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Introduction

The Social Life of Contentious Concepts

Ronald S. Stade

ABSTRACT

Concepts have cultural biographies and social lives. Some concepts become social and political keywords that can be both indicative of and instrumental in social and political conflicts. (It might even be possible to speak of conceptual violence.) But they are not just contentious; they also tend to be contested. Contentious and contested concepts have been studied by historians and social scientists from varying temporal and spatial horizons. It is a research area that lends itself to cross-disciplinary approaches, as is demonstrated in the three contributions to this section, the first of which investigates the Russian obsession with the concept of “Europe.” The second contribution to the section explores the military roots of the concept of “creative thinking” and the final contribution examines the social life of “political correctness” as a fighting word.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jun 2017
Article Type:
Introduction
Pages:
73–77 (5 total)
Free access

Introduction

The Digital Age Opens Up New Terrains for Peace and Conflict Research

Josepha Ivanka Wessels

ABSTRACT

The arrival of the Digital Age added a new way to preserve memories of war and conflict. These developments beg deeper reflection on the role of cyberspace and how memories of conflict have become publicly and collectively owned, shared and mediated in the digital space. Cyberspace offers a context for the deposit of digital memorials for victims and casualties of war from any adversary in a conflict. The final workshop in a three-part exploratory series entitled Virtual Zones of Peace and Conflict is the basis for this special section, which deals with digital memory. The three articles were selected because they reflect on the role of the Digital Age in peace and conflict studies, and specifically focus on the intersection between online (virtual) and offline (physical) realities and how cyberspace forms an enabling environment for digital memorializations.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jun 2017
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
125–129 (5 total)
Restricted access

The Many Faces of the State

Living in Peace and Conflict in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh

Nasir Uddin and Eva Gerharz

ABSTRACT

Reconsidering the trend in anthropology to conceptualize the multifaceted nature of the state and to focus on the local social dynamics beneath the institutional framework of the state, we argue that “state” is not a single governing entity but rather a multilayered body of practices at various levels of the society. We configure “state” as constructed, imagined, and negotiated by people in their everyday life in four dimensions: zones of limited statehood depicted as “peripheries,” “local state” by which the center governs locales, “public discourse” that represents dominant notions of “stateness,” and ambivalent positioning of political elites who represents state in the margin. This argument is substantiated with the reference to the case of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, a southeastern part of Bangladesh.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jun 2017
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
208–226 (19 total)
Restricted access

Military Violence in Its Own Right

The Microsocial Foundations of Physical Military Violence in Noncombat Situations

Nir Gazit and Eyal Ben-Ari

ABSTRACT

In this article, we use the case of the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian territories to offer a microsociological analysis of military violence in noncombat situations. Utilizing the insights of Randall Collins, we suggest that in order understand these encounters, the emotional dimensions of violent behaviors must be linked to the interactional dynamics that trigger the transformation of these emotions into violent actions. We review the emotional configurations that characterize military occupations and discuss a range of violent behaviors initiated by these emotions. Finally, our analysis goes beyond the microsociological level to complement Collins’s model by showing the trans-situational implications of our analysis. We focus on the emergence of violence leaders (the “violent few”), the importance of actual and real audiences, and the development of a violent military habitus.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jun 2017
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
189–207 (19 total)
Restricted access

Palestine

A Protracted Peacebuilding Process

Emile Badarin

ABSTRACT

This article explores the theoretical bases of the Israel-Palestine peace process to see how that impacts peacebuilding and everyday life in Palestine. It begins by examining the lens through which classical and contemporary realist and liberal thought approaches peace, nonpeace, war, and peacebuilding. Second, it examines how knowledge production on peacebuilding has been applied in the Israel-Palestine peace process based on selected confidential documents from the negotiations’ record that was made available in the so-called Palestine Papers published by the Al Jazeera Transparency Unit in 2011. My analysis of this source reveals how an embedded security and market metaphor regulated the Israel-Palestine peace negotiations. I argue that in an ambiguous context of decades-long negotiations, the results are in effect a “buyout” in which security is understood in exclusionary terms by the powerful side.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jun 2017
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
227–245 (19 total)
Restricted access

