H Vigh
Biographic Data
| ID | 15651 |
|---|---|
| NAME | H Vigh |
| GIVEN NAMES | H |
| FAMILY NAME | Vigh |
| SIGNATURE | VIGH H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4760-5595 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 970 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Grønne processer og negative effekter: Klimakrisen og den globale omfordeling af skade
Grønne processer og negative effekter: Klimakrisen og den globale omfordeling af skade
Introduktion: Kriser og etnografien
Introduktion
Outsiders on the Inside: Surveillance, Suspicion and the Social Life of Criminalisation
This article explores how surveillance and suspicion shape ethnographic criminology. Drawing on long-term fieldwork with West African cocaine dealers, it examines ‘the social life of criminalisation’ and its impact on ethnographic practices and immersion. Ethnographers commonly strive to become ‘outsiders on the inside’, balancing participation and observation. However, in the context of criminalisation, where social worlds become surveilled and …
Living with and for Others: Vicarious Viability and the Search for Social Being
Drawing on fieldwork conducted in West Africa, North Africa and Europe, this article ethnographically traces smuggling trajectories to shed light on how impoverished segments of the Guinea-Bissauan population seek to create socially meaningful lives under conditions of constraint. It examines the ways in which people attempt to reposition themselves and craft socially acceptable existences through migration and shows how, for those with few resou…
Five Limits to Current Autoethnography: Asking Old and New Questions of an Aspiring Mainstream Method
Autoethnography is no longer a marginal anthropological practice but one that is taught at many universities worldwide. And this approach to empirical knowledge gathering and anthropological analysis forms the basis for hundreds if not thousands of publications, many of which are well cited and widely celebrated. The success of autoethnography is surely a cause for celebration. It is, however, also a cause for concern, especially when we look at …
Para-crime: Notes Towards A ‘Grey Criminology’
Although criminology has long debated the so-called ‘crime drop’, the shifting nature of criminality complicates any clear-cut assessment. While some offences have decreased, this is not necessarily due to moral reform or growing securitisation but rather to transformations in crime modalities. The illicit does not simply retreat or relocate, we argue; nowadays, it increasingly adapts, embeds, and exploits the very systems designed to structure a…
Indledning
Indledning
Our other Others: On Perpetration, Morality, and Ethnographic Unease
This article critically assesses the impact of political and moral positions within contemporary anthropology. Re-examining ideas of advocacy and the ethical within the discipline, it argues for an alternative political anthropology that focuses on perpetration rather than victimhood, offenders rather than the offended. If anthropology wants to be a discipline that works against social wrongs and suffering, then understanding the positions and pe…
Slow crisis in Bissau and beyond
This article takes an ethnographic look at processes of long-term and lingering crises. Building on longitudinal and transnational fieldwork with migrants from Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau, it illuminates the ways that crisis may ramify across time and scale, thereby affecting everyday life, social relations and political dynamics. While the concept of ‘slow crisis’ sits uncomfortably within our common understanding of crisis as a momenta…
Tangier heat: On migrant vulnerability and social thermology
This article investigates a particular moment of political tension and intimidation of sub-Saharan migrants in Northern Morocco. Drawing on insights gained from collective fieldwork in Tangier, as well as from individual, longstanding ethnographic engagements with migrants from Guinea-Bissau and Mali, it describes the way West African migrants are policed, used as political capital and made the unwilling pawns of large-scale geopolitical negotiat…
Critical stasis and disruptive performances: ICJ and the Anwar R trial in Koblenz
This article explores the extraterritorial criminal court case against Anwar R, a high-ranking member of the Syrian regime on trial for crimes against humanity in Koblenz, Germany. Empirically anchored in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Koblenz and with the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, the article illuminates the trial as a ‘disruptive performance’. The case against Anwar R punctuates two instances of negative stas…
Bandits' fall from grace: Liberation heroes and alter-politics in Bissau [online article]
This article looks at the rise and fall of political legitimacy in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau. Building on long-term fieldwork with impoverished city dwellers, it looks at the legitimacy and sociality surrounding political figures and movements in the country, commencing with the liberation movement (the PAIGC) and ending in the current situation of large-scale drug-trafficking. While the liberation movement was initially portrayed as consisting of no…
La muerte social y las violentas oportunidades de vida
This article analyzes the military recruitment of urban youths in West Africa and analyzes their involvement in conflicts as a form of 'social navigation'. We propose a perspective on the youth that assumes this generational category, both a social process and a position. The article illustrates how urban youths navigate their social links and the options that arise from wartime situations to escape social death, which otherwise is the main chara…
