A few words about myself:

 

I am a conflict and development master student, and a self-defined anthropologist. I care deeply about social justice, I despise the colonised ethics of humanity and I research everyday life in zones marked by prolonged armed conflict.  

 

 

The Project:

 

We know so much about armed conflict(s), and yet, so little about the social existence of those who live through them; addressing this gap is the overall objective of this project.

 

In fact, although using the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a single case study, at its heart, this project is a call for a much needed social anthropology of warscapes; that is to say, an anthropology In conflict rather than one Of conflict.

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Allow me to explain myself: ​

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As paradoxical as this may sound, I believe that the field of conflict studies suffers from what I call the 'hegemonic conflict syndrome’. Simply put, this means that the study of conflict itself has taken an overshadowing role in the current analysis of warscapes, and consequently the people who live in them. A clarification is needed here. By Warscapes, I mean those spaces where the temporal and spatial scalation of conflict(s) into armed violence- or violence(s) into armed conflict- is always a possibility, but there is nevertheless a lack of constant direct fighting.

 

To put it differently, warscapes are social spaces in which the armed conflict has 'simply' become the background of everyday social life- the new normal.

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Sadly, these spaces are rarely explored beyond their conflict dimension. Somehow this happens because in warscapes 'the armed conflict' is commonly miss-understood as a kinetic force, a totalizing experience that subjugates all other social dynamics occurring in such spaces to its own logics; In other words, we lend to assume that ‘things do not happen during conflict, but because of it’ (Lubckemann, 2008).  In turn, this narrowing of the analytical framing to all thing conflict-like does not only create a deformed portrait of warscapes as simply conflict-ridden places (epistemological colonialism much?), but it also prevents the inspection of other important dynamics and social processes (beyond conflict) taking place in such spaces, and how these may affect the people who live in them; namely, the social condition of war.

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Similarly, I believe this hegemonic focus on the conflict-like to be extremely reductionist and deterministic, for it tends to universalize all warscape's inhabitants as a homogeneous mass with no needs nor interests outside the realm of the armed conflict.

 

In fact, most studies focusing on those people living in conflict zones but which are not directly involved on it (which remember, are the majority of the population), tend to simply analyse their livelihoods: how they cope with the conflict and its externalities in order to cover basic necessities. In other words, the focus seems to be on investigating how people make a living. Thus, limiting the exploration of their social existence to the most fundamental- the study of the 'Homo survivalus' if one likes. A very poor departing point for the analysis of social existence and behaviour of these populations... and a very subtle form of othering if you ask me. 

 

Here is an obvious but commonly neglected fact: there is normalcy in warscapes. Life goes on in such spaces, and therefore, warscape's inhabitants main concerns are to be found in their everyday preoccupations and occupations, which have little to do with the armed struggle, and more with the realization of life-projects (marrying, childbearing, forming a household, gaining autonomy, dignity and respect etc) and the navigation of other micro-struggles beyond the conflict (intergenerational, gendered, spatial, familiar, personal, etc) in such dire circumstances. You know? all those things which anthropology will normally focus on if it were not for the hegemonic conflict syndrome. 

 

Sadly, more often than not this is neglected and conflict is portrayed as the single determinant for the study of both, warscapes and the social existence and behaviour of those living in them.  

 

As such, this project aims to serve as an antidote to the hegemonic conflict syndrome by doing something commonly neglected : exploring both, warscapes and the social existence of those who live in them beyond their conflict dimension. Hence why -  an anthropology In conflict rather than one Of conflict. 

 

One way or another my research aims to investigate the ways in which everyday life in warscapes is lived in its totality; That is to say, not looking at how people survive, or make a living, but rather how they go about making a life- and one worth living at that. Perhaps the pivotal question driving this project is :   What does it mean to be human under the social condition of war? 

 

Other questions I ask myself ? What are people's existential preoccupations, their projects of personal and social becoming, their wants and needs, dreams and fears? What are the daily challenges warscape inhabitants have to confront in the pursue of a life-worth living? How do they manage and navigate these?  How does all this affect people's life choices and patterns of social behaviour? Do these existential drivers of social action have consequences for the course of the conflict? if so, In which ways? 

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The project is academic-ish.

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It is academic, because the information that appears in the website is collected via scientific methodologies within the social sciences: mostly in-depth interviews (asking questions and listening, I mean, really listening to people), and participant observation (hanging around for long periods of time while observing and trying to make sense of things)- we call this the ethnographic method. It is also academic, in that I use a vast amount of academic sources and I somewhat seek to engage with broader debates and theories within the academic literature.

 

However, beyond not limiting my self to the academic lingo and format, my aim is not to make any grand claims or come up with master theories, but rather to provide a more nuanced understanding of what does it mean to live in a warscape today via exploring the life experiences and subjective points of view of those who do so (I call this a vernacular perspective).

 

I am also doing this in the hope that by avoiding the hegemonic conflict lens, the project will also contribute to fight forms of epistemological violence and tropes of not-so-new-barbarism that reduce these spaces and the people who live in them to ‘Africa as usual’ and the 'Homo-Survivalus'.

 

One way or another, this project aims to break with essentialist 'Us and them' tropes of othering by exploring not only the social condition of war, but also the human condition in war. 

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# A final note. Although the project is presented in English, most if not all, the interviews have been done in French or Swahili. As such, the end product is the result of three situated knowledge's: that of the protagonists, the people who I collaborated with and helped with the translation, and myself. And while trying to minimise changes it is important to take into consideration that the quotations have been somehow paraphrased (shaped slightly) in order to make the texts flow and keep its intended meaning in the original language. 

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