2010-2016

The project's purpose was to investigate contemporary global war and transnational justice interventions of our times, with the primary aim of advancing our understanding of the complex phenomenology of centrifugal (e.g., refugee flows) and centripetal (e.g., justice interventions or diplomacy) travels of violent conflict. Building on (previous) ethnographic fieldwork carried out in war-torn northern Uganda on the Lord's Resistance Army, and in chronicling (newly collected) life histories of individuals traveling to as well as from the epicenter of war, the project was to delineate the different yet entangled ways people live through the realities of war. The ambition was to provide the means to challenge established categorizations such as victim or perpetrator; local impunity or international criminal justice; Europe vis-à-vis Africa; centre vis-à-vis periphery; and last but not least, of peace and war in our times.

The purpose remained the same, even if the (ethnographic) focus was adjusted to better cover to the changing realities that were to be studied. Two unforeseeable examples can be given:

1) In 2012 the US-based charity organization Invisible Children had a monster hit with the online film "KONY 2012." In May 2016, the film had had more than 100 million visits on YouTube. As the film reproduced several of those very stereotypes that the project was to dissect, the film and its global repercussions were made into an object of research. Especially of relevance to the project was the fact that the organization behind the film, Invisible Children, raised to stardom only to fall from grace: in late 2014, it was declared that Invisible Children would cease operations.

2) In January 2015, Dominic Ongwen, a senior commander of the Lord's Resistance Army, was arrested and taken into custody by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Ongwen was abducted and forced into rebel ranks aged 9 (or 14, depending if you are to believe the prosecution team rather than the defense team). I visited The Hague and the Court and was able to gather more information on this particular case, which again illustrate some of the given categorizations that the project was to dissect and also, by way of ethnography, challenge.

Next to the other case studies of the project, these two case stories form two individual chapters in the forthcoming monograph, tentatively called "War travels: in and out of northern Uganda."

The three most important results

Three interrelated results can be highlighted:
1. The results confirm yet deepens the research hypothesis, namely that local wars are best understood through an analytical lens that takes into account their global dimensions. Together with Neil Whitehead, I outline this argument in the introduction to our anthology "Virtual War and Magical Death." More precisely, we argue that war and peace ought to be seen in terms of a global continuum without any clear beginning or end. The asymmetry of today's warfare, we furthermore argue, is to be located in the very process of bracketing off the allegedly modern from the allegedly premodern or even primitive, by which dominant groups readily ascribe themselves the role of the modern civilizer and defender of democracy, while at the same time identifying the enemy as primitive, somehow less human, or anyway in need of education. As the contributions to our volume illustrate, such a Manichaean process follows a faulty epistemological tradition of thought.

2. The project analyses the conditions under which social scientists and researchers in the humanities may be dependent or even coopted by forces whose agendas they not necessarily share, such as global surveillance agencies, peace enforcing missions, or other (humanitarian and/or military) intervention/intervening apparatuses. Again, this is illustrated in the monograph's chapter on the International Criminal Court. An analysis of this Court's invitation to me to become an expert witness in the ongoing case against Dominic Ongwen forms part of an auto-ethnographic component of the book. As perhaps the most provocative aspect of the project's hypothesis, it was even suggested that liberal democracy in the West may be dependent on a parallel reality of a violent other, located elsewhere. In the forthcoming monograph, this thesis is illustrated in thematic chapters, e.g. on individual persons who travel in and out of the conflict zone, but also by way of a scrutiny of the everyday workings of larger institutions, such as the International Criminal Court. Also included is a critical reassessment of the project's initial hypothesis on "global war."

3. A third result, which essentially is about research methodology, exposes the tendency of a researcher to craft and edit his/her material to better fit a preset research narrative. When the agency of the storyteller -- as expressed in news and other media, personal testimonials of trauma and healing, in response to questionnaires, or in a life history interview -- is restricted to a dominant and linear discourse, alternative and more complex experiences and sociopolitical realities are obscured. In most modes of social science, such filtering out of social complexity may be actively sought to give the research a workable focus, a clear hypothesis or agenda, a fixed structure, and a commensurate methodology that determines which questions to ask and how to ask them. But when a researcher edit his/her findings, some segments of data and experience are foregrounded while some are backgrounded. Some parts are cut out of the representation. A focus on "global war", as in this project, will obviously highlight exactly those aspects of sociopolitical life. But what about other aspects of life? What can be found beyond the analytical gaze on "global war" and related stuff?