Recapturing the Lost

Digitalized Memories of the Rhodesian Bush War

Ane Marie Ørbø Kirkegaard

ABSTRACT

Rhodesians occupy a very specific digitalized time-space bubble at the very edges of a margin that researchers think of as “past” In this study, I trace the memorization of the Rhodesian Bush War on YouTube, of what it was like to fight for a dream and see it crumble in an isolated and highly racialized society. Through narrative analysis focusing on identity formation and social networks of relationships, a militaryromantic story of racialized masculine heroism, suffering and sacrifice is pieced together, forming a globally shared Rhodesian space-time bubble of meaningfulness, making it an active part of the present as much as a remnant of the past.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jun 2017
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
144–167 (24 total)
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Russia’s Return as True Europe, 1991–2017

Iver B. Neumann

ABSTRACT

Since the reign of Peter the Great, Russia has identified itself in opposition to Europe. In the late 1980s, Michael Gorbachev and associates forged a liberal representation of Europe and initiated a Western-oriented foreign policy. Against this westernizing or liberal representation of Europe stood what was at first a makeshift group of old Communists and right-wing nationalists, who put forward an alternative representation that began to congeal around the idea that the quintessentially Russian trait was to have a strong state. This article traces how this latter position consolidated into a full-fledged xenophobic nationalist representation of Europe, which marginalized first other forms of nationalism and then, particularly since 2013, liberal representations of Europe. The official Russian stance is now that Russia itself is True Europe, a conservative great power that guards Europe’s true Christian heritage against the False Europe of decadence and depravity to its west.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jun 2017
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
78–91 (14 total)
Restricted access

Shadow Soldiering

Shifting Constellations and Permeable Boundaries in “Private” Security Contracting

Maya Mynster Christensen

ABSTRACT

Contemporary warfare depends on private security contractors from countries in the Global South. In Sierra Leone, this dependency has produced emerging markets for private military and security companies (PMSCs) seeking to recruit cheap, military-experienced labor. This article explores how demobilized militia and soldiers in Sierra Leone negotiate categorical divides to make themselves employable for private security contracting in Iraq. Based on 19 months of fieldwork tracing militia soldiers as they move between shifting security constellations, the article introduces the notion of “shadow soldiering” to explain the entanglements of public-private spheres and the blurring of boundaries between the visible and invisible that characterize these constellations. While scholarly work on PMSCs has increasingly highlighted the public-private interconnectedness, the article contributes an ethnographically informed perspective on how security contractors on the ground interpret such entanglements and how global security dynamics intersects with the local, everyday practices and processes that facilitate the supply of contractors.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jun 2017
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
24–41 (18 total)
Restricted access

The Social Life of Fighting Words

The Case of Political Correctness

Ronald S. Stade

ABSTRACT

Political correctness has become a fighting word used to dismiss and discredit political opponents. The article traces the conceptual history of this fighting word. In anthropological terms, it describes the social life of the concept of political correctness and its negation, political incorrectness. It does so by adopting a concept-inmotion methodology, which involves tracking the concept through various cultural and political regimes. It represents an attempt to synthesize well-established historiographic and anthropological approaches. A Swedish case is introduced that reveals the kind of large-scale historical movements and deep-seated political conflicts that provide the contemporary context for political correctness and its negation. Thereupon follows an account of the conceptual history of political correctness from the eighteenth century up to the present. Instead of a conventional conclusion, the article ends with a political analysis of the current rise of fascism around the world and how the denunciation of political correctness is both indicative of and instrumental in this process.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jun 2017
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
108–124 (17 total)
Restricted access

Space of Hope for Lebanon’s Missing

Promoting Transitional Justice through a Digital Memorial

Erik Van Ommering and Reem el Soussi

ABSTRACT

This article explores how a digital memorial for forcibly disappeared persons contributes to transitional justice in Lebanon. It presents the joint establishment of an interactive digital memorial by a collective of nongovernmental organizations, relatives of missing persons, and youth volunteers. The case study is situated in debates on transitional justice, calls for democratization of collective memories and archives, and discussions on new information and communication technologies. The article demonstrates how the development and launch of Fushat Amal (Space for Hope) is shaped and confined by postwar sociopolitical realities that are all but favorable to memorialization or justice-seeking initiatives. It highlights how digitalized memories can open up spaces that remain closed in the offline world, enabling survivors to share their stories, build collectives, demand recognition, and advocate for justice. At the same time, the authors discuss the limitations of digital memorials in relation to questions of access, ownership, and sustainability.

Cover Conflict and Society

In  Conflict and Society

Published (Print):
01 Jun 2017
Article Type:
Research Article
Pages:
168–188 (21 total)