 

Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) and the Role of Anthropology

Violent extremism, often equated with terrorism, is defined by the FBI as “encouraging, condoning, justifying, or supporting the commission of a violent act to achieve political, ideological, religious, social, or economic goals.” Despite this definition being vague and arbitrary, it is the working definition most used when framing American counter-terrorism efforts and home and throughout the globe. Countering violent extremism is an anti-terrorism initiative of the United States government, including the military arm of the USDOD called AFRICOM. Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter condemns violent extremism which is conducive to terrorism, sectarian violence, and acts of terrorism while demanding that all terrorists cease participation in armed conflict and violence. Disturbingly, the growing acts of white nationalism and violent extremism in the US, are not labelled terrorism, weakening the credibility of counter-terrorism efforts in place like Africa and the Middle East. The UN call for member states to work collectively to combat the threat of terrorist fighters while avoiding the profiling based on stereotypes founded in discrimination and prohibited by international law. The problem is that these programs, which are not new, have often yielded dubious results, while claiming to root out all violent extremism they have focused almost explicitly on Muslims, stigmatizing them, and promoting fear, discrimination, as well as a rise in so-called “radicalization”, which is rarely applied to home-grown hate groups. A pervasive lack of cultural awareness, coupled with pronounced preferences toward militarization, as opposed to “soft-power” and diplomatic approaches, has helped to turn a brush fire into a forest fire, particularly in Africa. This paper calls for a greater role for education and cultural awareness via a culture and technology program—to create new relationships based on trust and educational development to deter violent extremism.

Despite ethical dilemmas within the discipline of anthropology, such as knowledge production, post-colonial hegemonies, and our role in engaged activism more generally, I believe that it would be fruitful for anthropologists to assist at the local level to connect different ethnic and religious groups and respective youths via digital story-telling, intercultural dialogues, cooperative activities, to combat extremism. There is i a vast array of debate internal to the discipline about security/counter-terrorism and the dilemma of the ‘culture expert,’ which this article evaluates by engaging the literature and opening the forum for other anthropologists to participate in a discourse (Atran 2010, 2016; Besteman 2008; Price 2011). Ethnography also has a role to play here, but ethics surrounding human subjects makes addressing violent extremism both difficult and often amoral. The approach confronts the rise in Islamophobia and its negative outcomes. As my Muslim friend Jalil Mgawe said when asked about Tanzanian radicalization, “When has a Tanzanian or African ever blown up or killed an American? Other than the Nigerian underwear bomber who was thwarted, we have no interest in killing anyone, and especially not Americans thousands of miles away. Americans do many great things here in Tanzania, they work on social justice issues by way of thousands of NGO’s, you are our friends” (personal conversation November 9, 2017).

A central issue to CVE has been a working definition and consensus, as to what exactly it means. The US Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) approach is built on the British “anti-radicalization” program which is equally problematic. According to McCants and Watts, “US documents frequently employ the term CVE, (but) there is not a shared view of what CVE is or how it should be done (2012, 1). The definitions are wide-ranging from acceptance of extreme beliefs to a propensity for violence in the name of distorted religious ideas. This ambiguity of language leads to conflicting approaches and the impossibility of evaluating the effectiveness of CVE programs. McCants and Watts propose the following goal for CVE, “reducing the number of terrorist group supporters through non-coercive means.” Exactly what terrorism and coercion mean is also ambiguous. However, such a broad definition does weed out some of the biases and Islamophobic intimations inherent in other definitions, opening the door for a more productive debate about the efficacy of programs. The UN talks about “counter-radicalization” even more broadly to the point that distinguishing between insurgent groups, gangs, criminal enterprises, and terrorists, is all but impossible. The word “countering” itself can be strongarm, and a justification for law enforcement and militaries to violate basic human rights.

Another important theme in the anthropological and social science literature has been the advent of AFRICOM, and the billions of dollars the US spends in Africa to combat terrorism. For Catherine Besteman (2008), AFRICOM (The United States African Command) offers humanitarian and development functions along with defense initiatives, but those on the ground view US engagement in Africa as a promotion of militarism, and the desire to extract African resources (20-21). In what Bakari (2017) dubs “the next American crusade”, he advocates for the use of more lethal measures by Sahelian security forces, to make them even more effective. Not everybody agrees. As Stuart Price notes in the Afro Barometer Project, prioritizing security in Africa is important since 36 countries consider security-related issues as a top three of concerns on the national level across the continent (www.Afrobaromter.org). However, more insecurity is perpetuated by dictatorial regimes and “foreigners” than homegrown extremists, and meanwhile security falls behind unemployment, health, education, infrastructure, water supply, and poverty as political issue in Africa (Bentley and Southall 2005). The amount the US spends on CVE to combat violent extremist organizations (VEO’s) compared to poverty and infrastructure is alarming. Even military scholars like Lisa Palmieri (2015) have pointed out the problems with the lack of a unified US strategy for addressing “Violent Salafi Jihadism” (VSJ), calling our approach “counterproductive” because of imprecise language and disaggregation, and Muslims in Africa and Asia are far more victimized by “VSJ” than Europeans and Americans. A key issue has been Saudi Arabia’s massive funding of “Salafist sects”, plus, America’s preoccupation with Iran, ignoring its own protracted wars, and the acts of its Middle Eastern allies in places such as Yemen, Afghanistan, Syria, and throughout Africa.

This article combines some ethnographic research from West Africa with archival research from Eastern Africa to evaluate and assess the role of anthropology in these contexts. Second, I will attempt to engage the ways of seeing in anthropology of cultural awareness through anthropology training where youths from African share stories about their ancestry, religion, family, and business ideas learned through interviewing and participant observation. Today, at the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at Wayne State University, we are developing peace education and digital story-telling programming which brings youths of different cultural, religious, and regional backgrounds to create video projects like life-history analysis, police and student dialogues, learning Islam 101, mindfulness and meditation exercises, and activities like “cross the line” which elicits common bonding experiences. Students also share ideas about how to resolve conflict and build sustainable environmental and business projects, this direct action via a “Culture and Peace Lab” (CPL )idea is a platform for various video and online projects aimed at building on existing resiliencies of interfaith and interethnic camaraderie on the ground. As part of this direct action, pointing out the profound failures of both CVE programs and neoliberalism in the Global South is necessary. This past month in Togo, where interfaith and interethnic cooperation is resilient, many now young adults who participated in my Culture and Peace Lab in 2014-15 have  now been recognized by the Togolese government as ambassadors of peace. There graduation ceremony included followers of Vodun, Islam, and Christianity all celebrating together.

Violent Extremism and violence begin as human ideas, with most youths feeling lonely or alienated. Kids flock to terrorism for the same reason they join gangs, because they feel helpless, and violent recruiters pray on these vulnerabilities. One example includes some groups which have embraced “violent Jihad”. And yet, most Salafists, and adherents of “Wahhabi” principles, like other Muslims, see “Jihad” as “inner struggle”, elements ignored by westerners, and also a part of Christianity and Judaism. Anthropologists know that in Africa, Muslims and Christians have had a long history of inter-marriage, cooperation, and working together. The Association of Applied Anthropologists were particularly interested in carving out a bigger role for ethnographers in Africa during my invited session at a 2017 conference in Montreal, especially ideas building on pre-existing resiliencies on the ground, namely, local indigenous law, inclusion, inter-marriage, pluralism, and intercultural and interfaith dialog and exchange.

Ethical Conundrums of Anthropologists and CVE 

Within the discipline of anthropology, contemporary frameworks and debates proliferate regarding the ethical conundrums in anthropology and its players regarding security, terrorism, counter-terrorism, and international conflict resolution in general (Nyamjoh 2012). Despite anthropology’s unabated call for diversity and inclusion, there is implicit racism and sexism throughout the discipline, shrouded in the rhetoric and talk of cultural diversity are policy actions of post-colonial actors which “beyond the masks” work to “enslave the soul of the other” through racialized subjectivities and the suppression of black femininity (Mama 2002). For Achille Mbembe (2000), the African post-colony has wrongly been framed as the “edge of the world”, with its resources and economic benefits being placed before its very people. This is the case concerning the recent American agenda which spends more money and resources on “securitization” than combatting structural poverty. The United States, despite President Trump doubling the $30 billion US government investment to $60 billion, is almost entirely focused on combatting “radicalization” with troops dispersed throughout the continent, often funneling money to autocratic leaders who do more to adhere to the colonial pact than to ensure democracy. The aim is to stamp out terrorists with the potential to harm the United States, and not improve the lives of everyday African citizens. Even China’s massive BRI (Belt and Roads Initiative), a trillion dollar investment, is disproportionately helping government elites and foreign companies, and doing little to contend with growing economic disparities.

Since the 2011 Arab Spring, there has been a marked escalation in “Salafist Islam” and the mystification surrounding this movement has been biased and short-sighted, leading to even more violence. The surge in extremism after the Arab Spring has engendered substantial research informed by the need to understand these new actors and account for their mobilization in places such as Syria and Iraq. However, current research suffers from two distinctive elitist and social media biases detrimental to current understandings of this phenomenon. The first bias pertains to the study of Salafi jihadi groups’ strategies and political agendas through the sole writings of their leaders and ideologues, while the social media bias refers to the inflated attention given to the role of the Internet in inciting jihadi recruitment. These two biases overlook the micro-level foundations of violent extremism, their pre-2011 roots in the Arab world, and the role of off-line social networks. The political ethnography by Drevon (2016) underlines these points, and encourages new hypotheses for Egypt. In fact, these same elitist and social-media biases are dangerous not because governments such as the US and Europe subscribe to them, but because they do nothing to understand nor eradicate the situation on the ground. There is a lack of data and contextualization of the data which leads to serious bias.

Throughout sub-Saharan Africa, issues with violence persist, despite the siren-call that “Africa is Rising”. While forms of violence target the physical destruction of people (massacres, genocide, contract killings), sovereignty outside of the state stemming from the confusion between public affairs and private government is only exacerbated in neoliberal modernity (Mbembe 2000, 260). These are the “counter-narratives” that ethnographers should be shedding light on, movements like “Lets Save Togo” which involves heroic women protesters calling for an end to the dictatorial regime, for term limits and fair elections. Throughout the continent, women’s rights, multi-party democracy, an end to violence, improved education, and redistribution of resources are the major grievances driving protests, anthropologists working in all these countries need to bring this to light (Ortiz et al. 2013). Even African ethnographers grapple with ethical dimensions relating to participant observation for the more integrated they become in the host community the more human-relations problems occur (Ezeh 2003). Paul Nkwi’s work in the Cameroonian grass-fields unveils great political, economic, and gender divides that come with attempts at regional balance and national integration, birthing more ethical dilemmas for the social scientists to sort out (Nkwi and Nyamjob 2011). Anthropology’s inherent ethical conundrums and problems with knowledge production means engaged anthropology must echo and amplify the voice of the people. The idea of a Culture, Technology, and Peace Lab (CPL) would do just this, build on the anthropological skill-set for qualitative and quantitative data, allowing for Africans to share their stories and ideas about peace and sustainable development with each other, with the ethnographers role relegated to that of translation and connecting groups across different regions to work on what they see as important.

Tanzania, Togo, and AFRICOM

The idea of teaching anthropology, technology, social media, and conflict resolution through the guise of a “Culture and Peace Lab” (CPL) proved effective in Togo during a pilot study in 2014, but it was a small program. In Togo, it is not uncommon for Christians, Muslims, or “Traditionalists” to consult and adhere to local systems of divination and judgement, including Vodu, Gorovodu, and Afa. Examples proliferate throughout the continent, despite a collective misunderstanding of “tribal warfare”. AFRICOM itself has a questionable recent history, bending the American arc of influence from an economic and social one to a military one. The “rationalization of post-Cold War global military command structure”, in the words of Keelan (2008), was justified under the global war on terror in the Bush-era, but, “this has become increasingly difficult as Africa, apart from the Maghreb, and incidents in Eastern Africa have been relatively free of terrorism” (2006, 17). With recent failures in Mali, Nigeria, and Somalia, perhaps we can find a role for anthropologists to assist with CVE via education? The positive trends of local courts in the post-conflict Rwandan genocide and the inter-cultural victories of Tanzania should be assessed side-by-side the protracted problems of extremism in northern Nigerian and northern Mozambique. AFRICOM in Western Africa is often viewed with concern, since the US sometimes props up dictatorial armies that suppress the local population, as has been the case in Cameroon, Burkina Faso, and Mali. Anthropologists may be able to assist in bringing a more culturally competent approach to deterring so-called violent extremism, by teaching necessary diversity and technological training creating fruitful counter-narratives and cooperative exchanges between different people, instead of pinning them against one-another in a “clash of civilizations”. Another reason terrorism persists in Africa is because of unnecessary and illegal wars in place like Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, and the spontaneous withdraw of troops create vacuums and breeding grounds for violence and “terrorism”.

My research in southern Ghana and Togo found that most southern Ewes, Guin-Mina, and Aja’s have great adoration and respect for their northern “Muslim” neighbors (even becoming them in possession trance), this despite nearly 50 years of autocratic rule in Togo by a northern army on a majority southern population (Montgomery and Vannier 2017a). Whereas in Nigeria, the Muslim population is higher, and the northern Hausa and Fulani disproportionately disempowered. African village law solved conflicts between groups, individuals, and sometimes gods themselves.

The case study of Tanzania is relevant in highlighting a situation of relative peace and tranquility in an ethnically and religiously mixed society, although Ujamaa has been overly romanticized ignoring the forced removal of some groups, and current President Magfuli shows some clearly autocratic tendencies. Ujamaa ­ (community and equality) traditions, as well as local systems of jurisprudence have been effective for decades at bringing some disparate groups together by articulating national values of understanding and tolerance, since Tanzanians were very multicultural and diverse before colonization. European colonization and trade, mainly German and British, perpetuated the spread of Islam in Kenya and Tanzania; Christian schools were entwined with the modern nation building reversing decades of power relations, with Christians taking over Muslims’ positions in the state bureaucracy, leading to the gradual socioeconomic decline for many Muslims. This perception of historical power loss has led to an “Islamic-centric” interpretation of history that highlights discrimination and difference while complicating sustained and inclusive peace. Anthropology’s methods of holism, relativism, and its concept of culture can generate powerful tropes based on cultural and religious relativity to deter the “gradual hardening” of an externally derived extremist response, including those of revivalist Salafist groups (Glickman 2011). These counter-narratives come in the form of microfinancing of sustainable businesses and curriculums set up through a CPL where video projects offer an array of matters related to peace, embedding the core themes of anthropology, technology, and peace and conflict studies, with accompanying lesson plans.

By showing films such as “Pray the Devil back to Hell” (Disney 2008) and “Long Day’s Journey into Night” (Reid and Hoffman 2000)—then, Africa’s youth can see efficacious African models for invoking peace on the national level. I also share my own work about inclusivity and inter-faith dialogue in Togo through the lens of “African Traditional Religion” with my film “Chasing the Spirit” (see Baier 2016). Students work collaboratively across ethnic and gender lines to create their own short-films about social justice issues of their choice, uploading them to the “peace labs” website, and screened at a youth film festival.

For Muslims and Christians to co-exist and thrive peacefully, as they have for generations throughout the African continent, the CPL builds on “progress” and “brother/sisterhood” on the model of Ujamaa ideas enshrined by former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere, a philosophy of equality, pluralistic unity, and tolerance. The marginalization that comes with global capitalism ignores the importance of reciprocity and relationships, by privileging objective measures and market principles alone. Tanzania boasts more than 100 ethnic groups and a nearly 50/50 split between Christians and Muslims. Tiny Togo has around 40 ethnic groups, and has maintained the highest percentage of “traditional religion” in all of Africa. In both contexts, violent extremism has been almost nonexistent. Many perceive the seeds of conflict to be present in Tanzania, and especially Togo (where the pro-democracy movement “Lets Save Togo”) fights the 50-year dictatorial regime of Eyadema (father and son).

The CPL itself involves cooperative businesses, sustainable agriculture, inter-ethnic and inter-faith activities and economic ventures. US military influence is deep in both countries, and yet AFRICOM opts to spend millions on training government troops “to take back their country” instead of empowering local people with jobs and the tools to understand one another. The Department of Defense and CVE program would ensure more stability and peace by building on existing cultures of tolerance and diversity through dialog and exchange programs, as opposed to militarization that perpetuates hate and violence. Many Africans see the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as both illegal and the real reason for the rise of terrorist groups, finding reconciliation for these wars would help bring securitization to the region. The CPL addresses these failures of CVE and contends with socio-economic disparities between individuals and groups fueling desperation and violence.

