From Coltan to Cattle: Unearthing Violence in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

Ann A. Laudati, Environment and Society, Utah State University

Research Grant, 2012

The aim of my research program was to understand the linkages between natural resources and violent conflict, using Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo as a case study. In particular, there exists extensive research that looks at whether there are links and what those links are. There is very little scholarship, however, about the mechanisms connecting violent conflict and natural resources. My project aimed to address this scholarly gap through a micro level qualitative investigation that asked how and in what ways does the use of natural resources in the DRC shape instances of violence. The DRC is a particularly relevant case study given the multiple natural resources at play in past and current “wars” and the significance particular resources have held within scholarly and media narratives surrounding the violence.

My earliest trips to the field focused on investigating the wider portfolio of resources that were linked to the region’s fighting. My paper published in 2013 entitled “Beyond Minerals” in the Review of African Political Economy highlights the findings from these earlier investigations. The paper illustrates the diversity of resources drawn upon by different conflict actors. In addition to well-known conflict resources such as minerals and timber, more mundane commodities, such as marijuana and palm oil, were found to be significant valuables in the region’s rebel economy.

I thus seek to understand how the use of different natural resources by armed actors leads to differentiated forms of violence against civilians.

Such findings raise important questions about the scholarly attention devoted to “conflict minerals,” as such a narrow focus overlooks non-mineral economies with important implications for peace in the region. Later research in the area, which continues today thanks to continued financial support through multiple other grants, focuses on the micro dynamics through which engagement in these various natural resource economies contributes to violence in the region.

It thus moves away from a general understanding of which natural resources play a role in the conflict to an analysis of how their use contributes to particular violent outcomes. In other words, what are the mechanisms through which these natural resources contribute to different forms of violence.

Bibliography

Laudati, AA, 2013, “Beyond minerals: broadening 'economies of violence' in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.” Review of African Political Economy, vol 40., pp. 32-50.

On Traumatic Modernities: Forced Migration and Nakh Cultural Memory Along Caucasus Borderlands

Rebecca Gould, Humanities, Yale-NUS College Singapore

Research Grant, 2014

My research for “On Traumatic Modernities,” carried out mostly in the Caucasus, yielded several new insights as well as concrete outputs. My findings include the following:

1. Migration narratives from the 1860s continue to inform the post-Soviet experience of migration.

2. Georgians recognize the role of Muslim displacements within their literary histories and in cultural memory, even though the documentary record leaves a stronger record of solidarity across religious divides.

3. Muslims from the Caucasus link their histories of displacement with Muslims from elsewhere in the Islamic world, including Central Asia.

My conversations with local scholars in Georgia and throughout the Caucasus enable me to probe the ongoing legacies of the violence that constitutes forced migration.

These findings emerge from the comparative perspective I brought to the study of the 1944 Soviet deportations. I spoke with many survivors of the deportation (particularly those who reside on the Daghestan/Georgian border), and documented their stories and experience for future publications. Finally, my conversations with local scholars in Georgia and throughout the Caucasus enable me to probe the ongoing legacies of the violence that constitutes forced migration.

This research has also been disseminated in general interest publications. Among the general interest publications is a widely syndicated piece on the concept of forced migration (hijra) within Islam. First published in 2015 as “The Islamic State’s Perversion of Hijra,” Project Syndicate, this essay was subsequently translated into Arabic, Amharic, Chinese, French, German, Polish, and Serbian, and republished in The Globe & Mail (Canada); Qantara.de (in German and Arabic); The Bangkok Post; Japan Times; Zaman France; L’Orient-Le Jour; La revista de prensa ‘Tribuna Libre’; Reporters: Quotidien national d’information; Media24: Portail d’information économique et politique du Maroc; The Jakarta Post; The Reporter (Ethiopia); Facts & Arts; and The Montreal Review (entitled “Hijra before ISIS”).

