Moving Memory: Remembering Palestine in Postdictatorship Chile. By Siri Schwabe. Cornell University Press, 2023. 120 pp. Paperback. ISBN: 9781501770647

In recent years, there has been a growing scrutinization of the rather homogenous accounts of diaspora communities and of the importance in understanding how diaspora identities and their subtleties are shaped by their embedment within different geographies. The Palestinian diaspora(s) have been approached by many scholars from a variety of perspectives, and even the idea of describing Palestinian communities across the world as diaspora has been problematized (Peteet 2007). The result has been an increase in rigorous ethnographic scholarship which has helped to deepen our understanding of the many Palestinian diasporic formulations, from Anaheed Al-Hardan's Palestinians in Syria (2016) to Andreas Hackl's The Invisible Palestinians. These books, with which Schwabe's work firmly fits, add to the understanding of how differences of education, geography, and social class all contribute to how Palestinian identity has evolved. Within this body of work, Schwabe's book offers a new and interesting perspective: specifically, how Palestinian diaspora identity is mobilized and shaped within a postdictatorship society.

From the opening, it is clear how descriptive Schwabe's work will be, transporting readers to Santiago through marches during Operation Protective Edge (the 2014 Gaza War Israeli Occupation Force's military operation launched on 8 July 2014) or wandering the streets of Patronato (Barrio Patronato in Santiago is often described as “Little Palestine”, due to the vast number of Palestinian families who moved to the area in 1910 and opened shops) with her interlocutors. The book prompts an affective reading of a well-known, but sparsely documented complex and dynamic Palestinian diaspora in Chile. Additionally, the author makes an important conceptual intervention for scholars of memory studies to engage with, specifically her coining of the term “moving memory.” Schwabe conceptualizes “moving memory” to understand how “memory transcends distances across and beyond borders via dynamic processes of remembrance and oblivion that in turn display affective facets and have stark political implications” (20).

The book is structured in five chapters. Chapter one, “Together Apart”, seeks to outline the social and historical factors that have contributed to the Palestinian presence in Santiago; chapter two, “Staging the Past”, focuses on the paradoxical memory relationships that fracture and complicate Palestinian life in Santiago. Schwabe argues that memory in this community goes beyond Marianne Hirsch's (2008) famous conceptualization of “postmemory,” whereby memory simply moves between generations (post-generations), but instead can move across and beyond borders. Chapter three, “Uneasy Absences”, explores the memories that are “unmoving” within the Palestinian community in Chile and the uneasiness of the (post)dictatorship narratives. Chapter four, “Where Memory Moves”, takes a more spatial focus and explores the particular places and spaces of Palestinians in Santiago. The last chapter, “Seeing and Believing”, looks at political mobilization and demonstration in the wake of Operation Protective Edge.

One of the vital contributions of Schwabe's book is how it deepens our understanding of the largest Palestinian diaspora in South America, a community often spoken about as though it is a solidified unit. However, this book helpfully expands our understanding of the community to show how the fracturing effect of local Chilean politics interacts with the more unifying effect of transnational Palestinian politics. The book produces an understanding of a Palestinian community with a plurality of cultural memories.

I take there to be two significant contributions from Schwabe's book: firstly, grounded, ethnographic research provides an understanding of the Palestinian community in Chile as struggling to deal with the disunity within the community. Secondly, her conceptualization of “moving memory” can be used to understand how “memory transcends distances across and beyond borders via dynamic processes of remembrance and oblivion that in turn display affective facets and have stark political implications” (2023: 20). These stark political implications influence both engagement with the Palestinian community in Chile, specifically Santiago, as well as mobilization for la causa (the Palestinian cause). “Moving memory” will be a helpful concept for scholars who work with diasporic and exilic communities.