 CVE and Tanzania

Although I have done a pilot study of the CPL in Togo, and Detroit, I think it has “legs” in Eastern Africa as well. Tanzania is a country of enormous diversity (more than 100 languages), and has had relative peace since Independence. Although post-Socialist Tanzania has seen its share of ethno-religious politics, especially in Zanzibar. There is sky-rocketing GDP and foreign direct investment (Atkinson and Lugo 2010) but most of the gains are going to the richest members of the population. And this too has a racial component, with Asian Muslims owning many firms and gaining upward mobility, while African Muslims continue to be among the poorest in all of Tanzania, especially pastoral groups living a nomadic lifestyle and not obtaining education.

Tanzania has a long history of inter-marriage and inclusivity in government and business circles. However, there have been an array of “Muslim complaints”. Anthropology has been underrepresented in curtailing violent extremism. For Azinade (2013) “Race, ethnicity, and nationality have marked African post-colonial efforts, such as those in Tanzania, to establish national political communities. Colonial agencies have deeply colored postcolonial struggles over who should belong to the nation and who should be excluded” (1). Just as this strong diverse nationalism has created love and civic engagement, it can also foster bloodshed, violence, and genocide targeting ethnic minorities and foreigners perceived as threats to the security of Tanzania. Teaching anthropology and technology in mass allows youth to create their own short films videos and share their voices with fellow children who remain optimistic as they fight against the conventional hierarchy of Tanzanian (or Togolese) politics dominated by the older generation.

As Mamdani (2001) reminds us, terrorism and violent extremism are more “political” than religious. And people in Tanzania engage in violence for the same reasons as most societies, with structural poverty and access to resources being at the forefront. My friend Timo at the Canadian World Education Fund, surveyed “at-risk” secondary students about why they think people engage in violence. Violence in Tanzania is related to the following: land issues, farmers and pastoralists disputes, water issues, political issues, identity issues, and violence from neighboring countries. My call for greater cultural and technological training facilitates understanding and employment. Video, social media, technology, cultural understanding, and basic skills in conflict resolution are all necessary and helpful for both curbing violence and sparking upward mobility. As the GDP and FDI (foreign direct investment) continue to rise exponentially, it is evident that the national government needs to do more to include all Tanzanians, especially African Muslims from poorer ethnic groups.

Ujamaa, the traditional system of empowerment and civic engagement in Tanzania has been sometimes effective. Such community traditions can be operative for conflict settlement (e.g. Gacaca courts), but they can also be discriminatory and monopolistic. When coupled with useful approaches from the UN and other regional approaches they can work, the reasons they have sometimes failed in the past is because of an “all or nothing” application, as opposed to a hybrid approaches from many sources.

Discussion: Teaching Peace and the need for Anthropology

For the past year, I have been working locally in Detroit through the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies (Peace in the Streets), at Wayne State University, to build curricula for peace education in a variety of local contexts. The chance to expand this diversity, conflict resolution, and cultural understanding training via digital story-telling in various parts of Africa, is a more effective mechanism for CVE than current approaches. The CPL has free online content with corresponding group video projects in the following areas: peace education, anthropology of religion, cultural anthropology, conflict mapping, video editing, and entrepreneurship. Activities around life-history, interviews, participant-observation, and inner/outer peace are designed to get kids from different backgrounds working together. In Detroit, during our annual Ralph Bunche Summer Institute, this approach has yielded long-term bonds between working class and suburban students crossing ethnic, religious, and gender boundaries. Once students engage with “others” for an extended period, fear and hate disappears because they realize they have a lot in common, and work cooperatively on their social justice themed videos. When they interview each other, and do videos on topics that interest them, cultural awareness and empathy are improved.

Anthropology had a disturbing colonial history in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, aligning the discipline aided imperialist and expansionist goals of the western world, the CPL is a chance to mend such past injustices. Similar reconciliatory approaches have worked in Detroit with programs we have run at the Peace Center such as “Understanding your Muslim Neighbors”, “Peace in the Streets”, and “Beyond Fear and Hate”. Africa is the youngest and fastest-growing continent on earth. Anthropologists know first-hand from their ethnographic research that youths are agents of positive peace and change, and when viewed as such, they can be empowered to fight their underrepresentation and repression in systems with poor governance and extreme poverty. Doing so early on and including children in the decision-making process can address the economic and political grievances that drive violent extremism by improving their relationships within their respective communities and states.

Too often ethnocentrism and lack of cultural awareness has led to the failure of various international funding projects; with nuanced cultural relativity, effective programs should build on historical resiliencies and promises shown in the films I mentioned. Since independence, Tanzania has remained an open, inclusive, pluralistic, and democratic society. My argument is that anthropology can invoke understanding between differing factions, and thus encourage positive outcomes by erecting educational video projects into local curriculum with focus on: 1) Unified national identity, 2) Religious and Ethnic tolerance, and 3) Sustained Cultures of Peace. Curriculums are extensive, with several 90-minute lecture/workshops complete with video projects across the six segments. Recent research suggests that “promoting online voices” may be highly effective in “countering violent extremism” (Helmus, York, and Chalk, 2013). The online approach proposed here is embedded in anthropological method and theory, including a nuanced understanding African culture, history, and society, and a critical eye for conflict management and resolution, once digitized it is shared widely at little cost.

Submissions proliferate from across the social sciences and humanities pertaining to CVE, but, anthropology seems to be underrepresented, and the literature lacks primary research– with a holistic perspective, such media and communication programs can be successful at combatting “radicalization” (Ferguson 2016, 28-29). There are some promising signs of an “anthropology and peace” revival including The Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence by Leslie Sponsel (2006) who builds on the concepts of Glenn Paige’s innovative ideas about a paradigm shift from killing to non-killing throughout human cultures, while highlighting the ideological and systematic cultural bias which privileges war over peace. Currently I am co-authoring a submission with Professor Elizabeth Drexler from Michigan State University on anthropology, peace, and conflict studies for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology (OREA). Scott Atran’s work includes extensive field interviews with terrorists, enriching our understanding of the “roots” of modern terrorism. The difference here is an ideology that appeals to them, extremism is something very attractive to more people than you might think. In France, a poll by showed that 27% of young French people, not just Muslims, between 18 and 24 had a favorable attitude toward the Islamic State.

One way to empower disadvantaged youth is through free tutoring and mentoring on conducting ethnographic research, developing interview, coding, and critical writing skills. Not just for learning about themselves, but for studying “us” as well, my work on “photo-voice” in Togo allowed Ewe-villagers to do just this and they were good at it (Montgomery 2017b). Students also learn about youth violence, diversity, domestic violence, non-violence, and many other peace themes, sometimes for the first time. When they return to their respective schools and neighborhoods, with self-created video projects, they become advocates for peace, possessing stronger leadership skills. In Detroit, students reported they are 120% more likely to speak up against injustice and to do so with the skills to diffuse violence. The literature and more recent work by Ferguson (2016) have concluded that one huge problem for CVE and terrorism is the absence of a unified academic “field” through which tougher academic standards could be enforced; bridging anthropology, peace and conflict studies, communication and conflict studies, and other related fields together in the CPL accomplishes this.

Today, anthropology’s engagement with activism seems often ambiguous and the field continues to debate the role of anthropologists in policy. And in my Peace and Justice Anthropology courses I continue to see increased interest in social justice activism on an annual basis. The time to strike is now! Many ethnographers are in a unique space to address violent extremism through cultural and religious awareness. Where are the anthropologists? Some find the entire CVE spectrum a zone of militarization that they do not want to justify. Anthropologists need to get more involved, the CPL is a format for empowering at-risk youths. In our “Understanding our Muslim Neighbors” and “Beyond Fear and Hate” at The Center for Peace and Conflict Studies in Detroit, we co-sponsor forums with partners like The Council on Arab and Islamic Relations (CAIR) and Meta-Peace Team, we find that most Americans know little to nothing about Islam, and the majority by way of worksheets also cannot distinguish between basic excerpts from the Torah, Bible, and the Quran. Critical engagement brought about by activist research is both necessary and productive. My own research in Togo has been most effective when empowering at-risk populations by allowing them to exercise their own agency and tell their own stories (Montgomery 2017b, 287-309) Photo-voice as a method allows subjects and “targets” to create their own storylines about a range of issues (religious and ethnic difference), and violence. Ethnographic research can contribute to transforming the discipline by addressing the human rights and peace and security outcomes that need to be part of anthropological research and CVE programming. Instead of focusing on the tensions inherent in anthropological research on countering violent extremism or even human rights, activist research and anthropological programs for bringing peace, “draws them to the fore, making them a productive part of the process” (Speed 2006, 68).

Terrorism and Security Studies as specific disciplines are recent additions to the social sciences, and as they cope with questions relating to a proper or appropriate methodology, the utility of anthropology and ethnography is absent from deliberations. International Relations in general stands to benefit from more method and theory, since “Liberalism” and “Realism” fall short in explaining modern activities across nation-states. First, many African states do not pursue state interests but rather the interest of authoritarian individuals within the regime, and without decolonization, many governments within Africa have no control over what happens in their own sovereign territories. There is even less research by anthropologists talking to terrorists, radicals, or “at-risk” actors, even though anthropology has entered virtually every other domain of human activity: clinics, homeless shelters, prisons, shopping malls, factories, court rooms, and factories (for exception see Brannan et al. 2001).

Anthropology as a means for deterring violent extremism is envisioned with the creation of a Culture and Peace Lab (CPL) in various locations, with correlative curriculum training and online video and narrative projects. Students and religious groups create various individual, small, and large group video and artistic projects which pivot around the central themes: job skills building, family history, sustainable development, religion and ritual, human rights, conceptions of peace and conflict, sport and collaboration, and more. Our programming is extended to students grades 2 through 12, with specific content aimed at each age set. The elementary peace education takes place in area schools and afterschool problems, namely in Hamtramck, Michigan and Detroit, Michigan—in both settings more than seventy percent of the children are students of color. The middle school programming is a “Cops n’ Kids” community dialogue program where police officers and children work together to on video projects and simulations. Whereas, the high school programming is a two-week summer camp that focuses on a new topic each day, for example: domestic violence, cultural awareness, suicide prevention, and mindfulness. In Columbia, Somos Capazes and the  Center for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPCS) orchestrated a “Peace Theater” competition where students wrote their own plays on stereotyping and conflict resolution. Last year at the CPCS Ralph Bunche Institute, local Detroit high school students and Colombian University students were amazed at the similarities between the 1967 Detroit rebellion, and situation with the Colombian peace process and the problems of violence in American cities. Students also recorded their various classroom activities and performed “conflict circles” discussing differences and similarities traversing ethnicity, religion, and gender. These skills acculturate participants and create lasting bonds. During workshops in Africa, screenings of important African international film selections, as well as teaching a basic three-part script: (Problem, Conflict, Resolution) allowed groups to create some wonderful short-films. They produced and edited films on recycling, north/south cultural differences, bullying, religious holidays, and lineage histories. I am currently seeking external funding for a peace lab website so programming can be shared widely. The anthropological role is to teach, implement, and facilitate various “agency-centered” oral and visual approaches to define problems, identities and parties, to assess local community and national needs and to create concrete action plans for invoking cultural understanding and dialogue between different individuals and groups.

Activist anthropology can offer a positive and corrective approach for CVE, building on the historical resiliencies of unified national identity, religious and ethnic tolerance, and sustained cultures of peace. This is a call for anthropologists the world around to begin tackling violent extremism in all its forms, not just in Africa and The Middle East, but in Europe and North and South America. The hate we saw last summer in Charlottesville, last fall in Pittsburgh, last month in New Zeeland, and the rise of Nativism/White Nationalism throughout the Western world also needs to be addressed, violent extremism is by no means a “Muslim” enterprise. Last month we held a “Beyond Fear and Hate” panel looking at racism, Anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia side-by-side with a keynote from Dr. Cassie Miller from Southern Poverty Law Center. This is the template for speaking truth to power, and these events need widespread attention and to be available to everybody. We need to frame terrorism in all its guises, including the uptick by white nationalist groups in the US and Europe, for anti-Semitism, and anti-Immigrant groups, like Islamophobia, are also on the rise. The representations of Tanzanians, Togolese, or Nigerians, should not come from above or outside the society, but from within and from the localities themselves (Ferguson 2016), reducing the need to revert to forceful repression in CVE.

Over the last decade, the growth of Boko Haram in Western Africa, and a growing number of attacks in Eastern Africa have targeted local Christian leaders and many soft-targets such as schools, bars, and restaurants (Lopez Lucia 2015, 2), although not on the scale the media would lead one to believe. The Tanzanian case is a great case to investigate. Muslims and Christians coexist and often marry in all major Tanzanian regions except Zanzibar which is 95 percent Muslim. Among Muslims, over 85 percent belong to the Sunni Shafi sect built on Sufism; there are also some Sunni Arabs and Asians, with those from Omani origins belonging to the Ibadhi sect. Most adherents to “radicalization” are “invisible” to the international community and lack a sense of control over their environment or circumstances. While extremists are not invariably poverty stricken, they often act on real or perceived grievances against groups with a sense of justification. This anthropological approach via direct action seeks to put technology and skills in the hands of many impoverished youth who can begin making money through their skills immediately: videography, marketing, event planning, website production, social media management, and editing.

Technology and Culture: Alternatives to Neoliberalism

A core components of this essay is the advocacy for the “soft power” of counterinsurgency through diversity and pluralism, something anthropologists are particularly good at. Secondly, anthropologists can establish CPL’s teaching cultural awareness across religious and ethnic lines. Violent Extremism springs from economic insecurity issues of poverty, land grabbing, displacement, and invisibility in the global sphere, thus fueling young people’s move towards jihadist groups. The role of capitalist economic relations in these kinds of the aforementioned processes is a powder-keg for the desperation that precedes extremism. It assumes what Jon Pahl (2010) in another context has called “innocent domination”, the silent hegemony that comes from neoliberalism and global capitalism, ideas contrary to local collective moral and economic values. These kinds of diplomatic policies have been tried extensively in Latin America and have failed, leading to increased insecurity in the region. Central America, American Indian reservations, and Mexico are just a few examples. So, how can we expect these same policies to work in Africa? Africa and the world cannot afford a further rise in violence, terrorism, and marginalization that are the result of these ethnocentric policies.

As Juan Cole (2018) asserts in his book “Muhammed: Prophet of Peace”, Islam has a history of tolerance, also evidenced in the film “Out of Cordoba” (2009). The Salafist interpretation of Islam is a recent phenomenon, catalyzed by hegemonic western wars in foreign lands, and according to many has more to do with interpretation and propaganda than actual Quranic teachings (Cole 2018). Most do agree that Violent Extremist Organizations (VEO’s), have been more effective with technology and the war of ideas than most government approaches to VE. Nyamjoh, Hackett, and Soares, New Media and Religious Transformations in Africa considers the importance of combining religion and media studies because Islam, Christianity, and African religions are all operating together in an era of political liberalization, media deregulation, and the proliferation of new technologies (2015, 9). If social media has been a tool to invoke “radicalization”, why not establish educational skills to counter it? In Sudan, a bizarre balance between education and popular media has occurred with the UN invoking Western style educational curriculum and media outlets being ensconced in Islamic teachings.

If the goal is to counter violent extremism, then intercultural and interreligious programming and economic empowerment workshops with curricula where students and religious leaders collaborate to launch business ideas and tell their cultural stories are surely more effective than clandestine activities in the name of intelligence and security. Family and religious history, entrepreneurial ideas, technological and social media skills, conflict management, video production and editing, interfaith dialogues, and the power of film— combine to create life-long skill sets designed to empower the local, by also building on a strong history of pre-existing African cultural legacies like Ujamaa in Tanzania, Gacaca courts in Rwanda, or Gorovodu in Togo. An anthropological approach opens new lines of communication between strangers. Providing action and making people “known” in a constructive way to each other and online make it less likely for violent extremism to flourish, especially when people from different economic, cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, including marginalized communities, build trust and work together consistently and collaboratively across these lines.

The online teaching program must do more than teach the precepts of anthropology and understanding, because research on violence shows that conflict stems from lack of access to work and the economy. Which is why coupling culture with technology is so important. Therefore, the CPL must also instill skills which allow citizens to garner the business savvy necessary for upward mobility, while also rebuilding a working and dependable justice system. Otherwise, this approach (like so many others) runs the risk of being just another top-down development experiment. The reasons this can work are because education and understanding can lead to liberation and positive peace. Building a platform for free media sharing to empower teachers, religious leaders, and young Africans to overcome their differences is essential. Anybody with access to a cell phone will be able to participate. The proposed websites provide a platform for Tanzanian and Togolese voices to be heard locally, and throughout Africa; with the permission of the creators, videos and other projects are archived and made available online. Another promising trend includes the exploration of intellectual history and agency from below, Hunter (2015) helps to empower others in her book Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania (2015). She argues that Tanzania developed its own political concern about progress and development (Ujamaa), and citizens find harmony, despite diverse ethnicity and religion (2015, 17). Our abiding fear of terrorist cells and violent extremism continues to motivate US policies throughout Africa. Past US mistakes in Somalia, ongoing mishaps in Mali and northern Nigeria, must serve as lessons; funding and supplying warlords, carrying out strikes against terrorist suspects, are sometimes counterproductive. We need new approaches, otherwise we propel local extremists and fear-mongering groups to power, only to later blame them and their religion for violence.

