Tag Archives: violence

Blog, Features, Syria After The Assads

Maria Kastrinou and Salam Said: How to kill a country: Feeling history in scenes of pillage

Image 1: “This is a photo of my mother looking at our village from afar, when she learned they were demolishing our homes—destroying her house, her history, and every moment of love she lived there. This image makes me cry.” © Photograph by Nadeem, Suwayda, January 2026.

We write at a time of genocide, war, and the feeling that whoever has the more guns can do whatever they want. We ask how different forms of violence — physical, symbolic and economic — undo the fragile infrastructures of coexistence and national belonging. We are scholars of Syria, coming together from different disciplines: Maria is an anthropologist who has been working in and on Syria since 2008 writing about the Druze,i sectarianism and the state. Salam is a Syrian economist who has been working on the political economy of olive oil, the Syrian army, and social justice. For the past year we have shared our doubts, hopes and devastation as we have witnessed, from afar, the sectarian violence in the Druze-majority governorate of Suwayda in southern Syria that took place in July 2025.

Between 14 and 16 July 2025, Suwayda witnessed a sectarian assault of shocking scale. Testimonies describe executions inside homes, killings in the main hospital, people forced to jump from balconies, ritual humiliations and beheadings—often filmed by the perpetrators. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, up to 1,700 people were killed in a week in July alone; hundreds remain missing, including 235 women (HRW 2026). The majority of those killed are civilians of the Druze religion. The violence was disproportionate and indiscriminate towards anyone who was seen as a religious other, as both Druze and Christian communities in Suwayda were attacked.

We have asked each other where did all the hatred and racism come from? We’ve found no satisfactory answer (Kastrinou & Said 2025).

On 15 July, Israel struck Syria’s Ministry of Defence and the Presidential Palace inside the Syrian capital Damascus, proclaiming a duty to “protect” the Druze.ii The United States brokered a ceasefire on 21 July 2025.

As the dust and the blood from the massacres ‘settled,’ we shared our profound uneasiness with the political repercussions and aftermaths of this violent attack: the rising calls for Suwayda’s autonomy, and especially those calling for Israeli ‘protection.’ It has been incredibly taxing both to write about acts of extreme violence, like the July attacks; as well as to write about the aftermath of this violence, namely the emergence of conservative pro-Israeli forces within Suwayda. As scholars, we find ourselves profoundly opposed to the notion that a state that erases Palestinian lives, can ever ‘protect’ the Druze or the Christians, or anyone else, for that matter, in Syria. But isn’t the basis of anthropology to grapple with the moral dilemmas of being human? Can we not extend our understanding to those that we disagree with?

In Salam’s latest visit in Syria, in December 2025, some friends, family and acquaintances were convinced that the Syrian Druze are not safe under the current “Islamist and terrorist” – descriptions they used – “regime” in Damascus. Those who did not support succession had quieter voices and uncertain plans. Salam was told often: “Khalas, there is no other way. As long as there is this regime, we can only rely on Israel for survival.” Even those who are explicitly against Israel said “We don’t like Israel but we have to admit without its intervention, the Druze community would have been completely exterminated,” or that “we are too small and too weak to decide on Suwayda, while the majority of the Druze community fears being killed.” A sense that the sectarian attack by the new Syrian regime, and the subsequent Israeli intervention was part of a “done deal” is what comes out of our connections and friends in Damascus and in Suwayda.

Using anthropology as a grounding tool, we juxtapose three scenes of rupture from the violent assault in Suwayda in order to put together the local forms of shock and betrayal that can help us sense the local contours of trauma, shock and revenge. These vignettes are not ‘ethnographic’ in the usual sense: the first is taken from a published piece of non-fiction detailing the experiences of a Druze nurse resident of Suwayda city, as narrated over the phone by herself to her former medical colleague, who is a doctor and a writer. Maria interviewed the author, and we use this piece as an ethnographic example, even if not collected by us, that elucidates the breakdown of society at the microlevel. The second is a vignette based on a conversation with a survivor that Salam met in a recent visit in Syria. And the third is the sense of historical change as gleaned from the opinions, delivered through WhatsApp and Facebook of one of Maria’s longest Syrian friends. Collected from afar and without being there, these are scenes of rupture with the past that permit us to put together a sense of history in the making, and at the same time prohibit and question the emergence of certainty of the unfolding and messy ways that history is felt in Suwayda and in Syria today. Perhaps we are as vulnerable and naïve for trying. Perhaps anthropology itself, can be a way through which to sense, to get a feeling of the past and the present.

First, we start with an introduction to the geographic and local conflicts that intersect and complicate the telling this violent and treacherous story.

What is New?

The ‘new’ Syria that emerged after the fall of Assad on December 8, 2024, is inseparable from the ‘new’ Middle East shaped through the violence, strangulation and ongoing genocide against Palestinians by Israel and its allies. What is ‘new’ about a ‘new’ Syria, or indeed about a ‘new’ Middle East? Is there perhaps new hope for peace and justice? ‘New,’ here, if anything is a bitter irony: despite Assad’s fall, and the battering of the Axis of Resistance — Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran — there is no new hope for the region’s peoples. What appears instead is a deepening condition of permanent war and pacification.

Since 2023, Israel, with the arms and the backing of all the world’s strongest powers and their coalitions, has caused the direct death of more than 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza, while criminally attacking, and in some cased invading and occupying, its neighbours in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. It is within the context of the supreme military and technological might of Israel combined with the international powers’ carte blanche (despite the pending arrest warrants for its leaders), that the formerly internationally ascribed terrorists of Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), with the crucial backing from regional and international allies, were able to make a lightening advance that soon reached Damascus and ushered a ‘new’ Syria.

Is there anything ‘new’ in HTS – who are leading the state of Syria? The short answer is ‘no.’ HTS is a political coalition based on conservative and authoritarian premises, who strategically broke away from Al-Qaeda and ISIS, but whose ideological basis is shared, and whose governing experiment in the north-western Syrian governorate of Idleb has been described as ruthless and foreign to the Syrian national experience.iii The first act of their government was to make all political parties illegal – a prohibition still standing more than a year later.

What has changed is that HTS is no longer ascribed ‘terrorists’ but has become an ‘ally’ to the most powerful backers, especially USA. Why this change? Not because HTS changed, but because the regional alignment changed: the so-called ‘Islamist extremists’ are now good for doing the reconstruction business with. In the regional chessboard, the change of regime has been advantageous for Turkey who wanted to expand its regional influence and crush any hope for Kurdish autonomy; and good for Israel who crushed Hezbollah in Lebanon, wants to destroy Iran, and has a long-term strategic goal to establish a demilitarized zone in Syria and Lebanon beyond its illegal occupation of the Golan Heights.

Despite the new geopolitical context, were there local reasons and past grievances that festered the ground upon which the sectarian massacre was carried out?

Syria is home to many of the region’s diverse religions and ethnic groups, but also home to a strong nationalist and politically pluralist heritage. Indeed, Suwayda, although the only Syrian governorate with a Druze majority, is also home to Christian and Sunni Muslim villages and neighbourhoods, as well as seasonal populations of Bedouin and farm workers that migrate periodically in and out of the region. Conflict, especially between Bedouins and Druze are not new but these conflicts, and the logics of their revenge and honour codes, are not sectarian or indiscriminate as the July attacks were (Dukhan & Chatty 2025). Fourteen years of war have indeed eroded trust between and within Syrian communities, some of whom see non-Sunni or non-Arab communities if not as complicit with the previous regime, then as unfairly treated. This image, often projected by the HTS-government in Damascus, is that Suwayda’s politics is tarnished by its former association with the Assad regime, and, after the Israeli intervention in July 2025, its current association with Israel. Neither of these allegations are true.

During the early years of uprising, Druze areas in Syria were as split between pro-and anti- protesters as any other place in Syria. As the uprising was weaponised and turned into a proxy war, Druze areas such as Jaramana and Suwayda were able to maintain a relative autonomy and broker local deals, from the central government as well as with surrounding rebel militia. In practice, that meant that Druze areas became safe havens for the internally displaced persons evading violence, the majority of which where peri-urban, or rural, and poor. Moreover, Druze areas are known to be liberal, educated, and politically progressive, and despite the rise of religious-military power in the years of war, many Druze were members of left non-sectarian parties, and many youth formed and participated in NGOs and other political organisations focussed on political change, solidarity and aid for the displaced.iv

What is new, therefore, is the increasing sectarianisation of political discourse and volunteering practice within Suwayda and Jaramana. Druze flags, Druze institutions, and NGOs, even religious attire are on the rise. Indeed, the community seems to be now, after the massacres in July, undergoing a profound change in the interrelations within their society as well as in their relations within Syria and beyond. A new sense of brotherhood across borders is emerging, especially between the Druze in Suwayda and the Druze in northern Israel/Palestine. What is certainly not new is Israel’s propaganda of using Druze religious difference as a means by which to sow sectarian hatred in the place of national belonging in both Palestine and in Syria. And certainly, many in Suwayda see and fear of this history, and feel afraid to call it out.

Scenes of rupture

The following scenesv not only tell us about the violence used, but also about the violence perceived to have been used. Betrayal, sexual depravity, scorched earth: these scenes of rupture are both instances of violence as well as violence perceived – and how different forms of violence carry the seeds of different histories and different futures.