Life in the ant trails
This article looks ethnographically at the cocaine trade in and through Bissau, Guinea-Bissau. It clarifies some of the less obvious aspects of illegal cross-border trade and ties the minor flow of drugs, often trafficked by the desperate and disenfranchised, to larger global dynamics. While international media and commentators alike frequently depict transnational organized crime as a pathogen attacking the healthy global order, a closer look at…
Displaced utopia: On marginalisation, migration and emplacement in Bissau
This article looks at the subjectivities of disenfranchised urban men in Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau. Taking its point of departure in an illumination of the ‘thrown’ character of subjectivity, it clarifies the social positions and futures that life in the city is seen to afford. As the city has been caught in a prolonged period of conflict and decline, the retrenchment of the state, economy and social networks has created a setting wher…
Lives opposed: Perceptivity and tacticality in conflict and crime
This article looks at the way people tactically adjust to contexts of insecurity and danger. Building on fieldwork with disenfranchised urban poor in West Africa and marginal West African migrants in Europe, it clarifies how perspectives and practices are attuned to precarious situations and life conditions. The article argues that the struggle to identify threats leads to a nervous sociality in which figures and social forces are examined for hi…
Caring through crime: Ethical ambivalence and the cocaine trade in Bissau
This article examines the way young men in Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau, make sense of and engage in the transnational cocaine trade, which has established itself on the Upper Guinea coast. It describes Guinea-Bissau's emergence as a regional centre for the trafficking of cocaine from Latin America to Europe, and shows how the illegality and volatility of the commerce are socially assessed and valued. The drug connection impacts on the li…
Social Invisibility and Political Opacity: On Perceptiveness and Apprehension in Bissau
This chapter looks at the relationship between apprehension, social invisibility, and political opacity. Building on fieldwork in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, it illuminates the way people grasp the persistent political instability and uncertainty that characterizes the small country. Politics is, in Bissau, currently described as enigmatic and mysterious. It is seen as embedded in an environment of cloaked and concealed figures and forces that work be…
Mobile Misfortune
This article examines how the emergent cocaine trade in Bissau, the capital of the west African country of Guinea-Bissau, has become entangled with and trickled into the life worlds, hopes and fears of the city's many impoverished young men. The article is divided into two parts. While the first part looks at the predicament of youth and the hope of migration in Bissau, the second illuminates the anguish of deportation and the despair of being fo…
Militantly well
Building on ethnographic fieldwork among militant, urban youth in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, this article illuminates how young men in the city actively engage in conflict in order to improve their lives and prospects. The article shows how mobilizing is seen as a move toward a reduction of hardship and the possibility of fulfilling one's social potential. Rather than looking at what people see themselves as having to fight against-the last decades o…
La marge au centre: Sur les réseaux, la cocaïne et le crime transnational à Bissau
This article investigates the recent proliferation of cocaine trafficking in and through Guinea-Bissau, a small West African country on the Upper Guinea Coast. Taking its point of departure in an ethnographic study of youth and patrimonial networks in Bissau, the country’s capital, the article elucidates the interplay between local formations of power and global criminal networks. It clarifies how Bissau has developed into a transhipment hub for …
From essence back to existence: Anthropology beyond the ontological turn
This article takes a critical look at 'the ontological turn'. Illuminating 'the turn's' theoretical point of departure, and clarifying its anthropological implications, the article argues that two key problems arise if the theory is to be taken at face value. It points, first of all, to the difficulty in studying 'radical alterity', in the manner proposed by the new understanding of ontology within anthropology. If anthropology is, as the ontolog…
Den Ontologiske Blænding: Om den ontologiske vendings metodiske og politiske problemer
Denne artikel anlægger en kritisk synsvinkel på 'den ontologiske vending'. Dens argument er, at den ontologiske vending indeholder to centrale problemer: det ene metodisk, det andet politisk. For det føste påeger artiklen vanskelighederne ved at studere 'en radikale Anden' påontologiske betingelser. Hvis tilhægerne af den ontologiske vending har ret i deres påtand om, at antropologien ikke bø studere multiple 'erdenssyn', men fuldstædigt og essen…
Critical states and cocaine connections
Adaptive lives. Navigating the global food crisis in a changing climate
Motion squared: A second look at the concept of social navigation
