Conflict, post-conflict and culture

The aim of the paper is to explore the cultural context of the conflict in eastern Ukraine. From this perspective, the conflict in Donbas has to be seen not only in the context of a political game, socioeconomic transition and geopolitical interests, but also in the light of a cultural conflict rooted in history. According to Ukrainian researcher Mykola Riabchuk, Ukraine is divided, not between ethnic Rus-sians and Ukrainians, but between two different types of Ukrainian identity. These profound differences have been exacerbated by the events of the " Euromaidan " and, subsequently, the violent conflict between the separatist forces of the self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics on the one hand and the post-revolutionary Ukrainian government on the other. This article focuses on how the cultural divisions of Ukrainian society have been used since the beginning of Ukrainian independence by the political elite as a tool of symbolic politics, contributing to the mass mobilization of Ukrainian society and the outbreak of a violent conflict.

"A seminal ethnographic account of northern Uganda and the LRA war; an excellent analysis of the complex dynamics at play." —Amy C. FInnegan, Contexts

[An] insightful, compelling ethnography. . . . Finnström has important things to say about ethnographic intimacy, the phenomenology of fieldwork, and the universality of culture as human existence. The book offers a fine example of the merits of local, detailed ethnographic knowledge for understanding civilian life in a warzone, as well as glimpses of the emotional connections an anthropologist forms with informants and collaborators.”—Catherine Besteman, American Ethnologist

“[Living with Bad Surroundings] combines rich ethnographic detail with sharp theoretical acumen. . . . [A]n important text.:—Alicia C. Decker, International Journal of African Historical Studies

“I recommend it to anyone wanting to understand the problematic side of Africa. It reads more like the writing of a good and thoughtful war correspondent rather than a traditional social scientist. It what is useful and appropriate for understanding the world of contemporary northern Ugandans whom the author clearly liked and cared about.”—T.O. Beidelman, Anthropos

“Finnström’s analysis of the factors involved in the devastating conflict in Northern Uganda between the Ugandan government and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is a valuable contribution to the literature on contemporary armed conflicts. . . . Finnström’s careful examination is essential for students, scholars, and practitioners who want to understand the political, economic, historical, cultural, and religious complexities involved in ay armed conflict.”—Joanne Corbin, African Studies Review

“As well as being a valuable text for anyone interested in contemporary Africa and issues such as ethnicity, property rights, post-colonialism, and the relevance and continuation of tribalism, Living with Bad Surroundings is a powerful analysis of relations between stakeholders within the modern nation-state.”—Justin L. C. Hancock, Australian Journal of Anthropology

“This is a moving, politically engaged and penetrating study. It has . . . page-turning qualities. . . . If you are going to read just one book on northern Uganda, this is the one to go for.”—Tim Allen, Africa

“Through a more explicit engagement with the ambiguities and unfinishedness of lived experience, ethnographies like Finnström’s Bad Surroundings may thus offer more than philosophy alone in making sense of governmentalization and subjectification as they unfold through individual, collective, and political life.”—João Biehl and Ramah McKay, Anthropological Quarterly

“This is a highly accessible anthropological study of Northern Uganda and the LRA. It is useful in part because it establishes the colonial legacies though which the Acholi came to be marginalized in Uganda and stereotyped by the international community. Rather than basing his account on simplistic explanations like ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ between the Acholi and other Ugandans, Finnström provides a rich array of interviews with Northern Ugandans that touch on cultural, historical, and political aspects of the war. In particular, he highlights the voices of young people, whom he says ‘did not passively wait for outside solutions; rather, in everyday life they built for a future despite displacement and social unrest.’”—Kristin Rawls, Christian Science Monitor

“[A]n important contribution to the corpus of literature on structural violence and the lived experiences of war. This book will be a useful read for courses focusing on armed conflict, displacement, ethnographic methods and/or African studies.”—Julia R. Hanebrink, African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review

“Living with Bad Surroundings is written with sensitivity for the historical background of the Acholi people and their day-to-day realities. It highlights the impact of colonialism, independent Ugandan government regimes established after independence from Britain in 1962, and the local peoples’ expectations and realities. . . . The author writes with an ethnographer’s perspective, providing a fresh viewpoint on the war.”—Habiba Chirchir, Anthropological Quarterly

“This book is rich in detail and nuance, and challenges dominant discourses on the war in northern Uganda. It links the historical, international dimension to the lived experiences of the Acholi people. . . . [A] major book on everyday lived experiences in wartime. It adds to scholarship that interrogates colonial orthodoxies as well as academic writings that have produced stereotypes inimical to nation building. Finnstrom’s book is necessary reading for students of the Acholi, African wars, and Uganda.”—Steven Arojjo Obbo Ofumbi, Journal of Contemporary African Studies