This plurality of cultural memories is vital to fully understand the unique configuration of the Palestinian-Chilean community. While a vast literature looked at how remembering the loss of the homeland and the telling of this loss in exile are key to expressing the continuity of al-Nakba in the Palestinian present, cultural memories are also vital in the construction of a collective Palestinian identity. However, unlike many other large Palestinian communities, like those seen in Jordan or Lebanon, for example, the Palestinian community in Chile is different in its migration story. The community, founded predominantly by Christian Palestinians from Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Beit Sahour, migrated over a century ago, pre-dating the al-Nakba, and could be best described as formed by economic migrants. This long history in Chile has meant that the community now reaches over half a million, many of whom are third-, fourth-, and fifth-generation Palestinian. The result is a predominantly Christian Palestinian community that is now part of the Chilean elite and an important part of the country's political sphere across all spectrums. As such, for most of the community, memories of al-Nakba were never lived. It is because of this, that Schwabe's intervention through her coining of the term “moving memory” becomes even more strikingly interesting, as the never-lived memories move beyond the dictatorship period lived by the community. Schwabe shows how recalling memories (and stories) of al-Nakba, as well as those that focus on the violent implications of a settler-occupation of Palestine, are used to continuously (re)connect Palestinians in Chile not only to Palestine and the Palestinian cause but also to the community within Chile itself. Each chapter of Schwabe's book analyses this reconnection within the different memory spaces, such as the Palestinian social club (Club Palestino), as well as in solidarity marches in Santiago. In exploring these moving memories, Schwabe uncovers the “unmoving” memories—those predominantly related to the Pinochet dictatorship of 1973–1990, because of the destabilizing effect it has on unity within the Palestinian diaspora in Chile. While chapter three explores these seemingly unmoving memories, the book still leaves space for further work on this. It feels as though the impact of the haunting presence of the Chilean dictatorship period on the Palestinian community or the Chilean political dynamics between the Mapuche and Palestinian (lack of) solidarity are not fully delved into. The topics were clearly part of the ethnographic findings but did not have the same level of analysis as other aspects. This would have been a critical additional chapter.

This book is an original and important study of Palestinian cultural memories because it showcases how, while the transnational cultural memory of al-Nakba is constantly “moving” and thus is mobilized to shape the Palestinian community in Chile, this is contrasted with the seemingly “unmoving” memories of local Chilean politics, and particularly those regarding the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. The book feels particularly timely in understanding current mobilization in Santiago in the aftermath of October 7, and I wonder whether this may be the unifying force to move beyond the ruptures within the Palestinian community due to the haunting dictatorship period, as well as the aftermath of the 2019 Chilean protests—a key Chilean political moment that happened after Schwabe's ethnography concluded.

Reviewed by Eleri Connick

The University of Amsterdam e.connick@uva.nl

The Invisible Palestinians: The Hidden Struggle for Inclusion in Jewish Tel Aviv. By Andreas Hackl. Indiana University Press, 2022. 230 pp. Paperback ISBN: 9780253060839.

In Zionist discourse, the question “Why don't they move on?” is recurrent regarding Palestinian grievances. While scholars such as Elizabeth Povinelli (2011), Ghassan Hage (2011), and Audra Simpson (2014) demonstrate the forces impeding indigenous and racialized peoples’ possibility to strive and create a better future for themselves and their communities, Andreas Hackl's book illuminates a different perspective and describes the challenges of indigenous Palestinians in their attempts to immerse themselves in the “big city” of Tel Aviv.

The book examines different Palestinian groups with different statuses. It mainly looks into middle- and upper-class Palestinian citizens of Israel, accessing professional and educational opportunities, striving for personal freedom, anonymity, and social mobilization (chapters 2 to 6), but compares these with unskilled Palestinian labor commuters from the occupied West Bank who do not enjoy the privileges of having Israeli citizenship, and are forced to seek employment in Tel Aviv due to lack of job opportunities in the West Bank (mainly chapters 1 and 3). One other group the book sheds light on is young, unmarried, and queer Palestinians trying to enjoy the city's liberal leisure culture hoping to realize individual freedom and desires (chapter 4).

Focusing on these Palestinians’ attempts to immerse in the “liberal” Jewish settler-colonial city built on the ruins of its Palestinian past, Hackl's book exposes the Palestinian experience of conditional inclusion. To immerse in the urban space of Tel Aviv and its economy, Palestinian citizens of Israel must adopt practices of political and social invisibility, what Hackl terms “immersive invisibility.” This invisibility comes into play in different socio-political constraints, calling forth the masking of the Palestinian identity, accepting the hegemonic Jewish culture, downplaying the Arabic language, and concealing political stances.

The book reveals how middle- and upper-class Palestinians negotiate their access to jobs, careers, or urban leisure by shedding off indicators of their Palestinian identity. They hope to achieve unmarked anonymity and to enjoy urban life. Still, they find themselves torn between contradictory demands: the liberal dictum for individuality and the demand to manage their visibility as Palestinians. Or the pragmatic need to prioritize their social mobility and professional success and claim equality and recognition. These dilemmas are also apparent when managing political invisibility. Palestinian professionals must moderate their political activity and not voice political dissent as part of their conditional inclusion. They are expected to meet the demand of being “good” hard-working “Arabs,” although they always remain potentially “bad.”

