Civil war and the non-linearity of time: approaching a Mozambican politics of irreconciliation

At least 1 million people died during the Mozambican civil war (1976/7-92). Unfolding after gaining independence from Portugal (1975) and alongside experiments with Afro-socialism in the 1980s, the war, despite its brutality, has not been subjected to global templates of reconciliation processes. Thus it comprises a unique case to probe what irreconciliation might mean – both as a political horizon and as an analytical concept. This text juxtaposes ethnographic material from rural, central Mozambique from the late 1990s and early 2000s emphasizing reconciliation with material from the same spaces from the 2010s onwards, where I identify what I term a ‘politics of irreconciliation’. I will make three arguments. First, informed by Hannah Arendt, I approach irreconciliation as fundamentally about the rejection of a world of violence in search of a world shared in common. Second, drawing on recent anthropological theorizing about temporal regimes and chronopolitics, I argue for the salience of a non-linear understanding of the politics of irreconciliation to grapple with the fact that civil war violence is understood as dangerously uncontained rather than nominally past. Third, within the context of Mozambique, forgiveness and its other, irreconciliation, are not only intimately tied to the temporally past or present; they are also, as I show, produced by a tangible and intense absence of a productive future.publishedVersio

A lesser human? Utopian registers of urban reconfiguration in Maputo, Mozambique

In the age of climate change, human life’s pliability is also re‐shaping anthropological debates. For debates centring on the urban domain, questions revolve around flexibility, adaptability and resilience, while in work drawing on the Anthropocene similar ideas of human beings as subsumable to Gaia are emerging. This article reflects on how these perspectives interweave and imply a paradoxical human figure. On the one hand,they convey a being that simultaneously infuses, consumes and transmogrifies the world. Conversely, the human figure is forged by theoretical and analytical orientations that prescribe that one should abandon such a human‐centric reading of the world. The latter aspect is particularly evident in so‐ called ‘resilience governance’ discourses. These discourses presuppose a form of becoming less through reinventing humanity and human life as more adaptable to post‐future horizons of always already collapsed ecologies. Critically tracing this paradox, this article probes the urban Anthropocene and its lesser humans as desirable under the aegis of ‘resilience governance’ in Mozambique, crucially also mapping and analysing the involvement of utopic registers in defiance of such developments.publishedVersio

Emergent Police States. Racialized Pacification and Police Moralism from Rio’s Favelas to Bolsonaro

The Pacifying Police Units, rolled out in Rio de Janeiro ahead of the 2016 Summer Olympics, were part of a police intervention conceived to end the logic of war that characterized the city’s public security policies. As such, it adopted “soft ” strategies of policing aimed at reducing violence and asserting state sovereignty in “pacifi ed” favelas. Drawing on a postcolonial framework of analysis, we argue that these favelas can be understood as sites for experiments in imperial statecraft , where a new set of socio-moral relations that we call police moralism were inscribed onto spaces and bodies. Pacification, in this context, means the reassertion of Brazil’s historical racial order. In our conclusion, we read the moral order implemented in the favelas as a prefiguration of President Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing authoritarianism on a national scale.publishedVersio

Lars BUUR, Steffen JENSEN & Finn STEPPUTAT (eds), The security-development nexus. Expressions of sovereignty in Southern Africa

This anthology is a timely contribution to the predicaments and complexities of the postcolonial state in Southern Africa, and especially commendable is the aspiration to analyze the intimate relationship between state/sovereignty and “development” in different national and empirical settings. It is timely in several senses, but primarily by virtue of its dual focus which establishes the foundation for a thorough examination of notions of, for example, the ‘community policing’ and a focus on ..

Enclaving: Spatial Detachment as an Aesthetics of Imagination in an urban sub-Saharan African context

While detachment and separation continue to be central to urban development across the globe, in several sub-Saharan African cities it has acquired a particular form of acute social and political efficacy. In many European and American cities, the making of fortified enclosures is considered as an effect of an endemic fear of societal dissolution and a growing number of sub-Saharan African cities are, seemingly, affected by a similar socio-political and economic dynamic. However, in sub-Saharan Africa the spatial lines of separation that isolate the affluent few from surrounding urban spaces follow both a much wider and less coordinated meshwork of social divisions and political fissures and draws on a deeper socio-cultural, economic and historical repertoire. In this article we trace the contours of enclaving as a critical urban driver, which is rapidly changing the social and physical fabric of cities across the sub-Saharan continent. Rather than considering enclaving simply as a physical manifestation of dominance and privilege, however, we consider it as an ‘aesthetics of imagination’ that migrates through the cities and thereby weaves together otherwise dissimilar and distinct social practices, spaces and political desires and economic aspirations

Cracks in the System and Anthropology. A response to Bråten

We begin by thanking our colleague Eldar Bråten for taking the time to read and comment on our article with such thoroughness. We continue right away with a response. A key aspect of Bråten’s critique is his claim that it is difficult to understand how we reason and, therefore, ‘how to discern substantial arguments in texts that overflow with evocative and metaphoric prose?’ In order to reply to such a concern, we choose to, first, take a step back and provide a backdrop to our anthropological thinking (and, therefore, reasoning and ‘prose’) and how it is situated within a longer trajectory of thought. Thereafter, we turn to his specific concerns with our approach to utopia.publishedVersio