Throughout Africa many are struggling to meet their basic needs and find their place in society; youth are vulnerable to VEO recruiters, who offer them a strong sense of purpose, community, and much needed money. Meanwhile, cell phones and internet access, have revolutionized the ways African youths communicate and stay informed (Nyamjoh and Soares 2015). Just as surely as at-risk youth can be recruited by extremists, they can also choose a more sustained peace. Young populations are more prone to “radicalization” than their elders; religion and media need not always exacerbate violence, as they can be positive channels through which violent extremism is countered. Ferguson insists “counter narratives” can be ambiguous and unclear; this project aims to clarify alternative voices through a public digital forum and archive and with the tools of anthropology including cultural relativity and tolerance (2016, 27-28).

Hinds writes regarding Islamic “radicalization” in North Africa, “a combination of poverty, political and cultural marginalization, low educational attainment, a lack of opportunities (particularly for young people), and the collapse of traditional Islamic organizations is a potent combination” (2015, 1). She continues, “The internet is a key component of modern processes of ‘radicalization’, however, few strategies have targeted online ‘radicalization’” (2015, 2). Attempts at democratization in the Arab Spring were strengthened with social media, but extremists also flocked to these media. We must be cognizant of this trend, for “while the internet is an important tool in modern ‘radicalization’, so far, few de- and counter-radicalization programs have included an online component” (Hinds 2015, 11; Helmus, York, and Chalk 2013). Evidence suggests that a variety of complementary approaches are the best means for countering terrorism; with anthropology and ethnography we can all talk to each other from a place of inclusion—thereby, recognizing the critical role of anthropology and development for addressing social, political, and economic grievances.

Conclusion

This paper brings to the forefront three important issues: first is the underrepresentation of anthropologists researching and involved in countering violent extremism, second, is the shift away from diplomacy and development towards “securitization” of US policies in Africa, third, how anthropologists might be involved in so-called CVE, including the use of technology and culture. The CPL is timely given contemporary trends in CVE and anthropology’s pivot toward the public sphere. An important kernel of the curriculum is learning cultural relativity, diversity, conflict resolution, and inclusion. Racism, sexism, hate, bullying, stereotyping, and exclusion can all tackled head-on through various lectures, activities, and group digital story-telling projects that work toward peacebuilding. Coming in to our programs at the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies regarding youths, most students struggle to even define diversity, and its many manifestations are often misunderstood. Upon completion of the program students are equipped with many ways to promote inclusion in society and end up rating diversity as “extremely important.” Meanwhile, cultural dialogues at Michigan State University have been fruitful for students, staff, and faculty alike. Most impressive, are the outcomes related to individual, community, and social violence stemming from surveys in Detroit and Colombia, as well as small data-sets from Togo and Tanzania. Students come up with mechanisms for addressing violence and many times even “teach” their parents new skills. As their capacity to de-escalate and de-colonize violence improves, students become ambassadors of peace in their homes and communities. Leadership and civic engagement also improve because once armed with proper conflict, culture, and technological training, participants find social justice issues that matter to them most and find cooperative ways to create positive change as activists. These skills will also minimize the prospects for violent extremism in Africa.

Ethical debates surrounding the relationship of anthropology to activism goes back decades, but are once again experiencing a resurgence (Speed 2006, 67). Ethnography is a tool grounded on acute insider knowledge and based on longitudinal research and an understanding of anthropological theory. Anthropology has made great gains in such bourgeoning fields as medical and forensic anthropology, and yet its role in policy and diplomacy seems scattered at best, especially when it comes to positively impacting the CVE debate. Anthropology is concerned with who we are as people, where we are going, and what we should do. Anthropology helps us get beyond fear and hate through the portals of cultural understanding and inclusion.

This does not come without ethical problems surrounding surveillance, so the CPL’s need to be run for and by Africans. And part of the programming involves projects around colonial history and governments themselves. CVE frameworks have been criticized by many for good reason, both at home and abroad, namely for the violations of privacy, overreach of surveillance, and the numerous Islamophobic dimensions. This offers something contrary to that, cultural and historical awareness aimed at peace! I have argued for diplomacy and empowerment as counterpoints to militarized approaches to counter-terrorism—this entails constructing counternarratives and opportunities more appetizing than what VEO’s can provide. These soft-power strategies have often been critiqued for relying on false dichotomies and blurred lines between ‘security’ and ‘diplomacy’, but when people get to know the “other”, they are less likely to invoke violence toward them. Teaching conflict resolution, mediation, and peace and conflict studies helps eradicate violence; both UNESCO and UNDP have agreed. Another important issue has been the debates and frameworks surrounding the anthropologist as “culture expert”, fostering an environment encouraging African youths to provide the innovation and development of their own CPL’s helps to off-set this, so does an honest discussion about colonialism and neocolonialism.

The literature on anthropology and countering violent extremism is scant, but there is a role for us. There have been some in-roads regarding “science based field research” and some anthropological methods have made their way into the monitoring and evaluation tools for counter terrorism and VE (Atran 2010)—an ethical problem of its own. Gledhill (2008) has expressed the need for “anthropology in the age of securitization”, claiming anthropology the world around could “provide the basis for countering those ideas and beliefs that fuel violence” (32). By building on pre-existing resiliencies on the ground, tolerance and peace directly address narratives of hopelessness and protracted violence. Anthropology needs to pay much more attention to culture, religion, technology, and “radicalization” by evaluating and analyzing them holistically; offering a local, regional, and national platform for dialogue and reconciliation.

What anthropology and conflict resolution can bring to peace and security and CVE is a holistic vision of how societies operate, how power from the top smashes peace from below, how cultures are constructed and maintained, and this seems to be conspicuously absent from many people working on VE and terrorism more generally (Atran 2010; Speed 2006). Many times, government agencies, NGO’s, and academics operate in our own silos of specialization, and we fail to capture the big picture of how human agents relate to one another in society. As ethnographers, we know that to understand how a society works, we need to understand the parts of the system that nobody talks about because they are not seen as important; sometimes it is the “silence” of individuals and cultures that say the most about what makes them “radical” or “extreme”. By combining conflict management and economic empowerment with anthropology and technology, and providing training with an electronic platform that is democratic and affordable, anthropologists can accelerate the dissemination of counter narratives from the people themselves, while combatting hegemonic narratives currently dominating the debate on VE. Social science provides individuals with an understanding of what makes us similar and what makes us different, it shows that multi-culturalism is an asset, not a problem. Anthropologists should be at the forefront of ongoing frameworks and debates concerning violent extremism, not just in Africa, but throughout the world.

References

Atran, S. (2016). The devoted actor: unconditional commitment and intractable conflict across cultures. Current Anthropology.

Atran, S. (2010). Pathways to and from violent extremism: The case for science-based field research. Statement Before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities.

Atkinson, Anthony B., and Maria Ana Lugo. “Growth, poverty and distribution in Tanzania.” (2010).

Baier, Randal. “Chasing the Spirit: Gorovodu in Southern Togo. A film by Eric J. Montgomery and Christian N. Vannier. 66 minutes, color. Detroit: CultureRealm Films (culturerealm. com), 2012 (available from Amazon. com).” Comparative Studies in Society and History 58, no. 3 (2016): 836-839.

Bentley, Kristina A., and Roger Southall. An African Peace Process: Mandela, South Africa and Burundi. Vol. 25. Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2005.

Brannan, D. W., Esler, P. F., & Anders Strindberg, N. T. (2001). Talking to” terrorists”: Towards an independent analytical framework for the study of violent substate activism. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 24(1), 3-24.

Disney, Abigail E., Gini Reticker, and Blake Leyh. “Pray the devil back to hell.” (2008).

Drevon, J. (2016). Embracing Salafi Jihadism in Egypt and Mobilizing in the Syrian Jihad. Middle East Critique, 25(4), 321-339.

Ferguson, K. (2016). Countering violent extremism through media and communication strategies. Reflections, 27, 28. Fry, Douglas P. The human potential for peace: An anthropological challenge to assumptions about war and violence. Oxford University Press, USA, 2006.

Gledhill, John. “Anthropology in the Age of Securitization.” In Annual Joel S. Kahn Lecture, Latrobe University. Accessed online at jg. socialsciences. manchester. ac. uk/Conferences/Anthropology in the Age of Securitization. pdf. 2008.

Glickman, H. (2011). The Threat of Islamism in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Case of Tanzania. Foreign Policy Research Institute.Hartman, Tod. “Beyond Sontag as a reader of Lévi-Strauss: anthropologist as hero.” Anthropology Matters 9, no. 1 (2007): 1-11.

Helmus, T. C., York, E., & Chalk, P. (2013). Promoting online voices for countering violent extremism. Rand Corporation.

Hinds, R. (2015). Role of development assistance in countering extremism and terrorism.

Hunter, E. (2015). Political Thought and the Public Sphere in Tanzania. Cambridge University Press.

Hutchinson, Sharon E. “Uncertain ethics: researching civil war in Sudan.” In Researching Violence in Africa, pp. 79-94. Brill, 2011

Keelan, Jeremy. “US militarization in Africa: What anthropologists should know about AFRICOM.” Anthropology Today 24, no. 5 (2008): 16-20.

LeSage, A. (2014, September). The Rising Terrorist Threat in Tanzania: Domestic Islamist Militancy and Regional Threats. In Strategic Forum (No. 288, p. 1). National Defense University Press.

Lopez Lucia, Elisa. Islamist radicalisation and terrorism in Tanzania. GSDRC Helpdesk Research Report, 2015.

Mamdani, Mahmood in Chabal, P. (2001). Beyond Rights Talk and Culture Talk: Comparative essays on the politics of rights and culture, edited by Mahmood Mamdani. Cape Town: David Philip Publishers, 2000. 170 pp.£ 12.95 paperback. ISBN 0‐86486‐429‐9. African Affairs, 100(400), 502-503.Books, 2000.

Mbembé, J-A., and Steven Rendall. “At the edge of the world: Boundaries, territoriality, and sovereignty in Africa.” Public culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 259-284.

McCants, Will, and Clinton Watts. US strategy for countering violent extremism: An assessment. Foreign Policy Research Institute, 2012.Neumann, P., & Kleinmann, S. (2013). How rigorous is radicalization research? Democracy and Security, 9(4), 360-382.

Montgomery, Eric, and Christian Vannier. An ethnography of a Vodu shrine in southern Togo: of spirit, slave and sea. Brill, 2017.

Montgomery, Eric J. “Visual “Voodoo”: Photo-Voice in Togo.” Visual Anthropology30, no. 4 (2017): 287-309.

Nkwi, Paul Nchoji, and Francis B. Nyamnjoh, eds. Regional Balance and National Integration in Cameroon: lessons learned and the uncertain future. Vol. 1. African Books Collective, 2011.

Nyamnjoh, Francis B. “Blinded by sight: Divining the future of anthropology in Africa.” Africa Spectrum (2012): 63-92.

Nyamnjoh, Francis B. New media and religious transformations in Africa. Edited by Rosalind IJ Hackett, and Benjamin F. Soares. Indiana University Press, 2015.

Ortiz, Isabel, Sara Burke, Mohamed Berrada, and Hernán Cortés. “World Protests 2006-2013.” (2013).

Reid, Frances, and Deborah Hoffmann. “Long night’s journey into day.” New York (2000).

Speed, S. (2006). At the crossroads of human rights and anthropology: Toward a critically engaged activist research. American Anthropologist, 108(1), 66-76.

Sponsel, L. E. (2014). The anthropology of peace and nonviolence. Diogenes, 61(3-4), 30-45.

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No one wants to be the “Global North”? On being a researcher across the North and South

In this blog post I would like to share my personal experiences of carrying out qualitative research in what contemporary scholars call the “Global South” (Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt) and the “Global North” (Australia and the United Kingdom). To convey my message clearly, I adopt the classical political geography of “South” and “North” with the intention of neither confirming these narrow categories nor of universalizing my personal experiences but in order to work towards an honest sociology of knowledge through such peculiar experiences.

In particular, I discuss what I think are some of the emerging behavioral and ethical tendencies in today’s research economy and its main methodologies. On the one hand, the reluctance in the “Southern” environments in recognizing their own tendency to embrace predominant ways of producing knowledge. On the other, the reluctance of “Northern” research entities to acknowledge their own positionality within the global scenario – that is, accepting the fact of conducting research as outsiders and, above all, the sociological harm of pretending localism. The result of these two tendencies is, from my perspective, a globalized impoverished attention to factual awareness, which depends on the personal involvement of researchers in the context they study and the cultivation of the capability to build and rebuild a continual relationship with the subjects and the places studied beyond the duration of fieldwork research.

The “Southern” tendency to perceive the practice of producing research as antithetical or substantially different to the North consistently builds on the universal romanticization of the research produced in the Global South, cutting across the North and the South. Indeed, while the research and academic institutions that I worked for in the Global South tended to believe that their fieldwork quality standards were inherently higher, the fact of being at the mercy of external – and unstable – sources of funding often endangered their existence and alternative ways of working. In these circumstances, fieldwork mostly took place in relatively small timeframes and, likewise, theories needed to be quickly wrapped up, making it difficult to identify any effective counter-culture of knowledge production. Studies on publishing locally and perishing globally have importantly highlighted the material constraints of localizing research. While “Southern” knowledge is barely known and mentioned by North-produced researchers (although it often marks significantly several fields of studies), it is also important to add that, in my own experiences across the Arab world, large segments of upper and middle classes tend to receive their postgraduate education and establish their scholarship in Northern institutions, thereby being trained according to Northern criteria while trying to preserve their reputation of being local researchers. In similar ways, Southern institutions often delegate fieldwork to research assistants who struggle to receive intellectual acknowledgment. (The same acknowledgment that many “Southern” research institutions have been looking for in the international arena, still dominated by Global North’s epistemologies and funding sources). In this regard, I have seen no co-authorships offered to research assistants, who undergo processes of alienation similar to those recently discussed in the context of the institutions of the Global North. Likewise, I have witnessed similarly exploitative relationships which seek to build knowledge upon the anonymity and the belittling of an underpaid workforce, whatever the latter’s passport is.

Despite acknowledging the partially ethnic character of some of these power dynamics – such as European academics versus local researchers in the Arab Levant, mostly when the former lack the necessary linguistic skills and in-depth knowledge of the research settings – I would like to emphasize some nuances. While the global archetype of neoliberal academia certainly does not stem from Southern institutions, largely due to colonial legacies, in my experience I have identified hierarchical and alienating structures of research-making across different cultural patterns of knowledge production.

Dauntingly, ethical research and decolonial methodologies are becoming tokenistic worldwide, turning into a further disenfranchisement of diversely vulnerable researched subjects, such as refugees. In this scenario, the Global North currently promotes itself as a pioneer advocate of ethical research – a phenomenon which has led to a proliferation of publications on the topic, rather than finally aiming for a radical transformation of research and for the uprooting of the vulnerabilities of the researched.

With no intention to bury unequal historical relationships, the intrinsic “non-ethicness” of such structural deficiencies needs to be observed across Norths and Souths. To ethnographers, if quality fieldwork means collecting relevant data, it also needs to mean collecting what matters at a local level and in an appropriate way. Contextual relevance and cultural appropriateness inevitably require generous timeframes. Doing less but long-term research and paying under-explored forms of respect to the researched may be the way to go.

Moreover, a pressing question may center on the tyranny of grants and funding, which is said to dictate the design of today’s projects. To what extent is this the cause of such an unacknowledged sociology of failure in academic research? The present tendency is to design methods that involve an extremely large number of interviews and what I would call the “participatory approach fever”. The result of a misinterpretation of what “participation” should mean is subcontracting scientific evidence to researched subjects overburdened with theoretical expectations and over-theorizations, a tendency which seldom turns out to provide sound empirical evidence. In this vein, Northern-led research not only tends to romanticize the South, which would not be new in postcolonial scholarship, but increasingly invites the South to actively participate in its own romanticization. Affected by “participatory approach fever”, many scholars in the Global North feel urged to depict their work as local, while also missing the fact that sharing their own conscious positionality vis-à-vis the researched would instead be an invaluable point of departure in the effort to avoid ethical and scientific failure. Indeed, such a self-acknowledgment would finally contribute to nuancing the multiple cultures in which research design, data collection, writing, and knowledge production are embedded – cultures that are hardly definable within the categories of “North” and “South”.