Tel Aviv's appeal to Palestinian citizens and non-citizens is not only to seek work and education but also to have fun and spend leisure time. Hackl demonstrates how partaking in the night scene of Tel Aviv requires regulating their visibility to the Jewish society as well as the Palestinian one. Hence, invisibility and anonymity come up as both a tool for realizing individual freedom and desires and a product of systematic racialization, exclusion, and marginalization. This is true not only for those trying to enjoy the nightlife or the liberal characteristics of the city but also when it comes to asserting the Palestinian culture in the urban settler-colonial space. Cultural initiatives depend on Israeli funding and, therefore, demand a lot of compromises. Again, the need to manage invisibility calls for resolving the tension between contradicting poles: the need and the political commitment to create spaces for the expression of Palestinian identity and culture and the economic dependency on Israeli institutions, the awareness of orientalization and “self-orientalization” of the Palestinian culture, the will to partake in the Israeli urban life, and feelings of estrangement from the Israeli hegemonic culture of fun.

The book, therefore, delves into the tactics of “immersive invisibility” and their implications in different aspects of the life of middle- and upper-class Palestinian students and professionals. However, as Hackl demonstrates, compared with middle- and upper-class Israeli Palestinians’ tactics of invisibility, unskilled Palestinian labor commuters from the West Bank are deprived of the advantages the city can offer. They are used and abused by the settler-colonial differential regime as cheap working bodies and are, hence, structurally invisible and economically dependent on the city's economy.

The book exposes the fragile and temporary character of Palestinians’ ability to immerse themselves in settler-colonial urban space. It also explores the political meaning Palestinian professionals allocate to their tactic of invisibility despite its friability. Hackl refers to the perception of the actor and musician Mira Awad regarding “personal achievement as a revolution” (133) and adds that such success stories are often co-opted and serve as a fig leaf to testify to Israel's democracy. Hackl claims that the need of Palestinians for anonymity mirrors the oppressive, indigeneity-abolishing, exclusive, racialized settler-colonial regime inherent to the urban space but also refers to anonymity as a Jewish privilege and as a sought-after Palestinian tactic whose failure could lead to dangerous consequences. The author describes moments when the liberal bubble of Tel Aviv bursts and reveals the impossibility of the conditional inclusion of Palestinians. Moments when, in the blink of an eye, the immersive, invisible, “good Arab” becomes “bad.” Hackl's book refers to a few such events. One is following the 2014 conflict in Gaza when Palestinian professional workers were either fired or threatened with dismissal for posting their stances on social media. Another arose with the events of May 2021, in which yet another surge of violence in Gaza was followed by widespread confrontations in Israel and the occupied territories. Palestinians protested in mixed Jewish-Arab towns such as Tel Aviv-Jaffa. At the same time, armed Jewish far-right Israelis moved into the cities to attack Palestinians, encouraged by Israel's public security minister. Reviewing this book amid the unprecedented current surge of violence evokes thoughts of a rupture that may not be bridged. Although the 2021 confrontations did not reoccur after the October 7th events and the following brutal attack on Gaza, the Jewish Israeli reaction to the October 7th events involved a combination of both bottom-up and top-down calls for persecutions of Palestinians. Jewish armed civil First Response Teams (Kitot Konenut) were created in Israeli cities, towns, and settlements around the country and in the West Bank. A wave of denunciations of Palestinian citizens accused of being Hamas supporters resulted in work dismissals, arrests, and harassment of Palestinian citizens. Students, nurses, doctors, teachers, and political and cultural figures were denounced by their Jewish colleagues or fellow students and were fired and even arrested.

Hence, when the bubble bursts, the individual practice of “immersive invisibility” fails for Palestinians as a whole, citizens and non-citizens, professionals, and unskilled workers. However, although this is not the scope of this book, it would have been interesting for Hackl to address the effect of invisibility management on the Palestinian society as a whole. The differential meaning of invisibility between Palestinian citizens and non-citizens is explored, but its impact on the possibility of political solidarity or shared political aspirations and future visions is still to be further studied (see for example Bishara, 2022). Lastly, the Israeli sociological and anthropological corpus of literature examines the way different communities, such as Mizrahi, Ethiopian, or post-Soviet Jews, must negotiate their assimilation in similar ways as those exposed in this book. However, Palestinian tactics of “immersive invisibility” between and during “bubble burst moments” and their effect on Palestinian citizens and non-citizens exemplify how the so-called liberal urban space continues to erase the Palestinian presence. Or, as Andreas Hackl puts it, “the exclusion of Palestinians lies at the core of what the city is and always has been. Its liberalism was never meant to include the Palestinians” (182).