Bibliography

Gould, R. (2018). Memorializing Akhundzadeh: Contradictory Cosmopolitanism and Post-Soviet Narcissism in Old Tbilisi. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.(https://doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2018. 1439397).
Gould, R., Shikhaliev, S. (2017). Beyond the Taqlīd/Ijtihād Dichotomy: Daghestani Legal Thought under Russian Rule. Islamic Law and Society, 24(1-2), 142-169.
Gould, R. (2016). Finding Bazorkin: A Journey from Anthropology to Literature. Anthropology and Humanism, 41(1), 86-101.
Gould, R. (2015). Ijtihd against Madhhab: Legal Hybridity and the Meanings of Modernity in Early Modern Daghestan. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 57(1), 35-66.

Political Economy of Memory: The Making, Unmaking and Remaking of the Nigeria-Biafra War

Godwin Onuoha, Democracy, Governance and Service Delivery (DGSD) Programme, Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa

Research Grant, 2014

This research examines the memories of wars, conflicts, and violence in postcolonial Africa. Its point of departure is the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967–1970). Referred to by multiple names, like “Nigeria-Biafra War,” “Biafran War,” “Nigerian Civil War,” “War of National Unity,” “War against Infidels,” the Nigeria-Biafra War was a global event, generally regarded as a defining moment in the postcolonial global order because it foreshadowed the array of devastating conflicts that would eventually threaten the survival of most postcolonial African states. The war was the first major conflict in postcolonial Africa, and in many ways, it represented the end of the “old wars” and the first of the “new wars.” Certainly, it was the first to approximate what we now call “black-on-black” genocide in postcolonial Africa; the first televised African war; the only conflict in postcolonial Africa that had both major super powers of the Cold War on the same side; and the war that launched the modern humanitarian-aid industry as we know it today.

Official memories conceal and disenfranchise other memories, but also perform the ideological task of projecting the state as the sole owner of war memories in post–civil war Nigeria.

Almost fifty years after the war, the individual and collective memories of the Nigeria-Biafra War still dominate national discourse in a manner that elicits passion, discord, and contestation in contemporary Nigeria. Drawing on a political economy approach, this research focused on the following. First, it offered new insights into memory studies by examining how memories are constructed, contested, resisted, appropriated, and structured in a postwar Nigerian context. Second, it explored how memories of wars, conflicts, and violence can underlie a group’s identity and sustain that identity and, ultimately, translate into a basis for future violence. Third, it explores the politics of “dominant” and “subordinate” memories of war and violence in a contested political space. The research was mainly qualitative and most of the fieldwork was done in the five southeastern states of Nigeria. Fieldwork comprised visiting key locations and cities in this region as landscapes of memory and where the activities of neo-Biafran movements took place.

The research provides a historical and contemporaneous analysis of memories of the Nigeria-Biafra War. It demonstrates the nuances in the making of Nigeria-Biafra War memories and why these memories continue to stymie and stunt Nigeria’s post–civil war nation-building project from becoming a more just and inclusive one. It unveiled the making of “official” memories by the state and the interrogation and contestation of these memories by opposing forces. Official memories conceal and disenfranchise other memories, but also perform the ideological task of projecting the state as the sole owner of war memories in post–civil war Nigeria. The research complicates this official narrative by exploring memory production in the Nigerian state as a continuously contested and conflicting project. This involves interrogating the ownership, production, and consumption of extant official war memories, understanding the different forces at play in inscribing and entrenching or subverting and challenging these memories, and the manifold ways in which diverse identities, classes, regions, and intellectual traditions simultaneously project memories of the war in post–civil war Nigeria.

Bibliography

2016: "Shared Histories, Divided Memories: Mediating and Navigating the Tensions in Nigeria-Biafra War Discourses,"Africa Today, Vol. 63, No. 1: 2-21.
2017: "Bringing 'Biafra' Back In: Narrative, Identity and the Politics of Non-Reconciliation in Nigeria,"National Identities, (Forthcoming DOI link: https://doi.org/10.1080/14608944.2017.1279133).
(Forthcoming): Memory, Reconciliation and Peacebuilding in Post-Civil War South- eastern Nigeria, APN Working Papers Series, African Peacebuilding Network (APN), Social Science Research Council, New York.