Serving as a metaphor for practice, the concept of navigation has become increasingly popular in anthropological theory. The concept seems to have almost sneaked its way into our analytical vocabulary; it is used when referring to how people act in difficult or uncertain circumstances and in describing how they disentangle themselves from confining structures, plot their escape and move towards better positions. Yet, despite its increasing popula…
Crisis and Chronicity: Anthropological Perspectives on Continuous Conflict and Decline
Crisis is normally conceived of as an isolated period of time in which our lives are shattered. It defines the loss of balance and the inability to control the exterior forces influencing our possibilities and choices. The phenomenon is seen as a temporary disorder, a momentary malformation in the flow of things. Yet, for a great many people around the world crisis is endemic rather than episodic and cannot be delineated as an aberrant moment of …
Wayward Migration: On Imagined Futures and Technological Voids
This article exploresimagined migration and migrantimaginaries. It takes its point of departure in fieldwork among would-be migrants in Bissau and traces the realization of their hopes into Europe. More specifically, it sheds light on the way young men from Bissau, the capital of the small, impoverished West African country of Guinea-Bissau, position the decline and destruction that characterize their city in relation to the peace, prosperity and…
From essence back to existence: Anthropology beyond the ontological turn
This article takes a critical look at 'the ontological turn'. Illuminating 'the turn's' theoretical point of departure, and clarifying its anthropological implications, the article argues that two key problems arise if the theory is to be taken at face value. It points, first of all, to the difficulty in studying 'radical alterity', in the manner proposed by the new understanding of ontology within anthropology. If anthropology is, as the ontolog…
Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in Guinea-Bissau
Through the concept of "social navigation," this book sheds light on the mobilization of urban youth in West Africa. Social navigation offers a perspective on praxis in situations of conflict and turmoil. It provides insights into the interplay between objective structures and subjective agency, thus enabling us to make sense of the opportunistic, sometimes fatalistic and tactical ways in which young people struggle to expand the horizons of poss…
Youth Mobilisation as Social Navigation. Reflections on the concept of dubriagem
This article sheds light on the mobilisation of young people into conflict. It argues that warfare constitutes a terrain of possibility for urban youth in Guinea-Bissau, and shows how they navigate war as an event by tactically manoeuvring within the social ties and options that arise in such situations. Building on the Guinean Creole term of dubriagem, the article proposes the concept of social navigation as an analytical optic able to shed ligh…
The colour of destruction: On racialization, geno-globality and the social imaginary in Bissau
Based on 18 months of fieldwork in Guinea-Bissau, this article sheds light on the social imaginary of urban youth in Bissau City. Set in a context of pervasive decline and destruction, the article shows how the social imaginary in Bissau has come to evolve around issues of race and conflict, and how this has led to an interpretative conflation of blackness and destruction. Through illuminating some of the modes of social differentiation that have…
Caring through crime: Ethical ambivalence and the cocaine trade in Bissau
This article examines the way young men in Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau, make sense of and engage in the transnational cocaine trade, which has established itself on the Upper Guinea coast. It describes Guinea-Bissau's emergence as a regional centre for the trafficking of cocaine from Latin America to Europe, and shows how the illegality and volatility of the commerce are socially assessed and valued. The drug connection impacts on the li…
Adaptive lives. Navigating the global food crisis in a changing climate
Conflictual Motion and Political Inertia: On Rebellions and Revolutions in Bissau and Beyond
Taking its point of departure in the distinction between rebellions and revolutions, this article sheds light on civil war in Guinea-Bissau and West Africa. It builds on prolonged fieldwork among the Aguentas, a militia of urban youth in Bissau, and interrogates their experiences of warfare to further our understanding of some of the dynamics of conflict in the region. It argues that a defining feature of the conflict we have seen in many parts o…
Slow crisis in Bissau and beyond
This article takes an ethnographic look at processes of long-term and lingering crises. Building on longitudinal and transnational fieldwork with migrants from Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau, it illuminates the ways that crisis may ramify across time and scale, thereby affecting everyday life, social relations and political dynamics. While the concept of ‘slow crisis’ sits uncomfortably within our common understanding of crisis as a momenta…
Militantly well
Building on ethnographic fieldwork among militant, urban youth in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, this article illuminates how young men in the city actively engage in conflict in order to improve their lives and prospects. The article shows how mobilizing is seen as a move toward a reduction of hardship and the possibility of fulfilling one's social potential. Rather than looking at what people see themselves as having to fight against-the last decades o…
Life in the ant trails