Reviewed by Livnat Konopny Decleve

British Academy International Fellow

The University of Edinburgh livnat.decleve@ed.ac.uk

Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon. By Maya Mikdashi. Stanford University Press, 2022. 288 pp. Hard cover. ISBN 978-1-5036-2887-8.

Sextarianism is a unique scholarly work of such intellectual rigor that it ought to be mandatory reading for scholars and students of the Middle East, anthropology, law, political science, and sociology. The book gives a new perspective on sex, sect and, the state in Lebanon—but its findings can also be applied to understanding other sextarian states such as Iraq. Sextarianism opens up a fascinating new way of understanding the intersections of sect, sex, and sexuality in relation to freedom, abuses of power, citizenship, and the state.

Drawing from the author's experiences in Lebanon, interviews, and stories from and surrounding the archives, Sextarianism is meticulously documented and well-written. This ethnography of Lebanon primarily delves into material from the archive of Lebanon's highest court, the Plenary Assembly. The author uncovers how “state power articulates, disarticulates, and manages sexual difference bureaucratically, ideologically, and legally.” Mikdashi coins the term “sextarianism” and defines it as “how sex, sexuality and sect structure legal bureaucratic systems, as well as how citizenship and statecraft are performed at the mutually constitutive intersections and suffusions between sex and sect.”

Sextarianism shows how intersectional experience and power distribution are at the center of state power. The book's contribution is both as a theory and method; sextarianism helps us understand how rule through categories distributes property, sex, race, and law. Most importantly, it shows us the immense inequalities embedded in a sextarian system and the agency of those who circumvent it by converting to maintain their interests, such as in the case of a divorce or an inheritance for a child. Furthermore, it reveals the banality of religious categories when they are assigned by the state—a sextarian system depletes religion of any meaningful spiritual value. It reveals a postcolonial state of disconnectedness and artificial and forced belongings created and managed by a biopolitical system of abuses of women, refugees, and queer people.

Mikdashi states that the book began in 2003 in Iraq, where the occupation-appointed Iraqi Governing Council had just been announced; it was an attempt to bring a Lebanese model based on sectarianism to Iraq. The author found it disturbing that the assumption was that people in Iraq had identities as opposed to politics or ideological affiliations and that it was, rightfully so, doomed to fail just as in Lebanon.

Mikdashi's life experiences and transparency in how access was gained to the archives give depth to the analysis of sextarianism, which is further enriched with fascinating life stories found in the archives.

The first chapter, “Archives of a Census: Rethinking State Power and Political Difference,” sheds light on sextarianism in Lebanon and how there is no practice of sectarianism, sovereignty, or citizenship that is not related to sexual difference. The author's contribution is based on three critical aspects of personal status and its relation to the regulation of sexual difference: (1) personal status laws produce and manage sexuality as heterosexuality; (2) personal status laws are a critical component of larger secular systems of law; and (3) personal status laws produce political difference through tying and untying the knot of sect and society.

The second chapter, “A Fire in the Archive: History, Ethnography, Multiplicity,” recollects how a fire during the civil war affected the archive in Lebanon while highlighting that archival destruction is a part of Middle Eastern reality. For instance, the Iraqi state archives were removed by the US occupation forces and placed in Qatar. Moreover, the PLO archives were removed from Beirut and moved to Tel Aviv. Hence, archival replacement and destruction are part of a postcolonial reality that the decolonial researcher ought to engage with. Mikdashi does that in detail; the reader is let into the building of the archives, the life of the archivist, and how access was given to the archives, all while the author openly and convincingly situates herself in the context and the subject of sextarianism. The theoretical reflections of the author, combined with a deep knowledge of sextarianism create a valuable scholarly work that opens a unique understanding of Lebanese society.