New research questions evoked by the project

The most acute issue that has been evoked as a consequence of the project and perhaps mostly so as a consequence of finding no 3, regards vulnerability. If my focus so far has been on the crushing vulnerability of people who live in the shadow of war and displacement, it is important to highlight that such lives also entail open-ended realities and stories enlivened by expectation and desire. In other words, and ethnographically, what does vulnerability really mean? How is vulnerability experienced and positioned? How is vulnerability manifested in everything from formal institutions to interactional practices? How can vulnerability be thought about in ways that don't disavow it or just wish it away?

The project's international dimension

The project is firmly anchored in international anthropology, as is illustrated by the fact that I in 2012 participated in two panels at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association. A result of these panels was the already mentioned anthology "Virtual war and Magical Death," which I edited with Neil Whitehead. In that volume, we gather some of the world's leading anthropological experts on "global war" and bring them together with an upcoming generation of promising anthropologists. My case-study in the volume presents some central findings from my project. More, my article in "Current Anthropology" came about as a direct result of a week-long international symposium organized by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, held in Portugal in March 2014. The symposium gathered scholars from all over the world. The publishing strategy, focusing on international peer-review publishing outlets, further illustrates the international potency of the project.

Research dissemination beyond the academic community

A number of public events was organized in relation to the KONY 2012 film, and a follow-up film seminar, but then with a French documentary on the Lord's Resistance Army, was organized in conjunction with the French Embassy in Stockholm. Some op-eds were also written and disseminated and discussed widely. The mentioned visit to the International Criminal Court was not only a research trip but also an opportunity to discuss research conclusions/findings with the non-academic community (in this case the team of prosecution). I have also been interviewed about the project for a podcast, made available on the Internet.

The two most important publications

War stories and troubled peace: Revisiting some secrets of northern Uganda, in "Current Anthropology" (2015, vol 56, no S12, pp S222-S230). The main analytical focus of this article is discussed above, under research findings, no 3.

"War Travels: In and out of northern Uganda." This forthcoming monograph is to be submitted later this year to Chicago Un Press, on the publisher's invitation. Individual chapters discuss separate themes of the research, yet these themes are brought together under the general umbrella of "global war" and those dichotomies that the project set out to investigate and critically analyze. Another overall theme of the monograph is the question about interventions -- including research interventions -- as something that edit our understanding of the world, even the world itself. Again, this is a theme that was introduced in "War stories and troubled peace," the article published in "Current Anthropology." Thus discussions about methods, ethics and fieldwork have a prominent place in the book's analytical framework.

Publication strategy, Open Access, and Internet access

An explicit ambition has been to publish research findings in international and peer-reviewed outlets. Parallel to this, a serious effort has been made to make key texts of the project available as Open Access, as indicated in the separate publication list. The introduction to the anthology "Virtual War and Magical Death" has been made available online, Open Access. This will also be the case with the introduction to the forthcoming monograph, "War Travels."

Also, some publications of relevance to the project are accessible from this webpage:
http://www.engagingvulnerability.se/sverker-finnstrom/

All Open Access publications of relevance to the project are available, direct or via link, from DiVA, Uppsala University's Online Database. This includes op-eds and commentaries:
http://www.diva-portal.org/dice/rss?query=+personName:%28Sverker%20Finnstr%C3%B6m%29&start=0&rows=500&sort=year%20desc

Research profiles have also been created at Academica.edu and ResearchGate, again with several publications available for download and/or online reading:
https://uppsala.academia.edu/SverkerF
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sverker_Finnstroem

The podcast is available from here:
http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/836-fieldwork-and-morality

Project publications, full list

Publications: monograph

Forthcoming: War Travels: In and out of northern Uganda [to be submitted to Chicago Un Press later this year, on the publisher's invitation]

