Contested Narratives: A Genesis of State Violence in Post-Revolutionary Iran (1979-1988)

Chowra Makaremi, Anthropology, Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur les Enjeux Sociaux (IRIS)

Research Grant, 2013

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The study explores dynamics of violence in Iran in relation to state formation after the 1979 revolution. It focuses on episodes of large-scale collective violence against political opponents and mass executions from 1981 to 1988. What happened between 1981 and 1988 in Iranian society while the country was undergoing a long-lasting war with Iraq? How can we approach these events, excluded from the hegemonic historical narratives of the revolution and the Islamic state? How does this genealogy help us understand today’s issues of secrecy and state violence in Iran?

In answering these questions, the study is driven by four main concerns. First, to look at how state apparatuses emerged within an everyday practice of control over society and through overlapping legal, para-legal, and extra-judicial processes. Second, to understand and show how experiences of violence weave into patterns of everyday life. Third, to analyze how memories are transmitted from exiles back to Iranian society, from one generation to the next, whether publicly or as family secrets. These observations lead to examining, lastly, how counter-narratives about state violence persist in different forms of memorialization, solidify through legal claims for truth and justice, and shape collective identities.

Through giving voice to feelings and experiences suppressed for decades, the project elucidates the genesis of state violence in Iran and explores the political subjectivities it has shaped.

These issues are explored in book chapters and a scientific article: “Héritages et Déni de la Violence d’Etat en Iran: Les Tracés du Pouvoir,” “Violence Partout, Justice Nulle Part!,” Monde Commun, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France (2018); “Death Politics and the Economy of Silence in Iran,” in Anstett E. and Dreyfus J.-M., eds., Destruction and Human Remains. Disposal and Concealment in Genocide and Mass Violence, Manchester University Press, 2014, p.183- 204; “’That Buried Secret of Ours!’: Memories of Violence in Post-Revolution Iran,” Allegra Lab, Thematic Threads, Juillet 2015; “États d’Urgence Ethnographiques: Approches Empiriques de la Violence Politique,” Cultures & Conflits 103-104, Winter 2016, pp. 15-34.

Articles and broadcasts aimed at a wider audience include a number of contributions at openDemocracy.net, “Mass Executions in Iran” (BBC radio broadcast on the program “Witness,” 24 August 2015), and a feature-length documentary movie scheduled for release in Fall 2018, for the 30th anniversary of the 1988 prison massacres.

Through giving voice to feelings and experiences suppressed for decades, the project elucidates the genesis of state violence in Iran and explores the political subjectivities it has shaped. Although considerable archival research and ethnographic interviews could be carried out thanks to the HFG grant, the study opened a site of research where much remains to be done. There is almost no empirical or historical scholarship to rely on, and academic knowledge on this disputed past is still to be built. This is why the HFG grant opened the path to a larger research project of digital counter-archives of violence, submitted to the European Research Council in October 2017.

Malvinas/Falklands War: Argentine Experiences of the 1982 Conflict Through Letters, War Diaries, and Amateur Photographs by Soldiers and Civilians Mobilized During the War

Federico Lorenz, CONICET—National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina

Research Grant, 2013

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The objective of my project was to study the war experience that Argentine conscripted soldiers went through during the Malvinas war in 1982. The material basis for the study were letters sent and received by soldiers during the conflict, as well as amateur photographs taken by them. Since the conflict was so short, in most cases, correspondence was not subject to censure: It offers unique, first-hand evidence to get to know how soldiers decided to communicate (or not) what they were experiencing.

Many of the photographs and letters were seized by the British or are scattered around. In order to have access to a representative sample, I visited archives and personal collections on the Malvinas Islands, Great Britain, and different regions in Argentina (mainly Patagonia). From this field work, I was able to build a collection of never-before-seen photographs and correspondence.

Civilian letters show a strong presence of the "national cause" in Argentine political culture and also an idealization about Patagonia and Malvinas.

Additionally, I found a large amount of correspondence from civilians who were volunteers to go to islands after the April 2 Argentine landing. Other noteworthy material that I found and used are the reports drafted by some soldiers shortly after their return to the mainland following orders of their units.

Jointly, correspondence and photos show major differences with the official version about the war created from photojournalism and war chronicles. Photos taken by the soldiers break away from the Argentine propaganda images and from the image built by British photographs after the Argentine surrender. Soldiers appear in their daily activities before, during, and after the combat in the way they chose to depict themselves.