The third chapter, “Regulating Conversion: Sovereignty, Bureaucracy, and the Banality of Religion,” starts with an ethnographic description of how the author's mother, having married in the US, converted from Christianity to Sunni Islam in Lebanon in order to be able to inherit from her husband. As long as she was registered as a Christian by the Lebanese state, she was not able to inherit from her Muslim husband. The reader is taken into the meeting with the sheikh, where the conversion took place. The author´s legal knowledge helped smooth the process of her mother´s conversion. Thereafter, fees were paid for the conversion; it ought to be added that neither of the author's parents are religious. It is a story among many that perfectly illustrates the banality of conversions in a sextarian system, ultimately the result of secularism's management of religious differences. The archives that are being examined are full of these stories, including failed ones, where conversions are used in order to protect assets in a system that is sectarian and based on patrilineal inheritance.

The fourth chapter, “Are You Going to Pride? Evangelical Secularism and the Politics of Law,” further interrogates the role of secularism in Lebanon in what the author calls evangelical secularism. It explores the movement of Laique Pride where protesters in 2010 demanded a Lebanese secular personal status law. Marchers carried messages such as “What is my sect? None of your business!” and “I want to be president of the Republic. Should I convert to Christianity?” Mikdashi describes evangelical secularism as relying on the belief that individuals should transcend sectarian attachments to become modern secular citizens of the nation and that the failure to do so was personalized. Evangelical secularism is understood as a relationship between secularism and biopolitics and as a practice of an identitarian category.

The fifth chapter, “The Epidermal State: Violence and the Materiality of Power,” deals with state power and sexual difference by examining hymen and anal exams together in Lebanon rather than as separate moments of sexism, racism, classism, or homophobia. Hence, Mikdashi reveals biopolitical power's production of sexual difference, abuses of power, and how sexual difference, in turn, mediates state power. In the book, the hymen and anal exams exemplify the epidermal state, which is a state that performs its sovereignty by materializing bodies through securitization, violence, and the law. While anal exams are now banned (but still being used), hymen exams have not been framed by the Lebanese state as torture or a form of violence—exemplifying how the sextarianism system targets women.

The book ends with a description of the author walking home in Beirut without electricity and the statement, “so many endings, and not an end in sight.” As a reader, one can relate to the feeling of hopelessness, but I was also left wanting more of Mikdashi´s analysis of possible solutions and alternatives to the sextarian system and evangelical secularism. Hopefully, Mikdashi will add this important aspect in future work.

Reviewed by Evin Ismail

evin.ismail@fhs.se

Swedish Defence University, Sweden

Syria Divided: Patterns of Violence in a Complex Civil War. By Ora Szekely. Columbia University Press, 2023. 278pp. Paperback. ISBN: 978-0-231-20539-9

Syria Divided explores the narratives of civilians and combatants in the Syrian civil war and examines how these competing accounts shape the dynamics of the conflict, especially through performative violence. The book focuses on the armed conflict that began in 2011 with a civilian uprising against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It traces not only the regime's narrative but also those of other prominent nonstate actors, including Kurdish forces, ISIS, and the armed opposition. Szekely charts the competing explanations of the parties in the conflict to underscore how the struggle for control over the narrative influenced the priorities of combatants, even when there was no apparent military objective. The patterns of violence in Syria's civil war, Szekely argues, can also take on a performative nature, particularly in instances involving filmed attacks on civilians.

The book's central argument is that there is a striking disjuncture between the “real” explanations for why an actor claims to be fighting for in Syria and its actual adversaries on the ground, emphasizing that “winning the war sometimes means first winning the argument” (p. 194) against actors presenting competing narratives. Combatants’ use of violence directed at both civilians and armed targets, not only in the case of Syria, could also serve as a means to communicate with their audiences, effectively becoming “a violent kind of storytelling” (p. 19). Social media such as YouTube, Facebook, Telegram were used as tools to spread far and wide the groups’ propaganda for recruitment, attract international donors and display threats to adversaries. This opens up discussions surrounding performative violence and military decision-making: do “commanders choose targets or tactics that could produce particularly impressive footage [. . .] actions they might have otherwise avoided?” (p. 179).

This insightful and skilfully written book, based on semi-structured interviews with Syrians from diverse religious groups, former members of the Free Syrian Army, members of the opposition, Kurdish Syrians, supporters of the Syrian government, locate combatants’ and civilians’ narratives of the war. Then, Szekely takes the propaganda material (in print and video) distributed by all the warring sides of the war and meticulously connects the rhetoric of each combatant in Syria, presenting a careful account of the narrative used in different points of the Syrian Civil War. The presentation of these materials is contextualized and managed in a way that the reader can easily grasp how the various actors employed the documented violence to achieve specific goals and reach political and civilian audiences.