In light of these considerations, I ask myself how ethnographic studies can survive without being sociologically relevant and, at times, even culturally appropriate. Subcontracting the production of knowledge either to local researchers or to the researched themselves is certainly not a one-size-fits-all answer. Yet it looks unfeasible for many researchers across the globe to dispose of proper time and funding to conduct research over a longer timeframe and develop a localized understanding of the contexts they wish to study. I identified a similar issue when I realized that some researchers who have a poor command of the local language shy away from hiring an interpreter due to a lack of material means or because they are in an environment that frowns upon social science researchers who lack contextual skills. While peacefully sharing one’s own limits and assets would potentiate empirical analysis overall, everyone wants to be the “voice of the Global South”. Instead, no one wants to be the Global North, impeding a honest sociology of knowledge. Thus, how do we decolonize sociological and anthropological knowledge and, at the same time, the sociology of knowledge, if the drivers of epistemological coloniality, across Norths and Souths, have managed to make themselves invisible?

This research has been conducted in the framework of the project “Analyzing South-South Humanitarian Responses to Displacement from Syria: Views from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey”, funded by the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation agreement no. 715582.

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CALL FOR PAPERS: INTERSECTIONS OF HUMANITARIANISM

Kickoff workshop of the EASA Anthropology of Humanitarianism Network (AHN)

Goettingen, 01-03 November 2019

 

What does humanitarianism look like when it intersects with the state and the military? Or with the local ways of giving? What sort of help are we dealing with when humanitarian forms of reasoning and practice become intertwined with “that which is not humanitarianism”, to paraphrase Gupta (1995: 393)? Anthropological studies have suggested that a lot of work has to be invested into keeping up the boundaries of humanitarianism (Fassin 2012, Dunn 2018, Gilbert 2016). The result of this work has been a loose network of aid that moves throughout the world and replaces, suspends, or otherwise sidesteps state sovereignties in an attempt to save lives (Redfield and Bornstein 2011, Ticktin 2014, Schuller 2016, Ramsey 2017).

In this workshop, we will focus on what sort of hybrids emerge when, instead of maintaining its boundaries, humanitarianism intersects with other ways of thinking and acting. What kind of politics does this enable or prevent (cf. Feldman 2018)? What types of social dynamics, positions, and exclusions take place in such cases? We invite papers that explore the following five thematic strands:

  1. Humanitarianism and voluntarism: What happens when humanitarianism becomes intertwined with vernacular ideas about how to help others (including activism, solidarity, or charity)?
  2. Humanitarianism and military: how is the relationship between humanitarian aid and the use of military force evolving in the context of transnational securitization and border management?
  3. Humanitarianism and development: How do large-scale humanitarian initiatives relate to developmental projects?
  4. Humanitarianism and human rights: How does humanitarianization of state politics and human rights look like?
  5. Humanitarianism and religion: Which moral configurations emerge as part of humanitarian projects and how are they related to religious orders?

This will be the first meeting of the Anthropology of Humanitarianism Network (AHN), founded in 2018 by the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), with an aim to provide a platform for a broad discussion on the meanings and practices of humanitarianism and on the possible future directions of an anthropological study of humanitarianism. The kickoff workshop “Intersections of humanitarianism” will provide a venue for the network members to meet in person, share ongoing research, and make plans for the future development of the network.

Please send abstracts of 200 words to ahn.easa@gmail.com as well as a 100 words bio by 30 June 2019.

The workshop “Intersections of Humanitarianism” is supported by EASA, Centre for Global Migration (CeMIG) of the Georg August University Goettingen, and Chr. Michelsen Institute.

Organizers:

Carna Brkovic, Georg August University Goettingen

Antonio De Lauri, Chr. Michelsen Institute

Jens Adam, Georg August University Goettingen

Sabine Hess, Georg August University Goettingen

 

The workshop is open to the public.

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Recentering the side-lines. On the politics of “standing by”

Manifestation 1

I had not planned to encounter three different types of crowds on Saturday 16th March 2019. Ascending from the metro station Château-Rouge in the 18th arrondissement in Paris, I found myself surrounded by people apparently eagerly waiting for something to happen or someone to appear. There was music playing from a truck to my left side, and there were blue flags with a yellow star in the upper left corner and a red stripe across – the national flag of the Democratic Republic of Congo. I noticed that I was nearly the only white person watching what I estimated to have been around 1000 people gathering at the intersection of Bd. Barbès and rue Poulet, effectively bringing traffic to a halt with their bodies. There were some passers-by whose body language signaled irritation and disinterest: tourists on their way to Sacré-Cœur, eager to get lost, made their way up the hill and left the residents of Montmartre behind where the atmosphere seemed both cheerful and charged.

I noticed a multitude of cell phones held up high in the air. One man climbed a lamppost to get a better overview for his video. In the evening, I watched some such footage on private YouTube channels; some was even embedded in official news reports such as this one (RFI Afrique). I asked a fellow bystander, a woman in her forties, what was going on and she explained said that “we are waiting for our President, Martin Fayulu.” She also clarified that the acting President was someone else – Félix Tshisekedi – but that he had “stolen the peoples’ votes.” This was a march in support of their candidate’s rightful claim to the Presidency. A few minutes later, Fayulu appeared in the crowd, waving from the open sunroof panel of a black limousine. People began to follow the slowly moving car, with their cell phones still raised, recording the words he was shouting, which were hard to understand from where I was standing. Later, RFI Afrique quoted Fayulu as follows:

The goal is to let everyone know that there was cheating, that there was an electoral hold-up and make it clear to everyone that the Congo cannot be on the side-lines of democracy, that is to say, for example, to institute the rule “who loses-wins” (“qui perd-gagne”).

Fayulu and his followers were denouncing the current acting Congolese President here in France, the country whose own President had just met up with Tshisekedi at the One Planet Summit in Kenya. In a way, the Congolese diaspora in Paris was sidelined, having to passively watch their country’s political drama from afar and suffer President Macron’s diplomatic encounter with Tshisekedi. But the engagement of the attendants signaled otherwise: Hadn’t they organized and realized this march, weren’t they taking up space both physically in the streets of Paris, as well as in international news that day? Hadn’t their candidate shown up, hadn’t he realized that here, in the metropole of France, fellow Congolese would be able to see him for who he really was? Montmartre was not on the side-lines – it had become the center of a manifestation whose participants were winners and losers at the same time.

Manifestation 2

I left the singing and chanting crowd behind and walked down the hill towards the 8th arrondissement. At the riverbank, I noticed an increasingly noisome smell in the air. It was only then that I became aware of the incessant sound of police sirens around me and the whirring of helicopter blades. The smoke was getting stronger and people stopped in the narrow streets, looking up, starting conversations with others who had sensed the same, a large black cloud had gathered over our heads and the air became increasingly unbreathable. Shopkeepers left their premises and walked into the streets, tourists got up from their tables on the pavements to get a better view. Some people came running towards me, while others seemed unimpressed by the event, continuing in the direction of the cloud.

Remembering a recent explosion in a Parisian bakery, which was reported immediately worldwide even before it was clear whether it had been an accident or a terror attack, I decided to turn away. Entering the Boulevard des Italiens, I suddenly found myself in an empty street – no traffic, and only few people. I spotted three agitated men talking and shouting in the middle of the boulevard: two members of the gilet jaunes-movement engaged in what seemed to be a heated conversation with a man dressed in a duffle coat. Judging from the latter’s body language and facial expressions, I imagined him trying to “talk sense” into the two gilets jaunes, who, in response, laughed, shrugged off his remarks, turned around and moved on along the empty street. There were now more members of the movement following them, all coming from the direction of the Champs Elysees, which was over half an hour’s walk away, and one could have thought that they were going home from work, which in a sense they were. It was only then that I noticed the amount of destruction that surrounded me: broken glass on the pavement in front of the high-end cafés and designer stores. But also flower tubs and garbage bins that had been knocked over and dragged into the streets along with other containers and food trailers, all used to erect make-shift barricades. Further down the street there was also a burned-out newspaper kiosk, of which only charred metal remained. So, while private capital had been targeted, public property had been destroyed as well. While I had been aware of the demonstrations that had been going on over eighteen consecutive Saturdays, I had neither planned nor expected to encounter gilets jaunes-activities in this area, but even staying away from the Champs Elysees, where the manifestations had been most intense so far, could not guarantee avoiding the unrest that day.

In the evening, all news channels covered what had turned out to have been a particularly rough day in Paris. The media coverage focused on a “kill the rich”-graffiti, on a man wielding a chainsaw in the area around Arc de Triomphe, and on repeated footage of acts of destruction. This appeared extremely one-sided to me, as acts of police violence were shared only on social media. It was also on social media that I first found out that President Macron, who had returned from the summit in Kenya, had gone skiing in the Pyrenees for the weekend with his wife.

For an outsider like me, who only lived in Paris for a month, it was difficult to obtain unambiguous information about the “yellow vest”-movement, whose members usually are not residents of the city itself but come from the structurally disadvantaged countryside. Several online sites of the gilets jaunes are “under construction,” others will give you access only once you become a “member” and register. It turned out (in retrospect) to be fairly easy to access maps in order to see where and when protests and actions would take place, but less easy to read up on the movement’s organizational structure. Although internet users are encouraged to join up for “membership,” organizers tend to downplay the corporate aspect of their movement. On the gilets-jaunes.com site, for example, the “Who we are” section reads as follows:

“We are a small team of volunteers who answer and advise you since October 26. We are the same team that created the official map of the rallies (35 million views). We do not belong to any party or political organization.” (my translation)

The tension between temporary “membership” signaled by putting on yellow vests, the need for virtual registration, and the rejection of any association with a “political organization” was perplexing: members without a group who register online for coordination. Another online site focuses more or less solely on the importance of organization for the self-proclaimed “militants,” invoking the common good, the “resistance” and various other popular tropes:

Both sites seem to reflect a desire for rather than de facto organization, while being careful to disavow association with any established institution. Whatever the political alignments, the information these sites release is multiplex or even inchoate, as it does not reveal a joint political message but rather speaks with a multitude of (often conflicting) voices. While one might argue that this allows the movement to go beyond established political categories and might even be one of its characteristics, the resulting multitude makes it difficult for by-standers to decode.

The reactions towards the gilets jaunes among my French colleagues and friends, both academic and non-academic, varied greatly. While some supported their demands, highlighting the need for labor reforms and criticizing the elitist and populist politics of Macron in particular, others were critical, emphasizing that right-wing extremists had managed to partly hijack the platform or that others are “in it” for the sheer joy of destroying public property. Finally, among Parisians, I noticed a strong sentiment of not taking “them” seriously. Many considered the gilets jaunes as outsiders, as people from rural areas with problems and concerns that they as city-zens did not share. The more systemic character of “those others who are coming into town” was revealed to me when I had coffee in my neighborhood a couple of days later, and a group of tourists on electric bikes cycled by, all wearing yellow vests for the sake of better visibility. “Attention! Les gilets jaunes!” screamed one person at a table next to me and other patrons at various tables began laughing. Another friend, herself a Parisian but living in Germany, sent a photograph to me on her recent trip back home showing a single man wearing a yellow vest and carrying the French flag. She subtitled the picture with the sentence “I have found one! [two smileys],” as if having spotted an exemplar of a rare species.

Picking up the sensual remains of a devastated landscape in the center of Paris that day in March, I felt I had become a bystander to political protest a second time. But not only me: thousands of others who populated the city partly watched and partly ignored the goings-on. We had not come out to protest, we had not even intended to witness, but we fully participated in “standing by.”

But my day was not over yet: I decided to continue towards rue St. Anne, into a quarter with mostly Japanese restaurants and shops. I was surprised to see the French Gendarmerie, a branch of the French armed forces, in full riot gear with military-grade weapons standing outside of noodle shops and antique stores. They were on a different kind of “stand-by”: not sure of their role, as I and others were, but passive (if intimidating) and waiting for orders.

Later during the week, I learned that the Gendarmerie is now being called upon more frequently to join the regular police force as the demands for abstract “security” had increased to such an extent that the police was given this (questionably proportional) support. After the French Prime Minister dismissed the head of the Paris police force in the aftermath of the gilets jaunes marches on Saturday 16 March, he had even ordered the deployment of anti-terror forces, the so-called dispositif Sentinelle, to maintain “law and order,” effectively turning Paris into a militarized zone.

 Manifestation 3

I made my way towards Les Halles, a run-down but much beloved shopping center in the middle of Paris that, especially at the weekend, turns into a meeting point for Parisian youth. It is always crowded in this area, but when I arrived at the entrance to Les Halles, I found the glass doors shut and protected by private security personnel in uniform, with muzzle-wearing German shepherds by their side. Positioned just behind the glass doors, they blocked everyone from entering the premises. I backed off and had decided to go home, when suddenly a group of about thirty youngsters began screaming and running away from the steep stairway. I noticed how quickly the people around me reacted, and for a few seconds I contemplated joining everyone in running, without knowing why. Instead, I just walked faster, still undecided how to respond. My heart was racing and my eyes swiveled left and right, trying to make sense of the situation.

“This is how it feels be when you are in the middle of a terrorist attack,” I found myself thinking; my previous encounters with the riot police in rue St. Anne had shifted my perception into high alert. But even then, I continued thinking in the abstract, still disbelieving that this was truly a dangerous situation. I remained on the side-lines a third time that day, even as I somehow picked up my pace in the wake of the others.

Eventually, I was running, too; only then did I realized that the whole situation had been set up as some sort of “breaching experiment”: The group of young people had staged an emergency, and succeeded in locking a large number of previously unrelated and non-interacting humans into a joint activity and interpretation of the situation. They had violated common-sense rules of public behavior; I assume because it empowered them, it gave them a rush of adrenaline, it made them feel in charge and made them laugh afterwards. Us others, who became part of their ethnomethodological exercise, had turned from Saturday shoppers, by-standers, and hanging-outers to a crowd that suddenly had something in common: fear. I could see it on their faces, I could sense it in the way the people dispersed in all directions within seconds, I could feel it inside my own chest.

The involuntarily communitas evaporated quickly and the rush petered out, as people realized that there was no discernible “source” to the sense of alarm (apart from a group of kids laughing) and no follow-up occurred. I was fed up, I felt tricked and angry that I had fallen for what turned out to be a sick joke and I decided to call it a day, walking back home across Pont Neuf and through St. Germain where everyday life seemed to go on as usual.

On the politics of standing by

The day left an impression on me: On three different occasions, I had become involved in collective types of behavior while standing on the side-lines. In Montmartre, I stood by a crowd that had been formed and was about to move. On the Boulevards, the crowd had already dispersed but left their mark, and in Les Halles, it formed and dispersed in front of my eyes. The types of demonstration that I stood by were markedly different: in Montmartre, it was a political manifestation of a diaspora population with their President that was realized on the territory of another state. On the Boulevards, it was a political manifestation of citizens against their own state, and at Les Halles it was a manifestation that was political in the sense that it piggybacked on globally circulating discourses of de-territorialized terror, thus independently of statehood and indiscriminately of the participating members’ backgrounds. Here, the French word manifestation shows its aptness to cover all three events.

What united the events for me is that I felt I had no say in any of them. I did not belong, nor did I know what was going on. Yet in all three cases, I did take part as my body was “added up” to the number of other bodies present. The events made me think of the relation between political action and the side-lines. In the anthropology of the state, we have had long-lasting discussions about approaching “the state” tangentially by re-centering its “margins,” investigating its borders or its infrastructural materializations. But, in the arena of national politics, there is a widespread moral expectation that citizens should be informed about politics and exert agency to “take part” rather than merely “standing by” apathetically. Especially in light of the recent (ethno-)nationalist shifts towards the right in Europe, there has been an increasing demand on people to not close their eyes to the right’s attempts to claim the streets.

In ethnomethodological studies, the acquisition of “membership knowledge” is regarded as a prerequisite for being able to analyze the practices of the actors the researcher intends to study. But what kind of knowledge is there to be acquired if a crowd consists mostly by-standers? In these instances of collective behavior, the emphasis cannot be on knowledge or on being able to “read” a certain situation, let alone participation proper. It is more about feeling one’s way through, working with one’s fallible senses and intracorporeal interaction that aligns one’s movement and pace with those of others.

What if situations such as the ones I found myself are more than a dysfunctional by-product of politics? Should we not reconceptualize the very practice of “standing by” as central aspect of politics? Is “standing by” without sufficient information and no personal commitment not what characterizes the de facto political position of a majority?

It is not the case that we now live in more politicized societies than previous generations did or that political fragmentation is “the new normal.” The difference is that most of us are regular by-standers of political action, and are as such involved in the production of a particular kind of political public sphere that impacts all our lives in tremendous ways – we get inured to the presence of armed forces in our streets, we are no longer surprised to breathe in teargas or burned rubber, and we normalize avoiding certain areas during certain times of the day or night, or circumvent crowds altogether. But is “standing by” as political as throwing stones? While we have known for a long time that those who “knew” and yet did nothing were an essential element of historical wrongs, “knowing” is problematic when it comes to manifestations as the ones I described. “Standing by” depends on not fully knowing; it also smudges the distinction between full members and people who think of themselves merely “at the side-lines” of political action.