There are also important regional and social differences when referring to the war, the nation, and the sacrifice that, ultimately, soldiers must make. Civilian letters show a strong presence of the “national cause” in Argentine political culture and also an idealization about Patagonia and Malvinas.

I plan to continue working on this research and have published articles focusing on this topic in scientific magazines.

Sexual Justice in the American Civil War

Charles Ritter, History, College of Notre Dame of Maryland

Research Grant, 2005

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The Sexual Justice in the American Civil War Project is the first comprehensive study of the response of the Union military to allegations of sexual assault against women and girls by soldiers and civilians during the American Civil War (1861–1865). In the summer of 1998, we began investigating how the Union military prosecuted crimes of sexual assault. Using Union court-martial records housed in the papers of the United States Judge Advocate General (Record Group 153, National Archives and Records Administration) in Washington, DC, we transcribed the complete testimony of more than two hundred trials, creating the first digital archive of this valuable historical material. We also transcribed the military service records and other relevant documents concerning each alleged assailant and recorded demographic data about each plaintiff. We have also written and presented six conference papers and made several presentations at local colleges. We have written an encyclopedia article on rape in the Civil War, an essay in a collection concerning the impact of Union occupation on southern women, Occupied Women (2012), and a chapter in Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones (2011).

We received funding from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation on two occasions. In 2005 we received a grant for expenses related to the purchase of microfilm and to field research we undertook to contextualize our research. Our approach to contextualization was three-pronged. First, we developed a historical context for the military cases by examining the ways in which civilian courts in Tennessee and Philadelphia treated accusations of rape and sexual assault in the antebellum period. Second, we intended to develop a broader procedural context by exploring the Union Provost Marshal General’s records in the National Archives. We did not undertake this research until 2006, supported by a second grant from the Foundation. Third, we collected data from ninety-three additional courts-martial cases that we identified at the National Archives. These cases represent clear instances of gender crimes although they are not necessarily sexual crimes. Teasing out the differences between these two types of offenses is an important facet of our developing definition of mid-nineteenth-century rape and sexual assault.

Teasing out the differences between these two types of offenses is an important facet of our developing definition of mid-nineteenth-century rape and sexual assault.

The two grants from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation were indispensable in conducting this research, particularly the field research and, closer to home, our ability to hire student assistants to work with us at the National Archives. The hands-on research experience these grants afforded our students was an added, and not insignificant, benefit of the funding.

Desistance from Sexual Offending Across the Life Course

Danielle Arlanda Harris, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University

Research Grant, 2013

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Desistance refers to the slowing down or stopping of offending. Although the term is relatively new to those who study sexual aggression, the phenomenon has been a staple of criminological research for two centuries (Laws & Ward, 2011). Crime is a “young man’s game,” and the observation of natural desistance or aging out (when one stops committing crime as they get older) is a key component of the criminal career. One reason desistance is such a new concept for people who have committed sexual offenses is the strong assumption of inevitable recidivism (Willis, Levenson & Ward, 2010). There is a persistent belief among many practitioners, policymakers, and members of the public that sex offenders seldom, if ever, stop and that when they are released from custody, recidivism (or “failure”) is the expected result.

This notion has considerable implications for policy and practice and adds to the growing argument for instituting an "expiry date" for offenses.

This study challenged these long-held assumptions by examining the post-release behavior of more than 500 men convicted of sexual offenses, incarcerated, and released from a purpose built facility for sexually dangerous persons in the Northeastern United States. A subsample of 27 men were ultimately located, contacted, and interviewed. Sixteen of those men were living offense-free lives in the community (and many had done for almost 20 years). The remaining 11 men had been returned to custody and will likely never be released. The most interesting finding in this study was that the majority of the men who were returned to prison had reoffended within just months of their release. This notion has considerable implications for policy and practice and adds to the growing argument for instituting an “expiry date” for offenses, the issuing of “certificates of rehabilitation” after a certain period of time, or an automatic reduction in risk scores over time.

Our results have also contributed to a better theoretical understanding of this phenomenon in men convicted of sexual offenses. Four specific styles of desistance were discovered: “aging out,” “resignation/risk,” “recovery/routine,” and “resilience/redemption.” These distinct styles emerged through thematic and content analysis and are currently being written and organized into a book.

Bibliography

1. Harris, Danielle A. (2015). Desistance from sexual offending: Behavioral change without cognitive transformation. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 1-22, Online first, DOI: 10.1177/0886260515596537.