Scene 1

The first scene comes from a nurse in Suwayda, and has been published in Arabic by Dr. Najat Abdul Samad in Daraj Media. Abdul Samad’s journalistic account centres on the nurse’s experience, whom we get to know with her initials, S.F., as she speaks of a lifetime of neighbourly coexistence with her Bedouin friends. Their children played together, families visited each other’s homes, everyday life unfolded through proximity rather than doctrine. Yet, this relationship began to fracture after the transitional government took power. Her friend’s husband forbade visits to Druze households, declaring them not “true Muslims.”

According to the nurse, the massacre was premeditated — an agreement between General Security and certain Bedouin tribes who were given weapons and promised the loot and homes of Druze families they would kill. Her testimony describes the assault between 14 and 16 July 2025. Entire families slaughtered, women and children among the dead, survivors hiding in terror.

What struck her most, however, was the economy of betrayal that preceded the violence. In the days before the attack, S.F. notes that Bedouins were buying large quantities of flour, sugar, and cigarettes; all on credit. When she asked a shop owner why he allowed such risk, he replied that his profits came from such sales, that payment was due Monday, 14 July, and that since even big merchants like Salim Ashti trusted the buyers, he would too. On 15 July, they tied up and robbed Salim Ashti, the elderly owner of the largest shop in the neighbourhood, in front of his shop, to watch its destruction, and then killed him.

The nurse’s account continues with more graphic accounts of deaths and torture in the hands of former neighbours. All of which is utterly harrowing. Yet, focusing on credit and death, this scene reveals not only the horror of neighbour turning on neighbour, but the collapse of trust itself. The breaking of economic credit mirrored the breakdown of social bonds. As anthropologists we know too well that debt and credit are not merely transactions, but forms of sociality, reciprocity, and trust — for example as shown in Paul Anderson’s work on merchants and exchange in Syria (2023). The collapse of credit and trust marks the unravelling of coexistence among the living. But in Suwayda, violence did not stop there.

Scene 2

When Salam returned to Syria in December 2025, she wanted to meet with Nidal, an old acquaintance whom, she had heard, had gone through a terrible ordeal. When they met, his first words were “I’m a refugee here. I have lost everything.” Salam could sense that he was angry, deeply sad, but had not surrendered. Nidal is a journalist with a degree in law. In the years of the Syrian war, he had been working in the Gulf in order to build a house of his own in his hometown in Suwayda, a house he described not as an investment, but as a return. He showed Salam a photograph of the house on his mobile: vibrant, carefully painted, surrounded by a tended garden. The next image was almost unrecognisable. The house had been reduced to blackened ruin; the garden trees cut down. Salam recalls the shock of seeing the images on his phone.

Nidal described the assault as faz`aa. In Arabic, this term carries references to a tribal call to mobilisation, an appeal to men and women to come to the defence of their kin. Since July 2025, many Druze residents used this word to describe the entry of armed Bedouin fighters into their villages. While the government did not officially frame its intervention in these terms, and President al-Sharaa denies sectarian intent, the local interpretation among survivors is that the violence unfolded through precisely this idiom: a tribal logic of collective mobilisation that blurred into state-backed force.

As discussed in the introduction, Druze–Bedouin tensions in southern Syria are not new. Clashes have occurred intermittently over land, honour, smuggling routes and patronage. Yet these conflicts were rarely narrated as indiscriminate or exterminatory. They coexisted with everyday interdependence, such as shared markets, seasonal labour, migration in and out of the region, and forms of pragmatic coexistence within a broader national framework. What Nidal experienced in July 2025 felt, to him, like a decisive break from those earlier logics. This was not framed as dispute or revenge within a shared moral world, but as eradication.

During the assault, Nidal remained inside his house until the early morning of 19 July, when he was kidnapped. Blindfolded and transported to Daraa, he was held for six days in a small, filthy, dark location. He did not wish to speak in detail about that experience. Yet, what he did want to emphasise was that he was “struck” most from a conversation he overheard among his captors: “we are here not to loot houses, but to kill the Druze.” Killing the Druze was articulated as an objective. For Nidal, this language marked the rupture. It suggested not punishment, nor bargaining, nor coercion into submission, but the targeting of a community as such.

After his escape, he began collecting photographs documenting the destruction. One image he described — because Salam could not look at it — showed “naked bodies of women stacked on top of each other. The bodies show gunshots in the knees to prevent resistance while raping them.” For him, this exceeded looting or punitive violence. It amounted to terror aimed at making future coexistence impossible. It was not, he insisted, about disciplining Suwayda or integrating it into the “kingdom of the new Emir” in Damascus. It felt instead like an effort to erase a community, and with it, the fragile national compact within which previous conflicts, however bitter, had been contained.

Nidal, like many people we spoke to from Suwayda and Jaramana, are quick to point to the change in the use of violence from the Assad-era to the Al-Sharaa-era. They say that part of the historical rupture is the change in the kinds of violence used, and the end results that the violence is used to usher. The killings and torture under Assad regime functioned as a form of punishment and a means to eliminate a political opposition that might challenge the existing political order. Similarly in the past, localized tensions between Druze and Bedouin tribes have often been driven by struggles for land, influence or economic power – a competition over resources. However, in the case of massacre of July, however, testimonies such as Nidal, like many people we spoke to from Suwayda and Jaramana, is quick to point to the change in the use of violence from the Assad era to the al-Sharaa era. For them, part of the historical rupture lies in the kinds of violence used, and in the ends that such violence is meant to achieve. Killings and torture under the Assad regime functioned largely as punishment and as a means to eliminate political opposition that might challenge the existing order. Similarly, earlier tensions between Druze and Bedouin tribes were often driven by struggles over land, influence, or economic resources.

In the July massacres, however, testimonies such as Nidal’s suggest that the violence cannot be reduced to struggles for control or collective punishment. Rather, the violence appears directed not at disciplining a political foe but at eliminating a community as such. Five months on, Nidal remained petrified for his life. He wanted Salam to understand that “they see us as kuffār, and they believe they will be rewarded for killing us, exactly what happened to the Yazidis.” The reference, often invoked by survivors, is to the Yazidi ethnic cleansing carried out by ISIS in Iraq in 2014. For Nidal, this form of torture and killing reflects an ideology that frames the destruction of his community as legitimate, even righteous. The violence experienced thus marks both a rupture with earlier forms of state violence and a dangerous present: many now fear that even if Suwayda were to align with a centralized Syrian state, this would not guarantee the Druze’s safety. Targeted violence could continue as long as this ideology persists and its perpetrators enjoy impunity.

Scene 3

Maria met Nadeem in 2008, when she was living in Damascus, in the Druze suburb of Jaramana. It was a different Syria. Nadeem was smart and passionate, working as a photographer hoping to support himself through university. When the war came, he continued photographing. Over fourteen years he created an extensive archive of the first days of the uprising and the war that followed.

In the early hours of July 14, 2025, his village in western Suwayda was attacked. Snipers, he wrote, shot indiscriminately at anyone entering or leaving. Many fled, those who did not were killed. His uncle was beheaded. When Nadeem returned briefly to the village, he found only death, pillage and scorched earth. His house was burned, and his photographic archive was either burned or stolen. “They killed everything,” Nadeem texted Maria on WhatsApp on July 17, 2025.

Nadeem’s story returns us to the question of what, precisely, is being destroyed. Once a revolutionary who smuggled food into Yarmouk camp and documented protest, he briefly joined the popular defence in Suwayda after the massacres. Yet what distinguishes his account is not only what he lost, but how he interprets it. For him, the struggle is between remembering and forgetting. Forgetting, he argues, aligns with colonial and authoritarian power. He points to the abolition of Yawm al-Shuhadāʾ (Martyrs’ Day), which used to be commemorated on 6 May in memory of Arab nationalists executed in 1916 by the Ottomans, and long woven into Syrian narratives of nationalist sacrifice. Its removal by the new authorities is read by him as part of a broader erasure of shared national memory. Alongside the diminishing of national commemorations and the seizure of Syrian land by Israel, he sees a single trajectory: the demolition of national consciousness and its replacement with religious, sectarian and tribal identities.

“This regime is a puppet of all colonial powers,” Nadeem texted in October 2025, asking for my editorial help before he uploaded his opinion in English on Facebook. His message continued: “brought about through the agreement of imperial forces to tear apart Syria’s social fabric, uproot and kill all revolutionaries, and destroy the Syrian state along with all its institutions. If the people do not awaken, they will cease to be a people, and will instead turn into tribal, sectarian, and religious factions.”

For Nadeem, displacement is not only material. “I never wanted to leave my homeland,” he wrote, “but how can I live in a country where I see a flag flying over my land that is not my own. Nor will I accept being defined by my religious sect.” He refers to both the new Syrian flag, but also to the flag of the state of Israel which has been raised in the city of Suwayda by some. He has searched online and through networks in Deraa for traces of his looted equipment. During the fourteen-year war, displaced Syrians were often shocked to encounter their own furniture for sale in Damascus’s “Souq al-Sunna,” known for looted goods (Tizini 2013).

For Nadeem, the burning of his archive and the abolition of Youm Al Shuhadaa (Martyrs’ Day) belong to the same process. The violence of July 2025 was not experienced simply as sectarian brutality. It was felt, by Nadeem and others, as an attack on the very idea that Syria could still be imagined as a common national home.