To end on methodology, I would argue that becoming “anthropological by-standers” is a pragmatic approach to studying how most people experience public politics. While the investigation of movements, resistance and direct action remains essential, joining the tourists in sipping their 5€ expresso as a black cloud of burning rubber hangs over their heads, observing the police forces who are told to “stand by” until new orders are given and hanging out on street corners, thus turning our eyes away from the immediate “action” for a moment helps us assume the perspectives of those on the side-lines. Because it is there that the majority of us become part of public politics.

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Launch Conference – Public Anthropologist

With the publication of the first issue of the journal, we are happy to announce that on May 3, 2019 the Chr. Michelsen Institute and Bergen Global will host the first conference of Public Anthropologist.

In this launch conference, leading anthropologists share their research on current crucial issues like asylum, migration and human organs trafficking.

Antonio De Lauri (CMI), the Editor in Chief, presents the journal and talks about Public Anthropology in Times of “Impact”.

Linda Green (University of Arizona) shares her insights on Ethics as Politics, Anthropology as Praxis: The Entanglements of Guatemalan Mayan Women Seeking Asylum in the US.

Barak Kalir (University of Amsterdam) discusses his research on Deportation as a Tolerated Evil State Project: A Tale of Illegalized Migration and Compromised Anthropology.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes (University of California at Berkeley) leads us through the issue of Kidney Hunter: Trafficking with the Organ Traffickers.

 

From 13:00 to 15:45. Finger food and drinks will be served. Welcome!

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Suggested Reading: “Mobile Secrets: Youth, Intimacy and the Politics of Pretense in Mozambique”

In Mobile Secrets Julie Soleil Archambault offers an engaging and original study of how cell phone technology is being used in Mozambique.

Through a rich ethnography, Archambault reveals how this technology allows youth to juggle the politics of display and disguise in a new digital space. Archambault allows the mobile phone to take centre stage in her analysis, and through this she demonstrates how Mozambican youth navigate a world of both everyday uncertainty and exciting new intimacies.

The book will give the reader a greater understanding of the ambivalent nature of mobile communication and the many ways technologies become both global and local.

Mobile Secrets is an important contribution not only to the field of digital anthropology, but also to ethnographers working in Africa, and to those working with youth. Additionally, the book informs broader debates about technology appropriation, postwar economies and information accessibility.

 

An enjoyable and thought-provoking read.

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Call for Reviews

Public Anthropologist publishes reviews of recent books, films and documentaries related to current debates that are socially and politically challenging.

Public Anthropologist is now looking for reviewers of books, films and documentaries on issues related to war, rights, poverty, security, access to resources, new technologies, freedom, human exploitation, health, humanitarianism, violence, racism, migration and diaspora, crime, social class, hegemony, environmental challenges, social movements, and activism. While the journal focuses on contemporary issues, it also welcomes reviews of works that have a historical perspective. Unfortunately we are unable to pay our film/book reviewers, but reviewers will receive a free copy of the film or book they have to review (depending on the publisher, the book either comes as a paperback copy or e-book). The works reviewed may be in any language, but reviews must be in English. Reviews should be written in a spirit of critical engagement and dialogue, and comprise between 1,000 and 2,000 words.

If you know of a new book, film or documentary that you are interested in reading or watching and would like to review for the Public Anthropologist readers, please contact Synnøve Bendixsen, synnove.bendixsen@uib.no or Olga Demetriou, olga.demetriou@durham.ac.uk with the information included.

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Humanitarianism, Trump Style

“My fellow Americans, tonight I’m speaking to you because there is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border.” So began Donald Trump’s televised address to the nation, made in an attempt to bring pressure on Congressional Democrats to fund the border wall he had long promised his supporters. “This is a humanitarian crisis,” he continued, “A crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul.” Trump’s goal of building a wall on the US-Mexico border needed no explanation, either to his avid supporters or to his eager opponents. But why, only in the two weeks leading up to the speech, had he begun phrasing the need for the wall in terms of a humanitarian crisis, when previously, he had presented it solely as an issue of national security? Why, given his base’s love of his tough-guy stance and his constant accusations that immigrants were rapists, murderers and worse, would he suddenly phrase this as a problem of their welfare? In his ham-handed attempts to invoke the notion of humanitarian crisis, Trump is attempting to justify intervention, to cloak himself in the mantle of innocence, and to blur the distinction between “protection for” and “protection from.” In doing so, he is pushing humanitarian doublespeak to new extremes, using declarations about his intent to provide humanitarian aid to indicate his intent to commit even more violence against asylum seekers at the border.

Humanitarianism is premised on two closely linked notions: the idea of crisis and on the right to interfere (Pandolfi 2001: 371). To declare a humanitarian crisis is to demand that something be done, and done now. This introduces a certain latitude in the scope of possible action: first, precisely what should be done remains unspecific. Doing something is clearly necessary, which often means that anything can be done, because something is better than nothing. (Indeed, “it’s better than nothing” is one of the most common responses to any critique of humanitarian action.) The push to “do something now” also introduces what Calhoun (2004) calls the “emergency imaginary,” a time pressure that seems to justify the abandonment of well-articulated bureaucratic process in favor of speedy action. End runs around the people who plan, regulate, monitor and evaluate humanitarian projects become seemingly necessary, in the name of addressing the emergency. Thus, in labeling migration from Latin America to the United States a “humanitarian crisis,” Trump seeks to grant himself the right to decide what the right solution to the problem is, and the right to unilaterally decide to implement it. The declaration of the sovereign exception has rarely been this explicit in American politics.

Trump could, of course, simply declare himself sole authority. But rather than just ruling by fiat, he seeks to justify his actions in moral terms by appropriating the notion of innocence.   The idea of innocence is part and parcel of humanitarian action: in order to be seen as worthy of aid, humanitarianism’s beneficiaries must appear as entirely passive and entirely blameless (Myers 2011). Trump gestures at innocence when, early on in his speech, he mentions two groups most likely to be seen as innocent: children, who he claims are being exploited by coyotes and traffickers, and women, who he posits as the victims of sexual violence while on the migrant trail. In doing so, Trump is trying to open up a space beyond politics, one in which action is taken on the grounds of moral obligation rather than political self-interest (Ticktin 2016). This might be seen as an attempt to move beyond the partisan politics that led to a stalemate between Democrats and Republicans over funding his proposed border wall, offering a twisted logic in which sealing off the border protects innocent women and children from harm by making the trip north no longer worth the trouble. This leaves aside, of course, the violence that pushes them to leave their homes in the first place and leaves unanswered the question of where people escaping persecution might find safe haven, but these questions are comfortably obscure for Trump’s supporters because they take place so far away from the United States. But the tack to humanitarianism isn’t meant to completely conceal violence. Trump quickly abandons the figure of the innocent migrant and returns to the figure he most often uses at his rallies: the figure of the migrant as criminal. Charging that “thousands of Americans have been brutally killed by those who illegally entered our country” (an assertion that the Washington Post deemed “false”), Trump attempts to turn the asylum seekers, those ostensibly suffering, into perpetrators. Using three anecdotes of Americans killed by undocumented people, Trump posits that the people truly suffering are not the migrants, but the “weeping mothers and …. grief stricken fathers” of the Americans killed by people “who had no right to be in our country.” Writ large, Trump posits that the true victims, the people truly in need of humanitarian aid, are the American people, not the asylum seekers. The beneficiaries of aid, in this logic, can and should be Americans; what happens to people from other countries seeking safety is of little consequence, as long as they are kept away from the American populace.

By blurring the distinction between protection for asylum seekers and protection from asylum seekers, Trump enacts an Orwellian logic. The “humanitarian aid” he is seeking $800 million dollars for is not to protect migrants, but to detain them; not to assist them but to enact violence against them. The Trump Administration has detained over 15,000 children (both children separated from parents and unaccompanied minors), and it has no more money to fund the detainment facilities and camps where they are being kept. Nor does the Administration have funds for the prisons where it is detaining both undocumented border crossers and those who present themselves at ports of entry in full accordance with international law. Incarcerating these people is, in a Trumpian twist of logic, humanitarian–and hence deserves funding for “humanitarian aid.”

Humanitarianism Trump-style brings with it not just the temporality of emergency, but the temporality of pre-emption. The point is not just to prevent people who have committed crimes in the past from entering the United States, but to prevent people who might commit crimes in the future. Trumpian humanitarianism requires not just a wall between Mexico and the United States, but one between the present and some imagined dystopian future, one in which invaders wreak death and destruction on American citizens. Because the logic of preemption does not include foresight about who might commit crimes, violence against anyone with even the remote potential to cause harm is legitimated as humanitarian action. Thus, children fall under the category of migrants to protect the population from, and incarcerating and deporting them falls under the rubric of “humanitarian aid.”

Anthropologists have long argued that humanitarianism blends violence and care, and that this mixture makes it susceptible to being co-opted by militarism (Fassin and Pandolfi 2010). The so-called “humanitarian bombing” of Serbia to protect Kosovar Albanians in 1999, or the bombing of Libya to protect civilians against Gaddafi showed demonstrated how quickly the notion of protection could morph into killing. But Trump puts a new spin on even this warping of the notion of humanitarianism. By mobilizing the idea of innocence, switching the victim, and operating under the logic of preemption, Trump evacuates humanitarianism of one of its other key notions: care for the distant other. The noble mantle of humanitarianism that once came from providing for suffering people far away is now supposed to be granted for taking care of the self.   In that sense, the me-first logic of neoliberalism has come to its logical conclusion: self-preservation, self-protection and self-aggrandizement have all taken on the halo of virtue once bestowed by humanitarianism’s altruistic promise.

References

Calhoun, Craig. 2004. “A World of Emergencies: Fear, Intervention and the Limits of the Cosmopolitan Order.” Canadian Review of Sociology, 41(4): 373-395.

Fassin, Didier, and Mariella Pandolfi. 2010. Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Humanitarian and Military Interventions. London: Zone Books.

Myers, Diana Tietjens. 2011. “Two Victim Paradigms and the Problem of the Impure Victim.” Humanity 2(2): 255-275.

Pandolfi, Mariella. 2001.   “Contract of Mutual (In)difference: Governance and the Humanitarian Apparatus in Contemporary Albania and Kosovo.” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 10:369-381.

Ticktin, Miriam. 2016.   “What’s Wrong With Innocence?” Cultural Anthropology https://culanth.org/fieldsights/902-what-s-wrong-with-innocence

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Il potenziale politico della responsabilità nell’umanitarismo interno

Operazione Confini Sovrani

Sebbene fosse una fredda notte invernale, la coda arrivava fin oltre l’angolo. Prendendo posto all’interno del magazzino di Melbourne dove si svolgeva la serata informativa per gli aspiranti volontari, il brusio si placò nell’istante in cui il direttore allargò le mani proclamando: “I nostri volontari riempiono questo edificio con uno tsunami di compassione che è così fragoroso da non poter immaginare ci sia un altro mondo là fuori. Ci sono ancora persone che credono nell’idea che si possa rendere grande l’Australia e le deluderemmo se ci arrendessimo di fronte ai nostri leader politici. Non abbiamo bisogno di codardi con cuori vuoti e idee bizzarre. Possiamo essere la ‘bussola morale’ della società che desideriamo.”

Questo coinvolgente discorso, accolto dagli applausi del pubblico, rispondeva a un’ondata di ostilità generale mobilitata nei confronti delle persone in cerca di asilo che tentano di raggiungere l’Australia via mare. Sin dal 2013, le persone in cerca di asilo hanno subito le conseguenze dell’Operazione Confini Sovrani, una strategia di deterrenza del governo australiano accompagnata da una brutale campagna pubblicitaria che recita “In nessun modo farete dell’Australia la vostra casa.” Indirizzata ai paesi di origine dei richiedenti asilo, questa strategia ha ricevuto un sostegno bipartisan e della maggioranza degli elettori innescando azioni militari e punitive come respingimenti in mare da parte della Marina Australiana e la carcerazione dei richiedenti sulle isole di Nauru e Manus.

Le persone raccoltesi in quella fredda notte di Melbourne stavano cercando un modo per essere di aiuto, ma anche un modo per credere in un’alternativa politica. Esprimevano frustrazione e sgomento per il trauma inflitto dalla politica di deterrenza del governo australiano alle persone in cerca di asilo.

Molti volontari, nel corso degli anni, hanno fornito aiuto a quasi 30.000 persone con visti temporanei. Seppur non in carcere, queste persone in cerca di asilo possono aspettare anni prima che le loro richieste di asilo vengano valutate vivendo nel frattempo in condizioni precarie con diritti di lavoro e/o di studio non adeguati e un basso stipendio governativo, corrispondente all’89 per cento del più basso contributo assistenziale. I richiedenti asilo sono strutturalmente costretti a fare affidamento su reti personali informali ed enti di beneficenza. A differenza delle persone in detenzione o di quelle con status di rifugiato, i titolari di visti temporanei sono pressoché invisibili nel discorso pubblico. In termini politici sono considerati “non-persone”, “non meritevoli” di aiuti umanitari o di residenza permanente a causa del loro arrivo “non autorizzato” (McMillan 2017).

L’umanitarismo interno

Questo pezzo si concentra sugli operatori umanitari che operano in Australia fornendo aiuti e immaginando alternative all’Operazione Confini Sovrani. Il mio uso del concetto di “umanitarismo interno” è dato dalla fusione di (1) un “soggetto umanitario” caratterizzato da un “bisogno di aiutare” (Malkki 2015) o “dall’impulso di dare” (Bornstein 2012) a uno sconosciuto, lontano e sofferente, con (2) un “soggetto responsabilizzato” (Rose 1996) spinto dallo Stato a prendersi cura della propria comunità in quanto dovere e condizione di cittadinanza (Muehlebach 2012). L’umanitarismo interno combina un impulso umanitario universale con sentimenti di dovere e responsabilità legati alla cittadinanza creando un umanitarismo “fatto in casa”. É proprio la relazione tra l’operatore umanitario interno/locale e la nozione di responsabilità a essere al centro della mia analisi. La domanda è: l’operatore umanitario interno si sente responsabile o tenuto a rispondere (Hage ed Eckersley 2012) delle politiche punitive del proprio Stato che colpiscono un “Altro” che è anche il proprio vicino? Nel pormi tale quesito, mi unisco ad altri antropologi che hanno cercato di studiare le distinzioni tra “casa” e “altrove”, “cittadini” e “non cittadini” (Fassin 2012, Malkki 2015, Brković 2016, Cabot 2018).

Dal punto di vista analitico, considerare come la responsabilità umanitaria possa manifestarsi a livello nazionale è una questione non solo di scala o di livello, ma di quello che accade quando queste scale si intersecano e di come ciò possa produrre nuove e molteplici forme di azione sociale e morale. Ma il modo più importante in cui spero di contribuire a tali dibattiti è suggerire che l’umanitarismo interno rappresenti la possibilità di un’alternativa politica più accessibile e inclusiva.

Un registro politico di equità e giustizia

Prima delle elezioni australiane del 2016 è stata lanciata una campagna umanitaria che mirava a introdurre un nuovo linguaggio umanistico atto a modificare il discorso nazionalista nei confronti delle persone in cerca di asilo. Questa campagna si basava su una ricerca che trovava il linguaggio antagonistico e reattivo degli attivisti non efficace nel convincere “i persuadibili”, ossia gli elettori indecisi che comprendono il 60% della popolazione votante. In passato, in risposta a coloro che sostenevano che “è illegale chiedere asilo”, gli attivisti rispondevano semplicemente “non è illegale” rafforzando involontariamente la narrativa dominante. Successivamente la tendenza è stata quella di praticare una sorta di politica prefigurativa (Maeckelbergh 2011) usando parole che enfatizzavano l’azione piuttosto che la sofferenza: speranza, libertà e processo equo. L’obiettivo era tradurre questa narrativa in politiche di ridefinizione delle procedure di richiesta di asilo introducendo, per esempio, i visti permanenti, una revisione legale più equa e il ricongiungimento familiare.

Il passaggio dai valori alla politica richiedeva un attento equilibrio, conferendo ai volontari una responsabilità maggiore. I volontari provavano un senso di responsabilità collettiva nel correggere i torti commessi dallo Stato e, contemporaneamente, vedevano se stessi e le persone in cerca di asilo come detentori di diritti politici e civili. Non avrebbero più aspettato passivamente che uno Stato moralmente corrotto potesse cambiare. Avrebbero invece dimostrato quale dovesse essere la nuova condotta morale. Piuttosto di uno Stato che responsabilizzava i cittadini, erano i cittadini che cercavano di responsabilizzare uno Stato immorale.

