Bøger i The Ethnography of Political Violence serien

This book examines how ordinary families and communities of minority groups in Sri Lanka have dealt with prolonged civil war and resulting issues as diverse as child recruitment, generational and gender conflicts, political terror, refugee camp life, ethnic nationalism, and migration and mobility.

Reverberations aims to generate new concepts and methodologies for the study of political violence and its aftermath. Essays attend to the distribution, extension, and endurance of violence across time, space, materialities, and otherworldly dimensions, as well as its embodiment in subjectivities, discourses, and political imaginations.

This volume of original essays tackles the dilemmas surrounding the ways in which victims and victimhood are socially, politically, and culturally constructed, asking: How do we recognize and acknowledge suffering without objectifying affected communities and individuals?

Building on long-term ethnographic research at the first integrated school of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Citizens of an Empty Nation offers a ground-level view of how reunification processes are negotiated by Bosnian youth, shedding light on the larger projects of humanitarian intervention, social cohesion, and citizenship.

In this study of Guatemalan peasants rebuilding their lives after years in the crossfire, anthropologist Kristi Anne Stolen examines the dynamics of violence, survival strategies in situations of extreme violence, and social reconstruction in its aftermath.

On the Doorstep of Europe examines the way asylum seekers, bureaucrats, and service providers in Greece attempt to navigate the dilemmas of governance, ethics, knowledge, and sociability that emerge through this legal process.

Through a detailed ethnographic account of the everyday lives of detainees' wives in the occupied Palestinian Territory, No Place for Grief reveals the ways in which the normalization of these women's distress is intrinsically and painfully linked to the collective struggle for freedom from the occupation.

This ethnography analyzes the popularity of Hindu nationalism in contemporary India through examining the everyday acts of women activists, finding that women's ability to recruit individuals from a variety of backgrounds and the movement's willingness to accommodate a multiplicity of positions are central to understanding its expansionary power.

Iraq at a Distance describes the plight of the Iraqi people, caught since 2003 in the carnage between U.S. troops and Iraqi insurgents. This provocative book is a bold attempt by five distinguished anthropologists to study an inaccessible war zone through ground-breaking comparisons with armed conflicts around the world.

The first ethnography of the Eritrean struggle for independence documents the transnational dimensions of revolution and nation-building from the dual perspective of both Eritrea and its U.S. diaspora.

Tracing social, political, and economic changes among Sahrawi refugees, Sovereignty in Exile reveals the dynamics of a postcolonial liberation movement that has endured for decades in the deserts of North Africa while trying to bring about the revolutionary transformation of a society which identifies with a Bedouin past.

Kristin Conner Doughty examines how Rwandans navigated the combination of harmony and punishment in grassroots courts purportedly designed to rebuild the social fabric in the wake of the 1994 genocide.

A Different Kind of War Story takes us to the frontlines of one of the most brutal wars in recent history. The setting is Mozambique during the fifteen-year war of terror that took a million lives - mostly civilian - and completely destroyed homes, crops, hospitals, schools, and even access to water. Carolyn Nordstrom tells, often in their own words, what Mozambicans experienced and how many not only endured but responded creatively to brutality and unrelenting terror. She shows us how, drawing on a rich repertoire of cultural traditions, Mozambican civilians dealt with devastating violence without perpetuating it and, through their courage and creativity, made the restoration of peace possible. She compares the conflict in Mozambique with similar conflicts and offers a new way of looking at political violence, showing that just as violence is learned, it can be unlearned.

Based on intensive fieldwork in Israel during the second intifada, this ethnographic study explores how Israeli Jews experience security in their everyday lives. When Israeli security imprints itself on individual lives, the book argues, security propagates the very fears it claims to prevent.

Offering one of the first long-term on-the-ground ethnographies of Afghanistan since the arrival of allied forces in 2001, Kabul Carnival explores the contradictions, ambiguities, and unintended effects of the emancipatory projects designed for Afghan women and imposed by the international community.