Making a killing

The historian Usama Makdisi, in The Age of Coexistence (2019: 84), contrasts different killings to show how violence can serve different purposes: the hanging of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in 1821 as warning within an imperial order, and the mutilation of Bishop Chrysostomos in 1922 as an act of elimination. This distinction, more than 100 years ago, reminds us that violence can discipline coexistence — or seek to extinguish it. In the Ottoman Empire, it foreclosed the future of the Turkish, Greek and Balkan states, and acted as a foil for bilād al-shām, modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine, where and the politics of sectarianism and co-existence emerged.

What unfolded in Suwayda in July 2025 was experienced by many not as a warning within a shared political order, but as an assault on the very possibility of living together. The violence scarred bodies and the relations through which people lived together, altering trust, neighbourliness, credit and the expectation that governance might restrain rather than unleash force. As Lisa Malkki (1995) reminds us, such violence marks people’s bodies in culturally specific ways. When credit turns into betrayal, archives are burned, commemorations erased, and neighbours mobilised through sectarian idioms, what is undone is not only lives but the infrastructures of national belonging. When violence reaches this point, it no longer aims to discipline coexistence, but to extinguish it, killing not only people but the very idea of a country held in common.

Maria Kastrinou is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Brunel University London and Research Fellow at ZMO Berlin. Her work focuses on Syria and the Golan Heights, examining kinship, death, land, and sectarian violence through long-term ethnographic research.

Salam Said is an economist and researcher specialising in Syrian political economy and conflict dynamics. She has published widely on sanctions, reconstruction, and regional geopolitics.

References

Abdul Samad, N. (2025, September 10). شهادة ممرّضة عن مجازر السويداء: “هلق بتروح تجيبلي إبني أو بفجّر حالي فيي وفيكن…” Daraj Media. Retrieved from https://daraj.media/شهادة–ممرّضة–عن–مجازر–السويداء–هلق–بت/

Anderson, Paul. Exchange Ideologies: Commerce, language, and patriarchy in preconflict Aleppo. Cornell University Press, 2023.

Davis, H. (2025, March 10). Sectarian violence simmers in Homs. New Lines Magazine. https://newlinesmag.com/spotlight/sectarian-violence-erupts-in-homs/

Dukhan, Haian & Dawn Chatty, 2025. ‘The Druze-Bedouin clashes in Syria were not a sectarian conflict.’ AlJazeera, 2 Sept 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/9/2/the-druze-bedouin-clashes-in-syria-were-not-a-sectarian-conflict, accessed March 1st 2026.

Hassan, R. (2023, March 15). In Homs, revenge is the only law left standing. New Lines Magazine. https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/in-homs-revenge-is-the-only-law-left-standing/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

Human Rights Watch. (2026, January 15). Syria: Accountability lacking for Sweida abuses. Human Rights Watch, URL: https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/01/15/syria-accountability-lacking-for-sweida-abuses

Kastrinou, M. (2023) ‘Looking at ethnic cleansing in Palestine from the occupied Syrian Golan,’ FocaalBlog, 16 November. Available at: https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/11/16/maria-kastrinou-looking-at-ethnic-cleansing-in-palestine-from-the-occupied-syrian-golan/

Kastrinou, M., & Said, S. (2025, July 28). Suwayda: Not a local conflict, but geopolitics in disguise. Qantara. https://qantara.de/en/article/suwayda-not-local-conflict-geopolitics-disguise

Kastrinou, Maria, Salam Said, Rawad Jarbouh, and Steven B. Emery. “Still There: Politics, Sectarianism and the Reverberations of War in the Presences and Absences of the Syrian State.” Conflict and Society 9, no. 1 (2023): 147-166.

Kastrinou, Maria. “From a window in Jaramana: Imperial sectarianism and the impact of war on a Druze neighbourhood in Syria.” In The Syrian Uprising, pp. 271-289. Routledge, 2018.

Makdisi, U. (2019). Age of coexistence: The ecumenical frame and the making of the modern Arab world. University of California Press.

Makdisi, U., 2019. Age of coexistence: The ecumenical frame and the making of the modern Arab world. University of California Press.

Malkki, L. H. (1995). Purity and exile: Violence, memory, and national cosmology among Hutu refugees in Tanzania. University of Chicago Press.

Said, S. (2025, August 12). Assad’s shadow looms over fractured Syria. Middle East Eye. https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/assad-shadow-looms-over-fractured-syria

The Jordan Times. (2025, September 16). Jordan, Syria, US ink roadmap to end crisis in Suwayda, stabilize southern Syria. https://jordantimes.com/news/local/jordan-syria-us-ink-roadmap-to-end-crisis-in-suwayda-stabilize-southern-syria?utm_source

Tizini, Tayyeb (2013). “The Sunni Market and the Plundered Syria”. Al etihad. In Arabic. URL: https://www.aletihad.ae/wejhatarticle/70812/%C2%AB%D8%B3%D9%88%D9%82-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D9%8F%D9%86%D9%8E%D9%91%D8%A9%C2%BB-%D9%88%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A7-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%8F%D8%B3%D8%AA%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%AD%D8%A9#google_vignette , Accessed on 14.01.2026

i With its roots in Shia Ismaili Islam, the Druze faith developed during the Fatimid Dynasty in the 11th Century. It holds all prophets of the people of the book sacred, but it combined gnostic, neo-platonic, and Sufi ideas. Historically it emerged as a radical religion doing away with collective ritual, and abolishing polygamy and slavery. Druze societies practice endogamy, meaning that a Druze should only marry another Druze, and they believe in a form of reincarnation called taqammuṣ whereby a constant number of immortal Druze souls is continuously recycled into Druze bodies. But Druze societies are better understood as national ethnoreligious groups. This is because you can only be born a Druze, but you don’t have to be religious. In fact only about 10% of any Druze community can read the Holy books, and only by initiation. The largest number of Druze is located in Suwayda, whilst in Syria there are large communities in Damascus suburbs of Jaramana and Sehnaya, and in the mountains of Idleb. Moreover, stateless Syrian Druze have been living under Israeli occupation in the Golan Heights since 1967. There are Druze communities in Lebanon, Northern Israel, Jordan and there are large diasporic communities globally. They estimate a total of 1-4 million people. But whilst their souls can travel between nation-states and borders, they form integral parts of different social and political histories and cultures in Syria, Israel and Lebanon.

ii There is a Druze minority in Israel/Palestine, live predominantly in the north, hold Israeli citizenship and the men are conscripted to serve in the Israeli Defence Forces. The highest religious-cum-political authority in Suwayda, Shaykh al-ʿAql Hikmat al-Hijri, thanked Prime Minister Netanyahu and called for international protection. The United States brokered a ceasefire on 21 July 2025. Moreover, the role of religious authority itself has changed as a result of the years of war. Druze shaykhs — once respected but marginal religious elders — shifted. They became consensus political mediators between Druze communities, the state, and opposition forces. Local sectarian militias formed, serving both as protection and as part of the wider war economy. Assad struck agreements integrating some militias into the national army while allowing them to remain in their areas in exchange for allegiance. In places such as Suwayda, some shaykhs commanded militia factions, reshaping the alignment of religious, political and military authority. It was within this matrix that religious authority was remade and figures such as the current shāyikh al-ʿaql, Hikmat al-Hijri, emerged as politically representative leaders. Sectarianisation was thus a product of war. Druze communities suffered violence during these years — in Idleb under al-Nusra in 2015, in Suwayda in 2018 during attacks by al-Nusra and ISIS, and in the Golan and northern Israel, where Druze ambushed ambulances transporting al-Nusra fighters for treatment. See Kastrinou et al, 2023.

iii Writing about Idleb, Bakkour and Stansfeld trace the politicisation of religious identities, a process that they quote as the ‘jihadisation of Idleb’ (2025: 247), noting how the eventual win of the Salafist al-Nusra, that would become HTS, in Idleb “refused to participate in any political process that not accompanied by … the establishment of a religious state.” In Idleb, as in Aleppo (Chalhoub 2025: 224), this kind of Islamist government often was seen as a foreign intervention “they banned smoking and want to close shops during prayers. This is how they do it in the Golf not in Syria.”

iv Maria and Salam have previously written about the changes that the Syrian war brought on Druze areas, see Kastrinou 2018; Kastrinou, Said, Jarbouh & Emery 2023.

v We have obtained consent and the right to review and withdraw from everyone involved and have taken care to anonymise and not publish sensitive information.

Cite as: Kastrinou, M. & Said, S. 2026. “How to kill a country: Feeling history in scenes of pillage” Focaalblog March 31. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/31/maria-kastrinou-and-salam-said-how-to-kill-a-country-feeling-history-in-scenes-of-pillage/

Blog

Markus Virgil Hoehne: Perpetuating conflict through democratization: Presidential elections in Somalia

Presidential elections will happen in Somalia on Sunday, 15 May 2022. This will most likely not bring peace and stability to the war-torn Somali society. To the contrary, the elections and their aftermath will, in all probability, perpetuate and even worsen to political crisis in the country. On the one hand, the electoral process has already dragged on for almost two years, producing violent clashes between government and opposition forces and instigating vote buying and other forms of political corruption (Gaas and Hansen 2022).  On the other hand, and this might even be worse, the country’s “democratization process” is out of tune with important political realities in Somalia, namely with the fact that the government only holds nominal power in parts of Somalia.