Publications: Peer reviewed anthology

2013. Virtual war and magical death: Technologies and imaginaries for terror and killing. Co-edited with Neil L. Whitehead. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

Publications: articles in peer reviewed journals

2015. War stories and troubled peace: Revisiting some secrets of northern Uganda. Current Anthropology. Vol 56, no S12, pp S222-S230. DOI: 10.1086/683270. [Open access]

2015. Comment on Media Legacies of War (by Victor MF Igreja). Current Anthropology. Vol 56, no 5, pp 691-692. DOI: 10.1086/683107

2012. KONY 2012, Military Humanitarianism, and the Magic of Occult Economies. Africa Spectrum, vol 47, no 2-3, pp. 127-135. [Open access]

Publications: articles in peer reviewed anthologies etc

2016. O Anthropology, Where Art Thou? An auto-ethnography of proposals. Pp. 46-59 in The anthropologist as writer: Genres and contexts in the 21st century, ed. Helena Wulff. Oxford & New York: Berghahn [a side-track to the project; still made possible by the project]

2015. War: Anthropological Aspects, Historical Development of [co-authored with Carolyn Nordstrom]. Pp. 377-38 in International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, vol 25, editor-in-chief James D. Wright. Oxford: Elsevier. DOI:10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.12235-4

2013. Today he is no more: Magic, intervention, and global war in Uganda. Pp 111-131 in Virtual war and magical death: Technologies and imaginaries for terror and killing, ed. Neil L. Whitehead and Sverker Finnström. Durham, NC: Duke University Press

2013. Introduction: Virtual war and magical death [co-authored with Neil L. Whitehead]. Pp 1-25 in Virtual war and magical death: Technologies and imaginaries for terror and killing, ed. Neil L. Whitehead and Sverker Finnström. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Open access]

2012. Humanitarian death and the magic of global war in Uganda. Pp 106-119 in War, Technology, Anthropology (Critical Interventions, vol 13), ed. Koen Stroeken. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Publications: Columns, debates, and opinions [all open access]

2012. “Kony 2012” and the Magic of International Relations. e-International Relations, March 15. Republished by Acholi Times, March 26.

2012. “Kony 2012” är en språngbräda för USA:s militär. Newsmill, March 12. Alternative version in English: “Kony 2012” Is a Springboard for the US Military. Watching America, 13 April. Abridged version re-published by Vasabladet (Finland)

Publications: Book reviews [academic, and only those of relevance to the project]

2016. Review of Sarah M. H. Nouwen, Complementarity in the Line of Fire: The Catalysing Effect of the International Criminal Court in Uganda and Sudan (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013). In African Studies Quarterly, vol 16, no 2, pp 124-25. [Open access] 

2016. Lord’s Resistance Army No More: Review of Evelyn Amony, I am Evelyn Amony: Reclaiming My Life from the Lord’s Resistance Army (Un of Wisconsin Press, 2015). In Warscapes Magazine, May 12. Open access.

2014. Disillusion, embodiment and violent reconciliations: Engaged anthropology on Rwanda, El Salvador, and Peru. Review essay on Jennie E. Burnet, Genocide Lives in Us: Women, Memory, and Silence in Rwanda (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), Irina Carlota Silber, Everyday Revolutionaries: Gender, Violence, and Disillusionment in Postwar El Salvador (New York: Rutgers UP, 2011) and Kimberly Theidon, Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru (Philadelphia: PENN Press, 2013). In Political and Legal Anthropology Review, vol 37, no 2, pp. 371-376. DOI: 10.1111/plar.12080

2013. Review of Susan Thomson, An Ansoms and Jude Murison, eds., Emotional and Ethical Challenges for Field Research in Africa: The story behind the findings (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. In Journal of Modern African Studies, vol 51, no 3, pp 540-541.

2013. Review of Nicolas Argenti and Katharina Schramm, eds., Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission (Berghahn Books, 2010). In Social Analysis, vol 57, no 2, pp 131-133.

Other (pod interview with me)

Arnoldi, Ea. "Fieldwork and Morality." AnthroPod: The SCA Podcast, Cultural Anthropology website, March 25, 2016. http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/836-fieldwork-and-m