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A Phone without Names

Distrust and Duress in Côte d’Ivoire

Kathrin Heitz-Tokpa

Abstract

The anthropology of war has provided intimate analyses of how communities deal with hardship in violent conflicts. These clearly affect such communities’ social fabric, but exactly how is little understood. This article uses the lens of trust and distrust to analyze the effects of violent conflict on social relations. Through an ethnographic case study of a nurse during the 2002–2011 violent conflict in Côte d’Ivoire, I show how his trust in social norms, political opponents, and strangers in general became transformed into distrust. He stopped saving names in his phone to protect himself and people in his phone. The case highlights how experiences of duress can create distrust and how distrust can prolong conditions of duress by hindering the rebuilding of social trust.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jan 2018
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
231–244 (14 total)
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Violence, Development, and Canada’s New Transnational Jurisprudence

Eliza Guyol-Meinrath Echeverry

Abstract

For decades, Canadian-based corporate development projects have been linked to acts of violence in countries all over the world. These acts include sexual violence, destruction of property, community displacement, the use of forced labor, and other forms of violence. While Canada has repeatedly failed to pass legislation holding Canadian-based corporations accountable for human rights abuses committed abroad, Canadian courts are increasingly asserting their jurisdiction over cases of development-related violence. Analyzing two ongoing court cases—Caal v. Hudbay, regarding sexual violence in Guatemala, and Araya v. Nevsun, regarding forced labor in Eritrea— this article examines the potential and limits of law to address the bureaucratic mechanisms and grounded experiences of corporate-development-related violence, and the changing relationship between states, corporations, law, and human rights in the modern global era.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jan 2018
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
167–185 (19 total)
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When the Outrage Becomes Personal, and the Urge to Act Unbearable

Therese Sandrup

Abstract

In this article, I draw on ethnographic data from previous fieldworks among Turkish immigrant families in a Norwegian suburb (2008–2009) and, more recently, on preventative actions against radicalization (2015–2016). As point of departure, I outline two events considered morally outrageous by many of my interlocutors: the Gaza War (2008–2009) and the repression of the Syrian civil uprising in 2011. By contextualizing moral outrage and analyzing certain incidents as “triggers” among people who are already outraged, I aim at providing a better understanding of that emotion’s generic power. I will also give an example of how a “trigger” incident can provide an emotional outlet. In seeing moral outrage as a kind of “prism” through which people negotiate values around right and wrong, good and bad, I will argue that these negotiations might as well result in generating emotional relief and to restored integrity.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jan 2018
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
74–84 (11 total)
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Along the Lines of the Occupation

Playing at Diminished Reality in East Jerusalem

Fabio Cristiano and Emilio Distretti

ABSTRACT

Augmented reality enables video game experiences that are increasingly immersive. For its focus on walking and exploration, Niantic’s location-based video game Pokémon Go (PG) has been praised for allowing players to foster their understanding and relationship to surrounding spaces. However, in contexts where space and movement are objects of conflicting narratives and restrictive policies on mobility, playing relies on the creation of partial imaginaries and limits to the exploratory experience. Departing from avant-garde conceptualizations of walking, this article explores the imaginary that PG creates in occupied East Jerusalem. Based on observations collected in various gaming sessions along the Green Line, it analyzes how PG’s virtual representation of Jerusalem legitimizes a status quo of separation and segregation. In so doing, this article argues that, instead of enabling an experience of augmented reality for its users, playing PG in East Jerusalem produces a diminished one.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jun 2017
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
130–143 (14 total)
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Book Reviews

Matthew Carey, Ida Nielsen Sølvhøj, Eve Monique Zucker, Younes Saramifar, and Louis Frankenthaler

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In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jun 2017
Article Type:
Book Review
Pages:
246–258 (13 total)
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Co-constituting Bodyguarding Practice through Embodied Reflexivity