Syria Divided is structured around four chapters introducing the participants and their roles in the Syrian civil war, followed by a thorough examination of the reasons why each participant is invested in the conflict and how these reasons are manifested as a performance in their propaganda materials. The most ground-breaking and rigorously researched chapters, 3 and 4, examine the relation between a group's narrative and its military objectives, illustrating how the “YouTube war” of violent state and nonstate actors is equivalent to what Charles Tilly describes as the “contentious performance” of social movements aiming to “demonstrate the worthiness of the cause, the movement's unity and numbers, and the commitment of its members” (157). Szekely, relying on conflict data, documents the violence against civilians by the Syrian government (132–135), the opposition (136–139), ISIS (139–142) and the Kurdish forces (142–144) showing how, especially in the cases of the regime and ISIS, the targets of violence served propaganda purposes to legitimize their overall narratives. While their military targeting runs counter to these narratives, propaganda materials are created and aimed at reinforcing a specific image, even if they jeopardize military victories or reveal the location of a group to an adversary. This observation is further examined in chapter 4, focusing on the social media battlefield, and showcasing how violence is used as propaganda to convey messages. For example, videos produced by ISIS emphasize “ISIS's power relative to its adversaries” (177) and can serve as a form of “trolling” against states and human rights groups. One of the book's greatest achievements is to untangle the political and strategic use of propaganda videos by placing each group's narrative in the context of the conflict.

Providing a concise history of the conflict and juxtaposing the competitive narratives of the combatants, chapters 1 and 2 paint a nuanced picture of 12 years of conflict, outlining the struggle over explaining what this war is “really about”. Configuring five main narratives as they were understood by Syrians and as they were communicated by the groups—dignity and democracy (mostly used by the Free Syrian Army and the Democratic Union Party), sectarianism (used by a plethora of actors such as ISIS, Jabhat al-Nursa, Ahrar al-Sham and other Islamist groups), containing terrorism (Assad regime's way of explaining the conflict to domestic and external audiences), ethnonational identities and the proxy warfare narrative. Szekely compellingly shows that these almost “strategic narratives” (74) act as the raison d’ être of the parties in the Syria conflict, justifying their performative use of violence to audiences both within and outside the country.

Syria Divided draws upon nearly 50 interviews with Syrians conducted by the author, mostly in Arabic and English, primarily in person in Berlin, Germany. The voices of Syrians, as they experienced and remember the war, are consistently heard in key places throughout the book, reinforcing the significance of narratives for Syrian audiences living at home or abroad. While the majority of the interviewees are not supporters of the Assad regime, Szekely openly reflects on the challenges of getting in touch with strong supporters of the regime, finding an alternative by conducting around 30 anonymous surveys using her most common interview questions with those that identify as supporters of the regime. Excerpts from interviews are seamlessly interwoven with propaganda material from YouTube, conflict data, and a large body of published work. These voices, especially in the conclusion that speaks about the future of Syria, enrich the book's considerable breadth, capturing the humanity of the interviewees: “Some people miss Syria. Love to go to Syria.” (201, Syrian woman from Latakia).

Szekely's writing is effortless and compelling, each party of the conflict is studied with rigorous scrutiny, placing them into the perspective of other participants. Readers are never lost in the competing narratives, as each chapter develops in a similar logic, allowing readers to go back and forth and trace each actor individually throughout the book. Syria Divided will prove to be an enduring reference point for social scientists and ethnographers working on Syria.

Reviewed by Natalia Tellidou

University of Muenster, visiting fellow, Germany natalia.tellidou@eui.eu

Central European University, external fellow, Hungary

Waves of Upheaval in Myanmar: Gendered Transformations and Political Transitions. By Jenny Hedström and Elisabeth Olivius, eds., 2022. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. ISBN 978-87-7694-323-3; Hardback GBP 70; Paperback GBP 22,50.

The authors of Waves of Upheaval, activists and academics from different career stages, illuminate in a detailed manner women's perspectives on everyday challenges since the first semi-civil government in Myanmar in 2011. The authors converse with each other through their contributions grounded in participant and archival research on women's lived experience. By bringing several perspectives on the three main topics—policy making, mobility, and labor—into conversation with each other, they convey to the reader a nuanced insight into the everyday realities and struggles of Myanmar women since 2011. Using gender as the primary analytical category, which intersects with race, religion, and class, the authors shed light onto blind spots within the international scholarly literature on Myanmar. This is a novelty, since most of the anthropological literature written by English-speaking scholars is centered around ethnicity and religion as the primary analytical categories.