Il registro culturale di vicinato

In una bancarella di un festival di strada locale a Melbourne, i prodotti da forno mezzi sciolti si stagliavano sotto a un festone fatto a mano. Alcune donne sedute ricevevano offerte in cambio di fette di torta e vendevano strofinacci. Sopra di loro, un angelo spiegava le sue ali decorate mostrando la scritta “Benvenuti”.

Sempre a Melbourne, un gruppo di madri svolgeva del volontariato promuovendo il “sostegno tra vicini di casa”. Fornendo aiuti materiali e cibo ai richiedenti asilo e raccogliendo fondi avevano attirato l’attenzione di tutto il vicinato grazie a sfrigolii di salsiccia, mercatini dell’usato nei garage, vendita di dolci e riffa. Il tutto era accompagnato da “arti domestiche” come cucito, cucina e giardinaggio. Un codice di buon vicinato è un modo per mobilitare il senso del dovere degli australiani nei confronti del prossimo in difficoltà attingendo a un quadro storico-culturale consolidato di cooperazione e mutuo soccorso che Oppenheimer (2008) ha connotato in modo distintivo come ” metodo australiano di fare volontariato.”

Trasformare i richiedenti asilo ha rimesso al centro il loro diritto di assistenza. Tuttavia, tale approccio pone alcune preoccupazioni, come per esempio il rischio di “addomesticamento” dell’ “Altro” sulla base di norme culturali vincolate allo Stato-nazione (Hage 1999). Ciò comporta, in ogni caso, il passaggio della “questione del richiedente asilo” a diversi piani o livelli: dall’internazionale al nazionale, dalla politica alla comunità, dall’estraneo al vicino, dalla paura alla solidarietà. Inoltre, favorisce sensibilmente una maggiore consapevolezza nell’opinione pubblica circa le condizioni di vita delle persone della porta accanto, non solo di coloro che vivono in zone di conflitto o in centri di detenzione.

Verso una “arte di governo” accessibile

I registri di responsabilità politica, etica e culturale si fondono in queste pratiche umanitarie interne. Il nuovo linguaggio umanistico nelle campagne delle ONG parla di equità e giustizia. Ciò non rimanda a un sentimento morale universale, ma si collega a specifiche rivendicazioni politiche. Allo stesso tempo, a livello locale si afferma un dovere morale culturalmente radicato nelle tradizioni australiane di cooperazione e mutuo aiuto.

James Ferguson (2009) evidenzia come la Sinistra globale non sia riuscita a promuovere una “arte di governo” di successo. Ciò ha particolare rilevanza in un momento in cui i movimenti populisti xenofobi stanno ottenendo sempre più consenso in molte parti del mondo. Pensando ai futuri passi delll’antropologia dell’umanitarismo, sembra opportuno andare oltre l’oscillante dibattito relativo alla depoliticizzazione o meno dell’umanitarismo. Quali sono le implicazioni politiche dell’operare su molteplici piani di responsabilità? Le responsabilità generate dall’umanitarismo interno possono avere un senso a cavallo dei tradizionali binari politici di sinistra/destra. Sebbene a un primo sguardo i miei esempi possano sembrare alquanto diversi, condividono una somiglianza nel cercare di rendere il loro “perché” accessibile a tutti i credo politici. A differenza di altre tecniche attiviste più radicali, equiparare la responsabilità del piano politico, etico e culturale potrebbe fornire la base per una politica progressista più inclusiva. Ciò potrebbe costituire un’attrattiva per persuadere gli elettori insicuri delle proprie opinioni e, in un clima di ostilità, incoraggiare atteggiamenti più umani verso gli “Altri”.

(Tradotto da Donata Balzarotti)

Ringraziamenti

Grazie di cuore a tutti coloro che hanno partecipato a questa ricerca durante il mio periodo di ricerca sul campo per il dottorato nel 2015-16 a Melbourne.

 

Bibliorafia

Bornstein, Erica. 2012. Disquieting gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Brković, Čarna. 2016. Scaling humanitarianism: Humanitarian actions in a Bosnian town. Ethnos 81(1): 99-124.

Cabot, Heath. 2018. The European refugee crisis and humanitarian citizenship in Greece. Ethnos: 1-25.

Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian reason: A moral history of the present. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ferguson, James. 2009. The uses of neoliberalism. Antipode 41(1): 166-184.

Hage, Ghassan. 1999. White nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. Sydney: Pluto Press.

Hage, Ghassan and Robin Eckersley. (Eds.). 2012. Responsibility. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Larsen, Birgitte. 2011. Drawing back the curtains: The role of domestic space in the social inclusion and exclusion of refugees in rural Denmark. Social Analysis 55(2): 142-158.

Malkki, Liisa. 2015. The need to help: The domestic arts of international humanitarianism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Maeckelbergh, Marianne. 2011. Doing is believing: Prefiguration as strategic practice in the alterglobalization movement. Social Movement Studies 10(1): 1-20.

McMillan, Chris. 2017. Who gets a fair go? A Žižekian reading of representations of asylum seekers in Australia. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 22(1): 33-51.

Muehlebach, Andrea. 2012. The moral neoliberal: Welfare and citizenship in Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Oppenheimer, Melanie. 2008. Volunteering: Why we can’t survive without it. Sydney: UNSW Press.

Rose, Nicholas. 1996. Governing ‘advanced’ liberal democracies. In A. Barry & T. Osborne (Eds.), Foucault and political reason: Liberalism, neoliberalism and  rationalities of government (pp. 37-64). London: University College London Press.

 

 

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Esperimenti di politica umanitaria

Negli ultimi quindici anni, le politiche del lavoro in Bosnia-Erzegovina hanno conosciuto un processo di umanitarizzazione. Con ciò mi riferisco al crescente utilizzo di sentimenti morali nelle rivendicazioni politiche dei lavoratori, in particolare l’uso delle emozioni che dirigono la nostra attenzione alla sofferenza degli altri e ci fanno desiderare di porvi rimedio (Fassin 2012: 1). Sebbene il sindacalismo socialista in Bosnia non fosse estraneo all’utilizzo di sentimenti morali per dare forza alle proprie rivendicazioni, il ricorso all’idea di sofferenza non faceva parte di tale politica. Un simile cambiamento, oggi, riflette la crescente precarizzazione dei lavoratori e la necessità di nuove tattiche per farvi fronte. Questo breve articolo, basato sulla mia ricerca tra i lavoratori disoccupati della città di Tuzla, nel nord della Bosnia, affronta la relazione che intercorre tra politica del lavoro, ragione umanitaria ed esposizione mediatica.

La maggior parte dei lavoratori che ho incontrato provengono da grandi aziende indebolite dai debiti, da una pessima gestione, dalla corruzione, dalla mancanza di investimenti e da altri effetti della privatizzazione voluta dallo stato. Sebbene Tuzla abbia una storia quasi centenaria di attivismo sindacale, le recenti lotte non riguardano le condizioni lavorative o una redistribuzione dei profitti. I lavoratori lottano per riavviare la produzione, per soddisfare gli obblighi di un contratto di stampo socialista e, quindi, per ripristinare un modello lavorativo basato su una crescita e una emancipazione umana intrinseca a quel contratto. In quanto disoccupati o in esubero, i lavoratori faticano a garantirsi un posto di lavoro e ciò ha dato origine a nuove e sperimentali strategie di rivendicazione. A volte  i lavoratori sono apertamente conflittuali: bloccano le principali vie di trasporto o si scontrano con la polizia di fronte a edifici governativi. Altre volte si mostrano in disgrazia, sofferenti e persino sull’orlo del suicidio proclamando scioperi della fame o marciando in segno di protesta per giorni nel cuore dell’inverno. Quale che sia l’azione specifica, i lavoratori tentano sempre di sollecitare una copertura mediatica, apparentemente per provocare un’azione statale imbarazzando (o irritando) le autorità governative.

Nel corso della ricerca mi ha colpito il fatto che, di solito, le azioni dei lavoratori non provocano la reazione desiderata da parte del governo. Tuttavia, innescano attenzione e azione da parte di altri attori sociali, spesso in modi imprevedibili ma significativi. Prendiamo, ad esempio, una lettera pubblicata su un notiziario web locale. Tale lettera descrive dettagliatamente la sofferenza dei lavoratori le cui richieste, per gli stipendi non pagati e i contributi non versati, erano cadute nel nulla. Sebbene il mittente si aspettasse ben poco dalla lettera, questa aveva attirato l’attenzione di alcuni studenti che stavano occupando l’università locale e cercavano un modo per dare più visibilità al loro attivismo. In poco tempo, gli studenti sono riusciti a radunare altri amici e docenti universitari, acquistare cibo e incontrare i lavoratori nel presidio situato all’ingresso della fabbrica. Tale incontro ha a sua volta generato una serie di relazioni che, nel tempo, sono riuscite a rendere le disuguaglianze socio-economiche di Tuzla un tema costante nei notiziari locali e nazionali dando eco internazionale alla situazione di questi lavoratori e contribuendo a (ri)qualificarli come soggetti politici rilevanti.

In un altro caso, circa 200 disoccupati, per lo più di mezza età, hanno lasciato Tuzla dirigendosi a piedi verso il confine di stato. I leader del sindacato hanno descritto tale esodo come una reazione all’abbandono dei lavoratori da parte del governo cantonale.

Nel corso di quattro giorni, si è scatenato un dramma politico nell’etere, con notiziari in diretta che trasmettevano le dichiarazioni del governo e i successivi commenti dei leader sindacali raccolti a caldo per la strada. Questi collegamenti erano colmi di immagini di sofferenza e di spontanei atti di compassione. Attaverso tale strategia, i lavoratori si sono consapevolmente posti in una posizione di rischio e vulnerabilità che ha moltiplicato le azioni dei partecipanti nel dare e ricevere aiuto. Prendendosi pubblicamente cura dei propri concittadini, i volontari della Croce Rossa e i singoli funzionari municipali hanno evidenziato la legittimità della richiesta di poter “vivere del proprio lavoro” e l’illegittimità del governo cantonale nel rifiutarsi di garantire la possibilità di farlo.

In un’altra occasione, il proprietario di un notiziario web locale ha recuperato un filmato che mostra la leader dello sciopero di una fabbrica confrontarsi con un avvocato in diritto fallimentare nominato dal governo. Nel video la lavoratrice chiede all’avvocato di non svendere le attività della fabbrica, ma di impegnarsi a riavviare la produzione. Ispirato dalla tenacia della lavoratrice, il proprietario del notiziario web ha deciso di rintracciarla per offrirle sostegno. Ha dunque attivato le proprie reti sociali e mediatiche per dar vita a una campagna nazionale che non costasse nulla ai lavoratori e che creasse una sufficiente domanda dei prodotti della fabbrica che, in tal modo, non è fallita.

Vorrei evidenziare due aspetti che emergono da queste azioni dei lavoratori e dai loro effetti inaspettati. Il primo è che abbiamo bisogno di riconfigurare il ruolo dei mezzi di comunicazione di massa per meglio comprendere le possibilità e i limiti della politica umanitaria dei lavoratori. Boltanski (1999) e Malkki (1996) hanno indagato il ruolo che le immagini di “sofferenza a distanza” di “Altri” culturali possono svolgere nel dare forma a risposte nazionali e internazionali a catastrofi lontane. Ritengo che le immagini di sofferenza di propri concittadini inneschino un diverso insieme di relazioni e una diversa partecipazione. La politica umanitaria dei lavoratori presuppone un pubblico giudicante davanti al quale i funzionari del governo si sentano sufficientemente imbarazzati o comunque provocati tanto da rispondere alle richieste dei lavoratori. Da qui la dipendenza dai mezzi di comunicazione di massa per mobilitare quel pubblico giudicante insieme alla necessità di mettere in scena eventi di sofferenza o di confronto che ottengano un certo tipo di attenzione. Per questo motivo la maggior parte dei lavoratori ha descritto e vissuto l’attenzione dei media come una forma di cura (nel doppio senso del prendersi cura dei lavoratori prestando loro cura). Tuttavia, la creazione e la diffusione pubblica di immagini di sofferenza dei lavoratori è rischiosa poiché crea differenti registri di interpretazione. Piuttosto che rifarsi al quadro interpretativo proposto dai lavoratori – di una loro sofferenza come ingiustizia inaccettabile che deve essere rettificata – è possibile che gli osservatori vedano i lavoratori in difficoltà solo come un’altra categoria sociale di soggetti bisognosi, insieme alle vedove di guerra, ai veterani feriti, alle madri single, etc. Un leader degli scioperi si è lamentato di quanto spesso la lotta dei lavoratori è stata pubblicamente riconosciuta come una mera richiesta di denaro allo stato, piuttosto che come un diritto al lavoro e alla retribuzione.

Tutto ciò conduce al secondo aspetto, che parte dal riconoscere come queste tattiche dei lavoratori di solito non riescano a smuovere il governo verso le direzioni desiderate, ovvero ricevere i salari e i contributi non pagati e riavviare la produzione. Tuttavia, come evidenziato dagli esempi precedenti, i lavoratori in difficoltà possono attivare il sostegno dei concittadini, spesso in modi inaspettati e imprevedibili. Ciò ha dato vita a relazioni e collaborazioni improvvisate e sfuggevoli, a volte brevi, come consegnare un pezzo di pane a un lavoratore, marciare uniti contro la polizia o filmare un annuncio da diffondere attraverso i social media. Per quanto fugaci, queste relazioni e collaborazioni possono produrre nuove forme di valori ed eventi pubblici che rinnovano l’importanza politica dei lavoratori sostenendo la loro lotta e aiutandoli a raggiungere vittorie concrete, sia grandi che piccole.

Molti di noi credono, in base a un senso comune condiviso, che le forze strutturali che modellano le nostre vite, come il capitalismo o il nazionalismo, siano difficili da turbare o sovvertire tanto che sembra sconsiderato persino tentare. Documentare relazioni improvvisate e vittorie inaspettate, in particolare quelle transitorie, fugaci e sperimentali, può allontanarci da questa convinzione e dal suo connesso pessimismo politico. Tali “esperimenti” possono ravvivare la nostra immaginazione politica permettendoci di ripensare a ciò che conta veramente, a ciò che è possibile e a come le cose possano andare diversamente.

(Tradotto da Donata Balzarotti)

Bibliografia

Boltanski, Luc. 1999. Distant Suffering. Morality, Media, and Politics. NY: Cambridge University Press.

Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Malkki, Liisa H. 1996. “Speechless Emissaries. Refugees, Humanitarianism, Dehistoricization.” Cultural Anthropology. 11(3): 377-404.

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Conversation on War

Antonio: Whatever the real reasons that generate a war, identifying the enemy is a crucial element of every call for conflict. Yet the changing character of ‘the enemy’ does not stand as one univocal and universal category. Wars have taken various forms across time and space to the point that, in certain circumstances, the enemy could not be understood in terms of a ‘distant other.’ For instance, civil wars have historically set neighbor against neighbor, and sometimes even brother against brother and father against son. Proximity to the enemy does not necessarily imply that hate can be avoided. The social and political production of hate is the result of complex historical processes, as well as ordinary stereotypes, prejudices and social discriminations. However, in order to be able to kill systematically, as it happens in war, it is not enough to disregard the enemy or to despise him/her, it is also necessary to see in the foe an obstacle to the realization of a social project. Fierce war violence is legitimized when applied to enemies that are seen as an impediment to the full realization of a collective self. This is why war consistently requires the transformation of a person’s identity from the status of an individual to a member of a (social, ethnic and political) group.

Deniz: There is something peculiar about the construction of the enemy. You may think that the more distant the enemy is, the easier it is to dehumanize him/her and to eliminate in a war situation. History has shown us the complexity of the process of enemy construction. In fact, the closer the so-called ‘enemy’ is to us, physically and socially, the easier it is to get alarmed, anxious and convinced for the necessity of a war to defend the in-group and its interests. During the collapse of the regime and breakup in Yugoslavia, we witnessed the most brutal tactics of torture and violence against civilians in those regions where there had been a long history of co-existence, intermarriage and affinity between the ethnic groups. Soldiers raped and killed both soldiers and civilians on the other side. However, civilians also killed civilians, sometimes including their neighbors, (re)constructing their distinct ethnic identities against their neighbor’s identity and politics. The so-called ‘enemy neighbor’s’ long presence in the (re)claimed homeland was used as discourse in nationalist politics of hatred, and used as a justification for ethnic cleansing, despite ethnicity having very little to do with the core-causes for the break-up of Yugoslavia. In the same vein, more recently, it is not the presence of a foreign enemy in a distant place, but rather its penetration into homeland through ‘terror’ attacks, that easily convinces the public to wage wars in faraway lands. The farther away the enemy is, the more difficult to imagine the real threat to the public. It is therefore the more difficult for war makers to legitimize the distant war that requires systematic mobilization of substantial amounts of financial and human resources. Especially in those circumstances, the justification of the war is done through the media creation of ‘enemies at home’ (e.g. the constructed illusion of invasion by Muslims, Arabs, potential terrorists, fundamentalists, immigrants, etc.) and dissemination of abstract propaganda to dehumanize them for public consent to exterminate their roots abroad wherever those roots are.