Epigenetic Influences on the Development of the Serotonin System: A Mechanism of Risk for Chronic Aggressive Behaviors in Humans?

Linda Booij, Clinical Psychology, University of Montreal

Research Grant, 2010

Many studies have shown that what happens early in development influences the way the brain develops and someone’s risk to develop behavioral problems later on, including chronic aggression. Studies in animals have shown that adverse factors during a mother’s pregnancy (e.g., malnutrition) or adverse experiences early in life (e.g. child abuse, bullying) can influence the way the child’s genes are expressed through “DNA methylation,” a process in which genes are marked with a chemical coating. This changes the development of certain brain regions and may have consequences for the way the child will develop emotionally, socially, and cognitively later in life.

In studies supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, we studied how early adversity affects the development of the brain, behavior, and the expression of genes that regulate serotonin, a brain chemical important for aggression. Two studies were supported: a study in animals and a study in boys and girls who were 15 years old.

In the animal study, we investigated how stress in rats during the adolescent period affected the brain and neurochemical serotonin, as well as aggression and anxiety. We used the so-called social intruder paradigm, in which a rat is placed in the cage of another rat, thereby creating interpersonal conflict, which is considered an animal analogue to bullying). We used a technique called immunohistochemistry to study the consequences of social defeat in adolescence for the density of the serotonin transporter in the brain in adulthood. We found that social defeat in adolescence increased serotonin transporter density in part of the prefrontal cortex when the rats were adults (Tao et al, 2017). Anxiety was also increased, with no effects of aggression. These results were somewhat different than what was previously observed when adverse experiences occurred earlier in life, and suggests that the effects of adverse experiences on brain, serotonin and behavior may depend on the specific timing of the stressor.

Together, these studies suggest that early adversity is associated with the development of the brain and with the regulation of the serotonin transporter.

In the human study, we studied the impact of early adversity on brain development, DNA methylation in genes that regulate serotonin, and on behaviors. For this study, we tested teenagers that had been followed since birth, and thus we had good documentation of their home environment and childhood experiences. Individuals were genetically identical twins, which allowed us to look at specific environmental factors and control for genetic effects. All individuals underwent brain imaging in combination with an emotion processing task to measure how their brain responded to various types of emotional information. A DNA sample was taken to study DNA methylation.

We found that, while controlling for genetics, prenatal (before-birth) factors but not postnatal (after-birth) factors predicted adolescent brain development. We also found that environmental-induced changes in epigenetic regulation in the serotonin transporter were predictive of neural activation in the Orbitofrontal Cortex and the way this brain region was connected to other regions (e.g. the amygdala) of the so-called limbic network. Associations were only observed when the brain was processing sad and/or fearful stimuli but not when processing angry stimuli.

Together, these studies suggest that early adversity is associated with the development of the brain and with the regulation of the serotonin transporter. Serotonin transporter density (animals) and methylation (humans) was more linked to regulation of sadness/fear than of aggression. The specific effects on brain, expression of genes, and behaviors may also depend on timing and/or type of the exposure to adverse events, genetics, and/or a combination of these.

When Comrades Go to War: Post-Liberation Movements, Elite Politics and the Internal Dynamics of Africa’s Great War

Harry Verhoeven, Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford

Philip Roessler, Government, College of William & Mary

Research Grant, 2013

Funding by the HFG enabled vital fieldwork in six African countries (Angola, Congo, Eritrea, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda), which helped detail the day-by-day, week-by-week chronicle of Africa’s Great War, a conflict that had its roots in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 and erupted in two phases (1996 and 1998), claiming the lives of more than four million Africans. These findings were written up in a monograph, Why Comrades Go To War. Liberation Politics and the Outbreak of Africa’s Deadliest Conflict.

We found in our research and argue in the book that Africa’s Great War was not a conflict between old enemies or distant strangers but rather between ideological fellow travelers and revolutionaries who had long waged the same struggle for a new, leftist Africa. Ironically, but not coincidentally, it was this very intimacy that would be the undoing of what initially seemed like a triumph (the ouster of Mobutu, arch-symbol of authoritarianism and decadence in Africa) but quickly turned into a fratricidal nightmare between leftist liberation movements from across the continent.

