Anthropology of Postconflict

Lauren Berlant argues that one dimension of the cruelty of life under late capitalism, is that we get attached to a cluster of promises regarding the good life that are generated by and embedded in conditions that are already not working. Thus, we get attached to the very conditions that defeat the fulfillment of those promises. This seems a particularly acute characterization of the structural function of financial debt for the economically vulnerable. Access to credit seduces with cruel optimism – it is intertwined with a cluster of promises regarding the good life while this attachment to living on credit is embedded in conditions of economic dystopia that are precarious and unsustainable. The affective structure of " empowerment " in enabling, even easing, access to credit precisely for those most financially vulnerable produces cruel optimism. Within feminist development economics, empowerment is an agential, participatory vision that shapes development policy, at once legitimizing that policy and producing crisis ordinariness in its subjects. This chapter probes the work done by the promise of women's empowerment in post-conflict environments. It focuses particularly on the empowerment programs of international financial institutions and development agencies in the arena of market-oriented post-conflict economic development.  In these contexts, interventions that seek to advance empowerment by enhancing women’s access to credit, property title and entrepreneurship have been significant elements of the development policy apparatus. This paper is interested in how particular feminist ideas about the empowerment of women became part of the knowledge apparatus of institutions shaping economic governance in post-conflict environments – and, concomitantly, how those ideas traveled into policies and processes that had far reaching effects on the ground – although not necessarily effects that were intended or anticipated.  This chapter looks at the coming together of feminism and international development in projects advancing women’s integration into the private sector in conflict/post-conflict environments. It does this partly by looking at how empowerment emerged as a nodal point for feminist development policy, and partly by looking at how one large-scale multi-donor development project (in collaboration with the UN and the Sri Lankan government), the Owner Driven Housing Assistance (ODHA) program, has interfaced with debt regimes in post-conflict Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan example draws attention to the striking tension between GF’s success in shaping policy (in the name of empowerment) on the one hand, and the exacerbation of women (and men’s) economic vulnerability (through those very policies) on the other. Moreover, as these policies get normalized into mainstream development policy, the precarity engendered by the legacies of conflict, and exacerbated by hegemonic development policy, becomes a constant; contexts where the development policy apparatus legitimates itself by contrasting its promises with the precarity of war. When ‘crisis’ becomes ‘ordinary’ in this way, these enabling conditions also become more difficult to challenge – indeed this normalization of precarity makes it more difficult to imagine an alternative ‘ordinary’. Cruel Optimism.

Conflict analysis is the systematic study of the causes, actors, and dynamics of conflict. Any method of conflict analysis must apply a socio-cultural approach to understand of the dynamics, structure, social networks and the relationships between the society and  territory of the conflict.

This paper reviews some methods for the assessment and analysis of  conflicts, emphasizing the importance of the socio-cultural information  obtaining stage.

Lanka While huge investments are currently being made in international intervention, democratisation and transitional justice programmes all over the world, we can see that they are by and large failing. Violent conflict is growing rather than decreasing and even many societies that are supposedly 'post-conflict' continue to experience periodic eruptions of violence. Part of the problem inevitably lies in the failure to meaningfully address many of the structural inequalities that contribute to conflict. So too dominant articulations of history, tradition and culture can serve to legitimate ongoing exclusionary and discriminatory socio-political structures and practices. This has certainly been the case in Sri Lanka. A combination of bad socioeconomic policy, the legacies of colonial and pre-colonial social hierarchies and powerful nationalist mythologies have fuelled endless violence since the establishment of the post-colonial state. Mainstream responses to this violence have continued to focus on institution-building despite the failure of liberal democratic institutions to prevent violence and in some cases contributing to its perpetuation. Meanwhile for vast sections of the population, for whom the formal public sphere is inaccessible and marginalising it is the realm of ritual, religious practice and traditional or popular art forms that provides space for comfort, relief from trauma and suffering and for social critique. Seeking to mobilise this arena, a group of community activists in eastern Sri Lanka have been trying to use these alternate subaltern sites to engage in projects of new myth-making. In the process they are offering interesting epistemological challenges to conventional knowledge production processes and conceptions of the political. They are also articulating new social imaginaries on which more radically democratic communities, discourses and practices may be built.

Durante los diez años de relativa paz que siguieron al final de la llamada “guerra sucia” en Perú, librada entre las fuerzas del Estado y los rebeldes maoístas de Sendero Luminoso (1980-2000), las comunidades de Ayacucho experimentaron cambios fundamentales en la concepción y reclamo de sus derechos. Pueblos remotos que habían vivido bajo ley marcial desde principios de 1980 se convirtieron en el centro de atención de organizaciones de ayuda humanitaria, grupos de derechos humanos y otros proyectos post-conflicto financiados o generados internacionalmente. Además de estos cambios, la reforma militar, el desarme y la retirada de tropas estatales y cuarteles de gran parte del territorio ayacuchano, significaron una marcada reducción en la presencia del Estado en el campo.