An Introduction to Egalitarian Thought and Dynamics

In this introduction we approach egalitarianism as an upsetting force that in various ways has shaped much of modern, especially Western, human history. We outline philosophical trajectories from the Enlightenment onward; consider the historical realization of an agency of ‘the people’ for the articulation of state, society, and politics; and highlight some issues that arise when the claims to freedom and equality clash against established institutions and values. Stressing the dynamic intertwining of the egalitarian with the hierarchical, we portray egalitarian life forms as modes of relationality that negate, subvert, or take advantage of open potentials in existing systems. Egalitarian life strives toward reconfiguring social orders through rupturing moments of effervescence and liminality while attempting to redefine central categories of life.publishedVersio

Just out of Reach: Imminence, Meaning, and Political Ontology in Mozambique

The leader of Mozambique’s Renamo party, Afonso Dhlakama, died on May 3, 2018. His death both necessitates an ethnographic, regionally comparative re-thinking of the analytical approach to the dominant Mozambican political parties (Frelimo and Renamo) as diametrically opposed formations from independence onwards and invites to a more general re-consideration of anthropological approaches to politics and the trajectory of African postcolonial states. Based on long-term fieldwork in Chimoio, Maputo, and Nampula, we analyze and compare articulations of political subjectivity and launch a novel reading of Mozambique’s political dynamics arguing how the erstwhile bifurcated political order is structured by a singular, imminent political ontology. Rather than analyzing politics by privileging institutions, identities or movements, we contribute to an anthropology that underline politics as fundamentally shaped by the formation and manipulation of broader systems of meaning, registers, and their spatio-temporal context—aspects which elude analyses based on political discourse or voting patterns. Highlighting the genealogy of this political ontology and emphasizing its generative and imminent nature in terms of forging subjectivity, we explore its enduring yet brittle nature, which includes hegemonic stasis, contestation, and the potential for openings and breakdowns

Ambulerende omsorg. Eller, spekulasjon i møte med byers oppløsning og framtidens slutt i Maputo

Grell ulikhet i globale storbyer forklares ofte som et resultat av strukturell eller nyliberal vold og antropologiske analyser skildrer gjerne mangeartede eksklusjonsmønstre, dehumanisering og vold. Selv om slike framstillinger er velbegrunnede, har, mener vi, antropologer et avgjørende oppdrag i å også identifisere bypraksiser rettet mot former for omsorg, empati og gjensidighet. I denne artikkelen utforsker vi slike praksiser hovedsakelig i form av tekster som smykker overfylte minibusser og vanlige personbiler i Maputo. De ambulerende navnene, ordtakene eller advarslene angriper sanseapparatet og fører ofte til latter, kommentarer eller diskusjoner, men det anerkjennes også at disse kommuniserer ønsker både om nye former for sosialitet, angrep på fraværet av empati og å skape affektive rom av kjærlighet, omsorg og gjensidighet. Ved å kartlegge det visuelt affektive i Maputo og ved å trekke på særlig Matthew Wilhelm-Solomons og AbdouMaliq Simones arbeider fremmer vi to argumenter. For det første vil vi argumentere for den antropologiske nytten av en mer nyansert forståelse av afrikanske byrom som ikke utelukkende vektlegger disse som åsted for stadig nye former for atomisering av kollektiver eller det Mbembe kaller nekropolitikk. For det andre vil vi vise hvordan slike tekstpraksiser utgjør former for kritikk mot hvordan særlig framstillinger av framtidens slutt er vevd inn i forståelser av byen.publishedVersio

Urban polarisering: Antropologiske bidrag

Dette spesialnummeret er viet antropologiske studier av urbane formasjoner og fokuserer særlig på polarisering og det sosiale livet som utspiller seg i møte med denne. Særlig søker vi å utforske og sammenligne de mangeartede og mangetydige konsekvensene av en langvarig, global dreining mot nyliberal byutvikling og byplanlegging. Som bidragene viser så innebærer dette ofte at urbane fellesskap og rom omdefineres. Genereringen av mangeartede og omstridte urbane former er tilgjengelige for antropologisk analyse, og bør være av stor interesse for vår disiplin. Polarisering innen dette feltet reflekterer ikke utelukkende fagets langvarige interesse for friksjon, konflikt, motstand og styringsformer innen det sosiospatiale og politiske felt, men omfatter også hvilke generative prosesser som dannes i møtet med disse. Bidragene i spesialnummeret analyserer tendenser fra ulike deler av kloden. Målsettingen er å anspore til en bredere diskusjon om urban antropologi, som kritisk tilnærmer seg forholdet mellom det private og det offentlige, relasjonene mellom materialitet og dens mange ideasjonelle uttrykk, eller måtene bystyring forholder seg til ulike former for kapitalistisk transformasjon på, for å nevne noen.publishedVersio