Militant Islamists control much of southern Somalia; the northwest of the country has declared its independence 30 years ago and exists since as the secessionist Republic of Somaliland. Other areas in central and northeastern Somalia are to some degree autonomous, partly controlled by clan militias. This means that the government controls only around 20 percent of Somalia’s territory. Foreign troops have to assist the government to hold its areas. Southern Somalia, where most of the resources and the economy of Somalia are concentrated, is still in a phase of active war (EASO 2021).

It can be assumed that the government in Mogadishu would, without external support, collapse even quicker than the Afghan government did in the wake of the US-withdrawal in mid-2021. Moreover, in the areas controlled by the government and its external allies, hardly any services are delivered to the ordinary population. The hallmark of the nominal Somali governments since many years is internal wrangling and massive embezzlement of the state’s budget including the income from foreign aid. The question is: what does the presidential election bring at all? My answer is: it helps to keep up a façade, which serves external actors, including the USA, Ethiopia, the EU and many INGOs and UN organizations, in that it allows the conduct of “business” (development business, counter-terrorism business, political stabilization business, humanitarian business) which enriches a few international and local elites, while it keeps the bulk of Somalis in extreme poverty and caught up in protracted conflict.

A story of many missed deadlines

Somalia should have had a new parliament and a new president long ago. The term of office of the current president Mohamed Ali Farmajo ended in February 2021. The UN and western donors including the USA and the EU have been pushing for free elections already for years (since around 2018). At the same time, the “one person one vote” formula introduced into Somalia’s politics was and remains unrealistic. While external actors, mainly UN officials, tried to push this voting-scheme through, President Farmajo actively undermined it by not taking any steps to prepare elections. This led to conflicts between the president and the prime minister, with the latter trying to steer the preparations of the elections. Eventually, as ACLED (2021) outlined, also in the face of ongoing war in southern Somalia, the major political actors agreed in mid-2020 to holding indirect elections in Somalia – in a similar way as the last elections in 2017.

This indirect election process is complicated: At the local level, family elders nominate a total of almost 30,000 electoral women and men. These then determine the 275 members of the lower house of parliament, the seats of which are not distributed according to party-membership, but according to belonging to patrilineal descent groups (and according to personal networks and who can pay which bribes). The 54 members of the upper house are nominated by electoral committees of the Somali federal member states. Together, the two houses then elect the president (Elmi 2021). President Mohamed A. Farmajo prefers indirect elections because they are strongly controlled by the presidents of the federal member states, some of whom are his supporters. Yet, he even did not push very energetically for the completion of this process. When his term ended on 8th February 2021, no members of parliament had been elected so that Farmajo was able to extend his mandate by decree for two years. This was, I would argue, the easiest way for him to stay in power.

However, it led to violent reactions. Temporarily, armed opposition supporters occupied parts of Mogadishu. The crisis finally calmed down in mid-2021 when Somali elites and external supporters agreed on indirect elections to be concluded by the end of February 2022. Although this deadline was missed, by the end of April 2022 all members of both houses had finally been elected and nominated. During the indirect election process, massive influence (buying of votes and exercising political pressure, even intimidating members of the electoral committees, elders or candidates) was exercised. The complete parliament can now vote for one of the more than thirty nominated presidential candidates. Again, much money is clandestinely changing hands these days in Mogadishu; and gun-prices are going up on the capital’s markets, according to The New Humanitarian.

Elections in a long-term battlefield

Violence in Somalia escalated from the end of the 1970s. In the context of the Cold War, first the Soviet Union and then the US and their respective allies (such as German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany) supplied arms to the dictatorship under Siyad Barre (1969-91) – even when it was evident that human rights violations would be committed with them. In 1991, rebels overthrew the dictatorial regime, but they were unable to agree on a new government. The state arsenals were broken open, and the population armed itself. Chaos and violence led to a famine that claimed hundreds of thousands of victims by the end of 1992. As a result, the USA and the UN intervened with up to 30,000 blue helmets to guarantee the supply of the civilian population with humanitarian aid and to restore political order. It was the first time in the history of the UN that blue helmets were deployed in a country without the government’s consent. The operation failed: the famine was alleviated admittedly, but the armed intervention intensified the fighting. The USA and the UN cooperated with some warlords and attempted to capture others, such as Mohamed Farah Aideed.
This led to the solidarity of many Somalis with Aideed, who, as a former army officer, was involved in the overthrow of dictator Barre. When American special forces tried to seize him in October 1993, fighting broke out in Mogadishu. Hundreds Somalis and 18 American soldiers were killed in the house-to-house fighting (depicted, albeit with an extreme US-centric [and racist] bias, in Ridley Scott’s movie Black Hawk Down). Subsequently, all intervention troops withdrew from Somalia by May 1995. The weapons and the warlords remained. The latter made “dirty” deals with foreign companies, for instance for dumping toxic waste off the Somali coast (VOA 2009).

Only after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Muslim nation of Somalia returned to the attention of Western governments. The USA and its allies – in the Horn of Africa especially Ethiopia – cooperated with several warlords to capture and eliminate Islamist terrorist suspects in southern Somalia. At the same time, the international community initiated a peace conference for Somalia in Kenya, at which, in mid-2004, former militia leader Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed was elected president by a Somali interim parliament. However, he and his government could not enter the capital because the local population rejected him. Most Somalis were now aligned with the lslamic Courts, which promised an alternative political and economic order for Somalia, based on Sharia law. These lslamists were the only ones to ensure peace in the urban neighborhoods under their control and offered effective jurisdiction (Ibrahim 2018).

Image 1: Elections in Somalia through the lens of the United Nations (their caption: “Members of the Somali Federal parliament queue to cast their ballots for round two during the presidential election held at the Mogadishu Airport hangar on February 8, 2017. UN Photo/ Ilyas Ahmed”)


From early 2006, tensions erupted into fighting between the Islamists on one side and the government and allied warlords on the other. The militias that fought for the Islamic Courts finally gained the upper hand. They soon controlled large parts of southern Somalia. The Ethiopian army intervened in December and dispersed all but a small core of Islamist forces. This was the nucleus from which Al-Shabaab (The Youth) emerged in 2007. In the following years, Al-Shabaab evolved into the strongest Somali force, which temporarily (between 2009 and 2011) ruled southern Somalia including Mogadishu and other urban centers and was then from 2011 driven out by a massive campaign of more than 10,000 African Union-troops deployed to Somalia. As of 2022, some 22,000 AU forces are stationed in southern Somalia. Together with around 10,000 Somali National Army soldiers and a smaller number of USA special forces (waging drone war) they have not managed to defeat Al Shabaab, which not only fights a guerilla war against the Somali government and its allies but actually also governs substantial rural areas, delivering justice and security at the local level and building-up some basic legitimacy in this way, despite the fact that the violence of the extremists, exercised through harsh punishments of (alleged) criminals or enemies and through regular terror attacks with many civilian casualties mainly in Mogadishu appalls many Somalis (Hoehne and Gaas 2022; Bakonyi 2022).

No one is legitimate

While a new war – one characterized as “counter-terrorism war” – escalated in Somalia and has cost tens of thousands of lives between 2007 and today, international actors have been trying to establish a government in Mogadishu, based on a new federal constitution (which was partly drafted by German legal specialists working for the Max Planck Foundation, which contrary to the name is not a basic research institute but a consultancy firm). Based on that constitution, indirect elections were held for the first time in 2012, and Hassan Sheikh Mahamoud became president. He sought to implement the federal constitution and establish federal states. The idea was to achieve some division of power in the state and between (patrilinear descent) groups through federalization. Traditionally, in Somali society, affiliation is regulated less by territory than by descent in the paternal line. Mahamoud’s government succeeded in establishing some federal states, at least nominally. Nonetheless, Al-Shabaab still controlled the hinterland of southern Somalia.

Also Mahamoud’s government was extremely corrupt. Approximately 70 percent of the funds given from outside disappeared into the private pockets of government actors, as documented by the World Bank, among other sources. The term of office of the following president, Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo, was accompanied by massive accusations of corruption as well. Farmajo negated the federal model of government and worked toward the centralization of power.

Given the limited function and low legitimacy of Farmajo’s government and the state in Somalia as a whole, the question arises why elections are nevertheless organized at great expense. It is common knowledge how corrupt the political actors are and that they have little support among the population. A leading UN representative said in a briefing end of 2021, at which the author participated, that “no matter how the election process turns out, it will not contribute to any improvement”. A German NGO worker told an expert panel in January 2022 (again, the author was present at this meeting) that his biggest concern was how the losing side would react after the corrupt election. Some fear a new escalation of violence.

One explanation is that Somali elites and external aid workers benefit from elections. Somali elites make sure that they get well paid for their participation in the farce that the elections are. In order to continue to carry out projects in the crisis-ridden country, Western aid organizations need administrative partners to sign off on projects – which is obviously an end in itself, because the aid often does not benefit the ordinary population, but the external actors and their Somali elite partners. Moreover, the elections formally support the narrative of Western governments that things are “getting better” in Somalia. In the end, even Al-Shabaab benefits from the election disaster. Although the militant extremists do not have a broad basis of legitimacy either, they only need to do things a little better than the government, and they can gain some support from the conflict-weary population.

Instead of holding elections, Somali political actors should seek reconciliation and strive for political dialogue with all relevant powers in Somalia, including Al Shabaab. Yet, in Somalia, this seems to be made impossible by an (informal) doctrine of military counter-terrorism mixed with a focus on formal democratization and institution building, no matter how hollow the construct of the thus erected “government” is.  