2. Harris, Danielle A. and Cudmore, Rebecca. (2015). Desistance from sexual offending.  Oxford Handbook Online: Criminology and Criminal Justice, Crime Prevention, Gender, Sex, and Crime, 1-12. DOI:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935383.013.77 

Collective Crimes in Times of War: Explaining Local Violence Against Civilians in Croatia

Mila Dragojevic, Department of Politics, The University of the South

Research Grant, 2014

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As a recipient of the Harry Frank Guggenheim research grant, I was able to conduct my fieldwork in Croatia. My research project sought to explain under what conditions mass violence against civilians occurred by examining the sources of the local variation in the level and type of violence in the war in Croatia that lasted from 1991 to 1995. This research addressed the following questions: 1) Why did targeted violence against civilians occur to a greater extent in some communities than in others? 2) Why did such violence occur in some periods more extensively than in others? 3) How could we account for violence even in the same families or among people who used to be neighbors, friends, and colleagues?

The research entailed a subnational comparison of communities with varied levels of violence against civilians including 131 in-depth interviews with residents in selected communities. I complemented this material with documents and additional interviews from NGOs, archives, and libraries across Croatia. Over the course of the fieldwork, I realized that my findings and insights would be more valuable if placed in a cross-national comparative context. That is why I decided to pursue further research in Guatemala and Uganda, two countries with different historical trajectories than Croatia, but with similar patterns of violence against civilians.

Thus, even before mass violence begins, certain communities are transformed into amoral communities, where the definition of crime becomes altered and violence is justified as a form of self-defense by the perpetrators.

Based on the analysis of the interviews and the documents from Croatia, Uganda, and Guatemala, I argue that civilians are targeted in some communities during the war when political ethnicities, defined as new identities linking a political goal and a cultural identity, form on the local level through two complementary processes — the exclusion of moderates and the production of borders. The exclusion of moderates is carried out through violence, in-group policing, and/or social ostracism. The process of the production of borders occurs through barricades, checkpoints, and wartime dividing lines. These complementary forces limit individuals’ freedom of expressing divergent political views, work to prevent the possible defection of the members of an in-group, and facilitate identification of individuals who are represented as a threat. Thus, even before mass violence begins, certain communities are transformed into amoral communities, or communities that I conceptualize as places where the definition of crime becomes altered and violence is justified as a form of self-defense by the perpetrators. This research complements the literature on genocide and civil wars by showing how violence is used as a political strategy, as well as how state-level and micro-level cleavages become linked in local communities through the complementary mechanisms of the exclusion of moderates and the production of borders.

Bibliography

1. Mila Dragojevic . “Violence and the Production of Borders in Western Slavonia,” Slavic Review, Vol. 75, No. 2: 422-455, Summer 2016.

“None of Us Dared Say Anything”: Mass Killing in a Bosnian Community During World War II and the Postwar Culture of Silence

Max Bergholz, Concordia University

Research Grant, 2013, 2014

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The seeds of this research project first crystalized in September 2006 while I was sifting through un-catalogued documents in the basement of the Archive of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo. One day I discovered a handful of blue folders, which stopped me in my tracks. The papers inside—a confidential communist government investigation of “Sites of Mass Executions” during 1941-1945—mentioned repeatedly a largely unknown community: Kulen Vakuf, a small town and its environs in northwest Bosnia. There, during two days and nights in September 1941, the documents indicated that approximately 2,000 people—men, women, and children “of the Muslim population”—were killed by their neighbors, described as “insurgents” and “Serbs.” The folders offered only a glimpse of this multi-ethnic community’s sudden descent into intercommunal violence. But this snapshot provided a compelling micro lens through which to embark on a search for macro answers to questions of global significance: What causes intercommunal violence among neighbors in multi-ethnic communities? How does such violence then affect their identities and relations? My research project was part of the search for answers to these questions. 

During my fieldwork, I sought to reconstruct the history of this multi-ethnic community’s collapse into intercommunal killing during the summer of 1941 and the resulting transformation of its residents’ lives. Contrary to a widely held view that sees nationalism leading to violence, I discovered that the upheavals wrought by local killing created dramatically new perceptions of “ethnicity”—of oneself, supposed “brothers,” and those perceived as “others.” As a consequence, the violence forged new communities, new forms and configurations of power, and new practices of nationalism. The history of this community was marked by an unexpected burst of locally executed violence by the few, which functioned as a generative force in transforming the identities, relations, and lives of the many. As such, telling the story of this largely unknown Balkan community in 1941 provides a powerful means through which to rethink fundamental assumptions about the interrelationships among ethnicity, nationalism, and violence, both during World War II and more broadly.