“This complex and empirically rich account clearly and very tactfully analyses the harsh realities of the war. . . . [Finnström] vividly challenges the reductionist view that focuses on consequences of war rather than causes.”—Sarah Khasalamwa, Journal of Refugee Studies

“[T]he book is still impressive in its historical and analytical scope, and is not only very readable, but also moving. The narrative voice vividly evokes the inter-subjectivity of the ethnographic experience. Living with Bad Surroundings is an essential reference for studies on northern Uganda, and is also accessible to a wider, non-specialist readership. The work also provides a valuable contribution to the ethnography of conflict as well to literature challenging the ‘breakdown’ paradigm of displacement.”—Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon, African Affairs

“At times poetic, often philosophical, Finnström brings the reader to a new level of insight into war and its effects on the lived realities of affected persons—and how and why it is possible for people to survive the impossible day by day. Equally important, he vividly connects these personal stories to the political domain, unveiling, as each chapter evolves, the politics that divide people.”—Erin K. Baines, African Studies Review

“Living with Bad Surroundings . . . [is] a very good book, perhaps the best written on northern Uganda since the 1970s. It will be an ideal text for courses dealing with Africa and the local realities of modern armed conflicts.”—Tim Allen, Times Literary Supplement

“This subtle, sensitive, and sophisticated ethnography adds enormously to our understanding of contemporary northern Ugandan society and, more broadly, of everyday life during ‘low-intensity’ warfare. . . . This book is very good indeed and should find a wide readership among social anthropologists, Africanists, and students of conflict and violence.”—Mark Leopold, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Violence and authoritarianism continue to resonate in Cambodia’s post-transitional landscape, leading many scholars, journalists, international donors and non-governmental organisations alike to posit a ‘culture of violence’ as responsible for the country’s democratic deficit and enduring violence. In contrast, this paper interprets the culture of violence thesis as a sweeping caricature shot through with Orientalist imaginaries, and a problematic discourse that underwrites the process of neoliberalisation. The culture of violence argument is considered to invoke particular imaginative geographies that problematically erase the contingency, fluidity and interconnectedness of the places in which violence occurs. While violence is certainly mediated through both culture and place, following Doreen Massey’s re-conceptualisation of space and place, this paper understands place not as a confined and isolated unit, but as a relational constellation within the wider experiences of space. This reflection allows us to recognise that any seemingly local, direct or cultural expression of violence is necessarily imbricated in the wider, structural patterns of violence, which in the current moment of political economic orthodoxy increasingly suggests a relationship to neoliberalism. Through the adoption of the culture of violence discourse, neoliberalisation is argued to proceed in the Cambodian context as a ‘civilising’ enterprise, where Cambodians are subsequently imagined as ‘savage others’.

Titulaire d'un MBA et d'un DEA en Histoire, Dima de Clerck est docteur en histoire de l'Université Paris I. Sa thèse a porté sur les mémoires collectives communautaires dans le Liban d'après-guerre et plus précisément sur les cas des villages druzo-chrétiens. Elle est chercheuse associée à l'Institut français du Proche-Orient et auteur de plusieurs articles publiés.

Nepal’s peace process can lay some claim to success by existing standards because the Maoist armed conflict has come to a closure after the completion of integration of ex-combatants. But it still has flaws in its warp and woof that are distinctly Nepali, and have enough potential in them for things to go wrong. One of the major problems is how sustainable peace can be achieved at the same time the country has emerged from armed conflict. There are very nominal studies have been done in the current status of ex-combatants.
The armed conflict from 1996 to 2006 against the government to end social exclusion and unequal laws dismantled most of the legal and social institutional frameworks. The non-violent people’s movement in 2006 was instrumental in accelerating the transition to peace. The peace accord provided a lot of hopes and expected to solve the issue of combatants within six months. But it has been already more than six years, and still most of the issues are remained unsolved.
The paper aims to share experiences of the process of solving the issues of ex-combatants at first. Besides that, this paper includes the brief discussion of the model (framework) adopted to manage the rebels which was distinctly Nepali. Finally, the paper will try to deal on the present situation and perception of ex-combatants in the situation of more than seven years long transition from war to peace.

Neoliberal policies explain why authoritarianism and violence remain the principal modes of governance among many ruling elites in posttransitional settings. Using Cambodia as an empirical case to illustrate the neoliberalizing process, the promotion of intense marketization is revealed as a foremost causal factor in a country's inability to consolidate democracy following political transition. Neoliberalization effectively acts to suffocate an indigenous burgeoning of democratic politics. Such asphyxiation is brought to bear under the neoliberal rhetoric of order and stability, which can be read through the (re)production of public space. The preoccupation with order and stability serves the interests of capital at the global level and political elites at the level of the nation-state. Citizens themselves may fiercely contest these particular interests in a quest for a more radical democracy, as evidenced by the burgeoning geographies of protest that have emerged in Cambodian public spaces in the posttransition era.

