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Often, violent behavior or harassment from a soldier is dismissed by the military as unacceptable acts by individuals termed, “rotten apples.” In this study, the author argues that this dismissal is unsatisfactory and that there is an urgent need to look at the (mis)behavior of soldiers from a structural point of view. When soldiers serve as an occupational force, they find themselves in a particular situation influenced by structural circumstances that heavily influence their behavior and moral decision-making. This study focuses on young Israeli men and their experiences as combat soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), particularly those who served in the “Occupied Palestinian Territories” (OPT) during the “Al Aqsa Intifada,” which broke out in 2000. In describing the soldiers’ circumstances, especially focusing on space, the study shows how processes of numbing on different levels influence the (moral) behavior of these soldiers.
This volume offers insights from political anthropology on how to analyze and how to think about contemporary areas of internationalized political phenomena in a fresh manner. By drawing on a variety of cases like policing, budgeting, the role of monetary politics in everyday life, development agencies, and international organisations it shows the promise of an “extended experience” for the study of international politics, yet without glossing over the limits of such approaches. This book is an essential contribution to the discussion about ethnography in international relations and a bridge between disciplines.
Security Blurs makes an important contribution to anthropological work on security. It introduces the notion of “security blurs” to analyse manifestations of security that are visible and identifi able, yet constructed and made up of a myriad and overlapping set of actors, roles, motivations, values, practices, ideas, materialities and power dynamics in their inception and performance. The chapters address the entanglements and overlaps between a variety of state and non-state security providers, from the police and the military to vigilantes, community organisations and private security companies. The contributors offer rich ethnographic studies of everyday security practices across a range of cultural contexts and reveal the impact on the lives of ordinary citizens. This book presents a new anthropological approach to security by explicitly addressing the overlap and entanglement of the practices and discourses of state and non-state security providers, and the associated forms of cooperation and confl ict that permit an analysis of these actors’ activities as increasingly “blurred”.
This book demonstrates the unique contribution police ethnographies make to our understanding of policing cultures and practices in a variety of international settings. It features contemporary examples of police ethnographies that demonstrate the continuing value of ethnographic work to our understanding of policing. The first section of the book focuses on the police and Anglo-American policing. The second section is international in scope and seeks to enrich our understandings of policing ‘beyond’ the police. Chapters explore police interactions during a stop and search and at a carnival. They peer behind the scenes at the control room and at the use of intelligence. We listen in to t...
This book provides an up-to-date introduction to the important field of urban anthropology. This is a critical area of study, as more than half of the world’s population now lives in cities and anthropological research is increasingly done in an urban context. Exploring contemporary anthropological approaches to the urban, the authors consider: How can we define urban anthropology? What are the main themes of twenty-first-century urban anthropological research? What are the possible future directions in the field? The chapters cover topics such as urban mobilities, place-making and public space, production and consumption, and politics and governance. These are illustrated by lively case s...
Borders, Territories, and Ethics: Hebrew Literature in the Shadow of the Intifada by Adia Mendelson-Maoz presents a new perspective on the multifaceted relations between ideologies, space, and ethics manifested in contemporary Hebrew literature dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the occupation. In this volume, Mendelson-Maoz analyzes Israeli prose written between 1987 and 2007, relating mainly to the first and second intifadas, written by well-known authors such as Yehoshua, Grossman, Matalon, Castel-Bloom, Govrin, Kravitz, and Levy. Mendelson-Maoz raises critical questions regarding militarism, humanism, the nature of the State of Israel as a democracy, national identity and ...
The Sensation of Security explores how private security guards are a permanent, conspicuous fixture of everyday life in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with security laborers, managers, company owners, and elite global consultants, Erika Robb Larkins examines the provision of security in Rio from the perspective of security personnel, providing an analysis of the racialized logics that underpin the ongoing work of securing the city. Larkins shows how guards communicate a sensação de segurança (a sensation of security) to clients and customers who have the capital to pay for it. Cultivated through performances by security laborers, the sensation of security is a set of culturally shaped racialized and gendered impressions related to safety, order, well-being, and cleanliness. While the sensação de segurança indexes an outward-facing task of allaying fears of crime and maintaining order in elite spaces, it also refers to the emotional labor and embodied worlds that security workers navigate.
The book is part of FAST’s ongoing activism, research, design, and advocacy work. It builds on earlier presentations, including the exhibition BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions for the Dutch Pavilion of the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale. At the intersection of architecture, urban planning, international relations and activism, BLUE: Architecture of UN Peacekeeping Missions seeks not only to change UN missions but also to open up and expand the operative realm of architecture. It combines research and projects involving policymakers, military engineers and officers, anthropologists, local inhabitants, activists, rebels, diplomats and ministers, architects and planners. BLUE offers examples of how entrenched institutional bureaucracies can be confronted by using more inclusive models of engagement, and it shows how designs rooted in local cultures and empowerment can address a history of violence.
During the Cold War - an era in which the term ‘asymmetric warfare’ was not well known - the issue of the laws and ethics of war seemed simple enough to most soldiers, being concerned mainly with leadership, management, and morale. Post-Cold War reality revealed a very different set of challenges, including a significantly wider moral dimension, particularly when forces, initially under UN leadership and later under the NATO flag, were deployed in different parts of the turbulent Balkans. Military observers, by now with legal advisers close by, watched events in the Balkans, East Timor and then in central and West Africa with professional interest, and some were involved there. A few yea...
Through an in-depth analysis of the multifaceted manifestations of gender and conflict, this book shows how cognition and behaviour, agency and victimization, are gendered beyond the popular stereotypes. Conflict not only reconfirms social hierarchies and power relations, but also motivates people to transgress cultural boundaries and redefine their self-images and identities. The contributions are a mix of classical ethnography, performance studies and embodiment studies, showing ’emotions and feelings’ often denied in scientific social research. Strong in their constructivist approach and unorthodox in theory, the articles touch upon the dynamic relation between the discourses, embodim...