The initial revolutionary euphoria of liberating Africa's third-biggest country rapidly gave way to distrust between the comrades, now turned ministers and generals.

The seeds of Africa’s Great War were sown in the revolutionary struggle against Mobutu—the way the revolution came together, the way it was organized, and, paradoxically, the very way it succeeded. The overthrow of the ancien regime proved a Pyrrhic victory because the protagonists ignored the philosophy of Julius Nyerere, the godfather of Africa’s liberation movements: they put the gun before the unglamorous but essential task of building the domestic and regional political institutions and organizational structures necessary to consolidate peace after revolution. Thus, the initial revolutionary euphoria of liberating Africa’s third-biggest country rapidly gave way to distrust between the comrades, now turned ministers and generals.

In the absence of robust institutions to settle disputes, divide the spoils of victory, and balance competing visions for the revolution, political disagreements and misperceptions became sources of great tension and later catastrophic physical violence. A mere 15 months after what should have been a “second independence,” the outcome was Africa’s Great War.

Homicide in North Italy: Bologna, 1600–1700

Colin Rose, History, University of Toronto

Dissertation Fellowship, 2015

The Papal State of Bologna, in North Italy, suffered high and at times increasing rates of interpersonal homicide throughout eleven sampled years of the seventeenth century. The powerful criminal court of Bologna, the Tribunale del Torrone, prosecuted homicides as capital crimes through the deployment of inquisitorial process and a public image of impartial justice, but it remained unable to overcome deep impulses to revenge and vendetta among the various populations of the city and hinterland. In sentencing homicides, judges erred on the side of exile over execution, and when judges attempted to condemn participants in vendetta to death, they found themselves made party to revenge violence. The inability of the court to effectively police interpersonal violence is indicative of a developing state whose institutions and social structures are failing.

The massive wave of mid-century violence is placed into a long history of Bologna’s failure to establish a meaningful civil society.

Socioeconomic crises of the early seventeenth century contributed to this deteriorating situation. In particular, the great plague of 1630 overturned social norms and, in the “world upside down” that followed, ordinary Bolognesi of the contado committed more homicides in pursuit of gain or in protection of fragile resources. The stresses of endemic rural poverty bore heavily on rural violence. From rural bases, republican and oligarchic factions of urban nobility launched a renewed assault on papal authority in the mid-sixteenth century. A civil war broke out in the city’s streets and homicide rates peaked at levels exceeding any thus far documented in early modern Europe. Officers of government bodies and of the criminal court were targeted for killing on multiple occasions.

This dissertation contextualizes these trends through interdisciplinary approaches to the history of violence and homicide in the west, and by deep qualitative analysis of patterns emerging from quantitative data collection. By combining these two approaches, the massive wave of mid-century violence is placed into a long history of Bologna’s failure to establish a meaningful civil society.

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

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

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

Ways of War: Toward a Global Military History

Tonio A. Andrade, History, Emory University

Research Grant, 2012

My research, supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, focused on an emerging field of study: global military history, resulting in the publication of a book, The Gunpowder Age (Princeton University Press, 2016), which compares Chinese and Western European military history from 900 to 1900 AD.

Scholars have long argued that China’s military traditions, technologies, and techniques fell behind those of the West shortly after gunpowder arrived in Europe in the early fourteenth century, with Europeans “perfecting” guns while China stagnated. My research showed, however, that China maintained military superiority or parity with the West for much longer: well into the eighteenth century.

Drawing on Chinese and Western sources—such as military manuals published in profusion in both China and the West during the 1500s and 1600s—The Gunpowder Age shows that China was undergoing many of the same developments that were revolutionizing warfare and society in western Europe at precisely the same time. For example, the famous Ming general Qi Jiguang (1528–88) adopted advanced muskets earlier than has been appreciated and, strikingly, employed advanced musketry drilling techniques some forty years before they seem to have appeared in Europe (these techniques have been considered a hallmark of Europe’s famous “Military Revolution”). In general, Ming China showed many of the cascading changes that historians have argued typified the European Military Revolution—a replacement of cavalry by infantry, a rapid increase in the complexity of military hierarchies, a proliferation of printed drilling manuals, and a rapid increase in the ratio of firearms to traditional weapons.