Markus Virgil Hoehne is a social anthropologist at the University of Leipzig researching on conflict, identity, state-building, and dealing with the violent past in Somalia and Peru. He has been working on Somali issues since 2001. He is the author of Between Somaliland and Puntland: Marginalization, Militarization and Conflicting Political Visions (Nairobi: Rift Valley Institute) and the co-editor of Dynamics of Identification and Conflict: Anthropological encounters (New York: Berghahn).

Bibliography:

ACLED 2021: A Turbulent Run-up to Elections in Somalia. https://acleddata.com/2021/04/07/a-turbulent-run-up-to-elections-in-somalia/

Bakonyi, Jutta 2022: War’s Everyday: Normalizing Violence and Legitimizing Power. Partecipazione&Conflitto Vol. 15, No. 1: 121-138

EASO 2021: Country of Origin Information Report: Somalia Security situation. https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/2021_09_EASO_COI_Report_Somalia_Security_situation.pdf

Elmi, Afyare 2021: The Politics of the Electoral System in Somalia: An Assessment. Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies: Vol. 21: 99-113, available at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/bildhaan/vol21/iss1/10

Gaas, Mohamed Husein and Stig Jarle Hansen 2022: A Near End to Somalia’s Election Conundrum? RAAD Policy Brief 1:2022.

Hoehne, Markus Virgil and Mohammed Hussein Gaas 2022: Political Islam in Somalia: From underground movements to the rise and continued resilience of Al Shabaab, in J.-N. Bach and Aleksi Ylönen (eds.): Routledge Handbook of the Horn of Africa. London: Routledge, pp. 411-427.

Ibrahim,Ahmed Sheikh 2018: The Shari’a Courts of Mogadishu: Beyond “African Islam” and

“Islamic Law”.  Dissertation, the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology, City University of New York.

Somalia Corruption Report July 2020, available at: https://www.ganintegrity.com/portal/country-profiles/somalia/

The New Humanitarian 12 May 2022: Gun prices soar ahead of Somalia’s presidential elections https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2022/05/12/gun-prices-soar-ahead-of-somalias-presidential-elections

VOA 30.10.2009: Waste Dumping off Somali Coast May Have Links to Mafia, Somali Warlords, available at: https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2005-03-15-voa34/306247.html

Cite as: Hoehne, Markus Virgil. 2022. “Perpetuating conflict through democratization: Presidential elections in Somalia.“ FocaalBlog, 13 May. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/05/13/markus-virgil-hoehne-perpetuating-conflict-through-democratization-presidential-elections-in-somalia/

Blog

Jaime A Alves: F*ck the Police! Murderous cops, the myth of police fragility and the case for an insurgent anthropology

‘Blue lives matter,’ says the mantra of police fragility. The mythology about defenseless officers being hunted and killed by criminals is indeed a powerful one, mobilized by right-wing politicians endorsed by police unions in countries such as Brazil and the United States. In the case of Brazil, a global reference in police terror, the narrative of police victimization helped president Jair Bolsonaro to galvanize popular support around the fictional image of patriotic officers (or soldiers like himself), ready to put their lives on the line to protect citizens and save the country.

Certainly, police officers are killed in Brazil at a rate that supersedes any other country in the hemisphere. According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety, 343 officers were killed in 2018 alone, 75% of them off-duty (FBS 2019). Although the numbers are extremely high when compared with the United States, for instance, where 181 law enforcement agents were killed in 2019 (NLEOMF 2020), this is a profession that, contrary to popular belief, has very low lethality rates worldwide. Yet, even in Brazil, with astonishing levels of officers killed on and off-duty, homicide is not the leading cause of police death. In what seems to be a trend in Brazil and the US, the leading cause of officers’ death is suicide (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018; Exame 2019; see also Miranda and Guimarães 2016).

While assault and killings of law enforcement officers do occur, this real risk is part and parcel of the work they perform. In fact, it is common-sensical that their work grants them special protection not enjoyed by any other civilian occupation. To raise a hand against a police officer is not only a serious felony offense, but is also quite often a lethal one. In Brazil, when an officer is killed, dozens of poor and predominantly black youths are killed in revenge raids such as the infamous 2006 massacre, when at least 600 youth were killed within the span of one week in response to gangs’ lethal attacks against police stations (Mães de Maio 2018). Police even deploy assassinations in order to pressure politicians to grant them better labor conditions.

Indeed, spreading terror has been an ‘efficient’ police strategy to gain political leverage. For instance, in February 2020, days before carnival, the Military Police of Ceará went on strike. Although the direct involvement of striking officers in the slaughter is the object of an ongoing investigation, there were several denunciations of police-linked death squads and hooded men in police patrols terrorizing the population. Coincidently or not, and repeating a pattern seen in other Brazilian contexts (see De Souza, 2016), at least two hundred individuals were killed within the span of one week (Jucá 2020; Adorno 2020). To no avail, the leftist governor Camilo Santana denounced these uses of terror as a tactic to bring the government to its knees. Widespread denunciations of human rights violations, from torture to assassinations, are consistently met with impunity in a country where at least 6,200 individuals were killed by the police in 2018 (17 deaths each day!), of which 99% were young male, favela residents and 75% were blacks (FBSP 2019).

Police officer with a club forcibly restraining a Black man who lies face down on the pavement while two other officers observe.
Image 1: While the US is the leading country in incarceration rates, Brazil leads the way in the killing of Black individuals by law enforcement policies. According to the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety, within six years (2015-2020) 29, 952 civilians were killed by the Brazilian police force. Black youth account for 8 in 10 individuals killed by the police. Click here for geo-reference on the lethality of policing in Brazil.

In this following, I focus not so much on the paradigmatic victims of police terror in societies of the African Diaspora such as Brazil and the United States, but rather on the critical role urban ethnographers can play in demystifying the ‘war on police’ and in advancing an insurgent movement pushing toward police abolition in the contemporary world. Brazil is the departure point of analysis for obvious reasons. As the country with the highest rates of civilians killed by the police, it has, within the last few decades, seen a proliferation of socio-anthropological studies on police violence and police culture. Not only have anthropologists dedicated increasing attention to the challenges and possibilities of democratic policing, but officers themselves have become ethnographers – or at least relied on some of its techniques – in their attempts to provide ‘privileged’ accounts of police praxis (e.g., França 2019; Muniz and Silva 2010; Storani 2008).

This article should be understood neither as a literature review of the burgeoning field of police studies in Brazil (for an overview see, Muniz et., all, 2018) nor an overview of global anthropology of policing. Instead, I call attention to new directions in the study of policing as a colonial regime of control that exists in urban contexts in Brazil and the USA, but is hardly unique to those societies. Crucially, as a global project, the practice of anthropology – and police fieldwork in particular (Steinberg 2020) – cannot be dissociated from the geopolitics of empire and global antiblackness. Enduring global colonialism is configured and continuously reinforced by Europe/US-led regimes of security and knowledge production. And yet, racial apartheid enforced by police terror –homeland security? — blurs geo-ontological boundaries between global north and global south and reasserts the afterlife of colonialism (Susser 2020; Nonini 2020; Beaman, 2020).  

How should anthropologists objectively treat police innocence and victimhood narratives without participating in this ongoing coloniality? If, as Anna Souhami forcefully argues, ‘the dynamics of police culture [ethnographers] so powerfully criticis[e] are reflected in the construction of the ethnographic process’ (2019: 207), how should we ethically write about police victimization without (even if involuntarily) endorsing the trope of cops’ fragility? What does the narrative of victimization engender? Finally, what should be the place of anthropology of policing in the urgent call of black activists and black studies to defend the dead? While studying the police (and any mainstream institution) does not necessarily lead to uncritical alignment to power, the antiblack animus of policing makes it extraordinarily challenging and politically compromising for anthropologists to work with the police in the name of ethnographic complexity and simultaneously engage with social movement’s critique of policing-as-antiblackness (Hale, personal communication). That is to say, the anthropology of policing, even when highly critical of policing structure, seems to underscore a liberal reform paradigm that goes against what the paradigmatic victims of police terror demand: defunding, dismantling and abolishing the police state.

The Myth of Police Fragility

There is a scene in Melina Matsoukas and Lena Waithe’s 2019 movie, Queen and Slim, that is worth recuperating here. The young couple is going on their first date when a white cop pulls them over. The minor traffic violation ends with Slim (Daniel Kaluuya) taking the cop’s gun and shooting him dead in self-defense when the officer fires his gun against Queen (Jodie Tuner). Slim wants to turn himself in, but Queen (who is a lawyer) reminds him that their blackness has already sealed their destiny. The ‘cop-killers’ go on the run through the deep South, hoping to reach Cuba. As the video of the killing goes viral, Queen and Slim’s story mobilizes other African Americans and images of Black Lives Matter protests are merged with their fugitive endeavor. The scene that strikes me features Junior, a black boy in the foreground leading a demonstration. With fists in the air he shouts, ‘Let them go!’ When an officer tries to stop him, he pulls the officer’s gun and shoots the officer dead.

