Programme coordinators: Bert Suykens and Maarten Hendriks

While fieldwork-based conflict studies have made great progress in gaining insights into the political economy of conflict and political violence, they have not always paid sufficient attention to the ways in which imaginaries influence people’s participation in conflict, and the role conflict plays in the formation of political subjectivities.

This research line on the cultural politics of conflict  wants to foreground these dynamics and understand them recursively. The formation of political subjectivities through violence can only be understood when taking into account the moralities, ideologies and cosmologies that motivate and shape violent action. Furthermore, the way ideologies, and political imaginations operate in violent contexts only makes sense if we understand how they help constitute violent  political subjectivities.

People

• Marte Beldé
• Jeroen Cuvelier
• Maarten Hendriks
• Hans De Marie Heungoup
• Sam Kniknie
• Julian Kuttig
• Saumya Pandey
• Soibam Haripriya
• Bert Suykens
• Clod Marlan Krister Yambao

Current Projects

• Boko Haram in Cameroon’s Far North (contact: Hans De Marie Heungoup)
• The vitality of creative action: Hipanow/ walking as a Political Act of the Internally Displaced Lumad Indigenous Peoples of Selected Ethnicities in Mindanao, Southern Philippines (contact: Clod Marlan Krister Yambao)
• Martyrdom and propaganda ontologies in Maoist India (contact: Bert Suykens)
• The moral anthropology of violent deaths in northeast India (contact: Soibam Haripriya)
• Urban youth gangs in Goma and Kisangani: the role of violence in subject formation (contact: Maarten Hendriks)
• Understanding urban protest in a context of war: an ethnographic analysis of ‘urban political terrains’ in eastern DRC (contact: Sam Kniknie) 
• The Dynamics of Urbanization and Ethnic Contestation in Peri-Urban Areas of Ethiopia: Addis Ababa and Dire Dawa Cities in Focus (contact: Ayehu Bacha Teso)