Countries that achieve too much military success may tend in the long run to become vulnerable to adversaries from regions where warfare is more frequent.

China maintained its military parity into the eighteenth century, but then found itself outclassed by the western states, whose military prowess continued increasing, whereas China’s atrophied, leaving China vulnerable to Great Britain, which easily bested it in the Opium War of 1839-42. Why? Not just because Britain was undergoing industrialization but also—and perhaps more importantly—because by 1839, China had enjoyed nearly a century of relative peace under the overwhelming regional dominance of the powerful Qing Dynasty. Thanks to Qing power, China enjoyed during this period what appears to be the least warlike period in its millennia-long history. (There were, of course, many wars and rebellions, so we are speaking relatively, comparing the incidence of conflict to other periods in China’s bloody history.) As a result, its once dynamic military institutions and technologies had atrophied.

I believe, therefore, that China’s nineteenth-century weakness was an aberration and that, in order to truly understand the military pattern of the Chinese past, one must pay attention to the frequency of warfare in and around China. It’s an old idea, but one that today can be applied more rigorously and with greater precision, thanks to a profusion of data from China. China’s so-called “stagnation” was a short-term state, due to the unprecedented power of its last imperial dynasty.

What does this study tell us about human violence and warfare in general? For one, it suggests that countries that achieve too much military success, such as the Qing dynasty’s unprecedented hegemony of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, may tend in the long run to become vulnerable to adversaries from regions where warfare is more frequent. In any case, it suggests that a careful and nuanced study of the frequency of warfare may shed significant light on patterns of global history.

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

Sayaka Chatani, History, Columbia University

Dissertation Fellowship, 2013

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

"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.

“There is Still No Justice Here!”: Theorizing Women’s Movements’ Influence on Postwar African States Enforcement of Gender-Based Violence Laws

Peace Medie, Legon Centre for International Affairs and Diplomacy, University of Ghana

Research Grant, 2014

African countries have begun to create specialized criminal justice sector mechanisms, such as specialized courts and specialized police units to address violence against women. Proponents of this international norm, including women’s nongovernmental organizations, argue that these specialized mechanisms will improve how victims of gendered violence are treated by the criminal justice system and will ensure that perpetrators are held accountable by the law. My book project is a comparative study of the implementation of this international norm in post-war states in Africa. I draw on over 300 interviews conducted in Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire to study variation in the establishment of specialized units in the police force and gendarmerie. While both countries have created specialized units, Liberia has made more progress in institutionalizing its unit. I also study how the establishment of these specialized units have affected the performance of street-level officers in cases of intimate partner violence and non-partner perpetrated rape.

These findings are also relevant for policymakers as they identify the conditions under which specialized units are more likely to be institutionalized and to improve law enforcement and advance women’s rights.

I argue that while pressure from the United Nations, including the peacekeeping mission in both countries, was sufficient for the creation of the specialized units, it was not sufficient for their institutionalization. Instead, strong pressure from domestic actors, particularly women’s organizations, and favorable political and institutional conditions were needed for rapid institutionalization. Furthermore, in both countries, officers in specialized units were less likely to adopt practices that re-victimized girls and women and were more likely to refer rape cases for prosecution. However, street-level performance was hampered by infrastructural and logistical constraints. These findings provide insight into the domestic implementation of international norms and demonstrate the roles of international and domestic actors in addressing violence against women and in building institutions in war-affected states. These findings are also relevant for policymakers as they identify the conditions under which specialized units are more likely to be institutionalized and to improve law enforcement and advance women’s rights.

Bibliography

Medie, Peace. “Rape Reporting in Post-conflict Cote D’Ivoire: Accessing Justice and Ending Impunity,”African Affairs, 116/464, 414-434

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