Category Archives: Elsewhere

Reviews at AQ and JMAS

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Earlier this year I had two different reviews published in journals. Just wanted to drop them here for folks who study violence in Africa.

In the winter issue of Anthropological Quarterly, I have a book review essay titled “Violence, Intervention, and the State in Central Africa,” reviewing two great recent works. Louisa Lombard’s State of Rebellion: Violence and Intervention in Central African Republic helps us understand the humanitarian intervention in CAR as well as roots of violence there, inequities in the global state system, and problems of peacekeeping and peacebuilding. A translation of Marielle Debos’ Living by the Gun in Chad: Combatants, Impunity, and State Formation gives insight into the politics of armed labor in Chad as men of arms navigate the violent margins of the state there. Both are useful reads that I’d recommend to folks studying similar processes, in Africa or elsewhere.

In the latest issue of the Journal of Modern African Studies, I wrote a short review of Holly Porter’s After Rape: Violence, Justice, and Social Harmony in Uganda, which is rooted in Acholi custom, lore, and language, and situates sexual violence—both in and out of war—in local understandings of consent, sex, and marriage; the realities of impunity and justice in Uganda’s political and legal system; and the Acholi conception of social harmony. An ethnography that is locally rooted to an extensive amount, Porter’s book is a useful read for those working on gender-based violence and justice after violence.

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Imagining Danger and Safety (and Conference Talks!)

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Quick note that I’ll be giving the same talk twice this month. First, this weekend in Philly I’ll be at the American Ethnological Society’s annual meeting. I’ll be part of panel 3.1.5 “Technologies of Disaster, Power, Ethics, and Politics,” Saturday morning at 8:00am. Then, on March 30th, I’ll be presenting at my department’s annual symposium here in DC. Reach out if you want the details for the latter – promo material forthcoming.

My talk is titled “The Promise of Early Warning: Radio, Protection, and Political Demands in Northeastern Congo.” I look at the different ways in which humanitarianism and infrastructure offer certain promises (of care, of life, of progress, of modernity) and what happens when those promises are not borne out as imagined. It’s one step in thinking through my research from this past summer as I prepare for fieldwork, and also thinking with recent scholarship on these issues. I’ll be continuing to think with, on, around, and about this, I’m sure.

As I both prepare for the upcoming AES conference and continue to read for my comprehensive exams (ack!), I wanted to drop some thoughts here. This weekend one of my readings was Juliana Ochs’ Security & Suspicion: An Ethnography of Everyday Life in Israel. Part of Ochs’ argument centers on how discourses about security get reproduced at the level of bodily practice and ways that fantasies of threats and protection get embodied. I’m still sitting with the book a bit, but I found it really generative to think about processes of everyday securitization. In the context of the second intifada, Israel’s itinerant, moving checkpoints and ever-changing security measures shaped people’s perceptions of security, not unlike what other scholars of security in Israel have shown. But Ochs demonstrates how these practices get filtered at the individual level as people’s personal imaginations of the city (Jerusalem) are shaped by their own experiences of the city, of Palestinians, of trauma, etc. – she shows this through, among other things, people’s commutes in the city and how they explain what parts of the city are safe or dangerous, when it’s okay to travel, and what modes of transportation are safest.

This is just one slice of the book, but it’s been useful to think with as I put the final touches on my conference paper, and I’m sure it will continue to be in the back of my mind as I study securitization, humanitarian infrastructure, and technologies of intervention. I’m interested in how the communication networks that I study might shape people’s understandings and interpretations of insecurity, and how the promise of technology and intervention might be changing these processes. Thinking with Ochs, then, I’m interested in how the threat posed by the LRA, but also the discourse and daily communicative practices around this threat, play out at the local level. How are the threat, discourse, and practice interpreted, embodied, lived, and felt?