Antonio: War is not only a battlefield on which to conduct military actions. It also entails the interlaced dynamics of violence, fear, sacrifice, opportunism, reaffirmation or subversion of the social hierarchy, transfiguration of the ‘other,’ redefinition of the individual and collective selves. The symbolic construction of the enemy thus becomes a fundamental element for those individuals, groups, factions or governments who incite war, attempting to transform it into an identity-making battle and defense of an existing lifestyle, with the ultimate aim of earning presumed freedom, attaining presumed justice or establishing a new order. Indeed, when war is transformed into an abstract ideal, or even to a way of achieving a transcendental goal, it becomes easier to obscure the connections among geo-strategic plans, historical antagonisms, access to resources, development politics, privatization, expansion of the global market, and economic networks linked to licit and illicit trafficking. The very concept of ‘ethnic conflict’ itself, which has found ample opportunity to come to the fore in contemporary wars, when not inscribed in broader political and economic scenarios, contributes in part to rendering such correlations less evident. Elucidative examples are provided by the Rwandan genocide and the Afghan wars, often seen as internal humanitarian crises with limited consideration of the (trans)national historical processes at the core of internal political unrest. In Afghanistan, this unrest is typically wrongfully attributed to the country’s inability to spontaneously and autonomously embrace democracy. Not surprisingly, while there is widespread awareness in the Western media of the dramatic consequences of the Soviet invasion of 1979, the historically negative impact of the Anglo-Afghan wars, or the role played by the US in supporting the emergence of fundamentalism during the past thirty years, are generally absent in mainstream explanations of today’s internal instability.

Within the rhetoric of war, ethnicity becomes the concrete manifestation of alterity, the emblem of otherness and difference. In war, the ‘other’ is an uncomfortable and unexciting role, in which the physical body becomes a projection of the social body, the most natural, intimate, and thus most significant site at which to identify the somatic signs of an enemy to fight.

Deniz: During the time I spent researching the political situation in southeastern Anatolia, the ambiguities associated with the concepts of ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic conflict’ and the ideological battle over these terms were especially intriguing for me. I learned immediately not to use the terms ‘ethnicity’ and ‘ethnic conflict’ in front of the supporters of the PKK because neither the term ‘ethnicity’ nor the concept of ‘conflict’ were the right terms to use in their discourse. The Kurds were a ‘nation’ not an ethnic group, and their struggle was a ‘national liberation war’ through ‘guerrilla warfare’ that could not be belittled by terms such as ‘conflict’ (understood in terms of it is general usage in Turkish as ‘clash’). The Turkish officials, both civilian and uniformed, would prefer to use the term ‘low intensity conflict with terrorists’ instead of the terms ‘war,’ ‘guerrilla warfare’ or ‘ethnic conflict.’ However, there were also those Kurds who would not sympathize with the PKK, the ‘Kurdish national liberation war’ or its ideologically charged justification, but would also feel alienated by the aggressive, patronizing, militarized state discourse about the situation. Ultimately, the discourses (of ‘conflict,’ ‘nation,’ ‘freedom fighter,’ ‘martyr,’  ‘enemy’ etc.), the politics (of ‘national liberation’ or ‘national security and unity’), and the fighting tactics (based on ‘guerrilla warfare’ or ‘counter-insurgency’) were used to promote a particular construction of conflict/war, to draw the line between the enemy and the friend, and to claim and control the territory. On the ground, there are competing micro discourses, ideals, ideologies and politics justifying each side’s cause and position and demonizing the enemy. But then again, the academic terminology, research methods and literature are available to study political violence in terms of ‘ethnicity,’ ‘ethnic conflict,’ ‘nationalism,’ ‘national liberation,’ ‘armed conflict,’ ‘violence,’ or ‘terrorism’ without necessarily contextualizing it in global geopolitical scenarios or in regional political economy of competition over resources, rent, markets and networks of trafficking. There may be a few book chapters remotely dealing with the Kurdish nationalist politics of the last two decades within the broader global context of neoliberal encroachment around the world, and/or in relation to the reshuffling of power in the Middle East pushed by the regional powers, foreign governments and/or neoliberal market forces. In addition, there is almost no evidence-based academically informed research or analysis on the opium and arms trafficking that the members of both/all sides of the war in southeastern Turkey have been systematically involved in since the early 1990s. The role of foreign actors, barons of black markets and the warlords of illicit trafficking have been explained by the entertainment industry in a way that has distorted reality and undermined its significance. Reality has been transformed into a caricature, a cheap conspiracy theory for consumption. The invasion of Iraq was removed from its historical context and geopolitical significance by the US government, the international mainstream media and Hollywood. They reduced the US-led foreign military presence into a witch-hunt theatre to save the world from a dictator and turned the war against the Iraqi people into Oscar-winning movies like The Hurt Locker and American Sniper for propaganda and cheap entertainment.

Antonio: Beyond politics, war is a complex human experience. If the only objective of war is the mere physical elimination of the enemy, then it is not possible to explain why the torture and destruction of bodies, both dead and alive, is practiced with such ferocity on so many battlefields. From the researcher’s point of view, among the principal difficulties linked to the confrontation with the violence produced by war is the need to produce logical explanations and interpretations in scenarios that sometimes put to the test our capacity to discern right and wrong, justice and injustice. We understand the rational logic beyond warfare, but it is more complicated to deeply investigate the brutality it can generate. It is challenging to explain, from the perspectives of the social actors involved, the fury involved in mutilating bodies, visceral hatred, or murderous desire. A sentiment of elusiveness permeates the ‘scene of violence’ in war contexts, and it seems, in some ways, to be akin to placing oneself before the indefinite which, in a tragically paradoxical way, produces clearly visible and verifiable effects: the agony of bodies in pain, abandonment, death. There is a sort of uncertain upper hand that expands to every level of daily routine and that apparently finds its epilogue only in the dialectics of good or bad luck. In her work on violence, Hannah Arendt (1969) argued clearly and impactfully that, more than any other circumstance, luck plays a crucially role on the battlefield. It is formally considered unacceptable for a human group to systematically unleash its power on other groups through homicide and violence, including torturing and raping people and dissecting their bodies. Although in abstract terms such violence appears unimaginable, it becomes concretely realizable when the murdered or tortured are aligned with dehumanizing representations that portray them as usurpers, cowards, filthy, paltry, unfaithful, vile, disobedient. Thus, war violence becomes a dramatic attempt to transform, redefine and establish social boundaries; to affirm one’s own existence and deny that of the other.

Deniz: The physical destruction of the enemy has never been the utmost goal of warfare. Rather, the common idea behind wars has been to assert power, impose control over, and pacify the targeted land, territory and social organization (Malesevic, 2010). We are overwhelmed by acts of modern genocide in recent world history when violence has been to exterminate every member of the targeted group in the most unimaginable and horrendous ways. Nonetheless, historically speaking, warfare has always been at the core of social organization, and organized violence is used to control, dominate and discipline the social systems. War has become more and more sophisticated, bureaucratized, and hierarchical; therefore, with modernity and industrial capitalism has become more systematic, vicious and destructive. In modern cases of genocide, the objective is not only to physically eliminate the individual members of the enemy group, but also to impose a particular kind of sociopolitical order over the rest of the society. Sociologists such as Charles Tilly and Michael Mann have produced substantial amounts of research on the relationship between the nation-state formation and modern warfare and genocide. However, Max Weber probably drew the first close link between industrial capitalism, bureaucratic rationalization and coercive control. Acts of torture, gang-rape, murder and mutilation may be quite unimaginable under ordinary circumstances that ordinary social norms and the rule of law apply to, but these acts are definitely not irrational, nonsense or senseless. Rather, the most heinous acts of violence in the 20th and 21st centuries may be the easiest to rationalize given the extraordinary social systems that modern societies have created. This is compatible with market capitalism, and the supporting ideologies that continue to normalize subtly and sophisticatedly the hierarchies between human beings.

Antonio: From my early childhood onwards, I learned about war through the memories of my grandparents and the signs (scars, amputations) on the bodies of their brothers and sisters. I have seen the wounds of war while travelling in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I have acquired an understanding of the long-term effects of the violence of war through meeting refugees, veterans and military in different parts of the planet. One aspect that attracted my attention to the issue of war was discipline, or rather indiscipline. I found the war stories that Carlo, an Italian man, used to tell me particularly fascinating. He was born in a small village in Northern Italy in 1918, the year in which the Great War was turning into a fragile and temporary epilogue. He passed away in 2009, with his daughter and niece at his bedside. Carlo was an introverted man who was extremely respectful of rules. Without a doubt, nobody could have defined him as being talkative. His sparing use of speech vanished only when speaking about his beloved job as a shoemaker, or when his memories carried him back to the years of the Second World War, when he was a soldier, or a ‘small soldier,’ as a Roman officer used to call him due to his short height. It is widely accepted that war is an extremely tragic event. However, historical records, literature and cinematography have contributed to giving shape to a sort of ethics of war identifying something humanly noble about it, something that directly connects tragedy with grandeur. In war, human beings touch the lowest level of their existence, but at the same time war enables them to aspire to something ‘more important.’ They can make something more than a mere man or a mere woman of themselves, they can become heroes who escape the banality of daily routine and boldly write their names in history. Glory, honor, defense of homeland, sacrifice and martyrdom are all elements that make the tragedy of war more acceptable to some degree. They are elements that make up the plot of a fertile rhetoric of war and exploit the tragedies and suffering in the name of ‘something greater,’ a superior interest that justifies the payment of innumerable lives. Yet, Carlo’s memories emphasized the suffering, famine, cold, thirst, the loss of dear friends, the affirmation of the hierarchy and loss of self. At the time as the Italian expedition to Russia, Carlo, who could read and had read somewhere the story of Napoleon, knew what the Italian soldiers were going to face. He knew that the expedition would not be a bed of roses. He was serving in Rome at the time and loved the city but was homesick and missed his fields and country lanes. When the time came to leave for the cold Russian lands, his restlessness became unbearable: ‘it was not the right thing to do,’ he told me. His life had already been miraculously saved on several occasions while wearing his uniform, the meaning of which he often questioned. He began to eat less and less. In a few weeks, his body became so weak that his captain took him to the medical lieutenant colonel. ‘This man is undernourished; he cannot leave,’ said the doctor. The captain, who had his own requirements to reckon with, did not want to accept this and tried to convince the doctor that the soldier had to go. ‘I repeat, this man is ill,’ decreed the doctor. Carlo was thus exempted from the expedition and assigned other duties. ‘I would have died,’ he often repeated. The expedition had meant the death of his comrades who, whether or not aware of the freezing ordeal to come, had been obliged to go.

These kinds of stories are not generally included among those echoing the hegemonic rhetoric that constantly invades talks, movies, songs, novels, poetry, and history books about war, in which the main focus is on killed heroes, not reluctant and ‘undisciplined soldiers.’ This dominant rhetoric alternates victimizing perspectives with glorifying narratives, sometimes in a schizophrenic fashion.

Deniz: I am not sure to what extent Carlo’s reluctance to continue to fight in that war was an act of intentional overt refusal to obey the orders from higher-ups. We do not know what he would do if the doctor had decided that he was fit to serve. I prefer to use the word ‘disobedience’ to talk about those individual and collective acts of objection to serve the interests of a military authority or a state in war with no legitimacy in the eyes of the objector. If Carlo were a deserter, his name would have been officially recorded and he could have appeared in some official documents as a statistic and in historical analysis as a subject matter to explore the war circumstances. Desertion has always been a concern for the states and their armies during war times, and might have been very well recorded and officially examined for strategic purposes. I was born and raised in a society where the army has, until very recently, been considered an institution as sacred as religion. Despite that, there was a very systematic problem with deserters (asker kaçağı in Turkish) in the Ottoman army before and during the WWI. There were political, economic and institutional reasons for and implications of the increasing number of Ottoman soldiers deserted during the final years of the Empire, especially during the First World War. Those soldiers were different to Carlo in terms that they did not hesitate to run away. Their leaving the official ranks of the army was against Ottoman law; therefore returning to their village was not an option for them and carried a risk of identification and arrest. They would immediately become outlaws, and a significant number of them would form their own bands or join the existing ones in the mountainous areas for survival. Historically, banditry in Ottoman Anatolia had been limited to pillaging the wealth of the rich ones, and had its own unofficial töre (customary norms) regulating the behaviors of the eşkıya (rebel/outlaw) to protect the welfare of the poor and oppressed. In people’s imagination (i.e. folk tales, legends, elegies and songs), Eşkıya was a romantic heroic character brave enough to challenge the oppressive state and its official representatives on behalf of the oppressed. During the war years (WWI) as official records of testimonies show, töre were violated by the newly formed bands of deserters regularly and the incidents of stealing from the poor, murder and rape increased drastically. The lines between the ‘haydut’ (bandit/thug), ‘asker kaçağı’ (deserter) and ‘eşkıya’ have become less and less obvious through time, but the eşkıya (sometimes hero, sometimes villain) has continued to have an intriguing presence in the artistic imaginations in Anatolian oral culture and Turkish fiction writing, poetry, painting, music and cinema. Ironically, the Turkish Liberation War was started by the irregular militia groups (Kuva-yi Milliye) led by former Ottoman army officials who rebelled against the Ottoman government in Istanbul and deserted the Ottoman Army at the end of the WWI. The Turkish Kuva-yi Milliye was, in a way, a nationwide movement of disobedience against the Ottoman Sultan. The leading figures were former high-ranked Ottoman soldiers including Mustafa Kemal, who were accused of treason and declared traitors to be given the death sentence. While the Sultan was negotiating with the allied powers for his own personal interests, civilians including women and Ottoman army deserters in Anatolia started organizing in every town under occupation or under the threat of occupation by the Allied forces to form ‘voluntary’ militia groups to fight back. It could have been ‘voluntary’ for women and children, but men were forced to volunteer with decrees. Men were obliged by the law to serve when the standing army was consolidated after the foundation of the new Grand National Assembly in Ankara in 1920. The war was not limited to the armed struggle against the occupying European powers, but it was also against the armed minority (mostly Anatolian Greek militia groups) resistance to the Turkish Kuva militia/army and often times against the civilian minority presence as well. The Kuva militia groups/army units would try to maintain the Turkish domination in their respective territory where there would also be eşkıya presence. My great grandfather was a former Ottoman soldier from Southern Anatolia who led Kuva militia groups against the armed Greek presence/occupation nearby the town of Iznik in northwestern Anatolia where he married my maternal great grandmother. There was a very fluid line separating the militia groups from the eşkıya groups who might or might not have supported the Turkish resistance against the occupation. It was not surprising to see the members of the Turkish militia leaving their side to join the eşkıya, and vice versa. This kind of desertion by soldiers to run away from the war joining the eşkıya continued after the regularization and consolidation of the standing Turkish army. The act could be looked down upon when it is limited to individual acts of refusing to fight for a ‘noble’ cause in the eyes of those representing or supporting the power, or celebrated as heroism when it is done collectively to rebel against a failing authority with damaged legitimacy in the eyes of the rebels and their supporters. Nonetheless, the interpretation will always be time and context specific, and differ according to the standpoint of those telling or writing the history.

Antonio: From a comparative perspective, it is interesting to look at Carlo’s hesitation in relation to other forms of what might be considered indiscipline and disobedience from an official-military viewpoint. From 1965 onwards, movements opposing the war in Vietnam had repercussions within the US military forces. The case of the Fort Hood Three was one of the first episodes of dissent against the Vietnam War in the US army. Dennis Mora, James Johnson and David Samas were stationed at Fort Hood in Texas, when in 1966 they received the order to leave for Vietnam. The three soldiers prepared a joint statement in which they refused to obey the order, arguing that the Vietnam War was unjust, immoral and illegal. They claimed they did not want to take part in a war of extermination and they rejected such a criminal waste of American lives and resources. The soldiers were arrested and each was condemned to three years of imprisonment by different tribunals. It has been observed that during the Vietnam war ‘the military itself was the locus of widespread anti-war activity. Opposition to the war intensified as service personnel began to see themselves as occupying the front ranks of a multi-faceted struggle against American imperialism abroad and injustice at home.’ Some, like the Fort Hood Three, ‘analyzed the disobedience in explicitly political terms. Others sought Conscientious Objector status, even while they served in the military’ (Tischler 2002, p. 395). Since then, many US soldiers have been arrested and condemned because they expressed dissent – the post-war activism of Iraq veterans is one of the most recent examples. Although these cases have generally been read as forms of mere disobedience, their implications go much further.

