Abstract
This chapter explores people’s experiences of violent conflict. Concepts such as conflict, grievance, and violence, are analysed through the way people experienced them directly through their bodies, their emotions, their families, and socio-economic changes in their households. The chapter then looks at different ways in which the everyday reality of conflict affected people’s bodies, beyond direct violence. This includes the emotional dimension, in particular emotions such as fear, anger, grievance, relationships, and gendered experiences.
In many ways, people’s narratives bring up in this chapter new and surprising dimensions of violent conflict that are meaningful to them, often related to their cultures, values, and family commitment. This shows how factors that people consider as ‘grievance’ or ‘violence’ can be very different from academic proxies for these concepts, and that they can shape people’s perspectives on peace and nonviolent change.
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Notes
- 1.
Sylvester, Experiencing War: 9.
- 2.
T. Zech Steven and M. Kelly Zane, “Off With Their Heads: The Islamic State and Civilian Beheadings,” Journal of Terrorism Research 6, no. 2 (2015).
- 3.
Zulaika, Basque Violence: Metaphor and Sacrament; Johnston, “Ritual, Strategy, and Deep Culture in the Chechen National Movement.”; Jeffrey S. Juris, “Violence Performed and Imagined,” Critique of Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2005).
- 4.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
- 5.
2ibid., 118.
- 6.
Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence: 9.
- 7.
Stathis, “Micro-Level Studies of Violence in Civil War: Refining and Extending the Control-Collaboration Model.”; Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War.
- 8.
Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War: 363.
- 9.
Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence.
- 10.
See: David Keen and Studies International Institute for Strategic, The economic functions of violence in civil wars, vol. 320 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1998); Berdal and Keen, “Violence and Economic Agendas in Civil Wars: Some Policy Implications.”; Keen, Complex emergencies; Collier and Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War.”.
- 11.
Keen and International Institute for Strategic, The economic functions of violence in civil wars, 320.
- 12.
Bhattacharya, Lalgarh and the Legend of Kishanji: Tales from India's Maoist Movement.
- 13.
Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War.
- 14.
Ibid., 149.
- 15.
Stoll, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala.
- 16.
Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War: 90–101.
- 17.
A gamcha is a very thin traditional cotton towel; men also wear it wrapped around the waist.
- 18.
Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World.
- 19.
K.M Fierke, “Human Dignity, Basal Emotion and a Global Emotionology,” in Emotions, Politics, and War, ed. Linda Åhäll and Thomas Gregory (Oxford: Routledge, 2015), 46–47.
- 20.
See, for example: Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War; Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence; Justino, “Poverty and Violent Conflict: A Micro-Level Perspective on the Causes and Duration of Warfare.” Humphreys and Weinstein, “Who Fights? The Determinants of Participation in Civil War.”; Shane Joshua Barter, “Unarmed Forces: Civilian Strategy in Violent Conflicts,” Peace & Change 37, no. 4 (2012).
- 21.
See, for example: Moore Jr, Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt; Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia; Gurr, Why Men Rebel.
- 22.
Wood, Insurgent Collective Action and Civil War in El Salvador.
- 23.
Sylvester, Experiencing War; Mac Ginty and Williams, Conflict and Development.
- 24.
Hutchison and Bleiker, “Grief and the Transformation of Emotions after War.”.
- 25.
See, for example: Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War; Kalyvas, “Wanton and Senseless?.”; Steven and Zane, “Off With Their Heads: The Islamic State and Civilian Beheadings.”.
- 26.
Swati Parashar, “Anger, War and Feminist Storytelling,” in Emotions, Politics, and War, ed. Linda Åhäll and Thomas Gregory (Oxford: Routledge, 2015), 72.
- 27.
Sengupta, Out of War: Voices of Surrendered Maoists.
- 28.
Alpa Shah, “The Intimacy of Insurgency: Beyond Coercion, Greed or Grievance in Maoist India,” Economy and Society 42, no. 3 (2013).
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Ibid.; Kriger, Zimbabwe's Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices.
- 31.
Parashar, “Anger, War and Feminist Storytelling,” 75.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
Justino, “Poverty and Violent Conflict: A Micro-Level Perspective on the Causes and Duration of Warfare.”.
- 34.
Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence.
- 35.
- 36.
Sanhati, “Lalgarh Movement—Mass Uprising of Adivasis in West Bengal”; Bhattacharyya, Singur to Lalgarh via Nandigram—Update 1.
- 37.
Sengupta, Out of War: Voices of Surrendered Maoists.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
Parashar and Shah, “(En)Gendering the Maoist Insurgency in India: Between Rhetoric and Reality.”.
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Carrer, M. (2022). Experiencing Conflict. In: How People Respond to Violence. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11342-0_6
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