The chapters on “Transitional Politics, Institutions and Policymaking” cover analyses of the institutionalized sexism which denies women political positions of power. In the last decade, policymaking around gender-based violence has been analyzed by Aye Thiri Kyaw as not necessarily serving women's safety but as an instrument to maintain patriarchal power clusters, especially around the Tatmadaw—the official armed forces. This maintenance of patriarchal power starts already in elementary school. As we learn in the chapter by Rosalie Metro on gender roles and how schoolbooks reproduce them, gender stereotypes are re-produced by state education through textbooks edited by the Ministry of Education. The textbooks analyzed by Metro reproduce sexist social structures of “gender harmony”. Gender equality is only tackled on the surface. These first chapters deal with the state and the military as a patriarchal power cluster and the challenges for women as individual and collective political actors.

The chapters on “Feminist Mobilization, Resistance and Movement Building” deal with feminist activism and peacebuilding. They analyze intersectional discrimination, whereby women are not only disadvantaged through their sex but also through race, class, ability, and other categories. Although the agendas of several women's organizations, like the Karen Women's Organization, promote ethnic rights and gender equality, they are still located in a militarized, male-dominated environment, where gender equality is either not a priority or not acknowledged as a field for improvement. The chapters that especially caught my attention are two transcribed conversations with women revolutionary leaders who reflect on the challenges they must deal with. One of these conversations is held between Zin Mar Phyo and Mi Sue Pwint. Mi Sue Pwint talks about the challenges of being a woman, becoming a leader and at the same time becoming a mother. Mi Sue Pwint, one of the leaders of the All-Burma Students’ Democratic Front and one of the founders of the Women's League of Burma and the Burmese Women's Union, reflects on her personal history. She was a student activist who participated in the 1988 Uprising and became a revolutionary leader in the aftermath; she also gave birth to a disabled child in a rebel camp in the jungle. Mi Sue Pwint reflects on the time and effort it took her to become aware of and deconstruct structural sexism and misogyny. In her elaborations, she also reflects on her male colleagues, who excluded her on purpose from decision-making processes. After Mi Sue Pwint gave birth in the jungle, she had to figure out how to balance her politics and parental labor. She is able to rely on an informal support network from other women, who partly take over her parental work since her husband does not support her political work. The personal experiences shared by the women leaders in these conversations support the reader to better understand the previous analyses.

The “Labour, Land and Everyday Lives” chapters cover gendered landscapes of labor migration, land grabs, and structural violence. Women in conflict-affected areas, significantly displaced, disabled, and persecuted women, are disproportionately vulnerable to structural violence and the absence of welfare structures regarding reproductive labor and care. The chapter by Hillary Faxon deals with how labor migration and land grabs shape gendered landscapes. She analyzes rural accounts of women's embodied experiences. Therefore, she and her colleagues used the participatory visual method of photovoice. By asking women in rural areas to take pictures of their everyday lives and environment, the research participants can decide how much and what parts of their realities they want to share with an audience. The audience is not only the researchers but also the readers. Looking at the pictures, supported by Faxon's analyses, the reader feels like looking through a window into rural areas, which are not as accessible as urban areas. Faxon stresses that the shift from an elite urban account to a marginalized rural account of everyday realities is significant within Myanmar studies.

The authors of the edited volume rely on vast amounts of data from semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, oral history, participant observation, reports, papers, statements, school textbooks, and other archival sources. This massive set of data also shows that human bodies—especially women's bodies—are battlefields of politics. As the reader learns in several chapters, gender stereotypes are deeply engrained into people's minds, and Myanmar women who aim at political participation and leadership have many barriers to overcome, not only structurally but also personally, in their close social environment.

Since the attempted coup in 2021, the population in Myanmar in general, but women especially, have become more empowered in their resistance to fascist forces. This edited volume shares insights that help us understand from an outsider position these changes within Myanmar's power structures. This book is for everyone interested in participatory and collaborative research, ethnographic writing, and discourse between Myanmar and international experts. In its form and approach to women's social realities off the beaten track of researching and writing, Waves of Upheaval in Myanmar: Gendered Transformations and Political Transitions is a welcome novelty in the literature canon on Myanmar.

Carolin Hirsch, MA

University of Konstanz, Germany

carolin.hirsch@uni-konstanz.de

At War with Women: Military Humanitarianism and Imperial Feminism in an Era of Permanent War. By Jennifer Greenburg. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023. 267 pages. ISBN: 9781501767746.