This article looks ethnographically at the cocaine trade in and through Bissau, Guinea-Bissau. It clarifies some of the less obvious aspects of illegal cross-border trade and ties the minor flow of drugs, often trafficked by the desperate and disenfranchised, to larger global dynamics. While international media and commentators alike frequently depict transnational organized crime as a pathogen attacking the healthy global order, a closer look at…
La marge au centre: Sur les réseaux, la cocaïne et le crime transnational à Bissau
This article investigates the recent proliferation of cocaine trafficking in and through Guinea-Bissau, a small West African country on the Upper Guinea Coast. Taking its point of departure in an ethnographic study of youth and patrimonial networks in Bissau, the country’s capital, the article elucidates the interplay between local formations of power and global criminal networks. It clarifies how Bissau has developed into a transhipment hub for …
Critical stasis and disruptive performances: ICJ and the Anwar R trial in Koblenz
This article explores the extraterritorial criminal court case against Anwar R, a high-ranking member of the Syrian regime on trial for crimes against humanity in Koblenz, Germany. Empirically anchored in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Koblenz and with the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, the article illuminates the trial as a ‘disruptive performance’. The case against Anwar R punctuates two instances of negative stas…
La muerte social y las violentas oportunidades de vida
This article analyzes the military recruitment of urban youths in West Africa and analyzes their involvement in conflicts as a form of 'social navigation'. We propose a perspective on the youth that assumes this generational category, both a social process and a position. The article illustrates how urban youths navigate their social links and the options that arise from wartime situations to escape social death, which otherwise is the main chara…
Mobile Misfortune
This article examines how the emergent cocaine trade in Bissau, the capital of the west African country of Guinea-Bissau, has become entangled with and trickled into the life worlds, hopes and fears of the city's many impoverished young men. The article is divided into two parts. While the first part looks at the predicament of youth and the hope of migration in Bissau, the second illuminates the anguish of deportation and the despair of being fo…
Para-crime: Notes Towards A ‘Grey Criminology’
Although criminology has long debated the so-called ‘crime drop’, the shifting nature of criminality complicates any clear-cut assessment. While some offences have decreased, this is not necessarily due to moral reform or growing securitisation but rather to transformations in crime modalities. The illicit does not simply retreat or relocate, we argue; nowadays, it increasingly adapts, embeds, and exploits the very systems designed to structure a…
Our other Others: On Perpetration, Morality, and Ethnographic Unease
This article critically assesses the impact of political and moral positions within contemporary anthropology. Re-examining ideas of advocacy and the ethical within the discipline, it argues for an alternative political anthropology that focuses on perpetration rather than victimhood, offenders rather than the offended. If anthropology wants to be a discipline that works against social wrongs and suffering, then understanding the positions and pe…
Tangier heat: On migrant vulnerability and social thermology
This article investigates a particular moment of political tension and intimidation of sub-Saharan migrants in Northern Morocco. Drawing on insights gained from collective fieldwork in Tangier, as well as from individual, longstanding ethnographic engagements with migrants from Guinea-Bissau and Mali, it describes the way West African migrants are policed, used as political capital and made the unwilling pawns of large-scale geopolitical negotiat…
Den Ontologiske Blænding: Om den ontologiske vendings metodiske og politiske problemer
Denne artikel anlægger en kritisk synsvinkel på 'den ontologiske vending'. Dens argument er, at den ontologiske vending indeholder to centrale problemer: det ene metodisk, det andet politisk. For det føste påeger artiklen vanskelighederne ved at studere 'en radikale Anden' påontologiske betingelser. Hvis tilhægerne af den ontologiske vending har ret i deres påtand om, at antropologien ikke bø studere multiple 'erdenssyn', men fuldstædigt og essen…
Introduktion Til Voldens Antropologi: Fra erfaring til fællesskab
The article positions the different anthropological approaches to violence on a continuum from the phenomenological to the sociological analysis. It argues that anthropological works on violence are crystallized around either the experiential aspects of violence or the phenomenon's ability to create, maintain and consolidate social communities. Yet, in conclusion it offers a perspective, which might be able to combine the different analythical av…
Navigating Terrains of War: Youth And Soldiering in Guinea-bissau (Methodology and History in Anthropology)
Through the concept of "social navigation," this book sheds light on the mobilization of urban youth in West Africa. Social navigation offers a perspective on praxis in situations of conflict and turmoil. It provides insights into the interplay between objective structures and subjective agency, thus enabling us to make sense of the opportunistic, sometimes fatalistic and tactical ways in which young people struggle to expand the horizons of poss…
Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in Guinea-Bissau