Local-level analysis revealed how violence created new, under-researched dynamics of nationalism in which daily incidents triggered traumatic memories of violence that led to momentary eruptions of "sudden nationhood."

In my research, I devoted sizable attention to analyzing the period of April-September 1941, during which time, unprecedented levels of locally executed violence occurred in my region of study. I sought to explain why some neighbors, who previously lived together in peace for long periods of time, engaged in violence on an ethnic axis and why this violence occurred in certain locations and at certain times, but not others. Yet, during my research, I uncovered archival documents and unpublished manuscripts that allowed me to push beyond solely analyzing causes of and variations in violence. They enabled me to illuminate how intercommunal violence can telescope multiple, simultaneous transformations in the meaning of ethnic categories and boundaries and, in so doing, can create new forms of local communities, particularly those whose members seek to escalate killing and, counter-intuitively, those who seek to restrain killing.

Triangulating among archival documents, memoirs, and oral history interviews, I followed the history of this local community into the decades after the cataclysmic events of 1941, to when communism was built, during which time, identities and social relations continued to be deeply influenced by the experience and memory of local violence. Here, local-level analysis revealed how violence created new, under-researched dynamics of nationalism, in which daily incidents triggered traumatic memories of violence that led to momentary eruptions of “sudden nationhood.” Taken together, my project suggests an overarching argument: Local, intercommunal violence is not merely destructive in a host of ways; rather, it can be an immensely generative force in the creation of social identities and configurations of power.

Bibliography

1. Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2016).

2. "Sudden Nationhood: The Microdynamics of Intercommunal Relations in Bosnia-Herzegovina after World War II." American Historical Review 118, no. 3 (June 2013): 679-707.

3. "As if nothing ever happened: Massacres, Missing Corpses, and Silence in a Bosnia Community." In Élisabett Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus, eds., Destruction and Human Remains. Disposal and Concealment in Genocide and Mass Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 15-45.

The Chinese Must Go: The Violent Birth of American Border Control

Beth Lew-Williams, History, Princeton University

Research Grant, 2015

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The American West erupted in anti-Chinese violence in 1885. Following the massacre of Chinese miners in Wyoming Territory, communities throughout California and the Pacific Northwest harassed, assaulted, and expelled thousands of Chinese immigrants. In The Chinese Must Go, I show how American immigration policies incited this violence and how the violence, in turn, provoked new exclusionary policies. Ultimately, I argue, Chinese expulsion and exclusion produced the concept of the “alien” in modern America.

The Chinese Must Go begins in the 1850s, before federal border control established strict divisions between citizens and aliens. Across decades of felling trees and laying tracks in the American West, Chinese workers faced escalating racial conflict and unrest. In response, Congress passed the Chinese Restriction Act of 1882 and made its first attempt to bar immigrants based on race and class. When this unprecedented experiment in federal border control failed to slow Chinese migration, vigilantes attempted to take the matter into their own hands. Fearing the spread of mob violence, U.S. policymakers redoubled their efforts to keep the Chinese out, overhauling U.S. immigration law and transforming diplomatic relations with China.

Anti-Chinese law and violence continues to have consequences for today's immigrants. The present resurgence of xenophobia builds mightily upon past fears of the "heathen Chinaman."

That violence held power over U.S. politics in the nineteenth century should not come as a surprise. Transformative moments of state violence—including the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the Indian Wars—clearly mediated politics through force, but so too did a host of extralegal battles. Violent racial politics swelled in popularity in the Reconstruction South and in western territories, where white citizens lacked more recognized forms of political power. This racial violence terrorized local populations, shaped local politics, and at times, advanced a national agenda. In the mid-nineteenth century, this political violence, and the rhetoric that accompanied it, challenged the federal government’s reservation of Indian lands, enfranchisement of African Americans, and toleration of Chinese migration. By the century’s end, the federal government had acquiesced to violent demands for Indian dispossession, black oppression, and Chinese exclusion.

By locating the origins of the modern American alien in this violent era, I recast the significance of Chinese exclusion in U.S. history. As The Chinese Must Go makes clear, anti-Chinese law and violence continues to have consequences for today’s immigrants. The present resurgence of xenophobia builds mightily upon past fears of the “heathen Chinaman.”

Bibliography

1. Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

2. Beth Lew-Williams, "'Chinamen' and 'Delinquent Girls': Intimacy, Exclusion, and a Search for California’s Color Line," Journal of American History (December 2017).