And so, by way of conference paper snippet, here’s a glimpse of what I was thinking about last summer when I was doing exploratory fieldwork in Haut Uele, DR Congo, and a snippet of what I’ll be talking about on Saturday:

Let me first describe an instance in which the radio allowed humanitarians and civilians to trace LRA movements. Last summer, while I was awaiting my Congolese visa, alerts were sent out about a series of small roadside attacks which included three incidents of looting and one killing of a soldier south of Garamba National Park, near the village of Sambia. Once I got my visa, I was able to travel by road to Dungu, and upon arrival heard that there had been more looting or sightings of LRA fighters south of the park and, more recently, west of the park. Given both the history of LRA tactics and the daily incident reports, one can cobble together the most likely scenario: if all of these incidents involved the same group of LRA fighters, then they probably had been living south of Garamba, looted local communities to gather supplies in advance of a journey, then traveled through Garamba to poach elephants, and headed west on their way up to Central African Republic, to take the ivory either to other LRA groups or to LRA commander Joseph Kony, who is rumored to be in hiding in Sudan and using illicit trade to continue his rebellion from afar. In June, while I was preparing to cross into the Congo, communities on the early warning network were hearing daily reports of LRA activity, which hopefully allowed parents to keep children close to home rather than tilling distant fields, allowed travelers to be on alert on remote roads and pathways where the danger of looting was heightened, and mobilized peacekeeping forces to patrol the areas most affected or most vulnerable.

Once I was settled into my routine listening in to daily rounds with the radio staff in Dungu, however, a problem arose, or rather, erupted. In late July, news came from near the town of Bangadi of a particularly bold attack in which an FARDC camp was raided and a small town was looted of food, medical goods, a power generator, and radio equipment. Days later a series of roadside looting occurred, including several deaths and the kidnapping of a local government official. Given the location of these incidents northwest of the park and on the route to Central African Republic, this is likely the same group which had been actively moving, looting, and attacking communities throughout those months. But despite the weeks of information-gathering, the fact that a government official had been abducted, and their mandate, the peacekeepers in Bangadi never deployed to the nearby communities to investigate or respond to the killings and abduction. Knowledge had been shared, but action wasn’t taken. People died, were looted, or abducted, and the assailants vanished with impunity.

What I explore more in the talk is what to make of such failed promise as when the early warning network provides information so that civilians know about the threat, but there’s little they can do about it. The promise of humanitarianism, and of technology, is premised on improving lives. What happens when these hopes are dashed? What do promises, even broken ones, generate? I gesture at political responses to abandonment and potentially new politics emerging in moments of such failure, but there are other places to train our eyes and ears. If we channel Ochs’ focus on everyday and embodied security, though, it’s worth asking how the radio produces particular imaginations of rebel movement, how the information that gets circulated shapes daily practices, and how knowledge about the LRA threat is felt. These are some of the things I’ll be tackling as I think through the promise and practice of early warning.

At the Smithsonian

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Quick note that a two-part piece of mine has been published at the Smithsonian Museum’s Collections blog. It’s called “Southwest Archaeology and ‘The Time of Vietnam’” – here’s part two. The post is about an archaeologist studying pueblos in Arizona who got help from the US military to photograph some sites during U2 training flights in the desert. It’s an interesting story, and one that has echoes of both the ties between the military and research of indigenous peoples and the connections between war and photography. The photographs are part of the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Here’s a little excerpt:

[One] thing that each photo shares is the mark of a small accessory attached to the camera: in the bottom-right corner, each image has a clock and a counter marking the time and number of the snapshot. Some visual anthropologists have analyzed not just the photographic image itself, but also the “micro-event of the making of the photograph” (Pinney 2012). The counter and clock here are such a “micro-event,” but they are also more: they are part of a whole apparatus that took and collected photographs of much of the world.

While I spent several hours following the roads and mountain ranges of the Zubrow photos, I was drawn mostly to the clocks and counters. I tried to decipher the numbers jotted alongside the counter and across the face of the clock. I got lost in making a chart and reorganizing images by time and by number (the photos are not dated, only time-stamped, and the collection is arranged alphabetically by pueblo name). I found myself wondering what images filled the gaps, and where the planes traveled when they weren’t photographing the American Southwest.