Through the concept of "social navigation," this book sheds light on the mobilization of urban youth in West Africa. Social navigation offers a perspective on praxis in situations of conflict and turmoil. It provides insights into the interplay between objective structures and subjective agency, thus enabling us to make sense of the opportunistic, sometimes fatalistic and tactical ways in which young people struggle to expand the horizons of poss…
The colour of destruction: On racialization, geno-globality and the social imaginary in Bissau
Based on 18 months of fieldwork in Guinea-Bissau, this article sheds light on the social imaginary of urban youth in Bissau City. Set in a context of pervasive decline and destruction, the article shows how the social imaginary in Bissau has come to evolve around issues of race and conflict, and how this has led to an interpretative conflation of blackness and destruction. Through illuminating some of the modes of social differentiation that have…
Crisis and Chronicity: Anthropological Perspectives on Continuous Conflict and Decline
Crisis is normally conceived of as an isolated period of time in which our lives are shattered. It defines the loss of balance and the inability to control the exterior forces influencing our possibilities and choices. The phenomenon is seen as a temporary disorder, a momentary malformation in the flow of things. Yet, for a great many people around the world crisis is endemic rather than episodic and cannot be delineated as an aberrant moment of …
Conflictual Motion and Political Inertia: On Rebellions and Revolutions in Bissau and Beyond
Taking its point of departure in the distinction between rebellions and revolutions, this article sheds light on civil war in Guinea-Bissau and West Africa. It builds on prolonged fieldwork among the Aguentas, a militia of urban youth in Bissau, and interrogates their experiences of warfare to further our understanding of some of the dynamics of conflict in the region. It argues that a defining feature of the conflict we have seen in many parts o…
Motion squared: A second look at the concept of social navigation
Serving as a metaphor for practice, the concept of navigation has become increasingly popular in anthropological theory. The concept seems to have almost sneaked its way into our analytical vocabulary; it is used when referring to how people act in difficult or uncertain circumstances and in describing how they disentangle themselves from confining structures, plot their escape and move towards better positions. Yet, despite its increasing popula…
Wayward Migration: On Imagined Futures and Technological Voids
This article exploresimagined migration and migrantimaginaries. It takes its point of departure in fieldwork among would-be migrants in Bissau and traces the realization of their hopes into Europe. More specifically, it sheds light on the way young men from Bissau, the capital of the small, impoverished West African country of Guinea-Bissau, position the decline and destruction that characterize their city in relation to the peace, prosperity and…
Youth Mobilisation as Social Navigation. Reflections on the concept of dubriagem
This article sheds light on the mobilisation of young people into conflict. It argues that warfare constitutes a terrain of possibility for urban youth in Guinea-Bissau, and shows how they navigate war as an event by tactically manoeuvring within the social ties and options that arise in such situations. Building on the Guinean Creole term of dubriagem, the article proposes the concept of social navigation as an analytical optic able to shed ligh…
Vigilance: On Conflict, Social Invisibility, and Negative Potentiality
This article analyses the relationship between conflict, social invisibility and negative potentiality. Taking its empirical point of departure in fieldwork conducted in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, it illuminates the manner in which people orientate themselves toward precarious prospects and potentialities. It focuses on the way futures are foretold and the forth-coming negotiated in an attempt to pre-empt violent possib…
Critical states and cocaine connections
Adaptive lives. Navigating the global food crisis in a changing climate
Den Ontologiske Blænding: Om den ontologiske vendings metodiske og politiske problemer
Denne artikel anlægger en kritisk synsvinkel på 'den ontologiske vending'. Dens argument er, at den ontologiske vending indeholder to centrale problemer: det ene metodisk, det andet politisk. For det føste påeger artiklen vanskelighederne ved at studere 'en radikale Anden' påontologiske betingelser. Hvis tilhægerne af den ontologiske vending har ret i deres påtand om, at antropologien ikke bø studere multiple 'erdenssyn', men fuldstædigt og essen…
La marge au centre: Sur les réseaux, la cocaïne et le crime transnational à Bissau
This article investigates the recent proliferation of cocaine trafficking in and through Guinea-Bissau, a small West African country on the Upper Guinea Coast. Taking its point of departure in an ethnographic study of youth and patrimonial networks in Bissau, the country’s capital, the article elucidates the interplay between local formations of power and global criminal networks. It clarifies how Bissau has developed into a transhipment hub for …
From essence back to existence: Anthropology beyond the ontological turn
This article takes a critical look at 'the ontological turn'. Illuminating 'the turn's' theoretical point of departure, and clarifying its anthropological implications, the article argues that two key problems arise if the theory is to be taken at face value. It points, first of all, to the difficulty in studying 'radical alterity', in the manner proposed by the new understanding of ontology within anthropology. If anthropology is, as the ontolog…