One may speculate: What led him to such an expected act of violence? Perhaps the painful consciousness of his blackness? Perhaps the limited options available, within the context of ‘fugitive justice,” to stop the “grinding machine of human flesh” policing represents?  The film and the scene in particular aroused heated debate on the nature and scope of Black resistance against police violence in the Black Lives Matter era. Lena Waithe has called the movie ‘a meditation on black life in America’ (King 2019). However, where the filmmakers gave cinematic representation to an all too familiar “state of captivity” (Wilderson 2018:58), some received the movie as a ‘war on cops’ while others blamed it for ‘going too far left in its implications in that black people condone, protect and are inspired by reciprocating violence against police as a result of their experiences with law enforcement’ (Vaughn 2019).

The “war-on-cops” rhetoric and its attending practices in the ‘Blue Lives Matter’ movement in the United States and its parallel (albeit diffuse) pro-cops movement in Brazil can be read as what legal scholar Frank Rudy Cooper calls “the myth of cop fragility”. Hecontends that such mythology draws a false equivalence between ‘blue lives’ and ‘black lives’ by ‘reposition[ing] police officers, and whites in general, as the new victims’ of racism (Cooper 2020:  654). In that sense, ‘white backlash better explains Blue Lives Matter’s self-defense perspective than does the vulnerability of police officers to attack’ (2020: 655).

 By hijacking the meanings of the black struggle for life, the police also cannibalize the terms of the debate. This, in turn, seems to resonate in the academia’s ambivalence (unwillingness?) in dealing with the cruelty of police power. Whereas radical social movements and scholars lay bare the impossibility of freeing justice from its coloniality (e.g., Best and Hartman 2005; Segato 2007; McDowell and Fernandez 2018; Flauzina and Pires 2020), we see a proliferation of works on police reform, or, in the case of anthropology, an investment in cops as a new subject of inquiry whose violent work must be understood in relation to broad social norms and power dynamics. I have nothing against the election of cops as ethnographic subjects and indeed, such an election has been crucial to illuminate social processes that otherwise would continue to remain obscure. Though in a fragmented form, I take this very path in my own ethnographic work on police brutality in São Paulo, Brazil and Cali, Colombia.

Likewise, recent groundbreaking ethnographies of policing (I am consciously grouping scholars from distinct disciplines whose work employs ethnography as its main methodology) have shed light on the ways in which officers justify their work as habitus – ‘just doing their job’ – which reflects a socially shared belief in torture and killings as a form of ordering the chaotic social world. In racialized geographies such as the Paris’ ‘banlieues,’ Los Angeles’ ‘ghettos’ or Brazil’s ‘favelas,’ these critical ethnographies show that officers enforce sociospatial imaginaries of belonging, entitlement and justice (Fassin 2013; Denyer-Willis 2015; Roussell 2015). Officers also perform a peculiar form of order-making in contested regimes of urban governance by competing local authorities such as drug-traffickers, paramilitarism, power-brokers and so on (e.g., Salem and Bertelsen 2020; Larkins 2013; Penglase 2012; Arias 2006). Other interventions have accounted for the ways in which police negotiate their everyday encounters with institutional violence and public discredit. Officers are forcefully portrayed as political actors whose practices, emotions and subjectivities echo broader systems of morals (Pauschinger 2020; see also Jauregui 2014). Police and policing produce a mode of “sociability,” an ethos, and a political rationale of governance (Karpiak 2010; Sclofsky 2016; Muniz and Albernaz 2017). Finally, there is the call for ‘publicity, practicality and epistemic solidarity’ among anthropologists, law enforcement agencies and larger publics to respond to the disciplinary invitation for political engagement with pressing problems of corruption and violence (Mutsaers et al. 2015: 788). 

These and many other works (too many to be listed in a commentary note) reflect an important anthropological contribution to demystifying this troubling institution and the subjectivity of its agents. In the last decade or so, it has become a consensus in the field – regardless of one’s theoretical perspective – that policing is much more than uniformed personnel patrolling the streets.  By making ethnographically visible what policing does and produces, ethnographers have provided insightful understandings of mundane forms of order-making, statecrafts and rationales of government (see Karpiak and Garriott 2018, Martin 2018, Steinberg 2020 for an overview).

My intervention does not go against these contributions that I loosely locate within the field of ethnographies of police. My concern here is with what anthropology does and what anthropology produces when giving cops more voice and space in these critical times when cities are on fire. In their edited volume, The Anthropology of Police, editors Kevin Karpiack and Willian Garriott ask the important questions: ‘What are the ethical and political stakes of trying to humanize the police? Are there any grounds on which one could even justify an approach that took up such a project of humanization over and against one centered on cataloguing, critiquing, and decrying police-perpetuated harms?’ (2018: 6-7). The authors answer this crucial question by calling for the study of police as a way to challenge the discipline’s trend to “study up” and as an attempt to understand contemporary notions of humanness embedded in policing and security practices. To them, one cannot understand the world and what it means to be human without understanding the work of police (2018: 8).

In this sense, it is argued, the risk pays-off: when attentive to one’s own positionality, critical ethnographies of policing can shed light on important issues such as the culture of militarism, the corrosion of democracy and the normalization of gendered violence (Kraska 1996; Denyer-Willis 2016). I can relate to that. My fragmented ethnographic encounters with police officers (usually themselves from the lowest social stratum of the society they supposedly serve and protect) gave me a first-hand understanding of how officers negotiate apparently contradictory approaches of defending the killings of ‘criminals,’ enthusiastically supporting a ‘new’ human rights-oriented community police, energetically detaching themselves from the “bad cops,” and embracing a hyper-militaristic crusade to ‘save’ family and Christian values (Alves 2018). 

While doing ethnography with/of police does not necessarily stand in contradiction to the ethics and promises of anthropology in solving human problems, something I have no doubt my colleagues genuinely embrace as a political project, and while we should suspend assumptions that all anthropologists must adhere to the militant/activist theoretical-methodological orientation (Harrison 1992; Hale 2008, Hale personal communication), studying the police requires one to face tough ethical questions on the troubling position of witnessing the perpetration of violence, the unintended normalization of police culture (see Souhami 2019), and the dangerous humanization of police work. 

My analysis (and that of many of my colleagues), was politically aligned with activists and empathic with individuals embracing outlawed forms of resistance against police terror. Still, I was constantly asked which side I was on. For instance, a black young man, who by the time of my research in the favelas of São Paulo was making a living in what he refers as ‘the world of crime,’ unapologetically told me I was an asshole for being ‘too straight, too naïve, too afraid to die.’ In Cali, Colombia, although I was considered “not kidnappable” — as the member of a local gang laughed and joked around, perhaps demarking the difference between my physical appearance and those of other foreign researchers usually from the global north — I was awkwardly enough associated with the mestizo middle class and its regime of morality that called for state violence against black youth seen as the scapegoat of the city’s astonishing levels of violence.

Thus, my contention here is not so much to stop studying police, but rather, to disengage from a seductive analysis of power that, while compelling in scholarly terms and in-depth ethnographic description, may involuntarily give voice to unethical power structures personified by the police. Following Frank Wilderson’s assertion that police terror ‘is an ongoing tactic of human renewal…a tactic to secure humanity’s place’ (2018:48), one should ask what such an anthropological project of humanization entails.  If we do not want our work to end up fueling and corroborating the skepticism over a discipline with an ugly history of complicity with oppressive power, then it is about time for an unapologetic ‘f*ck the police!’ in studies of policing.

Maroon Anthropology

In Progressive dystopia, abolition, antiblackness and schooling in San Francisco, anthropologist Savannah Shange urges anthropologists to apply ‘the tools of our trade to the pursuit of liberation, and [to enact] the practice of willful defiance in the afterlife of slavery’ (Shange 2019: 159). Abolitionist anthropology responds to scholars law-abiding investment in policing – what she calls carceral progressivism – by refusing the promises of the liberal state and liberal academia (39-42). The imperative ‘F*ck the Police!’ could be another way of engaging with Shange’s invitation to make space for freedom in our writing and our practices. The urgency of the moment asks anthropologists to work against the police, not with the police. If nothing else, the recent urban ‘riots’ in response to the lynching of black individuals in the United States and in Brazil support my call. Individuals strangulated with knee-to-neck asphyxia, skulls broken by police boots, wounded bodies calculatedly left agonizing in the streets or tied to the police patrol and dragged through the streets, rapes, disappearances and continued extortion are some of the mundane practices of police terror that should make us pause and reflect.  

A Black woman speaks into a microphone in front of a crowd gathered outside at night. A sticker on her shirt and pamphlet in her hand read "Marielle."
Image 2: On March 14, Marielle Franco, a black feminist, human rights defender and city councilperson from the socialist party, was murdered. She was also leading the Human Rights Commission to monitor police and military abuse during the military intervention decreed by then president Michel Temer and she was vocal against paramilitary groups that control Rio’s political system. Two years after her death, the question remains: “Who ordered the killing of Marielle?” (Source: Workers Party. https://pt.org.br/caso-marielle-franco-um-ano-sem-solucao/)

Let’s be honest, as a discipline, we have failed to side significantly with the victims of police terrorism beyond sit-in moments at conferences, open letters, creatively designed syllabi or academic journal articles such as this very one. Anthropologists seem to be too invested in the economy of respectability that grants us access to institutional power ‘to engage anthropology as a practice of abolition’ (Shange 2019: 10). Nothing can be more illustrative of such an abysmal dissonance with this call than the political lexicon we use to describe police terrorism itself – it is telling that the word terror is barely articulated in the field of anthropology of police – and people’s call to ‘burn it down’ and ‘end the f*cking world’. With one fist in the air and a rocket in the other hand, demonstrators have denounced again and again that ‘Brazil is a graveyard,’ ‘the US is a plantation,’ ‘police are the new slave-catcher.’ Cities turned into a smoking battleground, police stations stormed, patrols set on fire. What has anthropology got to offer beyond well-crafted texts, sanitized analyses of the moment and good intentions to decolonize the discipline? We lack rage!

