Conflict and Society

We are pleased to share that 2024 marked the tenth anniversary of our journal, Conflict and Society. This is an important milestone that we want to celebrate. Yet, it is a bitter milestone because the substance of our journal is intimately connected to the numerous conflicts over the last decade, without which it would not have existed, let alone thrive as it did.

In 2023, Manipur, Northeast India, witnessed “ethnic conflict” between the “majority” Meitei community and “tribal” Kukis. Some commentators framed it as religious, identifying Meiteis as Hindus and Kukis as Christians, while others linked it to “narco-terrorists” engaged in trafficking and poppy cultivation along the Indo-Myanmar border. This study uses digital anthropology and frame analysis to examine social media content on the conflict. Two frames emerged: one emphasizing antagonism between ethnic or ethno-religious groups; the other calling for peace. Widely shared content by journalists and activists labeled the conflict “ethnic,” identifying actors in ethnic terms. The study contributes to scholarship on ethno-political conflict and the online discourse–offline violence relationship, showing how framing enemy “others” reinforces ethnic group competition as a self-evident explanation for conflict.

Despite increased research on military veterans, little has examined how UK veterans end up in prison. This study addresses this gap through semi-structured interviews with 35 veteran prisoners, investigating their life courses from childhood, military service, civilian life, and into prison. Childhood difficulties—including pre-service contact with the criminal justice system and experiences of childhood neglect and abuse—shaped the participants’ military service experiences and re-entry to civilian society. In-service loss and trauma often led to mental health problems and substance misuse. Most participants regretted leaving the military and struggled to reintegrate into civilian society, citing loss of structure, purpose, and sense of belonging. Unemployment, homelessness, substance misuse, and mental health problems—exacerbated by loneliness and isolation—influenced later criminal offending and eventual imprisonment.

Police violence and the killing of suspects are ubiquitous in Brazil, with most victims being young people from the urban periphery. Policing in Brazil has been discussed in terms of postcolonial and authoritarian continuities, the social construction of criminal identities, and racialized forms of citizenship. Drawing on documentary evidence and narratives from inmates at a juvenile prison in Salvador, Bahia, this article explores police violence from the victims’ perspectives. It argues for an understanding of police (ab)use of force that considers both structural causes and the personal nature of police–suspect encounters, where the line between committing and fighting crime is increasingly blurred. The abuse and killing of juvenile offenders are conceived as the culmination of interpersonal and intergroup skirmishes between adversaries caught up in a spiral of mimetic rivalry, in which violence has become an end in itself.

It is tempting to interpret the eruption of armed violence in various parts of the world as a break with the past. However, in this special section, we call for attention to “conflict continuities” to understand contemporary violence. Challenging the conventional focus on causes or consequences, we argue that past violent conflict may serve to generate new conflict, in reworked forms. We foreground the psychosocial dynamics of conflict, particularly as they affect social relations and worldviews, often reproduced through cultural narratives. The special section brings together five studies from across Africa. In different ways, they reveal how conflicts are remembered, reiterated, and reproduced in narratives that circulate in families, communities, and national-level politics, thus embodying a generative force for new conflict and struggle.

This article examines the relationship between social media usage and duress in Mali, focusing on Twitter, TikTok, and WhatsApp. The violent conditions Malians face influence online discourse, with each platform having distinct dynamics. We address how Malians have responded to the country’s conflict since 2012 by looking at the discussion, embodiment, and expression of the conflict by various actors. Online social manifestations parallel long-existing narratives on war and old contestations while reflecting the changing context of the war’s actors and hardships. Violence is hence recursive. Focusing on duress leads us to argue that Malians’ use of social media contributes to the normalization of hardship due to prolonged war. Our multiplatform ethnographic and computational research illustrates that normalization takes on different forms—polarization, frustration, discrimination, and a search for economic alternatives—depending on the user demographics of the social media platforms.

Community-initiated militias—self-defense forces for community protection—have played an important role in past and current armed conflicts in Mozambique. During the civil war between the Frelimo government and the armed group Renamo (1976–1992), the Naparama militia was established to protect communities from Renamo (and state) violence. In the current insurgency in Cabo Delgado province (since 2017), the Naparama has mobilized again to fight jihadist insurgents. This article makes use of long-term fieldwork in Mozambique, including original interviews, archival work, and newspaper analyses, to trace the conflict continuities in the case of the Naparama and analyze differences between their current and past manifestations. The discussion shows how the active remembrance and remobilization of prior conflict actors can partially legitimize new violence and contribute to the continuation of conflict.