From Algeria and Malaya to Vietnam and Haiti, a Western-centric, liberal counterinsurgency approach combined military action with developmental policies such as building roads, schools, and markets to “win hearts and minds” of the local population. Informing this doctrine is a Western-centric aim not only to “civilize” and “modernize” the rest of the world but also to use these development initiatives as weapons of counterinsurgency campaigns.

In At War with Women, Jennifer Greenburg sets out to critically examine these dynamics and the gendered and colonial discourses behind them in the US-led counterinsurgency operations. Greenburg's analysis is informed by an ethnographic investigation of “military trainings [and] archival exploration into the histories that military instructors used to create post-9/11 doctrine, and servicewomen's interviews, journal entries, and other primary military sources” (25). This ethnographically grounded analysis offers insights into how the militarized forms of development and humanitarianism are used for gaining military intelligence and control.

Early in the book, Greenburg shows how the US counterinsurgency doctrine is influenced by the knowledge on past colonial experiences, such as those in Algeria and the recommendations of imperial figures such as T. E. Lawrence, who was key in the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire in 1917. For instance, David Kilcullen, a highly influential counterinsurgency theorist that influenced the United States’ post-9/11 counter-insurgency doctrine, named his widely read counterinsurgency book Twenty-Eight Articles with an inspiration from T. E. Lawrence's Twenty-Seven Articles (44). Added to this colonial layer is a gendered logic through which women soldiers are deployed in US counterinsurgency campaigns. According to this gendered logic, women soldiers are stereotyped around concepts such as emotional sensitivity, motherhood, and domesticity, while the women in the local populations are framed as helpless and in need of saving. Greenburg calls this combination of civilizational and gendered rhetoric the “new imperial feminism”.

Despite the prominence of colonialist experiences in the contemporary US counterinsurgency doctrine, there is a remarkable neglect of the colonial subject in the classrooms where this very doctrine is taught. Instead, it is “the colonial administrator's or military officer's experiences [that] form the basis of the lesson” (34). To the extent that the colonized communities are mentioned in the counterinsurgency training materials, “they appear as savage subjects located ‘backward’ in history—their inability to manage basic human functions such as hygiene, let alone their own territory, justifies military occupation” (34).

Such critical aspects of the US counterinsurgency approach could be traced in some key concepts used in the book. One of these is the notion of “proud parents”, which is coined by a commanding officer as part of a counterinsurgency course. This notion expects US soldiers to imagine themselves “parenting Afghans by teaching them the skills they would need to govern” (67). This parental metaphor also constructs Afghan people “as a monolithic group collectively represented as children” (67). Another such term is “emotional labour”, through which women are included in the military “through reinforcement of gender essentialisms, such as the assumption of women's ‘natural’ ability to soothe and calm victims of violent military interventions” (201). Women soldiers’ emotional labor is closely linked to intelligence gathering and even direct military violence. Therefore, in contrast to a liberal feminist approach, including female soldiers in counterinsurgency operations does not automatically lead to progression of women's rights globally.

Greenburg's critical analysis is informed by a comprehensive understanding of violence that goes beyond mere physical force. Instead, “the link between allegedly humanitarian activities and violent forms of combat and intelligence suggests that a more expansive definition of violence is necessary” (18). This not only helps the reader appreciate how the US counterinsurgency training is “directed inward, toward those who implement it” (93) but also leads Greenburg to argue that “rather than necessarily changing how war is fought, counterinsurgency seems to have the larger effect of reconfiguring soldiers’ understandings of themselves and their work—albeit not necessarily in the ways experts intend—as well as the financial and institutional relationships surrounding them” (94).

This entanglement of violence and counterinsurgency training is key to At War with Women. It not only changes the understanding of soldiers and those who design the counterinsurgency doctrines, but also creates what Greenburg calls a “permanent war” by “repurpose[ing] humanitarian rhetoric and practice as counterinsurgency weapons” (205). At this point, it would have been interesting to see how this notion of permanent war interacts with and potentially challenges the new wars paradigm.

At a time when counterinsurgency operations and military interventions become—once again—key topics in international politics, At War with Women provides a critical account of counterinsurgency campaigns. Thanks to Greenburg's accessible writing around key debates and cases within critical counterinsurgency scholarship, it will be an indispensable resource for students and scholars interested in researching counterinsurgency campaigns.

Review by Barış Çelik

University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

baris.celik@sheffield.ac.uk