Las memorias negativas asociadas al Estado no han desaparecido de aquella área, en la que la mayoría de los campesinos sufrieron la muerte de al menos un ser querido a manos de los militares o de las guerrillas. Sin embargo, comuneros percibían la intervención del discurso de los derechos humanos como una fuerza desestabilizadora, e incluso expresaban nostalgia por la disciplina militar de “hombres de verdad” del pasado reciente. Durante mi trabajo de campo en Wiracocha, una pequeña comunidad localizada en lo que fue el corazón de la guerra en Perú, tanto hombres como mujeres lamentaban la aparente pérdida de la solidaridad social que había traído el fin de la guerra.  Expresaban estas inseguridades a través de un discurso de género y autoridad que igualaba la virilidad y vitalidad masculinas con la autonomía comunitaria y la fuerza social. Si los antiguos líderes de Wiracocha habían sido efectivos y firmes por su fuerza y virilidad durante la guerra, los comuneros de hoy se quejaban de que ya no eran más que machu qari (hombre [s] viejo[s]), demasiado débiles e ineficaces para asegurar la continuidad y supervivencia de su comunidad.

Este trabajo explora cómo la transformación de la militarización a la reforma de derechos humanos en Wiracocha se ha vivido como una serie de cambios entreverados en los roles de género y en la ciudadanía de los campesinos indígenas en el Perú de la postguerra. Durante la guerra, los comuneros de Wiracocha habían encontrado seguridad e incluso orgullo en su cooperación con los militares, especialmente al ser confrontados con el autoritarismo de los rebeldes de Sendero Luminoso (Starn 1998). A partir de esa cooperación, los hombres comenzaron a “ponerse machos,” en palabras de un patrullero, formando sus propias patrullas de contrainsurgencia que más tarde serían subsumidas por las fuerzas del estado (Del Pino 1992).  La militarización de las comunidades llegó incluso a remplazar ciertas formas de liderazgo y justicia comunales que habían perdido relevancia durante la guerra.

En esta contribución, analizo algunos de los impactos sociales y culturales de las exhumaciones y la manera en la que se relacionan con un cambio generacional frente al pasado violento. Lo hago en base a una etnografía que sigo realizando en Navarra  y mediante una reflexión a dos niveles de análisis.
La primera parte propone interesarse en el discurso público de los representantes del ayuntamiento de Pamplona y del Gobierno de Navarra. Versa en la inscripción, en la retórica política, del cambio de paradigma frente a la manera en la que estas instituciones proponen, hoy en día, procesar el pasado dentro de su agenda política y mediática.
La segunda parte se enfoca en los discursos formulados en privado entre las familias de víctimas. Interroga la biologización de la memoria mediante el derecho de expresión sobre ese pasado otorgado, o no, a los descendientes de los protagonistas de la guerra civil. A través de un análisis de los discursos de las nietas y nietos -formulados en un contexto de exhumaciones de las fosas comunes- se trata de entender el beneficio, o al contrario el daño, al que conduce el lugar ocupado por el abuelo durante el golpe del Estado y su accionar a lo largo de la guerra civil y de la dictadura. En otras palabras, esta presentación se enfoca en las estrategias de legitimización y deslegitimización a las cuales se puede asistir hoy en día, “a pie de fosas”  (Ferrandiz 2014), entre los nietos de los protagonistas de la guerra y al proceso de naturalización de las afiliaciones políticas que está en juego y que revela, de manera inédita, “identidades dañadas” (Pollack 1993).
A manera de conclusión, se analiza los modos de procesamiento sensacionalistas de la memoria de la guerra civil. Se interrogará la espectacularización de la apertura de las fosas comunes en una sociedad dominada por la tele-realidad y un cierto voyeurismo.

Lanka While huge investments are currently being made in international intervention, democratisation and transitional justice programmes all over the world, we can see that they are by and large failing. Violent conflict is growing rather than decreasing and even many societies that are supposedly 'post-conflict' continue to experience periodic eruptions of violence. Part of the problem inevitably lies in the failure to meaningfully address many of the structural inequalities that contribute to conflict. So too dominant articulations of history, tradition and culture can serve to legitimate ongoing exclusionary and discriminatory socio-political structures and practices. This has certainly been the case in Sri Lanka. A combination of bad socioeconomic policy, the legacies of colonial and pre-colonial social hierarchies and powerful nationalist mythologies have fuelled endless violence since the establishment of the post-colonial state. Mainstream responses to this violence have continued to focus on institution-building despite the failure of liberal democratic institutions to prevent violence and in some cases contributing to its perpetuation. Meanwhile for vast sections of the population, for whom the formal public sphere is inaccessible and marginalising it is the realm of ritual, religious practice and traditional or popular art forms that provides space for comfort, relief from trauma and suffering and for social critique. Seeking to mobilise this arena, a group of community activists in eastern Sri Lanka have been trying to use these alternate subaltern sites to engage in projects of new myth-making. In the process they are offering interesting epistemological challenges to conventional knowledge production processes and conceptions of the political. They are also articulating new social imaginaries on which more radically democratic communities, discourses and practices may be built.