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Check out the whole thing at the links above. The post and the research that went into it were part of Josh Bell’s Visual Anthropology course, which I took last year and which included a couple of visits to the NAA. Big thanks to Josh and to Caitlyn Haynes and Gina Rappaport of the NAA for their help.

#AmAnth17

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The American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting is in DC this year, so thousands of anthropologists are descending on/near my neighborhood. I’ve been dropping the ball this fall insofar as keeping the blog updated with presentations (at PAC in DC and at ASA in Chicago, sorry), but here’s my AAA run-down.

Saturday, Dec. 2, 2:00-3:45p, I’ll be presenting “‘Come Home Messaging’ in a Counterinsurgency: Demobilization and Militarization in and around Northern Uganda,” part of panel (5-0880): “Understanding Violence: Cases and Analyses from Across Africa,” in the Marriott, Roosevelt 4

Abstract: Demobilization of armed groups typically happens en masse after the end of a conflict in an effort to prevent future conflict. In the efforts to stop the Lord’s Resistance Army in and around Uganda, however, demobilization has taken place during the conflict, targeting individuals to convince them to surrender. Sometimes conflated with defection, this process serves to weaken the insurgency and end the war as much as it aims to demobilize and reintegrate fighters. This elision merges what is typically a post-conflict intervention with a counterinsurgency effort, entangling these projects in temporal, relational, and political ways. This paper theorizes this merging by focusing on the ways humanitarian actors speak about demobilization and the ways that different humanitarian and counterinsurgency efforts overlap in terms of the ends they seek. Based on fieldwork, linguistic analysis, and interviews with humanitarians involved, I demonstrate how the demobilizing of armed actors can actually contribute to the militarization of the region.

In addition to my paper, I’ll be running around the AAAs all week, so I hope to see you. I’ll be live-tweeting a panel (2-0430), “Remoteness and Place-making as Social Practice,” Wednesday, 2:15-4:00pm, on behalf of Cultural Anthropology (where I’m a contributing editor now, icymi) and chairing the panel (4-0365) “Sex and War” (Friday, 10:15a-12:00p, Marriott, Jefferson) organized by Holly Porter. I’ve also been relentlessly promoting other events you should check out, and here’s an ongoing list of GW-affiliated presentations. There’s also, of course, a billion other panels, roundtables, meetings, and receptions to attend. Have fun with the whirlwind.

Activism Forum at Anthropology News

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In continuing my trend of working on anything but what I should be working on, I have a small update for you all. You might remember that I participated in a dialogue at American University in the fall discussing the role of anthropology in activism and activism in anthropology. I’m very pleased to announce that, in the intervening months, that dialogue has turned into a very nice little edited collection over at Anthropology News. The facilitators of the dialogue edited the collection and it just went up about a week ago.

My own article, titled “Writing and Research in a Conflict Zone,” touches on the ways that anthropologists might find themselves using similar tools as activists (gathering data, telling stories, etc.) either in the same, parallel, or opposing ways. I then give some short reflections based on my own interactions with, along side, and against popular non-profits working on ending the LRA conflict. Here’s a brief snippet:

The conflict between the LRA and the Ugandan government was the focus of numerous academic monographs and NGO reports for 20 years before I heard about it. Little of this coverage mattered when the film Invisible Children: Rough Cut toured the United States with the tagline “discover the unseen.” While anthropologists, political scientists, humanitarians, and northern Ugandans were certainly aware of the conflict with the LRA, the film’s primary audience of upper-middle-class millennials was not. And so the film and the grassroots activist movement it sparked caught fire over the course of the 2000s, culminating in the Kony 2012 campaign.

The idea that raising awareness about an issue will lead to it being addressed is a common narrative in social and political activism. From the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge to Kony 2012, awareness (and fundraising) is central to activism, especially in the digital age. And a crucial part of raising awareness through activism is storytelling: activists must tell a digestible and actionable narrative that tugs at the proper emotions to galvanize a response. For Invisible Children videos, the formula was one that shed light on the effects of the conflict on Ugandan children, with a request for funds to address these negative impacts (building schools) and a call to take action (lobby the government). This strategy isn’t unique. The Save Darfur Coalition created a similar narrative (Hamilton 2011) and the campaign against “conflict minerals” in your cell phone does similar work (Seay 2015).