This article examines the revolutionary rhetoric that pervades contemporary Southern African politics. As the majority of governments in Southern African states continue to be dominated by former national liberation movements, contemporary political discourse is profoundly shaped by the experiences of exile and war. Building upon the rich literature on memorial politics, this article develops the concept of the “liberation lens” to analyze how African political elites repurpose the historically infused language of the liberation struggle to address present-day political issues. As the liberation lens is transferred from generation to generation, it is a revealing example of conflict continuity.

How do Nigeria’s socioeconomic challenges influence the revival of memories of the Nigeria–Biafra war among survivors and their descendants? How do these recollections affect their daily life experiences? This article examines the motivations of the descendants of war survivors and how local “memory entrepreneurs” have become “cult heroes” with a messianic presence throughout Igboland, Nigeria. The study explores how multiple anxieties contribute to the mobilization of memories from the war. It employs a multi-sited ethnographic methodology, utilizing the “go-along method,” reviews of print and social media platforms, and the physical documentation of protests to explore the emergence of contemporary Biafran struggles. By contributing to the understanding of everyday life and civil society in postcolonial African societies, this article enhances our understanding of conflict continuities in Nigeria.

This article investigates domestic pedagogies of peace and conflict, as teaching and learning about violence in families affected by genocide and war may contribute to how ordinary people break cycles of conflict or enable its continuities. We draw on focused ethnographic research with two communities affected by genocide and violence: Rwandans and Banyamulenge refugees living in Rwanda. We found distinct patterns in respective communities, with Banyamulenge teaching concrete knowledge about past experiences and its implications for identity and survival; and Rwandans largely avoiding sharing of knowledge about the genocide within families but warning for general carefulness. In both communities, children interpreted the teachings in their own ways. We argue that domestic pedagogies of peace and conflict may shape war–peace dynamics, though not in linear ways.

In the field of peace and conflict studies (PCS), a primary focus on the causes of outbreaks of large-scale violent conflict is increasingly shifting to what causes wars to continue, and how they change or come to an end. Therein, the emphasis is often on structural factors and conditions of conflict, and whether and how interventions can break the cycle of violence, or “conflict trap” (Collier et al. 2003). In contrast, the contributions to this special issue are interested in how common people make and remake violent conflict through reproducing narratives of past antagonisms, contemporary violence, and the opponent, and how these narratives invoke and legitimize new violence. In this reflection, I tentatively assess what these contributions add to our understanding of “continuity in conflict.”

Khayyat, Munira. 2022. A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon. Oakland: University of California Press.

Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia. By Anastasia Shesterinina. Cornell University Press, 2021. 258 pp. Hardback. ISBN: 9781501753763

Conspiracy/Theory. Edited by Joseph Masco and Lisa Wedeen. Duke University Press, 2024. 504 pp. Paperback. ISBN 9781478025559.

Rethinking Community in Myanmar: Practices of We-Formation among Muslims and Hindus in Urban Yangon. By Judith Beyer. NIAS Press, 2023. 277 pp. Paperback. ISBN: 9788776943271.

Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir. By Omer Aijazi. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. 284 pp. Paperback. ISBN: 9781512823608.

Memories in the Service of the Hindu Nation: The Afterlife of the Partition of India. By Pranav Kohli. Cambridge University Press, 2023. 373 pp. ISBN: 9781009318686.

Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement. By Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi. Duke University Press, 2024. 412 pp. Hardcover. ISBN: 9781478020387.

The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems. By Adrie Kusserow. Duke University Press, 2024. 176 pp. Paperback. ISBN: 9781478025573.

Policing the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro: Cosmologies of War and the Far-Right. By Tomas Salem. Palgrave Macmillan, 2024. 330 pp. eBook. ISBN: 978-3-031-49027-9.

State of Fear: Policing a Postcolonial City. By Joshua Barker. Duke University Press, 2024. 328 pp. Paperback. ISBN: 9781478030768.

Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman. By Alice Wilson. Stanford University Press, 2023. 336 pp. ISBN: 9781503635784.