In Child Soldiers in Africa Alcinda Honwana brings her firsthand experience with child soldiers in Angola and Mozambique to shed light on how children are recruited, what they encounter, and how they come to terms with what they have done.

After El Salvador's brutal civil war ended in 1992, crime rates shot up. People began to speak of the peace as "worse than the war." This study examines how narratives of post-conflict violence, told by ordinary people, offered ways of coping with uncertainty during a stunted transition to democracy.

Describes the social fabric of a rural community that has become a reservoir of soldiers for the Sri Lankan nation in the brutal war against Tamil separatists.

Moran argues that democracy is not a foreign import into Africa, but that essential aspects of what we in the West consider democratic values are part of the indigenous traditions of legitimacy and political process.

"Besteman's well-written and important book is a fine example of how careful scholarship can expose the realities behind widely held beliefs."-Choice

Focusing on interpersonal dynamics during conflict in the Republic of Macedonia, Neofotistos describes how Macedonians and Albanians in the city of Skopje responded to threatening political developments, negotiated relationships of power, and promoted indeterminacy on the level of the everyday as a sense of impending war enfolded the capital.

Maoists at the Hearth details the ways that inhabitants of a hill village in central Nepal managed their everyday activities following the arrival of Maoist insurgents in the late 1990s, exploring their changing social relationships with fellow villagers and the parties to the conflict both during and after the civil war.

Challenging the notion that violence simply breeds more violence, Antonius C. G. M. Robben's provocative study argues that in Argentina violence led to trauma, and that trauma led to more violence.

The first work to focus specifically on the anthropology of state terror.

In 1998, Indonesia exploded with both euphoria and violence after the fall of its longtime authoritarian ruler, Soeharto, and his New Order regime. Hope centered on establishing the rule of law, securing civilian control over the military, and ending corruption. Indonesia under Soeharto was a fundamentally insecure state. Shadowy organizations, masterminds, provocateurs, puppet masters, and other mysterious figures recalled the regime's inaugural massive anticommunist violence in 1965 and threatened to recreate those traumas in the present. Threats metamorphosed into deadly violence in a seemingly endless spiral. In Aceh province, the cycle spun out of control, and an imagined enemy came to life as armed separatist rebels. Even as state violence and systematic human rights violations were publicly exposed after Soeharto's fall, a lack of judicial accountability has perpetuated pervasive mistrust that undermines civil society.Elizabeth F. Drexler analyzes how the Indonesian state has sustained itself amid anxieties and insecurities generated by historical and human rights accounts of earlier episodes of violence. In her examination of the Aceh conflict, Drexler demonstrates the falsity of the reigning assumption of international human rights organizations that the exposure of past violence promotes accountability and reconciliation rather than the repetition of abuses. She stresses that failed human rights interventions can be more dangerous than unexamined past conflicts, since the international stage amplifies grievances and provides access for combatants to resources from outside the region. Violent conflict itself, as well as historical narratives of past violence, become critical economic and political capital, deepening the problem. The book concludes with a consideration of the improved prospects for peace in Aceh following the devastating 2004 tsunami.

Exposes the fact that slavery remains widespread in Sudan and is not grounded in the current civil war but on old prejudices between the Muslim north and the Christian south. "A shocking account of Sudanese slavery."-Crime & Justice International

Crossing the Green Line Between the West Bank and Israel makes eloquent use of particular Palestinian experiences as the framework for a critique of the way borders work in the modern world.

The first in-depth ethnography of the brutal regime in Burma.

In its comparative analysis of postcolonial South Africa and Algeria and its examination of narratives of ex-combatants, Making Peace with Your Enemy demonstrates how former adversaries face a similar challenge: how to extricate oneself from colonial domination and the violence of war in order to build relationships based on trust.

Conscientious Objectors in Israel chronicles the personal experiences of two generations of Jewish Israeli conscientious objectors as they grapple with their consciences under the pressure of justifying their actions to the Israeli state and society.