Storytelling has, of course, long been the domain of anthropologists. We are trained (or at least learn by doing) to write stories about people and places, shedding light on the lived experiences of others. While sometimes criticized as neither digestible nor actionable, ethnographies broadly do work that is similar to many activist and advocacy narratives. Anthropologists interested in either doing activism or speaking to activists must navigate the different publics and different modes of storytelling involved in such acts. The type of activism I saw emerging around the LRA conflict is part of how I came to find myself an anthropologist trying to write within and between these spaces.

The article centers on how we write about what we write, and for whom. Part of this emerges from the long debates around non-profit messaging about Africa, and part of this comes from a longer academic reflection on how we write about violence. It is also another example of me navigating through how to write about my own progression from one place to another in regards to the conflict that I study. Have a look, I hope you get something out of it.

But more importantly, you should read the other pieces in the collection. The introduction by Haley Bryant and Emily Cain sketches out what the dialogue was all about, and the important questions highlighted by the conversation. Each of the individual pieces resonates with something either implicit or explicit to my article, and the different parts of the collection speak to each other in interesting ways. Chloe Ahmann’s piece looks at the politics, ethics, and methodology of being (in)visible when studying activists in Baltimore. Hugh Gusterson discusses the different audiences an anthropologist has, and the responsibilities one might feel toward particular groups and not others in the course of research. Emma Louise Backe looks at the importance of care and self-care involved in ethnography through her experience studying a rape crisis hotline. Each of these pieces is well worth reading, and I learned a lot from speaking with everyone involved (including Shweta Krishnan, who was a part of our PAC panel but did not write a piece for AN) both during the dialogue and in the writing process after. A big thank you to everyone involved in the event and the publication.

I’ve been doing a lot of writing recently, and a lot of activism. These sometimes overlap, but don’t always. I strongly believe that scholarship can and should be a form of activism, but it is certainly not the only one. This collection is just one small part of an ongoing conversation and reflection about what anthropology and activism can offer each other, where they converge and diverge, and how to use both to imagine and enact a better world.

Shameless Self-Promotion: ICC Justice at Warscapes

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Hello – brief note that I had a piece go up last week at Warscapes on the Dominic Ongwen trial at the ICC, now underway. It builds off of my first article for them last March, and parts of it are visible in this post I wrote the day the trial began. Here’s the article, and here’s an excerpt:

The courtroom is thought to be a site of justice, but critics have pointed out that justice often lies beyond the confines of law–that transitional justice, social justice, and a just memory can be attained not only in the courtroom but in  everyday public life. As Giorgio Agamben once claimed, “law is not directed towards the establishment of justice. Nor is it directed toward the verification of truth. Law is solely directed toward judgment.” The ICC case is arguably about judging Ongwen, regardless of what that judgment might mean. The LRA conflict is a good example, as Ongwen will likely be the only person to stand trial, and the four attacks for which he is charged are merely the ones with enough evidence to make it into court. This is shocking considering that the war has ravaged northern Uganda for the better part of three decades, resulting in thousands of killings and abductions and the displacement of millions at the hands of both the army and the rebels. The infamous rebel leader Joseph Kony is still in hiding; most other rebel commanders are dead or have been granted amnesty as part of a counterinsurgency demobilization effort. The Ugandan military has never been investigated for its role in the conflict. As such, Ongwen and the four attacks he is being tried for bear the weight of the quest for justice for countless victims of untold violations.