Beyond the differences in the historical, political and social contexts of Carlo’s and the Fort Hood Three’s stories, both subvert the idea of the soldier as an emblem of the ‘disciplined body’, a sort of religious figure who ‘has a mission and a calling’ (Lutz, Millar 2012, p. 487). The undisciplined soldier is different to the contractor (the modern version of the mercenary and one of the most visible effects of the privatization of warfare), different to the unaware soldier (as in Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil), and different to the deviant soldier (who loses control, commits a crime or is guilty of excess in the exercise of violence). The latter three figures are all functional to the hierarchical order. Although it may seem illogical, even the action of the deviant soldier is somehow predictable. Examples are provided by US soldiers who tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib and by the US soldier (even though there are still doubts as to whether or not he acted alone) who, in March 2012, killed children, women and men in Southern Afghanistan for no apparent reason. A ferocity that at first appears incredible may yet be explained within the dehumanizing framework provided by war. In order to reaffirm the authority of the government and the legitimacy of war, the soldier is condemned, perhaps even executed, but his actions remain functional to the macro-logics of the conflict, such as creating a climate of terror, exacerbating hatred, and justifying further interventions (or justifying withdrawal, depending on the specific political moment – e.g. election time). The undisciplined soldier, on the contrary, challenges authority, reacts to a fate that seems already sealed, and searches for his/her own humanity just as war is trying to annihilate it. Of course, the role of those who take part in war needs to be understood in another sense too. As Achille Mbembe puts it, dominant and dominated participate in the same épistéme. It is against the backdrop of shared canons that one must conceive of and interpret practices of ‘disorder’ and indiscipline, desertion, disguise, duplication and improvisation (1992, p.133)..

Carlo’s story, for instance, might be seen as a story of indiscipline, disguise and improvisation while the Fort Hood Three case might be regarded as a story of indiscipline and ‘exposure.’

Because of its co-participative epistemic nature, however, war cannot be simply described as the by-product of political decisions from above. It is also determined by participation and initiatives from below. This complicates the picture, as does the connection between individual actions and global forces. Yet, if scholars have devoted analytical effort (and some, political commitment) to understanding the causes of extreme violence and investigating the close relationship between historical processes and individual participation, to grasp the long-term wounds of those who ‘did their job’ in battle, it should at least be recognized that the stories of ‘undisciplined soldiers’ remain mostly untold in mainstream narratives. Throughout human history, untold stories have always had something to reveal that runs contrary to consolidated myths and official memory – Howard Zinn (2001) has provided some useful examples.

Deniz: ‘Conscientious objection’ is a specific kind of refusing to serve in the military. It means that the motivation to object is a set of morals and ethics that either call for antimilitarism or prescribe those circumstances to when it is right to serve in the armies and when it is wrong to do that. Especially in situations where the objector is obliged to fight on the more powerful, more violent and less legitimate side, it suggests an alternative discourse (not necessarily a counter-discourse) to the hegemonic or dominant one. I started following conscientious objection cases in Israel during my years of research on Israeli economy and politics in the early 2000s. As a response to the acceleration of the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) attacks on Palestinian civilians following the 2000 intifada, hundreds of Israeli soldiers were writing letters or signing petitions declaring their refusal to serve beyond the 1967 borders of Israel. The conscientious objection movement had been active and stubborn in Israel since 1950s; but the participation of the high-profile soldiers including pilots and elite commandos in the movement was impressive. Hundreds of high school students were also a part of the movement with their own signature campaigns. In September 2003, 27 pilots in the Israeli Air Forces signed a petition calling the IDF attacks on civilians in the Occupied Territories “illegal” and “immoral”, and refused to serve in the West Bank and Gaza. One of the pilots withdrew his signature, but another one joined and added his. The petition was directed to the Chief of the Israeli Air force who made a public statement arguing that there was a strong general Israeli public support for their ‘war against terror’ and thousands of other Israeli pilots did not agree with the signatories. A few months after the letter of the pilots, 13 Sayeret Matkal commandos sent a letter that was stronger in its tone to then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The letter read: “We say to you today, we will no longer give our hands to the oppressive reign in the territories and the denial of human rights to millions of Palestinians, and we will no longer serve as a defensive shield for the settlement enterprise.” Objection was indeed a means to (re)claim one’s humanity before the war exterminates it. In 2014, a group of IDF intelligence officers refused to operate in the West Bank in a letter stating that their activities aim to persecute Palestinians rather than defend the state of Israel. As of today, there are tens of conscientious objectors serving jail sentences in Israeli prisons. In terms of their numbers and impact on the Israeli policies in the Occupied Territories, the objectors may be insignificant. In terms of the historical role that they play in presenting and recording the diversity of opposing opinions among the Israelis against the hegemonic Israeli state policy and discourse, they are significant. However, the Israeli conscientious objectors are still a part of the history from the Israeli point of view; just like their American counterparts are a part of the history from the American point of view. They provide Israeli and American viewpoints alternative to those of their states. American conscientious objectors have never represented the Vietnamese, Iraqis and Afghans; rather, they have presented and defended their own (conscientious) concerns. Israeli conscientious objectors have never represented the Palestinians; rather, they have defended their own stance on the political situation. It was highlighted in the letters, petitions and statements that the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was corrupting the ‘people of Israel’ and the ‘Zionist cause,’ and risking the future of the ‘Israeli society’ and ‘Zionist Jewish Israel.’ We are still missing the voices of the oppressed here, and Palestinians continue to be a mass of victim bodies kicking, shouting and throwing stones without a clear articulation of what they have been experiencing since 1948.

Antonio: To be sure, from West to East, dominant narratives of/on war are anything but the product of a coarse ideology. They rather embody a complex fusion of morality and doctrine, reason and pragmatism. In the humanities and social sciences there are many instances of those (including eminent personalities of the past, from Machiavelli to Sun Tzu, from Evans-Pritchard to Wittgenstein) who have combined critical thinking with a personal pragmatic interventionist tendency, or those who have objectified war as a social fact with few emotional implications, or those who have thought to prove themselves through the experience of war, or again those who have associated scientific/professional expertise with military intelligence. Conflicting narratives on war are engaged in a continuous relationship with the ‘War, Inc.’ universe. On the one hand, the hegemonic position of governments and large corporations fuels a dominant rhetoric that tries to offer a more acceptable image of war, presenting it as an inevitable step towards solving extreme situations. On the other hand ‘indiscipline’ as a critical category may be seen as a useful instrument for the production of a different understanding of war. This implies reflecting on the (historical and new) political and cultural use of categories such as evil, good, justice, honor, homeland, and sacrifice, categories that become legitimating concepts allowing those who detain power to preserve it.

Deniz: 21st century warfare will not be same as that of the 20th century, just like 20th century warfare was different than that of the 19th century. I think this is why the mighty ones, now with industrial and virtual technologies beyond our imagination, will continue to destroy even more effectively in the 21st century. The corporate initiatives to introduce soldier robots with AI to the markets and fields of war sound thrilling, especially when put in the same picture with the increasingly more systematic blatant enslavement of human beings in Africa and around the world. In the 21st century, scholars will have to reconsider everything about good and evil, justice and injustice, honor and dishonor, homeland and exile or refuge. Our scholarly recipes using theoretical/conceptual ingredients from earlier centuries to produce 21st century counter-rhetorics are likely to fail.

References

Alon G. and Harel A., September 24, 2003. “Mofaz: IAF Pilots’ letter of Refusal Benefits Terror Grsoups” in Haaretz. https://www.haaretz.com/news/mofaz-iaf-pilots-letter-of-refusal-benefits-terror-groups-1.101072

Arendt, H., 1969, On Violence. Harcourt.

Harel, A., December 22, 2003. “13 Elite Reservists refuse to Serve in the Territories” in Haaretz. https://www.haaretz.com/13-elite-reservists-refuse-to-serve-in-territories-1.109397

Lutz, C., Millar, K., 2012, “War” in Fassin, D., (Ed.) A Companion to Moral Anthropology. Wiley-Blackwell.

Malesevic, S., 2010, The Sociology of War and Violence. Cambridge University Press.

Mbembe, A., 1992, Prosaics of Servitude and Authoritarian Civilities. Public Culture, 5(1): 123-145.

Tischler, B., 2002, “The Antiwar Movement” in Young, M. B., Buzzanco, R., (Eds.) A Companion to the Vietnam War. Blackwell.

Zinn, H., 2001, Howard Zinn on War. Seven Stories Press.

 

 

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Intermediaries in humanitarian action: a questionable shortcut to the effective localisation of aid?

Over the last decade, international humanitarian agencies have endeavoured to develop effective ways to localise their practices of intervention in areas receiving forced migrants or stricken by conflict or disasters. ‘Localisation’ is an umbrella term referring to all approaches to working with local actors, and includes ‘locally-led’ projects which refers specifically to “work that originates with local actors or is designed to support locally emerging initiatives” (Wall 2016).

Local-international partnerships have received much rhetorical attention as a more acceptable face of the humanitarian programming designed in the global North. Nonetheless, there is evidence that northern funding and organisational structures still give preference to implementers from the global north (Ramalingman, Gray and Cerruti 2012). In this framework, the middle space, spanning from international donors to local implementers, is of crucial importance in shaping decision-making processes related to humanitarian funding, practices and policies. In this framework, I would like to advance my considerations on the international humanitarian system that presently places special emphasis on the role of intermediaries in crisis-stricken settings, or contexts that are proxies to crisis.

On November 14 2018 I participated in a roundtable organised by the Overseas Development Institute which aimed to evaluate the role of intermediaries in humanitarianism. In this context, several London-based humanitarian professionals expressed the need to define the role of the intermediary figure in humanitarian action, and to rely on the latter’s support to access local and refugee communities in the targeted areas. By contrast, academic literature which seeks to map such a ‘middle space’ is scant (Kraft and Smith 2018). Based on these observations, what are humanitarian actors trying to bypass, remove, enhance or achieve by emphasising the importance of intermediaries in their sector? With the following considerations, I intend to shed light on how intermediaries may be problematically employed as a shortcut to localisation and as a logistic facilitation strategy to not further contextualise policies and practices which are often designed in the so-called global North.

The first observation I would like to make is related to the layered social identity of intermediaries. Indeed, it is a common belief that intermediaries are mostly local or regional residents with strong connections and networks in the areas targeted by humanitarian programmes. If the line of separation between the ‘international’ and the ‘local’ is unavoidably blurred, it is important to note that some segments of local middle classes – generally those employed in the humanitarian system to manage crisis – are as unfamiliar with other social strata of their own country as many international workers with whom they share common lifestyle standards. As a result, from a relational and emotional perspective, some local professionals may not necessarily be any closer to the people they address. At the same time, however, intermediaries are believed to be well placed to manage local politics, such as corruption, inefficiency or reluctance to comply with external norms and requests. Can such a social figure ever exist? In this respect, the research I conducted from 2011 to late 2013 in Lebanon (Carpi 2015) demonstrates a promiscuous intentionality of the international humanitarian apparatus: on the one hand, the desire to avoid local politics and its discontents, but, on the other, the need to rely on intermediary figures who are able to prepare beneficiary lists and can provide contextual knowledge to enable humanitarian actors to rapidly and safely access local and refugee groups. However, as my research has shown, by doing so international humanitarian agencies often end up recognising local authorities as key actors of the humanitarian machine. In my field experience, the moral impact of what I may call an ‘unintended alliance’ between humanitarian internationals and local gatekeepers was particularly relevant when local residents and refugees expressed their desire to get rid of intermediary figures operating between them, the humanitarian system and the central government. Intermediary roles were predominantly covered by local state officials and delegates (makhatir and mandubin respectively) and other local informal leaders (zu‘ama’). In sum, the necessary entrance of formal and informal local authorities into the international humanitarian labour chain produced a substantial impact on humanitarian workers who must deal with local politics and its contextual configuration.

The second issue that I would like to analyse is the excess of intermediaries in the contemporary humanitarian sphere. Looking at the intermediary role as a relational and performative process rather than a clear-cut sociological mission, it is possible to identify unorthodox configurations of “intermediariness”. Even though it is mainly conceived as local actors, –networks, individuals, diaspora groups or formal organisations that occupy the middle space between initial donors and final implementers, intermediaries can sometimes be epitomised by INGOs and UN agencies. For instance, the humanitarian corridors that currently take Syrian refugees from Lebanon to Italy and France across the Mediterranean are a suitable case in point. As a local aid worker recounted in an interview in Beirut in March 2017, in order to retrieve personal data and carry out an initial selection of the refugee groups who better suit the Italian and the French labour markets, the INGOs in charge of organising the humanitarian corridors rely, in turn, on other INGOs and UN agencies that can provide them with a contact database. This modality of selection is believed to avoid a costly and time-consuming door-to-door strategy. In this case, needs assessment is viewed as a bureaucratic hurdle rather than an effective way of identifying needs and protection and their changing nature. Likewise, another aid practitioner working for an INGO in a village of northern Lebanon affirmed that individual and family eligibility to cash transfers was determined through the UNHCR central database, rather than independent field visits and assessments (interview in Halba, February 2017). These two anecdotes show how intermediaries operating in the humanitarian middle space are at times excessive.

My third observation concerns bureaucracy. Enhancing and institutionalising the role of intermediaries may sort out the difficulty of pinning down sociological figures in changing contexts and of managing institutional trust versus informal society. By this token, we may think that the role of intermediaries should therefore be professionalised. However, the institutionalisation of the intermediary role might instead add complexity and slow down the already hyper-bureaucratised system of international humanitarianism and development. The same system has long been accused of being poorly responsive to context-sensitive needs (Belloni 2005) and de-humanising war and disaster victims (Pandolfi 2002). In this regard, Lebanon offers the meaningful example of the Municipal Support Assistant (MSA). This professional figure, appointed by local municipalities, has been created to work with local authorities and international humanitarian actors and acts as a local government administrative assistant. In the case of Lebanon, the MSA needs to be fluent in Arabic and English to be able to develop double communication strategies. As a municipality representative of Sahel az-Zahrani reported in a 2016 study conducted by UN-Habitat and the American University of Beirut, the MSA has presumably been created to enhance coordination between the local and the humanitarian systems of governance (Boustani, Carpi, Hayat and Moura 2016). However, considering the formal ways of working that the MSA needs to comply with, bureaucratic impediments are practically enhanced. In other words, if bureaucracy is enhanced to achieve greater coordination, I would be wary to believe that actual coordination can soon see the light.

The very aims of the ongoing efforts towards an “intermediary-sation” of humanitarian action need to be clearly motivated and contextualised. From a personal perspective, considering the provisional presence of many international humanitarians and researchers in the areas where crisis management is needed, we continue missing historical continuity. Short field visits are in fact unlikely to trace the local history of human relations, contextual power dynamics and assistance mechanisms. Should the international humanitarian system not find the radical determination to develop physical and moral proximity towards the populations it endeavours to serve, I hence envision intermediaries only as everyday researchers who conduct “reality checks” whenever accurate humanitarian assessments of outreach, programming, policies and local specificities are needed.

References

Belloni, Roberto (2005) Is Humanitarianism Part of the Problem? Nine Theses. John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Boston, MA.

Boustani, Marwa, Carpi, Estella, Hayat Gebara, and Moura Yara (2016) Responding to the Syrian Crisis in Lebanon. Collaboration between Aid Agencies and Local Governance Structures. London: IIED Urban Crisis report.

Carpi, Estella (2015) Adhocratic Humanitarianisms and Ageing Emergencies in Lebanon. From the July 2006 War in Beirut’s Southern Suburbs to the Syrian Refugee Influx in the Akkar Villages. PhD dissertation, University of Sydney (Australia).

Kraft, Kathryn and Smith, Jonathan D. (2018) “Between International Donors and Local Faith Communities: Intermediaries in Humanitarian Assistance to Syrian Refugees in Jordan and Lebanon”, Disasters.

Pandolfi, Mariella (2002) “’Moral Entrepreneurs’, Souverenaités Mouvantes et Barbelés: le Bio-Politique dans le Balkans Postcommunistes”, in Politiques Jeux d’Espaces, ed. Pandolfi, M. and Abélès, M., special issue, Anthropologie et Sociétés, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 29-50.

Ramalingam, Ben, Gray, Bill, and Cerruti, Giorgia (2012) Missed Opportunities: The Case for Strengthening National and Local Partnership-Based Humanitarian Responses, Christian Aid, CAFOD, Oxfam, Tearfund, and Action Aid.

Wall, Imogen with Hedlund, Kerren (2016) Localisation and Locally-Led Crisis Response: A Literature Review, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation.

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This research has been conducted in the framework of the project “Analyzing South-South Humanitarian Responses to Displacement from Syria: Views from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey”, funded by the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation agreement no. 715582.