Like police, and unlike workers in general, tenured scholars (including anthropologists) have very low risk in performing their work. Police perform what Micol Siegel forcefully calls ‘violence work’ (Siegel 2018). They are professionals that essentially deliver violence represented as a public good. Anthropologists, I would argue, are ‘violence workers’ not only in performing the enduring colonial project of othering, but also when taking a ‘reformist’, ‘neutral’ or distant stance on social movements that demand radical changes. Even worse, in giving voice to police based on a pretentious technicality of ‘just’ collecting data, anthropology ends up helping to quell that struggle (see Bedecarré 2018 for groundbreaking work on the role of white scholars in promoting vigilante justice against Black anger). That is to say, the nature of the violence performed by ethnographers of policing may differ in degree and scope from police terror but, as Hortense Spillers reminds us, “we might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words will most certainly kill us” (Spillers 1987: 68).

If the subfield of anthropology of police wants to be coherent to the discipline’s (incomplete) decolonizing turn, it should have no ambiguity in regarding police ‘violence’ as terror, have no doubts as to which lives are in peril in these terroristic policing practices and refuse the false promises of reforming this colonial institution. For ethnographers, refusing to performing ‘violence work’ may require disloyalty to the state – including rejecting the self-policing required by corporate academia – and instead unapologetically embrace the position of an insurgent subject whose ‘coherence [is] shaped by political literacy emanating from communities confronting crisis and conflict’ (see James and Gordon 208:371).

I am not completely sure how an insurgent anthropology of police would look (Ralph, 2020 is a powerful example of how anthropologists can use the discipline’s tools to mobilize larger audiences against police terror). A departure point for discussion, however, would be the intellectual humbleness to learn from the wretched of the earth’s refusal to legitimize, ‘humanize’ and promote the reforming of the police, not to mention the temptation to equate cop’s (real) vulnerability to violence with the (mundane) killing of civilians. Ultimately, those of us doing ethnography in collaboration with men and women in uniform ought to ask ourselves how to express empathy with and mourn blue lives – since as ethnographers we develop emotional bonds to our interlocutors even if critical of their behaviors– and still remain critical of the regime of law that necessitates and legitimizes the evisceration of black lives. How do we attend to the ethical demand for all (blue) lives’ grievability while also attentive to the ways, as some anthropologists have shown (Kurtz 2006; and Vianna et al., 2011), the state is anthropomorphized and performed by political agents? Are not cops’ lives, insofar as their identity are attached to the (state) terrorism they perform, an expression of state livingness? That is to say, blue lives are not the same as black lives because blue lives are state lives (albeit not the only ones, a peculiar performance of state sovereignty). There is no space for a theorization on the multiple ways the state comes into being as a mundane practice of domination. It is enough to say that at least in the USA and Brazil, statecraft is antiblackcraft. Indeed, the military labor performed by the police in postcolonial contexts such as Brazil and the United States is only made possible by the ‘politics of enmity’ (Mbembe 2003) that informs contemporary regimes of urban security. It is in the terrain of sovereignty, thus, that one has to situate the work of policing.  As Siegel and others have shown, one of the most important realizations of state violence is the mystification of police work as civilian as opposed to military labor. The police, the myth goes, works under the register of citizenship to protect and serve civil society. Still, both police and the military are one and same. The field in which police operates is a military one, which works effectively and precisely to deploy terror in a sanitized and legitimate way (Wooten 2020; Siegel 2018; see also Kraska 2007).

This is not a peripheral point. One has only to consider the ways black people encounter officers in the streets as soldier and experience policing as terror (again, asphyxiated with the knee on the neck, dragged in the streets, dismembered and disappeared) in opposition to the contingent violence experienced by white victims of cops’ aggression (Wilderson 2018; Alves and Vargas 2017) or by cops’ vulnerability inherent to their profession. And yet, if the logic of enmity is what sustains the enduring antiblack regime of terror enforced by policing, from the point of view of its paradigmatic enemy reforming the police is absurd and praising blue lives is insane.

How might anthropologists challenge the asymmetric positionality of terrified police lives and always already terrifying black beings?  When one officer dies, it is a labor accident. When an officer kills, it is part of his or her labor in performing the state. The degrees, causality and likelihood matter here. Even in societies such as Brazil, where the number of officers killed is extremely high, police lives are not as in peril as conservative pundits want us to believe. The lives of those cops eventually killed ‘in service’ are weaponized forms of life that predict the death of black enemies. Thus, police and their victims belong to two different registers, and if there is an ethical issue in relativizing any death—an approach I firmly refuse –, there is equal or even greater risk in lumping together state delinquency and retaliatory violence by its victims.

There is no equivalence between blue lives and black lives, and even if the call for equivalence is the order of the day in the liberal sensibility that ‘all lives matter,’ this is not the job of anthropology to reconcile these two positions. It is in the spirit of anthropology’s moral and political commitment to the oppressed – a commitment that while empathic with the powerless is also highly critical of the uses of violence as liberatory tool — that we should insurge against this false equivalency.

Based on her work with activists in the South African liberation movement, Nancy Scheper-Hughes asks, “what makes anthropology and anthropologists exempt from the human responsibility to take an ethical (and even a political) stand on the working out of historical events as we are privileged to witness them?” (1995:411). The author deals with this question by highlighting the complexity of not relativizing violence of the oppressed or taking a neutral distance from the cruelty of the oppressor and yet, positioning one’s fieldwork as a site of struggle. She opposes the anthropologist as a “fearless spectator” (a neutral and objective eye) and the witness (the anthropologist as a “companheira”). The later is positioned “inside human events as a responsive, reflexive, and morally committed being” and “accountable for what they see and what they fail to see, how they act and how they fail to act in critical situations” (1995: 419).

If we consider current waves of demonstrations against police terror as a historical moment that scholars committed to human liberation cannot refuse to attend, how do we respond to this call without been misunderstood as inciters of violenceagainst the police?  Although an insurgent anthropology should learn from different historical and ethnographic contexts where retaliatory violence has been deployed as one legitimate tool to counteract the brutality of power (Abufarha 2009; Cobb 2014; Umoja 2013), my critique here is obviously not an argument for embracing violence against cops as the way out of the current crisis of policing. I am also not turning a blind eye to a range of political possibilities militant and activist anthropologists already embrace in favor of empowering victims of state-sanctioned violence as “negative-workers”, public intellectuals, or member of advocacy groups (e.g., Scheper-Hughes 1995; Mullings 2015). Rather, informed by a black radical tradition, I am inviting anthropologists to rebel and change the terms of engagement with the police by questioning our (and our discipline’s) loyalty to the carceral state.

Thus, f*ck the police! is not a rhetorical device, but rather an ethical imperative and moral obligations to the eviscerating lives lost by state delinquency. It is indeed an invitation to seriously engage with the desperate call from the streets for making Black Lives Matter. Attending to their call, on their terms, would require a deep scrutiny on how anthropology participate in antiblackness as a socially shared practice. It also requires us to consider how antiblackness renders legal claims for redressing police terror quite often of little account, and what resisting police terror means to those whose pained bodies resist legibility as victims. What does the anthropological project of humanizing the police mean to those ontologically placed outside Humanity? For those whose marked bodies make Queen and Slim’s subject position – as new runaway slaves – very familiar and intimate, the answer is quite straightforward. Fuck the police!

Acknowledgments: This paper has benefited from generous comments from Charlie Hale, Micol Siegel, Graham Denyer-Willis, João Vargas and Tathagatan Ravindran, as well as from engaging audiences at the University of Colorado/ IBS Speaker Series, University of London / Race Policing and the City Seminar, and the University of Massachusetts/Anthropology Colloquium. I also thank Terrance Wooten and Amanda Pinheiro for a joint-conversation on police terror during the Cities Under Fire forum at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Don Kalb, Patrick Neveling and Lillie Gordon provided invaluable editorial assistance. Errors and omissions are of course mine.

Jaime A Alves teaches Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His academic interest includes urban coloniality and black spatial insurgency in Brazil and Colombia.  He is the author of “The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (University of Minesotta Press, 2018). His publications can be found at https://jaimeamparoalves.weebly.com

References

Abufarha, Nasser. 2009. The making of a human bomb: An ethnography of Palestinian resistance. DUhan: Duke University Press.

Adorno, Luis. 2020. Durante motim, 312 pessoas assassinadas no Ceará” [During riot, 312 people assassinated in Ceará]. Uol, 6 March, https://noticias.uol.com.br/cotidiano/ultimas-noticias/2020/03/06/durante-motim-da-pm-312-pessoas-foram-assassinadas-no-ceara.htm

Arias, Desmond 2006. The dynamics of criminal governance: networks and social order in Rio de Janeiro. Journal of Latin American Studies 24(3): 293-325.

Alves, Jaime & João Vargas 2017. On deaf ears: Anti-black police terror, multiracial protest and white loyalty to the state. Identities, 24(3): 254-274.