International criminal law has little room to acknowledge Ongwen’s unique position as both a war criminal and as the victim of war crimes. He himself was abducted as a child and forced into the rebel army in the late 1980s. Charged with the very crimes of which he was a victim, Ongwen’s personal history sheds light on the limits of international criminal justice in complicated situations like the war in northern Uganda. Ongwen has had to live his life in the context of everyday violence. His actions, whether he found himself reluctant or enthusiastic about the beatings, rapes, murders, and abductions he carried out or ordered, were shaped by this environment, making him what Erin Baines, professor at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, calls a “complex political perpetrator.” Growing up in such traumatic times, how does one pursue a moral life? And to what extent is one held responsible for failure in that pursuit? While admitting that “the evidence of many of the child victims in this case could, in other circumstances, be the story of the accused himself,” Chief Prosecutor Bensouda argued that “having suffered victimization in the past is not a justification or an excuse to victimize others.”

The uneasy act of prosecuting a victim-turned-perpetrator, and the continued failure to hold the Ugandan state accountable, are some of the reasons that justice here is seen as a fiction, or as justice only partially realized. For victims of other attacks–for victims of Ugandan state violence, and for victims in South Sudan, Central African Republic, and the Congo–justice still seems out of reach. The pursuit of justice, after all, is the quest to establish a fair and equitable society for all. In northern Uganda, where the president whose ascendancy provoked the LRA into existence is still in power thirty years later and increasingly authoritarian, there is little in the way of justice. The people of the other three countries have fared even worse, both in terms of justice and peace, as each state has seen numerous crises and wars in recent years. If, as anthropologist Kamari Clarke claims, “justice itself is not a thing but a set of relations through which people establish norms of acceptability,” then revealing the truth of what has happened in the war is as important as finding new ways for people to understand and reconcile with one another. This requires much more than a single trial.

Click on through to read the rest. Big props to the Warscapes team and the critical edits that got the piece out rather quickly. Ongwen’s trial will continue into the spring, so I’ll be keeping an eye out as everything moves forwards. I’m sure there will be more.

#AES2016: Justice and Forgiveness

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As a cadre of anthropologists flock to DC this week for the annual meeting of the American Ethnological Society, let me flag a paper I’m presenting at the panel, as well a public event in town.

First, Thursday night at 7:00 – at the Busboys and Poets on 5th and K, three anthropologists will be discussing recently published books in a public event co-hosted by AES titled “Homeland Insecurity: Anthropologists Discuss Terror, Corruption, and Displacement.” Catherine Besteman will be talking about Somali refugees in Maine, Joe Masco will be talking about counterterrorism, and Janine Wedel will be talking about corruption in U.S. politics. You should go – I’ll be there.

For followers of the blog, though:

I’ll be presenting a paper, “Between Justice and Forgiveness: Accountability across Borders in the LRA Conflict,” on panel 5.3: “Postconflict and Military Order.” It’s a diverse array of presentations on conflict, and it promises to be an interesting one. You can find us on Saturday, 8:00-9:45, in the Metro West room at the Capitol Hill Liaison Hotel. If you’re attending AES, hope to see you there!

Shameless Self-Promotion: at Warscapes

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Short post to link you all to a new piece I have up at Warscapes: “Dominic Ongwen and the Search for Justice.” The article focuses on Dominic Ongwen, an LRA abductee-turned-commander who sat before the ICC’s confirmation of charges in January. I explore his particular case, but also look at the ICC’s broader intervention in the LRA conflict, and how it has narrowed the popular understanding of what types of justice are possible and for whom. You should read the whole thing (please!) but here’s a preview:

When Dominic Ongwen stood before the International Criminal Court on January 21, he confronted  a team of prosecutors and judges presenting a list of his alleged war crimes.  After spending years as a brigade commander in the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Ongwen was no longer outfitted in rebel attire, but stood in a gray suit and tie, listening to the proceedings as they were translated into his native Acholi language. He waived the right to have each of the charges against him read aloud in court, so the presiding judge, Cuno Tarfusser, summarized the seventy charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

When Ongwen was first taken into custody last January, major rights groups heralded his capture as an important step towards justice. Amnesty International argued that “Ongwen now needs to be held to account for the numerous charges he faces of murder, mutilation, forced recruitment of child soldiers and use of sex slaves.” Africa director of Human Rights Watch, Daniel Bekele, called Ongwen’s transfer to The Hague “a major step for those affected by the LRA’s long history of crimes.” This was a sign of progress in the ICC’s first case, which was opened in 2004 and has otherwise seen little development.

