Violence as Action and Organizing Principle in Daily Life and Politics
Panel 008, 2010 Annual Meeting
On Thursday, November 18 at 05:00 pm
Panel Description
This panel addresses the theme of the production of violence and the sometimes contingent social, cultural and political effects its yields. The aim of the panel is to examine the logics and practice of organizing, living through and coming to grips with violence from the perspective of a spectrum of social actors, including militia leaders, ordinary civilians, and political and religious elites and activists. Violence is analyzed not merely as a straightforward act of war, a necessary component of armed conflict situations or even as essentially perpetrated against others, but rather as a phenomena that is inscribed with a variety of meaning for different kinds of social and historical actors.
The papers in this panel look at the Civil in Lebanon War (1975-1990), the political conditions in Iraq after the 2003 US-led invasion, the struggle between militant leftists and the Turkish state between 2000 and 2007, and the comparative experience of the French, Algerian, and American militaries in counterinsurgencies. In our papers we ask such questions as: What kinds of strategic and tactical issues are at play in the decision-making processes and layers of calculations among armed militias in civil war? What is the nature of violence? How do military organizations legitimize the use of violence, particularly forms of torture, in counterinsurgencies? Is violence committed against oneself a legitimate form of resistance? How do individual actors use their bodies as weapons, both during war and as part of political struggles more generally? What effects did invasion, civil war and violence have on the political geography of Shi'a Iraq. How did non-combatants in wartime come to order their lives around the daily experience of war and violence and to what extent did the rhythms of daily life normalize it?
We set up this panel as a vehicle for inter-disciplinary exchange. By bringing together historians, political scientists, and political theorists we can generate fruitful and perhaps provocative discussions. We see this as a great opportunity for the participants to pose questions to each other that they might not have otherwise encountered. Our hope is that this process will enable the presenters to deepen their own work substantively and also to increase its broader relevance to research on related topics and across disciplines.
The U.S-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 resulted in a two-level state- and nation-building process. On the one hand, the U.S. closely controlled the process of building state institutions, guiding the legislative process, and restructuring the economy. On the other hand, substate actors also surfaced during the power vacuum, amid occupation, violence, sectarian strife and a civil war. In a parallel process to state-level developments, a multiplicity of indigenous voices, once muted under the regime of Saddam Hussein, proliferated regarding the nature of the future Iraqi state. Drawing mainly on the various fatawa (religious decrees) by high-ranking ayatollahs throughout Iraq, this study is an opportunity to discuss contemporary perspectives on statehood from a Shiite perspective. My main question is: did the power vacuum in 2003 pave the way for previously suppressed Shiite voices to engage in bottom-up nation-building? This paper will explore the proliferation of Shiite thought on two levels in Iraq-- first in the violent reaction to the U.S. presence that contributed to the growing civil strife. Second, I will study contemporary views on the Islamic state and the role of the ayatollahs in politics.
In the Iraqi case, Shiite thought operated at junctures, in direct response to the politics on the ground. In essence, political viewpoints were linked to regime strategies. Shiite thinkers were adapting to the political milieu, keenly aware of the times where the regime was providing them with some breathing space for political participation, followed by moments of sheer repression, for which groups within the Shiite community organized responses to combat the regime. Given the creation of new political space in a deeply fragmented society, Shiite discourse in reaction to these events reveals the tensions among Shiites on issues such as statehood, political action, and democracy.
Internal war exacts a devastating toll on societies. Yet among countries that have gone through civil wars, striking variation exists simply in the length of exposure to violence. This paper develops a theory of decision-making by armed groups that explains why some civil wars are so persistent, and tests it using evidence gathered during field research on the Lebanese Civil War, 1975-1990.
The theory links local actions of armed groups to the macro-level process alliance with and support from external actors. In the presence of international competition, external involvement can become intense and widespread. External support constitutes a subsidy to armed groups, especially their leaders. The result is that for the leadership war is no longer a costly enterprise: the provision of external support to armed internal actors generates benefits for their leaders that exceed any possible share of the peacetime economy available to them.
The paper focuses on logic of the actions of the armed internal actors: what is the effect of subsidies on the decisions of armed groups about whether to continue fighting? How do leaders, who are singular beneficiaries of external support, maintain order within their groups such that their followers, both fighters and the civilian constituency, remain mobilized behind them to continue in the war?
The mechanisms of this theory are established drawing on interviews the author conducted with mid-level commanders who fought on all sides in the Lebanese Civil War. Observable implications of the theory are then tested using a neighborhood-level dataset which was collected specifically for this project, covering armed groups' daily activities for the first year of the war. These concern two sets of wartime behaviors that are linked to these subsidies: alliances and the nature of the use of military force. First, there is a link between external support and the behavior of actors who are allied on one side of a macro-level cleavage. Second, external support cushions against the pressures of competition and the potential for elimination by force, inducing a type of conflict characterized by fighting without warfare.
Estimates about the exact number of deaths and causalities during the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) vary widely. Likewise, there is still not a complete picture of the extent of internal displacements to say nothing of those that quit the country permanently due to the war. Nevertheless, despite the sometimes contentious exchanges about the compiling of such statistics few would dispute the notion that the war brought great pain and suffering to many. However, despite the shocking loss of life and moments of intense, even grotesque, violence there were often long periods of relative calm; countless newspaper headlines from that decade and a half proclaimed the "the return of ordinary life" after a particularly heavy episode of bloody fighting. Inevitably pictures of smiling children eating ice cream, sunbathers on the Corniche or shoppers jamming street markets adorned the front pages of these newspapers.
My paper offers a glimpse into the life of some of these "ordinary people" over the course of the Civil War. A series of questions about everyday life animates this paper. How did people manage their lives and realize some sense of normalcy even during times of intense fighting and near anarchy? How were the routines of work and home maintained and/or disrupted by the war? What kinds of social, economic and physical/spatial compromises were people obliged to make?
My paper is based a combination of archival material and on oral histories about the lives of school teachers, fruit venders, college students, and low-level government employees. I draw these portraits together to show ways in which ordinary people became acclimated to the Civil War.
Taken together these stories do not simply recount narratives of militias, invasions, car bombings and snipers. Rather they tell us much about other social forces whose importance has yet to be fully delineated in the many histories of the Lebanese Civil War