Neoliberal subject formation in posttransitional Cambodia has been facilitated through the ‘commonsense’ rhetoric of good governance, which is conceived here as a primary discursive formation in the creation of consent for neoliberalism. Neoliberal subjectivation is the process whereby one memorizes the truth claims that one has heard and converts them into rules of conduct, thereby effectively locking in the rights of capital. As disciplinary rationalities, strategies, technologies, and techniques coagulate under neoliberal subjectivation in contemporary Cambodian society through the proliferation of particular discursive formations like good governance, the structural inequalities of capital are increasingly misrecognized. This constitutes symbolic violence, which is wielded precisely inasmuch as one does not perceive it as such. How we interpret the fluidity between those who produce and those constrained by neoliberal discursive formations is paramount if we are to counter problematic notions of neoliberalism as inevitable or monolithic and begin to recognize the systemic violent geographies that neoliberalism (re)produces both in posttransitional Cambodia and beyond.

In Life Advice from Below, Eric C. Hendriks offers the first systematic, comparative study of the globalization of American-style self-help culture and the cultural conflicts this creates in different national contexts. The self-help guru is an archetypical American figure associated with individualism, materialism and the American Dream. Nonetheless, the self-help industry is spreading globally, thriving in China and other seemingly unlikely places. Controversy follows in its wake, as the self-help industry, operating outside of formal education and state institutions, outflanks philosophical, religious and political elites who have their own visions of the Good Life. Through a comparison of Germany and China, Hendriks analyzes how the competition between self-help gurus and institutional authorities unfolds under radically different politico-cultural regimes.

“This witty book charms its way through a very serious sociology of the seriously quirky field of self-help books. Read it for its fascinating pop-culture insights and you’ll come away with a deep understanding of contemporary sociological theory. Highly recommended.” - Salvatore Babones, University of Sydney

“Hendriks’ finding that Germany rather than China is more resistant to self-help gurus offers a powerful corrective to the assumption in much of the globalization literature that the greatest cultural divide is between the Anglo-Western European sphere and the rest of the globe.” - Rodney Benson, New York University

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"Può dirmi qual è la differenza tra un terrorista e una persona comune?". È  questa la domanda che una donna rivolge a un poliziotto in un annuncio radio della campagna antiterrorismo della polizia di Londra.
In questi anni di cosiddetta "guerra al terrore", opinione pubblica, forze di sicurezza e politici si sono ritrovati spesso a porsi le stesse domande: chi è il nemico e che faccia ha? Contro chi stiamo combattendo? Chi sono i terroristi e come agiscono?
Il testo analizza la "guida spirituale" degli attentatori dell'11 settembre, le campagne antiterrorismo messe a punto dalla municipalità e dalla polizia di Londra dopo gli attacchi del 7 luglio 2005, e i modi in cui - con la caduta di Baghdad, l'uccisione di Bin Laden e con la cosiddetta Primavera araba - abbiamo cercato di immaginare, per questo “conflitto", una fine.




In anteprima l'indice e l'introduzione al volume, che può essere acquistato sul sito di Libreria Universitaria all'indirizzo: http://www.libreriauniversitaria.it/terrorismo-sicurezza-post-conflitto-salerno/libro/9788862922876

Mariam Ghani’s work locates her enquiries within art as a ‘place’ to navigate and re-construct multiple intersections of histories, images and the inherent collective consciousness held in memories. Ghani’s work as an Afghan American artist uses a multi-disciplinary “lens” as a way to think through some of the questions on the transient nature of identities. Working between a post-conflict Afghanistan and a post 9/11 United States, ‘futures’ are often manipulated – “truths” bear the burden of a dominant white hegemonic narrative. Ghani explores alternatives both through the phenomenological relationship of body and site as well as the construction of a re-imagined future, stemming from lost, erased and invisible histories.