Methodological Reflections from the Field

Paul Higate

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the training context of private military and security (PMS) contractors. The training they undergo varies considerably, though the majority of training providers offer instruction in how to work in armed close protection (CP) as so-called bodyguards of dignitaries or on convoy protection. Set against this backdrop, the article reports on two periods of ethnographic field research of armed CP training where the author trained as a bodyguard in the first, and played the role of dignitary in the second. The discussion notes the very particular ways in which security is co-constituted between training instructor, author, and student. Here, a form of embodied reflexivity is used to show how security is translated between actors. Acknowledging that security is mediated through time, space, and the body can help to explain the experiences of host populations whose security has at particular moments been jeopardized by these armed actors.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jun 2017
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
42–59 (18 total)
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Creative Intelligence and the Cold War

US Military Investments in the Concept of Creativity, 1945–1965

Bregje F. Van Eekelen

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the Cold War entanglements of the concept of “creativity” with the US military. The field of creativity studies came about after World War II, and the military was a vital site for the production of knowledge about creative thinking. Creativity emerged on the geopolitical radar, in terms of the acquisition of creative thinking skills, attempts to “think the unthinkable” (atomic futures), and the detection of creative citizens. Creative, divergent thinking garnered a renewed urgency with the Sputnik shock, which showcased that conformist practices in knowledge production would not put an American on the moon. Between 1945 and 1965, the concept of creativity—as something to be defined, measured, and stimulated—was framed as a matter of national security and an object of geopolitical concern. This ensuing traffic in knowledge between Cold War academic and military contexts has been constitutive of present-day understandings of creative, undisciplined thought.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jun 2017
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
92–107 (16 total)
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“Eyes, Ears, and Wheels”

Policing Partnerships in Nairobi, Kenya

Francesco Colona and Tessa Diphoorn

ABSTRACT

Research on policing in Africa has provided tremendous insight into how non-state actors, such as gangs, vigilantes, private security companies, and community initiatives, increasingly provide security for urban dwellers across the continent. Consequently, the state has been categorized as one order among many whose authority is co-constituted through relations with other actors. Drawing on our ethnographic fieldwork in the past two years, we highlight how the state police dominates security arrangements in Nairobi and asserts itself not just as one order among many. We show how, in various policing partnerships between police, private security companies, and residents’ associations, the state police acts as a coagulating agent of such practices. In order to elucidate this relationship, we utilize the “junior partner” model from the criminology literature and expand based on the community policing initiatives that in Nairobi act as the “eyes, ears, and wheels” of the police.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jun 2017
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
8–23 (16 total)
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Guarding the Body

Private Security Work in Rio de Janeiro

Erika Robb Larkins

ABSTRACT

Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the private security industry, this article focuses on the training of low-level guards, examining the centrality of the body and embodied experience to their work in hospitality settings. In a racially stratified society in which lower-class, dark-skinned bodies are often equated with poverty and criminality, security guards are required to perform an image of upstanding, respectable, law-abiding citizens in order to do their jobs protecting corporate property. Guards learn techniques of body management at security schools as part of their basic training. They also learn how to subdue the bodies of others, including those of white elites, who represent a constant challenge to their authority. Working from my own experiences as a student in private security schools, I argue for the relevance of an understanding of the body and its significations to private security work.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jun 2017
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
60–72 (13 total)
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Introduction

Ethnographies of Private Security

Erella Grassiani and Tessa Diphoorn

ABSTRACT

This introduction emphasizes the value of an anthropological lens within the research on private security. Although much scholarly work has been conducted on private security throughout the past decades, anthropological attention for this subject was somewhat delayed. Yet, the works that have emerged from this discipline through ethnographic fieldwork have provided new and diff erent types of insights, namely bottom-up understandings that explore the daily practices and performances of security and the experiences of the security actors themselves, that other disciplines can unquestionably draw from. As the introductory piece of this section, it also familiarizes the four articles that constitute various “ethnographies of private security.”

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jun 2017
Article Type:
Introduction
Pages:
1–7 (7 total)