Beaman, Jean. 2020. Underlying Conditions: Global Anti–Blackness amid COVID–19.

Best, Stephen, and Saidiya Hartman. 2005. “Fugitive justice.” Representations 92 (1): 1-15.

Bedecarré, Kathryn 2018. Doing the work: the Black Lives Matter Movement in Austin. Ph.D Dissertation. U of Texas, Austin.

Cobb, Charles E. 2014. This nonviolent stuff’ll get you killed: How guns made the civil rights movement possible. Tuzcon: Basic Books.

Cooper, Frank Rudy 2020. Cop fragility and blue lives matter. University of Illinois Law Review, 2: 621-662.

De Souza, Raquel. 2016. “Cruel coexistence: Police violence and black disposability in Salvador/Bahia.” PhD dissertation. University of Texas, Austin.

DiAngelo, Robin 2018. White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. New York: Beacon Press.

Exame 2019. No Brasil, mais policiais se suicidam do que morrem em confrontos. Revista Exame, 26 August, https://exame.com/brasil/no-brasil-mais-policiais-se-suicidam-do-que-morrem-em-confrontos/

Fassin, Didier 2013. Enforcing order: An ethnography of urban policing. London: Polity.

FBSP 2019. Anuário brasileiro da segurança pública. FBS, 1 December.

Flauzina, Ana & Thula Pires 2020. STF e a naturalização da barbárie. Revista Direito e Práxis, 11(2): 1211-1237.

França, Fábio Gomez de 2019. “O soldado é algo que se fabrica”: Notas etnográficas sobre um curso de formação policial militar. Revista Tomo, 2(34): 359-392.

Hale, Charles R. 2008. Engaging contradictions: Theory, politics, and methods of activist scholarship. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Harrison, Faye V. 1992. Decolonizing anthropology: Moving further toward and anthropology for liberation. Anthropology News,33(1): 24-24.

Kurtz, Donald. 2006. Political power and government: negating the anthropomorphized state. Social Evolution and History, 5(2): 91-111.

James, Joy & Edmund T. Gordon 2008. Afterword. In Charlie Hale, Engaging contradictions: Theory, politics, and methods of activist scholarship, 371-382. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Jauregui, Beatrice 2014. Provisional agency in India: Jugaad and legitimation of corruption. American Ethnologist, 41(1): 76-91.

Jucá, Beatriz 2020. Policiais amotinados aceitam proposta. El País, 1 March, https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2020-03-02/policiais-militares-amotinados-aceitam-proposta-do-governo-e-encerram-greve-no-ceara.html

Karpiak, Kevin G. 2010. Of heroes and polemics: ‘The policeman’ in urban ethnography. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 33:7–31.

Karpiak, Kevin G. & William Garriott (eds.) 2018. The anthropology of police. London and New York: Routledge.

King. Noel 2019. Lena Waithe’s ‘Queen & Slim’ is an odyssey for the black lives matter era. NPR, 27 November, https://www.npr.org/2019/11/27/783223371/waithes-queen-slim-is-an-odyssey-set-in-the-era-of-black-lives-matter

Kraska, Peter B. 2007. Militarization and policing—Its relevance to 21st century police. Policing: a journal of policy and practice, 1(4): 501-513.

Kraska, Peter B. 1996. Enjoying militarism: Political/personal dilemmas in studying US police paramilitary units. Justice quarterly, 13(3): 405-429.

Larkins, Erika Robb 2013. Performances of police legitimacy in Rio’s hyper favela. Law & Social Inquiry, 38(3): 553-575.

Mães de Maio 2019. Memórial dos nossos filhos. São Paulo: Editora NósporNós.

Mbembe, Achille Necropolitics. Public culture, 15(1): 11-40.

McDowell, Meghan G. & Luis A. Fernandez 2018. ‘Disband, disempower, and disarm’: Amplifying the theory and practice of police abolition. Critical Criminology, 26(3): 373-391.

Miranda, Dayse & Tatiana Guimarães 2016. O suicídio policial: O que sabemos? Dilemas-Revista de Estudos de Conflito e Controle Social, 9(1): 1-18.

Mullings, Leith 2015. Anthropology matters. American Anthropologist, 117(1): 4-16.

Muniz, Jacqueline de Oliveira & Washington França da Silva 2010. Mandato policial na prática: Tomando decisões nas ruas de João Pessoa. Caderno CRH, 23(60): 449-473.

Muniz, Jacqueline, Haydee Caruso, & Felipe Freitas 2018. Os estudos policiais nas ciências sociais: Um balanço sobre a produção brasileira a partir dos anos 2000. Revista Brasileira de Informacao Bibliografica, 1(2):148-187.

Muniz, Jacqueline de Oliveria & Elizabete Albernaz 2017. “Moralidades entrecruzadas nas UPPs: Uma narrativa policial.” Cadernos Ciências Sociais, 3(2): 115–151.

NLEOM. Law Enforcement Facts. NLEOM, June 2020, https://nleomf.org/facts-figures/law-enforcement-facts

Nonini. Don. 2020. Black Enslavement and Agro-industrial Capital, FocaalBlog, Jan 20, http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/07/03/don-nonini-black-enslavement-and-agro-industrial-capital/

Pauschinger, Dennis 2020. Working at the edge: Police, emotions and space in Rio de Janeiro. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(3): 510-527.

Ralph, Laurence 2020. The torture letters: Reckoning with police violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 1995. The primacy of the ethical: Propositions for a militant anthropology. Current Anthropology,36(3): 409-440.

Sclofsky, Sebastián 2016. “Policing race in two cities: From necropolitcal governance to imagined communities.”  Social Justice, 6 (2): 1-14.

Segato, Rita Laura 2007. El color de la cárcel en América Latina. Nueva Sociedad, 3(208): 142-161.

Seigel, Micol. 2018. Violence work: State power and the limits of police. Duhan: Duke University Press.

Shange, Savannah 2019. Progressive dystopia: Abolition, antiblackness, and schooling in San Francisco. Durham: Duke University Press.

Salem, Tomas & Bjørn Enge Bertelsen. 2020. “Emergent Police States: Racialized Pacification and Police Moralism from Rio’s Favelas to Bolsonaro.” Conflict and Society 6(1): 86-107.

Souhami, Anna 2020. Constructing tales of the field: Uncovering the culture of fieldwork in police ethnography. Policing and Society, 30(2): 206-223.

Spillers, Hortense. 1987. “Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book.” Diacritics 17(2): 65-81.

Storani, Paulo.  2008. Vitória sobre a morte: a glória prometida: O ‘rito de passagem’ na construção da identidade dos operações especiais do BOPE. Niterói: Universidade Federal Fluminense.

Susser, Ida. 2020. Covid, police brutality and race: are ongoing French mobilizations breaking through the class boundaries?, FocaalBlog Jan 20, http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/12/03/ida-susser-covid-police-brutality-and-race-are-ongoing-french-mobilizations-breaking-through-the-class-boundaries/

Umoja, Akinyele Omuja 2013. We will shoot back: Armed resistance in the Mississippi freedom movement. New York: NYU Press.

Vaughn, Kenya 2019. Queen & Slim, a well-acted interpretation of a tragically flawed story. The St. Louis American, 27 November.

Vianna, Adriana, and Juliana Farias. 2011. “A guerra das mães: dor e política em situações de violência institucional.” Cadernos Pagu (37): 79-116

Wilderson, Frank B. 2018. ‘We’re trying to destroy the world’: Anti-blackness and police violence after Ferguson. In Marina Gržinić Aneta Stojnić (eds), Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance, 45-59. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Willis, Graham Denyer 2015. The killing consensus: Police, organized crime, and the regulation of life and death in urban Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wooten, Terrance. 2020. Cities Under Fire: a public Forum. Santa Barbara: University of California.

Cite as: Alves, Jaime A. 2021. “F*ck the Police! Murderous cops, the myth of police fragility and the case for an insurgent anthropology.” FocaalBlog, 27 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/04/27/jaime-a-alves-fck-the-police-murderous-cops-the-myth-of-police-fragility-and-the-case-for-an-insurgent-anthropology/

Blog

Soe Lin Aung: Three theses on the crisis in Rakhine

By now, the main contours of the recent events in Rakhine State, in western Myanmar, are well-known. On August 25, an insurgent group calling itself the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) (previously Harakah al-Yaqin) attacked police posts in northern Rakhine, eliciting a broad counterinsurgency response from the Myanmar military that has displaced over 400,000 Rohingya people into Bangladesh. As in previous cycles of violence, the Myanmar military, or Tatmadaw, has reportedly targeted civilians in its “clearance operations,” leading to allegations of killings, rape, and the burning of villages. The UN’s human rights body has referred to this latest outbreak of violence as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

Continue reading →

Blog

Karin Ahlberg: On the utility of truth in Egyptian terrains of necropolitics

In fall 2013, an alleged spy was put behind bars in the Qena governorate in Upper Egypt. The accused’s name was Menes, and his summer residency was Hungary. Menes was caught by a villager who spotted a suspicious device on Menes’s body, and he was put in custody until he was released by an attorney. In 2013, several foreigners were arrested in Egypt on similar accusations. Perhaps the most reported story is that of three Al Jazeera journalists accused of spreading lies and supporting terrorism. They were recently sentenced to between seven and ten years in prison (Al Jazeera 2014).

Continue reading →