Social Invisibility and Political Opacity: On Perceptiveness and Apprehension in Bissau
This chapter looks at the relationship between apprehension, social invisibility, and political opacity. Building on fieldwork in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, it illuminates the way people grasp the persistent political instability and uncertainty that characterizes the small country. Politics is, in Bissau, currently described as enigmatic and mysterious. It is seen as embedded in an environment of cloaked and concealed figures and forces that work be…
Mobile Misfortune
This article examines how the emergent cocaine trade in Bissau, the capital of the west African country of Guinea-Bissau, has become entangled with and trickled into the life worlds, hopes and fears of the city's many impoverished young men. The article is divided into two parts. While the first part looks at the predicament of youth and the hope of migration in Bissau, the second illuminates the anguish of deportation and the despair of being fo…
Militantly well
Building on ethnographic fieldwork among militant, urban youth in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau, this article illuminates how young men in the city actively engage in conflict in order to improve their lives and prospects. The article shows how mobilizing is seen as a move toward a reduction of hardship and the possibility of fulfilling one's social potential. Rather than looking at what people see themselves as having to fight against-the last decades o…
Caring through crime: Ethical ambivalence and the cocaine trade in Bissau
This article examines the way young men in Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau, make sense of and engage in the transnational cocaine trade, which has established itself on the Upper Guinea coast. It describes Guinea-Bissau's emergence as a regional centre for the trafficking of cocaine from Latin America to Europe, and shows how the illegality and volatility of the commerce are socially assessed and valued. The drug connection impacts on the li…
Displaced utopia: On marginalisation, migration and emplacement in Bissau
This article looks at the subjectivities of disenfranchised urban men in Bissau, the capital of Guinea-Bissau. Taking its point of departure in an illumination of the ‘thrown’ character of subjectivity, it clarifies the social positions and futures that life in the city is seen to afford. As the city has been caught in a prolonged period of conflict and decline, the retrenchment of the state, economy and social networks has created a setting wher…
Lives opposed: Perceptivity and tacticality in conflict and crime
This article looks at the way people tactically adjust to contexts of insecurity and danger. Building on fieldwork with disenfranchised urban poor in West Africa and marginal West African migrants in Europe, it clarifies how perspectives and practices are attuned to precarious situations and life conditions. The article argues that the struggle to identify threats leads to a nervous sociality in which figures and social forces are examined for hi…
Life in the ant trails
This article looks ethnographically at the cocaine trade in and through Bissau, Guinea-Bissau. It clarifies some of the less obvious aspects of illegal cross-border trade and ties the minor flow of drugs, often trafficked by the desperate and disenfranchised, to larger global dynamics. While international media and commentators alike frequently depict transnational organized crime as a pathogen attacking the healthy global order, a closer look at…
Critical stasis and disruptive performances: ICJ and the Anwar R trial in Koblenz
This article explores the extraterritorial criminal court case against Anwar R, a high-ranking member of the Syrian regime on trial for crimes against humanity in Koblenz, Germany. Empirically anchored in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Koblenz and with the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, the article illuminates the trial as a ‘disruptive performance’. The case against Anwar R punctuates two instances of negative stas…
Bandits' fall from grace: Liberation heroes and alter-politics in Bissau [online article]
This article looks at the rise and fall of political legitimacy in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau. Building on long-term fieldwork with impoverished city dwellers, it looks at the legitimacy and sociality surrounding political figures and movements in the country, commencing with the liberation movement (the PAIGC) and ending in the current situation of large-scale drug-trafficking. While the liberation movement was initially portrayed as consisting of no…
La muerte social y las violentas oportunidades de vida
This article analyzes the military recruitment of urban youths in West Africa and analyzes their involvement in conflicts as a form of 'social navigation'. We propose a perspective on the youth that assumes this generational category, both a social process and a position. The article illustrates how urban youths navigate their social links and the options that arise from wartime situations to escape social death, which otherwise is the main chara…
Sociology (24 works) · Political science (20 works) · Law (15 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (13 works) · Politics (12 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Psychology (9 works) · Political economy (8 works) · History (7 works)