But while Western rights groups were nearly unanimous in supporting Ongwen’s transfer to the ICC, the mood among Ugandans was decidedly mixed—even among victims of LRA violence. The Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative issued apress release regretting that Ongwen had been sent to the ICC, arguing instead for him to be brought home and forgiven through traditional reconciliation ceremonies. The statement said that the ICC, “which is punitive or retributive, promotes polarization that only leads into ultimate alienation on both sides” of the conflict. Around the same time, Makerere University’s Refugee Law Project facilitated a dialogue of local leaders in Gulu, a town that was at the center of the conflict for many years. A report on the discussion found that attitudes among the Acholi people were complicated and support for Ongwen’s arrest was far from universal.

#ASA2015: Come Home Messaging on the Radio

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Greetings from San Diego! I’m here for the annual meeting of the African Studies Association. On Saturday, at 8:30am in Room 411, I’ll be presenting as a part of a panel on “Accounting for Violence.” My presentation, entitled “Encouraging Rebel Demobilization by Radio in Uganda and the DR Congo: The Case of Come Home Messaging.” It’s part of a chapter from my MA thesis, which is also a forthcoming article. Here’s the abstract:

For several years, local radio stations in Uganda broadcast “come home” messages that encouraged the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army to demobilize. Since the rebels began carrying out attacks in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Central African Republic, several international actors have introduced the same messages to these regions. This new effort has internationalized radio programming, benefited local radio stations, innovated new forms of messaging, and collaborated with military actors. This article provides an overview of how come home messaging functions in different contexts, examining the effects of these actions and highlighting an important shift in military-humanitarian relationships.

If you’re interested, come check it out! If you’re at ASA, let’s get in touch! If you’re down for drinks, there’s a tweet-up tonight at The Grand on 5th at 8:30.

Conferences, Conferences, Conferences

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A few conference-related items of potential interest.

Firstly, I’m issuing my own brief call for any fellow travelers in justice/reconciliation/Africa/intervention studies by anthropologists thinking about attending the American Ethnological Society this March 31-April 2 in Washington, DC. I’m thinking about submitting a newer iteration of the paper I presented at ASA last year, on reconciliation and accountability, the ICC, and Invisible Children. I’m open to ways of framing it, so if anyone wants to help me cobble together a panel, I’d greatly appreciate it. Deadline is Jan. 31, but you can’t submit until after you register (I know, right?). I’ve heard AES is awesome, and I can’t wait to go – hopefully you’ll come with me! Comment, e-mail, tweet, etc. if you’re down to do a panel together on any of the aforementioned subjects.

On a related note, doing my grad-student-Africanist duty and spreading the word of a couple of Calls for Papers to any relevant Africanist scholars-in-training:

Boston University’s African Studies Center will be hosting its annual graduate student conference this March, with the theme of “Mobilizing Africa: Innovation, Syncretism, Appropriation.” Deadline for submission is Jan. 15, and the conference is March 25-26. I’ve never been, but it looks mighty interesting and is geared towards graduate students, so check it out.

At about the same time, Tennessee State University will be hosting its annual Africa Conference March 31-April 1, with the theme of “Africa in the 21st Century: The Promise of Development and Democracy.” Deadline is Dec. 31, and more details are in the CFP here [pdf].

And lastly, it’s almost that time of year again. I’ll be headed to San Diego in two weeks for the African Studies Association’s annual meeting, where I’ll be presenting a chapter from my MA thesis that is also a forthcoming article in African Studies Review. The paper is on the role of come-home messaging in the LRA conflict, focusing on how come-home radio programs began in Gulu, how they fared in neighboring Lira district, and how they have been transplanted into northeastern DRC. Looking forward to presenting, and if you’re headed to ASA, it’s session IX (Saturday morning), panel I-1, vaguely titled “Accounting for Violence.” Hope to see you there!