This thesis examines identity work in the ongoing war in the Donbas region of Ukraine. It takes as its object of study a corpus of songs about the conflict representative of the key political and military actors involved: Ukraine, Russia and the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. Songs are examined using multimodal discourse analysis, with both their visual and musical elements considered, but with a special emphasis placed on the song lyrics. In the thesis, I begin with examining the songs at the level of ‘syntax’ – paying particular attention to how identity work is mobilized through history, language, and different approaches to constructing the image of the enemy – before tracing the coming together of these individual syntaxes into the prevalent ‘grammars’ of othering. I posit that two competing strategies or grammars are actively shaping identities of groups and individuals in the War in Donbas: circumstantialist othering, which distinguishes between friends and enemies on the basis of the specific conditions that prompted the division, and essentialist othering, which implies the existence of an inherent trait that unavoidably pits one group against the other. I contend that these two grammars of othering reflect two different world-view paradigms persisting in the communities that circulate the songs. I argue that the circumstantialist approach – as of early 2019, most commonly found in Ukrainian war songs – is aligned with a vision of complete disengagement as the desired outcome of the war. By contrast, the essentialist approach – now most commonly found in songs from Russia and the self-proclaimed republics – is associated with a messianic vision of the war, aiming for cultural and territorial expansion as a means of fulfilling a historical mission.

This paper outlines the context in which many thousands of people went missing in Timor-Leste between 1975 and 1999. The issues related to estimating the exact number of missing are discussed, followed by a review of the mechanisms implemented by the government and civil society since independence to attempt to examine and investigate the fate of missing persons. The paper then examines the technical issues involved with searching for the missing and the impact those issues have on the effectiveness of the implemented mechanisms. Further complexities related to scientific and religious and cultural beliefs when dealing with the missing are discussed. The paper concludes with questioning the to date ad hoc approach to the search for the missing in Timor-Leste, and providing suggestions for ways that the future search for the missing can realistically continue in light of other competing development priorities.

This article explores the link between processes  of democratic subjectification and truth commissions. Looking at the two truth commission projects that operated in Guatemala in the 1990s, it argues that these commissions can and have been used as important spaces for the articulation of political identity and thus  for making demands upon the future democratic society for the communities involved.

Since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 - the formal end-point of the thirty-year modern 'Troubles' - contemporary visual artists have offered diverse responses to post-conflict circumstances in Northern Ireland. In Ghost-Haunted Land - the first book-length examination of post-Troubles contemporary art - Declan Long highlights artists who have reflected on the ongoing anxieties of aftermath.

This wide-ranging study addresses developments in video, photography, painting, sculpture, performance and more, offering detailed analyses of key works by artists based in Ireland and beyond - including 2014 Turner Prize winner Duncan Campbell and internationally acclaimed filmmaker and photographer Willie Doherty. 'Post-Troubles' contemporary art is discussed in the context of both local transformations and global operations - and many of the main points of reference in the book come from broader debates about the place and purpose of contemporary art in today's world.

This article examines Australia's post-conflict reconstruction and development initiatives in Iraq following the intervention of 2003. Overall, it finds that Australia privileged the neo-liberal model of post-conflict state building by investing in projects that would enhance the capacity of the new Iraqi state, its key institutions and the private sector towards the imposition of a liberal democracy and a free-market economy. To demonstrate, this article documents the failures of the Australian government's stated aims to " support agriculture " and " support vulnerable populations " via interviews conducted in Iraq with rural farmers and tribal members and those working in, or the beneficiaries of, Iraq's disability sector. It concludes by noting that such failures are not only indicative of the inadequacy of the neo-liberal state building model, but also that these failures point the way forward for future post-conflict reconstruction and development projects which ought to be premised on a genuine and sustained commitment to addressing the needs of those made most vulnerable by war and regime change.

Of the many cultural artefacts which lay claim to representing the cultures they emanate from, music—especially within the Tibetan context—does it with great effect, because it straddles the realms of the sacred and secular with ease, and becomes a site where identity comes to be negotiated within the exile community. Building on this premise, this paper seeks to critically investigate an "incident" which has been reconstructed from the pages of the monthly journal 'Tibetan Review' for the months of May to October, 1982. It pertains to a particular performance which took place in the TIPA (Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts) auditorium that year when a 'local' Dharamsala rock band, comprising long-term British, Canadian and German residents, called the Vajra Hammer was invited to play a concert to commemorate the end of a six-month 'Enlightened Experience Celebration' organised by the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition, which sought to promote Buddhist teachings in the West. The concert, which saw the band performing to a packed crowd of Westerners and Tibetans " jumping up and down half the night, " was also attended by some of the monk initiates who had just completed this course alongside the many lay people in it. All was going to plan until, as columnist Tsering Wangyal puts it, " Tibetans looked in disbelief as a number of Western monks and nuns disrobed backstage, changed into T-shirts and jeans, and got on the dance floor with wild abandon " (Wangyal 1982, 11). News of this event spread across Dharamsala quickly, and the incident incited much excited comment in the Tibetan community, including criticism levelled against TIPA itself, for permitting such a " scandalous spectacle " to occur on campus. This article seeks to investigate the tensions of navigating the realms of sacred and secular practice –heightened by the fact of exile –which emerge from a close reading of this incident, and the heated debates it gave rise to within the exile and expat communities in Dharamsala.