Private Gun Ownership in Modern China, 1912–1949

Lei Duan, History, Syracuse University

Dissertation Fellowship, 2015

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This dissertation examines private gun ownership and its sociocultural and political implications in modern China from 1860 to 1949, a period characterized by foreign invasion, constant military conflicts, and political decentralization. During this period, foreign guns, along with their Chinese imitations, flooded society. In response to the social disorder, many Chinese civilians turned to this new class of weaponry for self-defense. While historians have understood the gun in China in terms of military modernization, this dissertation sets the privately owned gun in its social and political context, and studies why Chinese civilians chose to arm themselves with guns and how governments of different periods responded to their armed civilians.

This study argues that growing social violence and the state’s inability to respond to it led Chinese men and women to seek to obtain their own weapons. This demand was fueled by the gun’s powerful symbolism in public culture and social life, and by beliefs that guns were a source of social status and self-empowerment. Civilian ownership of guns contributed to persistent social violence, and also transformed power structures in local society and accelerated local militarization, impacting the balance between state and society. Both late Qing and Republican governments’ regulation and control over armed civilians was a dynamic and contingent process, hovering between two practices: the state’s resolute maintenance of its monopoly on the uses of guns, and its reliance on armed civilians in local defense.

This study chronicles both the state efforts to deal with armed civilians and the reactions from the bottom.

This study argues that the state’s dilemma over whether to control private guns or rely on them prevented the formation of an effective and consistent gun policy. In contrast, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) adopted a different policy towards private gun ownership, by making the mobilization of an armed populace part of its mass line policy. The CCP’s private gun policy played an important role in strengthening the CCP’s presence and authority in wartime China.

Drawing from a variety of sources such as government documents, legal cases, social survey reports, and popular writings, this study chronicles both the state efforts to deal with armed civilians and the reactions from the bottom. This dissertation engages with and complements wider research on modern Chinese history in examining violence, social life, and the dynamic state-society relationship.

Nation-Empire: Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea 1895–1945

Sayaka Chatani, History, Columbia University

Dissertation Fellowship, 2013

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By the turn of the twentieth century, “rural youth” came to symbolize the spirit of hard work, masculinity, and patriotism. The village youth associations, the seinendan, carried that ideal and spread it all over the Japanese empire. This dissertation examines how the movement to create “rural youth” unfolded in different parts of the empire and how young farmers responded to this mobilization. By examining three rural areas in Miyagi (northern Japan), Xinzhu (Taiwan), and South Ch’ungch’Òng (Korea), I argue that the social tensions and local dynamics, such as the divisions between urban and rural, the educated and the uneducated, and the young and the old, determined the motivations and emotional drives behind youth participation in the mobilization.

To invert the analytical viewpoint from the state to youth themselves, I use the term “Rural Youth Industry.” This indicates the social sphere in which agrarian youth transformed themselves from perpetual farmers to success-oriented modern youth, shared an identity as “rural youth” by incorporating imperial and global youth activism, and developed a sense of moral superiority over the urban, the educated, and the old. The social dynamics of the “Rural Youth Industry” explain why many of these youth so internalized the ideology of Japanese nationalism that they volunteered for military service and fought for the empire.

The spread of the Rural Youth Industry most clearly exemplifies a central characteristic of the Japanese empire, which is summarized as its drive to pursue nation-building across its imperial domains, forming a "nation-empire."

This dissertation offers a new perspective to the study of modern empires in several respects. It provides a new way to dissect the colonial empire, challenging the methodological trap of emphasizing the present-day national boundaries of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. It highlights rural modernity, often neglected in the urban-centric historiography of colonial modernity. It also brings together global, regional, and local histories. The seinendan were part of the global waves of imperialism, nation-state building, agrarianism, and the rise of youth. I argue that the spread of the “Rural Youth Industry” most clearly exemplifies a central characteristic of the Japanese empire, which is summarized as its drive to pursue nation-building across its imperial domains, forming a “nation-empire.” This dissertation examines the operations of the “nation-empire” at the grassroots level by comparing the social environments of mobilized agrarian youth. Situating the practices of the Japanese empire in these broader contexts as well as the specific local conditions of village societies, it illuminates the nature of mass mobilization and the shifting relationship between the state and society in the first half of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

1. "Between ‘Rural Youth’ and Empire: Social and Emotional Dynamics of Youth Mobilization in the Countryside of Colonial Taiwan under Japan’s Total War,” The American Historical Review 122, no.2 (April 2017): 371-398.